This seems like a practice that would work for some students and hurt others. Some students may not do well with a particular teacher. Being stuck for years with that teacher is a disservice to the student.
That one student should be able to switch to a different group. If all want to switch then there's a problem with the instructor.
Let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum. Student loves an instructor but is needlessly switched to someone new. My point though is that the flexibility to change or stay in the same group should exist.
In U.S. public schools, this will not be allowed. Schools already do everything they can to discourage and deny teacher switching requests. Why? Because there is a large difference in quality between teachers, and everyone knows which teachers are best, but administrators aren't allowed to fire a teacher with low enrollment because of switching requests, and face class size limits in the case of the good teachers.
When my kids were in public elementary school there was a teacher that was so bad that most families who had children assigned to that teacher simply left the school. The administration was going through the procedure to get the teacher removed but it was going to take more than one year. They finally came up with the solution of having the terrible teacher become a "social studies specialist" and have her teach a few hours weekly to every single classroom in the school, thereby diluting her awfulness among the maximum number of students.
I live in the US. My daughter switched classes last year. We transferred to the school system before the start of the school year (a much better one than the previous one which mostly catered to children from lower class families) and as a result, she was behind her classmates for her grade and age group.
The teacher was openly derogatory towards her when she didn't understand a concept and refused to help her during open study periods. The child was flat out depressed when having to do anything with the class. We had enough and had a conference call with the principal, her assistant, and the teacher. Our kid was in a new class the next day.
There are also the sorts of teachers I hated having as a teenager, but am deeply grateful in terms of what they taught us, after all.
Many of those were pretty much universally disliked often mainly due to the amount of work we'd have to do compared to others.
But when our class would get merged and we'd get one of the more 'popular' teachers, we were often kinda surprised how little the other half knew/had learned.
U.S. public schools are locally run and any sweeping statements regarding them is going to be incorrect. For example my daughter is now in 10th grade. Over the years we have requested to switch teachers 3 times. Once in elementary, once in middle school and just last week. In each case there has been no push back from the schools involved and the change has taken place quickly. Last Monday I contacted my daughter's counselor at 10am regarding changing one of her teachers and by 1pm the change had been made.
People have been commenting on the early start especially for high school students and claiming it won't change because of sports. Our school district starts elementary schools at 7:30am or 8am, middle schools at 8:30am or 8:50am and all high schools start at 9:30am. The varying start times for elementary and middle schools is due to bus scheduling. Some of our neighboring districts have similar schedules and others still have HS kids starting early again showing that sweeping statements regarding U.S. schools aren't accurate.
In this scenario switching is not just getting a different teacher, but an entirely new set of classmates as well, meaning the child is willingly walking away from all their friends and acquaintances they've made possibly over years.
I suspect the vast majority of students will choose to stay with the current teacher, even if a very poor fit for them, because of that.
> In this scenario switching is not just getting a different teacher, but an entirely new set of classmates as well, meaning the child is willingly walking away from all their friends and acquaintances they've made possibly over years.
Do they (correct me if I am wrong)? What I have seen in the USA, children indeed would switch classes, but relationships are continued on, especially middle and high schools where free time and extra curricular activities are often in shared space and time across classes.
It's a matter of perception, not reality. They no longer will see them all day like they are used to, and instead just at specific times.
To someone such as myself that didn't share a lot of classes with my good friends that doesn't seem like a big deal. To someone that may have already spent a couple years with these people all day long? That is likely a very scary thing to consider at a young age.
My sons school (in the UK) intentionally mixed up classes every year through primary school, and I was sceptical at first but it seemed to work quite well, in that they were able to get people away from kids they didn't do well alongside.
Obviously mixing like that does not work if you want to keep the kids with the same teacher.
I agree, people struggle to leave jobs with horrible bosses due to other aspects that aren't as big as your friend group and support structure as a child. This sounds awful for those kids.
I suppose there's an argument to be made about "preparing for the 'real world'" but still.
