I have been teaching for 48 years & what past students have always said about me was: Thank you for caring about me, for making me feel important, for making me feel special, getting me excited, motivated & inspired, about what you were teaching. How I was always enthusiastic & excited about what I was teaching, & how I took an INTEREST in them. One student I taught thanked me for giving him a condolence card when his dog got run over it made him want to do the best he could do in my class because I gave him my personal time to buy the card and then to write words that helped ease the pain of his loss. It's because of all of the above that I believe technology will never take over from teachers. However, technology used in conjunction with the good teacher's (as outlined above) teaching a big fat YES. At 73 I am continually developing my expertise with technology so I can, where appropriate, incorporate with my teaching. I am so excited about teaching next year in my 74th year & 49th year of teaching in this wonderful and rewarding profession.
Thanks for being a TEACHER and not an educator! And I bet you have NEVER called the people in your classes LEARNERS. They are have ALL been students, but some will never be learners. Being able to recognize the difference is the key. You have and will continue to serve your students well. They are lucky to have you! Regards
*laughs at my high school students* Why should we learn this? Because it's on the exam. And why should we do well in the exam. Well your entire life depends on it and you are useless if you fail, the only meaning in your life should just be to memorize all the exact facts for the exam.
"The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn." And so far, you did that better than any teacher I've had.
Nixola97 most of my teachers were so bad at it that they did nothing to improve my need , combined with a textbook full of basic and stuff I already learned and the things I didn't learn boring and only few interesting ones ...
If the primary job of a teacher is to inspire learning, TH-cam and the internet really _have_ revolutionized learning. All public school did was make me _not_ want to learn things!! It's TH-camrs like you who really made subjects interesting again!
I get what Veritasium says here, but he is just Wrong. As CGP Grey pointed out years ago, this time is different. Mechanization and all that DOES change the world. Or rather: It would, if Humans wouldnt reject it. But obvious fact is, the Schools will not stay like they are for a Billion Years, duh.
@@loturzelrestaurant Well, then you dont really get what Veritasium point is. His main point is what the most important in education is a learner's experience. From my personal experience at studying university remotely via meeting in zoom and other platform, the SOCIAL experience we get at classroom with other student and teacher is irreplacable. And the technology nowadays can't change that.
"Tank, I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter." untill we get this... well. Computers are just tools. Intenet is a tool. You can hammer a nail with electronic microscope. But, I can tell you this, if I had access to Veritasium when I was 9th grade, I would probably get PhD in quantum physics :D
The altruistic posting of information on the internet was a pretty big deal. Before this era, a curious person had to physically get a textbook, or find an expert for a conversation. Now, a curious person needs 30 seconds to get the gist of almost any common topic on Wikipedia. Much lower friction leads to more people choosing to learn because it's simply easier. I agree with your points regarding the job of teachers and fellow students to motivate each other.
sMystring1 you might be right bout this 1, but still there are people who likes studying, and for those people the internet will be the infinite source of knowledge.
Finding an expert for conversation is still a huge problem. And you do not have to be seeking for an expert but anybody open enough who will actually give you something new and worthy from the conversation.
The revolution in education is the quick availability of answers to questions. His examples of radio, computers and television all failed to address this one issue. There has been nothing in history that can efficiently answer individual's specific and diverse questions like the internet. The other key is motivation, and he has some valid points on that one.
" [...]Luckily the fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information. It is to guide the social process of learning. The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn. Yes, they also do explain and demonstrate and show things, but fundamentally that is beside the point. The most important thing a teacher does, is to make every student feel like they are important, to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning. " I love this quote!
I'm 31 and currently a post doc researcher in physics and I think that the growth of physics and mathematics channels on TH-cam by people who care about the subject and who can explain the topic in an interesting way has revolutionized physics education at third level at least. The problem with lecturers at university is that they view teaching as a chore they have to do if they want to be able to conduct their research. As a consequence its possible to leave university with a physics degree without a thorough understanding of some very basic concepts.
As I look back 50 years to my public school teachers, I now think many were trying to inspire me and my classmates, but I was 'too smart' and wasn't having any of it. Perhaps I thought I was too smart and couldn't pick up what they were laying down. My daughter is a graduate student about to become a public school teacher, I hope she doesn't get too many 'unreachable too smart' students like me. :)
Or you were disinterested and never wanted to rise to the challenge. Plenty of those in a classroom as well and that didn't mean they were unsuccessful in life after school either.
@@gordoncharles741 returning to this comment a year later, I disagree with the original message. I think I have had amazing teachers that have inspired me, and I was just whining about school. Or perhaps farming likes? In which case I guess I succeeded.
I have been an engineering professor for over 30 years, I have a channel with video lessons on TH-cam, and I completely agree with the statement: "the main job of a professor is to inspire learning". Transmitting information is not the main thing for a teacher nowadays, with so many resources available to students. However, inspiring students to learn and want to learn more is much more relevant. Therefore, classes must also be fun, so that students feel well in the classroom, willing to pay attention to what the teacher says. In addition, it is important to show the importance and applications of what is being taught, always making a connection with what the student already knows.
This is quite relevant now after 18 months of COVID lockdowns. But all those technological aids did help - as usual, one size does not fit all. And, of course, _motivating_ the student is the most important, and hardest to do remotely. But you, Derek, are a very good role model of a highly motivating teacher.
As one of the late-night hosts pointed out just this last week, probably every parent right now has had it up to 'here' with online classes. Forget motivating, just keeping their attention must be nigh impossible.
@@jaradams Motivation, mainly. No massive procedural differences, but uni students are expected to do most of our work autonomously (I'm in uni right now -- second year, so I speak from experience) and we are, in general, mostly in uni because we want to be there, unlike school and high school where kids are pretty much forced to attend regardless of what they want to do. Plus we're also strapped for time, and a lot of us who aren't living on campus appreciate not having to make the commute. Not everyone will be like this though. And of course if you're studying something that requires special equipment or labs then you'll need face to face classes.
@@danielrodrigues4903 i think a good middle ground would be to have online clases and go to the campus for the face to face lessons that are required to have, because i have been loving online clases soo far
From my experience, I feel like people learn more outside of the classroom once they find that thing they are passionate about. By the time I hit college, I had already learned a ton about filmmaking from all sorts of TH-cam channels and online courses and many books that I felt my actual college classes about filmmaking were almost a waste of time. That being said, the teachers themselves were wonderful people who were incredibly encouraging. The information they taught may have been slightly outdated or irrelevant, but their hearts were in the right place. Even though I didn't really learn any new information in those classes, it was still a good experience.
Agreed. I think the premise of this video is correct, after all he's talking about public education, universities, etc. I'm 41 years old and I feel like I learn more every year than in all of my schooling. When I was young, information wasn't available to everyone. If you were lucky, you had a 10 year old encyclopedia set, so teachers were always right even when wrong. How would I know? Now I learn because I want to, not because I have to. I have access to the latest research, papers, even lectures at MIT, forums, Wikipedia, etc all on my phone! My kids who are in school play angry birds. So while our 'educational system" really does rely on teachers, education in general HAS been revolutionized. There has never been a time in history when the average guy sitting in a restaurant has the same access to information as the richest Ivy League frat boy. Learning will always be the responsibility of the learner. Credit to great teachers, but if someone doesn't want to learn, it's not the teachers fault. This video alone kinda proved this video wrong! I mean, here I am, in bed, learning!
People who try to revolutionize school should look into changing the whole education system. Because barring several experimental systems, school is filling a similar social role as prison, with many similarities between them: people are forced to be there, their schedules are designed by other people, the topics that are covered are commonly determined at such a high level that even the teachers have little choice... so what you get is teachers as prison guards and students as prisoners. And that is the aspect that needs to change before any kind of revolution can be claimed to have happened. Make a school people will want to attend. No, it's not easy at all.
Bojan Kopitar Yes and students are locked in rooms at night with cell mates in fear for their safety... While one could argue that schools are like prisons it is just as easy to see how they are nothing like prisons. As a teacher I see that most students honestly enjoy school. After all, at what other point in your life are you surrounded by your friends of similar age, and challenged in meaningful ways? Of course we could liken schools to a whole range of things but it would not make sense. Schools are places of education, they are community and social centres where the students and teachers alike are working on improving each others lives.
My thoughts have been expressed by other educators: "Teaching only happens when learning takes place". and, "Teaching takes place in time; learning takes place over time. "
Virtual learning doesnt work for a lot of people and especially since its far easier for kids to get distracted and be unaccountable combined with the fact that school administrations are trying to counteract this ends up making virtual school even more of a painful drag for most students That and the increased work load from classes many kids arent interested kills what little motivation kids would have for the few classes they do enjoy And also the fact that much of student engagement is trigger by conversation with their friends and teachers yet now kids are just discouraged from speaking up at all so they are even less engaged Basically virtual sucks for most kids already and crappy ways administrations handle online school is making it worse
@@tadpole9264 yeah I agree... the thing is, there are so many distractions when you are learning at home, like phones and the iPad I’m typing this comment on right now.
I had a math teacher in 11th grade who was the only real teacher I have ever had. Every math teacher I always have, I ask them, "Why do I need to know this stuff I am never going to use it?" but he was the only one who gave me a true and inspiring answer, he said "I don't care if you learn what 2+2= I care about you understanding the process of problem solving." Every other teacher just said, because it is a math class and you have to learn it. This teachers name was Brian Meyer and was by far the best teacher I have ever had. I learned so much in his class because he didn't teach what 2+2 was, he taught how to solve these problems and made sure we understood it. If one student didn't understand it, he would teach that kid either another way or help him/her step by step of how to solve it. He was an amazing teacher and I will definitely remember him forever, he definitely inspired me to not just learn facts but dive deeper and actually understand them.
I definitely agree that the problem solving part is the most important, and one of the most neglected. Now being a bit cynical, but hugely enthusiastic about my work developing software, I'd probably answer something like "If you're not going to use any of it, that probably means you'll be working a boring job that will soon be automated by someone who does use it." ;) Seriously, though, I wish we'd learned calculus and algebra way sooner, but with everything put in the context of the freaking amazing stuff you can do with them, instead of learning a bunch of disembodied rules. It makes things make so much more sense when you can try things out and see what happens. Physics, for example, goes from being "memorize these formulae and know how to apply them in the right order", to "What cool things can I figure out today?" Maybe I should stop procrastinating with my stalled TH-cam series, teaching how you can solve the Schrödinger equation of quantum physics without needing to know any complicated math in advance. It's not quite at the point where learners can go off on their own yet, but it's hopefully at the point where learners realize that they can do stuff they didn't think they could do before.
Neil G. Dickson That sounds awesome dude and I agree with you 100% its so hard to get into math when all it is, is memorizing repetitive formulas but actually applying it and using it is interesting. Another thing that same teacher did, he (for example) taught us about exponential growth. And instead of just using equations to explain it, he used real world situations like the exponential growth of the human race.
Math teachers are carefully selected math freaks who survived intense brainwashing (call them specialists), not just random citizens. So it is normal that you will encounter only a few outliers making sense.
That, and without math, science and technology , no one won't be living in a modern society right now, everyone would still live in a cave with a life span of 20 years old.
I had an 8th grade science teacher that would take us through experiments. Throwing a ball up in the air, blowing into a pneumatic piston to make it go up and putting books on it to make it harder to raise, are just a couple. I'm too old now to remember what was taught for the lesson, but I do remember that it was some of the best experiences in my education. Letting the student be involved actively in the processes of being taught was important for the lesson and could help you learn new information about yourself. For instance, in 8th grade, I had a personal horsepower of 0.8. So, I was 80% as strong as a horse in 8th grade...lol
I think we also have to differentiate between learning and memorizing. Learning a physics concept and the ability to develop an intuition about it probably would be best done in a social setting with peers and demonstrations. On the other hand, learning a chain of steps for organic chemistry is rote memorization where a social setting may not help. Technology can help substitute teachers when it comes to things that need memorizing, allowing teachers to better focus on their role in the classroom.
Is anything truely learnt from memorisation? If there is a clear difference between understanding a process that is called learning and memorization is knowing something without anythibg to support it, then is that useful? Especially when we xan now look up anything we want within seconds on a mobile device.
Agreed, a lot of "education" still focuses on memorizing rather than understanding. I think some things should be committed to memory but most of the mental effort should be spent on understanding.
***** exactly, as a maths teacher pretty much every lesson I gave had to focus on teaching how to memorize methods of calculation because that is what the maths exams test. When the phones in all their pockets can do that for them in fractions of a second yet no time was given for teaching them what it was for, how to use it to solve problems.
***** Many synthesis reactions require memorization. Though I think this is a case where memorization helps foster learning, as after repeatedly going through several synthesis reactions, the mechanisms become intuitive.
The teachers in my life that have really inspired me all showed love and excitement for their subject and communicated those feelings to me, inviting me in on the process. I was in a remedial math class once, and my teacher showed me how to calculate logarithms from scratch, instead of using tables, just for fun. And it WAS fun!
In computer science they found that one of the most effective changes was to have students actively coding during the course. The teacher will spend a few classes going over topic x, then at the end of that topic there will be at least 1 session of live coding where the teacher and students code together. Normally functioning as the teacher getting some code started, the students finishing it, then the teacher finishing it live as a self check for the students. The takeaway from this, the most effective form of education is one that requires active and frequent participation from all students.
I'm a fan of upside down teaching - the students learn the stuff as homework, and do the homework in class. But it's not for every child - eg. they have a disruptive home life or get too easily distracted without being forced to sit down.
@Maiahi wow im replying to maiahi replying to alex edwards commenting that he just watched a veritasium video showing a clip from CPG grey showing a clip from a minute physics video
@@smartart6841 wow i am replying to smart art who is in turn replying to malahi who is replying to alex edwards commenting that he just watched a veritasium video showing a clip from CPG grey showing a clip from a minute physics video
Actually I do learn about so many stuffs from TH-cam. Given the fact that I live in developing country, just makes it so much better to use this platform as a way to gain knowledge from people all around the world without having to pay a single penny.
Rasta Mon Indonesia. Granted, I can understand English speaker quite clearly, so yeah, I get so many benefits from this platform and I certainly believe that it can really revolutionize the education, especially in the place where I live right now.
You do have to pay for the internet and electricity to watch the video but I agree with you that TH-cam can be very educational. Sometimes I feel like I have learned more from it than my school (I live in the us).
I've been considering becoming a teacher recently. Your videos are part of that inspiration. It's funny how the people getting paid to teach me never do a really good job, bore me, leave me uninspired, and hand out busy work. And yet I watch your videos on a free platform and suddenly I'm engrossed in what I'm learning. I want to be to the future generations who you are to me.
I am a teacher, I really wonder, do you really want to be a teacher? Why? Is there no other better option for you? Dream big, man. There is never a rich teacher (unless he or she does a side business).
@@sillynilly7513 I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money... and I don't need to be rich. Just a modest life, find love, start a family, that's all I need to be happy
1.Show students static graphics. 2.Give time for them to visualize it. 3.Show them the Animation. This helps them to think, make corrections and think better next time.
Back when MOOCs (massive open online courses) were being touted as "the revolution", I quipped that we needed the opposite: "Extremely Individualised Emotionally Intelligent Offline" courses, E I E I O for short. Old Macdonald's school.
It’s difficult to form emotionally intelligent rapport when students have different teachers every year and don’t get to know their teachers outside of class. I say that throughout secondary schools, students should have forty minutes in a small group each day with the same teacher for all six years. Going through schools is pretty easy when you don’t have learning disabilities and have a college educated parent at home who can be present support you in learning. I noticed that many of my classmates who struggled in high school were not lacking a good teacher; they were lacking a parent who had the means and know-how of the typical teacher. If those kids had a stable, long-term, second or third parent at schools who was as knowledgeable, caring, presents and emotionally intelligent as the typical teacher at my school, I think those struggling kids would have had a better chance.
The reason why we feel pleasure, is so our brains can re-enforce behavior that lead up to the pleasure. Things that are dull, or uncomfortable or painful, can become pleasurable, if our brain associates it with leading to pleasure. This is why people spend hours at slot machines, watching symbols appear over and over again. If we learn there is a payoff for something, we can addict ourselves to it. What needs to happen is that education needs to be build around leading students to natural rewards that come from study and work. Not artificial rewards like grades. If students can build, fix, or communicate something, and that thing they did or build makes a difference in their lives or someone else's. There brain will start to make the connection naturally between study and success. Having a class that ends with a multiple choice test, and a grade, will not inspire students to love learning, but it may teach them to like grades. So whatever method is used, like MOOC or your clever EIEIO, it needs to focus on a natural use of our own emotions.
@@mrnameless7637 This is the giga brain take. I think you've hit the nail square on the head. Hats off to you, king. 👑 Now I just hope we can find someone who will implement your model.
Derek, you are revolutionizing education. Your reach is huge and your presentations are engaging. You are the bonus for kids (and adults) that love to learn.
Gosh 7 years had passed and this thing is still damn accurate. I think the necessity for teachers to create a supportive learning environment (the ones where students are *actually* interested in what was being taught), for a STEM student like me, should also be based on (a) experiments conducted real-time rather than a separate session, cause it helps to visualize the concepts by literally seeing it rather than envisioning the blurted facts from 0; (b) a sort of personalized learning experience, meaning students can *freely* ask about concepts that they don't understand, under the assurance of the teacher will wait for us until we gain full comprehension. The thing with massive class sizes is, (a) there exist a fear that our comprehension pace is slower than the mean comprehension rate of the class-and we considered that as embarrassing. Or (b) the scheduled study materials to be taught on that day is just a lot and we can't have all day to answer every one's questions. And it goes back, like what Derek said, to the question, what was the function of education in the first place? I believe in order to train scientifically-conscious individuals, we shouldn't compromise the time element. We should let everyone learn with their own pace until they gain understatement, and by only then they can move to a more complex study material. But yet to do so is costly. Private tutoring are so damn expensive. Whoever manages to read this until this point, sorry haha apparently I was having some thoughts about how f*cked up primary to secondary education on STEM actually is. Coz I'm a current engineering student at uni and I still struggling on the basic concepts. I think the blame was on how I don't understand much of the basic concepts in early schooling years because the learning pace isn't personalized, henceforth I still have questions unanswered.
I like your comment. You see, as a kid you understand things completely different as an adult. You can learn some basic stuff, but never grasp it in its entirety. Thats why many countries have circular curriculae, meaning to revisit certain tobics for example every year and deepen the understanding of said topic. To be able to fully understand even a basic topic, you need to have revisited the topic time over time. I agree to a certain extent, that private tutoring would help. But its nit possible, logistically, financially etc. I'd rather pledge for smaller classes, so teachers have more time for each student individually. But for that, we would need more ppl wanting to be teacher, which there are not, more money to pay them and more classrooms etc. So even that seems to be impossible, at least in the next 50 years or so. Good luck on your studies!
