There a lot of learning where students need to give a specific answer to a specific question. It’s useful to learn multiplication tables by heart. The most efficient way to teach that stuff is spaced repetition. Every kid should use Anki for those problems.
If you solve those topics with Anki you have more time for teaching critical thinking.
Let students evaluate the work of other students. Every student writes a text. Alice gives her text to Bob. Bob reads Alice’s text and searches for spelling errors. Afterwards the two students discuss the erors that Bob found in Alice’s text.
If Alice and Bob can’t agree on whether something is an error they ask the teacher.
In art class students should evaluate and discuss the work of other students. To prevent concerns of bullying I would advocate to randomize groups and use mostly groups of two students.
Create a enviroment where the kids can give each other constructive feedback.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Then how about increasing the amount of experiments?
Experiments in itself are however not without issues.
One of my worst experiences in school was where we did an experiment about gravity. In our group we didn’t reproduce the official results, It would have been quite trival for me to change the value to match reality as it’s supposed to be. I sticked with the values that I measured and got a bad grade. The teacher didn’t explain to me why I did get the results I did.
I think nearly all physics experiment had a “correct” result and the result that the formula predicts overrules the result of the experiment.
That style of making experiments doesn’t teach believe in empiricism.
Young children often do not the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
What’s the goal of that religion class? It’s probably not to let the children ask critically whether or not god exists ;)
I sticked with the values that I measured and got a bad grade. The teacher didn’t explain to me why I did get the results I did.
That’s terrible. In all of the labs I had in high school, our teachers specifically assured us we wouldn’t get worse grades for getting unexpected results, as long as we documented everything well and provided some possible explanations for those results.
Teachers absolutely should not incentivize students to do things that would send them to Science Hell.
That’s terrible. In all of the labs I had in high school, our teachers specifically assured us we wouldn’t get worse grades for getting unexpected results, as long as we documented everything well and provided some possible explanations for those results.
I think the problem did lay in the possible explanation for those results part. I couldn’t think of a possible reason for getting those results. I listed a bunch of reasons I could think of. I didn’t believe in them. The teacher didn’t gave me any reasons that I missed and just noted that my reasons were bad.
If the real motivation would be to do science, I should have repeated the experiment to see whether my results replicate. There was no time for a repeated experiment.
Getting results that you are unable to explain is very frequent if you do real science. In university we did a group PCR experiment and for some unknown reason it didn’t work in any group. The person leading the experiment made some changes the next day when another group did the experiment and it still failed.
She eliminated possible reasons and in the end didn’t know why it failed. She was quite embarrased about it.
In real science you frequently have say: “I don’t know why the experiment I did produced the results that it did.”
In my own Quantified Self experiments I have frequently data where I have no explanation what happened.
If you really want to teach the scientific method you have to confront students with experiments where the students are allowed to trust the results of the experiment over a theory that tells the student how the experiment is supposed to end. Most of the physics/chemistry experiments are poor in that regard.
They teach cargo cult science, in which experiments that don’t validate theories as right or wrong instead it’s the other way around.
That is unfortunate. I think my teachers would have accepted something along the lines of “Here are some reasons I thought of; I don’t think any of these reasons are very good, though, so I actually don’t know what happened.”
Maybe a teacher could introduce an experiment where the students have been taught a “lies-to-children” model that doesn’t quite work in the experiment, then have them do the experiment, and then after some agony on the students’ part, explain that the results were because the model is actually wrong and now they need to learn a newer one. As a sort of live-action science retelling. Still a little bit cargo-culty because there is still an answer at the end of the tunnel, but might give them a better idea of how things are supposed to work.
I think nearly all physics experiment had a “correct” result and the result that the formula predicts overrules the result of the experiment. That style of making experiments doesn’t teach believe in empiricism.
Indeed. The results of experiments done in first-year physics and chemistry labs routinely demonstrate that the laws of physics as we know them are clearly wrong. ;)
I agree that experiments in school tend to be downright TERRIBLE. THere is never, even in a wealthy enviroment, enough time, equipment, or whatever to let students make any more than trivial choices in experimental design—and I would say that knowing what experiment to perform is downright essential.
My main opinion is that we should not teach so many scientific facts in high school, and more rationality and scientific method, using that as a hook for specific disciplines. Chemistry is pretty good because you can get into some nice empirical predictions and deconstructionism without much difficult math.
