Hello, Mr. Chips
I received an e-mail last week from someone who is sure to become one of my heroes — an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher. He was concerned about the proper use of technology, especially iPads, in the classroom, and had quite specific suggestions for what to do. We’ll probably get to that in my next column but here I’d like to consider his more fundamental idea, which is that technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.
“The problem is that I’ve found that all these things that are purported to improve student learning ignore the number one factor in student success, which is the student’s attitude toward learning and motivation,” wrote my new friend the math teacher. “The truth is that if students are motivated to learn, they will learn, pretty much regardless of the specific format or technology that is used in the lessons themselves. Conversely, if a student is not interested in learning, the details of how lessons are presented, technology, etc. don’t matter very much…the student will find whatever way is available to avoid learning…they may socialize with their neighbors, or frequently ask to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom, or simply try to tune out and take a nap during class. Thus, while we focus on how teachers teach, I’m finding that the real key to student success is not so much how you teach but how you go about motivating students to want to learn, and how the systems you use in the classroom help support and encourage students to succeed even when they are not intrinsically motivated by the subject.”
He’s correct. In an ideal world students want to learn and teachers want to teach and the two meet in a common space where knowledge is transferred. Except how often and how well does that really happen?
It happens all the time in some places, like at Stanford where my students used to chase me back to my office after class arguing over some point or other. But not every school can be a Stanford and even there, as at many research universities, much of the faculty doesn’t really want to teach.
Ironically, there was a time when I taught simultaneously at Stanford and Foothill College, a junior college just down the street and a million miles way. I used to joke that Stanford students couldn’t write but at least they could read. But you know that was unfair to my students at Foothill, many of whom were just as dedicated and hard working, though with different expectations.
A lot of this comes down to expectations. And our expectations of technology in education more often than not come down to it being a tool for compensation, either working like an instructional Hamburger Helper to stretch teachers across more students or to literally teach what the present faculty cannot.
One sure-fire success would be a truly great calculus teacher in a box. What would that be worth? Maybe $50,000 per year times 5,000 high schools? There’s your educational startup idea.
Which brings us to costs. Steve Wozniak, who spent a decade and several million dollars working two days a week in the Los Gatos Public Schools when his kids were students there, taught me an important lesson about the price of educational technology. “A desk lasts 25 years, a textbook lasts a decade, and a computer is good for maybe three years: which of those costs the most?” he asked. It was only by putting a decade of educational technology on his credit card that Woz was able to create an ideal environment in Los Gatos, giving every student a notebook computer and Internet access, yet even he would be hard put to say with certainty that it made a consistent difference in student outcomes.
School administrators hate technology, whether they admit it or not, because they don’t understand it and it takes funds away from hiring more teachers. If we go back to our math teacher’s quote, above, you can see why. Because technology for technology’s sake is a crap shoot while hiring teachers who are known to be good at their jobs of inspiring students to learn is pretty close to a sure thing.
Fortunately two things are happening to change these facts of educational life. Technology is getting cheaper, better, broader, and deeper. It’s not good enough or cheap enough yet, but the school PC of today has five times the utility for one fifth the price of 25 years ago (not Moore’s Law numbers, but this is utility, not cycles, we’re talking about). That 25-to-1 improvement is a trend that is only going to get better faster, but I’d say we are still a decade away from the critical mass needed for a true educational renaissance, which I’ll describe below.
The other thing that’s happening is parents are changing. I’ve written about this before but it bears repeating. This week I’ll turn 59, but my kids are 9, 7, and 5 and I talk to the other parents — many of them young enough to be my children — as we wait to get our kids from class or band practice or chess club or science club or basketball practice, or Odyssey of the Mind. Parents aren’t the same as they used to be.
These parents all use computers every day. They grew up with computers. They don’t know a world without computers. And so they may be frustrated by technology as all of us are and may always be, but they aren’t afraid of it and they see its potential. A decade from now one of those parents will be running the school system and another will be running the state department of education. Only then will things really change. And the cool part is that’s about when I think the technology will finally be where it needs to be.
A decade from now technology will be cheaper and the lubricity of acquiring knowledge will be dramatically improved. I think time and space will cease to be factors in the educational experience with the result that the best teachers and the best students will have a far better chance of finding each other. But for the best that’s, what, maybe a 10 percent improvement? After all, these are the already motivated we’re talking about, not the kids who need a little help or a lot. It’s the very normal kids I hope will gain the most from technology, far more than 10 percent.
