> That implies (and requires) that bad teachers are expunged from the system like a bad infection.
Good luck with this, when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective.
(I do think that quality of teachers is sometimes an issue, but I think there are larger systemic issues impeding education than the quality of workers on the front line.)
> teaching methods, technology and curriculum
Teaching methods and curriculum are important. And educational research is mostly crap: well controlled studies basically don't exist.
EdTech, etc, is part of the problem. Occasionally technology is a great support to teaching, but I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all: certainly much less than is trendy in core classrooms (like, no joke, having middle school students write out machine language programs on paper). Edtech is expensive and very often unproven snake oil that allows distractions into your classroom, but it's something administrators love to point to to show they're doing something.
> when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective
Of course. And that needs to change. Right?
However, this should not be a freebie. Pay more? Absolutely. And, with that, comes a require for excellence and performance that should be no different from any job where, if you don't perform, you are out looking for work elsewhere.
> I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all
This is crazy. I am not sure how to put it other than, with the money we spend our public schools should be so good that private schools --not just in the US, world-wide-- should use them as a tough-to-follow metric.
I have tried very hard in our own school district to help up the level of STEM education in a range of ways.
My first attempt was with one of the local elementary schools. I offered to fully fund and conduct a model airplane STEM program for up to 100 students (about three classrooms). I would provide airplane kits to build and, for the more advanced class, also the radio control equipment. I met with the Principal to discuss. A couple of meetings later the county and school district got involved. The only way I can described what happened is "dystopian". Rather than jump on the opportunity to provide our kids with something like this, the reaction and interaction was in a range between being ghosted and feeling like I was the enemy at the gates. Truly incomprehensible.
My next attempt, years later, was to introduce a robotics class as at four local schools (two elementary, one middle and one high school). I scheduled and met with all four Principals from these schools. I brought with me a short presentation as well as a small inexpensive robot made from 3D printed parts and RC servos with an Arduino for control.
Once again, I volunteered to fund the entire thing at all four schools. Well received. Good conversation. One of the Principals took lead and proposed to organize a meeting with the science and math teachers from all four schools. This felt like progress.
What happened next?
I was ghosted. Seriously. And my kids attended two of these schools at that time.
The meeting never happened. Emails and calls were never returned. Nothing. Once again, I eventually dropped the matter.
Fast forward to just about a month ago. I offered the local high school's Physics teacher to come in every so often to help with anything she needed. I could bring interesting STEM show-and-tell items from my work in aerospace, robotics and more. She was kind enough to thank me for the offer. Since then, silence. I asked one more time. Nothing. One of my kids is in her class. I spend more time teaching my kid the Physics she is not teaching than she probably does actually teaching the kids in class. It's crazy.
We have a bad teacher problem. We have a bad schools problem. Until the system is morphed into one where excellent teachers and excellent schools survive and bad ones do not, we are not going to improve outcomes. And, yes, of course, this affects lower socioeconomic sectors far more than others.
The odd thing is that we already spend more per student than most nations of the world. Our return on that investment are high school graduates who are only good for stacking boxes in a warehouse and barely good to work at the local coffee shop. Being that about 60% of kids go from high school to college, that means 40% of adults leaving high school have no marketable skills whatsoever.
From there you have to look at what portion of that 60% actually finish college with what I will call a useful degree and how many drop out. A useful degree adds enough value to have better than minimum wage employment. There are lots of degree programs out there that are a straight path to minimum wage + no real marketable skills + lifetime college debt. Those who drop out are back to having no marketable skills due to the failure of our K-12 education.
The data [0] (interesting site) seems to show that only about 30% of the 60% who go to college actually graduate. Once again, that is terrible. No useful skills from high school and the vast majority of our college-bound students don't or can't graduate.
This is not an example of a school system designed to lift people out of their station in life. Quite to the contrary. It is an expensive mess with bad outcomes everywhere.
I could go on. STEM education is a topic I am obviously passionate about. I can't say I have not tried to make things better. I can only hit my head against a brick wall for so long. At some point all I could do is revert inward to devote my time, attention and resources to my own kids. They are doing great. They are far more advanced in STEM than any of their peers. I was willing to devote a nontrivial amount of time to help hundreds of kids in this region. The system expelled me, rather than those who are likely actively causing damage to our kids. That's sad.
I teach in a private school and the school resources my programs well, and I'm willing to kick in whatever else is needed. I chose the "crazy" because it's a better way.
