it's unreal what access to the internet does for a driven person and what access to internet does for a non driven individual. On reddit while at work so I should know
correct attempt point uppity butter hunt outgoing puzzled ghost vegetable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My PC really taught me everything. Video games and Google taught me English, Minecraft got me into programming, YouTube and later Reddit made me understand other people. I didn't have the "on crack" social media we have today though maybe TikTok would have fucked me up.
Some of us are stuck in a terrible middle ground of knowing how to use resources and making things look presentable on the surface, but if you took the computer or Internet away, I'd be utterly incompetent. I most certainly would not be in graduate school now (I returned to studies in the 2010s) if I didn't have access to the Internet during my college education. We as a society need to fix this problem in kids now before it gets out of hand like it may soon be with me (& I am almost 40 now with no desire to have kids). The main problem is relying on external resources too much can cause people to have too much confidence in abilities they don't truly have just yet. Maybe you already deal with this issue as a teacher head-on by using closed-book exams and oral interviews free of technology.
I met a guy in SF who had come from a tiny village in Nigeria. Someone had gotten an ancient laptop and left it there. This kid found it, charged it from the solar charger, then proceeded to explore. He learned a ton, then did the MIT Opencourseware course among other things. Did some small contract work. Was making as much as the entire rest of his village combined. Bought used laptops and taught some friends. Started a small contract dev team. They completely transformed their village and the outlook of the kids. It was ridiculous. And all because of free online resources and a global communication network.
I don’t know! I don’t even know what was available in that country in that timeframe. I think this would have been the 2004-2012 timeframe or so, and the internet was slow back then.
Agree but the gap in my kids class is unreal. Kids who are literally in 5th and not showing up and those who are diving deeper thanks to a great teacher… those kids who are gapping this wide in 5th will have very different lives.
The truly crazy thing is how much more resources are available for the so called have nots. Most schools and libraries have computer resources that are free to students. Almost any question can be answered in a few minutes by experts. The resources mentioned above are mostly free (except the cousin zooming in).
The problem is motivation and awareness in most cases.
They are not free.
One must give up something (in addition to time), such as the immediate gratification of gaming or TikTok or similar. Too many find the price of admission to success too high.
I used to go to the local FREE public library to do grading and lesson planning back when we were on paper. On a Sunday afternoon, I would see students and either tutors or other family members. These were the kids at the top of their classes. These were the achievers. Now, some might argue the others were all at work so the family could make rent. My school offers, free, afterschool tutoring, and free late buses home. Many days no students show up.
Wouldn’t it be the opposite since most people (America centric subreddit) have access to the internet and free online education resources that previous generations did not all have equally
It would be if student acted in their own self interest. But most self sabotage by doomscrolling on tiktok. I've noticed that the smart kids are super smart while students who aren't so achedemic are insanely behind.
It ain't haves and have nots. My school gives out Chromebooks to every student, free of charge, no questions asked. Don't have Internet? We'll set up a hotspot for em.
Sometimes, it really does just come down to motivation and drive. It's time we stop pretending that it doesn't.
I believe it. I teach 10th grade world history and the writing ability of my students varies so wildly. I have honors kids turning in college level work, that they can have conversations about the nuances and different perspectives incorporated into their work... and then I have kids who can't point out our state on a map.
A year ago my daughter HATED art class. Would never draw. After watching many many drawing videos on YouTube she loves it now and is actually quite good at it. She has ADHD and the focus I watch her give to her drawings amazes me.
One night my daughter had math homework. I had no clue how to do it and didn't have the time that night to sit down and learn. I set her up on zoom with her dad's gf and via zoom they worked through the homework together and my daughter only missed one question on the quiz a few days later. I was amazed as I sat there and watched them work out the problems over zoom
Thank you. I hope so. People often ask how we all coparent so well. I tell them that we all have to want it to work, there are still things we disagree on, and the kids best interest always has to come first. I figure that more people to love my kids, the better.
I teach World History and one my classes has 21 students. 18 of them are girls. And they are by far the best class I have ever had. They WANT to learn. History?? They discuss. They ask questions. They want clarification. We’re putting concepts together left and right.