This goes back to my math teacher quote, above. Motivated students succeed, but since every student is different and every student has a different way to learn best, unless we can design an individual curriculum for each kid, the system won’t be optimized.
My kids go to the best public school in Sonoma County. I know that because I chose my house based on that research. But when Cole finishes his math problems in a quarter the time it takes anyone else in the class, his teacher has him insert a wait state by putting his head down on his desk. Conversely, when some other kid never quite gets the problem set finished, ever, well he/she never gets a rest and never masters the material, either.
The current system is unfair to both kids.
The only solution I can see is one teacher per student. And the only way something close to that is going to happen is through technology. And it’s coming.
What I have noticed is that different people learn differently. Some folks have to have a published text book and have to take the time to read it, you can stand there and tell them something until you are blue in the face and it wont work, they have to read it from a book. Some folks cant learn from the book you have to stand there and show them. And some folks need a little prompting and a little guidance but room to find their way, periodically put up a wall or fence when the start to wander in the wrong direction they will find their way. This leads to the conclusion above, one teacher one student. Very expensive but you can then tailor to the learning of the student. I apparently went to poorly rated schools but did well anyway because I needed the space to wander and a little guidance and I took it from there. The kids that needed better teachers or books, didnt get that and probably lead to the bad statistics. The problem today that the statistics are the measuring stick for everything, funding, salaries, etc which only leads to teaching to the test, which teaches the kids nothing, they end up poorly educated. The highest rated schools statistically will produce the least educated children.
Student motivation is directly related to how good a teacher is. If they can’t engage the kids in a meaningful way, then they will tune out. The exciting question is whether someone will create incredible courseware using iBooks Author and/or through iTunes U. That’s where your great calculus teacher in a box will come from.
AWESOME
Great Comment and Suggestion. A Great Teacher who engages all his students is a Success to the Students as well as Themselves. BRAVO !!! 
The other way to get to one teach per student approach (or very very close) is through mini schools (a la the Amish), and/or homeschooling (which is how I went through school).
Neither is a guarantee of success, and they may not work for everyone, but it’s most certainly an option.
You bring up many excellent points but leave out potentially the one that has the most influence on effective use of technology in the classroom: training. A teacher may have a great deal of personal experience with technology outside of the classroom, but that does not necessarily translate to using technology for educational purposes in the classroom – either to present content or to allow students to demonstrate their understanding. This can can take of both the valid issues your articles raises: teachers who are well-trained in the best uses of educational technology can be very effective in motivating students who have been traditionally hard to reach, and the technology that is purchased is actually used!
“…technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.”
I develop technology-based educational products in an area where it truly can become the solution — science, specifically chemistry. How is chemistry taught at the high school level today? Each teacher has cobbled together her own set of PowerPoint slides over the course of her career. To many in education, this is what it means to use technology in the classroom — students lulled to sleep by PowerPoint.
When I meet chemistry teachers, I suggest to them that, over the years, they have accumulated hard-earned images and movies that run in their heads as they teach. Understanding chemistry has its unique challenges — it requires the ability to visualize in 3D, yet its subject matter is too small to see it even with the most powerful optical microscope. So, teachers resort to waving their hands, showing static 2D pictures from the web and running cartoonish Flash animations.
I ask these teachers if they wouldn’t rather be able to show realistic, dynamic, 3D models of atoms and molecules to their students. Oh, and how about if they could interact with them — indeed perform “experiments” on them to “discover” atomic and molecular structure, periodic trends, or the gas laws themselves.
A light bulb goes on for every one of these teachers. Some can’t wait to get started. But many are intimidated by the thought of learning new technology or throwing away their cherished PowerPoints. Some seem afraid that their students will “get it” faster than they do — put it in front of students and they just run with it. I’ve even had one teacher write to us about how engaged and enthusiastic his students were as they worked with the software — then proceeded to ask how he could now embed these interactive simulations as passive animations in… you guessed it… his PowerPoint slides.
This technology, originally developed for use by drug and plastics designers, is changing the way students “see chemistry” (that’s an intentional double entendre). But getting teachers to think of technology in the classroom as more than PowerPoint, web browsing, and students blogging is a slow process.
And now we have e-Textbooks and emerging tools to produce them. iBooks Author even has the ability to embed 3D models its books. But these models are just static collections of polygons that can’t be interacted with except to zoom and spin them around. And they don’t know any chemistry or physics.