Most of the course was pencil-and-paper and the special computers come out at the end. If you choose to let the students get their 1 to 1 laptops out, there's a million additional distractions you have to deal with.
For the most part you don't need a lot of "stuff". And the stuff you have, it's better to get out sparingly so it's exciting and use of it is focused.
(I do coach 2 FTC teams and 1 FLL team; sure, computers are out more in those rooms, and there's capital costs to coaching a robotics team...)
> We have a bad teacher problem.
Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task.
My closest experience with this is that I teach AP Microeconomics. In most classes, I have a lot of discretion on curriculum, etc. But this is an AP course, and the College Board stuffed the course 110% full of stuff I need to cover and my performance is measured by students' performance on the end-of-year exam.
If a Nobel Laureate wanted to come do a fun activity or give a talk in my econ classroom, I'd say no. I don't have the class time.
It's terrible: I have a few students that are independently game theory nerds. I have half a class period to talk about game theory in the context of oligopolies. If it were up to me, I'd gladly shear off some content to talk more/play with a subject that my students are passionate about...
I also have only 2-3 simulations/activities in the semester; with just a little bit less material I could have a lot less direct instruction and present the material in a way that is much more likely to be retained in the long run.
> Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task.
Understood. I do know teachers who are, objectively speaking, just terrible. Like the teacher who, years ago, was "teaching" a Lego robotics class. My kid told me she would come into the room, take out her magazines and tell the kids to do whatever they wanted. My kid ended up teaching the others, she did nothing all year.
When I characterize things as "bad" I am thinking about what I will call the system rather than, for the most part, individuals. Few people are motivated --in any profession-- to push hard and excel without a process, structure and stimulus that drives them there. The colloquial term is "self starters". Most are not self-starters, that's just normal and independent of profession. Add a unionized system within which a genuinely bad teacher can "hide" and be protected for decades and you have the makings of bad educational outcomes.
You seem to be the kind of teacher we should strive to have at every school. Your students are lucky to have you. As a kid I attended both private and public schools (about the same number of years each) and I know the difference. My argument is our public schools should be far better than they are and, perhaps, even better than anything private schools could deliver. For one thing, they have the financial backing of an entire nation. The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong.
I come down hard on unions, not out of spite or ideology but rather out of experience. I was a member of a union for about ten years when I was in my 20's. I saw the sausage being made. Unions had every reason to exist back in the day. It is my opinion that, in a wide range of industries (maybe not all) unions are horrible beasts that exist for the benefit of the wrong people. This is to say, their management. Union members are not the problem. They are average folk who just want a good life and everything anyone else would want. Unions, however, are driven into creating the problems they do because their mission isn't aligned with the outcomes of what it is they affect; in this case, educational outcomes.
Getting off that subject, I was a mentor for our local FRC team for many years. We got to Nationals a couple of times.
While not a teacher, I am pretty good at teaching complex subjects in ways that make them accessible. Well, at least that's the feedback from my own kids and FRC team members. I very much understand you don't need a lot of stuff to teach. It can get in the way.
I absolutely love working with kids. I would hate to be under the thumb of a system that did not allow me to help them excel (in real terms, not just pass tests).
Regarding your microprocessor trainer. You'll appreciate this. I own a couple of these:
I am of the 8080, 6502, MC6800 era. I actually owned an IMSAI and such things as a real DEC VT100 terminal.
I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. They had a lot of fun with it.
I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor and defining your own assembler instructions. From there I would implement Forth, move on to programming block-based storage, write a text/code editor and then implement a few interesting higher-level projects. I know this would be a lot of fun to do (at least for me). It's a question of time. I might be able to jump on this in a few months. It's one of those things that's been in the back of my mind for, quite literally, years.
> The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong.
The real dirty secret is that schooling is an adverse selection problem. Private schools usually spend far less per student, but can be selective behaviorally and in learning capability. Further, parents who are willing to spend for "better" education are a far different cohort than those who are not.
I'm able to teach undergrad material to MS students, because they come in primed to learn, without many substantial behavioral problems. All of the resources can go to top-end programs, because there's no need to provide services to students with learning disabilities 1:1. Etc.
Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected. Indeed, the direction of policy change is to make many of these things worse, with increased mainstreaming and reduction of tracking for equity reasons.
> I come down hard on unions
IMO, unions are part of the problem, but really mostly a symptom of it. We have terrible administrative systems, terrible societal expectations for teachers, and unions are seen as a necessary response to make the job halfway survivable (but end up perpetuating the worst parts of the system in the process).
