The Limits of Classroom Teaching

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Even a great teacher can’t easily implement mastery learning in a classroom. You know, where students only move on to a next topic after mastering its prerequisites.

See, here’s the problem. You’re a public school teacher.

You got 4 classes, each with 20 to 30 kids. That’s like 100 students that you’re having to manage all in parallel.

And one single teacher can’t keep track of every single topic every kid knows or they don’t know or just how well they learn it and what should they learn next.

It’s, it’s, it’s just too much work.

And unless the teacher has some kind of technology to help them do that work, to manage the knowledge profiles and learning schedules of all these different students, unless they have that, the teacher just has to move the whole class at the same pace.

And that means some kids just sit there bored waiting for everybody else to catch up while other kids are rushed through and they gotta move on before they’re actually ready.

And because math is so brutally hierarchical, they just fall further and further behind with every new topic.

Further reading: A Brief History of Mastery Learning .

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