A lot of labs in high schools are not even all that experimental, and the hypothesis is always crystal clear.
THere is never, even in a wealthy enviroment, enough time, equipment, or whatever to let students make any more than trivial choices in experimental design
We have art classes in which there’s plenty of time for the students to create artwork. In a similar context there no reason why there shouldn’t be experimention classes that teach students to experiment and give them plenty of time for the exercise.
School wastes massive amounts of time by teaching facts without SRS that get forgotten by the students a few years after they take the class.
Learning the paradigm of experimentation might be more important then teaching the way the periodic table is arranged.
We have art classes...no reason why there shouldn’t be expermentation classes.
In high school, most studio art classes have a lot less time devoted to verbal learning or whatever and much more to practice. Plus mundane art materials are both inexpensive and very safe to use. (and may already be in the classroom. Much can be taught with pencil sketches.) Chemistry (especially with modern-day, possibly excessive safety consciousness) is not, and requires more specialized space and has a hard time admitting of experimental design by students beacause they might design a bad experiment.
I don’t know about mechanical physics. My school had an ‘applied physics’ class meant to go alongside the normal class, in which actual freaking predictions were made but it was more engineering than physics and more shop class than either. Plus the kind of rudimentary stuff made by students such as air cannons and the like tends not to be regular enough in i.e. firing velocity for math analysis to work very well. OTOH, chemistry often isn’t either at the high school level. Damn three-beam balances.
I don’t know how to deal with the issue of governmentally imposed tests that must be taught to. It seems to me that one thing that should be done is to develop a way of testing this sort of thing, but on the other hand there might be
In high school, most studio art classes have a lot less time devoted to verbal learning or whatever and much more to practice.
That’s the point. Setting up real experiments is scientific practice.
Chemistry (especially with modern-day, possibly excessive safety consciousness) is not, and requires more specialized space and has a hard time admitting of experimental design by students because they might design a bad experiment.
I don’t really see the point of most chemistry experiments that I did in school and university. The last batch at a university introductionary chemistry course just showed me that my finger coordination was really bad. Afterwards I learned some card magic to get finger coordination.
Let students evaluate the work of other students. Every student writes a text. Alice gives her text to Bob. Bob reads Alice’s text and searches for spelling errors. Afterwards the two students discuss the erors that Bob found in Alice’s text.
If Alice and Bob can’t agree on whether something is an error they ask the teacher.
I don’t expect ordinary elementary school students to be mature and competent enough to do this without devolving into bickering and status posturing.
Keep in mind the age of the students in question. Feedback from eight year olds on academic work is likely to be unhelpful even to other eight year olds.
I don’t expect ordinary elementary school students to be mature and competent enough to do this without devolving into bickering and status posturing.
In some schools teaching the skill of giving and receiving feedback without going into status fight will be a challenge for the teacher. On the other hand it’s a skill that students should learn as early as possible.
Keep in mind the age of the students in question. Feedback from eight year olds on academic work is likely to be unhelpful even to other eight year olds.
You are right that eight year olds can’t give each other the “correct” passphases to academic work in all cases. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that the feedback isn’t useful.
As far as spelling errors go, I see no reason why eight year old should be unable to find them. As far as style issues go, a eight year old has a much easier time to understand feedback from another eight year old than to understand feedback from an adult.
It’s also not only about getting feedback but also about giving it. If you give feedback then you think about what you consider to be good and what you consider to be bad. That process is very important.
Verbal feedback is about more than giving someone a correct way to do things. It’s about direction attention to an area over which the person might learn something.
You are right that eight year olds can’t give each other the “correct” passphases to academic work in all cases. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that the feedback isn’t useful.
As far as spelling errors go, I see no reason why eight year old should be unable to find them. As far as style issues go, a eight year old has a much easier time to understand feedback from another eight year old than to understand feedback from an adult.
I think you may be overestimating the writing abilities of the average eight year old. When it comes to style issues, more third graders are in need of learning basic coherence than stylistic elegance.
I think that most of the Less Wrong population was probably at least somewhat precocious, which may make it hard to relate to what the average third grader needs to learn, as opposed to exceptional ones.
Having third graders attempt to correct each others’ work sounds to me like trying to get white belts to try to correct each others’ form in a martial arts class. Low level students may practice together, but you don’t try to put them in a position of giving each other instruction until they achieve some measure of basic competence.