It's probably true; schools are generally run for the benefit and convenience of teachers, not students. The former have a strong union with outsized influence on local elections, whereas the latter don't even vote. The same incentives lead to early school start times which help teachers at the cost of students (particularly teenagers who generally have 'later' circadian rhythms).
> It's probably true; schools are generally run for the benefit and convenience of teachers, not students.
This is, emphatically, not even close to true. If someone told you this, they were lying or just had no idea how schools work and were guessing.
> early school start times which help teachers at the cost of students
A perfect example of how you're veering away from reality with your faulty premise: teachers don't like super-early starts, either! Except the coaches who like having plenty of time for long after-school practices with the sun still up. Parents of athletes may like it, too, just so only one end of their daily schedule changes when their kids' sports are in season (as opposed to having to get them in for an early practice, and pick them up late for a late practice, unable to use the school bus for either end). The justification given for keeping it is usually some combo of "parents want it" (do they? I'm a parent and I fucking don't—but then I don't have any high school athletes in my house yet) and, overriding all other concerns, school sports. Adjusting those schedules may also mean elementary kids start earlier so that the high schoolers can start later, because districts want to be able to stagger bus schedules so they need fewer busses—again, not because teachers are demanding it—which I guess maybe some parents don't like (I'm a parent of elementary kids, and yeah, I'd like them there earlier and the high school kids later, reverse of how most districts do it, but maybe some parents do in fact want their elementary kids starting at 9 o'goddamn-clock when they've already burned 1-2 of their most alert hours for the day, and the high schoolers starting before 8:00, for some reason). It is absolutely not because teachers are demanding to start school before the sun's even up in the Winter.
like daylight savings, I think everyone feels compelled to pretend there is a reason for this madness.
I don't believe there is any purpose in the current school start time, but it's been this way for ages. I'm sure it works for at least some people - but I don't see any reason why student athletes couldn't practice in the morning and spare the rest of us.
The sports-parent and coach lobby in high schools is often one of the stronger interest groups. I've known teachers to advocate for later starts in meetings (again: it really, really isn't due to some powerful cabal of ordinary teachers who just looooove starting school incredibly early) and be told sports are the reason it's not gonna happen (plus having to re-do bus schedules—admin hates working). Also, I can report that the old trope of high school athletes getting grades adjusted or being given way more leeway on disciplinary issues, which one might hope was now only observable on retro 80s movie nights, is still very much a real thing. Most teachers hate that crap, too, but administrators, coaches, and sports-parents all like the preferential treatment for athletes.
My understanding is that schools are run for the convenience of administrators, who want metrics based performance to look at like butts in seats, test scores, cost per student, etc
I have no doubt administrators have a large role to play in this but "test scores" and "cost per student" seem like perfectly fine metrics by which to judge schools, no?
"I literally don't have the time to cover the Indian Wars or Jim Crow south while still covering what I need to cover so my students can pass the state standardized test"
Metrics are meaningless without context, useful only for snap judgements by peanut galleries. Judging by metric is an pernicious antipattern that sounds good but the public and politicians rarely have the time for the contextualization necessary to make truly “data-driven decisions”. This is true outside of school management as well.
Are teachers really the ones pushing for such early starts of school? Anecdotally, most teachers I know don't love waking up at 5am in order to get ready and get to school on time. I always thought the early start was to have enough time in the afternoon and evening for after-school activities, but not sure.
Oh wow. You know U.S. labor is in a terrible place when AFT is described as a powerful union with an outsized influence on elections. (It’s exactly the opposite, actually, the only power teachers have left is the power to strike.)
> the only power teachers have left is the power to strike.
That's the only power any worker has. Pay and/or other powers tend to correlate to how often the worker ceases to work and/or how expensive it would be to replace them (true for both union and non-union workers).
That's what happened to my student. He went to s small elementary school and didn't get along with a particular teacher. He switched schools and bam different kid entirely.
