One of my sons is one of those. He's smart, tends to creative pursuits, and while he will research and learn on his own about stuff he's interested in, put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.

I never taught myself, so take this with a grain of salt (though I do think it is extremely hard to do well).

I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.

I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.

Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.

I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)

After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".

As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.

> teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.

This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.

And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.

The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.

I had the opposite experience. I saw college kids who didn’t know where the F5 key was on the first day write smart matlab and python programs by the midterms.

I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.

I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.

> nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.

It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.

> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.

> [...] isn't interested in learning.

I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.

No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.

Almost all such attempts start with the flawed assumption that there is One True Way to teach literally every person in the same cookie cutter fashion.

The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".

Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.

Well, we've all been students, haven't we? And most of us probably have experience with ways of teaching us that worked, and ways that didn't. Of course we're all going to have an opinion.

I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.

I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.

So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.

There's also this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ which claims data shows students being forced to "figure it out" is not the best way to learn. Most HNer disagree with this.

From experience (with a moody teenager), can confirm; I think this is less teaching methods and more personal development.

Younger children will conform more easily to e.g. structured education, teacher / parent authority, and basically do what they are told/asked to do. But at college / uni ages, you're dealing with young adults, some of which are only doing an education still because it's expected of them by parents/society. Or even when they want to be there, the motivation to do the work may not be there. yet.

It's difficult because their brain is still at high learning capacity, so one has to capitalize on that. But they also have other interests, like sleeping until midday and spacing out for ages.

I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. There were articles to read in advance. I should have taken that class before I spent 15 years teaching at university rather than afterwards.

Yes, and I probably was that student in school.

The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.

Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.

> I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.

Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.

I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

Absolutely.

I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).

Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.

I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.

Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.

Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.

It's the circle of liiiiiife......

Also, there is no 'right way to teach', but there are 'right ways of teaching'. This difference being that people can respond very differently to the same approach, so many approaches are needed to be effective.

We know what works: a 1:5 staff to student ratio. At that ratio, method matters less. Beyond that, it's a productivity problem.

based on your description, one reasonable way to 'revolutionize' school might simply allow people (who don't want to be there) to leave.

> I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"

This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?

I think the problem with your argument is that you are placing teaching as something done to students at the centre of your view, rather than something done by students. It assume classroom learning. That rules out any really different approach. The fundamental problem is trying to revolutionise schooling rather than learning.

> They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Then they should not be there. That is the fundamental problem. Especially at that level why is anyone there who is not even motivated enough to study? Someone might not like ever undergraduate level course they need for a degree, but they should be able to push themselves through the boring stuff.

At school level, its difficult to make things work in a classroom setting with a fixed curriculum. Once I took my kids out of school they largely learned what they found interesting until they started studying towards doing exams. I made sure they learned core skills around reading, writing and maths, but they still had a say in what to do and how. A lot of it can be done by pursuing other subjects or hobbies. With the exams they had a choice (discussed, and they had to do maths and English language) but they had a choice) of what subjects to do and made choices that suited them, including some less common subjects (such as astronomy and Latin). Again, motivated and requiring very little actual teaching (they both entirely taught themselves Latin, and did other subjects with minimal help - although we did have tutors for English literature and classical civilisation, and varying amounts of parental help with other subjects).

A lot of the best universities (in the UK, at least) have tutorial systems that rely heavily on small groups rather than lectures (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews - that I know of). A lot more individual attention is a long proven method of getting better results.

At school level it might look very expensive, but that is balanced by needing a lot less time per student. A few hours of one to one a week is cheaper than school.

I was one of these "smart students" but it really wasn't that I did not want to be there. I was a lazy, or complacent, f*ck. I've have had to learn how to learn and how to have discipline late(r) in life.

That's true. I'm frustrated for example in how they teach math at my kids school. They don't do rote memorization of how to multiply. No quizzes, no reciting... they teach the conceptual parts of it which is fine, but without memorizing I feel they will never have fluency. And my daughter never did get fluency in math now I'm drilling my younger son every day.

I was one of those students. I refused to do homework after the age of 11 (I cited the 13th amendment). Quit school as soon as it was legal to do so. I wrote about this in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Now approaching my 60th birthday, I feel certain I was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD.

You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.

I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.

I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?

Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?

Both my parents were teachers so I thought I had some idea, but it wasn't until I ventured into the middle school to assist a teacher with a coding class (probably this was 10 years ago now) that I learned something about education.

> I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything

I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?

To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.

How to teach isn't always aligned with how to learn.

How children learn is not how adults learn.

There's a huge difference between things people are forced to learn and stuff they want to learn. Life does tend to make you learn a few things by force, but that can also kill off one's taste for a subject.

Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...

I am teaching for at the university level for 6 years now, with 5 courses per year.

The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.

The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.

When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.

So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.

Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.

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