I'm a retired physicist-engineer. I'm a lifelong learner and I've done industrial design of electronics and taught electronics in the classroom setting to novice would-be technicians. I've mastered countless other physical and mental skills as well, from music to medical technician. I recall when I was four or five wanting to be a scientist when I barely knew what to call it. Everything I saw I remembered and it all looked obvious to me. When I went to school I always seemed to learn everything shown to me first time, and never had to be shown again. This while I saw other kids struggling around me. I noted that while I always believed I could learn anything, and that excited me, that they didn't believe that about themselves, and were consequently uninterested, except to get teachers and parents off their backs. This continued into high school and so on. There were always a small number for whom science was all they ever wanted to do, and the rest who never seemed to know what they wanted to do in life except find a way to keep people in authority from bothering them to learn and find a way to get rich quick so they didn't have to learn anything. Scientists are people who would do science even if they couldn't find a way to be paid for it. They approach everything in life as an experiment and it fascinates them. They can't picture doing without that in their life, even if they had to do it for free. The rest seem to live on the outside of things, and they can't figure out what to do with themselves and try to find happiness with formulaic antidotes to boredom, sports, marriage, family, parties, and other distractions that bored people like me. And if you try to teach them things they can't remember them for more than five minutes. These are the people who are always calling their friends up to "fix" their computer when they screw it up. These are the folks who get gypped by their mechanic because they never bothered to find out how engines work or what is what in gasoline vehicles. They seem quite sad to me, really, they have NO confidence that they can learn, and that lack dates back to before they even went to school. I'm not sure if it comes from the way their parents talked to them, or didn't, or the way they first apprehended the tiniest lessons in the way the world works not long after birth. My impression is that it is a fool's errand to try to teach these folks, they will not learn, they have a mental block against it, and no strategy, no new teaching medium, or any such new method will enable them to believe they can learn. And of course people lose interest in things that totally stymie them. I am beginning to believe this may be inherited, and that it may have something to do with the complement of genes and their behaviors which we inherited from our forebears, and the distribution of some very special genetic features in a small percentage of the population. Whatever it is, it is inherited unevenly throughout the human population, and there appears to be some Gaussian distribution of these abilities in our population genome that will ever prevent many people from achieving that kind of facility with ideas. As an inveterate teacher I hate that thought, but as I grow older it seems more and more to be the obvious reason why we struggle in vain to teach many or most students.
+rstevewarmorycom I completely agree! I see the same things now at my school! except that the children at my school do learn but that's it. they don't go search more information outside school, which I do! They seem to have no interests in finding out what they really want to become what so ever. And they all have the same lifestyle, going out, hanging out with friends, maybe go to sports and working.. nothing more interesting about those people, they seem to have no special background. A girl in my class always likes to talk about her weekend, telling that she went out this and that and that she and her friends went to a party got drunk etc. and then I asked her, what do you do besides going out, besides going to parties and hanging out with your friends? she was thinking. I asked her, don't you have anything more interesting in your life that you fantasize about? No special hobby or something? Something that you think about all the time and want to be better at it or know more about it? All you do is going to parties and clubs with or without friends and get drunk? really? Doesn't that get boring? She had NOTHING TO SAY. after that conversation, I realized that the majority of people are just like her! All of the people around me were like that, If I started talking about the future or what is happening on the news, nobody cared. Nobody knew anything, the stuff they learn at school, they don't remember any of it except if they have to for a test. Outside of school, most of them have no knowledge at all. It really is sad. The only people that aren't like that are the really smart people at my school, they are busy with their future the whole time and talking to them is way more interesting and enjoyable than the kids like the girl I mentioned here. When I listen to conversations between those kids that aren't interested in anything, they sound really stupid, they have childish humour and act really dumb. the responses between them make no sense at all. Every time I am in an argument with such a person, I win like 8/10 times. They seem to not being able to communicate at my level. Even kids that have higher grades than me don't know what to say back when I start talking to them.
johnny dss Yes, it makes me wonder whether all these other people I see are even real or if they are just robots, players in the play of my life, people reading lines with no content, and I wonder if only some of us are really real persons. Are they automatic response mechanisms? Is this just an interactive movie adventure with only a few real players? Are the rest just simple software? This is a genuine question and a puzzlement.
Interesting, I did an a MOOC course on Electricity and Magnetism and learnt so much. The fact there were real tests, homework, real classmates and feedback made it very personal despite I was 1000's of miles away from MIT. I would say it was just as involving as I was going to lectures on my university degrees. The really great thing with MOOC is you can always learn, not just for the few years you are at university.
@@ishanghosh6604 Unfortunately it doesn’t. That’s the reason why we can’t replicate certain techniques, despite the fact that we have tons of Information about them. Knowledge is to be found on the side of Nature. Information on the side of Logic. Nobody actually knows how to extract Knowledge out of Information. Another fact is, that Language, another Logic-based System, is the wrong tool for communication. The complexity of this Topic is unfortunately to big to discuss in this format of texting. Especially due to the aforementioned inability to communicate. Due to my experience most people have resigned to the fact that they can’t follow recorded language; they face even severe difficulties in an face-to-face Conversation. Maybe one day I‘ll find a way to communicate this topics, using different ways. Mankind could do so much better, if everyone would use their senses. But they weren’t taught to do so.
@@onikamura888 could you be a bit more specific? Im not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but the reason we've used language for thousands of years in the first place is its one of our most effective ways of communicating specific meanings, otherwise it would have been abandoned in favor of... maybe pictures, sounds and smells alone? Also id like to know what you consider to be knowledge or information, because i do agree with your OP but im again not entirely sure what the context of that statement is.
To be sure, language has a lot of shortcomings, it doesnt let us reach or see in to someones brain to get true context. But to say its impossible to formulate useful knowledge from information isnt quite true, otherwise we wouldnt have the technologies we do now, as any invention would die with its inventor since it couldnt be passed on.
@@onikamura888 even if it's too big for language, shouldn't language at least be able to name the thing? What is it? And what are the examples of those techniques you claimed as unreproducible? Telepathy?
A problem I see here, is that most teachers don't have the inspiration to inspire students. They don't get payed enough to actually want to be there and do all the work they have to do.
Dude. Your statement in itself explains why you are false. Teachers do want to be there, that's why they work there. They went to college to become a teacher and work with students. Teacher is not the last or only option for them. They pay doesn't matter.
Mike Millhoff They start off with the hope and the passion of inspiring the kids, but as soon as they see the truth and the reality, what the majority of kids are really here for, they lose that passion and just don't do their jobs, like they only give attention to the smartest and ignore the ones who are stupid, and it goes like that ''most'' of the time.
Seven Echoes I'd have to say they are required to give more attention to the children who do the worst. The troublemakers. Why? Because the troublemakers are required to "change", so the teacher _has_ to put the most amount of effort into "changing" them. Basically, if you have a troublemaker in your class, up until about High School (or Middle School in some cases), then they are most likely going to be given the most attention by the teacher. Especially if they technically aren't doing anything against school rules. But if there are no troublemakers, then they have to pay attention to the ones failing, so that they can try to get their grades up. Same with the kids almost failing.
batman88891 The problem is the kids have to be inspired to learn early. If the parents and elementary school teachers don't instill the importance of education into a child's mind, that child usually will not be motivated to learn. For the most part, if a kid doesn't want to learn by the time they reach high school, then they never will.
6:16 So per his description of the most important thing a teacher does, that means out of the 130 different teachers I had throughout my entire school life from 2nd grade to graduation...only 1 of them did their job. Every other one simply wasted their time. And all the "teachers" I actually had fun learning things from, WEREN'T EVEN TEACHERS, they were staff workers, psychologists, and other members of the "front offices" as we call them. So, fundamentally, none of my teachers did what they were supposed to. At least for me anyway
This is honestly one of the biggest issues facing our educational institution these days. We keep on running education like a business, building the educational system around an industrial production model, and people perpetuate harmful mentalities about grades and competitive learning and exam results and all sorts of things. We also tend to treat teachers like garbage, especially in the US. The real problem is that we need more care, more thought, and more money put into the educational system, while cutting down on the bureaucratic exploitation and the sheer amount of influence given to for-profit businesses who have no place dictating what education is. We need to make people give a crap about supporting the institution of learning, and instead of spending so much time trying to police children, actually try to _understand_ them.
Bear in mind that the current system (current from last century until today) is still based on teachers as information transmitters and only secondarily, as motivators. That traslates into teachers not being able to invest enough time into developing motivational skills and devote lesson time to engage in student motivation because they have to finish covering the curricular contents.So don't be so quick to judge your teachers, not everybody is willing or able to push through the bureaucracy or understands the importance of motivation in education.
Juan Andrés Ramírez The system is built on an industrial model of efficiently and quickly trying to bash as many children as possible into a very limited, narrow concept of "smart" and then grade them on their ability to achieve that template. My dad was a middle school level teacher for twenty years, and he could talk your ear off about how awful the bureaucracy of education is, or how restrictive the framework can be, or even how much other people take advantage of it. And I almost don't want to think about what that's like in america, where the general opinion of school teachers seems to be "those worthless losers who don't do their jobs."
shingshongshamalama As the younger brother of a teacher, I can say that's very accurate. But its not the teachers faults most of the time, its the system itself that sets them up, and subsequently their students up for failure. I can also say as a graduate of school, I've learned a hell of a lot more OUT of school then I ever did IN it.
As a teacher my self I want to add that the revolution we've been searching for on the last century is a market reavolution - on how to produce 'educated' handwork without the expensive teacher as you said. Also, education needs to be different for every different person, it's part of the job of teachers to find how to bend the materials and experiences we have in a way that's proper for one student. Maybe one day an AI can do all that but I think we're far from it. It's a big discussion for sure. Thanks for your video.
It’s amazing how many people seem to have only taken one thing away from this video: “If a teacher’s job is to inspire, my teachers must absolutely suck.” There are amazing teachers, there are terrible teachers, and there are millions of average teachers (go check out his video on ‘regression to the mean’). I’ve had the opportunity to work and volunteer in many different schools, and I can say wholeheartedly that most teachers are trying to inspire their students each and every day. If you think all of your teachers are terrible, you might need to take a deeper look at your own expectations for school and for your teachers. I’m not defending bad teaching-I’ve had plenty of rough classes-but it is important to recognize that your own attitude and mindset play just as important a role in deriving interest as your teachers (if not an even more significant role).
I can't tell you how much I agree. I had amazing teachers and truly horrible teachers - which led me to ultimately teach. I drew inspiration from both sets of teachers, especially after I realized how much responsibility I had to "want" to learn. I love my students. I strive to inspire them in anything they do. I can only hope it's working! But in 12 years I've seen a lot of "this is the new solution" bits come and go. What stays the same no matter what is how teachers interact with their students!
"it is important to recognize that your own attitude and mindset play just as important a role in deriving interest as your teachers " Well try to explain that to a kid who has no interest at all that it is his responsibility to have this interest too :v Part of the job of the teacher is still to create that interest even if he has to do it subconsciously. He must positively "manipulate" a student so that he doesn't feel like it's a shore but a challenge, something useful in his future... Obviously you can't always get every student's interest but I don't call a good job having a lot of my math teachers speedrunning the course and having half of the class failing at math :v
Students nowadays are just terrible 90% of the time. In high school I appreciated my teachers and they made me interested in many things while my friends complained all day about homework and tests and just learning in general, they’d rather just play video games and be potatoes all day
Like the worst teacher I ever had. He was making up so many stories once someone in class screamed: "Teach us something already!" Great teacher. To face it more seriously, I do agree in the way you mean it. Edited*
***** i think the internet is a very powerfull tool for people who want to learn something, because its the biggest database in the universe, that we know of. but it is also a trap for people to waste there time with other kinds of entertainment. the person chooses which kind he is its like veritas says if you want to learn u can use anything to do that.
Probably not stuff like advanced calculus, though. Quantity means nothing if all you learn is simple, useless stuff. Unless you use sites like Khan Academy, in which case you get both quality and quantity.
I am also learning a lot on the web, including for example jazz guitar (but I feel I do miss a teacher to talk to) and programming in Python (that I then teach my own students in the physics context ;). Point is, though, I am fifty, and positively would not have had the right mindset and discipline as a teen.
I have as well. I thinks it's more because I, personally, learn better if it's something I want to know about rather than being forced to learn a set thing at a set time. For anyone else like me TH-cam is a great way to learn about the things that either interest me in general, interest me at the time, or have a purpose for me to learn. Examples being; learning how to weld for a personal project, and learning how to make archery bows from pvc pipe and even the bowstrings because my son is interested in archery and I'm broke...
I think the "Experts being radioed into a classroom" idea has real merit, we're just not implementing it correctly. Why make teachers give the same lecture over and over, when we could have a few of the world's best teachers do it almost perfectly, once? Get all the kids to watch the lecture in their own time, or give them time to do it, but let them do it *ALONE*, so they can pause and rewind the video when they miss something or need to hear it again. Have them take notes on whatever they just couldn't understand. Finally, have the students meet in the classroom with the teacher, and have a big open discussion about the lecture. Direct communication between the students and teacher, and the teacher can clear up all the misunderstandings, and they can all have a merry old time.
I'd love to see a back-and-forth on the future of teaching between these two. They're both educated as physicists and teachers, work as TH-camrs, and seem to have come to very different ideas about how interactive technologies will change education.
Excellent point. Derek is a genius as he states "...making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment with other learners and a caring teacher" . Great video!
there are too many "research show" or "researchers found" in this video; I would say to keep up the spirit of your channel, when there are too many "claims" a reference or link to the study in the comment or the description would make it more true to the spirit of Veritasium. Just my two pennies!
Fair call! People have been asking for refs, which are all in my thesis, google Derek Muller PhD If you're interested and I'll add the link in the description
Thank you Derek. I think this video has a great lesson for life itself. A big thank you from this part of the world for all your great videos and themes.
What I think of school~ Everyday, millions of children march to school with drudgery and resistance. As young children, they go in open-hearted and free -- at night, they imagine that their tiny hands can reach up and touch the birds. The entire world is a new place and the fascination of beauty never subsides. But as older adolescents leaving their high school, they go close-minded and bondaged -- at night, they drink themselves into passing out and talk about the most popular thing to come, under obligation. The boys worry about their sexual conquests. The girls worry about their sexual appearance. Both worry about being social in a society that has made a weakness of kindness and an insult of emotion. Such a great change occurs between those who enter school and those who leave it. Just think of the sheer idiocy of compulsory education. We threaten these children with imprisonment if they do not appear in class. Once in class, they spend their time either sleeping or completing tasks that are completely irrelevant to them. By giving them no option in their schooling, what have we taught them? The first lesson they learn is to detest learning, to hold unbridled sympathy for education. Take any man, put him in chains, and force him to recite poetry, or force him to play an instrument, or force him to farm the land -- and once he becomes a free man, do you think he will want to engage in that activity that was forced upon him? The scars on a slaves hands from working the fields, the memories of abuse of a house servant; given the right to do as they wish in the world, is it likely to think that they will return to that work which they were forced to do? And then consider schools. We force children to sit and overfeed them erroneous facts, faulty logic, damaged reasoning, concealed under the guise of "schooling." Once the mental faculties of these children are damaged, their heart grows an animosity towards learning, towards books, towards facts and knowledge. It is the greatest folly to make children hate learning, and the greatest danger to a real, living Democracy in any nation. Because when the Red Sox win a baseball game, five universities in the state of Massachusetts riot. But when the United States regime supports a South American dictator known for slaughtering his own people, it's a whisper lost in the wind. Our ignorance is their power. Real knowledge is acquired by learning what interests you, through reading, investigation, practice, or any other desirable method. To become intelligent, you must engage in activity with the idea that are you learning because you want to, because knowledge is a goal. The path to conformity varies greatly from this. First, you engage in nothing, but allow cultural standards and social obligations to control you. Second, the idea of learning is to memorize random, perhaps unrelated and blatant facts -- true or untrue -- so that they may be recited upon command. Third, the goal is not knowledge, but a passing grade; they learn to for the sake of knowledge, but rather for the sake of social acceptance. Take two children. Give the first freedom and liberty, give him a wealth of books and movies, give him teachers to aid him upon his request and a place that encourages art, creativity, and independence. Then take away the freedom and liberty of the second, require his presence in a classroom in front of a teacher, threaten him with a jail sentence if he does not go to his school. Give each of them ten or fifteen years, and check the development of each of them after this amount of time. The only forced to endure slavery may be able to stand in a lecture hall and he might be able to say to you, "George Washington was born in 1732 and died in 1799. In 1776, the Revolutionary War began where he acted as general. In 1783, it ended. In 1789, he was elected president a first time, and in 1792, he was elected president a second time." You are given dates and events, surely, it is true history. But take the child who was given freedom to do as he pleased, and he might be able to stand in a lecture hall and tell you, "In the sixteenth century, in Europe, a Spanish physician by the name of Michael Servetus was convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. Fleeing from his oppressors, he made it to Geneva, where the vindictive John Calvin had absolute authority. In earlier years, Servetus expressed his doubt on Calvin's protestant religion. Once captured by the authorities, Servetus was burned to death at the orders of John Calvin in 1533. They had him wear a hat of sulphur and used slow-burning wood, that the crowd could listen to screams for mercy for the duration of a half hour. One year after the death of this man, Calvin published a list of insults of his former enemy." Be a rebel. Because being a conformist means admitting that the parts of you that matter are already dead. But if that's the case, what does matter? The emotions that run rampant through our head, the thoughts that we tumble and toss over in our minds constantly -- sexual fantasies to memories of our friends and family, thoughts and ideas about our future, wishes and desires for our current life with those who are close to us. The idea of a living freedom, knowing that what you wish to do believe with your mind is unrestricted and what you wish to do with your body, so long as you harm none, is unlimited. Life matters to us because we make it matter; if we never told a lover we would miss them upon our departure for a long voyage, if we never told a family member that we dream of a time when oppression ended, if we never wrote a poem and hoped to give it to a friend whose face we haven't seen in years -- if we never cared about life, then life wouldn't matter. What matters is what we make matter. So in a few years, all the kids who graduate from high school will know that their grades never mattered, because even though so young, they already know that it won't be the grades they got that they think about upon their death bed. Twenty years ago the textbooks used in history class just began to cover some of the issues of the four hundred years of oppression of the African race in this country. Children who are forced into a school and forced to complete erroneous assignments learn only one thing: to hate education. I clearly demonstrated this truth earlier, but there is more to be learned from it. Take a slave. It could be a slave from any society, whether an African in colonial America or a Plebeian in the Roman Empire. For the entirety of their life, they labor. Their sweat, their tears, their blood, the bi-products of their toil seep into the ground and their garments. All they produce goes to the one who did not labor (and alas, our modern Capitalist system has managed to recreate these conditions). Inside every slave, there will be a growing hatred of their activity as a servant, a farmer, a manufacturer -- they will learn to hate what has been forced upon them without their consent. But inside some of them, there will be the kindling of hope for a dream. One day, they will hope to produce for themselves, knowing that what their hands reap will be what fills their stomach, and not the stomach belonging to idle hands. So, too, it is with our compulsary education. The more we are forced into schools and our minds filled with useless facts, the stronger our thirst grows for real education, for real knowledge. Few are like this, but we exist. Others simply remain politically and emotionally sedated, as the focus of their mind is the next test or the next prom, and not children enslaved in southeast asia or the meaning of life. To every student who must endure the excuse of an education system that we have, I can only offer these words of hope... Educate yourself, not with school teachers, but with the books they wanted to ban. Teach yourself, learn, grow, and develop. Learn that the greatest asset education can offer is that of independence. "If the teacher happens to be a man of sense, it must be an unpleasant thing to him to be conscious, while he is lecturing his students, that he is either speaking or reading nonsense, or what is very little better than nonsense. ... "The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him, as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other."" - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 5, Chapter I, Part 3, Article II.
iamihop Actually still no. Another thing you have to remember is that students are different. In many ways education can actually ruin your motivation to learn more. How do you know kids aren't self motivated to learn? Someone has to push them to learn? What do we learn in high school about math? Seriously? We don't learn anything about actual math, science(besides physics), history( besides AP courses) and language(look at how many people can actually speak two languages) It's literally all about the grades to go to a university, although in university it basically changes dramatically when you actually start learning things and actually get good professors that you payed good money for. Also you're talking about forcing yourself to learn math, think about why it was so boring? Did they really make math interesting for you? Did they really show you math? If anything there are lot of things about sociology and psychology that you ignore about kids. (look at a lot of unschooled children, usually MUCH less unhealthy stress, they probably learn more things THAT WILL ACTUALLY HELP THEM, and they aren't made into obedient little sheep in schools)
+I am Jeffrey Da Pig You seem to think that for some reason the only type of information that is useful to people is the information they need for their groceries... Idiot.