This was my experience in schooling two decades ago. I had the same teacher for Grades 1, 4 and 7. This teacher and I did not work well together and I noticeably got worse grades in grades 4 and 7 than I had in the surrounding years.
I am sure the teacher was sick of me by the third year as well.
Seems like, in aggregate, the question is whether adding variance to outcomes is net positive or negative?
Some students will receive multiple consecutive years of excellent instruction, others will receive multiple consecutive years of subpar instruction. Does the upside contain innovation and social mobility? Does the downside contain increased disillusionment with school and education broadly?
We pull the goalie when the odds are against us and increased variance is desirable. Is this such a case? Sadly, it may be.
I had split 3/4 and 5/6 classes, where you stayed with the same teacher and students for both years, with either an older or a younger cohort with you to fill out the other grade
Theres at least one benefit outside of having a good teacher for two years - - the teacher starts the second year with context about your skills and what needs improvement. Eg. They can spend the summer knowing how many students are ahead and plan relevant coursework
The downside was around not interacting with the students who have the other teacher much for a couple years. Much harder to retain those friends
This assumes that the teacher correctly identified what needs improvement, or cares to improve you. Neither of these are given. My recollection of school was that I was often miss-understood by teachers resulting in net-negative interventions. Sometimes I'd be fortunate and click with the right teacher. In aggregate my current success depends heavily on those few times I clicked.
Also some teachers are better than others! I think two year in a row can have advantages. But different teachers bring different perspectives and different strengths. Sometimes a teacher will magically click in some way with your child and bring something out of them that other teachers hadn't managed.
I remember having the same English teacher (as in English literature) for five years (slightly accidentally - we got randomly allocated a couple of times and I ended up with her each time) and I think it gave me a rather narrow view of the subject.
> This seems like a practice that would work for some students and hurt others.
We need to figure out how to enact school practices in a way that different people get different practices; ideally lined up with what works for those people.
Obviously, if the school is small enough that it's one teacher per grade level, you can't have some kids in the grade loop and others not.
You may have a point in there, but not one that can counter the comment you are replying to.
Some bullet points:
- Many kids “learn the same”. From the perspective of schools, it’s true that differences in children can sometimes actually be differences in teachers
- In some school systems (such as Western public school) the teachers are all railroaded in to teaching the same and having the same attitudes in class. In that way, it’s also possible that a student who has issues with a particular teacher would have issues with many teachers throughout school
- Even among the kids who “learn the same”, there are massive differences internally. What we don’t see are the kids who work twice as hard and think that’s the amount of work everyone is doing, or the kids who are auditory learners but learn to read the words aloud in their head in order to remember them, or thousands upon thousands of ways that “non-typical” kids learn to mask their differences while thinking that it’s just what everyone does
- Objectively a lot of kids learn differently. We’re at the stage where teachers are taught this as a normal thing. On one hand the school system screens for all sorts of differences that might cause learning issues (like dyslexia), and on the other hand teachers are bringing different teaching styles in to classrooms so that all the “typical” kids can learn in their own style.
I had this exact experience. My sister loved our school, but also had all the 'good' teachers. I was in a different roster and ended up not enjoying my classes and eventually dropped out.
But that's life though. Even when you get a job there are people that you don't get along with, but you still find a way to make it work. If you would just move that student to a teacher that they preferred, might instill wrong perceptions of reality in the kid.
They're both humans. Humans can talk and reason, why not use that to try and solve the issues?
Edit: Feel free to down vote, but I'm of the opinion that adversity builds character and even more, it makes you into a person that people can rely on in tough situations. I know that parents these days want to make the lives of theirs kids so smooth that they'll never see a 90° degree angle in their life, but that's just not how the world work. At least the majority, I don't know how it's in US and huge cities. I'm from a village where everyone knows everyone.
> Even when you get a job there are people that you don't get along with, but you still find a way to make it work.
