Hi, I'm Ted Shachtman. I went to Vanderbilt for elementary education and cognitive studies and have a master's in computer science. And I've been teaching since I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2022. I'm writing this post to encourage more teachers to ask the questions I started asking two years ago, with great results. When a student is solving a problem and is inexplicably behind the other students, ask them what they actually see in their mind's eye and hear in their inner voice.

What I found is a good seven out of ten students who are behind are behind because of one of three reasons. Reason number one: their inner voice doesn't move on its own and they don't know to use it to solve problems in their head. Number two: their mind's eye doesn't render pictures on its own and they don't know to use it as storage for the problem in their head. And three: they're picturing something in their mind's eye that if you saw what they were picturing would make you fall over laughing at how terrible of a representation it was.

To illustrate these three examples, I have three anonymized stories from my own teaching. The first story resolves what happens when a student is picturing something in their mind's eye that makes you fall over laughing.

I was working as a basic skills instructor in an elementary school. My job was to work one-on-one with students who had been falling behind and bring them up to grade level. This particular student, who I'll call John, was in fourth grade and could not add five plus three in his head. However, when talking to him, it was immediately obvious he was profoundly bright. I'd explain a concept through analogies and his eyes would light up while he offered a distant analog that was, in fact, structurally the same. Yet, again, he couldn't add five plus three in his head.

So I asked him, when you're doing five plus three in your head, what are you picturing and what are you hearing? He said, I hear nothing, but I picture a number line. I was surprised because I picture a number line as well, and I know it to be a very efficient representation for adding in your head. So I asked him to draw the number line, and he drew this. I'm representing it in ASCII below.

|—|—|—|—|—|—|—|—|—|

As I looked at what he drew, a question popped up in my head. You might have spotted it already, but it went, “John, where are the numbers?” He stared back at me, confused. I asked him, “Okay, when you use this number line to add in your head, can you show me by pointing on this drawing what you would do?” He nodded and said, “First I would count to five.” He put his finger on the left.

Then, he tapped each successive vertical line on the number line, Silently, until he got to the fifth. He looked up at me and said, “Now I know I'm at five, and I remember that I have to add three more.” He moved his finger three more times to the right and landed on the eighth, albeit, to know that he was on the eighth line, I had to count there myself. Then he said, “Now I go back to the beginning so I can see how many that is.” He was about to start moving his finger when I asked, “How do you remember where you got to? He replied, “Sometimes it's really tough, especially for big numbers like eight or nine.” Then he moved his finger all the way from the left up to the seventh line and said, “Seven. Five plus three is seven.”

This story has a happy ending. I was able to teach John to put numbers on the number line in his head. He was then immediately able to add five plus three in his head, as well as much bigger numbers such as 16 plus 7. With this incredibly subtle change, just adding numbers to his number line, it unlocked his mathematical ability. Working with him throughout the year, he showed amazing improvement.

The next story I'll tell is with a girl named Cynthia. I worked with Cynthia because she had trouble with problem solving. When presented with a word problem or an unfamiliar type of problem, her teachers described that she had a lot of trouble adapting to it and only really was able to solve that type of question with significant amounts of one-on-one instruction. When I started working with her, I gave her a word problem. I saw her stare at the word problem and asked, “What do you hear in your mind? What do you see?”

She said, “What do you mean?” I asked. “When you are walking through the halls or eating lunch, do you hear a voice in your head that talks and describes the world around you?” Cynthia shook her head no. I asked, “When you're solving a word problem like this, do you hear a voice in your head that talks through the problem?” She furrowed her brow and again shook her head no.

“If I ask you to hear 'My name is Cynthia' in your mind, can you?” She said, “Yes, I can hear that.” I described to Cynthia that most people have an inner voice in their head that talks all the time and it moves on its own. But in her mind, her voice doesn't move on its own— it’s like an arm that only moves when you tell it to.

The way everybody else is solving these word problems is by talking it through in their head. The reason she didn't think to do it was because her mind's voice doesn't move on its own. So, guessing that you should move your mind's voice to talk through the problem is something pretty hard to guess.

Now, there's a reason I knew to ask this specific question. I am exactly like Cynthia, except when I was in elementary school, nobody told me that my inner voice didn't move on its own. I only found this out when I was 24. So, two years ago. And from my experience, I knew exactly how detrimental not using her inner voice to reason through problems was in her elementary school curriculum and would continue to be throughout the rest of her life.

What is it like to not use your inner voice to solve problems and think? It is an utter inability to reason.