Having third graders attempt to correct each others’ work sounds to me like trying to get white belts to try to correct each others’ form in a martial arts class.
I haven’t used the word ‘correct’. A third grades should be able to give you an answer to: Does this sentence look coherent? Why do you think so?
I see no reasons why he shouldn’t be able to share the answer to those questions with his classmates.
If the teacher wants he can offer the correct solution afterwards.
I think it would probably be more effective to have the students work on samples provided for them by the teacher, perhaps ones written by students from other classes, so as to avoid bickering and posturing between students.
Students are used to receiving corrections and critiques from their teachers. Having a peer critique one’s work and offer corrections, and not take it as a status affront, is and act that requires some maturity, and many people never learn to do it at all.
Learning to receive correction from peers gracefully is an important skill which is probably worth taking the time to teach to students, but I don’t think that paired peer critiques would be the best way of doing this. Some students will naturally produce better work than others, and thus have more criticism to offer and less to receive compared to their peers. The exercise would provide an element of “smart people don’t have to receive criticism from their peers, ordinary/stupid people do,” which the teacher would have to actively work against.
To teach students to accept correction from peers without taking it as a status challenge or an affront, I think I would try an exercise along these lines. Split the class into two groups. In each group, students work solo on a task provided by the teacher. However, the teacher provides different information to the students in each group. Neither group has all the information needed to perform the task correctly. After the students have tried and failed for a while, integrate the groups and pair the students up together, and tell them to pool their information.
Another way to get students to accept critizism would be to let each student rewrite his text after the feedback and then grade the revised version.
Having a peer critique one’s work and offer corrections, and not take it as a status affront, is and act that requires some maturity, and many people never learn to do it at all.
Saying many people never learn the skill at all is just another way of saying that today’s schools are very bad at teaching the skill.
To me the skill seems on of the most important that children should learn in school.
I think it makes sense to try to teach the skill as early as possible. Of course, when trying something new it’s importance to see how it works in practice and calibrate on the reactions of actual students.
Another way to get students to accept critizism would be to let each student rewrite his text after the feedback and then grade the revised version.
But this runs into the problem I mentioned before, that some students will have plenty of correction to offer others’ work, but little correction to receive from their peers. So instead of “everyone needs to learn to accept correction gracefully,” you risk teaching them “regular/stupid people need to learn to accept correction from smart people.”
If I had been put through such activities at that age, I suspect it would have amplified the arrogance that I was already developing at that time. In third grade, I tested as having a twelfth grade reading level; it’s highly probable that no student in my class at the time could have offered any useful critique on my work, whereas I could have offered critique on all of theirs.
It was already hard enough to unlearn the habits of thought that sort of disparity cultivated in me without participating in class activities which reinforced it.
So instead of “everyone needs to learn to accept correction gracefully,” you risk teaching them “regular/stupid people need to learn to accept correction from smart people.”
Which is a good and useful thing for stupid people to learn.
Better than their thinking they don’t need to accept correction at all, but then, if you don’t teach them measures for determining whether “corrections” are actually correct, they’re liable to get their heads filled up with garbage.
And teaching the stupid students to learn to accept correction gracefully from smart students is a lot less good and useful than teaching all the students to accept correction gracefully from their peers whenever they’re mistaken and receive it.
Well of course, if after hearing an explanation they realize they were wrong and why, then they should accept that correction no matter where it came from. And they should be open to listening to such proposed corrections from all sources.
But often even after the error is pointed out and explained, they still don’t understand why they were wrong. The one correcting them needs to know more than the minimum to be able to teach others, and needs to invest the time to explain it. There’s a long way from “remember correctly the right answer” to “be able to explain why this answer is the right one”. Most children are not able to understand why what they are taught is right, and even if they are, they are rarely taught these reasons.
So if children know some other, smarter children are pretty reliably right, then they should definitely use a heuristic of deferring to them whenever they disagree about the study subject matter. This is easy to calibrate empirically based on previous experience, even for children—people are good at tracking who tends to be right.
I don’t think students tend to be particularly shortchanged with respect to that sort of lesson by the current system though. Most students are aware of who the top students are, and that the top students are more reliable in their areas of expertise than the lesser ones.
