Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software.
To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones.
As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.
Also, I will add, there is an element of good teaching that involves building a relationship with your students.
Getting personalized feedback (encouragement, small corrections, etc) can mean much more to a student than a simple green checkmark/red x somewhere. Good educators can know when to apply the right amount of pushing or backing off that can help a student succeed.
Ideally, of course. Lots of bad teachers out there…
100% agreed. On the other hand, automated grading would remove a lot of the biases. For example, it's been repeatedly proven that girls get graded higher than boys.
Maybe I'm clashing with the specific phrasing since I haven't heard of a bias in the grading itself (i.e. a bias of the teacher), but rather a bias of the system. Schooling as a whole aligns more with girls' strengths as they're more consistent in the day-to-day (ex: organization, planning, homework) whereas boys tend to test better [0]. The weighting of assignments in a particular class could tip the benefit in either direction.
I could believe girls 'get graded higher' on written assignments due to generally better handwriting. I had poor handwriting (though recall at least one girl classmate with worse) and certainly received no credit on some correct answers as a result. I imagine a frustrated teacher reading through a chicken-scratch essay might dock some points - whether directly with a note calling it out (also happened to me), discreetly, or subconsciously.
Not GP, but I frequently start comments like this if the comment I’m replying to isn’t just slightly off, but reflects a deeply unexamined prior. It’s a signal that “The thing that’s wrong with your comment isn’t even in the text of the comment, it’s in the worldview that led you to think this in the first place. Simply reacting to the text of the comment would be insufficient.”
I get the impulse, but I just think that if the goal is to correct someone--not just to be correct--starting with snark is most likely to be counterproductive. Even if the first comment is actually in bad faith, I consider my audience to be any reader, not just the one I'm replying to, and snark undermines credibility there, too.
The problem is that this type of reply reflects your own deeply unexamined prior (e.g. that software can't play a part of solving this issue, or that anyone who said X believes Y, etc.), and so sets up an antagonistic interaction with the other person where you are each arguing from atop your ladders of inference, rather than climbing down those ladders and deconstructing those priors in more detail.
It’s often a deeply examined prior. The people I know who are the most doubtful about software are the engineers with more than 20 years experience. They have spent most of their adult lives thinking about what software is, and isn’t, good for.
On the other hand, some contributions to a conversation are simply beyond the boundaries of common sense in such a way (blindingly obvious, unacceptable, dangerously naive, etc.) that ridicule is appropriate. Even if the contribution was made in good faith. Ridicule has numerous powerful social functions: it helps social groups self-govern, transmits knowledge from one generation to the next, enables social groups to circumscribe what is acceptable in a bottom-up way, and so on. Sometimes a little public skewering is exactly what's needed to give everyone something to think about. It's an online comment. Real names weren't used. There appears to be an overwhelming consensus as to the quality of the contribution (it's so light I can barely read it). No one's suffering any undue injury.
I personally don't think ridicule is ever necessary or appropriate. Even if it results in compliance or submission in the moment, it's very likely to produce resentment. In an organization, it produces a culture of fear, rather than curiosity and initiative.
Ridicule can absolutely produce resentment, no doubt about it. It can cause workplaces to become toxic, cause people to shut down (or worse: cause people to _learn_ to shut down), cause people to cope in unhealthy ways like projection, bullying, etc.
However, consider that _satire_ is, fundamentally, ridicule. And it's very public (or at least intended to be). Often satire is one of the only ways that unaccountable power can be brought to account, or institutions which have overstayed their utility can be mobilized against.
It really depends on who's the butt of the joke. On HackerNews, we're mostly anonymous as to our individual identities, but at the same time, any one of us could unwittingly end up playing the part of a public archetype, representing anything from a naive and harmless misconception all the way to a rotten, spiteful ideology that nihilistically boasts of its intent to destroy everything. Some of those ideas need to be challenged. And the people that amplify those ideas need to be challenged too. Bad faith and ill intent warrant ridicule, if not outright invective and contempt (not very often to this degree, but as a history enjoyer, I'll die on this hill). But sometimes even a genuine, bona fide contribution _ought_ to be ridiculed, if it stems from a misunderstanding which amplifies a terrible idea - especially if it's a terrible idea with actual supporters. In this case, the bad idea was _technocratic solutions to complex social problems._ The context is important too: it's HackerNews, which has some of the most brilliant minds, willing to share deep, detailed insights into complex, systemic problems, glomming onto some of the most simplistic, reductive tropes about human needs and behavior. It's a kind of paradoxical, radically individualistic groupthink, which, taken to its logical end (or even just considered half-seriously with a modicum of self-awareness), would smother the social and economic conditions for a healthy society. A small set of shallow, rote answers to complex human problems, coming from defenders of “second-order thinking.” It needs to be challenged in a way that an overclocked galaxy brain can't intellectually weasel its way out of.
I love comedy and satire for my personal enjoyment, but I'm not at all convinced they've been at all effective at stopping some of the most harmful ideas of our time.
Why was this instance a good use case for ridicule?