My entire life, I never liked to plan. Why? I couldn't. What does it mean to plan? It means to reason, to think things through. In my head, only my images moved on their own. And so, to plan a birthday party on Tuesday, for instance, I could only plan what pictures could represent. Pictures have a very hard time representing a Tuesday. In fact, pictures have a very hard time representing anything even decently abstract at all. For my entire life, I could think very well when I wrote things down. I was very good at spatial puzzles. I was extremely good when talking an idea out loud to a friend. But if you asked me to silently think through a problem, what I thought “thinking” meant is to stare at you with images popping into your mind until some image gave me a fully formed idea, and then speak.

What I would not have given for someone to have asked me the question, “What do you see and what do you hear?” from a young age.

The continuation of my story is similar to the continuation of Cynthia’s story. Cynthia learned to reason in her head, and her teachers reported that her problem-solving ability skyrocketed. She was able to think through novel problems and notice patterns, as was I once I learned to reason in language.

The last story I'll tell is about a girl named Ruby. Ruby was in fifth grade and had extensive trouble doing math in her head. By this time, I had asked the question, “What do you see in your head? What do you hear in your head?” many times.

She was trying to multiply 60 times 20. She said what she heard in her head when multiplying was, “nothing”, and that she never heard anything in her head. I asked her the classic next question: “Can you hear My name is Ruby in your head?” And she said yes. Then I asked her to Draw a picture of what she saw in her head when she multiplied 60 times 20, and gave her a sheet of scrap paper. She wrote down the number 60, and then the number 60 below that, and then the number 60 below that, and then the number 60 below that, and so on, some number near 20 times.

60
60
60
60
60
….
60

Then she moved her pencil back up to the top two 60s and wrote 120 to the side. Then she looked up at me and said, “After that, the picture gets fuzzy.” In her case, this was a double whammy. I taught her to use her inner voice to reason, and I taught her how to picture a number line. After this, her academics greatly improved.

These stories have a moral. Every time I've peeked under the blanket of why a student is falling behind, it is almost never because they are just “not so bright.”

There is always some monster hiding under that blanket: either their inner voice doesn't move on its own, their inner pictures don't move on their own, or how they're using either their inner voice or their inner pictures is ill-constructed for the task. So, I ask the question: If every time you look, you find the same thing, what can you conclude but all the other times you didn't look?

We should be asking more students, “What do you see and what do you hear?” I'm quite convinced that a large amount of difference in academic ability can be explained by some students using greatly inefficient mental processes for tasks that students performing better use efficient ones on. So, in the comments of this post, share stories where you found that what goes on in a student's mind is the fixable reason why they're falling behind.

I’m not sure if this has been talked about elsewhere, but I’ve been thinking about the new “Do No Harm” standard to be implemented by the current administration, under which degrees will have to prove their economic worth or else be disqualified from student loan funding.

This made me consider the ramifications and ironies of such a policy. Naturally, much of the humanities would be under scrutiny. However, won’t this lead to a brain-drain of sorts that will create a shortage of humanities teachers (and possibly professors, eventually)?

Because K-12 teachers are paid so little, it will place the onus on the universities to make their tuition commensurate with the meager pay of teachers, or else the programs will be only available to students who can pay out of pocket, making the humanities a rich person’s field.

To me it seems like the last nail in the coffin for a culture who chronically devalues the humanities and has lost sight of the traditional purpose of education, which was to create well-rounded citizens, not just financially comfortable specialists.

Am I getting this wrong? Thoughts?

I was fired from a job that I really loved back in June, the benefits were great, and the pay was the best that I’ve had since working in higher education. I started at $25 & after the annual raise, my rate increased to around $27. I was recently offered a new role as a Financial Aid Processor at 45k annually/~$22 hourly. This role is working on the backend & my last role was as an advisor, which was student-facing. I live in FL so pay is lower, this new role is based in MD & the last role was based in UT.

What software do people use for scheduling classes for schools? I'm talking from a school admin perspective here.

Or manually?

Hi! I have 2 boys, 3 years apart. My oldest was born in May and my second in August. I've heard and read a couple of studies saying it's better to delay kindergarten a year for summer-born boys. Has anyone done this, and do you think it was a good decision or not?

Thank you so much!

I love maths. Currently in electrical engineering university where I attend math, physics and computer science classes.

Why does everything have to be academic? With textbooks and exams? As if it's going to help you acquire the practical skills needed to be qualified for a job. But it won't, and this is exactly why job recruiters don't want employees with no experience... because they just don't have practical skills. You don't learn your job in university. You learn it after you actually get the job.