You expect a 6 year old to have the insight and emotional maturity to work around with a terrible teacher? Why would they even need a teacher if they could overcome that kind of adversity by themselves?
Sadly many people especially those that work in factories can't really seek out new jobs, as that could mean not being able to put the food on the table and pay for school stuff that the kids might need.
Learning to be able to tolerate and deal with people that you don't like or don't get along is an incredibly valuable thing.
I agree, but a single year is long enough to learn that lesson. Looping magnifies the positive/negative outcomes of being assigned a good, bad, or indifferent teacher (or one you just don't get along with).
But even in non Waldorf schools, it’s common to have the same teacher for the first 4 years, sometimes longer.
At least it’s common here, in East Germany.
I also think it is kind of important that it is this way, because kids learn FOR their teacher. A positive relationship must come first. Of course conflicts can happen. If this is the case and parents feel their children don’t grow to their full potential there are lot of ways to resolve the conflicts.
I think in Finland I had one teacher for first 2 or 3 years and then other one for next 3/4. It kinda does make sense as those ages are very different.
For next 3 years we had 1 retiring and then one taking over "home room" teacher. But at that point every class was with specialised teacher.
We did have repeat teachers for 3rd/4th grade (as the article described, it was probably due to staff shortages at the time), but by 5th/6th grade we moved to having different teachers for every subject.
Common in Montessori schools as well. Children typically spend 3 year "sets" in the same classroom with the same teacher (called "guides" in Montessori though).
Just opinion but I think kids benefit from different teachers teaching styles and personality.
And in case you get a bad teacher or a teacher who is not a fit, then the problem is resolved by passage of time within 12 months.
In fact my boy did get a bad teacher in primary school and exactly this line of thinking played out.
I'd never send my child to a school that did this.
Slightly off topic but I also don't think it is a good idea for kids to go to the same primary school and high school (i.e. some schools have kids all the way from prep to year 12). I think its good for them to have a different set of peers, teachers and environment after primary school. 13 years of the same is enough to make anyone sick of all of those things.
Article was interesting, my comment pertains to the "electric schoolbus" paragraph lower on the page :)
When I commuted between the South End and Cambridge MA for work right after college my roommates and I would make bets as to who would end up being late to work because the Cambridge Public High School electric schoolbus would break down, blocking a major road. For those who don't know, there's no great way with public transit to go from one end of Mass Ave to the other on any given day during rush hour. Train is about 1.1 hours, bus is 40 min best case scenario.
I kid you not - this was in 2019.
Ironically, also around the time Bird attempted to launch in Cambridge. This commute problem was later solved after we asked a Cambridge Police officer if we could buy impounded Bird Scooters in bulk. We each picked up 15 scooters at $8 per pop (basically brand new - sans new controller) and kept the rest in our basement. Ergo, "free" transportation for the next two years. Granted, NEVER buy a Ninebot product, the scooters on average would last around 105 miles prior to having a major mechanical or electrical failure. For those who are still reading, scooter cut the 40min bus commute to around 14 minutes.
I have to ask, you never got the idea of using a bike? Only when buying out electric scooters from a broke company did you think there might be a better way?
I got stuck with a maths teacher in my second/third year of highschool who couldn't teach. Like, none of his students ever passed. literally NONE. it wasn't even a close thing. My grades went something like 70% year 1, 40% year 2, 32% year 3, 60% year 4, 75% year 5, something like that. I was one of the lucky ones in that my brother could help me with my maths work for those grades. I'm not joking when I say 1/3 to 1/2 the class would regularly get <10% on any given test.
My parents(and many others) complained to the school. They couldn't fire him for a bunch of reasons I don't want to get into, beyond "south african public school".
When people talk about keeping a child with one teacher for a long duration, I think about that maths teacher.
It's like a democracy, rotating people in power around highlights problems, and also limits the damage of the bad ones. I don't think any teacher should ever teach any child for more than 1 subject for more than 1 year, in an ideal world.