Should they defer to the top students in matters outside of what they know to be those students’ areas of expertise? Not necessarily; a lot of smart people are not particularly good at getting right answers outside their areas of expertise. For a not-so-smart person, simply trusting that a smarter person knows what they’re talking about on any given subject, even when they don’t know that person to be an expert on the subject, is not a very trustworthy heuristic.
Trusting people who’re more expert than you in a particular field over your own judgment in that field is something that most students already learn. Being unable to assess who’s more expert in domains in which they’re not well trained is natural and probably unavoidable, and students can’t be trained to be expert in everything.
So instead of “everyone needs to learn to accept correction gracefully,” you risk teaching them “regular/stupid people need to learn to accept correction from smart people.”
There’s a corollary: “Smart people need to learn to give feedback in a way that doesn’t annoy stupid people but let stupid people accept their feedback.”
You probably would have profit from learning that skill in third grade.
I did learn that skill much earlier than I learned to accept correction gracefully from others. I had much more occasion to practice tailoring my feedback to others so that it would be accepted than I had to practice receiving and incorporating it.
I don’t think smart students are as shortchanged when it comes to learning that skill as the reverse, with the current status quo.
As far as style issues go, a eight year old has a much easier time to understand feedback from another eight year old than to understand feedback from an adult.
“Don’t write like that, it’s stupid! You’re a stupid if you write like that!”
There a lot of learning where students need to give a specific answer to a specific question. It’s useful to learn multiplication tables by heart. The most efficient way to teach that stuff is spaced repetition. Every kid should use Anki for those problems.
If you solve those topics with Anki you have more time for teaching critical thinking.
Let students evaluate the work of other students. Every student writes a text. Alice gives her text to Bob. Bob reads Alice’s text and searches for spelling errors. Afterwards the two students discuss the erors that Bob found in Alice’s text.
If Alice and Bob can’t agree on whether something is an error they ask the teacher.
In art class students should evaluate and discuss the work of other students. To prevent concerns of bullying I would advocate to randomize groups and use mostly groups of two students.
Create a enviroment where the kids can give each other constructive feedback.
Then how about increasing the amount of experiments?
Experiments in itself are however not without issues. One of my worst experiences in school was where we did an experiment about gravity. In our group we didn’t reproduce the official results, It would have been quite trival for me to change the value to match reality as it’s supposed to be. I sticked with the values that I measured and got a bad grade. The teacher didn’t explain to me why I did get the results I did.
I think nearly all physics experiment had a “correct” result and the result that the formula predicts overrules the result of the experiment. That style of making experiments doesn’t teach believe in empiricism.
What’s the goal of that religion class? It’s probably not to let the children ask critically whether or not god exists ;)
That’s terrible. In all of the labs I had in high school, our teachers specifically assured us we wouldn’t get worse grades for getting unexpected results, as long as we documented everything well and provided some possible explanations for those results.
Teachers absolutely should not incentivize students to do things that would send them to Science Hell.
I think the problem did lay in the possible explanation for those results part. I couldn’t think of a possible reason for getting those results. I listed a bunch of reasons I could think of. I didn’t believe in them. The teacher didn’t gave me any reasons that I missed and just noted that my reasons were bad.
If the real motivation would be to do science, I should have repeated the experiment to see whether my results replicate. There was no time for a repeated experiment.
Getting results that you are unable to explain is very frequent if you do real science. In university we did a group PCR experiment and for some unknown reason it didn’t work in any group. The person leading the experiment made some changes the next day when another group did the experiment and it still failed. She eliminated possible reasons and in the end didn’t know why it failed. She was quite embarrased about it.
In real science you frequently have say: “I don’t know why the experiment I did produced the results that it did.” In my own Quantified Self experiments I have frequently data where I have no explanation what happened.
If you really want to teach the scientific method you have to confront students with experiments where the students are allowed to trust the results of the experiment over a theory that tells the student how the experiment is supposed to end. Most of the physics/chemistry experiments are poor in that regard.
They teach cargo cult science, in which experiments that don’t validate theories as right or wrong instead it’s the other way around.
That is unfortunate. I think my teachers would have accepted something along the lines of “Here are some reasons I thought of; I don’t think any of these reasons are very good, though, so I actually don’t know what happened.”
Maybe a teacher could introduce an experiment where the students have been taught a “lies-to-children” model that doesn’t quite work in the experiment, then have them do the experiment, and then after some agony on the students’ part, explain that the results were because the model is actually wrong and now they need to learn a newer one. As a sort of live-action science retelling. Still a little bit cargo-culty because there is still an answer at the end of the tunnel, but might give them a better idea of how things are supposed to work.