I think we need to accept:
- Education will take more resources than are currently given.
- Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome.
- Differentiated experiences, magnet schools, tracking, behavioral selectivity for classroom environments, etc, are necessary to get the best outcomes for top students and acceptable outcomes for students with problems.
> I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level.
Computers are more accessible now. But the terrible thing is there's not a really good onramp to figuring out how things work anymore. I try and get students to tinker, and they're not really used to it in the way 70s and 80s kids were.
> I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor
This was basically what we did in my Comp Org & Design class, though after we got the "gist" of our own processor with registers, an ALU, flags, and a skeleton of control logic we pretty much hand-waved it and pivoted to ARM THUMB. We didn't do any of the higher level stuff. We didn't get to any higher level stuff (didn't even really reach procedure calls for most students-- lots of spaghetti code of branches everywhere).
I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. It's a challenge, though, because our high school is relatively small. I also seem to have a bit less success getting HS students to really stretch in the way middle school students do in my classroom-- in part because there's so much other academic weight for high school students to carry.
(Unfortunately, parents want this academic pressure and "rigor" even though it is often counterproductive to the best learning).
> Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected.
The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking "this guy is a bigot". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think.
Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane.
We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why?
The whole thing is interesting, however the story that starts about 15 minutes in speaks loudly to this matter of treating all kids as if they were clones of some made-up model of humanity. I won't spoil it for those who might not have seen it. Watch this and think about what we are doing to our kids in school.
> who just don't care about the educational process
I don't know enough about this. I wish I understood it better. My uninformed thinking is that we damage both groups of kids by forcing them together. One of my kids had to ask to be moved to a desk at the front of the class because the kids in the back were not interested in the class at all and made it impossible to pay attention and learn. The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help. If their families can't support them, perhaps better programs can. I revert back to this idea that not everyone in K-12 is, or should be, college-bound. That's an unnecessary model that might just be causing more damage than good.
Of course, this has policy implications that transcend schools. There has to be opportunity outside of college-centric careers for that large percentage of non-college-bound students to be able to access middle-class living. This perspective, if accurate, results in many tentacles affecting wider policy and politics. In other words, it isn't just about schools and the policies that control them.
> Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome
Maybe I am being naïve. My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society? Equal outcomes are a fantasy. That does not mean we don't try. I would gladly devote half or more of our war-machine budget towards a better educational system and better outcomes. For that to happen humanity needs to change. None of these things are simple. Easy to throw around grandiose ideas. Hard to make them happen. Also, very easy to throw your hands up and give up when nobody seems to care (as I have done locally).
> I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school.
I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic. I could be wrong. Perhaps it is because of the fact that I came up wiring raw gates together on breadboards that I feel getting down to that baseline has greater value than instantiating an entire circuit with half a dozen lines of code.
Here's a thought I had for yet another attempt to help our local schools with STEM. There are so many well executed resources out there that one could create a hybrid program based on using them under supervision.
My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision. This was a lot of work, yet, a lot easier than coming-up with a full curriculum and coursework from scratch. I could see taking this kind of an approach with HS kids to teach a CS class or two. They would get to boast about earning CS certificates from MIT, which I would hope would me motivating enough.
> Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus?
No US school system requires proficiency in Calc to graduate. Here in California, graduation requirements are 3 years of math. The low track in public schools around me is "Integrated Math I" to "Integrated Math III" which perhaps slightly goes beyond Geometry-- a pretty decent path for votech (building some intuition for triangles and solving equations is going to serve you well in a whole lot of trades). If you can't cut it in integrated math, you can graduate taking the "Math Skills" class which is even more practical/vocational-oriented.
Similarly, Physics CP (tracked beneath Physics 1 or Physics 2) is not very rigorous. Indeed, the top class my local public high schools offer is AP Physics 2, which doesn't even require any calculus and is all Algebra-based.
I don't think the graduation requirements are too high, in general. And I think there's a decent votech path available through many high schools interwoven with the supports community colleges provide. The problem is it's stigmatized and everyone expects to go to college.
(And, honestly, US comparative advantage is predicated upon sending a whole lot of kids to college... though we need to do better at getting people into practical majors and control college costs).
My local public high schools do offer "CTE" tracks in food/hospitality, agricultural business, basic IT, vet tech, multimedia production, woodworking, and construction. Before there was automotive and trades, but that's now been centralized to the adult school and the community colleges (a bit of a heavy lift for high schools to do well).