I don't like studying alone. Yes, I'm great at maths, but just sitting on your desk alone is so boring. And after long periods of time it triggers chronic isolation. I get stressed just by solving a single math problem. Two days ago I got to know another student in university and he later spotted me in the library. I showed him a problem that I was trying to solve for some time but couldn't. He was also stuck at first. But he sat down, we shared our thoughts, and after an hour of deep conversation we solved it together.

It was so fun that it seemed effortless. Time just flied. Education doesn't have to be tiring. It's supposed to be relaxing, and yet so many students around the world hate school with a burning passion because classrooms are the most counter-productive places known to man.

I don't want to continue sitting for hours in front of a desk solving exercises. I've been doing that for the past two years for hours every day just so that I could enter the university I'm in. But chronic stress has prevailed and I can't do this anymore with this stupid academic system of education that is meant to kill your will to be educated. I love maths, but I hate math textbooks. And I especially hate structured learning. But I simply can't learn the way I want because I absolutely need to get that useless paper that says I'm eligible for a job that I won't have learned until I get recruited. Whose idea was it to make everything fit into books and render it utterly useless... Academia sucks.

I find it insane how the literacy rate is only dropping in America. I’m a high school senior applying to college and I have a near-perfect GPA, test scores and everything else but it still feels impossible for my peers and I to get into good colleges, as things are only getting more competitive. However on the flip side there are kids at my school studying basic algebra, and it’s just so sad to me. Especially because a lot of those kids look like me, and in some of my AP classes i can count on one hand the number of POC students. It genuinely breaks my heart because so many people are getting left behind, and will likely end up struggling in life as a result. It’s ridiculous that i engage in conversations about how competitive everything is, but also how low/behind a lot of people are.

And if you’ve had a child repeat a grade, did it actually help?

I’ve hit a point where studying consumes all my time. Even when I’m trying to relax or do something else, the guilt follows me and I’m constantly thinking about what I should be doing

I’ve been looking into the growth of alternative credit providers like Sophia Learning, Study.com and StraighterLine. A lot of people on Reddit talk about taking credits from courses from these companies. I’m curious how people working in higher education think about all of this.

From what I’ve read on Reddit, universities are actively encouraging students to take courses with these providers.

I wrote an article describing online institutions as finishing schools. That they are ceding the first two years of academic instruction to alternative credit providers that offer inexpensive self paced courses.

The feedback and pushback that I received was that what I wrote was hyperbole, that the usage from these providers was minimal and had reached maturity. That it helps with completion rates, it gives students momentum, but it’s not widely adopted with partner universities.

So for people working at colleges/universities:

- are you seeing greater acceptance or active encouragement of Sophia, Study.com, and StraighterLine

- do you think online institutions will eventually become comfortable outsourcing a much larger portion of general education? How far does this go?

Making your canvas look more appealing can help improve study motivation!

Forked from the popular bettercanvas, this extension adds dark mode, a better todo list, custom backgrounds, GPA calculator, grade history, global search and more! 100% free and open source forever, I do not plan to add ads or make money off of this.

The extension runs fully locally (except for fetching custom background images which is optional) and all data never leaves your computer.

I have developed this enough to a point where it should be 99% stable to use and there are currently around 2800 users across firefox and chrome

feature suggestions, feedback, and questions and welcome!

Landing Page | Source Code/GitHub

Chrome Download | Firefox Download

Not sure about the flair.

Title, basically. On one hand my teacher complains about being so busy with other students (individual lessons), on the other he offers me (just me, as far as I am aware) extra lessons, if I would like, in the little free time he has during the day. I think he likes working with me, but it got me thinking, that while I was teaching (I am currently attending my second uni) I would never offer extra lessons when I felt I am extremely busy, as I would like to take a break and care a bit for my mental health.

Were you ever in a similar situation? What was your motivation? Was I a bad teacher for taking care of myself in this way lol?

The Flynn Effect shows IQ gains of 15+ points per generation with environmental improvement. That suggests capacity wasn't the constraint—activation was. If we take that seriously, what does it mean that some populations have been systematically denied the kind of cognitively demanding work and education that builds skill across generations? Isn't that a mechanism worth exploring?

hello, i am a french uni student who is studying english lit and i need to interview someone that works in a english field (as in teacher, translater, journalist, and so on) and was wondering if anyone here could perhaps help me.

it would be a short interview, around 15 to 20 minutes long where i would ask you questions about your field, why you chose this job and what you had to do (like studies for example) to qualify for it. i appreciate any and every answer, i don't have a specific job in mind however i would appreciate it if teachers could answer!

thank you so much for reading!