So we will continue to sell our curriculum as software — walking that fine line between an eBook and an App. I’m looking foward to Apple releasing a framework that will us to embed Cocoa into iBooks. I recently told the chemistry editor at one of the big publishers that we are still a few years away from really interesting eBooks in chemistry. I have the code ready to go.
So this was a lot of words about something that I claim is 3D, dynamic, visual, and interactive. If you want a little taste of what I’m talking about, take a look at the screencasts on the following page about our popular Mac App, The Atomic Dashboard:
http://www.bitwixt.com/jsite/atomicdashboard
Then think about students interacting with these as jump out of the pages of their books. Harry Potter, here we come.
also, check out reality. it is amazing how thing in the foreground appear closer than anything in the background.
Take a look at the url (from the New Yorker) below where a surgeon describes the benefit of a coach. In the middle of the article he cites work done with school teachers and their coaches. It plainly shows that the concern the coaches have is about engagement (motivation to learn) of all the students in the classroom. Given the age distribution of our population, how about asking the really good, soon to retire teachers to coach the younger teachers? Small investment with multiplier potential.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_gawande
JD
Speaking as a former public school teacher, the problem for younger teachers is rarely lack of coaching.
There are usually “mentors” in the department, school, and school system, and willing retired teachers in the community. The young teacher is overwhelmed and can rarely get to them.
The extra requirements include:
-documenting pedagogy & “standards” in lesson plans
-daily & periodic documenting for each student in each class with a classified “impairment”
-documenting accommodations for students with short or extended absences
-documenting each contact with parents, especially in low performance cases. With 150 students (total) in 5 classes, this logging alone can take hours a week.
-much more
The added demands have the veneer of reasonability, but require more hours than there are in a day. There is already a lot of start-up time for a new teacher, preparing materials and classes that veterans have on hand.
Coaching can’t readily reduce these burdens. The recent bureaucratic demands bog down even experienced teachers, even the flourishing ones. They result is many good teachers burnt out of the system.
An iPad is nothing more than a tool. It replaces the books and a slate with chalk. The problem with our students in the USA is not the technology but discipline (motivation) and more importantly the teachers and the teaching content.
The schools are full of union teachers who don’t teach and cannot be fired. We are spending astronomical amounts on education but the money never reaches the students. Throwing more money at the problem without accountability will never solve the problem. The money is wasted and stolen.
Students have been taught reading, writing, and arithmetic for hundreds of years in the USA long before calculators, slide rules, computers, and iPads. We are failing to teach the most basic of skills.
The problem started in the 1970′s with so called “progressive” teaching methods. Instead of rote repetition which has worked for hundreds of years. Silly unproven methods were implemented. Discipline dropped dramatically at the same time. You want motivated kids? Force them to pay attention. There was no such thing as ADD / ADHD. How is it a student can just talk and ignore the teacher or worse take a nap? You take a nap at the workplace and you’ll find yourself in the unemployment line very quickly! Students are arriving at major universities completely unprepared for the rigors of a true education. They can’t understand why they cannot succeed when they have to do real work and they don’t get the pat on the back and easy A.
Pratt & Whitney would hire machinists off the street and put them through an aggressive apprenticeship program. i.e. School. They had to teach them basic math, how to read a ruler, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. This program no longer exists because those jobs were outsourced overseas to China where the workers already have these skills. Apple cannot manufacture their products in the USA because we don’t have the workforce in place in large enough numbers. Of course, much of the hand assembly could be automated with robots, but who will engineer and fix those robots? Not enough workers with strong enough basic engineering skills.
Time to throw the baby out with the bath water and start over from scratch. Return to the old concepts and teach by rote. It works every time. Increase discipline. Not talking about corporal punishment, but just kick the kid out of class with a suspension if the child cannot adapt to the classroom. Hold the parents accountable. This is why private education works. The student adapts to the school not the other way around.
Thanks for that. I’m sure many of us were thinking the same things, but you expressed it so well. Yes, we need a return to common sense. Discipline, tests that provide motivation, parent involvement, recognition and rewards for good teachers.
“One teacher per student” works. That’s how I learned computer programming.
As a student at the Control Data Institute in 1978 I used the PLATO system of self-paced multimedia training. The theory is that when you got stuck you went and stood in a line at the teacher’s desk and waited your turn for one-on-one help. In practice there was hardly ever a line so I got help instantly whenever I needed it.
I especially appreciated burning through Fortran IV programming as fast as I could read the test questions. This module only took me about a week versus just about everyone else who needed two months. Admittedly I had found a Fortran book in the school library when I first got into high school and read it like others would read a novel. Apparently 6 years later I’d retained enough of the material to ace the tests with very little actual studying required. Curiosity and motivation is the best teacher.
