The Future Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher 352
An anonymous reader writes: English teacher Michael Godsey writes in The Atlantic what he envisions the role of teachers to be in the future. In a nutshell, he sees virtual classrooms, less pay, and a drastic decrease in the number of educators, but thinks they will all be "super-teachers". From the article: "Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it's enough to say that the role is shifting from 'content expert' to 'curriculum facilitator.' Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation's most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The 'virtual class' will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.
I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a 'tech') to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized'); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."
I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a 'tech') to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized'); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."
sage (Score:5, Insightful)
And who answers questions about the lectures?
performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized')
What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?
better education (Score:5, Informative)
However she also had a great physics teacher to help her during lunch. I think it might reduce the local teachers time requirement per student 1/2-2/3, but not the skills. Ultimately the kids may have more equal opportunity to determine their level of education by their own interest, ability and effort in such a system.
Re:better education (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem with education is trying to make a horse drink water - the horses that don't feel like drinking at the moment monopolize the resources of everyone and dictate the techniques used. Everyone is led by the teacher in a ritualistic dance at the end of which, if the dance steps are followed, mastery is supposedly achieved. Those who can be engaged by this kind of thing and dance along with the class do well. Those who don't care to dance are unteachable - labeled dumb.
When first introduced, compulsory education was compulsory because the compulsion was necessary to force parents to give up the labor of their children so they could be educated. Education was an opportunity, and there were few who would not compel their children to take part if they could afford it.
Today child labor laws and the general way society is configured make children worthless as labor. Time in school is if anything is the financial equivalent of 'free babysitting'.
After a certain age it's impossible to keep someone in school and learning if they don't want to be there and the level of compulsory education should therefore be low anyway. K-6 makes more sense to be compulsory than beyond.
The idea that there should be a diploma at the end of it all and that that diploma should 'mean something' undermines the value of that diploma. By insisting that it certify a minimum standard, we guarantee that the standard is very low. If graduation rate is a priority than that priority is at odds with not only the level of the standard, but the possible level anyone can achieve. Catering to students who don't want to learn deprives everyone else. Dragging people kicking and bucking into education sets people against anything to do with it. The process of having education shoved down one's throat even turns people who would otherwise be receptive to education off to it.
What would be better would be for a certain number of years of education be paid for, and students can go as far as they want. They don't get a diploma, they get a transcript. They learn basic skills, not because they must, but because they are prerequisites to a class they are interested in taking. They want to pass for lots of reasons, such as peer pressure not to be the oldest kid taking the class, but also because they want to take some other class. If someone is behind in some area they can concentrate their efforts there.
Grades aren't important. Make classes pass/fail but keep the standard for passing high enough that students who pass have demonstrated enough understanding to succeed at the next level. Students who excel would have a broader transcript, or complete the courses offered early. But there is no need to penalize someone who struggles in a certain area if they have demonstrated mastery eventually. If they have truly mastered whatever it is, then they should be as able as anyone else who has mastered it to apply it in the future.
Can older, engaged kids benefit from well produced virtual classes? Sure. Will fourth graders watch the screen intently enough to learn Long Division? Will a 'tech' necessarily be able to answer a frustrated student's questions in a helpful way? If they can, then they aren't too bad at teaching... Couldn't they conceivably do as well as the video teacher? Yep, better probably. And does the video get paused every time one of the kidnergarteners has a question? Does it then become impossible to engage with?
That's one of the problems with the ritual dance method of teaching. Everyone brings certain things to the table before the class. It's hard not to fall asleep and miss the stuff you need to hear, or waste your energy doing useless ( for you ) dance steps and be too tired from that to learn anything difficult. It's better to be engaged in learning and spend your time on the stuff you don't know. When people do this they apply the sharpest edge to their problems and tend to cut through difficulty like a laser.
School should make that possible.
Re: (Score:3)
This is just about the only truly accurate statement in your post. Quite simply, the body of students in highly performing schools do well because their parents expect them to do well and help them to do well. The parents take time to help their kids learn, and they do not make excuses for poor results.
Unfortunately there's no way to compel the parent to do the rig
Re:sage (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. And if most students can learn simply by watching videos and then taking tests, why have school at all? They can do that at home.
Good teachers are much more than subject matter experts - they're sociologists and mentors. Those roles can't be done by some national "super teacher."
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"And who answers questions about the lectures?"
Yep. And if most students can learn simply by watching videos and then taking tests, why have school at all? They can do that at home.
