I spent an hour yesterday working with one student. She was scared of the soldering iron. "Do your parents let you use the stove at home? It could burn you too, right? But we understand how to be safe and it's not a problem."
She did a beautiful job on her project and learned the names of many parts and learned that she can be scared to do something but still be extremely successful.
This is only really possible because my classes are small. If I need to work with a student I can do it.
"HoW dO We IMprOVe EdUcaTIoN??"
People act like it's a big mystery but it's not?
1. Better educated teachers.
2. More experienced teachers. (as in a ratio to new teachers)
3. Limit class size to 20 students aim for an average of 14.
4. Equip schools with sufficient materials eg: buildings that are safe and functional, internet that works, computers for students, you know the materials.
Most "education innovations" are trying to skip this stuff and use something else instead to save money.
And it might work if you, say, cheat. If you, for example, select a population of students with parents who can buy materials for them, and only let in students who have already learned how to do self-guided instruction you can have a class of 90 students and lecture them on calculus and they will learn a lot.
But at some point SOMEONE had to put in the real time to get them ready to do that.
@futurebird It would help also if we (a) didn't rate students against each other (VERY difficult to achieve in our society), and (b) taught a lot less nonsense.
Our current society VERY often promotes to the top those who rate highest in repeating complete nonsense. This is a big reason why we are headed towards things like climate disaster.
BTW I was soldering when I was like 8 years old but that was the 1960s. Parents had me using plastic solvent to make a model battleship when I was 6. :)
I'm about that age too. On other social media, it's hilarious how young(er) people mythologize the past we actually lived in.
Kids riding bikes without helmets and disappearing all day? 🤯
Making your own fireworks in the back yard? 😬
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth in the 80s! Dude, I'm from the 70s.
There's a lot of right-wing nostalgia for that epoch by people who know nothing about it. Someone on Twitter said 'The past is white people's Wakanda'.
@Phosphenes I used to fly sticks-and-paper kites from my backyard (after we moved to one of those developments) and the kites would sometimes crash randomly, heck knows where, and leave kite line all over the power lines and roofs.
Also, we were on an approach to Newark Airport, for planes coming from the west to land from the south, and airplane engines were NOT quiet and they did NOT employ noise abatement. :) But I loved watching the huge variety of types there was back then.
Oh, shit. My best friend was in the hospital a few days after being badly burned from a bomb he made with his cousin. He had scars but fortunately did not lose any parts.
After that he was a lot less enthusiastic about pyrotechnics than I was.
@Phosphenes The dad around the corner grew up in the Bronx and was an electronics buff from an early age. (He installed stuff in Alan Shepard's Mercury, etc.) So one day he thought he'd make his own galena crystal for a radio.
He put the lead sulfide in the end of a copper pipe, I suppose a crimped one, and hit it with a torch. To quote Richard Pryor (when he was still making up stories about how he got burned), the shit blew up...
@Phosphenes It worked. They were the best crystals anyone had ever seen, better than the natural ones. He sold them to THE Lafayette store on Lafayette Ave. :) But wouldn't make more when they asked him if he could.
It was an accident, anyway. It turned out that a little doping with copper is what makes a good galena crystal.
Variable coil being like a variac?
Variable capacitor being one of these old things we found in TV sets?
@Phosphenes That's a variable cap, alright. You can buy the radio ones on eBay. I have a couple. But as a kid I used to use a little one with plastic dielectric, from "Allied Radio Shack", attached to the Tandy Leather store. The kind for a transistor radio.
The coils they sold, I could take a photo but don't feel like it. Library books I used to borrow showed how to wind your own. You could probably get by with the coil antenna from an AM pocket radio, esp. if the ferrite were loose.
@Phosphenes @athena_rising @futurebird @chemoelectric
And they’ll say: we did x, y, and z and didn’t have a, b, c and we all survived!
… except that we didn’t all survive, not the ones who died of illness, or ‘accident’, and no one counts the maimed and institutionalized.
@DavidM_yeg @athena_rising @futurebird @chemoelectric
Really.
'Everyone who died raise your hands!'
'Guess nobody died.'
@ShadSterling @athena_rising @futurebird @Phosphenes @chemoelectric
“we also paid for x, y, and z with taxes at rates they lie and say would ruin the <rich people’s yachts>”
Yup, the substitution works here too!
@chemoelectric @ShadSterling @athena_rising @futurebird @Phosphenes
A good question to ask of people when the economy is raised is, “What is your economy *for*?”
The answer is often very enlightening.
*My* economy is to provide a system that helps organize production and exchange so that everyone can enjoy a comfortable standard of living and participate fully in society.
@athena_rising @Phosphenes I cannot know what people younger than I think the past was like. But I can tell a lot of what I have seen from older media people in recent past decades was "War on Christmas"—and this was obviously, to me, wanting to return to a time when Jews were less visible. All the "Happy Holidays" stuff was adopted by media in the 1970s mainly to be inclusive of Jews.
But that has gone by, now. It is a new generation of RWers.