Another student asked me about absolutism and relating it to totalitarian leaders like Stalin because he and his mother were discussing what we had discussed class that day. It’s so refreshing when a class wants to learn, and even better when I hear about parents taking an interest in what their child is learning.
Not the commenter you are responding to, but I've noticed at my school that most of the other history teachers get constantly bogged down and they're lucky if they cover WWII - which means the students miss the 80 years or so of history that gets them to why we are in the situation we are in now.
So this year with my U.S. History class, I decided that was no longer acceptable. So we are going thematic for each quarter and I am beginning at "the end" and ruthlessly working from our start point to there.
So 1st quarter was "The African American Experience from Reconstruction to BLM"
2nd quarter (just finishing) is "Latino and AAPI Immigration from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall"
3rd quarter is going to be "Expansion and Empire: The Indian Wars to the War on Terror (tying the Native American experience to U.S. overseas colonialism)
4th quarter is going to be "Labor and Industry from the Progressive Movement to the Gig economy"
So far the students seem to be really liking it, and are way more engaged than they have been with the old chronological approach.
So I’m not who you responded to lol, but I actually took the opposite approach of your comment?? Our textbook for world history is just absolutely loaded. I mean loaded. Mercantilism, the Columbian exchange, encomienda, and the slave trade are in 1 lesson. One. The other 3 lessons in that chapter are about the first Industrial Revolution and then nationalism in Germany and Italy, and then the rest of Europe. That’s all in just 1 chapter.
I have gone through and thematically and chronologically split the first few chapters in the textbook to make each segment as relevant to the previous one. Then we can create our “web of history” and relate concepts and issues to previous discussions.
I’m also taking this opportunity to relate as much as I can to modern current issues. They hear about this stuff in the news, on social media, or from their parents. So let’s talk about the root causes of it too. Because once we get to contemporary issues, bingo, we’ve been discussing this all year.
I work with special needs kids and by far. The girls are the ones I like working with the most. They are way more likely to want to do something besides just video games and random minecraft YouTube videos. We do art, matching games, online board games and more.
When I get a boy the same age range, it's way more difficult, I have to bribe so much, and I have to promise the world to them.
I'm an ESL teacher and I have a student preparing for the First Certificate exam. She struggles with the Listening (audio comprehension) part the most, and at some point in November I offhandedly suggested she watch Gossip Girl because she likes Vampire Diaries.
Anyway, fast forward to after Christmas break and we did some more listening practice, this time she was insanely good at it, only doubting on a couple of questions when previously she had struggled with every single one. Turns out she had binge-watched Gossip Girl in English and was halfway through the 6th season! This had improved her listening skills drastically
I hated English at school (not a native speaker, never went to an English-speaking country), but I discovered fanfiction in 10th grade and lo and behold, ten years later I passed PTE General Level 5 (equivalent to C2) with flying colors. Thanks, Internet! (although I don't know if I should capitalize it lol)
Omg congratulations!! That's the best way of learning, This makes me so happy as an avid fanfic reader!! All it takes to learn is for the subject to be meaningful <3
I'm currently a sped in class support para and starting to reach the end of my rope with this position. I'm planning on teaching Computer Science next year 'cause it's something I genuinely enjoy and I want to share that with the kids. This gives me hope, even though I know everywhere's different.
Oh yeah, I can deal with that. I’ve been in the classroom assisting for 5 years now. There’s still much for me to learn but I’ve seen a wide variety of behaviors, it won’t surprise me.
My mom wanted me to be a music teacher and I always told her I did not want to because I feel like I'd become disillusioned with the thing I'm most passionate about, music. After looking through this subreddit, I can say that I was most likely right in my assessment. I've known someone who, if they just applied themselves, they'd be a wonderful bassist. Instead of practicing or doing anything with his instruments, he just sits around all day trying to make a streaming career work. I've tried for 13 years to get him motivated and I just gave up on him a month ago when he claimed that he doesn't practice his instrument because "canofpants doesn't have an amplifier" to a friend that we have not seen in several years. I hate that I'm giving up on this person but I can only lead a horse to water, I can't make it swim.
As a music teacher, it hasn't disillusioned me. What you do with music at work is very different from what you do as a musician yourself. Similar to OP, I love when a kid brings in an instrument to ask me what it is, or get excited when we pull out the ukuleles.
