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359 points FromTheArchives | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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cjs_ac ◴[] No.45293534[source]
I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.

The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus

An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.

The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.

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1. ycombigators ◴[] No.45294416[source]
You should have asked the head of languages to teach you tensor calculus.
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2. layman51 ◴[] No.45294628[source]
I don’t have a firm opinion one way or another about that idea that a “great teacher can teach any subject” but it does bring to my mind the other idea that teachers are increasingly becoming “learning coaches” who aren’t only transferring knowledge into the students, but who are rather encouraging them to develop self-awareness about their own learning.
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3. ycombigators ◴[] No.45295869[source]
That concept of teaching seems like a nice idea in a private school setting but wildly incompatible with most schools in the Anglosphere.