I just read an interesting account of what life is like for high school students. An adult shadowed a student for a whole day, going to class, taking exams, sitting all day, etc. The article is definitely worth a read for anyone in ed.

I liked the idea of structuring lessons starting from students questions. It wouldn’t work for 1-on-1 tutoring (a student may have only unknown unknowns) but collectively as a class, the set of all known unknowns probably covers a lot material that would make sense to cover in the current class.

Here’s an idea. Rather than writing advanced software that “measures” the student’s level of understanding and schedules appropriate material for them, why not let students tell you what they do or do not know, and—more importantly—what they would like to learn.

Update Oct 19: Grant posted an followup post.