But here in India 🇮🇳 Internet and distance from classrooms ( so that students can learn from TH-cam on their own) has definitely revolutionized the Education (here I can watch your videos at the least).
What's amazing is that this was uploaded 7 years ago and still gaining comments! I agree that teachers are more educational coaches who help students manage learning - if done properly. Students need to learn how-to-learn for today and for the future when they have to teach themselves that special skill that will get them the job they want/need. The shame is that we don't have a way to reward inspirational teachers vs. ones who give easy A's. The students and their parents want the A, not necessarily the hard work needed to learn/earn that A. I'm constantly limited with "that's not how we did it last year". Limited in that I can't offer that extra experience, project or video because a teacher I work with doesn't want to, and all teachers of the same subject should be offering the same instructional material. What a pain!
***** Then what's the point of taking notes? Taking notes is so that it sticks in your head by writing it down. I think it's better because you can write on pre-loaded PDF's and since it's electronic, it's easier to do basically anything. You don't have to spend time erasing, etc.
***** No, not exactly. And I only look back at my notes when I need to study (in which most cases, tests are easy so I don't look back). Even if tests are more difficult, normally it's somewhere else where I study.
All of my teachers write on smart boards, but they still expects us to copy the notes down. I honestly don't see the point of even having them if they are going to be used like that.
The most efficient way for an individual to learn a topic is with a tutor that is well versed in the topic at hand....and that is the way that the nobility educated their children in times past.
one on one tutoring, paid privately between individuals. That was the way it was done since the Ancient Greeks. I'll say though, that was also the reason only 10% of people were educated. Not enough money and teachers to go around.
6:00 onwards: Thank you for pointing that out! That is what most people (and sadly most teachers) fail to understand. I always learned effortlessly when I liked or respected my teachers. Conversely I learned next to nothing when I hated my teachers.
I love predictions. They show us just how little we know. This was great! I never thought about it much, but when you look through history, effective learning is an inherently social activity. I hope this sentence is grammatically correct. I didn't feel the social interaction in English class.
I know this video is old, but for me TH-cam truly revolutionized education. I have learned so much stuff from this platform.. (regardless of topic) and nothing from school =] as ebulousDraconic wrote: "All public school did was make me not want to learn things!! It's TH-camrs like you who really made subjects interesting again!" so, thank you, Derek! and the whole TH-cam community!
All these innovations "revolutionized" our learning. I'm sitting here, learning from a random video on the Internet - because I want to. Because it interested me. I'm learning new specialized stuff every day from the internet from random people who are better in solving the specific problems that I ran into. We just measure wrong. Schools are ...old. It's like saying horses never changed and nothing revolutionized in transportation, because horses are still ...slow/old.
You are not actually learning anything from youtube. Unless it's a skill which you need to figure things out on yourself, things such as learning science can't come from a 10-20 minute youtube video. TH-cam hour long series of lectures might work but again that is basically except you can't ask teacher any questions. I am not saying don't watch educational vids, after all it feels good to know stuff, but treat it like entertainment.(Unless you are into coding, then I understand)
@@daksharora928 why just for coding? I learned a ton of coding from TH-cam and a lot of blog posts (on MSDN and many other websites), but I'm wondering why one couldn't learn something else on TH-cam?
@@daksharora928 well actually i still remember that when Antarctica broke of from South America, the waters around Antarctica became "isolated" as warm water stopped being transported there and so Antarctica froze over before the ice age. (i still gotta fact check that, but i do remember it)
Is it possible that it has nothing to do with the technology but the fact that the fundamental format/system of education has basically remained unchanged for far too long?
+arachnophilegrrl It's because the government has a monopoly on it and is much more concerned with instilling their "values" into you. Than actually teaching anything that's worthwhile.
+Mitjitsu What do you mean by "instilling their values"? The government is made up of made up of many different politicians with many different and opposing agendas.
There are teachers in this world that doesn't care about if the student is learning or not, they think being a teacher is just being in a class room and talk for 1 hour and leave. They think whether or not a student fail or succeed is up to the student to take in the information that is taught in class and not how the lesson is taught.
This is why a good teacher is of vital importance. A dull teacher will make a student less likely to care or want to learn, even if they enjoy the subject on the whole.
“The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite...” I have to say, a lot of a teachers are quite bad at this job. If a student really wants to learn, the best way is to figure out how to inspire, challenge, and excite themselves. Then there really is no teacher needed!
Same, I think everybody has their own preferred way of learning that stimulates them the most. Some enjoy large class rooms, others a hands on experience, and some enjoy learning alone. The idea that all children need to conform to this one universal method of teaching is far too outdated to still be applied to modern day education.
yeah but you lack the apropriate judgment and knowledge to filter these informations. you need a teacher to teach you discretion and fundamentals trhrough which you'll judge the world around you.
before any education systems should be worked on we need to solidify what will be taught. there is way to many sources of bad information coming from the places where all information should be good. the main problem is that we let people do/become what they want instead of what they should. Simply wanting to be a teacher (and buying the degree), does not make good teachers (or anything else). We need to identify people with passion and ability and support them, not the way the current system works to cater to certain folks over others.
That's right. It's easy to get your degree with a 60% score and then forget what you learnt a year after your study. I'm always extremely skeptical about people who say 'passed is passed, right?'. No. There's an unbelievable difference between passing with 80-90% scores and passing on the edge of failing. Some people just don't get why you learn. You learn to understand your subject, gain expertise on your field. You don't learn to get a piece of paper saying you did this and that study
@@mudkip_btw also i really doubt that there is much to learn in order to pass as a highschool teacher, considering all your going to be teaching is highschool students you don't need a heavy background in that subject, nor much knowledge. and in general I think that throughout the years teachers have to go to uni they should be taught how to TEACH and engage with their students as well as have the confidence to not tolerate bad behaviour.
How crazy is it that 6 year old Veritasium videos still show their quality and care even to this day. I could watch a 7 year old video and a 2 month old video and both of them are just stellar. Veritasium you are a mammoth of greatness bro.
If there is no significant difference, it seems to me we can safely get rid of the "not good" teachers. Keep the good ones but replace the lackluster teachers with video and animation. Massive cost savings and the kids are only going to remember the good teachers anyway. :-)
nathnolt We can't afford to make actions taking "the economy" into account as much as we used to nowadays. There's just too much change coming up, that will replace human workers.
I think you would have to look at two things. Test scores and student evaluations. If you think back, there are probably two or three teachers who really inspired you with their own passion for either teaching or the topic. I think many of my teacher friends went into it because they "love children". That's great; but what if they went into teaching because they loved *teaching*? There are things I love to do which make me a great teacher. If I am uninterested in it, my lack of passion overflows onto whoever has the misfortune to be listening. What if you recorded me teaching what I love? What if you recorded others teaching what they love? Put those together in a video and you have a real teaching aide. The scientists we see on television; Bill Nye, Neil Tyson, Kawasaki, the guy who did that Connections show... Passion! But then what happens when you get a teacher who has no passion for anything he/she is teaching in third grade? You get low scores and uninterested students who cannot remember that instructor's name five years later. It's not just passion but it makes such a big difference, it is difficult to ignore.
David Buschhorn judging wether a teacher is good or bad with test scores would become unreliable very quickly, specially if, as you propose in the first comment, we're considering "getting rid of them", and would even cause harm, think about it, in the long (and not so long) run, teachers will get a mindset of "I'll be fired if the students fail", and conversely into "I'll keep my job if I give high grades regardless of how much students have actually learnt". This is already happening in my country in fact, schools (specially in low class areas) say that if kids get low scores they'll drop out and fall into a life of crime, while this may be true the solution they chose was to "suggest teachers to overlook small mistakes", meaning they began pressing them to let students pass grades without actually learning, and some have actually been fired over this (this also happens in schools for rich kids, although for different reasons) That would leave the student evaluations, for starters how much the students like a teacher doesn't necessarily measure how good of a teacher he is (I've met plenty are poorly skilled but "cool" teachers, and very good educators that their students hate), and (although not in all cases) can also be manipulated through the presviously mentioned scores subject. In a scenario where teachers are selected through student evaluations, its not a longshot to picture one saying "talk well about me and I'll let you pass".
Why should we not abandon teachers all together and hire actors? If one technology is as good as another for transmitting information and the difference is really in terms of the communicator, then why not hire communicators rather than experts in the field, especially those experts that are not in fact communicators ? William James poses a similar question in his article "The PhD Octopus."
@@jaradams I'm pretty sure you know the answer, but: Because you need both the knowledge and the communications skills. Sure, if an actor is also a teacher, that would be a plus. Though just because they're an actor does not mean they have the drive to teach well, especially for long periods of time.
@@jaradams Students aren't stupid. They can spot a fake, and it's a turn-off. Over a whole semester, you can't feign the enthusiasm for a subject that gets a student enthusiastic about it too. That enthusiasm, which is why the teacher got the expertise in the first place, in turn becomes why the teacher wants to teach. A good teacher also intuitively understands the subject's intrinsic value, and that's crucial to constructive social interactions between a teacher and student. That intuitive understanding is born of the expertise itself, and it just can't be faked. It's true, generally, that teachers enter the field with more knowledge of the subject than ability to communicate it, even if they took an education degree with courses in pedagogy. Nothing teaches like doing. Teachers learn in the classroom, too. A teacher who really wants to teach picks up the social and communication skills they need as they try to get the subject across, day in, day out. Teachers without "the fire" for teaching don't pick up these skills, get frustrated, and eventually leave the classroom. Also, vitally, teachers end up learning there's no one-size-fits-all communication skill set for all subjects at all levels; you have to acquire different communication skills depending on exactly what and whom you're teaching. That too is something subject experts pick up a lot better than trained communicators, because they're attentive to what students "get" (and don't) about the subject - and why. Your proposal really misses the video's point about how *social* education is.
@Soulsphere001 "Most instructors don't make learning interesting to students" - my, that's a sweeping generalization! Do you know for a fact most students feel their teachers don't make learning interesting? Could it be a conclusion you've reached from a modicum of observation, i.e. talking with other students who also didn't "get it"? Or is it simply the case that you don't find learning in a classroom interesting, and you're generalizing from that? Just where did you get this notion? By the way, no instructor makes "learning" interesting to students. What student ever was interested merely in "learning"? Students grow interested in SUBJECTS. In fact, that's not even wholly accurate - they grow interested first in certain aspects of subjects, and then, if their curiosity is rewarded, they branch out. But, in the first place, students have to show up with some desire to learn, some want-to. The best teacher in the world can't make a lesson interesting to a student who's staring at his phone the whole time. Generalizing the way you have is unhelpful because you can't have a "revolution" to solve a problem if you can't (a) clearly define the problem or (b) show that it even really exists.
@@joshualavender"Over a whole semester, you can't feign the enthusiasm for a subject that gets a student enthusiastic about it too" Have you ever seen John Houseman's performance in The Paper Chase or Robin Williams' in Dead Poets Society? Houseman had no knowledge of law at all. Williams probably knew some poetry, but if they'd given him a well-written botany lecture, he would have performed it in the same inspirational, challenging, and exciting manner. and I know lawyers who studied law because of Houseman and students who studied poetry because of Williams " Teachers without "the fire" for teaching don't pick up these skills, get frustrated, and eventually leave the classroom. " my, that's a sweeping generalization! I agree that some quit. others are just too committed to the job and have no alternative, so they stick it out. even more suffer from dunning-Kruger, they believe they are good when they aren't. I had an instructor as an undergraduate who was a terrible teacher in the minds of almost everyone I took his classes with. while he clearly loves the material that he taught, he seemed to be more interested in proving that he knew more than you did than in making sure you learn something. when I returned to my alma mater as an adjunct instructor 30 years after I graduated the school, he was still there teaching the same way. but in the end, I think you miss my point. we are told in the video that the technology doesn't matter and I accept it. Soulsphere001 suggested what we needed was an improvement in teaching. while some things clearly require in-classroom demonstrations, many materials do not. for those. a trained communicator who may or may not know anything about the subject matter may be the most successful kind of instruction possible, successful in the sense that it produces students with an understanding of the material and the knowledge needed to go forward. in the last year, I suspect more than half of all students have taken their classes solely online, entirely by watching videos. I know this is true at my Institution. And these students have been and will be awarded degrees based upon these video classes. I am suggesting is to genuinely buy into the idea of video instruction and forget about requiring PhD expertise in the classroom, instead devoting that expertise to creating the best material to be presented by the best presenters.
"The most important thing a teacher does is making a student feel important, to guide them during the learning process and get them excited" You must live in a different world. Yes I've had such teachers but I can count them on 2 fingers... the majority of them drove me to become a school dropout and robbed me from my personal time for being who I am. I have ASD and ADD and because I have a great amount of imagination, I read slow due to my mind imagining every single detail about the text that I read. Due to me constantly having to fidget, rock my chair etc to sooth my mind, teachers constantly punished me for something I have no control over. Supposedly less than 1 in 1000 people have an IQ as high as mine and my mind is a sponge that soaks up information. I lack communication skills and social skills however and I get terribly uncomfortable by strange smells, bright colours, noises and so on. If you combine that with teachers nor parents who are aware of the underlying issues, you've got a perfect recipe for disaster for the education of the kid and that is exactly what happened to me. Not only was school very slow and boring to me, I also got picked on by nearly every teacher I ever had. The fact that as a kid, I didn't understand the social repercussion of disagreeing with or correcting teachers when they were wrong, made my childhood a living hell. I still don't have a degree and even if someone would pay me to go back to class and teacher, the idea just gives me so much anxiety that I decline. For people like me (>150 million people in the world), video and audio courses ARE the ideal way to learn and unleash all the potential. I now work in IT and everywhere I've come so far, I've been considered exceptionally good at what I do. I've been promoted over peers with university degrees and much more experience, learn a lot faster and my ability to think out of the box makes me solve problems that the average person thinks is impossible. I don't have my teachers to thank for that however. After I dropped out of school, I started to learn by myself from whatever information was freely available on the internet. Especially video courses were of great help to me to advance fast enough but since everyone is different, I'm sure audio books or just regular books without a teacher could work for them. The regular education system IS imo a very bad system because, like you say, it goes too slow for some, too fast for others and only a portion of the students are helped with it. Many teachers (from my experience most) are bullies and don't care about individuals. No teacher has ever unlocked an interest or motivation for me, quite the opposite in fact. And even though the media reports that students have suffered so badly during Covid-19 lockdowns, it's only a few that have the loudest voices. When I talk to people, most say the transfer and absorption of information is not the issue, just the lack of social interaction, which you can have outside of school too. Without the lockdowns, I'm sure a lot of people would prefer (at least part-time) remote education where they can learn in their own time at their own pace and still see friends outside of class. If the education system would allow that choice, class rooms would only be half as full and the students who actually need a teacher to be present would be better off as well because they could get more personal attention. You'd have less traffic on the roads, less polution, happier people, ... it'd be a win-win solution for everybody on the planet.
@@pyhead9916 Who votes those idiots in power? "Regular people" do not realize the power the have with their vote. Unfortunately they don't use that vote the way they should. The last generations have become selfish pricks, they don't want to pay taxes anymore. Taxes pay for education, law enforcement, the country's infrastructure, health care, pensions, etc. And in return, you get a good economy that provides people with salaries that can easily pay those taxes. The whole world (not just the US) is now overtaken by short sighted, selfish people who favor short term gains over long term gains... it's been going on for decades now and what remains of education? infrastructure? health care? pensions? ... Everything is in decay. And the sad thing is, we're at a moment in history where we all need to put our heads together and work on solutions. Instead people just look for others to blame. All they need to do is reflect on the situation and use their right to vote for a better future. And that's not voting for the (usually corrupt) politicians that try to sway you with lower taxes. Vote for people who have a plan for the future. It might get a little more expensive but the longer people wait, the worse things are going to get. I do agree with you that we're in a nearly hopeless situation (just look at the COP26 fiasco), but just pointing the fingers at politicians is wrong. "We" put them in charge and "we" have the ability to take that power away from them.
It's become like a tradition to come back to this video to remind myself on how important education is and how important teachers are. Learning is supposed to be a fun process. As kids we are born with no awareness and are curious to learn, so any questions we have, it is very acceptable for it to be listened to and be respected enough to be answered. "The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn." So true and I wish all educational institutions understood this better
I think TH-cam and PBS cartoons have taught me equally as much as teachers. Once I could actually understand words and sentences, I could completely comprehend the English stories in my books whereas my peers required the teacher to translate and explain the story (I'm not a native to the language). This was because I did know how to comprehend English and even speak it, so reading it was a quick process. Similarly in science, a lot of the topics that our teachers would teach us, I would already have a basic concept about. And even if I knew nothing, I already had at least heard the name of the topics, so that sense of familiarity made me buzzing with excitement.
Education is a method, everything else are tools for that method, and since education is about people, it will always be about how the person is educated. The method must always keep the people as the focus.
As a long time college professor I agree with and can confirm the conclusion of this video. Of course, not all teachers are equally effective by any means (as we see when interviewing prospective candidates) but the best don't just share information, they inspire and guide students on their own learning journey. Its a pleasure to see that take place every term...
"What's important is what's going on inside the learner's head." Absolutely right. If you want a 'revolution' in education, the way to do it is to make learning fun, so the learner wants to participate. Gamification could be the answer.
@@revimfadli4666 This. No one is interested in learning a topic which their brains declare as garbage and give up on processing it, no matter how fun the gameplay could be. It could be maths for some, a language for others and for some others it's history.
@@angelas5099 Amen. I think every class should start with a pitch that answers the question: "Why would I ever want to know this?" Providing a meaningful answer would motivate children to engage with the learning process.
I don't think Gamification is THE answer. It might help with retaining enough knowledge for the exam, but if students don't have a way to use it practically in their life. They'll just sit passively without the passion for learning.