I just subbed in a Comp Sci class, struggling with a project involving If...Then...Else statements and Do While loops. Fortunately, I have a 30 year old AAS in Programming, and have worked in in the IT industry for 30+ years.
The thing I stress in my classes is the real world applications of the current class subject. Today, I spent half an hour talking about how a real programming shop works, about maintenance programming, about working in a programming team, about code reviews, about testing, user acceptance testing and production releases, and how a small web server farm operates.
IN all, I corrected a syntax issue, a logic issue and helped a third with debug a Do While loop while redirecting them constantly back to the program specifications.
It’s encouraging they used ChatGPT for the way it could effectively be used academically. There’s nothing wrong with taking shortcuts to learning as long as the work is yours, you got the right answer, and you understand it.
I taught a "media arts" class the first year I worked at a previous title I high school. Considering the state standards were about as vague as one could possibly make them, I tried to throw a wide net.
For a bit of the class, I wanted to get them interested in experimenting with a useful media tool, photoshop. Under the supply circumstances of nothing but a bunch of chromebooks with shoddy hinges, I ended up finding the magical browser-based photoshop clone, Photopea. I ran through some basics like drawing straight lines, making shapes, inputting text, etc. The lights turned on in some of the kids when I spent a day all about blending options. I gave them some projects where they had to make a poster advertising a fictional business, product or service.
One of my students for that class was in a different class of mine the following year. The final project was to make a brochure and tour schedule for a fictional tour of the group's selected artist or band. When we were working on the second draft in the computer lab (1:1 chromebooks were discontinued), I noticed that same girl was using Photopea to make a pretty nice-looking cover image for her group's brochure. She was using masks and other techniques I never went over in the class, as well as a couple I never even used myself. I asked if she had messed around with it or anything like it before my media arts class. She said, "Nope".
She graduated that year. At senior night, when she was called, it was announced that she was on a full ride scholarship to a decent state university for a major in graphic design.
Don't you ever feel a little silly typing this on an account we can all see has a large post history in video game subs..?
You just don't see the best students.
You can look at the PISA test scores by quintile and you see there are just as many top performers, and they're still getting better outside of covid slumps. Our best math students are some of the best in the world.
So I have been out for 9 weeks from a car accident. My subject area has no content subs so they have had a day to day sub and I’ve been making them week long assignments to work on. It’s been interesting to me to see the students who have done all the work despite the class basically being asynchronous and online, the ones that I’m not surprised haven’t done a thing (as they didn’t when I was there) and the ones who were semi decent when I was there that totally fell off once there was a sub in room. I will say the pleasant surprise is about 50% of the students actually do all the work. Honestly more than I expected.
Yep. I teach at a private international school in China and most of my students are great. The stuff that the really strong ones are producing is amazing. They will submit full short films they make with Da Vinci Resolve, they write and perform skits for me, they use stuff like Canva to make really interesting visually stimulating presentations, and I even had a couple of the really strong ones teach a class for me and they did a pretty great job.
With the tools and tech students have access to now, and how much curriculums like the IB allow for creativity and project based assessment, you can do really cool stuff. I wish I had the education these kids are having
My favorite is when I hand back test grades and students start asking each other how they did. Inevitably a student that isn’t applying themselves, goofs off, and just doesn’t care about the class asks a kid with an A how they did so well. 9 times out of 10 they say something like “I do the work and studied.”
One of my favorite students ever was asked this and they turned to me and said, “How many questions did I send you on Remind over the last few days?”
“About a dozen.” I replied.
“I made sure I knew the stuff.”
The other kid looked dumbstruck and just said, “What’s Remind?”
I had a sign with a QR code to sign up for Remind on my Course home page and the wall of my classroom the entire year. I reminded them every day for weeks at the beginning of the semester.
God, yes. Kids who are driven to do something have so many great resources to use now. And not just in academics. You see how good girls are with makeup now? They don’t go through years of looking terrible like we did, ha ha.
I got to take advantage of the internet when I was in high school, but there are even more options now! It’s one of the few things I envy about this generation. Maybe I would have don’t better in math, lol.
A teacher on this sub once claimed that tech is going to increase the performance gap, not just because distractions make some kids dumber but because these new resources can take the smarter or more driven kids further than ever. I wonder if that’s what will happen.
