[alphydan]

>> Teachers don't buy that,

We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense.

The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied.

We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.

[dhimes]

You do- sort of. The problem I ran into is that a lot of what we know comes from educational “gurus”- not science. So if you have software that disagrees with what the teacher thinks is the right way to teach, they won’t budge even if all the data show that you’re giving them a better way.

I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics.

Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year.

The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.

[6510]

More money for teachers might help but I think it should be an entirely separate job description. Automation [in my view] should be something invested in for a while, enough to make it work, have a period of maintenance then do it again. Gradual improvement may get stuck.