The US education system only has one mode, and thats to survive in a slim way with overworked staff and huge classrooms. 40 kids in a math class is seen as normal.

Everything you see of its character, including emphasizing tests and practice, follows from that. Talking about good UX is miles away.

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borroka 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's a problem that goes beyond the United States, overworked staff, and constraints in general, although these are legitimate concerns. I studied in a non-US country, but the attention paid by teachers to pedagogy was virtually zero.

I mean, we had five years of English classes in high school, and by the end of high school, less than five out of 30 people in my cohort were able to string a couple of sentences together in English. And my class was made up of serious, studious young people. It seems to me that the time was not well spent, but did the teacher, a caring and generally competent person, reflect on the poor results? I highly doubt it.

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ako 2 days ago | parent [-]

Most teachers want to do better, but are stuck in a system where they're not able to. Overwhelmed with large classes, small budgets, ridgid programs, demanding parents, it's hard to also dedicate energy to reflection or student attention.

	▲	borroka 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Most teachers have very little clue about pedagogy; let's be honest about it. And it does not mean they are incompetent at their subjects or lazy. The fact that, outside of the expected exceptions, a skill/subject/section is never brought up after the test means that teachers are not thinking at all about retrieval practice. There is a time for understanding and justifications, and a time for saying things as they are. Then, my personal experience and that of my friends, who all attended mid- to high-ranking schools outside the United States, is that regardless of class size and teacher workload, teachers never seemed to know how to teach effectively and efficiently.