Why have videos? They can read books.
That's what Feynman did with his lectures.
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Good teachers are much more than subject matter experts
What's with this dogma that teachers are subject matter experts? Yes, I have had some teachers that knew their subject and were enthusiastic about teaching it. But that wasn't the rule. I attended two different high schools, and my children attended a third. It varies. Some teachers are outstanding, some should be fired with prejudice -- and the quality of the teacher has no impact on the compensation that the teacher receives.
Re:sage (Score:4)
and the quality of the teacher has no impact on the compensation that the teacher receives.
I think this is the real problem and unfortunately it doesn't get much better in college. In college you could have a professor
that was terrible and EVERYONE told the dean he was terrible but even then they didn't do anything about it. And it
wasn't just tenured professors. Even TAs got this insane treatment. After complaining about a TA that couldn't
teach and could barely even speak english, the dean actually told me that many foreign TAs were hired before they
ever set foot on campus and that once they got hear it was too late to do anything about it. What??? You can't fire
someone that can't do their job? Name one other non-government, non-union job where someone can't be fired for
sucking at their job.
I think probably the only way out of this mess in elementary school is with school vouchers and private schools.
At least then the schools would have to compete and hopefully the bad schools that let bad teachers stay would
run out of business when they ran out of students. That being said, you have a choice in college and there still
tended to be some politics that let some bad teachers keep their jobs.
Who decides what is "super" (Score:3)
Those roles can't be done by some national "super teacher."
The other problem is who decides the criteria for being "super"? Different people find different teachers effective. For example I know that Feynman was regarded by most as a "super teacher" but I hated his books and found his explanations needlessly complicated and far more confusing than most other textbooks. In short I found him a terrible teacher. I realize I'm in the minority with that but the point is that not everyone will agree on who a super teacher is because different people learn differently.
Re: (Score:2)
And who answers questions about the lectures?
They'll tell you to look it up on Google.
Re:sage (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'virtual class' will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide,
"will contain whatever buzzword content sounds good regardless of its impact on understanding of geometry, grammar, US history, chemistry, foreign languages, or coding" more like.
Re:sage (Score:5, Interesting)
What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?
HIs "vision" of education is silly. If the kids are watching a recorded lecture, there is no reason for them to be assembled in one place, and there is no reason that they should all be watching the same lecture. It will be individualized by letting each student progress at their own pace. Except we already have that. It is called Khan Academy [khanacademy.org], and while it works well for bright, motivated students, it leaves the dumb, unmotivated students even further behind.
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The FAQ. If a million students see the same lesson, how many genuinely unique questions would be asked?
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So who supervises the children, who ensures they play well together, who ensures they learn life and citizen lessons, who ensure the actually learn the material. Let me guess armed guards with tasers and handcuffs, they are really fucking cheap and hell, when it comes to the US the will be more than ample law enforcement types who would switch to school enforcement in order to 'play' with the kiddies, hell there would a whole bunch of pseudo conservative, pseudo religious types who would pay to play.
Qual
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"And who answers questions about the lectures?"
Why should they be questioning anything?
We have spent a lot of millions on those super-teachers and then more millions on licensing the products from the tech corporations that support all this show. They know better!
Remember, poor bastard: we are not educating here: that's for the real people aka "The Rich".
We are nurturing minions!
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NY has "solved" this with EngageNY. This is a series of modules that the teachers are required to use to teach their subjects. The modules say just what they are supposed to teach, how they are to teach it (both method and emotion used), the exact wording they must use, the questions that students should ask, and the responses that the teachers should give. It's an exact script so actual teachers aren't really needed anymore, just glorified actors. Which means
Re:sage (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not, but as someone who went to both public and private schools K-12, I wouldn't say my education was ever individualized. Sure, I could ask questions to an extent (up to when a teacher became annoyed), but the lesson was never for me, but rather the group.
I went to public school. When they saw that I was a good science student, they gave me a lab class with 4 other students, where we grew bacteria and bred fruit flies. That actually turned out to be useful in my future career.
Most of my teachers were dedicated and knew what they were doing. A lot of them stayed after work to help kids with projects and tutorials. They treated their students like their own kids.
The people who put down public schools and experienced union teachers are "visionaries" but they don't have facts to back them up. If you want the facts, do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch."
Re:sage (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who put down public schools and experienced union teachers are "visionaries" but they don't have facts to back them up. If you want the facts, do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch."