@@Drekromancer good point, but many students will simply disagree with the viewpoint of the teacher. It takes real immersion into a subject to start to appreciate it.
Only if teachers cared more. 6:17 my math teacher in middle school was the best she tried everything she could to make us understand and learn and often made math jokes that associate to the subject.But in the first math class in high school our teacher told us that none matter and are important unless we make something out of our selves and didnt care who actually listened in class and who didnt,she just told us the lecture and thats it.And on the first test 26 of 30 of us got the worst grade (1) and the 4 guys were taking private lessons.
Three things "limit" education: student motivation, student potential (IQ), and societal infrastructure/investment. All the technologies, etc. are really minutiae in this equation.
even thought his whole talking during this entire video is intresting，but he still thinks that we might be bored so he quickly shifts between dozens scenes love you dude
I have had few if any teachers that made me feel important, many of them seemed to go out of their way to put me down and tell me I would never amount to anything. Many Teachers would not allow talking in class and would make you feel stupid if you asked any questions. My C++ Teacher Quote "I am not here to teach you I am here to make sure you read the book" he also would refuse to look at the programs and if you asked for help he would just tell you to redo the entire program. One teacher I had would only lecture and when I went to office hours he would recite what he said in class. I told him I didn't understand it in class and I would like him to explain it a different way and he responded "That is the only way I know how to teach." I have never had a teacher ever go out of their way to help me, they used the excuse that they could not give anyone special treatment. You say that education is based on the interactions between teachers and students? Are there really teachers who care what the student has to say? Are there any teachers that care at all about the students? I have never seen any.
VodShod we need a different system, we need education but done in a different way, and sometimes people can learn some stuff by themselves without teachers, just by reading books and tutorials. maybe classes should be separated into people that need a teacher and a more traditional system and people that don't need a teacher and can learn by themselves if you give them the books and tools.
***** I understand. I have designed my own education system that I felt would be much better than the current system, and could improve the current system if implemented it.
I believe we should try implementing some of the things that the Finland educational system has done: shorter school days, hour long lunches, no homework, etc. The learning environment there also emphasizes collaboration over competition, which has consistently helped students' grades skyrocket. Teachers are also paid as much as doctors, and only 1/10 people who apply to be one is actually a teacher. The job is considered to be hella prestigious, which it should be; teachers cultivate the future of society: children. children make up a fraction of our population, but a whole of our future.
These are pretty good to learn fun facts or make a topic more easily understandable, but you won't learn engineering or quantum mechanics relying on these. However, I feel like MOOCs are a valid alternative to classroom teaching. Good teachers will always surpass computers, but they are sadly quite rare. So, compared to your (stereo?)typical I-get-ma-paycheck teachers, serious online education (ocw.mit.edu) might be a valid alternative. I guess time will tell.
misakstefl These videos show cool facts and stuff, but it pretty much ends there. You won't learn topics in depth rather than a teacher teaching a lesson.
Jessy Pelletier-Lemire I think things like the MOOC's are good for those of us who are already motivated and do things ourselves. But Veritasium has a point in the "inspiring" part since even those of us who are already motivated in general might not be inspired for specific subjects. Lastly, we'll NEVER replace teachers with technology in early grades because of the baby sitting aspect--schools are also a type of day care.
Uhhm, well this is the first time I mostly disagree with you. I think technology could have played a massive role in changing the education system, and I think that indeed, the argument that it's not changing because of the momentum of the huge institution that the education system is, is spot on. I'm only 20, and yet I lived through the "learn to do math because you won't always walk around with a calculator in real life" period. And now, well... I do, actually. I learned more from the internet than in school, without a trace of a doubt. I don't have an anormally strong imagination, and yet I can think of so many ways the technology we have now could be used to teach more efficiently than a teacher. Another very very important point that wasn't addressed, is that the educational institution is still centered around memorizing things. Technologies are more apt to help us develop cognitive skills, problem solving skills, etc. Memory is the one thing technology truly freed us from, we all have google in our pocket, we don't need to memorize things anymore, so it's simply silly that we're still trying to.
dominic508 I also get the feeling that I learn more from the internet, but that's just a feeling. I think if I looked at it objectively, I learned the most fundamental and most important skills at school, like writing, reading, basic logic, how to deal with people and socialize, and even how to learn and experiment. Most of these are pretty much a requirement to being an adult these days, whereas the internet can teach more factual stuff like politics, history, science. In short, school teaches you how to behave and how to think, and the internet teaches you facts or how to research facts.
UncleRob199 That's the "social setting" stuff. Indeed, home-schoolers have argued for years that kids can learn the whole syllabus at home just fine, and test results often bear this out. I think the reason technology never changed anything in the classroom is that the basic idea of having a teacher that lectures, and students who daydream or talk to each other in the meantime, never changed. All the technological solutions did was attempt to create a mechanical teacher, as it were, that worked the same way as the flesh and blood ones.
Couldn't agree more, I think from my school experience I was constantly annoyed and frustrated at school by my teachers because a good number didn't really care they were just there to get paid and it was just a job to them. Some tried to inspire but were constrained by exam boards. I can't tell you the number of times I heard "That's true but we're not going into it because it's not on the exam". I can only go off England because my experience of education so far has just been here but I'll use my example. When I was 11 I went to the best school in the area and I was put in the middle group set which was given the letter F and we were always told H was the top set for the most intelligent kids. So from day 1 you're given a catagory of what they say you're capable of, this comes down to what exams you're entered into and what grades you'll achieve. So I had some teachers tell me I'd not be going to college (here we go to college at 16 then University at 18-19) and one in particular told me I'd never amount to much and several when I asked about University told me I'd never make it there but other students in the top set would go. So I made it to college and there it was the same again the "It's not on the exam paper" answer and again the frustration and annoyance set in, again told I'd not go to university and I'd not get to do what I wanted to do and again I felt I had to start to accept that. So after college I made it to university and I did my degree in Biomedical Sciences and this is where the change occured, because I was not once told at university "It's not on the exam" or not to explore a particular idea I was always encouraged to do so and from there I went from strength to strength, finished by degree with one of the highest marks attainable and now I'm all lined up to do a masters with ties to a PhD afterwards. I often wonder what might have happened if I had a teacher to encourage me along through school and in college to push me that little bit and tell me to go and explore my ideas and go forward, to have open discussions in class rather than "the text book says, it will be on the exam" I think that could make all the difference in the world.
"Some tried to inspire but were constrained by exam boards." Couldn't be more relatable. Some teachers I have are fully conscious and outright say (just as it's stated here) that the entire point of education is to turn kids into fact-knowing computers who just know half of wikipedia to succeed for exams. Yet they keep giving as facts and terms to learn for the exams. It is sort of hypocritical, but also understandable.
"The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn." except the problem is 99% of the teachers don't know that lmao
Because of poor funding, most teachers nowadays are either people who couldn't find work anywhere else or people who haven't lost their passion of teaching yet, while the actually good teachers go to good universities and bring the University gets even more funding due to them, so the rich get richer even in the education system. I mean most schools tried to put physical schooling into computers, gotta love funding.
@@theblinkingbrownie4654 Yeah I can agree with you that the education sector is underfunded and since the pandemic, the governments keep proving that they couldn't care less about education, but I don't agree that that is the sole reason why teachers in high schools and elementary schools are just horrible... not as in horrible at teaching but just horrible people in general. I've had some atrocious teachers that had major mental health issues that they took out on students, like unhappy wives taking out their aggression on male students is a common occurrence... and best of all, not the underpaid teachers but the ones high on the paygrade and age. I thought it was all teachers but now in university, all the professors feel a lot more like people that are really passionate about their studies and want to share that, no dickheads.
@@dimitrijepesic2607 A federal legislation proposal for the US directs funding towards schools, counselors, and teacher training...but it's only for one country and can't last forever. But, hey, that's a great start!
@@dimitrijepesic2607 the thing is to be a highschool teacher you don't need to be that passionate or even knowledgeable to get a job, and there will always be plenty of replacements for you, however uni professors have to absolutely love their subject to get through all the learning in order to work there.
@@timayovyk2036 I absolutely agree dude. Man I hated 80% of my teachers up to UNI, here it's the opposite. Most are sooo passionate about what they teach, and truly want you to do good because they want more people to do what they love.
As a teacher I fully stan this! No one can possibly replace a teacher. Helping students make connections is something good teachers, teaching is essentially facilitation, when you can light a spark and guide students to explore their best selves and learn a lot more in the process!
Nice video, I wish faculties in India would understand what you are stating. Here a teachers job is to give notes and make sure every student passes. Literacy should be treated equally with creativity. Which lacks a lot.
Ok, so what's new and earthshattering here? This is Dewey and Montessori and Papert and Sarason and Holt and many others without the references. The bigger issue I have here is that it says nothing about transferring the agency of learning to the learner. All sticky learning is intrinsically motivated. We may "learn" something for a short time for a transient reward (a passing test score, for example.) But what sticks with us is the stuff we wanted to learn more about, after the class has ended. Here's what will transform education: Giving learners a greater freedom to learn. Moving the focus of schooling away from curriculum and knowledge that we decide is important (which is now everywhere) to the process of learning. Moving our emphasis away from student as product toward student as ongoing, master learner who can make use of everything that's now available to her. The huge promise of technology will only be realized when we situate our discussions around it in the context of learning and increasing student autonomy and agency. As long as we see oursleves as the arbiters of what will be learned, when and how, the "revolution" will never take place.
Great response, Will. There is truly nothing new stated here. The love of control over content dominates versus instilling the capacity to analyze, critique, discern, make decisions, reflect, and, even more radically, to allow them to learn what they actually find value in. This will continue to limit our kids and the tools and resources at their disposal.
I agree. If the job of a teacher is to get students excited about learning, I feel like one of the best things they could do is say "Hey everyone, let's sit and watch Numberphile for an hour."
I get what Veritasium says here, but he is just Wrong. As CGP Grey pointed out years ago, this time is different. Mechanization and all that DOES change the world. Or rather: It would, if Humans wouldnt reject it. But obvious fact is, the Schools will not stay like they are for a Billion Years, duh.
I usually love your videos but for a physicist you are taking an awful lot of things for granted in this one. I don't know how you can say something like: "And making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment" with a straight face. Some social environments hinder learning, even with well-intentioned teachers. A lot of schoolwork serves as a barrier simply by placing a demand on the students' time and energy that would be better spent on some other activity. I'm sad that you failed to mention autonomy as well. High quality learning happens when people have control over the pace, level of depth and even the material. Again, this is very tough to achieve in a classroom setting. I would argue that most of the learning actually happens outside of class when students can think over the material alone or in small self-selected groups.
I can confirm this. The fact that some school environments makes the learning process slow is completely true. I am currently homeschooled, but i have gone on two different schools aswell. At school i noticed myself using a lot more time on the same thing i do in no time now at home. It felt like it was so many unnecessary things implemented, wich didnt really have any thing to do with learning. I teach myself now, with the help of the internet and i have absolutely no problems. I got so little done on the schools i went to, that it almost came to the point where i did more school related things at home, than at the acual school. I feel like im much more concentrated at home, and i learn to think myself instead of turning to a teacher as soon as i am stuck with a task. Schools have their advantages over homeschooling, but as far as i have experienced, i learn a lot better at home an easier. Personally i would choose Homeschooling over a public school any day. Anyways, sorry for my lacking English, it is not my native language. Have a nice day :)
I can't speak to your point about the tension between social and autonomous learning, and it sounds like an interesting one, but I just want to point out that his degree is in physics education, not physics. He may be oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, but I don't think it's fair to assume he's entirely naive about how one learns physics.
Elliott Collins The main purpose schools serve in our society is to watch over kids while the parents are at work. Many teachers, and excellent teachers especially, are in denial about this. They want to believe that they are an indispensable part of the learning process. He even said it himself: most of the learning happens when the student grapples with the problem herself. There's some role for teachers for explaining why you would want to learn something and as a help of last resort when the student is stuck. Or to suggest materials on a subject. But the best thing a school can do for a student is to get out of the way and let them learn in their own way.
***** When in school I was always wondering why we needed the 20 minute lecture on 2+2=4, Students should be separated by: How they learn (visual, understanding, repetition, etc.) Past knowledge (What you know before the lesson) Learning speed( How fast they can comprehend something)
"Inside the learner's head". Exactly! That's why some people succeed and others fail. My parents treated both my brother and me equally. In fact, they went out of their way to do so and pointed out each decision they made to accomplish this. They wanted us to know that there was no favorite. For Christmas, birthdays, etc., I asked for electronic project sets, chemistry and other science sets, building sets (Lego, Erector sets, etc.) and other things that helped me to learn. My brother asked for toys and sporting equipment. I've spent the last 40 years designing advanced electronic systems. My brother has spent the last 40 years bankrupt, unable to get a credit card, and indebted to family and friends to the point no one will speak to him again. The only difference between us was what was "Inside the learner's head".
Yeah, that was a failure of the education system I was in. I barely remember the teachers I had. Very few of them had any impact on me except to hinder the learning process for me. For the most part, I remember the ones who hindered me, and even then, just barely. Give me an automated learning tool (a book, a video, a computer program) any time over teachers (with occasional access to teachers to answer specific questions).
As a professor, I agree with Veritasium! The most essential part of education isn't just the content, but the social interactions and skills learned. To be honest, very few of us will remember all the content of a course taken one year ago. Still, most likely, we will not forget an interaction or an anecdotal detail or an unrelated comment that the professor made.
"The job of a teacher is to excite and inspire their students to learn." In that case, I'm afraid, in my experience, they've almost all failed miserably at their job. In fairness, I knew that before I heard this definition. The fact is learning is a universally pleasing human experience, and yet teachers and schools manage to make it as dull and tedious as possible way too often. It's basically institutionalized clinical depression.
I have been teaching for 48 years & what past students have always said about me was: Thank you for caring about me, for making me feel important, for making me feel special, getting me excited, motivated & inspired, about what you were teaching. How I was always enthusiastic & excited about what I was teaching, & how I took an INTEREST in them. One student I taught thanked me for giving him a condolence card when his dog got run over it made him want to do the best he could do in my class because I gave him my personal time to buy the card and then to write words that helped ease the pain of his loss. It's because of all of the above that I believe technology will never take over from teachers. However, technology used in conjunction with the good teacher's (as outlined above) teaching a big fat YES. At 73 I am continually developing my expertise with technology so I can, where appropriate, incorporate with my teaching. I am so excited about teaching next year in my 74th year & 49th year of teaching in this wonderful and rewarding profession.
Good onya Neil. Merry Christmas.
Thanks for sharing this. Glad there are teachers out there like you who continually inspire students.
Thanks for being a TEACHER and not an educator! And I bet you have NEVER called the people in your classes LEARNERS. They are have ALL been students, but some will never be learners. Being able to recognize the difference is the key. You have and will continue to serve your students well. They are lucky to have you! Regards
Wow, you are incredibly inspiring! Thank you for your hard work for so many years!
Very few teachers live up to that example
Humans only learn something if it is meaningful to them. A teacher's primary job is to make it meaningful to the student.
No its a students job to make the information meaningful to them.
@@stirfrysends both.
*laughs at my high school students*
Why should we learn this? Because it's on the exam. And why should we do well in the exam. Well your entire life depends on it and you are useless if you fail, the only meaning in your life should just be to memorize all the exact facts for the exam.
Most teachers are terrible at that
At which they fail so spectacularly that its better without them
"The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn."
And so far, you did that better than any teacher I've had.
*Cries*
Nixola97 That's partly because before you came here you were wanting to engage. At school you don't necessarily want to, but you have to
Me too that's why i became a physics teacher myself :) and why i am a huge fan of figuring out better ways to teach physics.
Nixola97 my teacher does do that
Nixola97 most of my teachers were so bad at it that they did nothing to improve my need , combined with a textbook full of basic and stuff I already learned and the things I didn't learn boring and only few interesting ones ...
If the primary job of a teacher is to inspire learning, TH-cam and the internet really _have_ revolutionized learning. All public school did was make me _not_ want to learn things!! It's TH-camrs like you who really made subjects interesting again!
I get what Veritasium says here,
but he is just Wrong.
As CGP Grey pointed out years ago, this time is different.
Mechanization and all that DOES change the world. Or rather: It would, if Humans wouldnt reject it.
But obvious fact is, the Schools will not stay like they are for a Billion Years, duh.
@@loturzelrestaurant Well, then you dont really get what Veritasium point is. His main point is what the most important in education is a learner's experience. From my personal experience at studying university remotely via meeting in zoom and other platform, the SOCIAL experience we get at classroom with other student and teacher is irreplacable. And the technology nowadays can't change that.
technology of the future sure will, *points to meta's VR projects*
Na just more interesting but also much clearer
Yap!
Veritasium passes 2 million subscribers! Thanks for all the support!!
grats
Awesome! Congrats!
"Tank, I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter." untill we get this... well. Computers are just tools. Intenet is a tool. You can hammer a nail with electronic microscope. But, I can tell you this, if I had access to Veritasium when I was 9th grade, I would probably get PhD in quantum physics :D
What do we mean by black holes are not black?
your channel is impressive
The altruistic posting of information on the internet was a pretty big deal. Before this era, a curious person had to physically get a textbook, or find an expert for a conversation. Now, a curious person needs 30 seconds to get the gist of almost any common topic on Wikipedia. Much lower friction leads to more people choosing to learn because it's simply easier. I agree with your points regarding the job of teachers and fellow students to motivate each other.
It's great to see you subscribe to Veritasium also
sMystring1
you might be right bout this 1, but still there are people who likes studying, and for those people the internet will be the infinite source of knowledge.
Finding an expert for conversation is still a huge problem. And you do not have to be seeking for an expert but anybody open enough who will actually give you something new and worthy from the conversation.
The revolution in education is the quick availability of answers to questions. His examples of radio, computers and television all failed to address this one issue. There has been nothing in history that can efficiently answer individual's specific and diverse questions like the internet. The other key is motivation, and he has some valid points on that one.
Geoffrey Ritchey i think there is 1 more thing that teacher have to deliver to students after the motivation : the methode to study.
"
[...]Luckily the fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information. It is to guide the social process of learning.
The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn. Yes, they also do explain and demonstrate and show things, but fundamentally that is beside the point. The most important thing a teacher does, is to make every student feel like they are important, to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning.
"
I love this quote!
I hardly ever met such teachers. Five in my 13 years of school to be exact.
I'm 31 and currently a post doc researcher in physics and I think that the growth of physics and mathematics channels on TH-cam by people who care about the subject and who can explain the topic in an interesting way has revolutionized physics education at third level at least. The problem with lecturers at university is that they view teaching as a chore they have to do if they want to be able to conduct their research. As a consequence its possible to leave university with a physics degree without a thorough understanding of some very basic concepts.
It reminds me of the quote
"Never Let Schooling Interfere With Your Education" - Mark Twain
oh man these writers ..spot on :)
Danielkaas94
On the wall of one of my classrooms, it has that quotation, but it attributes it to Einstein. Someone must be wrong.
Everyone attributes everything to Einstein , be suspect.
@@lynallott3404You may attribute everything to Mark Twain, he won't mind
Schooling is Educating, Educating is Schooling. In this sense, Mark Twain is wrong.
