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Most schools are arranged such that students move between 5-7 classes daily. If each class has 20-30 students, a teacher might have 100-200 students/year. Does any adult in this system fully understand any one child? If the parents are checked out, the kid's essentially orphaned.
High Tech High is succeeding with an alternative model in which two teachers with broad, compatible backgrounds (English + social sciences, math + physical sciences, for example) collaborate with the same single group of kids. IMO spreading this model would have tremendous impact
Because the two teachers are working together, they can plan in increments of *days* rather than *class periods,* which means that kids work on projects in sensible intervals. Because the adults really get to know the kids, they can iterate toward what works for them specifically
This is the closest I've seen to a homeschool model that can scale to a similar size as the schools we're used to. Assuming you keep class sizes reasonable, I really think this can work. Age-mixing + matching teacher pairs to students on the basis of interest would make this 🔥
There's a documentary on one of these schools I *strongly* recommend — Most Likely to Succeed, available on Amazon: smile.amazon.com/Most-Likely-Su…
"My daughter had always been a good student. Always loved school. Then suddenly, in the fourth grade... just, kind of quit. She wasn't interested in school anymore. She'd struggle to get out of bed, she'd fake being sick. Getting her to complete her homework was a total battle."
So the documentarian and his wife requested a meeting with their daughter's teacher after a bad math test. They knew she wasn't working at the level she was capable of.
Her mother asked her what she was feeling in math class. She said "I just look up, and I'm not interested."
Her mother asked her what she was feeling in math class. She said "I just look up, and I'm not interested."
The teacher explains to this little girl that she's building character, that when she gets to college things are going to get really tough, and she needs to learn "perseverance." She needs to learn what it means to "do her best." 
"Now, later... I'll tell her that school seems meaningless now, but later, when she's applying to college or when she's looking for a job, she'll understand what this was all for. She needs to take this seriously now because one day, she'll see that this will all make sense..."
"But after spending two years working on this film, I now worry that these things that I've told my daughter and my son are a lie."