Ah yes, a single data point proves everything. Sorry. No.
I have had exceptional public school teachers that cared about the students, knew their material, and provided a rich, learning environment. I have had hideous public school teachers that made it obvious that they hated the students, wished they were elsewhere, and only because thy had been on the job so long and were tenured that it was too late to change careers at that point. I have had public school teachers at almost every point in between.
I'm extremely glad that you had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. But please, don't start pretending that you're representative of all public school students' experience or that your teachers were representative of all public school teachers.
Do your homework. I said do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch." Do I have to do everything for you?
http://dianeravitch.net/ [dianeravitch.net]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under GWHB and Bill Clinton. She believed in testing and charter schools and getting rid of unions. The Wall Street Journal gave her a column. But she knew how to understand data. And the data said that charter schools were failing and the testing was unscientific gobbledygook. So -- unlike some people -- when the evidence went against her, she admitted she was wrong. She has more data than you knew existed. For example, she knows about the NAEP http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... [ed.gov] which actually did a good, scientific study of charter schools and found that they were on average worse than public schools. And I'm not going to find it for you, you can look it up yourself, although you're probably too lazy for that.
There's plenty of data. And it doesn't do what the "visionaries" say. Most of this stuff has been tried before, and didn't work.
I didn't say that I had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. I had good teachers and bad teachers, like every institution. but most of them -- enough of them -- were good. I found more dedicated people in the public schools than I found in private businesses.
Re:sage (Score:5, Insightful)
Do your homework. I said do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch." Do I have to do everything for you?
This seems to have come up several times recently from different people. If you're trying to make an argument, then yes, it IS you who has to do "everything". Merely exhorting the person you're arguing with to go out and do enough research that they convince themselves that you're correct generally makes the other person not bother, because why would someone who already disagrees with you set out to prove themselves wrong?
Anyway now you've posted enough information to convince me. So, it works!
So, one size fits all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, sounds like "one size fits all" to me. What a dismal world.
Some kids do great with books and classroom materials. Others of us excelled with a rapid flurry of hands-on programming and lab exercises, with healthy doses of welding, machining, soldering, and troubleshooting.
This sounds like a dismal future for public school, and a bright opportunity for private & charter schools.
Re: (Score:2)
"and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."
As if the inequity was due to the books. When they figure out how to motivate the parents equally, then they might get somewhere on the equal results front.
Welcome to the future (Score:5, Insightful)
We may not have flying cars, but we already have a one-size-fits-all educational system. Mainstreaming, where slower learners and those with reduced cognitive function are added to classrooms (with and without aids, depending on severity) brings up the bottom, and all but the brightest on standardized are discouraged from entering "gifted and talented" programs. Teaching is aimed at producing the maximum number of passing grades on standardized tests.
The top and bottom 2% are weeded out - charter schools or G/T at the top, traditional special ed for those who will never achieve. The other 96% are lumped together and the teacher is salary-bound to make as many of them pass as possible. That means standardized worksheets and test prep pretty much from day one. The result? The bottom 10%, which would require extraordinary help to pass, are dropped as a waste of effort, the next 30% get most of the attention to try and get them to make the grade, and the rest of the class pretty much floats for the year with little or no real instruction because they learn well enough from the books and videos to get a passing grade. Anyone in the top 30 percentile points is bored to tears.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Some teachers put in lots of extra time and effort, others are the truly gifted teachers who weave engaging lesson plans and get the kids interested enough to retain the knowledge and pass the tests without crazy drilling. But, for the most part, when your job depends on hitting a number and there's no accounting for whether you have the smart class or the dumb class you're going to get a rhythm down and stick to it. At least if the test scored come back poor, you can open you planner and show all the drills and fact sheets you went over showing you covered the material.
It's pretty damned sad.
(Oh, and as for private schools...have you seen the cost? It's unlikely a family with 2 children who aren't in the top 10% of wage earners are going to be able to afford 12 years of private education. The opportunity is there, but the consumers to support it are pretty thin.)
This plan has holes (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno. I'm not an educator, but I'm pretty sure that when I was in school that there was more to the class than just the lecture. I don't think you can just roll a copy of something from "The Great Courses" and declare yourself done.
I would be very worried about any teacher that would reduce their own job to that.
Re:This plan has holes (Score:5, Interesting)
Between the stupidity of "leaders" in teaching, and zero tolerance insanity, homeschooling or private schooling my children looks better and better every day.