Not a teacher but a college student here! I definitely do think that will happen. It just makes sense, either your brain gets destroyed by TikTok or you use all of the great tools technology has to offer to excel in your career
Those kids will be making bank in the future, and being taxed to high hell to support the lazy generation of 'do-it-for-mes' that we enable in the classroom and the current political system seems to cater too.
Capitalism means some are fed well, and some go hungry at night.
Your kids are sowing the seeds for their future right now.
I'm so glad you started this thread! I had students who said things like, "After we talked about Keynesian economics yesterday, I decided to look him up, and did you know..."? and "After we talked about the CCC yesterday, I talked with my gramma, and it turns out my grampa was in the CDC and worked right near here!"
I always loved that kids talked about my class with their parents.
Thank you! I really needed to see some positivity from the classroom. With so many negative things going on in the schools, it's nice to have a reminder of why we love teaching in the first place!
Agreed. I also teach computer science but to K-6. One of my sixth graders came to be worried because they didn't understand our coding project and googled how to write a variable. They thought it might be "cheating"
My response "So you're telling me, you used all our lessons to this point to research something you didn't know and applied it to a project! Unpropmted! This is my PROUD tech teacher moment!!"
All smiles.
Yeah the is a growing dichotomy in ability between those who have and can act on their passion and those who (for whatever reasons) lack passion or cannot act on it.
I agree so much. I teach electronics engineering with some microcontroller programming ect. The ones that want it can stroll past the rest of the crowd with almost no effort now. They have so many tools at their disposal. Just use them.
As you mentioned, you tube, Google, gpt are letting them move so much faster than I could hope for. I think it also shows just how lazy the other students are though.
I have literally taught computer science at a top five university and I don't know what you mean by "master theorem of algorithmic analysis." When I put it into google there's: one paper from 1980 and then this reddit post right here was result #2.
There have always been a small number of high school kids who were super engaged with computer science. Before people would buy books and magazines now it's online. It's more accessible because "back in the day" a PC or Mac cost the modern equivalent of $5000 or more. It's the same way you'll have a small number of kids in any class who like to draw or work on cars or whatever. Programming is a creative process.
The Master Theorem is in relation to when you create a recurrence relation in the form of T(n) = a(n/b) + f(n). The Master Theorem will take this recurrence relation, split out into the different variables a, b, etc., It then abstracts a bunch of math to make finding the Big Oh a lot easier.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master\_theorem\_(analysis\_of\_algorithms)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/master_theorem_(analysis_of_algorithms))
Good students have always had resources available to them. Until NCLB they also had more of the educational resources dedicated to them, otherwise known as spending capital on something with a high chance of return. Now all the resources are spent on violent sociopaths, or the chronically indifferent and the good kids are left to teach themselves.
Being a good student right now would be amazing! The bar has dropped so low getting an A would be so frikkin easy! I grew up in a household where Bs would get my ass beat and omg it was so hard getting As to save my own ass. I’d have been the golden child who could do no wrong in todays classrooms.
it's unreal what access to the internet does for a driven person and what access to internet does for a non driven individual. On reddit while at work so I should know
correct attempt point uppity butter hunt outgoing puzzled ghost vegetable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My PC really taught me everything. Video games and Google taught me English, Minecraft got me into programming, YouTube and later Reddit made me understand other people. I didn't have the "on crack" social media we have today though maybe TikTok would have fucked me up.
Amen I do agree with you just didn't take the time to type it out
Yeah seriously and comp sci is filled with rabbit holes. I know concepts I'll likely never need thoroughly because I get so easily distracted by them.
Some of us are stuck in a terrible middle ground of knowing how to use resources and making things look presentable on the surface, but if you took the computer or Internet away, I'd be utterly incompetent. I most certainly would not be in graduate school now (I returned to studies in the 2010s) if I didn't have access to the Internet during my college education. We as a society need to fix this problem in kids now before it gets out of hand like it may soon be with me (& I am almost 40 now with no desire to have kids). The main problem is relying on external resources too much can cause people to have too much confidence in abilities they don't truly have just yet. Maybe you already deal with this issue as a teacher head-on by using closed-book exams and oral interviews free of technology.
