Item — HN Reader

I have two kids in high school. It's frustrating to me that the teachers spend so much of their time encouraging kids to make their writing more interesting, and less direct, and padded to meet word length criteria.

They'll then spend the first few years of their career unlearning this and attempting to write as directly and clearly as possible with as few words as possible.

2 comments

This is like complaining that they teach the Bohr model in science classes until they reach chemistry.

The ideas, concepts and expectations can be refined after you've learned the foundational knowledge, skills and history required to do so.

A lot of "why do we do things like that" questions students will naturally have can be answered with "because we used to do things like this/we need to avoid things like this/etc"

Keeping outdated models in the curriculum needs to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Some of them are detrimental to the learning process and should be relegated to a history of science class—skip directly to current understanding; others are useful because they're developmentally appropriate for younger students. Someone who has a background in science pedagogy would be the proper person to make that decision for the Bohr model.

I can’t guess how old they are but there is some sense in doing that if you think about it like math exercises. It makes for terrible prose but the only way to get the ability to write more complicated sentences is to practice writing them, even when they are not necessary.

The problem is that teachers stop pushing complexity for complexity’s sake way to late.