This is roughly my definition of unit test: "tests run in a single process"

It's bullshit jobs all the way down.

What does this have to do with "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity"?

If you don't like the idea of someone maintaining a "digital reputation" based on your activity on platform X, don't use platform X. It's that simple.

Also: "We should compare this problem to Global Warming." Similarities? Social cooling is subtle and complex, just like global warming! Such insight.

I think it happens more easily in smaller companies for sure. Big corporations seem more hollow.

At work, it is often a routine, that you talk to people, maybe befriending some of the frequent encounters. That dynamic is reduced if not lost, with WFH.

Extroverted people actively pursue social activities outside of the work, but if you are not, then it is possible work could be only opportunity you are speaking with people outside of you circle.

[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_cu...

In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming).

Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.

There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.

So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity.

I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?

The other did what you suggest, and would have me go around and help others as soon as finished my own work. It was useful as a means to learn to understand what other people found difficult and why. It might not have helped that much with my understanding of the subject (maths) itself, but it helped with problem solving skills - having to come up with different ways of explaining things or approach a problem from different angles to whichever one I thought was most obvious when that "obvious" angle didn't work for someone else, and I think that was useful.

This was a big help for socializing skills and empathy, since you were no longer segregated by age or sex and were exposed to many age groups with their own challenges throughout your early schooling.

Sticking the smart kids in one classroom or segregating their work means they don’t gain empathy for those who aren’t as gifted with academics. I’d argue the most important skill for a smart young person is empathy.

Social skills that work with a variety of people are something you can’t get by studying alone.

That said, it doesn’t take years and years to learn.

On the other hand, there have been numerous studies conducted by educators regarding what to do with the “best and the brightest”. Above all, we have learned what NOT to do. What you don’t do is make too big a deal out of it. The label rapidly becomes their identity and they hold onto it for dear life. This translates into becoming highly risk averse. In time this means they get passed by the average students who don’t have such fear of “no longer being considered a genius” and happily take more risks.

We know a few points * don’t talk about it much, it’s just “fun stuff” the kid is doing * let him do it. Kids learn to hate school that makes them feel bored * let them ease out or drop out if it without guilt or warnings about how their future will be average

Being “gifted” is one thing. Having the self drive to show something for it over a period of years is another.

Is it worth spending 1h of the day learning new things then 7h teaching others? I say that is wasteful.

The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.

It has even been observed that people can bond over a shared meal better than if everyone eats their own different food.

Overall a huge huge part of school is about socializing, with fellow students or against fellow students, obeying and rebelling against teachers, being honest or cheating to copy your homework, the dynamics of bullying and protecting from bullies, snitching on others or lying to protect minor wrongdoers, feeling guilt when you made the wrong decision, feeling proud for the right decision, discovering the difference of rules and morals, of friendship and togetherness and betrayal and loyalty, of acting tough or showing compassion, of romance and heartbreak, etc. So many lessons that aren't taught by teachers explicitly or asked on a test. But these add up to a stable individual later on who can draw from a rich well of experiences for later reference, even in adulthood. You can do a lot of low risk experimentation at that age. If people become atomized, dropped into a class full of almost strangers in each subject, there is no way to develop group dynamics of the above sort. Maybe you can do some of it with your sports team but you spend much less time with them than with a shared class.

This is not as practical as one would hope, because all of the assigned work and hours of lecturing would still be repetitive and boring. Can a smart kid stop doing times tables on problem 5 and do calculus for the rest of the worksheet? Can a smart kid decline to show up to class if they already know what will be covered? No, and that's why smart kids think school is too slow.

Now if someone is a real outlier in IQ, then maybe these things are still too easy, but you can't design the system for the 1% smartest. They have to go to special schools really.

But anyways, schools are already tiered somewhat at least in Hungary. You get admitted based on centralized test scores, so your peers are roughly similar.

Also not going so well for the top 5%. They develop much better if they are not stuffed in the same prison every day as the rest of the population. I'd guess the same would be true for the the corresponding slower slice, but I have seen no studies to that effect.

I think there was a study on this highlighted here on hn recently, but my google-fu is too weak.

You only have to endure 4, 6 or 8 years among the general population of your neighborhood, but at least that exposes people to some socialization with the different "classes". I'm doing a PhD now, but made good friends with people who now do blue collar jobs which makes the working class less of an "other" in my eye, compared if I had been to elite high brow schools the whole time.

The first few paragraphs are fun / scary.

