Substrate

We have a part our school day dedicated to tutoring and reteaching. Every kid deserves to go to a school where they are always safe and never bored. There is a tremendous amount of intellectual labor that goes into good teaching. Every great teacher knows this and we think that in order to be a great school, we should provide and protect our teachers’ time to do it. We will not be back in the same building until next school year, but the school is not the building. We aren’t safe from the world, but we can feel the safety of teachers and classmates celebrating our successes and learning from our errors.

But you can tell a lot about a teacher by how they respond when students don’t succeed. Some will say, “What’s wrong with you?” Others will ask, “What’s wrong with me?” great teachers know three things: they know their subject, they know how to explain their subject, and they know their students. Knowing the history of a topic, the interesting problems, the common misconceptions, the multiple approaches, the links to other topics. And it’s about expert communication of all of that. They co-create educational experiences with their students because they realize that students hold key knowledge of their own that most don’t acknowledge or even recognize.

of work I poured into our course blog. Every student contributed two posts to the blog, and I gave multiple rounds of detailed feedback on all twelve posts, learning a lot from the students in the process. ​ and especially not Jekyll, since having a working Ruby environment is the hardest problem in computer science

But it is quite difficult to find a level of teaching which is comprehensible and at the same time interesting to an entire class with heterogeneous background. The shape of the mathematics education of a typical student is tall and spindly. It reaches a certain height above which its base can support no more growth, and there it halts or fails. But once you really understand it and have the mental perspective to see it as a whole, there is often a tremendous mental compression.

There's also a useful version of such critical remarks which can be made. One wants two things: (a) remarks which help people understand their own potential better; and (b) remarks which help people better understand what's involved in working in a particular field.— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) November 24, 2018