@Phosphenes @chemoelectric @futurebird
I agree it should not mythologized. A lot of things were much worse than today. But not requiring parents to supervise kids 24/7 was one of the few things the past did better. I walked ten blocks to kindergarden, and by the time I was in 1st grade played outside without supervision fairly often. Kids still do that in much Europe today, including places with much lower child mortality rates than the USA.
@GarLipow @Phosphenes @futurebird I have no idea what kids do now. There are so few of them around near where I live.
Me being born in 1961, kids were numerous alongside me. But now they just aren't there.
@chemoelectric @GarLipow @futurebird
Depends on the neighborhood. In our area they go in maybe 15 year cycles. They grow up, disappear, new couples move in, new kids appear.
@chemoelectric @GarLipow @futurebird
Haha that's the down swing of the cycle. My mother's neighborhood was like that and everyone died the kids moved in. No shade, that's where I am too now.
@Phosphenes I have lived here nearly 30 years, though. It's merely gone down. :)
Anyway, the immediate neighborhood is a tiny townhome development built mainly for the old, because no stairs. I moved in when it was being built because bad back, and we are the longest residents. The only kids we've ever had were teenagers, such as the grandkids tha were included across the street when their grandparents were unable to get along alone.
@Phosphenes But both in our old place and this place the sound of stick hitting hockey puck fades away. We used to live by a creek. Here the old guy across the street who accidentally burnt his house down used to flood his yard with a garden hose.
OTOH I grew up in very young New Jersey suburban neighborhoods. One was half-slummy (nice, but a good place to buy drugs) and the other a sort of Levittown. Both full of kids. (The former is probably the same. The latter is now full of millionaires.)
@Phosphenes Actually the part of the yard the old guy used to flood was, I think, some of the land he had sold but on which townhomes were not yet built.
Mostly it is land the city had owned, but some of the land used had been his.
He used to raise farm animals in his actual backyard, I think mainly for eating at the annual Greek festival. Geese are the noisiest. Turkeys, wild or domestic, are the most bothersome. Goats are the cutest.
@Phosphenes There is a lake a half mile away, so I remember this couple who must have been an executive and a housewife with two small children, they built this huge house with like a thirty car garage, and a playground in front.
But they probably moved soon after, to a new city. And built a new house there.
@Phosphenes I remember another property by that lake where obviously it had to go through multiple owners just to get finished. :) Much better just to wait for one of the more modest older properties to come up for sale and then see if you can bring it up to code.
Those tend to have shared dirt driveways.
@CaymanPilot See Alfie Kohn's book "Punished by Rewards". (I am not the Barry Schwartz he quotes in it.)
But it isn't just that. I know for a fact the people who are getting PhDs in certain "scientific" fields are actually those most skilled at being authoritarian followers. That this should be the result of a fierce competitive ratings system should shock no one.
"Quantum computers" sound like magic, for instance? That's because they ARE! I can show they are bullshit. But I have no career.
@CaymanPilot Papers in "quantum computers" are now being retracted for falsified research, same as they have been for some time now in biomed.
That is what you get when people compete with each other.
But, like I say, when you aren't competing at all, like I'm not, you can sit back, take a look, and realize it's actually a pseudoscience!
@futurebird This is how private schools do it in Sweden. They get the same amount of money per student as the municipal ones, but don’t have the same costs, because they advertise to “easier” students, they can choose how many students to admit (I.e. no costs for small classes).
Handing off the “difficult” students to the municipality also increases the municipality’s costs and thereby the money the private schools receive, so it’s a double benefit!
And that’s only the legal ways they cheat.
*Us being absolutely hit w/ the realization people who were in high school that were also "bad at math" after seeing your thread, quotes in there for a reason*
*and that we probably were not the only USian forced through two years of algebra 1 courses, one year of geometry, and never getting to an algebra 2.*
Thank you, we have a lot to process now we think.
We somehow get the feeling we were not as "behind" as we believed, and we were fortunate enough our system/brainbody was "good at everything else" (also in quotes for a reason, we know logically that is bullshit but yknow).
SO youre thread gave us a new tool to do the thought-unpacking. XD
How to improve education? I can sum up the answer in one statement.
Pay what it costs.
Stop trying to do it on the cheap. Pull the money out of the war budget if you have to.
@futurebird also:
Pay the teachers
Bring back competent lab technicians
Bring back teaching assistants
Worry less about the stuff in labs breaking and more about students actually using them to learn
@futurebird Back when I was in elementary school (30 yrs ago), we had someone who was basically doing an internship as part of their formal training to become a teacher.
They were still highly motivated and we talked a bunch about the education system. She told me a lot about studies and pilot projects giving amazing results by increasing student autonomy.
Back then, I was still naive and thought schools would improve – but since then student autonomy has only been clamped down more and more.
Politicians know what would work. There has been a ton of data collected, studies done and pilot projects run. But they're just ignoring it and doing the exact fucking opposite instead. This is beyond frustrating and I think a lot would improve if we could strategically opt to just slap the decision makers until they stop that shit.
As an ancient circuit board maker I really love this story.
Terrific story, great to read! Educators are my favourite people ❤️ Thanks for sharing!
What are your students soldiering?
I've been thinking about showing a kid how to join stained glass with a soldering iron. The safety part has to be just the right amount of scary but not too scary.
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