As you admit, the question asker might very well have been genuinely curious. The answer to their question doesn't seem blindingly obvious to me (although I can certainly speculate about good reasons that grading isn't automated). I can't tell what you mean by "unacceptable" (perhaps there is some cultural taboo you're referring to here?). And it also doesn't seem "dangerously naive", which might apply where someone asking this question had decision making power in a critical situation, but clearly doesn't apply here.
By the very criteria you lay out, this doesn't seem like an instance in which ridicule was necessary or good. To me, it feels like a weak justification for bullying someone who thinks differently about something you obviously feel very strongly about.
I don't believe this was a case of bullying at all. It was a light ribbing. It also aligned with an archetype (of being able to engineer our way out of human problems) that's especially salient for some people on here, yet totally lost on others. The contradiction is funny, too, because it's classic human folly. Whether or not the commenter is anything like that really doesn't figure into the calculus of how necessary or good this instance of another commenter's snarky side comment was: there are no material consequences, no damage to anyone's reputation (except for some votes), and no one was even the butt of a joke here - it was the idea of the smart engineer with the engineered solution to a human matter which doesn't need solving. That's what we're laughing about.
Regarding all the talk about ridicule, it was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that humor at someone's expense is _never_ appropriate. It is appropriate and even healthy for a society to be composed of individuals who can withstand a bit of a ribbing when they unwittingly find themselves representing human folly in one of its many forms, and who can stop and ask, why did that happen?, and potentially learn from it, if it came from a moment of lacking self-awareness, or if it was just bad luck (everyone - everyone - winds up in the crosshairs sometimes.)
Truly no ill will meant, just wanted to defend the social function of ridicule. It probably ended up being a lot more of a well, actually thing than I intended. Which I do get teased for sometimes.
I think the issue here is that I fundamentally disagree with the direction of this particular ribbing. I think we should be sensitive to this kind of naive questioning, which comes from a good place (wanting to make teaching easier and more effective) and can lead down productive paths where our priors are deconstructed such that we change what we think of as possible. We work in an industry where rabbits have been pulled out of hats and geese have laid golden eggs, by which I mean people have put their minds to hard problems and have come up with solutions that before seemed impossible and would have faced the ridicule that you're defending. To the extent that ridicule causes people to be less curious, we should be very careful about deploying it.
I'm certainly no fan of shutting people down for asking questions. I think we may be interpreting the context of the question differently though. The parent poster was recounting having worked as a math teacher, stressed out every day from the planning and grading demands of the job, working in excess of 12 hours per day, earning a salary low enough that colleagues without a spouse's income to help out had to work a second job - and who still has nightmares about being back in the classroom. And then moving on to a software job with double the salary and half the stress. I read it as saying teachers should be appreciated / paid more and the response as why are teachers still doing unnecessary grunt work, making lesson plans and grading papers? Isn't that dumb work that a software engineer could just solve for them?
(Also, following through on this, if such a solution - computers planning your lessons for you, so all you have to do is what the smart computer tells you to - were to become reality, the lack of teacher appreciation / salary, which was the main point of the parent comment, would not improve at all - it would likely get worse, with teachers getting paid less for fewer available jobs. The deskilling of labor would probably follow, reducing teacher roles to individual, specialized, repetitive tasks, since it saves an enormous amount of money if low-skilled workers can simply be swapped out if they don't work out.)
FWIW, as the person who raised the criticism of the snark, I also am a former math teacher. I have experienced just how much more valued I am as a software engineer. I have experienced how vastly better my work-life balance is. I, too, have observed how folks in the tech startup scene can approach complex social problems with overconfidence in tech solutions. So I have a similar claim as the OP to feeling insulted and entitled to snark back. I just don't think it's the right thing to do, from the standpoints of how I aspire to treat people and from a pragmatic standpoint of seeing the changes I want.
My comment is net -1 right now, and I don't believe I made any assumptions about the person I responded to in the feedback I tried to offer. If people don't think my feedback is useful, that's fine, but if I had started it off with something like "ah, the presumptuous teacher", I'm pretty sure it would be been received even worse.
I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as long as they are open to answers that contradict their assumptions. People should be able to do that and get earnest answers without backhanded comments. Asking naive questions is a big part of how I learn, personally.
The point, I think, is that it almost never leads to this outcome. Humans respond very poorly to [perceived] antagonism from anonymous strangers. I know I do, and it’s why I’m working on removing all my snark from internet comments.
I’ve also found that you can usually rephrase the snark (“do you really think…?”) into a straightforward question in a neutral tone.
> But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc.
I mean this seriously: why? High school math is not a rapidly changing field. Sure, you might have to slow down or speed up, depending on the class -- although, is even that true? Is the average student really changing all that much from year to year? -- but that means taking out the file for day 82 on day 87 or whatever. That's not a massive adjustment.
The material is unchanging. The students aren't going to be all that different from year to year. What's going on that it seems like common sense to so many people that teaching high school math requires a bunch of novel planning?
Also, as a teacher, you have to adopt the district standards, which change every few years. Certain areas are removed, others added, some things are more important, some less. Those standards are changing to meet new standardized testing requirements.