Indeed. The results of experiments done in first-year physics and chemistry labs routinely demonstrate that the laws of physics as we know them are clearly wrong. ;)
Yeah, here’s a nice article on the topic :-)
I agree that experiments in school tend to be downright TERRIBLE. THere is never, even in a wealthy enviroment, enough time, equipment, or whatever to let students make any more than trivial choices in experimental design—and I would say that knowing what experiment to perform is downright essential.
My main opinion is that we should not teach so many scientific facts in high school, and more rationality and scientific method, using that as a hook for specific disciplines. Chemistry is pretty good because you can get into some nice empirical predictions and deconstructionism without much difficult math.
A lot of labs in high schools are not even all that experimental, and the hypothesis is always crystal clear.
We have art classes in which there’s plenty of time for the students to create artwork. In a similar context there no reason why there shouldn’t be experimention classes that teach students to experiment and give them plenty of time for the exercise.
School wastes massive amounts of time by teaching facts without SRS that get forgotten by the students a few years after they take the class. Learning the paradigm of experimentation might be more important then teaching the way the periodic table is arranged.
In high school, most studio art classes have a lot less time devoted to verbal learning or whatever and much more to practice. Plus mundane art materials are both inexpensive and very safe to use. (and may already be in the classroom. Much can be taught with pencil sketches.) Chemistry (especially with modern-day, possibly excessive safety consciousness) is not, and requires more specialized space and has a hard time admitting of experimental design by students beacause they might design a bad experiment.
I don’t know about mechanical physics. My school had an ‘applied physics’ class meant to go alongside the normal class, in which actual freaking predictions were made but it was more engineering than physics and more shop class than either. Plus the kind of rudimentary stuff made by students such as air cannons and the like tends not to be regular enough in i.e. firing velocity for math analysis to work very well. OTOH, chemistry often isn’t either at the high school level. Damn three-beam balances.
I don’t know how to deal with the issue of governmentally imposed tests that must be taught to. It seems to me that one thing that should be done is to develop a way of testing this sort of thing, but on the other hand there might be
That’s the point. Setting up real experiments is scientific practice.
I don’t really see the point of most chemistry experiments that I did in school and university. The last batch at a university introductionary chemistry course just showed me that my finger coordination was really bad. Afterwards I learned some card magic to get finger coordination.
I don’t expect ordinary elementary school students to be mature and competent enough to do this without devolving into bickering and status posturing.
Keep in mind the age of the students in question. Feedback from eight year olds on academic work is likely to be unhelpful even to other eight year olds.
In some schools teaching the skill of giving and receiving feedback without going into status fight will be a challenge for the teacher. On the other hand it’s a skill that students should learn as early as possible.
You are right that eight year olds can’t give each other the “correct” passphases to academic work in all cases. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that the feedback isn’t useful.
As far as spelling errors go, I see no reason why eight year old should be unable to find them. As far as style issues go, a eight year old has a much easier time to understand feedback from another eight year old than to understand feedback from an adult.
It’s also not only about getting feedback but also about giving it. If you give feedback then you think about what you consider to be good and what you consider to be bad. That process is very important.
Verbal feedback is about more than giving someone a correct way to do things. It’s about direction attention to an area over which the person might learn something.
I think you may be overestimating the writing abilities of the average eight year old. When it comes to style issues, more third graders are in need of learning basic coherence than stylistic elegance.
I think that most of the Less Wrong population was probably at least somewhat precocious, which may make it hard to relate to what the average third grader needs to learn, as opposed to exceptional ones.
Having third graders attempt to correct each others’ work sounds to me like trying to get white belts to try to correct each others’ form in a martial arts class. Low level students may practice together, but you don’t try to put them in a position of giving each other instruction until they achieve some measure of basic competence.
I haven’t used the word ‘correct’. A third grades should be able to give you an answer to: Does this sentence look coherent? Why do you think so? I see no reasons why he shouldn’t be able to share the answer to those questions with his classmates.
If the teacher wants he can offer the correct solution afterwards.
I think it would probably be more effective to have the students work on samples provided for them by the teacher, perhaps ones written by students from other classes, so as to avoid bickering and posturing between students.