My brother had this opportunity in a public elementary school. "Mrs. F" was the teacher for the same group of students for 2 or 3 consecutive years. It was very much an experiment, but by all accounts it was a success.
I recognize that this is just an anecdote, and there is the potential to get stuck with a bad teacher as other commenters have pointed out, but at least in his case, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. I wish that I'd had the same opportunity.
The class formed an especially close bond with each other and the teacher, and that led to some really unique extracurricular activities. At that age, parents are often still very involved in their children's education, and Mrs. F was able to form relationships with the parents as well, allowing the class and their families to go on special weekend camping trips, visit museums, participate in science competitions, among other things.
Years later, many of them still keep in touch, and I think just about everyone involved went on to higher education, many at very prestigious schools.
This shares the benefit of "looping" with homeschooling, which is sort of an extreme form of looping I guess. Homeschooled kids benefit tremendously from having a teacher who is _incredibly_ familiar with their previous experiences and learnings, which the teacher can draw upon to teach new ideas.
If a teacher has an even slightly better understanding of what their children already know, they are set up to succeed at helping them learn new things.
It's not the only factor that matters, but it is a big deal especially for earlier grades.
Gonna need some citations on homeschool effectiveness (not written by homeschool advocates) because in my experience, I knew 1 parent that actually was knowledgable and engaged enough to provide the kind of teaching you are talking about. I have known several that homeschooled for religious reasons or "scared of public school and couldn't get into private school" reasons and the kids were clearly educationally behind.
To answer your anecdata: There are kids in public school who are clearly behind, too. In fact, I wonder (also without data!) if the same kids from the same families would be behind in public school. And then I wonder whether they'd be more behind or less behind.
As I said, no data. But it takes heroic amazingness from the school to make up for a badly-screwed-up home environment.
And that's really depressing, because I don't know of any policy that can fix badly-screwed-up home environments. You could take the kids, and we do if it's bad enough, but the bar for that is very high, and rightly so.
School just doesn’t do very much for learning so homeschool can’t have much of a negative effect. Unschooled children, those who receive no formal, systematic instruction whatever, are only one grade level behind their traditionally schooled peers.
Educationally behind who? In New York less than half of students met "proficiency standards" in English and Math in 2019 - before the pandemic when NYC schools were closed for over a year. A look at how incredibly low a bar it is to be considered "proficient" makes this stat much worse than it looks at first glance. A functionally illiterate homeschooled child who was unable to do basic math would be on the same level at ~60% of New York public school students.
I don’t have an academic paper which, you’re right, this deserves.
As far as it goes, I was personally homeschooled 1-5th and had a really positive educational experience. I certainly know the kind of people you are talking about, though.
I don't remember a single post-Soviet school which did not do that.
Sometimes your teacher gets replaced for one reason or another, but unless that happens, the default is that a given subject (such as maths) is taught by the same teacher from beginning (middle tier school) to the end.
Students end up informally calling their teachers by the subject since threre is no ambiguity - "the geographian" or "the english".
My intuition is that it'd be great for good teachers who match decently with their students, but borderline outright abusive with a bad teacher or students with a major teacher mismatch.
Looping for at least 3-4 years seems the standard in most countries. Strange to see it discussed as something "strange" or "novel" without recognizing this basic fact.
Yes I'm always amazed by these topics coming up on HN where something which is commonly done in lots of countries is brought up and you see lots of posts talking about how this can never work, or is an absolutely terrible idea which will lead to incredible damage to children, society... For some reason or the other.
I noticed this most often on topics about education, transport and housing.
Imagine being unable to interview the new hire. You're not even told their name until the day before they start.
Imagine this new hire is your boss. Who stands in front of you all day every day and watches you work.
Imagine that no one in the company – not even the CEO – can fire them.
Imagine being unable to quit this job for any reason.
Imagine this is your first job, and you are a child, and your boss is an adult.
