If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).
There is no correlation between better educational outcomes and higher teacher pay. Washington has the highest teacher pay and the smallest classrooms yet is below average in educational outcomes. Stop this canard, it just isn't true. US Schools have plenty of money, they just don't spend it wisely. In fact, both Mississippi and Louisiana have better outcomes than Washington state despite the fact they have half the spend per student.
The Washington schools constantly ask for more money so they can teach. I don't see what monetary resources are needed to teach arithmetic beyond a blackboard and chalk.
Projectors, videos, computers, tablets, calculators, are all completely useless in teaching math.
I have a great deal of respect for you. Your math skills are much greater than my own. But you have stretched your statement too far. Flash cards can be very helpful in teaching math. Timed tests for math facts can be very helpful. Both of these can be facilitated with computers or tablets. Animations can be a very useful instructional tool. Even taking a picture of the chalk on the blackboard and putting it online can help students (and possibly helpful parents) review the in-class lecture from home while they do their homework.
I don't dismiss your overall point, but don't be too flippant. A video of the lecture can be very helpful.
I mostly agree with you. However, if you imagine yourself sitting down with a set of exercises that you need to figure out how to do, it is true that some well-chosen animations / models will be helpful in that process.
You have to do the exercises. But it might be beyond your ability to start doing them straight from the textbook. Crafted didactic material can walk you through initial exercises to the point where you have a theory of where to begin on another one. Or it can let you investigate a structure until you have an idea.
In your analogy, if you want to be able to bench 150 pounds, at some point you'll have to bench 150 pounds. But a nonconfigurable 150 pound weight isn't the best way to get there. You can have a set of weights that let you start with easier tasks. You can have a set of exercises that aren't bench pressing. Those things are helpful, and generally required.
I watched "The Mechanical Universe" videos on newtonian mechanics. They used lots of animations. I found the animations to be too fast and too distracting to be of any use.
The series was created by Dr Goodstein, who was my freshman physics prof. I understood the same material via him scribbling on the blackboard.
I've seen other animations of mathematics, with the same result - confusion.
I suspect the problem is that an animation does not build a mental model in your head. Carefully examining the diagrams and the equations does.
What you've discovered is your learning style. It's not the same for everyone so it's an important thing that everyone should discover about themself.
There are visual learners out there. Being a visual learner doesn't mean you don't need to do the work, it means you typically need some visualization for things to click, and then you practice applying it like everyone else. Some people can even manage with just lectures.
This causes some students trouble in school because their needs may not be met by every teacher. It's especially worse if the student hasn't learned what their learning style is yet.
I have difficulty believing that my learning style is uncommon. Consider trying to build muscle. There are techniques that are proven to work best. There are no individual "muscle building styles" that work better, unless the person has a disability.
And I don't believe that in general the kids in classes are mentally disabled.
I think it's more of a motivation problem. Not all students are eager to learn. They may not be interested in the subject for whatever reason. It's hard to teach someone who isn't open to it. Learning styles can help bring some of those barriers down by shifting the material into a form that they are more open to.
The same applies to building muscle. Not everyone is self-motivated to do it. There are different ways to motivate people to work out. But in the end they all need to do the work/practice.
All good examples but all relatively low cost as well (and don’t require 1:1 student-laptops). However I’m pretty darn sure that videos do more harm than good - too easy to zone out during them, and providing them to students only allows them to slack in class with the attitude “I can just watch the video again later.” Despite being horribly inefficient this is true for students of virtually all ages. Providing videos to those who ask only might help.
The real problem beyond all this is that the educational spending goes to the wrong spots. If you ask me, teachers should be empowered to select their own curriculum using a budget and most of the rest of the money should go towards paid tutors, better teacher-student ratios, etc (and probably way fewer administrators). I am firmly convinced that a lot of kids act out because they can’t grasp the material, not in spite of it.
I cynically suspect that most people just cannot stand the idea that a teacher and a blackboard works better than all those technological crutches.
I remember when "educational" CD-ROMs came out for classrooms. The pitch was that at any time, a student could go look up the corresponding text on the CD-ROM.
Once I was at a presentation, and the presenter didn't show up. The organizer asked if anyone in the audience was willing to substitute. I raised my hand, and asked for nothing more than a whiteboard and markers.
It was the best presentation I ever did. It was a lot of fun, and the crowd was very engaged.
