There's a Point of Diminishing Returns to Cramming Content into a Course

An overlooked way to get kids to learn a lot more is to teach more content faster.

And I know this is a super unpopular idea, this goes against every instinct we have about mastery and quality, but in the quality and quantity trade-off, obviously there's a point of diminishing returns, but I don't think we hit it in most classes.

I think the only time when we teach kind of too fast, we try to cram too much in, and The quality suffers is in AP classes.

And this is a complaint K-12, right?

Every teacher believes that they have too many standards to teach, too many lessons to teach.

It just does not really all fit.

But the faster we teach, the more we teach, the more kids learn.

I think it's very hard to deny that basic logic.

And when we argue against it, what we're really saying is there is a point of diminishing returns, but I think we place that point of diminishing returns at far too slow a pace.

We could actually be teaching much, much faster in most cases, and students would learn a lot more.

Now, I'm not sure that that's true in math.

I don't know that I would make that case for math because there are so many prerequisite concepts and skills, right?

And if you don't build that foundation, you're really not ready for the next thing.

But in social studies, in science, in every other class that kids take, I think we could be teaching a lot faster And we kind of know what happens when we've reached that too fast point, right?

We know what happens in AP classes.

AP classes, kids get overwhelmed.

There is too much reading to do.

There's too much homework to do.

There is too much to zip through and you start to resorting to like lecture and you're blasting through PowerPoint slides and you can't do any kind of, you know, enjoyable in-depth activities.

Okay, that's how we know we're teaching too fast.

I think feeling like we're teaching too fast is not a good indicator that we are teaching too fast.

And if you look at any classroom, almost any classroom, you can find another classroom that has a similar population, similar subject area, similar setup in every way, but is teaching a lot more.

And in the quality quantity trade-off, we have to remember that the quality of something you don't get to is zero, right?

There is zero quality to content that you don't get to.

And if you've ever had this happen as a student where your class just didn't get to a whole section of the course that they're supposed to get to, and then you go on to the next class where you were supposed to learn that stuff, you realize it would have been better to move a little bit faster through the other stuff so that you could get to, you know, World War I or whatever it was that you didn't get to in that other class.

And again, I think math is a little bit different.

But most of the time, some exposure is valuable.

even if we can't spend as much time as we would like to have the luxury of spending on everything.

And when students come back to it, that prior exposure, even if it was quick, is going to be valuable.

So I think we've got to push this quality-quantity tradeoff a little bit further in the direction of quantity.

Let me know what you think.