There is a lot of change happening. Just like in programming. People who learned Cobol still need to learn new languages once in a while, because things change, even though the principles stay the same. It's the same data structures, same algorithms, but yet software engineering is rapidly changing.
I always phrase it as the principles (mostly add/delete) stay the same, but the methods are almost always different. Once you learn the principle, it's always about the method of getting there.
That's still work though. You might know all you need to know on the subject you will teach, but if the standard you have to fulfill changed, that means you have to change your plans.
Most of this change is driven by something other than need. The high school mathematics curriculum is a bit of a funny beast in the US, but it is certainly not the weak point in the system.
The desired goal of high school math may not change much from year to year, but the best strategies for meeting that goal certainly do. I cannot imagine asking a student today to learn algebra the way I did 55+ years ago. Log-tables and slide rules? Probably not a good strategy.
Until one has taught something that is completely new to a student, it is difficult to imagine how challenging that can be, and how individual it is. What helps Johnny understand (or even care) is often completely different from what helps Mary. It is very difficult to teach effectively without figuring out what the student does not understand. And there are as many ways to misunderstand as there are students.
That is why teachers keep revising. They want to make the material more accessible to more of their students.
In addition to changing cohorts that others mention - What are the chances the way you taught it last year is the most effective way?
Good teachers experiment - maybe something they taught last time didn't go over too well, how can that be improved? Can they make the material even more relevant this year?
Also, it makes teaching it more interesting, rather than regurgitating lessons. Teachers are human after all.
If kids were learning high school math just fine 50 years ago (and, as far as I know, they were), then that suggests that advances in pedagogy are either not forthcoming, entirely irrelevant, or overwhelmed by other factors.
It doesn't "suggest" that at all. Perhaps changes in pedagogy were necessary in order to adapt to a changing world.
Education isn't like the naive "encoding/decoding" model of communication, where the subject matter is simply "transmitted" from teacher to students. Even if the subject matter remains stable over time, many other things do not: changes in the media of communication, signal interference (say, from the average classroom size drastically increasing over time), all kinds of changes in the teachers and students themselves, changes in society's expectations of what constitutes success or failure (e.g. rote learning is now widely seen as having many shortcomings), changes in what students actually need to move forward (a career in the trades may well require a much lower standard of understanding in the age of the pocket calculator), ... this list could go on and on. Teaching is not a "solved problem" like that.
50 years ago, high school math at most schools ended with trigonometry. Today a large fraction of college bound seniors have taken calculus, and STEM students have taken two years of calculus. And yet, 50 years ago there were lots of math-phobic kids who, today, are expected to perform at some modest level (50 years ago, they stopped with algebra I).
It is true that 50 years ago a fraction of kids were learning just fine, but more recently the goal has been to make that fraction larger, in a society that actively devalues learning.
Your day is 8 hours long and includes 5 hours of meetings, 1 hour which is composed of duties and and maybe 30 to 45 mins for lunch. You've now got 1.5 hours to make "small adjustments" to the 4 classes you teach. Also, maybe you need to do some grading, deal with unruly kids, document what you did for those kids with IEPs, field emails, and adjustments for whatever latest fad the school admin is applying to the curriculum.
The material is not so static. Finding square roots by hand is no longer taught as part of the curriculum.¹ Interpolation from data tables is also not typically taught since students are expected to have a calculator that can at least handle trig functions and logarithms. Graphing calculators enable solving problems as part of classwork that weren’t possible before the calculator. When I was in high school, the lowest-level math class offered was Basic Math which didn’t even cover fractions. Some schools (but not the one I attended) topped out with AP Calculus BC which was roughly equivalent to a Calc II college class (integration and series). Now, the lowest-level math class available at the high school level is Algebra and students cannot graduate without passing Algebra and Geometry.² Some schools offer AP Calculus CD which covers multivariate calc (e.g., Calc III) as well as AP Statistics, neither of which existed when I was in high school.
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1. I’m sure that there are occasional classrooms where this is still taught, but it’s more an enrichment topic than part of the curriculum.
2. I was in high school when Illinois raised its graduation requirement from one year of math to two years of math. The year after that happened, my high school began offering Basic Math 3/4 in addition to the Basic Math 1/2 class it had previously because too many kids were unable to do fractions.
Software is a tool that can be used effectively in education (e.g., Khan Academy). Nobody says it is the only tool that you should use.
If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual, it implies 0% effectiveness of Khan Academy (false). In practice, even if just a half of the tests can be automated, it would free the time for teachers to do the work that can't be automated.
> If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual
That's not what was said though; I don't think anyone has a problem with some grading being automated (e.g. multiple-choice), and software has been used for decades for this kind of thing.
But there are serious limitations to this. If I solve a math problem in the correct way but made a silly mistake in the arithmetic leading to the wrong answer, then this is still a "correct" answer in a way, worth of some points.
And grading math is easy; how would you automate the grading of a question like "describe two reasons why the American settlers declared independence"?
To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones.
As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.