IBM 360 Assembly Language clicked for me too. Prior to college I’d done HAPAS Assembly just as a fun mental exercise. I did the entire module, again, in only a couple of weeks, compared with the two months other students needed. I know that the learning stuck because I became the “go to guy” for the other students who for some reason didn’t grok assembly language. Also, my first job was as a CADOL programmer (a hybrid of Basic and Assembler) where I did very well.
I’ll celebrate the day someone takes the PLATO philosophy out of moth balls and makes it available to high school students. In high school, for excitement, my best friend and I would compete to see who could get the closest to the minimum passing grade. Kind of student Russian roulette… my confidence in my answers had to so complete that one mistake and I’d fail. It was really a game of chicken… answer too many extra questions as a safety net and I’d get a higher score than my friend and lose the competition.
High school was a complete waste of four years of my life. Even if PLATO is only suitable for motivated learners there are lots of students who could breeze through high school in a fraction of the time that it currently takes.
Now this would be a real economic stimulus package!
Have you watched this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ?
Second, it’s not going to make any difference when computer-literate/savvy people are running the schools. They will still be Teaching rather than Facilitating Learning. They will still be boring their students to death. There’s no sign that that is going to change in 10 years. Somewhere it might, but definitely not in the USA.
This is because so much has to change, and it’s way more change than can actually occur because parents, teachers and school administrators still think our school system needs minor changing rather 97% change. Can you imagine schools eliminating “classes by exact age”? Eliminating Grading and replacing it with Level of Understanding? Making school relevant to the future rather it currently is, to the past? I can’t.
“The current system is unfair to both kids.”
I figured out a method on how to deal with that problem.
I taught freshmen english at a Korean University. English is a core test subject, if you test good on English, math and science, you’ll go to a good University. Ours was second rung, maybe even third. So, a few of my students were fluent, the rest were so so, and then there were some that didn’t know enough to understand me – so they were prone to checking out.
Obviously I have to teach to the bulk of the students. What to do with the rest?
Well, on the first day of class, before I even introduce my name, I give them a quiz. Since most teachers write their name on the board, hand out a syllabus and then leave, this produces a big groan from the class. I then grade the quiz and rank the students. I organize the class in teams of 2, 4 and 8, depending upon the project or the work. I then fold the quiz rankings in two and pair the good students with the bad students to create a mentoring system.
I talk to the good students. I tell them, that I expect them to get A’s because they already know the subject. But if their partner doesn’t pass, then they will get A- minus. If their student passes, they’ll get As, if their student gets a C+ they’ll get an A and if their studend gets a B- or above, they will get the highest score possible (since we posted grades using a numerical system – this can have a huge effect in overcoming a bad performance else where.
Now the Smart student is engaged and by them, the poor student is engaged. The smart student learns by teaching/tutoring, and the poor student learns because the smart student is making sure he isn’t missing anything. The smart student also develops good compassionate leadership skills and social confidence. Later on, out side the class room this gives him HUGE social proof with the girls and causes him to get laid. (I never got around to explaining this to them, but in the future I might).
To motivate them, I had them they work in teams in competition … it helps to motivate students – they don’t want to lose.
The other thing I did is throw as much novelty at them as I could.
Every class I had saw the Seinfeld episode of the Soup Nazi two times, the second time with a script, and then had to act it out from the script. (Note that the fair use exception to copy right allows the use of copy righted material for educational purposes). Because that episode is situational, you can laugh even if you don’t know the language…but then the more you know, the funnier it gets.
Instead of just teaching them hi, my name is Bo, what’s yours? I showed them the scene from Dead Poet’s society: the point of language is to whoo women etc.. I then gave them a script of James Bond trying pick up Angelina Jolie in a spy vs spy scenario at a coffee house. Then I told them they had to change it… make it better, make if funnier. One team of 8 had James Bond calling Angelina Jolie”s office to set up a date, only to have James flirt with the receptionist over the phone… he then makes a date with the receptionist instead,who accepts, but then the receptionist reveals that she’s not a she, but just a man with a high voice, but looking forward to the date nonetheless. Funny stuff.
I don’t think you can use those gimmicks in math. But novelty can be fit in there somewhere. Technology can’t be used to teach. There is no substitute for a teacher. I think mentoring is especially the way to go when you have very advanced students… they can help bring up the rear … the best way to learn a subject is to teach a subject.