I am not sure if this is the right subreddit but how do you become a teacher's aid in Washington? (Preferred option with scholarships/grants if tuition is needed)

TL;DR: If two students are equally capable of earning a degree, but only one can afford to finish, are we measuring academic achievement or financial security? Research shows financial aid improves graduation rates. So how many capable students are we losing simply because they can’t afford to stay enrolled?

America may be confusing financial opportunity with academic achievement.
We spend an enormous amount of time measuring educational success in America.
We compare graduation rates between communities, states, income brackets, and school districts. We debate whether our schools are doing enough, whether students are prepared, and whether educational standards are slipping.
But there’s something missing from that conversation.
What happens when a student is academically capable of finishing college but financially incapable of staying there?
And why do we count that as an educational failure?
The Progress We’re Overlooking
High school graduation rates have improved considerably over the past decade, including among students from historically disadvantaged communities.
That’s encouraging. It suggests that more young people are successfully navigating the first major stage of their education.
But something interesting happens when we follow students beyond high school.
Getting into college and graduating from college are two entirely different accomplishments.
Students can complete high school, qualify for admission, and enroll in higher education, only to leave without earning a degree.
We often discuss these outcomes as if they reflect academic preparation, motivation, or personal responsibility.
Sometimes they do.
But what if we’re overlooking one of the largest variables?
Money.
Two Students, Two Different Realities
Imagine two students graduating from the same high school.
They have comparable grades, similar academic abilities, and the same ambition to earn a degree.
Both are accepted into college.
One comes from a household that can help cover tuition, housing, transportation, and unexpected expenses.
The other has to work 30 hours a week to afford the same opportunity.
Both students are expected to attend classes, complete assignments, prepare for exams, and maintain satisfactory grades.
But only one has the financial freedom to make education their primary responsibility.
If the second student struggles, reduces their course load, or eventually leaves college, what have we actually measured?
Academic ability?
Or financial security?
A student who has to work twice as hard just to remain enrolled isn’t necessarily less capable than a student who graduates with financial support.
Yet our statistics may treat them that way.
The Evidence Is Already There
Research has demonstrated that financial assistance can directly improve college completion.
A study of Florida’s need-based student grants found that qualifying for additional aid increased the likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree within six years.
A randomized scholarship study in Nebraska found that generous financial support increased bachelor’s degree completion by approximately eight percentage points among applicants pursuing four-year degrees.
Other studies have found that additional grants can reduce students’ need to work while attending college.
These findings matter because they go beyond simply observing that wealthier students graduate more often.
They show that changing financial circumstances can change educational outcomes.
That raises a difficult question.
How many students have we labeled unsuccessful when the real problem was that they couldn’t afford to succeed?
Income Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
Even comparing students from households with similar incomes doesn’t necessarily create a level playing field.
Two families earning $50,000 annually might have entirely different financial circumstances.
One may own a home, have savings, and carry little debt.
The other may be renting, supporting relatives, paying medical bills, or living without any financial safety net.
Their incomes are identical on paper.
Their ability to support a college student is not.
And when an unexpected expense arrives, that difference can determine whether a student stays enrolled.
This is why household income alone isn’t enough to measure educational opportunity.
We also need to consider accumulated wealth, debt, family responsibilities, housing stability, and the actual cost of attending college.
What Does Merit Really Mean?
I believe in merit.
I believe effort, preparation, and personal responsibility should matter.
But if we’re going to build an educational system around merit, shouldn’t we make sure we’re actually measuring it?
A student who completes college while working full-time has demonstrated considerable determination.
A student who leaves college because they can no longer afford tuition hasn’t necessarily demonstrated a lack of academic ability.
And a student whose family can comfortably cover every expense hasn’t necessarily demonstrated greater merit simply by graduating.
None of this means academic standards should be lowered.
Quite the opposite.
We should be removing financial obstacles so that academic standards, rather than financial circumstances, determine who succeeds.
That would give us a more accurate picture of the talent our country actually possesses.
The Cost of Wasted Potential
There is a legitimate debate about how much government should invest in higher education.
Public money is limited. Programs should be evaluated, and financial assistance should produce measurable results.
But there’s another cost we rarely discuss.
What does it cost the country when academically capable students never complete their education?
What happens when a potential engineer, teacher, nurse, scientist, or business owner leaves college because they cannot afford another semester?
We lose more than a graduate.
We lose the economic contributions, innovation, and opportunities that person might have created.
And that loss doesn’t disappear simply because it never appears in a government budget.
A Better Way to Measure Success
Instead of measuring only how many students enroll in college, we should examine how many academically prepared students complete their education.
We should compare students with similar academic preparation but different financial circumstances.
We should determine how much unmet financial need affects persistence, academic performance, and graduation.
And we should ask whether targeted financial assistance produces enough additional graduates to justify its cost.
Research already tells us that financial aid can improve completion rates.
The remaining question is how effectively we can identify students whose greatest obstacle isn’t academic ability but financial survival.
We don’t need to guarantee everyone a diploma.
We need to make sure capable students have a fair opportunity to earn one.
The Question We Should Have Been Asking
America spends a great deal of time debating why some students succeed and others don’t.
We examine school systems, communities, family backgrounds, and personal choices.
All of those things matter.
But perhaps we’re overlooking something much simpler.
If two students are equally capable of earning a degree, but only one can afford to finish, are we really measuring educational achievement?
Or are we measuring financial privilege?
A country that claims to reward merit should be deeply concerned when opportunity depends more on financial security than academic ability.
Because the real tragedy isn’t simply that some students don’t graduate.
It’s that some students could have graduated, and we never gave them a fair chance.

