The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?

My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school

Yeah - this is on OP if that is the case. No teacher wants that and it's annoying for the ahead kids and the behind kids. Better to give them something tangential to keep them engaged but still gate on moving ahead with the mainline curriculum.

> Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?

Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A.

This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suffer (it’s okay I did their exams too, lol).

Another big problem for her was that teaching me was a pain in the ass. I was clearly fluent in English but couldn’t be arsed to follow today’s lesson. My essays were a pain to grade because she could never tell if I was using a weird word I picked up from Tolkien or the internet, or just used the wrong word. She had to use a dictionary. During class sometimes I’d pull her on tangents discussing the nuanced meaning of a word she was teaching and none of the rest of the class could follow. Etc.

Basically I was a pain in the ass because the class was too easy and teenage boys aren’t known for their good classroom behavior.

The best advice that teacher gave me before the matura exam (like SATs) was this: Ok Swiz I know you think you’re a wiseass, but the matura commission won’t pull out a dictionary, they’ll just mark your answer wrong. Tone it down.

And if you think “Wow that teacher failed to control a problem student”, I think she did the right thing. It’s very easy to crush someone’s spirit if you don’t let them explore and pursue a thing they’re clearly talented in.

On top of that the teacher has to juggle two tracks, the normal one and a special needs one. There has been a push for awhile to put mentally disabled kids in with their age peers and the teacher has to handle it, maybe with a low pay assistant.

To be fair - maybe that's what the product mentioned should have been doing? You can focus on general problem-solving ability by giving talented kids hard problems with the amount of knowledge adequate for their level rather giving them more an more material and making the whole learning process less manageable.

A major part of this problem is teachers who treat "student knows something I don't (or aren't prepared to teach right now)" as a status challenge to be rapidly obliterated, rather than as an opportunity to encourage a student.

Many, many adults are extremely emotionally unprepared to accept the possibility that they may be wrong and a child may be right; they start from the assumption that this is an impossibility, and reason backwards from there.

Or, in the case where they do in fact know that the child is right, they nonetheless decide to prioritize asserting authority over demonstrating how a mature adult should handle being wrong. And thus do students learn bad examples of what to do when they're wrong.

I was the same in math and science. I remember being told “You are not supposed to know that, and who told you?” angrily. My moment of disillusionment with authority.

Denmark did this about 10 years ago, the results pretty much speak for themselves: Everyone is frustrated with it, teachers, parents, students, as well as their special-needs counterparts.

Grades have been steadily decreasing across the board, while enrolment in private education has skyrocketed (private schools do not have to accept difficult students). The private education is particularly surprising as Denmark has a very strong tradition of public education, where private education was viewed as something for the "elites" of society (e.g. royalty), now it's becoming more and more common.

In primary school there was a teacher who straight up hated me because I did the exercises too fast and this would cause extra work for him to keep me busy.

I think it would be better to have a system where teachers aren't required to synchronize knowledge between 30 kids and some source material; where each kid can excel at their own pace and the teacher helps them manage their goals rather than being the primary source of information

"general problem solving ability" isn't a real thing. Proficiency in solving, for example, math problems, does not confer the ability to draw conclusions based on evidence in history class. If you require a kid who's already mastered fractions to simply do harder and harder fractions rather than allowing them to continue onward, they will become bored and distracted, and ultimately burned out or resentful of the education system

I had something similar happen to me. But it sounds like my teacher handled it differently. I used to watch a lot of documentaries. There was a public access TV channel that would air educational content, I'd occasionally watch it for "fun".

After watching a documentary about Conic Section I asked my math teacher "When are we going to learn about Ellipses and Hyperbolas?" This was in year 7 (so age 12/13), We were learning about perimeter and area at the time I found it dead easy.

He patiently explained to me that we needed to build up to those topics and it wasn't something we could just skip ahead to. looking back on it I think he handled me pretty well. He didn't discourage me and he justified things in a way that 12 year old me could understand that there was a reason we covered the topics in the order that we did.

Conic sections would end up being taught in 11th Grade when I was 17.

OK, not general problem-solving ability, but subject-specific problem-solving ability. And I don't mean more tedious problems, but rather those that require self-discovery of non-standard approaches while not relying on any knowledge from further grades. E.g. for maths Olympiad problems exist for at least as early as 3rd grade, it might be possible to figure out something for younger children too.

I don't see why would shouldn't make it a goal to allow more advanced students to learn at a more advanced pace. They shouldn't be held back by the other students

We'll need to get rid of grade system then and let students advance on different tracks independently for that. Might be a good idea, but nobody is going to redesign the whole educational system because someone made an app.