At least you're guaranteed to get a new boss next year.
Now imagine this guarantee is taken away. It's because a study in "EdWorkingPapers" found that taking it away is "associated with small increases in academic achievement".
Looping is stupid though because whatever small benefits accrue they don’t justify teachers learning a new curriculum every year as they bounce from grade to grade. I want my grade eight history course taught by someone who knows grade eight history well. I don’t want it to be taught by someone who spent the last three years on completely unrelated topics in previous grade’s history.
Typically, schools that loop do so in fixed-size windows (often 2 years, so K/1, 2/3, etc). Often, teachers for the looped grades plan curriculum together. This tends to minimize the effects of unfamiliar subject matter and the kids' changing social/emotional maturity.
(Source: I helped to start and taught at a charter school in the early 00's. For better and for worse, that school grew into a fairly large charter management organization. Classroom management - which boiled down to convincing a lot of very jaded kids that we actually cared about them - took months at the beginning of each year, and no substantive academic work was possible during that time. Looping in two-year windows struck a good balance between amortizing that cost and preserving teacher expertise.)
Have you talked to actual teachers about the concept? Based on what you’ve written here, what I understand from teacher friends, and my own child’s experience with looping, you all have a very different outlook than what I’ve witnessed and heard.
My son had his 1st grade teacher loop; he loved her and she loved him. It was a joy to have him feel comfortable with his teacher two years in a row. As a kid with a harder time socially as well as an anxious personality, it was wonderful for him to feel at ease two years in a row and have that stability! In addition, it was especially great for us as we received a unique look at his progression at that age.
No one was REQUIRED to loop. The teacher as well as the student and/or parents could request a student not loop.
Then looping might work for the first few grades of grade school. Maybe up to grade 4 or 5? If a teacher can’t handle that curriculum I … don’t think they should be teachers.
If a teacher can't "learn" the next year's curriculum faster than the children they are teaching, there is something very wrong with the selection and hiring process for teachers...
It’s one thing to learn from a teacher who knows the material and a wholly different experience to learn from someone who knows the material.
My literature professor in high school knew literature. His class was amazing. He spent each period bringing the material to life and telling stories from authors’ lives, the background behind each story and poem, additional anecdotes etc, and really put the whole thing in context. Then for the last 10 minutes he explained what we needed to know for the standardized curriculum.
That sounds more like he knew the subject (literature) rather than knowing the material (n'th grade literature). In my experience the people best equipped to do something like that are people that have knowledge beyond the class they teach - the high school teacher that has a phd in the subject they are teaching, the university teacher that is currently involved in research etc. Especially in physics and mathematics I think this is relevant, as there are many times where questions naturally lead into topics from a much more advanced level. Like say the teacher explains that 3 isn't divisible by 2 and someone pupil says it is in fact divisible and the answer is 1.5. A teacher with solid knowledge of abstract algebra, that knows peanos axioms, and how Q is constructed from Z will be better equipped to deal with that.
On the other hand I could see how teaching one and the same class over and over might lead to a bored teacher and a narrow perspective.
A teacher can learn the curriculum far faster but any educator will tell you they do a better job of teaching a lesson when they’ve already taught it before. Looping literally means every lesson you teach will be your first time teaching it. It’s silly to give up on all the advantages that come from adapting a lesson after seeing what works well and what doesn’t. The challenges from having a different teacher in grade two and grade one aren’t larger than the benefits of having a grade one teacher who’s delivered the same lessons many times and constantly improved them.
> Looping literally means every lesson you teach will be your first time teaching it.
I don't think that's literally true, even if you're correct that looping for more than a year is suboptimal. A proportion of teachers are teaching a curriculum for the first time even "without looping" (i.e. looping for only a year). With two-year looping, teachers only take a year longer before they're teaching a curriculum they've taught before.
Is there any advantage in looping for less than a year (e.g. changing teachers each semester)? What's the optimal amount of looping?