Students are used to receiving corrections and critiques from their teachers. Having a peer critique one’s work and offer corrections, and not take it as a status affront, is and act that requires some maturity, and many people never learn to do it at all.
Learning to receive correction from peers gracefully is an important skill which is probably worth taking the time to teach to students, but I don’t think that paired peer critiques would be the best way of doing this. Some students will naturally produce better work than others, and thus have more criticism to offer and less to receive compared to their peers. The exercise would provide an element of “smart people don’t have to receive criticism from their peers, ordinary/stupid people do,” which the teacher would have to actively work against.
To teach students to accept correction from peers without taking it as a status challenge or an affront, I think I would try an exercise along these lines. Split the class into two groups. In each group, students work solo on a task provided by the teacher. However, the teacher provides different information to the students in each group. Neither group has all the information needed to perform the task correctly. After the students have tried and failed for a while, integrate the groups and pair the students up together, and tell them to pool their information.
Another way to get students to accept critizism would be to let each student rewrite his text after the feedback and then grade the revised version.
Saying many people never learn the skill at all is just another way of saying that today’s schools are very bad at teaching the skill.
To me the skill seems on of the most important that children should learn in school.
I think it makes sense to try to teach the skill as early as possible. Of course, when trying something new it’s importance to see how it works in practice and calibrate on the reactions of actual students.
But this runs into the problem I mentioned before, that some students will have plenty of correction to offer others’ work, but little correction to receive from their peers. So instead of “everyone needs to learn to accept correction gracefully,” you risk teaching them “regular/stupid people need to learn to accept correction from smart people.”
If I had been put through such activities at that age, I suspect it would have amplified the arrogance that I was already developing at that time. In third grade, I tested as having a twelfth grade reading level; it’s highly probable that no student in my class at the time could have offered any useful critique on my work, whereas I could have offered critique on all of theirs.
It was already hard enough to unlearn the habits of thought that sort of disparity cultivated in me without participating in class activities which reinforced it.
Which is a good and useful thing for stupid people to learn.
Better than their thinking they don’t need to accept correction at all, but then, if you don’t teach them measures for determining whether “corrections” are actually correct, they’re liable to get their heads filled up with garbage.
And teaching the stupid students to learn to accept correction gracefully from smart students is a lot less good and useful than teaching all the students to accept correction gracefully from their peers whenever they’re mistaken and receive it.
Well of course, if after hearing an explanation they realize they were wrong and why, then they should accept that correction no matter where it came from. And they should be open to listening to such proposed corrections from all sources.
But often even after the error is pointed out and explained, they still don’t understand why they were wrong. The one correcting them needs to know more than the minimum to be able to teach others, and needs to invest the time to explain it. There’s a long way from “remember correctly the right answer” to “be able to explain why this answer is the right one”. Most children are not able to understand why what they are taught is right, and even if they are, they are rarely taught these reasons.
So if children know some other, smarter children are pretty reliably right, then they should definitely use a heuristic of deferring to them whenever they disagree about the study subject matter. This is easy to calibrate empirically based on previous experience, even for children—people are good at tracking who tends to be right.
I don’t think students tend to be particularly shortchanged with respect to that sort of lesson by the current system though. Most students are aware of who the top students are, and that the top students are more reliable in their areas of expertise than the lesser ones.
Should they defer to the top students in matters outside of what they know to be those students’ areas of expertise? Not necessarily; a lot of smart people are not particularly good at getting right answers outside their areas of expertise. For a not-so-smart person, simply trusting that a smarter person knows what they’re talking about on any given subject, even when they don’t know that person to be an expert on the subject, is not a very trustworthy heuristic.
Trusting people who’re more expert than you in a particular field over your own judgment in that field is something that most students already learn. Being unable to assess who’s more expert in domains in which they’re not well trained is natural and probably unavoidable, and students can’t be trained to be expert in everything.
There’s a corollary: “Smart people need to learn to give feedback in a way that doesn’t annoy stupid people but let stupid people accept their feedback.” You probably would have profit from learning that skill in third grade.
I did learn that skill much earlier than I learned to accept correction gracefully from others. I had much more occasion to practice tailoring my feedback to others so that it would be accepted than I had to practice receiving and incorporating it.
I don’t think smart students are as shortchanged when it comes to learning that skill as the reverse, with the current status quo.
“Don’t write like that, it’s stupid! You’re a stupid if you write like that!”