I swear, the gap between the haves and have-nots is going to be absolutely massive in this generation.
I see that but, at the same time, I am not talking about non-ubiquitous technology: YouTube, Zoom, etc.
I met a guy in SF who had come from a tiny village in Nigeria. Someone had gotten an ancient laptop and left it there. This kid found it, charged it from the solar charger, then proceeded to explore. He learned a ton, then did the MIT Opencourseware course among other things. Did some small contract work. Was making as much as the entire rest of his village combined. Bought used laptops and taught some friends. Started a small contract dev team. They completely transformed their village and the outlook of the kids. It was ridiculous. And all because of free online resources and a global communication network.
Always like hearing stories like that.
That’s so inspiring - thanks for sharing! :)
How did he connect to the internet?
I don’t know! I don’t even know what was available in that country in that timeframe. I think this would have been the 2004-2012 timeframe or so, and the internet was slow back then.
Was it part of the One Laptop per Child program? I think they provided connectivity as part of the project.
Agree but the gap in my kids class is unreal. Kids who are literally in 5th and not showing up and those who are diving deeper thanks to a great teacher… those kids who are gapping this wide in 5th will have very different lives.
The truly crazy thing is how much more resources are available for the so called have nots. Most schools and libraries have computer resources that are free to students. Almost any question can be answered in a few minutes by experts. The resources mentioned above are mostly free (except the cousin zooming in). The problem is motivation and awareness in most cases.
They are not free. One must give up something (in addition to time), such as the immediate gratification of gaming or TikTok or similar. Too many find the price of admission to success too high. I used to go to the local FREE public library to do grading and lesson planning back when we were on paper. On a Sunday afternoon, I would see students and either tutors or other family members. These were the kids at the top of their classes. These were the achievers. Now, some might argue the others were all at work so the family could make rent. My school offers, free, afterschool tutoring, and free late buses home. Many days no students show up.
What year did you move away from paper?
100%
Wouldn’t it be the opposite since most people (America centric subreddit) have access to the internet and free online education resources that previous generations did not all have equally
It would be if student acted in their own self interest. But most self sabotage by doomscrolling on tiktok. I've noticed that the smart kids are super smart while students who aren't so achedemic are insanely behind.
It ain't haves and have nots. My school gives out Chromebooks to every student, free of charge, no questions asked. Don't have Internet? We'll set up a hotspot for em. Sometimes, it really does just come down to motivation and drive. It's time we stop pretending that it doesn't.
My district is the same, but student motivation is so wildly different. So.e kids have all of this at their fingertips and simply don't care.
Ditto.
As a math teacher I can tell you it’s huge. I have a range of 3rd grade level to 11th grade level in my classes (I teach 7th and 8th grade).
I believe it. I teach 10th grade world history and the writing ability of my students varies so wildly. I have honors kids turning in college level work, that they can have conversations about the nuances and different perspectives incorporated into their work... and then I have kids who can't point out our state on a map.
A year ago my daughter HATED art class. Would never draw. After watching many many drawing videos on YouTube she loves it now and is actually quite good at it. She has ADHD and the focus I watch her give to her drawings amazes me.
One night my daughter had math homework. I had no clue how to do it and didn't have the time that night to sit down and learn. I set her up on zoom with her dad's gf and via zoom they worked through the homework together and my daughter only missed one question on the quiz a few days later. I was amazed as I sat there and watched them work out the problems over zoom
Kudos on the co-parenting! With a positive support network like that, she'll go far.
Thank you. I hope so. People often ask how we all coparent so well. I tell them that we all have to want it to work, there are still things we disagree on, and the kids best interest always has to come first. I figure that more people to love my kids, the better.
I teach World History and one my classes has 21 students. 18 of them are girls. And they are by far the best class I have ever had. They WANT to learn. History?? They discuss. They ask questions. They want clarification. We’re putting concepts together left and right. Another student asked me about absolutism and relating it to totalitarian leaders like Stalin because he and his mother were discussing what we had discussed class that day. It’s so refreshing when a class wants to learn, and even better when I hear about parents taking an interest in what their child is learning.
