The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.

EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.

The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.

Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.

Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).

When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.

Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.

Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment?

I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.

We can't expect teachers to provide a good environment for students who are good at self paced learning, and students who need structure in the same classroom. But we might be able to have classrooms that lean one way or another...

- Schools in nicer areas are sometimes in the middle of some dumbshit half-implemented (the other parts made admin uncomfortable) "discipline plan" that the superintendent got sold on at some damn district-paid drinking vacation away from the family... er, I mean, education conference, which may lead to insane crap like letting a kid scream in the classroom for ten minutes (sending them to the office might get the teacher in trouble for not following the plan). Half-implemented plainly-doomed-to-fail admin-driven plans for discipline, or for education approaches to any or all subject areas, are often a factor in stupid crap schools do.

I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems.

Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method.

Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!

Nah. The people expect EdTech to allow children to find their own suitable learning style with only babysitter oversight. But no teacher wants to "demote" themselves to being a babysitter, nor do the administrators want to become seen as running a daycare, so you end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365.

I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.

At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.

The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.

Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU

Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.

Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.

tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.

What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced.

Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you

Don't kids get expelled anymore? How the hell could you feel comfortable sending your kid to a school that is so full of violence? That's crazy.

Just like I'll say that spaced repetition seems like a good theory that I'm having trouble (with adhd) putting into practice esp while taking classes and holding down a job. Or that I liked the approach the class took during lectures by talking with a small peer group, but could see that it didn't work for many shy people and seemed to take a lot of lecture time. Overall they were interesting and I'd try them again.

These are my own observations I am not professing to be an expert in education.

If not, then your wife's experience doesn't say anything about how well the Little House/Christmas Story model works.

Indeed, I would go so far as to suspect that this is likely a failure of the "integrate kids no matter what, and force them to learn at the exact same pace, no matter what" style of schooling that has become so ubiquitous in modern society.