In the USA there are approximately 50 million students aged 5-18. If you paid for each student to get 1:1 attention one day a week, you would need one teacher per five students in schools that meet five days a week. Let's use that number because it reduces 50 million students nicely to 10 million teachers. Let's pay each teacher $70K/year. That would cost $700 billion per year.
The USA military spent $100 billion per year in Afghanistan.
If the USA provided the 1:1 attention only in 1st Grade and 3rd Grade, they could fund it with the same commitment they made in Afghanistan with a lot fewer deaths. The USA persisted in Afghanistan for 20 years. Shall we experiment with education for 10 years and see if we get a better result than we did in Afghanistan?
Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.
Show me the lobbyist who will push for giving 700 billion a year to teachers.
That 100 billion goes to a bunch of extremely well-connected businesses who fund lobbyists to make sure the USA continues expending munitions in a series of utterly pointless, futile, wars.
I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.
As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.
In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.
Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.
If you use other students for that problem instead of other teachers, you'd swap a budgetary problem for a bootstrap problem.
The upshot for this is that the benefit is as much for the student doing the teaching as the one doing the learning. Teaching has a much greater effect on _retention_ than listening reading or even doing, which is the majority determinant underlying the primary school curriculum.
There are a whole host of secondary benefits to this (as well as lots of logistical challenges): the students are doing something useful, teaching, and we pay teachers if you wanted to expend budget there I suspect it would have great effect, as would any other form of ~~bribery~~, I mean, incentivisation; socialising, especially if you have the teaching being done across different classes (which you would want to do because you want the teacher to know more than the student).
This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.
Swimming togs? That's what they were commonly called at my primary school in Belfast. Never heard it used since!
Same goes for "gutties" - rubber-soled shoes to wear in the gym (presumably from gutta-percha).
I think "bloke" was more common in the 90s over here. It picked up an association with boorishness, especially when used as an adjective - "blokey" was almost the middle-aged equivalent of "laddish".
Yep, definitely still in use. Do yall above have an opinion if the pragma is better than the syscall? What are the trade offs there? Another comment thread mentioned this as well and pointed to io uring. I was thinking that dism spam is worse than syscall spam.
I may be wrong, but I think you wrote somewhere that you're looking at the WAL size increasing to know if something was committed. Well, the WAL can be truncated, what then? Or even, however unlikely, it could be truncated, then a transaction comes and appends just enough to it to make it the same size.
If SQLite has an API it guarantees can notify you of changes, that seems better, in the sense that you're passing responsibility along to the experts. It should also work with rollback mode, another advantage. And I don't think wakes you up if a large transaction rolls back (a transaction can hit the WAL and never commit).
That said, I'm not sure what's lighter on average. For a WAL mode database, I will say that something that has knowledge of the WAL index could potentially be cheaper? That file is mmapped. The syscalls involved are file locks, if any.
Interesting, thank you for the response and explanation. Honker workers/listerners are holding an open connection anyway. I do trust SQLite guarantees more than cross-platform sys behavior. I will explore the C API angle.
Probably the biggest issue is that it's primarily useful in the context of exploratory analysis and makes iteration on a plot much slower, requiring you to re-run the query to get a new viz. Iterating on a viz is best done with the data cached locally or elsewhere.
In the context of a query used for a dashboard in prod, you're likely using a different viz environment so it's not useful at all there.
What’s interesting here is that with AI, all our interfaces should evolve away from previous generation rigid forms / buttons / tables etc. towards something more fluid / dynamic / “natural”. Yet all the AI coding is geared towards producing more of the former.
Most of the software we interact with is at the end of the day some db tables, queries to read/write, and some ui to read/write. There have been so many times I wished I could just do my own db joins on the underlying db to get the views I wanted. But I can’t - because the app has pre-defined ui/query paths.
With AI, I should be able to ask for things the product designers didn’t anticipate or left out and the system could query, create ui on the fly, etc…
i think of them as tiers of expertise— need to master the basics of structure and form before the robot has the learned representations to competently model user interactions with more fluid instantiations (by downprojecting into the overlearned fixed-semantics)
I did the EBC trek last year and at ~4400 meters, we heard about a local Nepalese woman dying from complications of AMS in the local clinic. There might be fishy things going on with the rescues, but the health risks are real.
Related, I’d love an editor that’d let me view/edit identifier names in snake_case and save them as camelCase on disk. If anyone knows of such a thing - please let me know!
Sure. Presumably you could have localized source presentation, too.
But, yeah, I think a personalized development environment with all of your preferences preserved and that don't interfere with whatever the upstream standard is would be a nice upgrade.
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