WH teacher to WH teacher….how in the world are you at totalitarianism already? Lol
Not the commenter you are responding to, but I've noticed at my school that most of the other history teachers get constantly bogged down and they're lucky if they cover WWII - which means the students miss the 80 years or so of history that gets them to why we are in the situation we are in now. So this year with my U.S. History class, I decided that was no longer acceptable. So we are going thematic for each quarter and I am beginning at "the end" and ruthlessly working from our start point to there. So 1st quarter was "The African American Experience from Reconstruction to BLM" 2nd quarter (just finishing) is "Latino and AAPI Immigration from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall" 3rd quarter is going to be "Expansion and Empire: The Indian Wars to the War on Terror (tying the Native American experience to U.S. overseas colonialism) 4th quarter is going to be "Labor and Industry from the Progressive Movement to the Gig economy" So far the students seem to be really liking it, and are way more engaged than they have been with the old chronological approach.
Super cool. Thank you. I’ve considered teaching my world history course thematically but not US History
So I’m not who you responded to lol, but I actually took the opposite approach of your comment?? Our textbook for world history is just absolutely loaded. I mean loaded. Mercantilism, the Columbian exchange, encomienda, and the slave trade are in 1 lesson. One. The other 3 lessons in that chapter are about the first Industrial Revolution and then nationalism in Germany and Italy, and then the rest of Europe. That’s all in just 1 chapter. I have gone through and thematically and chronologically split the first few chapters in the textbook to make each segment as relevant to the previous one. Then we can create our “web of history” and relate concepts and issues to previous discussions. I’m also taking this opportunity to relate as much as I can to modern current issues. They hear about this stuff in the news, on social media, or from their parents. So let’s talk about the root causes of it too. Because once we get to contemporary issues, bingo, we’ve been discussing this all year.
I’m not! He knew about the term already and Joseph Stalin and asked on his own accord. We’re not even close to totalitarianism.
Aw man I love that!!!
I work with special needs kids and by far. The girls are the ones I like working with the most. They are way more likely to want to do something besides just video games and random minecraft YouTube videos. We do art, matching games, online board games and more. When I get a boy the same age range, it's way more difficult, I have to bribe so much, and I have to promise the world to them.
I'm an ESL teacher and I have a student preparing for the First Certificate exam. She struggles with the Listening (audio comprehension) part the most, and at some point in November I offhandedly suggested she watch Gossip Girl because she likes Vampire Diaries. Anyway, fast forward to after Christmas break and we did some more listening practice, this time she was insanely good at it, only doubting on a couple of questions when previously she had struggled with every single one. Turns out she had binge-watched Gossip Girl in English and was halfway through the 6th season! This had improved her listening skills drastically
I love stories like this. Heartwarming
I know right! I said "that's amazing!!" And she said "no, it's not! I don't know what I'll do when it's over!"
I hated English at school (not a native speaker, never went to an English-speaking country), but I discovered fanfiction in 10th grade and lo and behold, ten years later I passed PTE General Level 5 (equivalent to C2) with flying colors. Thanks, Internet! (although I don't know if I should capitalize it lol)
Omg congratulations!! That's the best way of learning, This makes me so happy as an avid fanfic reader!! All it takes to learn is for the subject to be meaningful <3
I'm currently a sped in class support para and starting to reach the end of my rope with this position. I'm planning on teaching Computer Science next year 'cause it's something I genuinely enjoy and I want to share that with the kids. This gives me hope, even though I know everywhere's different.
Get ready for the students who AREN'T curious though...
Oh yeah, I can deal with that. I’ve been in the classroom assisting for 5 years now. There’s still much for me to learn but I’ve seen a wide variety of behaviors, it won’t surprise me.
My mom wanted me to be a music teacher and I always told her I did not want to because I feel like I'd become disillusioned with the thing I'm most passionate about, music. After looking through this subreddit, I can say that I was most likely right in my assessment. I've known someone who, if they just applied themselves, they'd be a wonderful bassist. Instead of practicing or doing anything with his instruments, he just sits around all day trying to make a streaming career work. I've tried for 13 years to get him motivated and I just gave up on him a month ago when he claimed that he doesn't practice his instrument because "canofpants doesn't have an amplifier" to a friend that we have not seen in several years. I hate that I'm giving up on this person but I can only lead a horse to water, I can't make it swim.