Seems to me that technology can facilitate learning, but it can’t substitute for teaching.
Students can have a variety of reasons for not being motivated in a particular subject. The teacher can figure that out and find a way to compensate. My favorite subjects are history and geography. I hated English until I saw the documentary “The Story of English” which took the subject and framed it in my favorite context. Might a Geometry teacher do the same thing? The ancient Greeks used geometry at the battle of Syracuse. Now its not a foreign language… that sort of thing.
And of course, there is parenting.
“The only solution I can see is one teacher per student.”
There’s another word for that; homeschooling.
Then technology and following the interests and passions of the student are only limited by the resources of the family.
I agree 100% Joanne. The key is not technology, it is parenting. And if you can not home school, at least empower parents through school choice, vouchers, etc. The system of public schooling is obsolete and should be scrapped.
As we all know from our own school experiences, home schooling cannot replicate, for better or worse, the deep social development that school forces upon us.
Robert, we’ve iPads in our school now. The kids are filming movies, playing multimedia learning games while traditional reading has plummeted. Is this is good or bad? I’ve no idea, but it does remind there was at the time TVs where supposed to herald a revolution in learning. They certainly can be a useful tool, but more often are not.
“The current system is unfair to both kids.”
When I was growing up, these two kids would have been in different classes.
The student who blasted through the problems would have been placed in an advanced class where the lessons moved more quickly and the problem sets were more challenging. The student who struggled would have been placed in a remedial class where they would have received more individual attention and lessons targeted at their current level of understanding.
In the interest of not bruising the delicate self-esteem of the children in the remedial classes, there has been a huge push for “inclusion” in our area. “Inclusion” basically means the end of leveled classes – there are no more advanced classes or remedial classes. Every kid, regardless of intelligence of motivation, is jammed into the same classroom. Teachers are expected to “scaffold” the material for the lower students, essentially teaching a base lesson with an individualized add-on package for every single student in the classroom who falls below the base lesson.
Due to the ridiculous pace at which teachers have to present material to make sure that their students pass the yearly standardized tests, this is basically an impossible task. As a result, teachers are stuck aiming their lessons somewhere around the middle of the normal curve to try to hit the classroom’s broadest intellectual target. This is obviously to the detriment of the students on both the left AND the right of intellectual curve.
Hopefully they’ll wake up eventually and flush this idea down the same tube where all the other failed educational experiments go (classes without walls, exclusive whole-word language, etc.). But by then, plenty of kids will get a substandard education because of this experiment and no one will ultimately be held accountable.
Education is surely changing and scaling with the Internet…and probably you won’t need extra equipment.
The AI class at Stanford could be just the start: it has been a ‘shocking’ experience for Prof Thrun if he has decided to pursue different models for teaching.
Read more here: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/3658-sebastian-thrun-resigns-from-stanford-to-launch-udacity.html
Ok, this is not for kids at primary school but…
How about the educational experience of Team Cringely and your planned Moon rover (maybe with a bowling trophy)? It’s getting close to the end of the month, and I recall you promised some news about this.
“Always leave them wanting more …” Yes, yes, I know you are VERY good at this. I won’t whine or complain (much).
Adaptive learning. And at least 2/3 of the students in a college class have smartphones (I did a survey). No need to buy everyone an ipad. Hmmm….
When I was young, and by young I mean 39, I couldn’t grasp that people just didn’t think the way I do. For me – when I want to learn something, I research everything I can about the subject in books. In fact, I’m fat, dumb, and happy when I have an excellent book on the subject, and a computer at hand to try things out for myself just to see how it really works.
One day it clicked for me. It was the day my wife decided to take a C++ programming course. Now, I’ve been trying to get her interested in geeky things – including programming for years – and I gave her reading lists and some of the best books on the subject – things I wish someone had done for me back when I was just getting started. As much as she tried – she just never got it…especially, it seems when I would try to explain it to her. For her the ideal learning experience is in a formal classroom setting with a teacher she can ask questions, and a solid curriculum with homework and all the rest – the works.
I knew something significant was going on when she started talking to me with excitement about her first project – the archetypical hello world program. When she came home with an ‘A’ in the subject – I knew there was a qualitative difference between the different modes of learning – and those modes are different and unique for every person.
After sulking for several years, I have now come to accept that reality – and by doing so it has helped me communicate with and help others find their best way in spite of my own limitations.