With class sizes steadily growing, teachers are often stretched thin - from speaking with a few friends who happen to be teachers, they also often get lots of well-intentioned advice on pedagogy. Very little of it is actionable, especially when you're already overburdened and have little time to rigorously investigate further, some of it comes with thinly-veiled edtech pitches ("this shiny new tool will solve all your problems for every kid!"), and yet other parts are utter nonsense from helicopter parents who will insist that you're teaching their kid incorrectly no matter what you do.

As a result, it's a lot easier if you can simply teach everyone to the same template - if that works for 90% of kids, that's arguably better than catering to the other 10%, especially if half of that 10% is comfortable with self-directed learning. Plus you can point to standards to argue that you're just doing your job, which is much more straightforward than defending your profession / methods and their value to every last person who believes something random they found off the internet or a vague feeling about how best to educate over those with actual practical and theoretical expertise in the field.

That being said, the recommendation I heard when I was studying education was to offer enrichment activities. Which allows smart kids to do their own thing without going in front of the rest of the class in the normal material (so that you do not need full-on tracking and class separation). I generally like that recommendation, although it is not a cure-all. I may be biased since this fit my learning style well well since my academic behavior was chronically inconsistent at times (on-set of mental illness), and the enrichment activities often counted for extra credit which helped me make up for times when I was underperforming.

More generally I think letting smart kids build up a cushion of extra credit takes the edge off of the "always-need-to-be-perfect" pressure smart kids often feel.

Curious to see what the retention rate for school friends are.

Normal

Talented and Gifted

and Honors

TAG were people that planned on doing good in school, generally focused better. Significant overlap with Honors.

Honors seemed to sacrifice a life for prestige (tons of Advanced Placement classes) and it didn't seem to really make a practical difference, unless going to college at all is a practical difference to you, everyone went to state schools, maybe one went to Ivy League.

The main distinction was that it was a bad school district, non-designated students had almost no expectations, which is why there was a separation at all. The "good schools" in the bad district had Tag and Honors programs.

I think it created some solidarity, where philisters would have ostracized the people making an attempt at coursework.

The general concept can work in better school districts though.

There is, but it involves identifying the high achievers and putting them on a different track. Without too much thought, this sounds great. Except in real life, you end up with kids who are late-bloomers stuck in the "average" track. Or poor kids who didn't learn to read until kindergarten stuck in the "remedial" track for life.

As a society (in the US), we haven't been willing or able to solve those problems. The closest we've come is offering a few "gifted" courses to those high achievers (or forcing parents to pay for a private education). But, at the primary school level, that's generally a few hours/week of extra instruction. And at the secondary school level, it's AP/IB courses, but we've pushed the "college for all" narrative so hard that those are now watered-down crap at a lot of schools.

Last year of "gymnasium" (grade 12), right before I started my university masters program: I was travelling most of the year and only returned to school two months before graduation. I spent less than two months, on my own, reading up on a year's worth of what amounts to a specialised "science focused high school" program. Then testing through, taking all tests and assignments for a year, and got the top result from both schools in the city. 1000+ students graduating that year.

This was pretty insane, so I started digging. How was it possible to score so well after so little time, studying alone, when everyone else had 10 months of class. I'm not 200 IQ with eidetic memory.

So I started talking with teachers and professors I came in contact with. Very few actually had data available, but those who had... Wow!

Regardless of whether it's young children, high school, or university students the numbers were similar.

The top few are simply so much faster than the rest. I'm absolutely sure that good pedagogical methods have a huge effect on the students' learning. But even the best methods and tutors can't make up the difference.

The "5%", specifically, comes from two sources. A physics teacher and a math professor. They were both very interested in pedagogical methods and were experimenting and keeping detailed data on every student they had taught, over decades. Scoring them on a wide variety of tests and situations. Both had similar numbers, falling around 5-10x between the top 5% and the median.

My impression is that this is simply an issue that most societies don't want to know or deal with. It certainly is not hard to test for. Specifically, the physics teacher mentioned above told me that the municipal head of schools had threatened to fire him when he tried to discuss the data to improve the teaching for high capacity students.

The teachers in my son's school (6-12 year olds) solve this by either giving them more difficult exercises, or letting them help the kids that don't grasp it yet.

The latter is really interesting because helping others is a lesson on its own.

From what I have learned while reading about pedagocial reforms, most arguments don't really treat the student body as a diverse set of people, rather they pretend that students are all alike and then present a way of learning that a subset of the students strive with.