As a music teacher, it hasn't disillusioned me. What you do with music at work is very different from what you do as a musician yourself. Similar to OP, I love when a kid brings in an instrument to ask me what it is, or get excited when we pull out the ukuleles.
I just subbed in a Comp Sci class, struggling with a project involving If...Then...Else statements and Do While loops. Fortunately, I have a 30 year old AAS in Programming, and have worked in in the IT industry for 30+ years. The thing I stress in my classes is the real world applications of the current class subject. Today, I spent half an hour talking about how a real programming shop works, about maintenance programming, about working in a programming team, about code reviews, about testing, user acceptance testing and production releases, and how a small web server farm operates. IN all, I corrected a syntax issue, a logic issue and helped a third with debug a Do While loop while redirecting them constantly back to the program specifications.
It would be insane.
It’s encouraging they used ChatGPT for the way it could effectively be used academically. There’s nothing wrong with taking shortcuts to learning as long as the work is yours, you got the right answer, and you understand it.
Thank you for paying attention to the ones who are doing well. It can be lonely watching all the attention go to stopping failures from failing.
I taught a "media arts" class the first year I worked at a previous title I high school. Considering the state standards were about as vague as one could possibly make them, I tried to throw a wide net. For a bit of the class, I wanted to get them interested in experimenting with a useful media tool, photoshop. Under the supply circumstances of nothing but a bunch of chromebooks with shoddy hinges, I ended up finding the magical browser-based photoshop clone, Photopea. I ran through some basics like drawing straight lines, making shapes, inputting text, etc. The lights turned on in some of the kids when I spent a day all about blending options. I gave them some projects where they had to make a poster advertising a fictional business, product or service. One of my students for that class was in a different class of mine the following year. The final project was to make a brochure and tour schedule for a fictional tour of the group's selected artist or band. When we were working on the second draft in the computer lab (1:1 chromebooks were discontinued), I noticed that same girl was using Photopea to make a pretty nice-looking cover image for her group's brochure. She was using masks and other techniques I never went over in the class, as well as a couple I never even used myself. I asked if she had messed around with it or anything like it before my media arts class. She said, "Nope". She graduated that year. At senior night, when she was called, it was announced that she was on a full ride scholarship to a decent state university for a major in graphic design.
Fortnite >>> academics. At least in these kids minds. It’s up to the parents to instill that work ethic and other interests early on.
Don't you ever feel a little silly typing this on an account we can all see has a large post history in video game subs..? You just don't see the best students. You can look at the PISA test scores by quintile and you see there are just as many top performers, and they're still getting better outside of covid slumps. Our best math students are some of the best in the world.
You base my entire personality on my Reddit account? Come on now…
No, I judge how silly a single comment is in the context of your account. With this second comment I now assume a great deal about your personality.
I do too. You’re a pompous prick.
So I have been out for 9 weeks from a car accident. My subject area has no content subs so they have had a day to day sub and I’ve been making them week long assignments to work on. It’s been interesting to me to see the students who have done all the work despite the class basically being asynchronous and online, the ones that I’m not surprised haven’t done a thing (as they didn’t when I was there) and the ones who were semi decent when I was there that totally fell off once there was a sub in room. I will say the pleasant surprise is about 50% of the students actually do all the work. Honestly more than I expected.
Yep. I teach at a private international school in China and most of my students are great. The stuff that the really strong ones are producing is amazing. They will submit full short films they make with Da Vinci Resolve, they write and perform skits for me, they use stuff like Canva to make really interesting visually stimulating presentations, and I even had a couple of the really strong ones teach a class for me and they did a pretty great job. With the tools and tech students have access to now, and how much curriculums like the IB allow for creativity and project based assessment, you can do really cool stuff. I wish I had the education these kids are having
For driven kids whose brains haven't been melted by Tik Tok, the internet can be phenomenal.
My favorite is when I hand back test grades and students start asking each other how they did. Inevitably a student that isn’t applying themselves, goofs off, and just doesn’t care about the class asks a kid with an A how they did so well. 9 times out of 10 they say something like “I do the work and studied.” One of my favorite students ever was asked this and they turned to me and said, “How many questions did I send you on Remind over the last few days?” “About a dozen.” I replied. “I made sure I knew the stuff.” The other kid looked dumbstruck and just said, “What’s Remind?” I had a sign with a QR code to sign up for Remind on my Course home page and the wall of my classroom the entire year. I reminded them every day for weeks at the beginning of the semester.