Re:This plan has holes (Score:5, Interesting)
not necesarily morons, just slaves to fashionable management ideology.
what's pushing this is the management class's absolute loathing of skilled individuals. they demand that every worker be a replacable component and they simply don't care that that means loss of productivity through loss of experience, skill, and talent.
they have this attitude towards workers in education and every other industry - whether for-profit or not-for-profit. it's what they're taught, and it's what they believe.
Re: (Score:2)
Look and see if you have local Montessori schools. We're big fans of our local preschool + K classroom, and hope he can get into the school proper (but its new, and small relative to the preschool -- the headmaster though is awesome to talk to and seems to really know his stuff and have good but kind control of the class.)
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Look and see if...
Pick one verb, or the other.
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"Between the stupidity of "leaders" in teaching, and zero tolerance insanity, homeschooling or private schooling my children looks better and better every day."
Homeschooling rocks. You can do everything from completely pre-canned video courses online to doing everything via cobbled together public domain content.
Of course, your child(ren) and whoever does the teaching must take to it. But if it works, it works quite well.
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I dunno. I'm not an educator, but I'm pretty sure that when I was in school that there was more to the class than just the lecture. I don't think you can just roll a copy of something from "The Great Courses" and declare yourself done.
I would be very worried about any teacher that would reduce their own job to that.
This reveals my age, but I remember when I was waiting in my home room in the morning and some of the kids in the back of the room were excited about something.
A kid had just built one of the first transistor radios from schematics.
I saw a transistor for the first time.
It was not in the textbooks.
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Here is what I don't get... (Score:5, Insightful)
Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go? The local tech wouldn't be of any use - the kid's family would need to hire an outside tutor or some such. And if the family can't afford a tutor, well that's too bad.
Re: (Score:3)
To the FAQ page?
Seriously, while I doubt very much that educator is going to disappear, a great deal of the raw information is quite susceptible to computerization.
The most important thing you need a teacher for at that level is the socialization skills - we have less need of well-educated psychopaths than you might think (other than politicians and such, of course)....
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Is education about information, or about skills (in the subjects, but also meta-skill at learning in a classroom and by oneself, plus handling deadlines/difficulties/failure/criticism/success...) + socialization w/ peers, teachers, admins, gurlz,... ?
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What if the kid can't read? Is disabled ot live in some backwater like Appalachia were ignorance is a virtue.
Re:Here is what I don't get... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or NYC, or LA, or Chicago. Willful ignorance is not limited to the backwaters of 'Appalachia '.
Wow total distopia (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the stupidest thing I have seen all day, all week, all month.
Leave education to the professionals please. Pay more and hire better folks.
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Even if you're just "rolling a tape", you still have to manage the students. The "educator" is not just devaluing his own job but that of the tech. In all likelihood, the "tech" could probably get a better job somewhere else. The catch about the tech is he/she would need to be able to troubleshoot.
The same is kind of true of the "student management" aspect of the task. This "educator" seems to be just assuming that everything will go as easily as possible (both the tech and the cat herding).
If anything this
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In all likelihood, the "tech" could probably get a better job somewhere else.
You are forgetting the craze to make everyone in the country an I.T. Guru/ Rockstar Coder and if there is any shortfall fill gap with bodies from whatever the low wage country du jour is.
Re:Wow total distopia (Score:5, Informative)
This is the stupidest thing I have seen all day, all week, all month.
Leave education to the professionals please. Pay more and hire better folks.
Pay more?
Tell that to the taxpayer , and maybe you'll remember why we're having this discussion.
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The taxpayer pays plenty for education.
The problem is they don't get the product they pay for.
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The taxpayer pays plenty for education. The problem is they don't get the product they pay for.
The taxpayer has the same problem with government.
I wonder which problem stands a better chance.
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I would gladly pay more to get less government .
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Be careful what you wish for. Usually the parts of government that is cut is the part that serves the people. Emergency services, food inspection, road and bridge inspection etc. Meanwhile the parts that infringe on peoples rights are expanded, there's always more money for the spy agencies, the prison industry (who are promised X number of prisoners), and hundred dollar hammers from the Congress-mans/Mayors buddy.