This is not about the (long debunke) myth that some people would be visual learners and some would learn better with their sense of smell. No.

What I mean is, some people fare better with lecture-style classroom presentations, some better with individual experimentation. All kids need guidance.

It seems that the reforms that are made are usually a certain pedagocial-model teaming up with monetary or economic interests (cutting costs in education). So in our schools, we saw that Physics teachers were on short supply (they rather earned better money outside of schools). So they mixed all Science subjects in middle school and named it "Natural Phenomena". As a result, the physics is taught by biology teachers who sometimes prepared their lessons with the math teachers of the school because it wasn't their core strength...

Theoretically,differentiated learning is what teachers should use. But as you observed, and like in many other countries such as France, reforms supposedly pedagogical are mostly decided based on economic interests.

On the field, teachers are understaffed and unable to apply the program.

And then someone comes in and suggests that we don't need so many new teachers if we "use technology" to help fill the need, like some learning app could be the silver bullet that revolutionizes teaching. Maybe it will some day, but seeing what we've had so far I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting to see that happen.

However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.

"[...] phenomenon-based learning requires students have strong self-discipline and initiative. They also require students to be independent, focused and flexible."

I'm not a teacher nor do I have children, so I'm mostly ignorant about this topic. But reading this made me think, if we shouldn't but maybe much more focus on qualities like being independent, focused and flexible early on instead of strictly following subjects as measured by Pisa tests? Given just how hard it is to focus and not procrastinate in today digital world, even for adults.

I'm not sold on pure Phenomenal Education as I understand it. But my hunch is, that a mix could work quite well. Spent part of the time on focused bottom up learning on a single topic, and another in a more exploratory top down way.

But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".

I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures.

On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do.

So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.

This sounds terrible. Not everything in life can be achieved purely by intrinsic motivation. Human beings are a social species. We motivate each other through laws, social norms, and economic incentives. Children, who don’t know about any of those things, need direction lest they be caught totally unprepared.

I remember watching an interview with a Finnish teacher where they were asked this very question. Their answer was something like "Being best in the world doesn't mean we can't be better"

When you realise that Finland has little in the way of natural resources and it's economy is very much tied to the skills of the population it makes a lot of sense to be this focused on education.

But even the best education system we have in the world could well be orders of magnitude worse than some other system that's never been realized before.

It's also possible (I don't know - i'm just admitting the possibility) that a system that focuses on teaches young children self-motivation, goal-formation, critical-thinking, personal-responsibility at the expense of traditional academic knowledge could produce adults that are vastly more capable while at the same time leaving kids far behind on traditional academic abilities until they get older and catch up. _If that were the case_, measuring outcomes by something like a standardized test after a 4 year period would show all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits.

But do those things really require decades of exclusive instruction to form? Or are they mostly something you pick up on the way, as part of your study habits?

If a child reaches adulthood without learning any reading, writing, or arithmetic then it is a terrible tragedy. As a mature student in my mid 30s studying math in university I would not recommend this life to anyone. I’ve lost the better part of two decades of my best working years for building wealth. I’m going to need to do extremely well after graduation if I ever hope to retire.

Not only that, but the current administration may have vastly overestimated their own influence in the previously great PISA results. Putting all their “smarts” into overhauling the system to improve it might not do anything of the sort.

My favourite riposte to the latest directive from the Education Dept was by a fellow teacher who said he always knew when change was coming: it would happen just when he had finally worked out how to implement the present policies.

Take a typical Android installation for an example.

- There is no tutorial mode for a true newcomer. - There is no central naming scheme - every application is an island. - Most of the applications are hostile and present you with ads. - Most of the applications won't let you study them.

It resembles a street market more than a safe learning environment.

I agree with you that primary and middle school students are too young to be self-directed, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the no-subjects approach. The phenomenon-based learning can still be led by a teacher.

Also as far as technology being distracting, that doesn't surprise me much. I think some very careful selection of the apps and tools is needed, but it can totally be done (e.g. offline or local installation of web apps and tools specific to learning and not open access to the internet or game-like apps).

And if so, do the ministers and government officials who decided on that send their kids to public schools? (not implying any scheme, just curious if they eat their own dogfood)

So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.

I wonder if Finland evaluated that.

I saw one school system where the students vote on everything. It wasn't Montessori but something else I can't remember the name of.

the montessori method comes to mind as an approach that potentially enables self directed learning.