“The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite...” Well I must have some bad teachers then.
nice one
Lol
As I look back 50 years to my public school teachers, I now think many were trying to inspire me and my classmates, but I was 'too smart' and wasn't having any of it. Perhaps I thought I was too smart and couldn't pick up what they were laying down. My daughter is a graduate student about to become a public school teacher, I hope she doesn't get too many 'unreachable too smart' students like me. :)
Or you were disinterested and never wanted to rise to the challenge. Plenty of those in a classroom as well and that didn't mean they were unsuccessful in life after school either.
@@gordoncharles741 returning to this comment a year later, I disagree with the original message. I think I have had amazing teachers that have inspired me, and I was just whining about school. Or perhaps farming likes? In which case I guess I succeeded.
Someone said "books will revolutionize education" ... and they were right .
+Ryan R
What? Books are pretty much the foundation of my education.
Somebody also said humans will gain more knowledge everyday
But that exact person one day remembered how to turn on a calculator, before saying so.
actually, Pythagoras said that books would only make students lazy.
Pythagpras believed that the number 5 was magic and sacred,.. ...
But I mostly just know about possums.
*looks at my friends*
"not really"
I have been an engineering professor for over 30 years, I have a channel with video lessons on TH-cam, and I completely agree with the statement: "the main job of a professor is to inspire learning". Transmitting information is not the main thing for a teacher nowadays, with so many resources available to students. However, inspiring students to learn and want to learn more is much more relevant. Therefore, classes must also be fun, so that students feel well in the classroom, willing to pay attention to what the teacher says. In addition, it is important to show the importance and applications of what is being taught, always making a connection with what the student already knows.
This is quite relevant now after 18 months of COVID lockdowns. But all those technological aids did help - as usual, one size does not fit all. And, of course, _motivating_ the student is the most important, and hardest to do remotely. But you, Derek, are a very good role model of a highly motivating teacher.
As one of the late-night hosts pointed out just this last week, probably every parent right now has had it up to 'here' with online classes. Forget motivating, just keeping their attention must be nigh impossible.
@@christopherbedford9897 Online classes are great for college/university students though!
@@danielrodrigues4903 what exactly is the difference in the learning procedures of a high-school student and the University student?
@@jaradams Motivation, mainly. No massive procedural differences, but uni students are expected to do most of our work autonomously (I'm in uni right now -- second year, so I speak from experience) and we are, in general, mostly in uni because we want to be there, unlike school and high school where kids are pretty much forced to attend regardless of what they want to do.
Plus we're also strapped for time, and a lot of us who aren't living on campus appreciate not having to make the commute. Not everyone will be like this though.
And of course if you're studying something that requires special equipment or labs then you'll need face to face classes.
@@danielrodrigues4903 i think a good middle ground would be to have online clases and go to the campus for the face to face lessons that are required to have, because i have been loving online clases soo far
From my experience, I feel like people learn more outside of the classroom once they find that thing they are passionate about. By the time I hit college, I had already learned a ton about filmmaking from all sorts of TH-cam channels and online courses and many books that I felt my actual college classes about filmmaking were almost a waste of time. That being said, the teachers themselves were wonderful people who were incredibly encouraging. The information they taught may have been slightly outdated or irrelevant, but their hearts were in the right place. Even though I didn't really learn any new information in those classes, it was still a good experience.
Agreed. I think the premise of this video is correct, after all he's talking about public education, universities, etc. I'm 41 years old and I feel like I learn more every year than in all of my schooling. When I was young, information wasn't available to everyone. If you were lucky, you had a 10 year old encyclopedia set, so teachers were always right even when wrong. How would I know? Now I learn because I want to, not because I have to. I have access to the latest research, papers, even lectures at MIT, forums, Wikipedia, etc all on my phone! My kids who are in school play angry birds. So while our 'educational system" really does rely on teachers, education in general HAS been revolutionized. There has never been a time in history when the average guy sitting in a restaurant has the same access to information as the richest Ivy League frat boy. Learning will always be the responsibility of the learner. Credit to great teachers, but if someone doesn't want to learn, it's not the teachers fault. This video alone kinda proved this video wrong! I mean, here I am, in bed, learning!
A good teacher ignites passion for their subject in the students.
People who try to revolutionize school should look into changing the whole education system. Because barring several experimental systems, school is filling a similar social role as prison, with many similarities between them: people are forced to be there, their schedules are designed by other people, the topics that are covered are commonly determined at such a high level that even the teachers have little choice... so what you get is teachers as prison guards and students as prisoners. And that is the aspect that needs to change before any kind of revolution can be claimed to have happened.
Make a school people will want to attend. No, it's not easy at all.
Bojan Kopitar Yes and students are locked in rooms at night with cell mates in fear for their safety... While one could argue that schools are like prisons it is just as easy to see how they are nothing like prisons. As a teacher I see that most students honestly enjoy school. After all, at what other point in your life are you surrounded by your friends of similar age, and challenged in meaningful ways?
Of course we could liken schools to a whole range of things but it would not make sense. Schools are places of education, they are community and social centres where the students and teachers alike are working on improving each others lives.
@@bradparkin9619 You can say all of that about prisons, too. Depending on the prison, that is.
I think this video may revolutionize education one day
I don't think education will ever be revolutionized. It will probably improve, though
I hope you're right.. I'm pretty sure it may
It will.
Well, it didn't.
It did
My thoughts have been expressed by other educators: "Teaching only happens when learning takes place". and, "Teaching takes place in time; learning
takes place over time. "
“learning on computers”
People who have virtual learning during 2020: yeah, I’ve had enough of that
Agreed
I live about 1.5 hours away from my school, so i save 3 hours of travel. I love it!
@@dangerousdoggo5465 either your school or your home have been chosen poorly
Virtual learning doesnt work for a lot of people and especially since its far easier for kids to get distracted and be unaccountable combined with the fact that school administrations are trying to counteract this ends up making virtual school even more of a painful drag for most students
That and the increased work load from classes many kids arent interested kills what little motivation kids would have for the few classes they do enjoy
And also the fact that much of student engagement is trigger by conversation with their friends and teachers yet now kids are just discouraged from speaking up at all so they are even less engaged
Basically virtual sucks for most kids already and crappy ways administrations handle online school is making it worse
@@tadpole9264 yeah I agree... the thing is, there are so many distractions when you are learning at home, like phones and the iPad I’m typing this comment on right now.
I had a math teacher in 11th grade who was the only real teacher I have ever had. Every math teacher I always have, I ask them, "Why do I need to know this stuff I am never going to use it?" but he was the only one who gave me a true and inspiring answer, he said "I don't care if you learn what 2+2= I care about you understanding the process of problem solving." Every other teacher just said, because it is a math class and you have to learn it. This teachers name was Brian Meyer and was by far the best teacher I have ever had. I learned so much in his class because he didn't teach what 2+2 was, he taught how to solve these problems and made sure we understood it. If one student didn't understand it, he would teach that kid either another way or help him/her step by step of how to solve it. He was an amazing teacher and I will definitely remember him forever, he definitely inspired me to not just learn facts but dive deeper and actually understand them.
I definitely agree that the problem solving part is the most important, and one of the most neglected. Now being a bit cynical, but hugely enthusiastic about my work developing software, I'd probably answer something like "If you're not going to use any of it, that probably means you'll be working a boring job that will soon be automated by someone who does use it." ;) Seriously, though, I wish we'd learned calculus and algebra way sooner, but with everything put in the context of the freaking amazing stuff you can do with them, instead of learning a bunch of disembodied rules. It makes things make so much more sense when you can try things out and see what happens. Physics, for example, goes from being "memorize these formulae and know how to apply them in the right order", to "What cool things can I figure out today?" Maybe I should stop procrastinating with my stalled TH-cam series, teaching how you can solve the Schrödinger equation of quantum physics without needing to know any complicated math in advance. It's not quite at the point where learners can go off on their own yet, but it's hopefully at the point where learners realize that they can do stuff they didn't think they could do before.
Neil G. Dickson That sounds awesome dude and I agree with you 100% its so hard to get into math when all it is, is memorizing repetitive formulas but actually applying it and using it is interesting. Another thing that same teacher did, he (for example) taught us about exponential growth. And instead of just using equations to explain it, he used real world situations like the exponential growth of the human race.
Math teachers are carefully selected math freaks who survived intense brainwashing (call them specialists), not just random citizens. So it is normal that you will encounter only a few outliers making sense.
That, and without math, science and technology , no one won't be living in a modern society right now, everyone would still live in a cave with a life span of 20 years old.
I had an 8th grade science teacher that would take us through experiments. Throwing a ball up in the air, blowing into a pneumatic piston to make it go up and putting books on it to make it harder to raise, are just a couple. I'm too old now to remember what was taught for the lesson, but I do remember that it was some of the best experiences in my education. Letting the student be involved actively in the processes of being taught was important for the lesson and could help you learn new information about yourself. For instance, in 8th grade, I had a personal horsepower of 0.8. So, I was 80% as strong as a horse in 8th grade...lol
I think we also have to differentiate between learning and memorizing. Learning a physics concept and the ability to develop an intuition about it probably would be best done in a social setting with peers and demonstrations. On the other hand, learning a chain of steps for organic chemistry is rote memorization where a social setting may not help. Technology can help substitute teachers when it comes to things that need memorizing, allowing teachers to better focus on their role in the classroom.
Is anything truely learnt from memorisation? If there is a clear difference between understanding a process that is called learning and memorization is knowing something without anythibg to support it, then is that useful? Especially when we xan now look up anything we want within seconds on a mobile device.
Agreed, a lot of "education" still focuses on memorizing rather than understanding. I think some things should be committed to memory but most of the mental effort should be spent on understanding.
***** exactly, as a maths teacher pretty much every lesson I gave had to focus on teaching how to memorize methods of calculation because that is what the maths exams test.
When the phones in all their pockets can do that for them in fractions of a second yet no time was given for teaching them what it was for, how to use it to solve problems.
Bad example, you can figure out most of organic chemistry if you know the basics very well. Just like with physics and almost any academic course.
*****
Many synthesis reactions require memorization. Though I think this is a case where memorization helps foster learning, as after repeatedly going through several synthesis reactions, the mechanisms become intuitive.
The teachers in my life that have really inspired me all showed love and excitement for their subject and communicated those feelings to me, inviting me in on the process. I was in a remedial math class once, and my teacher showed me how to calculate logarithms from scratch, instead of using tables, just for fun. And it WAS fun!
In computer science they found that one of the most effective changes was to have students actively coding during the course. The teacher will spend a few classes going over topic x, then at the end of that topic there will be at least 1 session of live coding where the teacher and students code together. Normally functioning as the teacher getting some code started, the students finishing it, then the teacher finishing it live as a self check for the students.
The takeaway from this, the most effective form of education is one that requires active and frequent participation from all students.
Do you have a paper/citation for this? I would find it super helpful.
@@carmineg Me too. Have you found anything?
I'm a fan of upside down teaching - the students learn the stuff as homework, and do the homework in class. But it's not for every child - eg. they have a disruptive home life or get too easily distracted without being forced to sit down.
Take away from this: Trade schools are the best schools
2:09. Wow! I was watching a veritasium video showing a clip from a CGP grey video showing a clip from a minute physics video.
Inception
Now all we need is to throw in NurdRage, NileRed, and Vsauce!
@Maiahi wow im replying to maiahi replying to alex edwards commenting that he just watched a veritasium video showing a clip from CPG grey showing a clip from a minute physics video
Lk
@@smartart6841 wow i am replying to smart art who is in turn replying to malahi who is replying to alex edwards commenting that he just watched a veritasium video showing a clip from CPG grey showing a clip from a minute physics video
Actually I do learn about so many stuffs from TH-cam. Given the fact that I live in developing country, just makes it so much better to use this platform as a way to gain knowledge from people all around the world without having to pay a single penny.
so you can teach your kids table manners only using tablets?
+011azr Which country, if you don't mind saying
Rasta Mon Indonesia. Granted, I can understand English speaker quite clearly, so yeah, I get so many benefits from this platform and I certainly believe that it can really revolutionize the education, especially in the place where I live right now.
+011azr Russia. Same situation. :)
You do have to pay for the internet and electricity to watch the video but I agree with you that TH-cam can be very educational. Sometimes I feel like I have learned more from it than my school (I live in the us).
I've been considering becoming a teacher recently. Your videos are part of that inspiration. It's funny how the people getting paid to teach me never do a really good job, bore me, leave me uninspired, and hand out busy work. And yet I watch your videos on a free platform and suddenly I'm engrossed in what I'm learning. I want to be to the future generations who you are to me.
This is so beautiful and relatable! I was an engineer and I'm starting a teaching masters just next week :D
I hope you do!
I really agree 👍 💯 👏
I am a teacher, I really wonder, do you really want to be a teacher? Why? Is there no other better option for you? Dream big, man. There is never a rich teacher (unless he or she does a side business).
@@sillynilly7513 I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money... and I don't need to be rich. Just a modest life, find love, start a family, that's all I need to be happy
1.Show students static graphics.
2.Give time for them to visualize it.
3.Show them the Animation.
This helps them to think, make corrections and think better next time.
Unless the student is incapable of visualizing.
Back when MOOCs (massive open online courses) were being touted as "the revolution", I quipped that we needed the opposite: "Extremely Individualised Emotionally Intelligent Offline" courses, E I E I O for short.
Old Macdonald's school.
It’s difficult to form emotionally intelligent rapport when students have different teachers every year and don’t get to know their teachers outside of class.
I say that throughout secondary schools, students should have forty minutes in a small group each day with the same teacher for all six years.
Going through schools is pretty easy when you don’t have learning disabilities and have a college educated parent at home who can be present support you in learning.
I noticed that many of my classmates who struggled in high school were not lacking a good teacher; they were lacking a parent who had the means and know-how of the typical teacher.
If those kids had a stable, long-term, second or third parent at schools who was as knowledgeable, caring, presents and emotionally intelligent as the typical teacher at my school, I think those struggling kids would have had a better chance.
The reason why we feel pleasure, is so our brains can re-enforce behavior that lead up to the pleasure. Things that are dull, or uncomfortable or painful, can become pleasurable, if our brain associates it with leading to pleasure. This is why people spend hours at slot machines, watching symbols appear over and over again. If we learn there is a payoff for something, we can addict ourselves to it. What needs to happen is that education needs to be build around leading students to natural rewards that come from study and work. Not artificial rewards like grades. If students can build, fix, or communicate something, and that thing they did or build makes a difference in their lives or someone else's. There brain will start to make the connection naturally between study and success. Having a class that ends with a multiple choice test, and a grade, will not inspire students to love learning, but it may teach them to like grades. So whatever method is used, like MOOC or your clever EIEIO, it needs to focus on a natural use of our own emotions.
@@mrnameless7637 This is the giga brain take. I think you've hit the nail square on the head. Hats off to you, king. 👑
Now I just hope we can find someone who will implement your model.
I mean, if Extremely Individualised Emotionally Intelligent Online were possible, that would probably be great too. But.
This is genius!
Derek, you are revolutionizing education. Your reach is huge and your presentations are engaging. You are the bonus for kids (and adults) that love to learn.
Gosh 7 years had passed and this thing is still damn accurate. I think the necessity for teachers to create a supportive learning environment (the ones where students are *actually* interested in what was being taught), for a STEM student like me, should also be based on (a) experiments conducted real-time rather than a separate session, cause it helps to visualize the concepts by literally seeing it rather than envisioning the blurted facts from 0; (b) a sort of personalized learning experience, meaning students can *freely* ask about concepts that they don't understand, under the assurance of the teacher will wait for us until we gain full comprehension.
The thing with massive class sizes is, (a) there exist a fear that our comprehension pace is slower than the mean comprehension rate of the class-and we considered that as embarrassing. Or (b) the scheduled study materials to be taught on that day is just a lot and we can't have all day to answer every one's questions.
And it goes back, like what Derek said, to the question, what was the function of education in the first place? I believe in order to train scientifically-conscious individuals, we shouldn't compromise the time element. We should let everyone learn with their own pace until they gain understatement, and by only then they can move to a more complex study material.
But yet to do so is costly. Private tutoring are so damn expensive.
Whoever manages to read this until this point, sorry haha apparently I was having some thoughts about how f*cked up primary to secondary education on STEM actually is. Coz I'm a current engineering student at uni and I still struggling on the basic concepts. I think the blame was on how I don't understand much of the basic concepts in early schooling years because the learning pace isn't personalized, henceforth I still have questions unanswered.
I like your comment. You see, as a kid you understand things completely different as an adult. You can learn some basic stuff, but never grasp it in its entirety. Thats why many countries have circular curriculae, meaning to revisit certain tobics for example every year and deepen the understanding of said topic. To be able to fully understand even a basic topic, you need to have revisited the topic time over time.
I agree to a certain extent, that private tutoring would help. But its nit possible, logistically, financially etc. I'd rather pledge for smaller classes, so teachers have more time for each student individually. But for that, we would need more ppl wanting to be teacher, which there are not, more money to pay them and more classrooms etc. So even that seems to be impossible, at least in the next 50 years or so.
Good luck on your studies!
maybe AI will be the next revolution
I'm a retired physicist-engineer. I'm a lifelong learner and I've done industrial design of electronics and taught electronics in the classroom setting to novice would-be technicians. I've mastered countless other physical and mental skills as well, from music to medical technician. I recall when I was four or five wanting to be a scientist when I barely knew what to call it. Everything I saw I remembered and it all looked obvious to me. When I went to school I always seemed to learn everything shown to me first time, and never had to be shown again. This while I saw other kids struggling around me. I noted that while I always believed I could learn anything, and that excited me, that they didn't believe that about themselves, and were consequently uninterested, except to get teachers and parents off their backs. This continued into high school and so on. There were always a small number for whom science was all they ever wanted to do, and the rest who never seemed to know what they wanted to do in life except find a way to keep people in authority from bothering them to learn and find a way to get rich quick so they didn't have to learn anything. Scientists are people who would do science even if they couldn't find a way to be paid for it. They approach everything in life as an experiment and it fascinates them. They can't picture doing without that in their life, even if they had to do it for free. The rest seem to live on the outside of things, and they can't figure out what to do with themselves and try to find happiness with formulaic antidotes to boredom, sports, marriage, family, parties, and other distractions that bored people like me. And if you try to teach them things they can't remember them for more than five minutes. These are the people who are always calling their friends up to "fix" their computer when they screw it up. These are the folks who get gypped by their mechanic because they never bothered to find out how engines work or what is what in gasoline vehicles. They seem quite sad to me, really, they have NO confidence that they can learn, and that lack dates back to before they even went to school. I'm not sure if it comes from the way their parents talked to them, or didn't, or the way they first apprehended the tiniest lessons in the way the world works not long after birth. My impression is that it is a fool's errand to try to teach these folks, they will not learn, they have a mental block against it, and no strategy, no new teaching medium, or any such new method will enable them to believe they can learn. And of course people lose interest in things that totally stymie them. I am beginning to believe this may be inherited, and that it may have something to do with the complement of genes and their behaviors which we inherited from our forebears, and the distribution of some very special genetic features in a small percentage of the population. Whatever it is, it is inherited unevenly throughout the human population, and there appears to be some Gaussian distribution of these abilities in our population genome that will ever prevent many people from achieving that kind of facility with ideas. As an inveterate teacher I hate that thought, but as I grow older it seems more and more to be the obvious reason why we struggle in vain to teach many or most students.