You are right about spending more money though
Re:Wow total distopia (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't price, it's value. Public education is cheaper than most private education. All the conservative studies that show it expensive look at education-only schools (the ones that have the facilities provided out of a separate budget, and no government oversight, so almost no compliance costs). When you look at it with those constraints, private should be about 1/3 the cost of public. But it fails even then. Public is more effective and cheaper, in most cases.the government is always cheaper and more effective (like the IRS and Social Security), but the complaints are with the conservative legislators who saddle the department with stupid rules, not their ability to execute them.
The Telescreen (Score:2)
Ahh, the telescreen from Orwell's 1984 [wikimedia.org] will finally be installed in all classrooms, feeding only appropriate knowledge into the young minds who know better than to ask questions anyway.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think now is an excellent time for a Two Minutes Hate!
We'll finally achieve equity, alright... (Score:2)
If we do this, we'll achieve equity by destroying the entire system and smearing the remains into an inch-high paste, using BS like this as a binding agent. Meanwhile, the children of the highly paid "super-teachers" will probably go to traditional private schools, just like the children of the rich do now.
The exact opposite of what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
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...Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.
Why is it when we attend free public school we demand an effective teaching scenario, and yet when we shell out $20,000/year to attend college, we don't mind watching that student/teacher ratio turn to shit as we sit in a single classroom full of hundreds of students and pay dearly for such ineffectiveness?
A shitload of dead-broke, well-educated minds want to know.
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Those lectures with hundreds of students were, at least in my experience, often followed by much smaller workshops or labs with the instructor's graduate student assistants. That's typically when you got your questions answered in more detail. Also, at the collegiate level, I suppose instructors figure that students should need a bit less hand-holding at that point. It's not all that dissimilar to tech conferences at the professional level. You generally only get the high points and broad brush strokes
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At a time when we are realizing that students aren't all the same and we need to adapt our teaching strategies to each of them, this dude brilliantly claims that the future is to sit them all in front of a screen with no support. We need to hire more teachers, not less. Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.
He is talking about 20 years from now. Technology has a habit of changing at an accelerated rate, so to envision what technology will provide in 20 years it is probably better to compare today's technology with 1975 tech. So take a look at Siri and Cortana compared to voice recognition and natural speech processing in 1975. Take a look at the amount of information is retrievable in Wikipedia with what existed in an Altair 8800.
Imagine going back to 1975 and describing the world wide web, ordering on Amazon,
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get em young, get em forever (Score:2)
A grab bag for corporate interests to get the advertising message right into classrooms and capture the market at its youngest and most impressionable through a hodgepodge of incompatible proprietary technologies put there by uninformed school departments and selected from a pork barrel of suppliers who paid the biggest lobbying fees to the politicians responsible for ensuring the "very best for growing young minds".
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My high school had something like that [wikipedia.org] in the 90s. It was a cheap way to inject advertising into a completely captive audience under the guise of "educational" programming.
Viewing was initially mandatory but early in eleventh grade I unplugged the damned thing so I could study and the response from the teacher and the rest of the class was a mix of acceptance and relief. That year the school was running the thing first and third lunch (lunch being three 30 minute periods) which meant our class got it twic
Why a classroom? (Score:2)
So, basically, it's going to be just like school is today, except the teachers will be working remotely?
I suspect that veteran teacher has been doing it so like that he can't get outside of the box and imagine education without classrooms, schools, or even structured classes.
I think the future is going to look a lot more like home schooling (possibly in groups to get around the whole school-as-babysitter issue that allows parent to hold jobs) than anything close to the institutions teachers currently work i
MOOCs Reincarnated? (Score:3)
There was an idea to do something related not too long ago. Universities and Community Colleges panicked and thought all of their students would leave in the future and move completely online. MOOCs would traditional education.
The reality is that not all people want to learn that way. The Slashdot crowd might be able to be completely successful watching a screen and talking to an in-class "Tech", but most people are not like that. Many people attend community colleges and smaller universities because they can ask questions and get answers in a much smaller and personal setting.
If this idea had true mass potential, it would have happened already and community colleges would already be gone.
And Drum Machines (Score:4, Insightful)
What this most reminds me of -- A drummer friend of mine was told, as a teenager by an older adult drummer in the 80's, not to take up the instrument because in the future all drumming would be done by electronic drum machines.
Really? (Score:2)
Laughable (Score:3)
This won't work at all. One of the most basic requirements of teaching is that your teaching level correspond to those you teach; aim to high and you loose them because they don't understand, aim to low and you loose them because they are bored. Having one "super teacher" yapping one-way lectures from a giant screen without the "teacher" knowing what his pupils can, is simply a lost cause when it comes to engaging and teaching the pupils.