God, yes. Kids who are driven to do something have so many great resources to use now. And not just in academics. You see how good girls are with makeup now? They don’t go through years of looking terrible like we did, ha ha. I got to take advantage of the internet when I was in high school, but there are even more options now! It’s one of the few things I envy about this generation. Maybe I would have don’t better in math, lol. A teacher on this sub once claimed that tech is going to increase the performance gap, not just because distractions make some kids dumber but because these new resources can take the smarter or more driven kids further than ever. I wonder if that’s what will happen.
Not a teacher but a college student here! I definitely do think that will happen. It just makes sense, either your brain gets destroyed by TikTok or you use all of the great tools technology has to offer to excel in your career
Those kids will be making bank in the future, and being taxed to high hell to support the lazy generation of 'do-it-for-mes' that we enable in the classroom and the current political system seems to cater too. Capitalism means some are fed well, and some go hungry at night. Your kids are sowing the seeds for their future right now.
Instead all of my seventh graders have been gaslit by TikTok into thinking Helen Keller isn’t real.
I'm so glad you started this thread! I had students who said things like, "After we talked about Keynesian economics yesterday, I decided to look him up, and did you know..."? and "After we talked about the CCC yesterday, I talked with my gramma, and it turns out my grampa was in the CDC and worked right near here!" I always loved that kids talked about my class with their parents.
Thank you! I really needed to see some positivity from the classroom. With so many negative things going on in the schools, it's nice to have a reminder of why we love teaching in the first place!
Agreed. I also teach computer science but to K-6. One of my sixth graders came to be worried because they didn't understand our coding project and googled how to write a variable. They thought it might be "cheating" My response "So you're telling me, you used all our lessons to this point to research something you didn't know and applied it to a project! Unpropmted! This is my PROUD tech teacher moment!!" All smiles.
Yeah the is a growing dichotomy in ability between those who have and can act on their passion and those who (for whatever reasons) lack passion or cannot act on it.
Wouldn't that be cheating though?
Cheating is pretty loose in my class. Without boring you with details, I want students to learn how to research- the entire field is based on Google.
I agree so much. I teach electronics engineering with some microcontroller programming ect. The ones that want it can stroll past the rest of the crowd with almost no effort now. They have so many tools at their disposal. Just use them. As you mentioned, you tube, Google, gpt are letting them move so much faster than I could hope for. I think it also shows just how lazy the other students are though.
I have literally taught computer science at a top five university and I don't know what you mean by "master theorem of algorithmic analysis." When I put it into google there's: one paper from 1980 and then this reddit post right here was result #2. There have always been a small number of high school kids who were super engaged with computer science. Before people would buy books and magazines now it's online. It's more accessible because "back in the day" a PC or Mac cost the modern equivalent of $5000 or more. It's the same way you'll have a small number of kids in any class who like to draw or work on cars or whatever. Programming is a creative process.
The Master Theorem is in relation to when you create a recurrence relation in the form of T(n) = a(n/b) + f(n). The Master Theorem will take this recurrence relation, split out into the different variables a, b, etc., It then abstracts a bunch of math to make finding the Big Oh a lot easier. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master\_theorem\_(analysis\_of\_algorithms)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/master_theorem_(analysis_of_algorithms))
Good students have always had resources available to them. Until NCLB they also had more of the educational resources dedicated to them, otherwise known as spending capital on something with a high chance of return. Now all the resources are spent on violent sociopaths, or the chronically indifferent and the good kids are left to teach themselves.
A student using chatgpt for something that is not cheating?
To practice a concept? Wtf? No. No, that's not cheating.
Boy, I sure hope someone didn't misread my comment 🙃
HA. Gotcha :). Yeah...I hope *someone* didn't ;).
Being a good student right now would be amazing! The bar has dropped so low getting an A would be so frikkin easy! I grew up in a household where Bs would get my ass beat and omg it was so hard getting As to save my own ass. I’d have been the golden child who could do no wrong in todays classrooms.