+Karla Lee No idea what you're talking about here.
not more than 50 words please
+rstevewarmorycom I completely agree! I see the same things now at my school! except that the children at my school do learn but that's it. they don't go search more information outside school, which I do! They seem to have no interests in finding out what they really want to become what so ever. And they all have the same lifestyle, going out, hanging out with friends, maybe go to sports and working.. nothing more interesting about those people, they seem to have no special background. A girl in my class always likes to talk about her weekend, telling that she went out this and that and that she and her friends went to a party got drunk etc. and then I asked her, what do you do besides going out, besides going to parties and hanging out with your friends? she was thinking. I asked her, don't you have anything more interesting in your life that you fantasize about? No special hobby or something? Something that you think about all the time and want to be better at it or know more about it? All you do is going to parties and clubs with or without friends and get drunk? really? Doesn't that get boring? She had NOTHING TO SAY. after that conversation, I realized that the majority of people are just like her! All of the people around me were like that, If I started talking about the future or what is happening on the news, nobody cared. Nobody knew anything, the stuff they learn at school, they don't remember any of it except if they have to for a test. Outside of school, most of them have no knowledge at all. It really is sad. The only people that aren't like that are the really smart people at my school, they are busy with their future the whole time and talking to them is way more interesting and enjoyable than the kids like the girl I mentioned here. When I listen to conversations between those kids that aren't interested in anything, they sound really stupid, they have childish humour and act really dumb. the responses between them make no sense at all. Every time I am in an argument with such a person, I win like 8/10 times. They seem to not being able to communicate at my level. Even kids that have higher grades than me don't know what to say back when I start talking to them.
johnny dss Yes, it makes me wonder whether all these other people I see are even real or if they are just robots, players in the play of my life, people reading lines with no content, and I wonder if only some of us are really real persons. Are they automatic response mechanisms? Is this just an interactive movie adventure with only a few real players? Are the rest just simple software? This is a genuine question and a puzzlement.
rstevewarmorycom well i rarely use socialhub, i surf internet for random interesting facts, is it count?
Interesting, I did an a MOOC course on Electricity and Magnetism and learnt so much. The fact there were real tests, homework, real classmates and feedback made it very personal despite I was 1000's of miles away from MIT. I would say it was just as involving as I was going to lectures on my university degrees. The really great thing with MOOC is you can always learn, not just for the few years you are at university.
this made me remember all the great teachers who left their impact on my brain in school, love you teachers. thank you
"The Most Persistent Myth" is, in fact, that Information equals Knowledge.
It doesn't?
@@ishanghosh6604 Unfortunately it doesn’t. That’s the reason why we can’t replicate certain techniques, despite the fact that we have tons of Information about them.
Knowledge is to be found on the side of Nature. Information on the side of Logic. Nobody actually knows how to extract Knowledge out of Information.
Another fact is, that Language, another Logic-based System, is the wrong tool for communication.
The complexity of this Topic is unfortunately to big to discuss in this format of texting. Especially due to the aforementioned inability to communicate.
Due to my experience most people have resigned to the fact that they can’t follow recorded language; they face even severe difficulties in an face-to-face
Conversation. Maybe one day I‘ll find a way to communicate this topics, using different ways. Mankind could do so much better, if everyone would use
their senses. But they weren’t taught to do so.
@@onikamura888 could you be a bit more specific? Im not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but the reason we've used language for thousands of years in the first place is its one of our most effective ways of communicating specific meanings, otherwise it would have been abandoned in favor of... maybe pictures, sounds and smells alone? Also id like to know what you consider to be knowledge or information, because i do agree with your OP but im again not entirely sure what the context of that statement is.
To be sure, language has a lot of shortcomings, it doesnt let us reach or see in to someones brain to get true context. But to say its impossible to formulate useful knowledge from information isnt quite true, otherwise we wouldnt have the technologies we do now, as any invention would die with its inventor since it couldnt be passed on.
@@onikamura888 even if it's too big for language, shouldn't language at least be able to name the thing? What is it?
And what are the examples of those techniques you claimed as unreproducible? Telepathy?
A problem I see here, is that most teachers don't have the inspiration to inspire students. They don't get payed enough to actually want to be there and do all the work they have to do.
Dude. Your statement in itself explains why you are false. Teachers do want to be there, that's why they work there. They went to college to become a teacher and work with students. Teacher is not the last or only option for them. They pay doesn't matter.
Mike Millhoff They start off with the hope and the passion of inspiring the kids, but as soon as they see the truth and the reality, what the majority of kids are really here for, they lose that passion and just don't do their jobs, like they only give attention to the smartest and ignore the ones who are stupid, and it goes like that ''most'' of the time.
Seven Echoes I'd have to say they are required to give more attention to the children who do the worst. The troublemakers. Why? Because the troublemakers are required to "change", so the teacher _has_ to put the most amount of effort into "changing" them. Basically, if you have a troublemaker in your class, up until about High School (or Middle School in some cases), then they are most likely going to be given the most attention by the teacher. Especially if they technically aren't doing anything against school rules. But if there are no troublemakers, then they have to pay attention to the ones failing, so that they can try to get their grades up. Same with the kids almost failing.
batman88891 The problem is the kids have to be inspired to learn early. If the parents and elementary school teachers don't instill the importance of education into a child's mind, that child usually will not be motivated to learn. For the most part, if a kid doesn't want to learn by the time they reach high school, then they never will.
Jacob Tadlock I'd say A LOT earlier than high school. I'd say third to fifth grade.
6:16 So per his description of the most important thing a teacher does, that means out of the 130 different teachers I had throughout my entire school life from 2nd grade to graduation...only 1 of them did their job. Every other one simply wasted their time. And all the "teachers" I actually had fun learning things from, WEREN'T EVEN TEACHERS, they were staff workers, psychologists, and other members of the "front offices" as we call them. So, fundamentally, none of my teachers did what they were supposed to. At least for me anyway
^What he said.^
This is honestly one of the biggest issues facing our educational institution these days. We keep on running education like a business, building the educational system around an industrial production model, and people perpetuate harmful mentalities about grades and competitive learning and exam results and all sorts of things. We also tend to treat teachers like garbage, especially in the US.
The real problem is that we need more care, more thought, and more money put into the educational system, while cutting down on the bureaucratic exploitation and the sheer amount of influence given to for-profit businesses who have no place dictating what education is. We need to make people give a crap about supporting the institution of learning, and instead of spending so much time trying to police children, actually try to _understand_ them.
Bear in mind that the current system (current from last century until today) is still based on teachers as information transmitters and only secondarily, as motivators. That traslates into teachers not being able to invest enough time into developing motivational skills and devote lesson time to engage in student motivation because they have to finish covering the curricular contents.So don't be so quick to judge your teachers, not everybody is willing or able to push through the bureaucracy or understands the importance of motivation in education.
Juan Andrés Ramírez
The system is built on an industrial model of efficiently and quickly trying to bash as many children as possible into a very limited, narrow concept of "smart" and then grade them on their ability to achieve that template.
My dad was a middle school level teacher for twenty years, and he could talk your ear off about how awful the bureaucracy of education is, or how restrictive the framework can be, or even how much other people take advantage of it. And I almost don't want to think about what that's like in america, where the general opinion of school teachers seems to be "those worthless losers who don't do their jobs."
shingshongshamalama As the younger brother of a teacher, I can say that's very accurate. But its not the teachers faults most of the time, its the system itself that sets them up, and subsequently their students up for failure. I can also say as a graduate of school, I've learned a hell of a lot more OUT of school then I ever did IN it.
As a teacher my self I want to add that the revolution we've been searching for on the last century is a market reavolution - on how to produce 'educated' handwork without the expensive teacher as you said. Also, education needs to be different for every different person, it's part of the job of teachers to find how to bend the materials and experiences we have in a way that's proper for one student. Maybe one day an AI can do all that but I think we're far from it. It's a big discussion for sure. Thanks for your video.
It’s amazing how many people seem to have only taken one thing away from this video: “If a teacher’s job is to inspire, my teachers must absolutely suck.”
There are amazing teachers, there are terrible teachers, and there are millions of average teachers (go check out his video on ‘regression to the mean’). I’ve had the opportunity to work and volunteer in many different schools, and I can say wholeheartedly that most teachers are trying to inspire their students each and every day. If you think all of your teachers are terrible, you might need to take a deeper look at your own expectations for school and for your teachers. I’m not defending bad teaching-I’ve had plenty of rough classes-but it is important to recognize that your own attitude and mindset play just as important a role in deriving interest as your teachers (if not an even more significant role).
I can't tell you how much I agree. I had amazing teachers and truly horrible teachers - which led me to ultimately teach. I drew inspiration from both sets of teachers, especially after I realized how much responsibility I had to "want" to learn. I love my students. I strive to inspire them in anything they do. I can only hope it's working! But in 12 years I've seen a lot of "this is the new solution" bits come and go. What stays the same no matter what is how teachers interact with their students!
Bell curve
"it is important to recognize that your own attitude and mindset play just as important a role in deriving interest as your teachers "
Well try to explain that to a kid who has no interest at all that it is his responsibility to have this interest too :v
Part of the job of the teacher is still to create that interest even if he has to do it subconsciously. He must positively "manipulate" a student so that he doesn't feel like it's a shore but a challenge, something useful in his future...
Obviously you can't always get every student's interest but I don't call a good job having a lot of my math teachers speedrunning the course and having half of the class failing at math :v
the only good teachers are the ones you find on TH-cam! Change my mind.
Students nowadays are just terrible 90% of the time. In high school I appreciated my teachers and they made me interested in many things while my friends complained all day about homework and tests and just learning in general, they’d rather just play video games and be potatoes all day
"The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students."
Oh how I love these words.
"..and a caring teacher." Brilliant!
Yup, the best teacher is not one that merely teaches. The best teacher is the one that makes the students want to learn.
Like the worst teacher I ever had. He was making up so many stories once someone in class screamed: "Teach us something already!"
Great teacher.
To face it more seriously, I do agree in the way you mean it.
Edited*
***** While that is true in English, not all languages have different words for "teach" and "learn". My native Norwegian doesn't, nor does German.
Nillie German DOES have different words for "teach" and "learn". They are however quite similar, so that even many native speakers mess them up.
***** It was in my native language of which teach and learn have the same word. I don't read my comments thoroughly enough before posting I guess.
Nillie german has, for teaching : lehren, belehren, unterrichten,beibringen ; and for learning : lernen, erlernen, sich geistig entwickeln .
I learned more things on the Internet than at school.
*****
i think the internet is a very powerfull tool for people who want to learn something, because its the biggest database in the universe, that we know of. but it is also a trap for people to waste there time with other kinds of entertainment. the person chooses which kind he is its like veritas says if you want to learn u can use anything to do that.
Probably not stuff like advanced calculus, though. Quantity means nothing if all you learn is simple, useless stuff. Unless you use sites like Khan Academy, in which case you get both quality and quantity.
I am also learning a lot on the web, including for example jazz guitar (but I feel I do miss a teacher to talk to) and programming in Python (that I then teach my own students in the physics context ;). Point is, though, I am fifty, and positively would not have had the right mindset and discipline as a teen.
I have as well. I thinks it's more because I, personally, learn better if it's something I want to know about rather than being forced to learn a set thing at a set time. For anyone else like me TH-cam is a great way to learn about the things that either interest me in general, interest me at the time, or have a purpose for me to learn. Examples being; learning how to weld for a personal project, and learning how to make archery bows from pvc pipe and even the bowstrings because my son is interested in archery and I'm broke...
I think the "Experts being radioed into a classroom" idea has real merit, we're just not implementing it correctly. Why make teachers give the same lecture over and over, when we could have a few of the world's best teachers do it almost perfectly, once?
Get all the kids to watch the lecture in their own time, or give them time to do it, but let them do it *ALONE*, so they can pause and rewind the video when they miss something or need to hear it again. Have them take notes on whatever they just couldn't understand.
Finally, have the students meet in the classroom with the teacher, and have a big open discussion about the lecture. Direct communication between the students and teacher, and the teacher can clear up all the misunderstandings, and they can all have a merry old time.
That is pretty genius
Alexandra Ipatova Wish it were my idea.
This will revolutionize education for sure!
nouidle Rofl.
This is happens already with platforms such as coursera.
Ooh, shots fired, CGP Grey!
I'd love to see a back-and-forth on the future of teaching between these two. They're both educated as physicists and teachers, work as TH-camrs, and seem to have come to very different ideas about how interactive technologies will change education.
iamihop Wait Derek has appeared on HI?! Man I am way behind times, I really need to catch up asap.
iamihop
Don't you mean Durk from Verasastium? ;D
iamihop Oh, damn, here I was thinking they delivering the promise of the extra guests.
as a high school student, I can tell you first hand that the teachers only function is to change the slides on the power point.
And get angry when we were too busy to finish something or forgot something.
And they get angry if they are wrong and you point it out
That they got from a free website XD
We didn't even have ppt when I was in highschool. I didn't even know it's a thing now.
and give basic examples and when exam comes they just pull out a question 10000000x harder than what they "taught"
Excellent point. Derek is a genius as he states "...making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment with other learners and a caring teacher" . Great video!
there are too many "research show" or "researchers found" in this video; I would say to keep up the spirit of your channel, when there are too many "claims" a reference or link to the study in the comment or the description would make it more true to the spirit of Veritasium. Just my two pennies!
Fair call! People have been asking for refs, which are all in my thesis, google Derek Muller PhD If you're interested and I'll add the link in the description
Thank you Derek. I think this video has a great lesson for life itself. A big thank you from this part of the world for all your great videos and themes.
+Veritasium when veritassium was small enough to respond to comments.
+Angel Pygs Small enough? 2 million subs is not really small...
Ziemboy0 at most, 75% of people watch the videos uploaded, and out of that only 50% actually comment.
What I think of school~
Everyday, millions of children march to school with drudgery and resistance. As young children, they go in open-hearted and free -- at night, they imagine that their tiny hands can reach up and touch the birds. The entire world is a new place and the fascination of beauty never subsides. But as older adolescents leaving their high school, they go close-minded and bondaged -- at night, they drink themselves into passing out and talk about the most popular thing to come, under obligation. The boys worry about their sexual conquests. The girls worry about their sexual appearance. Both worry about being social in a society that has made a weakness of kindness and an insult of emotion. Such a great change occurs between those who enter school and those who leave it.
Just think of the sheer idiocy of compulsory education. We threaten these children with imprisonment if they do not appear in class. Once in class, they spend their time either sleeping or completing tasks that are completely irrelevant to them. By giving them no option in their schooling, what have we taught them? The first lesson they learn is to detest learning, to hold unbridled sympathy for education. Take any man, put him in chains, and force him to recite poetry, or force him to play an instrument, or force him to farm the land -- and once he becomes a free man, do you think he will want to engage in that activity that was forced upon him? The scars on a slaves hands from working the fields, the memories of abuse of a house servant; given the right to do as they wish in the world, is it likely to think that they will return to that work which they were forced to do? And then consider schools. We force children to sit and overfeed them erroneous facts, faulty logic, damaged reasoning, concealed under the guise of "schooling." Once the mental faculties of these children are damaged, their heart grows an animosity towards learning, towards books, towards facts and knowledge. It is the greatest folly to make children hate learning, and the greatest danger to a real, living Democracy in any nation.
Because when the Red Sox win a baseball game, five universities in the state of Massachusetts riot. But when the United States regime supports a South American dictator known for slaughtering his own people, it's a whisper lost in the wind.
Our ignorance is their power.
Real knowledge is acquired by learning what interests you, through reading, investigation, practice, or any other desirable method. To become intelligent, you must engage in activity with the idea that are you learning because you want to, because knowledge is a goal. The path to conformity varies greatly from this. First, you engage in nothing, but allow cultural standards and social obligations to control you. Second, the idea of learning is to memorize random, perhaps unrelated and blatant facts -- true or untrue -- so that they may be recited upon command. Third, the goal is not knowledge, but a passing grade; they learn to for the sake of knowledge, but rather for the sake of social acceptance.
Take two children. Give the first freedom and liberty, give him a wealth of books and movies, give him teachers to aid him upon his request and a place that encourages art, creativity, and independence. Then take away the freedom and liberty of the second, require his presence in a classroom in front of a teacher, threaten him with a jail sentence if he does not go to his school. Give each of them ten or fifteen years, and check the development of each of them after this amount of time. The only forced to endure slavery may be able to stand in a lecture hall and he might be able to say to you, "George Washington was born in 1732 and died in 1799. In 1776, the Revolutionary War began where he acted as general. In 1783, it ended. In 1789, he was elected president a first time, and in 1792, he was elected president a second time." You are given dates and events, surely, it is true history. But take the child who was given freedom to do as he pleased, and he might be able to stand in a lecture hall and tell you, "In the sixteenth century, in Europe, a Spanish physician by the name of Michael Servetus was convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. Fleeing from his oppressors, he made it to Geneva, where the vindictive John Calvin had absolute authority. In earlier years, Servetus expressed his doubt on Calvin's protestant religion. Once captured by the authorities, Servetus was burned to death at the orders of John Calvin in 1533. They had him wear a hat of sulphur and used slow-burning wood, that the crowd could listen to screams for mercy for the duration of a half hour. One year after the death of this man, Calvin published a list of insults of his former enemy."
Be a rebel. Because being a conformist means admitting that the parts of you that matter are already dead.
But if that's the case, what does matter? The emotions that run rampant through our head, the thoughts that we tumble and toss over in our minds constantly -- sexual fantasies to memories of our friends and family, thoughts and ideas about our future, wishes and desires for our current life with those who are close to us. The idea of a living freedom, knowing that what you wish to do believe with your mind is unrestricted and what you wish to do with your body, so long as you harm none, is unlimited. Life matters to us because we make it matter; if we never told a lover we would miss them upon our departure for a long voyage, if we never told a family member that we dream of a time when oppression ended, if we never wrote a poem and hoped to give it to a friend whose face we haven't seen in years -- if we never cared about life, then life wouldn't matter. What matters is what we make matter. So in a few years, all the kids who graduate from high school will know that their grades never mattered, because even though so young, they already know that it won't be the grades they got that they think about upon their death bed.
Twenty years ago the textbooks used in history class just began to cover some of the issues of the four hundred years of oppression of the African race in this country.