And why the giant screen? Why not having each pupil following an individual course on individual screens instead of forcing everybody to follow the same course. And why the classroom at all if its only function is to supervise discipline among the inmates/pupils.
(Why not just strap the pupils to a chair in their home and force feed them lectures through Occulus rift headsets and noise-cancelling headphones; it is easy to motive the pupils through reinforcement stimuli like tasing them gently if they have wrong answers. This will be very cheap and is guaranteed to produce marvellous results.)
relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks (Score:4, Funny)
"...relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks..."
I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read that.
Re: (Score:3)
He did say 'powerful' TedTalks, so we really can't judge until they have some of those.
Lower pay for super teachers? (Score:2)
That does not make sense. If you want to attract great talent, offer great pay. Isn't that what we say in the private sector? If it is true then teachers need more money, not less.
Content Expert (Score:2)
Being a teacher at the high-school and elementary school level is more about classroom management and communicating the ideas, not about being an 'expert.'
Also, good luck finding someone you can pay $15 an hour to fix computers and take care of a classroom full of kids.
Remember television classrooms (Score:2)
You Seem To Think... (Score:2)
...that this giant screen will be streaming the very best, most informative lessons available, from subject experts around the world. While I see it streaming whatever commercially-laden content can be produced by the lowest bidder, or whichever church has the largest voter turnout in the school board elections, or whatever company has a CEO that golfs with the secretary of education.
Teaching will be one of the last jobs to go (Score:2)
Disaster (Score:2)
If that vision comes to pass, then our education system will have imploded and we'll be producing generations of uneducated students.
I cannot think of a single person who hasn't had one or two teachers who've made a huge difference in his or her life. And I cannot think of a single child who would prefer a screen to a living human being. What a pile of hogsh*t.
public schools are political patronage (Score:2)
As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The TFA is an excellent example of that fraction of the population who has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails, but somehow thinks they understand it completely. As one of the respondents in this thread (who did understand it) put it, real teaching jobs will be one of the last to go, as they entail interaction between human beings. It's in the interaction that the best teaching happens. That's why K12 classes need to be smaller, and not like my 200+ member Biology 1 lecture at university forty years ago.
Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, that is the crux of the problem. The cost of any service or product that requires real human interaction is skyrocketing when compared to other fields. Every technology sector job is based on one human producing a product which will be used by thousands to millions of people with almost no incremental cost. Electronics are assembled more and more by machine. Mineral exploration and energy production is becoming automated. Factory farming and staple goods production is the culmination of 200 years of industrial revolution efficiency.
Look at anything where costs are increasing fast and you'll find people - one on one interaction - is at the root. Unfortunately, public education is under the thumb of reduced municipal revenues at a time when more and more is expected. We can't go back to a one room school house and school finishing up at a 3rd grade level for 90% of the population, which is where much of the current "overtaxed" public seems to feel we should go.
I don't see this ending well.
Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
When 1/4 of the class flunks a college intro to bio class, they pay the university another $15,000 and they take it again - or they look for a major which doesn't require bio. When a 1/4 of a 5th grade class flunks a standardized test, the teacher can get fired.
See the difference?
Sounds like Hugo Gernsback's "teleducation" (Score:4, Informative)
"THE ELEMENTS OF TELEDUCATION"
"... The threat to our future can be met
(snip)
"In short, without going into details, this is the way the proposed system, outlined by the writer in 1945, works:
"From a central point or points the best technical and science teachers in the land instruct via large wall projection color television AA the classes in the land. If the instructor of the moment is at Yale, the rest of the country is connected to that point. The next lecture may come from MIT in Massachusetts, from Caltech in California or from any other point because all institutions of learning are tied in to the national teleducation closed-circuit hookup. Such lectures will not be merely talk. The teacher - be he a physics, chemical, electrical or electronics professor - will instruct directly from the laboratory all important experiments and make clear any technical point by actual physical demonstration."
Re: (Score:2)
Which failed. All attempts using more modern technology have also failed. I can conclude conclude that some group of educators is insane: They are trying the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome. It may also be a factor, that the "Peter principle" was discovered in the educational field and only latter found to apply elsewhere as well.
$15 HR need masters WTF? (Score:2)
The student loans will be so high that mc'ds is a better job.