It is profoundly weird to look at everything through the lens of corporate life. There are places where the relationship isn't that of a boss with their boot on their employees' neck.
> There are places where the relationship isn't that of a boss with their boot on their employees' neck.
Indeed! However, school isn't exactly one of those places. If anything, it's designed to prepare people for that corporate life and to be cogs in that machine. I refer to the explicit population-management goals of the founders of modern education in the US — figures such as Horace Mann, Barnas Sears, W.R. Harper, and Edward Thorndike.
Montessori (AMI) does this. Like anything there are tradeoffs. It great when it works; it's aweful when there is a problem. Implementation is also dependent on teacher availability.
Italy does this. My Italian family hates it, as if you get a bad or bad-fit teacher you are stuck with them for years. Much better to change from time to time, try different things
Yeah, I had like two math teachers from like 4th grade to 12th and I mostly attribute my dislike for it to them, even though I want to relearn now if I could get the time.
I'm in the opposite end of this, end teachers being close to students in anyway. I hated hearing about their personal lives, trying to be "pals", expecting some sort of social engagement,etc... again I lament people not knowing the right place for the right thing (I've been arguing on a different thread against politics and religion at work). I just want to learn $subject and go home! I have no desire to be indoctrinated or form relationships with teachers and this shouldn't be the norm either. Teachers are like a 3rd parent these days. Why do they do that when they don' even get paid enough? I mean, I hope if I ever have kids ML algorithms and online classes will teach them instead of humans so I can do the parenting. </endrant>
It references multiple studies which show evidence that this discrepancy in disciplinary action is not due to a difference in offenses committed by black students.
It's probably not a coincidence that we see these same sort of harsher penalty in the justice system for sentencing of black folks for committing the same crimes committed by white folk. It's the same systemic issues at play.
> This feels like a statement that needs some serious backing up, since the implication is that most teachers are racist.
Actually the implication is that some teachers and/or administrators are racist. If even one teacher is racist, then that would skew the numbers a tiny bit.
"Some members of X profession are racist" is almost certainly true for any X.
> This feels like a statement that needs some serious backing up, since the implication is that most teachers are racist.
Assuming it true, then it’s pretty surprising how we can simultaneously call teachers heroes and racists without much debate.
The point is that this is an ingrained bias that is fundamental throughout our culture. No teacher says to themself “This kid is black, so therefore I will punish him more harshly because I am a racist”. It is far more sinister, subtle, and unconscious than that.
It seems to me that the us education system rearranges the deck chairs while the ignoring the titanic problem that the schools are designed for the staff, not the kids.
I think our school system is approaching a local maxima where the idea that learning sucks and should be avoided is embedded in as many young brains as possible.
I opened it with a Tor Germany node and got
> Our European visitors are important to us.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Hmm. I am torn. It has some really amazing potential benefits in theory, but I can absolutely see how it could be an issue if the kid somehow does not 'gel' with the teacher or vice versa. And, naturally, there is a question of pygmalion effect, whether the teacher is.. well.. good enough to maintain that kind of long term relationship.
If I recall my early years correctly, we had one 'main' teacher, but the rest of the subjects were done by other teachers. It maintained some of the benefits, while still exposing the kids to the world outside their class. Come to think of it, one my 'main' teachers really did not like me ( and advised my parents to move me somewhere else ).
My district stopped it a few years ago because teachers complained that "it was too hard to learn to teach both third and fourth grade" (and so they wanted to only teach a single grade).
I've never been a professional elementary school teacher, but that doesn't seem to be a Herculean task.
The teacher has to adapt to the curriculum, develop material for it that suits the students and their own teaching styles. All while teaching kids all day. This consumes a lot of time, and is incredibly mentally taxing.
Many school districts require "lesson plans" to be submitted for darn near everything, and it is much easier to just recycle the same pile of lesson plans each year than actually create new ones.
I suspect much of the "lesson plan" submission stuff is TPS-level busywork.