Children who are forced into a school and forced to complete erroneous assignments learn only one thing: to hate education. I clearly demonstrated this truth earlier, but there is more to be learned from it. Take a slave. It could be a slave from any society, whether an African in colonial America or a Plebeian in the Roman Empire. For the entirety of their life, they labor. Their sweat, their tears, their blood, the bi-products of their toil seep into the ground and their garments. All they produce goes to the one who did not labor (and alas, our modern Capitalist system has managed to recreate these conditions). Inside every slave, there will be a growing hatred of their activity as a servant, a farmer, a manufacturer -- they will learn to hate what has been forced upon them without their consent. But inside some of them, there will be the kindling of hope for a dream. One day, they will hope to produce for themselves, knowing that what their hands reap will be what fills their stomach, and not the stomach belonging to idle hands. So, too, it is with our compulsary education. The more we are forced into schools and our minds filled with useless facts, the stronger our thirst grows for real education, for real knowledge. Few are like this, but we exist. Others simply remain politically and emotionally sedated, as the focus of their mind is the next test or the next prom, and not children enslaved in southeast asia or the meaning of life.
To every student who must endure the excuse of an education system that we have, I can only offer these words of hope... Educate yourself, not with school teachers, but with the books they wanted to ban. Teach yourself, learn, grow, and develop. Learn that the greatest asset education can offer is that of independence.
"If the teacher happens to be a man of sense, it must be an unpleasant thing to him to be conscious, while he is lecturing his students, that he is either speaking or reading nonsense, or what is very little better than nonsense.
...
"The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him, as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other.""
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 5, Chapter I, Part 3, Article II.
Quite an essay :P Good read though
Thanks, I guess.
tl;dr i'm so sorry :(
My god, this is beautiful!!!
iamihop Actually still no. Another thing you have to remember is that students are different. In many ways education can actually ruin your motivation to learn more. How do you know kids aren't self motivated to learn? Someone has to push them to learn? What do we learn in high school about math? Seriously? We don't learn anything about actual math, science(besides physics), history( besides AP courses) and language(look at how many people can actually speak two languages) It's literally all about the grades to go to a university, although in university it basically changes dramatically when you actually start learning things and actually get good professors that you payed good money for. Also you're talking about forcing yourself to learn math, think about why it was so boring? Did they really make math interesting for you? Did they really show you math? If anything there are lot of things about sociology and psychology that you ignore about kids. (look at a lot of unschooled children, usually MUCH less unhealthy stress, they probably learn more things THAT WILL ACTUALLY HELP THEM, and they aren't made into obedient little sheep in schools)
my teachers utterly fail at there job.
Oh man I can tell your not teachers are rubbish because you used 'there' instead of 'their'...
Even tho that was just a typo, my english teacher is actually the worst xD
Lehtaani i feal you man
+I am Jeffrey Da Pig : ever watched the movie "Idiocracy" ? Might change your mind on that particular subject ;)
+I am Jeffrey Da Pig You seem to think that for some reason the only type of information that is useful to people is the information they need for their groceries... Idiot.
very well explained. often i found lot of students and teachers are just confused not understanding what each other role are.
But here in India 🇮🇳 Internet and distance from classrooms ( so that students can learn from TH-cam on their own) has definitely revolutionized the Education (here I can watch your videos at the least).
What's amazing is that this was uploaded 7 years ago and still gaining comments! I agree that teachers are more educational coaches who help students manage learning - if done properly. Students need to learn how-to-learn for today and for the future when they have to teach themselves that special skill that will get them the job they want/need. The shame is that we don't have a way to reward inspirational teachers vs. ones who give easy A's. The students and their parents want the A, not necessarily the hard work needed to learn/earn that A. I'm constantly limited with "that's not how we did it last year". Limited in that I can't offer that extra experience, project or video because a teacher I work with doesn't want to, and all teachers of the same subject should be offering the same instructional material. What a pain!
We've got smartboards at school and honestly I don't quite get the point. It's exactly the same thing as a classic whiteboard except electronic.
Well my teachers didn't get it that way :p
***** Then what's the point of taking notes? Taking notes is so that it sticks in your head by writing it down. I think it's better because you can write on pre-loaded PDF's and since it's electronic, it's easier to do basically anything. You don't have to spend time erasing, etc.
***** No, not exactly. And I only look back at my notes when I need to study (in which most cases, tests are easy so I don't look back). Even if tests are more difficult, normally it's somewhere else where I study.
It makes everything alot easier and smoother, since its everything in one. It does need some improvements, but its still good:)
All of my teachers write on smart boards, but they still expects us to copy the notes down. I honestly don't see the point of even having them if they are going to be used like that.
The most efficient way for an individual to learn a topic is with a tutor that is well versed in the topic at hand....and that is the way that the nobility educated their children in times past.
one on one tutoring, paid privately between individuals. That was the way it was done since the Ancient Greeks. I'll say though, that was also the reason only 10% of people were educated. Not enough money and teachers to go around.
It will be revolutionized when you just install something on your brain and then you would say "I know Kung Fu"
like... an intersect?
Jeremiah B Wouldn't we all love to have The Matrix in real life?
Jeremiah B Sadly few people actually got that one haha. But still, made me smile.
Jeremiah B -Yes!!!! Hahahaha
Jeremiah B Like Big Hero 6 with Bay Max?
6:00 onwards: Thank you for pointing that out! That is what most people (and sadly most teachers) fail to understand.
I always learned effortlessly when I liked or respected my teachers.
Conversely I learned next to nothing when I hated my teachers.
I love predictions. They show us just how little we know. This was great! I never thought about it much, but when you look through history, effective learning is an inherently social activity. I hope this sentence is grammatically correct. I didn't feel the social interaction in English class.
I know this video is old, but for me TH-cam truly revolutionized education. I have learned so much stuff from this platform.. (regardless of topic) and nothing from school =] as ebulousDraconic wrote: "All public school did was make me not want to learn things!! It's TH-camrs like you who really made subjects interesting again!"
so, thank you, Derek! and the whole TH-cam community!
All these innovations "revolutionized" our learning. I'm sitting here, learning from a random video on the Internet - because I want to. Because it interested me.
I'm learning new specialized stuff every day from the internet from random people who are better in solving the specific problems that I ran into.
We just measure wrong. Schools are ...old.
It's like saying horses never changed and nothing revolutionized in transportation, because horses are still ...slow/old.
You are not actually learning anything from youtube. Unless it's a skill which you need to figure things out on yourself, things such as learning science can't come from a 10-20 minute youtube video. TH-cam hour long series of lectures might work but again that is basically except you can't ask teacher any questions. I am not saying don't watch educational vids, after all it feels good to know stuff, but treat it like entertainment.(Unless you are into coding, then I understand)
@@daksharora928 if you think that one can't learn from youtube then i think you probably got a slow and dumb mind
@@daksharora928 why just for coding? I learned a ton of coding from TH-cam and a lot of blog posts (on MSDN and many other websites), but I'm wondering why one couldn't learn something else on TH-cam?
@@daksharora928 as if learning interesting things at school wasn't entertainment to begin with
@@daksharora928 well actually i still remember that when Antarctica broke of from South America, the waters around Antarctica became "isolated" as warm water stopped being transported there and so Antarctica froze over before the ice age.
(i still gotta fact check that, but i do remember it)
Is it possible that it has nothing to do with the technology but the fact that the fundamental format/system of education has basically remained unchanged for far too long?
+arachnophilegrrl It's because the government has a monopoly on it and is much more concerned with instilling their "values" into you. Than actually teaching anything that's worthwhile.
+Mitjitsu I do not disagree.
+Mitjitsu What do you mean by "instilling their values"? The government is made up of made up of many different politicians with many different and opposing agendas.
+Mitjitsu Also, they want their electors happy.
Teachers are electors. Students aren't.
+arachnophilegrrl I don't disagree with you, but does this have to be bad? I guess the system of one teacher, a group of students works quite well.
There are teachers in this world that doesn't care about if the student is learning or not, they think being a teacher is just being in a class room and talk for 1 hour and leave. They think whether or not a student fail or succeed is up to the student to take in the information that is taught in class and not how the lesson is taught.
I can relate
This is why a good teacher is of vital importance. A dull teacher will make a student less likely to care or want to learn, even if they enjoy the subject on the whole.
“The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite...” I have to say, a lot of a teachers are quite bad at this job. If a student really wants to learn, the best way is to figure out how to inspire, challenge, and excite themselves. Then there really is no teacher needed!
I learned waaaaaaaaaaay more stuff from TH-cam and waaaaaaaaaay faster and easier than i learned anything ever at school...
Yup. Exactly my experience.
Lol, same. I probably learned just as much stuff from TH-cam and educational TV as I did from school.
EnigmacTheFirst
Oh,and more important i learned stuff that I actually care about lol
Same, I think everybody has their own preferred way of learning that stimulates them the most. Some enjoy large class rooms, others a hands on experience, and some enjoy learning alone.
The idea that all children need to conform to this one universal method of teaching is far too outdated to still be applied to modern day education.
yeah but you lack the apropriate judgment and knowledge to filter these informations. you need a teacher to teach you discretion and fundamentals trhrough which you'll judge the world around you.
before any education systems should be worked on we need to solidify what will be taught. there is way to many sources of bad information coming from the places where all information should be good. the main problem is that we let people do/become what they want instead of what they should. Simply wanting to be a teacher (and buying the degree), does not make good teachers (or anything else). We need to identify people with passion and ability and support them, not the way the current system works to cater to certain folks over others.
That's right. It's easy to get your degree with a 60% score and then forget what you learnt a year after your study. I'm always extremely skeptical about people who say 'passed is passed, right?'. No. There's an unbelievable difference between passing with 80-90% scores and passing on the edge of failing. Some people just don't get why you learn. You learn to understand your subject, gain expertise on your field. You don't learn to get a piece of paper saying you did this and that study
@@mudkip_btw also i really doubt that there is much to learn in order to pass as a highschool teacher, considering all your going to be teaching is highschool students you don't need a heavy background in that subject, nor much knowledge. and in general I think that throughout the years teachers have to go to uni they should be taught how to TEACH and engage with their students as well as have the confidence to not tolerate bad behaviour.
How crazy is it that 6 year old Veritasium videos still show their quality and care even to this day. I could watch a 7 year old video and a 2 month old video and both of them are just stellar. Veritasium you are a mammoth of greatness bro.
If there is no significant difference, it seems to me we can safely get rid of the "not good" teachers. Keep the good ones but replace the lackluster teachers with video and animation.
Massive cost savings and the kids are only going to remember the good teachers anyway. :-)
Kinan Radaideh
its ok wtf stop spamming
I agree. Fire them and make the economy worse.
nathnolt
We can't afford to make actions taking "the economy" into account as much as we used to nowadays. There's just too much change coming up, that will replace human workers.
I think you would have to look at two things. Test scores and student evaluations. If you think back, there are probably two or three teachers who really inspired you with their own passion for either teaching or the topic. I think many of my teacher friends went into it because they "love children". That's great; but what if they went into teaching because they loved *teaching*?
There are things I love to do which make me a great teacher. If I am uninterested in it, my lack of passion overflows onto whoever has the misfortune to be listening. What if you recorded me teaching what I love? What if you recorded others teaching what they love? Put those together in a video and you have a real teaching aide.
The scientists we see on television; Bill Nye, Neil Tyson, Kawasaki, the guy who did that Connections show... Passion!
But then what happens when you get a teacher who has no passion for anything he/she is teaching in third grade? You get low scores and uninterested students who cannot remember that instructor's name five years later.
It's not just passion but it makes such a big difference, it is difficult to ignore.
David Buschhorn judging wether a teacher is good or bad with test scores would become unreliable very quickly, specially if, as you propose in the first comment, we're considering "getting rid of them", and would even cause harm, think about it, in the long (and not so long) run, teachers will get a mindset of "I'll be fired if the students fail", and conversely into "I'll keep my job if I give high grades regardless of how much students have actually learnt".
This is already happening in my country in fact, schools (specially in low class areas) say that if kids get low scores they'll drop out and fall into a life of crime, while this may be true the solution they chose was to "suggest teachers to overlook small mistakes", meaning they began pressing them to let students pass grades without actually learning, and some have actually been fired over this (this also happens in schools for rich kids, although for different reasons)
That would leave the student evaluations, for starters how much the students like a teacher doesn't necessarily measure how good of a teacher he is (I've met plenty are poorly skilled but "cool" teachers, and very good educators that their students hate), and (although not in all cases) can also be manipulated through the presviously mentioned scores subject. In a scenario where teachers are selected through student evaluations, its not a longshot to picture one saying "talk well about me and I'll let you pass".
The problem is that most instructors don't make learning interesting to students. If a revolution happens, that's where it needs to occur.
Why should we not abandon teachers all together and hire actors? If one technology is as good as another for transmitting information and the difference is really in terms of the communicator, then why not hire communicators rather than experts in the field, especially those experts that are not in fact communicators ? William James poses a similar question in his article "The PhD Octopus."
@@jaradams
I'm pretty sure you know the answer, but: Because you need both the knowledge and the communications skills. Sure, if an actor is also a teacher, that would be a plus. Though just because they're an actor does not mean they have the drive to teach well, especially for long periods of time.
@@jaradams Students aren't stupid. They can spot a fake, and it's a turn-off. Over a whole semester, you can't feign the enthusiasm for a subject that gets a student enthusiastic about it too. That enthusiasm, which is why the teacher got the expertise in the first place, in turn becomes why the teacher wants to teach. A good teacher also intuitively understands the subject's intrinsic value, and that's crucial to constructive social interactions between a teacher and student. That intuitive understanding is born of the expertise itself, and it just can't be faked.
It's true, generally, that teachers enter the field with more knowledge of the subject than ability to communicate it, even if they took an education degree with courses in pedagogy. Nothing teaches like doing. Teachers learn in the classroom, too. A teacher who really wants to teach picks up the social and communication skills they need as they try to get the subject across, day in, day out. Teachers without "the fire" for teaching don't pick up these skills, get frustrated, and eventually leave the classroom. Also, vitally, teachers end up learning there's no one-size-fits-all communication skill set for all subjects at all levels; you have to acquire different communication skills depending on exactly what and whom you're teaching. That too is something subject experts pick up a lot better than trained communicators, because they're attentive to what students "get" (and don't) about the subject - and why.
Your proposal really misses the video's point about how *social* education is.
@Soulsphere001 "Most instructors don't make learning interesting to students" - my, that's a sweeping generalization! Do you know for a fact most students feel their teachers don't make learning interesting? Could it be a conclusion you've reached from a modicum of observation, i.e. talking with other students who also didn't "get it"? Or is it simply the case that you don't find learning in a classroom interesting, and you're generalizing from that? Just where did you get this notion?
By the way, no instructor makes "learning" interesting to students. What student ever was interested merely in "learning"? Students grow interested in SUBJECTS. In fact, that's not even wholly accurate - they grow interested first in certain aspects of subjects, and then, if their curiosity is rewarded, they branch out.
But, in the first place, students have to show up with some desire to learn, some want-to. The best teacher in the world can't make a lesson interesting to a student who's staring at his phone the whole time.
Generalizing the way you have is unhelpful because you can't have a "revolution" to solve a problem if you can't (a) clearly define the problem or (b) show that it even really exists.
@@joshualavender"Over a whole semester, you can't feign the enthusiasm for a subject that gets a student enthusiastic about it too" Have you ever seen John Houseman's performance in The Paper Chase or Robin Williams' in Dead Poets Society? Houseman had no knowledge of law at all. Williams probably knew some poetry, but if they'd given him a well-written botany lecture, he would have performed it in the same inspirational, challenging, and exciting manner. and I know lawyers who studied law because of Houseman and students who studied poetry because of Williams
" Teachers without "the fire" for teaching don't pick up these skills, get frustrated, and eventually leave the classroom. " my, that's a sweeping generalization! I agree that some quit. others are just too committed to the job and have no alternative, so they stick it out. even more suffer from dunning-Kruger, they believe they are good when they aren't. I had an instructor as an undergraduate who was a terrible teacher in the minds of almost everyone I took his classes with. while he clearly loves the material that he taught, he seemed to be more interested in proving that he knew more than you did than in making sure you learn something. when I returned to my alma mater as an adjunct instructor 30 years after I graduated the school, he was still there teaching the same way.
but in the end, I think you miss my point. we are told in the video that the technology doesn't matter and I accept it.
Soulsphere001 suggested what we needed was an improvement in teaching. while some things clearly require in-classroom demonstrations, many materials do not. for those. a trained communicator who may or may not know anything about the subject matter may be the most successful kind of instruction possible, successful in the sense that it produces students with an understanding of the material and the knowledge needed to go forward. in the last year, I suspect more than half of all students have taken their classes solely online, entirely by watching videos. I know this is true at my Institution. And these students have been and will be awarded degrees based upon these video classes. I am suggesting is to genuinely buy into the idea of video instruction and forget about requiring PhD expertise in the classroom, instead devoting that expertise to creating the best material to be presented by the best presenters.
"The most important thing a teacher does is making a student feel important, to guide them during the learning process and get them excited"
You must live in a different world. Yes I've had such teachers but I can count them on 2 fingers... the majority of them drove me to become a school dropout and robbed me from my personal time for being who I am.
I have ASD and ADD and because I have a great amount of imagination, I read slow due to my mind imagining every single detail about the text that I read. Due to me constantly having to fidget, rock my chair etc to sooth my mind, teachers constantly punished me for something I have no control over. Supposedly less than 1 in 1000 people have an IQ as high as mine and my mind is a sponge that soaks up information. I lack communication skills and social skills however and I get terribly uncomfortable by strange smells, bright colours, noises and so on.
If you combine that with teachers nor parents who are aware of the underlying issues, you've got a perfect recipe for disaster for the education of the kid and that is exactly what happened to me. Not only was school very slow and boring to me, I also got picked on by nearly every teacher I ever had. The fact that as a kid, I didn't understand the social repercussion of disagreeing with or correcting teachers when they were wrong, made my childhood a living hell. I still don't have a degree and even if someone would pay me to go back to class and teacher, the idea just gives me so much anxiety that I decline.
For people like me (>150 million people in the world), video and audio courses ARE the ideal way to learn and unleash all the potential. I now work in IT and everywhere I've come so far, I've been considered exceptionally good at what I do. I've been promoted over peers with university degrees and much more experience, learn a lot faster and my ability to think out of the box makes me solve problems that the average person thinks is impossible.
I don't have my teachers to thank for that however. After I dropped out of school, I started to learn by myself from whatever information was freely available on the internet. Especially video courses were of great help to me to advance fast enough but since everyone is different, I'm sure audio books or just regular books without a teacher could work for them.
The regular education system IS imo a very bad system because, like you say, it goes too slow for some, too fast for others and only a portion of the students are helped with it. Many teachers (from my experience most) are bullies and don't care about individuals. No teacher has ever unlocked an interest or motivation for me, quite the opposite in fact. And even though the media reports that students have suffered so badly during Covid-19 lockdowns, it's only a few that have the loudest voices. When I talk to people, most say the transfer and absorption of information is not the issue, just the lack of social interaction, which you can have outside of school too. Without the lockdowns, I'm sure a lot of people would prefer (at least part-time) remote education where they can learn in their own time at their own pace and still see friends outside of class.
If the education system would allow that choice, class rooms would only be half as full and the students who actually need a teacher to be present would be better off as well because they could get more personal attention. You'd have less traffic on the roads, less polution, happier people, ... it'd be a win-win solution for everybody on the planet.
You'll never change an education system run by idiots earning six-figure Union salaries!