Recipe for failure (Score:5, Insightful)
My step-daughter was literally math-illiterate upon entering college - very poor math SATs, couldn't multiply 1-digit numbers without a calculator, and didn't know that a+b commutes but a-b doesn't. I spent several hours a day 3-4 days a week with her, and through tremendous effort and lots of tears she earned all A's in Calculus 1 and 2 and Statistics. There is simply no way she could have even passed without my help (and a boost of self-motivation by a short stint in the real world earning near minimum wage with no college degree and no future).
Rich people will hire tutors to do the same thing. Poor people can't afford to and rarely have anyone like me around to help. So the rich will get ahead regardless of ability; other than a few exceptionally talented ones, the poor will get further behind, continuing the cycle of failure and poverty.
There is something about individual interaction that can't be duplicated with a computer or projection screen. A 50-to-1 student/teacher ratio with little individual one-on-one instruction is going to make things much worse.
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They said the same thing of film (Score:2)
No different than when the "talkie" was expected to revolutionize education. The thing that drives teacher count and pay is the need to adapt the education to individual pupils.
Moreover, if the Tech doesn't have any child skills, it will likely be a 1:20 ratio, and you are right back at $1/student hour just for the tech.
Change needs to happen, but the most economical solution is parent involvement.
Recorded, broadcast lessons? No way. (Score:3)
No one will listen to recorded, broadcast lessons. They want a live teacher giving a lecture.
They tried that with sports and no one watches sports broadcasts. Everyone goes to a local game instead, even though the local performances aren't as good as the best athletes in the world.
They tried that with dramatic performances, and no one watches movies. Everyone would rather go to a community theater performance.
They tried that with music, and no one listens to pre-recorded music. Everyone would rather listen to a live performance.
Recorded content and broadcasting are a fad.
Still nonsense (Score:3)
This has been "envisioned" time and again for at least half a century. It always fails. Sure, most teachers are not really good, but as it turns out, they are a lot better than a good one on a TV screen. Distance education works only for those that can also self-learn. That experience has been made by distance educators time and again, whether snail-mail and paper, email, TV, videos or interactive virtual classrooms were used. For most peoples, an educator that is not physically there does not cut it.
This whole thing is only intended to make education a lot cheaper, not better. And it fails at that.
Every tech revolution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every technical revolution in education since Edison's wax cylinder phonograph or prior has been prophesied to replace classroom teachers.
A brief list:
The Gutenberg press.
Edison's phonograph.
Classes by mail.
Voice radio.
Television.
Two way video.
Multi user computer terminals.
Microcomputers.
Multimedia software.
The internet.
This too will become a minor fad, blossom, fade, and find a very minor place in the ongoing art of education.
I think the difference (Score:4, Insightful)
I got this far into the article... (Score:3)
I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. ...And I stopped. This guy doesn't get it.
You could have the most engaging, informative lesson on the face of the planet, and kids may still not listen to it. Maybe they didn't get much sleep last night. Perhaps they ate at McDonalds for breakfast and have a sugar rush. Sometimes they feel depressed, because they just broke up with their significant other. Maybe the topic is about mathematics, a subject that's just difficult to understand. There's a possibility the student is dyslexic. And this is not even the tip of the iceberg.
Generally, humans need inspiration, and they are best inspired by other humans, education no exception. There is a small subset of students who possess enough initiative and tenacity that, even at a young age, they find success by their own merits. But the majority of students face challenges that interfere with their motivation to learn. They need to be coached through these challenges, actions requiring insight into the human psyche, something computers have yet to achieve.
To draw a parallel, do we yet see any high school sports teams being coached by a computer? Shouldn't a computer be better equipped to analyze plays, to determine strengths and weaknesses of players, and to determine strategies that have the greatest probability of success? What does the coach have that the computer doesn't?
Nice theory but... (Score:2)
never going to fly. Why? Because it sounds too much like everyone gets the same quality of education in that scenario. Rich and upper middle class families don't want that. Why? Because they paid lots of money to buy a home in a neighborhood with other wealthy home owners. High value homes pay higher property tax and more property tax means more money for schools. Which means that Jr. gets an unfair advantage (one of many, but that's another issue) over kids in less wealthy families. And the folks with mone
Freak wormhole (Score:2)
Re:edu-babble (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:edu-babble (Score:5, Funny)
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Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.
1984? Oh dear, I'm sorry. We appear to be going backwards here.