I'm a tenth grader taking CE physics and it is an absolute joke. Its nearing the end of term one and we are just getting to Newtons laws and it has the easiest grading scale I have ever seen with the grades changing every 20% so F: 0-20% D: 20-40% C: 40-60% B: 60-80% A: 80-100%. All that has been taught is distance velocity acceleration mass weight. I think physics used to be hard so they dumbed it down so anyone can easily pass the class.

The assignments are the most repetitive things ever for an entire month the assignments were only using a video analysis website that you just find a scale and add a bunch of dots and it finds the velocity and acceleration of an object but all that changed was the videos were of different things moving. Not to mention that the final test I completed in four minutes with 100% accuracy and even if you randomly guessed you would probably still get a D on the test.

Taiwan’s education isn’t about learning; it’s an industrial meat grinder. You’re conditioned to cram until midnight, chase credentials, and become an obedient cog in the tech machine. Any genuine passion—whether it’s dissecting Technical Death Metal or playing guitar—is treated as a defect. What sickens me most is the ruthless elitism it breeds: winners don't gain wisdom, just venomous arrogance toward anyone drowning in this pressure. They call it meritocracy; I call it collective Stockholm syndrome. I refuse to let this sterile factory define who I am.

Hello! I am a Finnish teacherstudent about to write my masters thesis about democracy education and citizenship studies for pupils aged 11-16(ish).

I am interested in doing an analysis of textbooks used for these ages mainly in different parts of Europe, pereferably the nordics, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and German speaking countries.

My question is about what book series you use or recomend me to get to know?
What is the subject ”social studies” called in your country? When do pupils start studying this sibject?
Is there eBook resources in your country that I could acces?

Any help would be much appriciated!

How hard do you guys think it would be to balance 17 credit hours while working outside of school 25-30 hours a week? Has anyone done this and is it common? For background, I am in my first semester of college. I am currently enrolled in 13 credit hours and with this workload I have had no issues balancing my personal, work, and school life. As I look through the catalog for my upcoming spring semester I wonder if 17 is too ambitious? I am ambitious. Help me!

Hi y'all,

as a new freshman in college, I'm thinking of swapping from paper to iPad. Some rzns include more availability to colors, more availablity to reusing diagrams, and easier time reading the lecture slides while takin the notes.

My main concern is I've heard that handwriting on a tablet may reduce memory retention. I'm a slow learner (always have been really) and am wondering if iPad notes are not the way to go cuz of that.

Please any and all inputs help and are greatly appreciated!! thanks

these fees do not even make any f ing sense



Hello Reddit educators, I am writing a paper for my class about changing education in literacy in the 2000’s and I would like to research CogAT and ITBS test scores to see if my observations align with academic results from the time period.

Does anyone know how to, or if I can, see results to those tests from that time period to observe trends within?

How many of you ended up teaching a completely different subject than what you went to school/got a degree for?

Hi everyone!

I'll keep it super brief. I've been seriously considering going back to university to get my post graduate degree. I currently have a Film Production Degree & I'm (obviously if I can) thinking of getting a PG in advertising or marketing so they can feed off of each other irl.

I'm not sure if its worth it, but idk. Any advise would be hugely appreciated.