@@pyhead9916 Who votes those idiots in power? "Regular people" do not realize the power the have with their vote. Unfortunately they don't use that vote the way they should. The last generations have become selfish pricks, they don't want to pay taxes anymore. Taxes pay for education, law enforcement, the country's infrastructure, health care, pensions, etc. And in return, you get a good economy that provides people with salaries that can easily pay those taxes.
The whole world (not just the US) is now overtaken by short sighted, selfish people who favor short term gains over long term gains... it's been going on for decades now and what remains of education? infrastructure? health care? pensions? ... Everything is in decay.
And the sad thing is, we're at a moment in history where we all need to put our heads together and work on solutions. Instead people just look for others to blame. All they need to do is reflect on the situation and use their right to vote for a better future. And that's not voting for the (usually corrupt) politicians that try to sway you with lower taxes. Vote for people who have a plan for the future. It might get a little more expensive but the longer people wait, the worse things are going to get.
I do agree with you that we're in a nearly hopeless situation (just look at the COP26 fiasco), but just pointing the fingers at politicians is wrong. "We" put them in charge and "we" have the ability to take that power away from them.
I feel like there would just be half as many schools.
It's become like a tradition to come back to this video to remind myself on how important education is and how important teachers are. Learning is supposed to be a fun process. As kids we are born with no awareness and are curious to learn, so any questions we have, it is very acceptable for it to be listened to and be respected enough to be answered.
"The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn." So true and I wish all educational institutions understood this better
That last remark you made..
You forgot to add "For some people."
I hate classrooms and learn a lot more effectively and efficiently on my own.
I think TH-cam and PBS cartoons have taught me equally as much as teachers. Once I could actually understand words and sentences, I could completely comprehend the English stories in my books whereas my peers required the teacher to translate and explain the story (I'm not a native to the language). This was because I did know how to comprehend English and even speak it, so reading it was a quick process.
Similarly in science, a lot of the topics that our teachers would teach us, I would already have a basic concept about. And even if I knew nothing, I already had at least heard the name of the topics, so that sense of familiarity made me buzzing with excitement.
Education is a method, everything else are tools for that method, and since education is about people, it will always be about how the person is educated. The method must always keep the people as the focus.
I totally agree.
As a long time college professor I agree with and can confirm the conclusion of this video. Of course, not all teachers are equally effective by any means (as we see when interviewing prospective candidates) but the best don't just share information, they inspire and guide students on their own learning journey. Its a pleasure to see that take place every term...
"What's important is what's going on inside the learner's head." Absolutely right. If you want a 'revolution' in education, the way to do it is to make learning fun, so the learner wants to participate. Gamification could be the answer.
Or simply properly answering the question "why are we learning these 'useless' things in school" before they even ask
@@revimfadli4666 This. No one is interested in learning a topic which their brains declare as garbage and give up on processing it, no matter how fun the gameplay could be. It could be maths for some, a language for others and for some others it's history.
@@angelas5099 Amen. I think every class should start with a pitch that answers the question: "Why would I ever want to know this?" Providing a meaningful answer would motivate children to engage with the learning process.
I don't think Gamification is THE answer. It might help with retaining enough knowledge for the exam, but if students don't have a way to use it practically in their life. They'll just sit passively without the passion for learning.
@@Drekromancer good point, but many students will simply disagree with the viewpoint of the teacher. It takes real immersion into a subject to start to appreciate it.
Only if teachers cared more. 6:17 my math teacher in middle school was the best she tried everything she could to make us understand and learn and often made math jokes that associate to the subject.But in the first math class in high school our teacher told us that none matter and are important unless we make something out of our selves and didnt care who actually listened in class and who didnt,she just told us the lecture and thats it.And on the first test 26 of 30 of us got the worst grade (1) and the 4 guys were taking private lessons.
Three things "limit" education: student motivation, student potential (IQ), and societal infrastructure/investment. All the technologies, etc. are really minutiae in this equation.
even thought his whole talking during this entire video is intresting，but he still thinks that we might be bored so he quickly shifts between dozens scenes love you dude
This video reminds me of the time pre corona when schools were offline and not like how they have "evolved" now.(online)
I have had few if any teachers that made me feel important, many of them seemed to go out of their way to put me down and tell me I would never amount to anything. Many Teachers would not allow talking in class and would make you feel stupid if you asked any questions. My C++ Teacher Quote "I am not here to teach you I am here to make sure you read the book" he also would refuse to look at the programs and if you asked for help he would just tell you to redo the entire program. One teacher I had would only lecture and when I went to office hours he would recite what he said in class. I told him I didn't understand it in class and I would like him to explain it a different way and he responded "That is the only way I know how to teach."
I have never had a teacher ever go out of their way to help me, they used the excuse that they could not give anyone special treatment. You say that education is based on the interactions between teachers and students? Are there really teachers who care what the student has to say? Are there any teachers that care at all about the students? I have never seen any.
you can learn c++ by yourself at home, you don't need a teacher anyway
***** So you are saying we don't need good teachers or an education system that works? Sounds like the points that elected Donald.
VodShod we need a different system, we need education but done in a different way, and sometimes people can learn some stuff by themselves without teachers, just by reading books and tutorials.
maybe classes should be separated into people that need a teacher and a more traditional system and people that don't need a teacher and can learn by themselves if you give them the books and tools.
***** I understand. I have designed my own education system that I felt would be much better than the current system, and could improve the current system if implemented it.
I believe we should try implementing some of the things that the Finland educational system has done: shorter school days, hour long lunches, no homework, etc. The learning environment there also emphasizes collaboration over competition, which has consistently helped students' grades skyrocket. Teachers are also paid as much as doctors, and only 1/10 people who apply to be one is actually a teacher. The job is considered to be hella prestigious, which it should be; teachers cultivate the future of society: children. children make up a fraction of our population, but a whole of our future.
I would choose Vsauce or Veritasium or AsapScience and not school. These guys learned me more things in one day than teacher in one year...
These are pretty good to learn fun facts or make a topic more easily understandable, but you won't learn engineering or quantum mechanics relying on these.
However, I feel like MOOCs are a valid alternative to classroom teaching. Good teachers will always surpass computers, but they are sadly quite rare. So, compared to your (stereo?)typical I-get-ma-paycheck teachers, serious online education (ocw.mit.edu) might be a valid alternative.
I guess time will tell.
misakstefl These videos show cool facts and stuff, but it pretty much ends there. You won't learn topics in depth rather than a teacher teaching a lesson.
except for grammar
housewars1 You mean me? Sorry its hard to learn 3 languages at once.
Jessy Pelletier-Lemire I think things like the MOOC's are good for those of us who are already motivated and do things ourselves. But Veritasium has a point in the "inspiring" part since even those of us who are already motivated in general might not be inspired for specific subjects.
Lastly, we'll NEVER replace teachers with technology in early grades because of the baby sitting aspect--schools are also a type of day care.
Nail hit firmly on head!! (having been a teacher for 35 years I've finally come to the same conclusion as you do here). Thank you!
Uhhm, well this is the first time I mostly disagree with you. I think technology could have played a massive role in changing the education system, and I think that indeed, the argument that it's not changing because of the momentum of the huge institution that the education system is, is spot on. I'm only 20, and yet I lived through the "learn to do math because you won't always walk around with a calculator in real life" period. And now, well... I do, actually.
I learned more from the internet than in school, without a trace of a doubt. I don't have an anormally strong imagination, and yet I can think of so many ways the technology we have now could be used to teach more efficiently than a teacher.
Another very very important point that wasn't addressed, is that the educational institution is still centered around memorizing things. Technologies are more apt to help us develop cognitive skills, problem solving skills, etc. Memory is the one thing technology truly freed us from, we all have google in our pocket, we don't need to memorize things anymore, so it's simply silly that we're still trying to.
How many dumb people do you see on the internet?
Algiark
I'm not even sure where to begin to respond to this
Sounds like you went to a bad school if you're memorizing things. It should be learning and critical thinking. Not just random facts
dominic508 I also get the feeling that I learn more from the internet, but that's just a feeling. I think if I looked at it objectively, I learned the most fundamental and most important skills at school, like writing, reading, basic logic, how to deal with people and socialize, and even how to learn and experiment. Most of these are pretty much a requirement to being an adult these days, whereas the internet can teach more factual stuff like politics, history, science. In short, school teaches you how to behave and how to think, and the internet teaches you facts or how to research facts.
UncleRob199 That's the "social setting" stuff. Indeed, home-schoolers have argued for years that kids can learn the whole syllabus at home just fine, and test results often bear this out.
I think the reason technology never changed anything in the classroom is that the basic idea of having a teacher that lectures, and students who daydream or talk to each other in the meantime, never changed. All the technological solutions did was attempt to create a mechanical teacher, as it were, that worked the same way as the flesh and blood ones.
Couldn't agree more, I think from my school experience I was constantly annoyed and frustrated at school by my teachers because a good number didn't really care they were just there to get paid and it was just a job to them. Some tried to inspire but were constrained by exam boards. I can't tell you the number of times I heard "That's true but we're not going into it because it's not on the exam". I can only go off England because my experience of education so far has just been here but I'll use my example. When I was 11 I went to the best school in the area and I was put in the middle group set which was given the letter F and we were always told H was the top set for the most intelligent kids. So from day 1 you're given a catagory of what they say you're capable of, this comes down to what exams you're entered into and what grades you'll achieve. So I had some teachers tell me I'd not be going to college (here we go to college at 16 then University at 18-19) and one in particular told me I'd never amount to much and several when I asked about University told me I'd never make it there but other students in the top set would go. So I made it to college and there it was the same again the "It's not on the exam paper" answer and again the frustration and annoyance set in, again told I'd not go to university and I'd not get to do what I wanted to do and again I felt I had to start to accept that. So after college I made it to university and I did my degree in Biomedical Sciences and this is where the change occured, because I was not once told at university "It's not on the exam" or not to explore a particular idea I was always encouraged to do so and from there I went from strength to strength, finished by degree with one of the highest marks attainable and now I'm all lined up to do a masters with ties to a PhD afterwards. I often wonder what might have happened if I had a teacher to encourage me along through school and in college to push me that little bit and tell me to go and explore my ideas and go forward, to have open discussions in class rather than "the text book says, it will be on the exam" I think that could make all the difference in the world.
"Some tried to inspire but were constrained by exam boards."
Couldn't be more relatable. Some teachers I have are fully conscious and outright say (just as it's stated here) that the entire point of education is to turn kids into fact-knowing computers who just know half of wikipedia to succeed for exams. Yet they keep giving as facts and terms to learn for the exams. It is sort of hypocritical, but also understandable.
"The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn." except the problem is 99% of the teachers don't know that lmao
Because of poor funding, most teachers nowadays are either people who couldn't find work anywhere else or people who haven't lost their passion of teaching yet, while the actually good teachers go to good universities and bring the University gets even more funding due to them, so the rich get richer even in the education system. I mean most schools tried to put physical schooling into computers, gotta love funding.
@@theblinkingbrownie4654 Yeah I can agree with you that the education sector is underfunded and since the pandemic, the governments keep proving that they couldn't care less about education, but I don't agree that that is the sole reason why teachers in high schools and elementary schools are just horrible... not as in horrible at teaching but just horrible people in general. I've had some atrocious teachers that had major mental health issues that they took out on students, like unhappy wives taking out their aggression on male students is a common occurrence... and best of all, not the underpaid teachers but the ones high on the paygrade and age. I thought it was all teachers but now in university, all the professors feel a lot more like people that are really passionate about their studies and want to share that, no dickheads.
@@dimitrijepesic2607 A federal legislation proposal for the US directs funding towards schools, counselors, and teacher training...but it's only for one country and can't last forever. But, hey, that's a great start!
@@dimitrijepesic2607 the thing is to be a highschool teacher you don't need to be that passionate or even knowledgeable to get a job, and there will always be plenty of replacements for you, however uni professors have to absolutely love their subject to get through all the learning in order to work there.
@@timayovyk2036 I absolutely agree dude. Man I hated 80% of my teachers up to UNI, here it's the opposite. Most are sooo passionate about what they teach, and truly want you to do good because they want more people to do what they love.
As a teacher I fully stan this! No one can possibly replace a teacher. Helping students make connections is something good teachers, teaching is essentially facilitation, when you can light a spark and guide students to explore their best selves and learn a lot more in the process!
Cool video! Now get back to my boring homework from physics....
Physics? Lucky. I've got to write a paper for world history. By tonight. That I haven't started yet.
BioniclesaurKing4t2
I feel better now about my almost done homework, thanks.
BioniclesaurKing4t2 You're late! ;)
Je ne peux qu’applaudir !
Bravo !
:D
t'es là toi :o
Nice video, I wish faculties in India would understand what you are stating. Here a teachers job is to give notes and make sure every student passes. Literacy should be treated equally with creativity. Which lacks a lot.
Couldn't agree with you more!
The best teacher is one's own ability and desire to discover something new. Memorizing ideas that are already known isn't true learning.
Ok, so what's new and earthshattering here? This is Dewey and Montessori and Papert and Sarason and Holt and many others without the references.
The bigger issue I have here is that it says nothing about transferring the agency of learning to the learner. All sticky learning is intrinsically motivated. We may "learn" something for a short time for a transient reward (a passing test score, for example.) But what sticks with us is the stuff we wanted to learn more about, after the class has ended.
Here's what will transform education: Giving learners a greater freedom to learn. Moving the focus of schooling away from curriculum and knowledge that we decide is important (which is now everywhere) to the process of learning. Moving our emphasis away from student as product toward student as ongoing, master learner who can make use of everything that's now available to her.
The huge promise of technology will only be realized when we situate our discussions around it in the context of learning and increasing student autonomy and agency. As long as we see oursleves as the arbiters of what will be learned, when and how, the "revolution" will never take place.
Great response, Will. There is truly nothing new stated here. The love of control over content dominates versus instilling the capacity to analyze, critique, discern, make decisions, reflect, and, even more radically, to allow them to learn what they actually find value in. This will continue to limit our kids and the tools and resources at their disposal.
6:00 *Only one in 10,000 may actually live up to this ideal. The vast majority of "teachers" are simply glorified babysitters.*
TH-cam is a great method of teaching. I've learnt so much from channels like this, the vSauce channels, sci show and others :D
I agree. If the job of a teacher is to get students excited about learning, I feel like one of the best things they could do is say "Hey everyone, let's sit and watch Numberphile for an hour."
As a former teacher at both the high school & college levels, I'll say this---
KUDOS, you're right on the mark. Happy Trails
I get what Veritasium says here,
but he is just Wrong.
As CGP Grey pointed out years ago, this time is different.
Mechanization and all that DOES change the world. Or rather: It would, if Humans wouldnt reject it.
But obvious fact is, the Schools will not stay like they are for a Billion Years, duh.
I usually love your videos but for a physicist you are taking an awful lot of things for granted in this one.
I don't know how you can say something like:
"And making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment"
with a straight face. Some social environments hinder learning, even with well-intentioned teachers. A lot of schoolwork serves as a barrier simply by placing a demand on the students' time and energy that would be better spent on some other activity.
I'm sad that you failed to mention autonomy as well. High quality learning happens when people have control over the pace, level of depth and even the material. Again, this is very tough to achieve in a classroom setting. I would argue that most of the learning actually happens outside of class when students can think over the material alone or in small self-selected groups.
I can confirm this. The fact that some school environments makes the learning process slow is completely true. I am currently homeschooled, but i have gone on two different schools aswell.
At school i noticed myself using a lot more time on the same thing i do in no time now at home. It felt like it was so many unnecessary things implemented, wich didnt really have any thing to do with learning. I teach myself now, with the help of the internet and i have absolutely no problems.
I got so little done on the schools i went to, that it almost came to the point where i did more school related things at home, than at the acual school. I feel like im much more concentrated at home, and i learn to think myself instead of turning to a teacher as soon as i am stuck with a task.
Schools have their advantages over homeschooling, but as far as i have experienced, i learn a lot better at home an easier.
Personally i would choose Homeschooling over a public school any day.
Anyways, sorry for my lacking English, it is not my native language.
Have a nice day :)
I can't speak to your point about the tension between social and autonomous learning, and it sounds like an interesting one, but I just want to point out that his degree is in physics education, not physics. He may be oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, but I don't think it's fair to assume he's entirely naive about how one learns physics.
Elliott Collins
The main purpose schools serve in our society is to watch over kids while the parents are at work. Many teachers, and excellent teachers especially, are in denial about this. They want to believe that they are an indispensable part of the learning process.
He even said it himself: most of the learning happens when the student grapples with the problem herself. There's some role for teachers for explaining why you would want to learn something and as a help of last resort when the student is stuck. Or to suggest materials on a subject.
But the best thing a school can do for a student is to get out of the way and let them learn in their own way.
effortless35
You are saying exactly what i have experienced! I agree with every point :)
***** When in school I was always wondering why we needed the 20 minute lecture on 2+2=4, Students should be separated by: How they learn (visual, understanding, repetition, etc.)
Past knowledge (What you know before the lesson)
Learning speed( How fast they can comprehend something)
WOW! the end was so deep I found some diamonds and uranium
Uranium is found on the surface and so are diamonds sometimes.
Go for magma.
CapnTates
Magma is just lava under the surface - which, yes can be many kilometers under the surface but also just some meters.
CapnTates Active volcanoes contain magma very close to the surface.
Go for molten iron.
go so deep you can mine on stars on the other side of the planet?
CapnTates I really should check my facts before I post...
"Inside the learner's head". Exactly! That's why some people succeed and others fail. My parents treated both my brother and me equally. In fact, they went out of their way to do so and pointed out each decision they made to accomplish this. They wanted us to know that there was no favorite.
For Christmas, birthdays, etc., I asked for electronic project sets, chemistry and other science sets, building sets (Lego, Erector sets, etc.) and other things that helped me to learn.
My brother asked for toys and sporting equipment.
I've spent the last 40 years designing advanced electronic systems.
My brother has spent the last 40 years bankrupt, unable to get a credit card, and indebted to family and friends to the point no one will speak to him again.
The only difference between us was what was "Inside the learner's head".
This rather bears out what I was once told by my friends Dad, saying 'it's not about WHAT you learn - it's more about HOW you learn'.
You inspire me to learn man
Yeah, that was a failure of the education system I was in. I barely remember the teachers I had. Very few of them had any impact on me except to hinder the learning process for me. For the most part, I remember the ones who hindered me, and even then, just barely. Give me an automated learning tool (a book, a video, a computer program) any time over teachers (with occasional access to teachers to answer specific questions).
As a professor, I agree with Veritasium! The most essential part of education isn't just the content, but the social interactions and skills learned. To be honest, very few of us will remember all the content of a course taken one year ago. Still, most likely, we will not forget an interaction or an anecdotal detail or an unrelated comment that the professor made.
No matter how well its presented, the student still has to understand the material individually and care enough to study it
"The job of a teacher is to excite and inspire their students to learn." In that case, I'm afraid, in my experience, they've almost all failed miserably at their job.
In fairness, I knew that before I heard this definition. The fact is learning is a universally pleasing human experience, and yet teachers and schools manage to make it as dull and tedious as possible way too often. It's basically institutionalized clinical depression.