So the upshot of my torturous journey is to tailor education for the students – and today we have more than enough CPU cycles to go around to make that happen.
https://plus.google.com/112333944070832643201/posts/2NATXJE3FRj
The teacher can explain the bad grades with “ADHD”.
Salman Khan, of Khan academy, has most probably cracked this problem, about as well as it is going to be cracked.
“….when Cole finishes his math problems in a quarter the time it takes anyone else in the class, his teacher has him insert a wait state by putting his head down on his desk. Conversely, when some other kid never quite gets the problem set finished, ever, well he/she never gets a rest and never masters the material, either.”
A visitor to my class, sent me the link to your blog. The problem you describe above is central to the education misery of children’s lives worldwide. The other misery is that children are evolutionarily blessed with an inclination towards playfulness and experimentation. We deny them their naturalness in schools.
I use games to achieve to take an aim at both of the problems. Children payback by learning in school, going online to my site after school (no homework!), and deliver double digit academic growth. This is now going on for three years and has been done without giving everybody a laptop. Checkout the video on my site.
Perhaps the “wait state” is actually when his mind takes what we think is a breather although is actually reinforcing what has been learned? He may be benefiting after all, while other kids do not get this moment to form deeper connections with the material. Often a gotcha moment occurs with the mind wandering than with the puzzle at hand.
One other perspective on this. I lead incoming parent tours at my son’s school. Often parents ask about accelerated instruction, but having two older boys I know understand while their son may be brilliant at something, they might not be so hot with another subject, such as composition or Espanol. I’ve also seen children enter in K having finished the Potter series but a couple of grades later, being passed by late readers.
Screw the Teachers Unions!
FYI: If you need a union to represent you then you are NOT skilled labor.
Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. [3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NA31Dj01.html
It’s not the unions, it’s the teaching method. The “best” private schools, without unions, are just the same. The problem is the “teacher center” traditional approach, where everything in the classroom is focused on the teacher, and students are discouraged from doing anything that detracts from that. All learning has to go through the teacher. If a student finishes teacher assigned work, he has nothing to do.
Private schools have better results because parents expect more, and because the general level of ability of the students is better.
The Montessori method is not “teacher centered” and encourages students to work at their own pace. Teacher centered lessons are only a part of the curriculum, and students work on their own (or in small groups) much of the time and work through the materials at their own pace. A student who finished work ahead of others would not be left to kill time waiting for others.
But Montessori training is very different from traditional teacher training. Teachers who are already working in traditional schools can’t just be handed different materials and told to use the Montessori method (or any other method).
a wise teacher would have Cole help the other student rather than just wait there for everyone to catch up. Children like Cole can communicate better/easier with another child than any teacher can. If it’s collaborative, all benefit, even the teacher…but then that removes the teacher from an authoritarian position…which threatens the system. It’s sad…
With all due respect, I’ve attended a large allegedly good research university UC Berkeley, and I’ve attended junior colleges. While Stanford may well have had more motivated students, on average, the quality of instruction that I received at the junior colleges far surpassed that which I received at Berkeley.
When I hear “large research university” I think of shitty teachers; and when I hear “junior college” I think of dedicated teachers. This ties in with your primary point in that teachers who actually care about their students focus on inspiring them–something that I found totally lacking at Berkeley.
For you Cal fans who are offended by my comments, get over it. There are great colleges for undergraduate education in the US: I doubt that any of them are research universities.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
Absolutely correct. I’m lucky I could not afford to go to any college other than the state subsidised one. The teachers were there to teach. After graduating I went to MIT for my masters where it seemed the teachers and students were there to serve the school.
I think the comment by Tim K above should be contemplated. My variation of that is that our society operates on a “competitive paradigm” instead of a “cooperative paradigm.” Watch television, you see competition. But what would happen if we operated by the idea the no one wins unless everyone wins? I couldn’t tell you how to actually accomplish that until I read Tim K’s comments above.
If we are not yet able to have one teacher per student, how about a variation where the students teach each other? They cooperate in some way and keep at it until everyone understands what is being taught. Again, if you asked me yesterday how to actually do that, I would not have had an answer, but now we have one example (above) of how to try to do that.
We should at least consider the possibility that some fundamental belief in our minds, something so basic that we can’t even see it as a fundamental belief, but see it just as the way things are, always were, and always shall be, might be wrong. That’s what I was thinking with the “competitive paradigm” and “cooperative paradigm” ideas. Maybe we need some completely new way of looking at things.
[...] (An excellent technology blogger, Bob Cringely, is writing about this very point in connection to technology right now. Go take a look at his [...]