social.noyu.me

man we are in such a bad place if textbooks die out as a way of learning. i am not going to tell you the traditional system of education is the best way for everything, but i think that textbooks have incredible value for learning about grammar for second languages, for example

@hikari this might be a bit of a surprising statement given our background, but we don't really agree with this. textbooks are very useful and we think they should stick around as something people can reference, but we don't feel like they are necessarily a good way of learning. the "introduction to that thing -- but only for people who already know it" meme captures the essence of what we see as the problem (even though we own our fair share of that type of textbook)

@hikari it feels like what you want from traditional education is something like "a structured curriculum, including appropriate amounts of direct instruction"?

the instructors we've found most effective have had a particularly impressive ability to build curricula and lectures that don't actually contain too much "textbook" type material but instead fundamentally seem to focus on *reshaping worldviews and patterns of thinking*

@hikari e.g. there is a particular style of "fancy-university academia-brained usually-bottom-up abstraction building" approach to EE/CS especially but also other disciplines that we've noticed many of the "globally top-ranking" schools have, and which we are *really* drawn to. but this is... not something that comes directly from or via textbooks? it's just a particular _vibe_?

@hikari this worldview-reshaping vibe comes not only from worked examples in lectures but also a *particular* style of building guided homework, labs, and projects (which, incidentally, thus drags in a lot of out-of-scope-for-this-discussion problems and criticisms regarding TAs and labor relations)

@hikari the thing that really frustrates us, that we don't get and don't know what to do about, is that basically all of our own attempts to teach other people things using this vibe have not only failed but often seem to get explicitly rebuffed

we have no idea why or whether it is even something that we ourselves are doing wrong

@hikari we unfortunately didn't get a "fair" exposure to second-language learning in school (we did Mandarin and stumbled hard into the realization that normal curricula are completely unsuitable for heritage speakers), but what we've seen of (American) first-language English grammar instruction is *completely worthless*

@hikari for reasons that we also don't understand, compulsory education English teachers seem vaguely allergic to grammar, and *especially* allergic to "more academic" analysis of things such as tense–aspect–mood (imo the hardest part of English grammar)

we ended up getting taught this by our father who presumably learned it from some (possibly-non-US) english-as-a-*second*-language teaching material

@r oh yes first-language english grammar instruction is universally awful as far as i can tell

@r different kinds of awful depending on where you live! but awful

@hikari which is really weird! right??

like, academic linguistic analysis of English is actually really good and imo rather accessible as far as academia goes, and we have so much ESL curricula around the world. but it feels as if compulsory-education teachers just go "lalala i can't hear you" towards all of this?

@r it's because 1) native speakers of a language do not realise that they already know how their own language works better than anyone can teach them, 2) the purpose of teaching grammar in schools tends to be to force someone to speak in the Preferred Manner, not to improve understanding