Would it help bring you back to today if we called those giant screens "smartphones" and put them in the hands of every 5-year old instead?
Re:edu-babble (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.
I think the truly intractable problem is that such a system would centralize control of the educational system. Centralize it right down to every single word that is presented. The true power of the public education system is that it gives teachers a great deal of independence in what they say in the classroom. Imagine a situation when something terrible happens in our democracy. Someone seizes control. The system gets even more perverted than it already is. Then imagine an educational system where children only received "approved" resources. No independent human teacher. Just video and text. If the children don't get information from the media, then they will effectively be blind to reality.
I know this is hypothetical, but I think it demonstrates my point, that independent teachers are an essential buffer against tyranny emerging in our democracy.
Re:edu-babble (Score:5, Insightful)
God save us from educational reform. We have had 30 years of it and things only get worse and worse. Less relevant course work, too many tests, talent driven out of the system, destruction of decent school lunches, no PE, etc. All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system.
Terrible Then Too (Score:3)
God save us from educational reform. We have had 30 years of it and things only get worse and worse. Less relevant course work, too many tests, talent driven out of the system, destruction of decent school lunches, no PE, etc. All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system.
There's a story that Mayor Koch in New York had an old Lady stop him and say, "Mayor, make it how it used to be." And he said, "Lady, it was never like that."
Educational reform is the only thing we have to try to make the system better, and it's not good enough right now. Some of the time--maybe even most of the time--it is going to be the wrong reform. And then you try something else.
School was terribly done 30 years ago. It's terrible today. Not only because we keep getting the material wrong, but be
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The lure of it is the contrast to union practices. Nobody wants bad or abusive teachers in
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In my experience though, the improvement is marginal at best. Yes, you can fire people faster, but at the same time, how many for profit companies do you see trying to spend what it takes to get the best workers, even at the cost of cutting their profits, and how many want the cheapest minimum standard they can find?
With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of
business by the schools that hire quality teachers. I would like to see a point where private schools are competing for the vouchers to the
point where they are bragging about the quality of the teachers, the quality of their programs, etc... My town of 80,000 is small enough
that you can drive from one end to the other in about 20 minutes but is big enough that it has abo
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"With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of
business by the schools that hire quality teachers."
For this to happen you'd need offer to vastly outgrow demand, which is not going to happen, neither on public nor -much less, on private money.
No, what you'll get is the rich going to good schools and the poors to bad ones. Hey! isn't this already hapening? No: the poors' ones will be even worse than today since more m
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In NY we have charter schools to "compete" with public schools. They draw funds from public school coffers leaving public schools with less money. They also get to accept or reject any student so all low performing or special needs students get booted to the public schools. You wind up with low funded public schools struggling to deal with tons of low performing/special needs students while the charter schools seem to be doing really well. This leads the politicians to call for more charter schools and
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The union should care enough about the kids and their own profession that it wants to keep bad teachers from working.
will never happen, non-working/fired teachers dont pay dues and collecting dues and expanding the flock of payers is the fundament of a union.
Re: (Score:2)
"All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system."
What makes you think that wasn't the plan from the very begining?
If you really tried to educate the masses they might start questioning the 'statu quo'.
Re:edu-babble (Score:5, Interesting)
From personal experience, I don't know where this educational reform is you are talking about. I went through a good set of public schools in the 70's in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game was the highlight of the week at high school. Classes were pretty good, the kids that wanted to, got into good colleges. Now, 40 years later, my kids are going through a good set of public schools in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game is the highlight of the week at high school. The kids that want to are getting into good colleges. Two main differences from my experiences -- my kids seem to be learning more advanced concepts in math and science sooner than I did and the school district doesn't offer Driver's Ed as an elective. I wish that Driver's Ed was an elective, other than that the K-12 education experience seems as good or better than what I got.
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Why do get the impression that he approves of it?
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Current culture has an infatuation with the latest shiny shiny and just assumes that anything new is better anything old is bad and that the ancients didn't know anything. That's why they needed the help of extra-terrestrials.
Has nothing to do with re-invention (Score:2)
It has everything to do with dollars. Top private schools can spend $30k a student on teachers and amenities. Public schools have 1/3 of that, and the most challenging students to deal with.
The 1% and the educational experts know the same thing: Education is an intensive, hands-on process which is by its very nature an expensive endeavor. They know that it's more efficient if you can weed out poor educational candidates before they enroll. They know that the educational success of a student is highly corre