Agree 100%. Micromanaging someone’s lessons by actually reviewing the plans is an exercise in frustration and futility. But as a student you’d know when your teacher showed up unprepared and tried to wing it.
If you're a professional programmer, it would be the same as asking you as a full stack developer to develop a monolith in a datacenter using java on Windows this year and then next year asking you to develop microservices in Python using linux on Kubernetes.
The high level skills are similar, but the details are all different.
Yes. For one, science and social studies cover completely different topics. For two, even the math and English cover very different parts of those topics. And 3rd to 4th is also a huge transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn". 4th grade is the first time kids are expected to learn new information on their own from reading it, so it's a very different teaching experience.
Changing grades is like starting again as a brand new teacher.
Thanks for the thought-provoking reply, raising several issues I hadn't considered. It does seem like an inordinately high percentage of third grade teachers are able to learn the equivalent of python microservices on k8s on linux in a single summer as I rarely hear of a teacher being unable to make the leap between 3rd and 4th grade instruction (or vice versa) while developers who are unable to rapidly switch ecosystems is quite common. It is work to be sure, but success seems fairly assured.
This is common practice in German primary level education. The downside is if your kid is unlucky to have one of the bad teachers…they have the same bad teacher for years.
This book very much comes off as someone who works with the top 10% of kids and has a plan that will work wonderfully for them. But it’s not even remotely realistic for the bottom 10% of kids who would play video games all day on their phone if their study was self guided and insufficiently accountable. Pretending that slice of the population doesn’t exist will do a lot of harm to them.
On a personal level I don't think that matters. From a policy perspective, sure, but for my own decision on how to school my children, IDGAF about the bottom 10%.
This only works if the teachers are good and remain good. I am imagining how much damage a bully teacher could do if they weren't limited to a single year.
I think it more important to have a structure that supports students in building and advisor relationship with a senior faculty that last year over year.
The mother of a friend of mine did this as a grade school teacher in Denmark. Same kids for nearly a decade, multiple runs (she's retired now). I'm not sure they still do it this way, but I suppose as long as the kids are exposed to other teachers it's not so bad. This way there's someone the kid is familiar with, while still having a variety of teachers for various classes.
So torn on this! Thinking back on my best teachers, they had a huge impact on my development and what I thought of school. On the flip side, some teachers made me count the hours every day until I could be done with their class. It won't happen, but it would be pretty interesting to see merit increases tied to this (retention of students, requests to join/leave group, etc.).
They seem fairly orthogonal to me. I guess you could frame the connection like this, though: A teacher acclimated to a group can provide more customized instruction; a slightly older instructing student that is cognitively closer to a learning student can provide more customized instruction.
In general I think they provide different functions, though: stability of environment from the looping teacher, and diversity of information sources/instructors from the other student age groups.
Yes, I think when I've heard about it in the past the different student age groups together were most frequently brought up as the primary cause of benefit.
Where I was wondering if there might be a connection is that a multi-grade classroom also (particularly in small schools) means that a student probably will have the same teacher for multiple years (2-4, in most of the cases I've heard of). I realize that's much less extreme than some of the cases mentioned in the article, but it may still be a secondary source of benefit.
I think I benefited from multi-grade classrooms and certainly enjoyed interacting with multiple cohorts of students. I missed that after switching back to largely single-grade.
considering good teacher is rarity it's pretty bad idea, without looping everyone can experience him at least for short time, with looping some may never met such teacher
in kindergarten I couldn't wait until my kid gets through a year to get better teacher next year, now in primary school we are first four years stuck with oldest teacher in school, we won a "lottery", at least I teach my kids not to take teachers very seriously because with these salaries nobody competent will keep teaching (and don't get me started 95% teachers in school are females, very healthy ratio to have diverse views presented), same goes for telling kids if they won't study good at worst they can always join police force where bottom of the barrel ends
https://archive.ph/vq67E