> The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help.
They need smaller ratios and easier, more engaging material.
I can handle 24 students and present very high level material. Because I have a student population that is very much "easy mode". I can even be excessively hands off at times like your kids' robotics teacher-- sit back and see what the room does (after establishing a bit of culture and common goals in the room in prior classes).
In other contexts, I've worked with 6-7 students who were not invested or interested. It is really hard to build that investment if it isn't there.
> My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society?
Maybe as a society, but probably not in mainline education.
You want things like Big Brothers Big Sisters (which has the highest quality of research in support of their program that I've seen from any nonprofit, based on a study controlled between students-on-the-waitlist and students-allowed-to-skip-the-waitlist). You want social work. You want coaching. Teachers can be subsidiary members of such a team: another set of eyes and hands supporting whatever the big plan is.
BBBS is able to make a radical difference in the likelihood of students attending class, avoiding violence, avoiding drugs, etc, in just several months.
> I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic.
There's always magic. There's a lot of circular dependencies in knowledge and you need to spiral.
When I started with gates, there was "well, wait, what are transistors?" When I started with transistors, there was "how does anyone build something useful from this and how do they work?" I haven't tried starting from semiconductor physics, but I don't picture it going perfectly, either ;).
Few students in middle/high school are going to be able to grasp (and it's arguably not a great use of their time to force them to specialize enough to do so) the whole relations between semiconductors, circuit analysis, gates, combinatorial logic, boolean algebra/synthesis, sequential logic, the software/hardware interface, compilers, etc. The normal approach is to try and handwave through all of it. I teach classes where I give a really deep window into one part of it and handwave around other parts (and maybe if they take another of my classes they get a really deep window into another part and slightly different handwavy explanations of the other parts).
> My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision.
This works well with a few highly driven kids, but mostly hasn't been successful for me. Even in my academic environment, flipping with lessons from OCW, etc, gets pretty low engagement. Having a passionate, motivated presenter in the room with a social connection seems to be essential.
(Also, as much as I hated groupwork as a kid... think-pair-share and groupwork is a superpower for retention and overall class esprit de corps. Many kids hate explaining stuff to fellow students, but it makes everyone so much better. Few of these outside resources are set up to really allow you to do that well).
The best thing I've been able to do with outside presenters / material is to use them in a "adversarial" mode in the classroom. Superstar presenters like Jacob Clifford, Richard Rusczyk, or Walter Lewin are great, but students are inclined to tune out from multimedia... OTOH, if everyone is sitting on the edge of their seat trying to figure out if Mr. Lyle is going to go on a rant about what "Mr. Richard" is saying this time, then they pay attention. ;)
This is really interesting insight. Thank you. I am particularly interested in what you said about BBBS. I just added them on my list of entities to donate to every year.
I'll repeat, I wish more teachers were like you. It really sounds like the kids in your classes get access to really cool and valuable material and thinking they are unlikely to see with other teachers.
> I am particularly interested in what you said about BBBS
I, too, give to BBBS. Money definitely helps (but it's not super clear how to e.g. make it 2x bigger). It's my sense that many Boys and Girls Clubs are also good in the same way, but less supported by research.
> I'll repeat, I wish more teachers were like you.
I do my best. I'm not a career teacher but it's my second (third? fourth?) career after retiring from tech. (I hear rockstar teachers through my walls, and I'm able to do well in part because I can just piggy back on a lot of their efforts).
> It really sounds like the kids in your classes get access to really cool and valuable material and thinking they are unlikely to see with other teachers.
Last thought: IMO it doesn't matter too much what you teach, as long as the teacher thinks it is cool and it builds a tolerance for taking on difficult work in the students. Most of my students will never use the stuff I'm ostensibly teaching them, but that's OK.
Good luck with this, when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective.
(I do think that quality of teachers is sometimes an issue, but I think there are larger systemic issues impeding education than the quality of workers on the front line.)
> teaching methods, technology and curriculum
Teaching methods and curriculum are important. And educational research is mostly crap: well controlled studies basically don't exist.
EdTech, etc, is part of the problem. Occasionally technology is a great support to teaching, but I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all: certainly much less than is trendy in core classrooms (like, no joke, having middle school students write out machine language programs on paper). Edtech is expensive and very often unproven snake oil that allows distractions into your classroom, but it's something administrators love to point to to show they're doing something.