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The fact that school math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' is not the issue. Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard. For instance, they contain

The fact that school math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' is not the issue. Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard. For instance, they contain monsters and are difficult to complete. They even have objective grades (scores). What makes the difference is that video games aren't compulsory. So they represent true play. Which is what makes them educational, unlike a school curriculum, however much it is tweaked. Well, until something more fun than video games arrives on the scene...

chii 9y ago
There are some aspects of doing math that isn't fun, because it is grinding. Learning the time tables for example - you just have to do lots of exercises to get used to multiplying. No way around that. Just like in sports, where you must also do a lot of basic practise to get good. Making the practise like a game can be done to done degree, but ultimately, a kid is going to see through that after a while, since it gets boring.
- Micoloth 9y ago
  Maybe they could present kids with timetable After showing them more variate and interesting concepts, so that at that point they have both the spark of interest and the maturity to understand multiplication is important and the attitude at learning that makes it not a torture. I'm just making things up tho
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  Thats the kind of BS math they shouldn't bother teaching. Most of math is about concepts, and if 5 year olds can grapple with super-basic calculus how about teaching 10 year olds proof-based math and concepts (closer to college level) than memorization? Its kind of dumb how arithmetic is seen as a precursor to math when its really not. You could do an ENTIRE college-level course in linear algebra or calculus or graph theory or even combinatorics perfectly well even if you have no idea what 11*15 is off the top of your head and have to look it up every time. Its just a ridiculously backwards approach to teaching. We don't teach CS by testing people on memorizing syntax and API calls - they are rightly relegated to "google it when you need it, eventually you'll remember it". Of course algorithms are more interesting and building things is more fun so we focus on that. Current way of teaching math is just a historical accident IMO. No real reason it couldn't be conceptual and interesting from the start if there wasn't so much inertia around current systems.
  - tttt5 9y ago
    Being able to recognize that 11 * 15 = 10*15 + 15 may be related to success in higher level math courses like linear algebra and calculus.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      I never learnt my times tables when I was little I just learnt how to do the multiplications in my head on the fly. Years later when I worked in a shop I used to cost complex print jobs in my head and co-workers though it was magic. The way maths is taught in the UK is largely how and very rarely why.
  - Ntrails 9y ago
    Of course understanding fourier transforms isn't reliant on my ability to do 6x7 - but arithmetic as a lifeskill is actually valuable. It's like saying that grammar and spelling aren't important because spellcheck will sort it out. Splitting out arithmetic from "Maths" doesn't seem terribly sensible to me. Times tables aren't really problematic, and they do provide opportunities to teach valuable concepts (5x6 = 6x5).
    - eecc 9y ago
      No, you're straying away from the original point which was: there's no need to make rote memorization of arithmetic tricks and multiplication tables a hard prerequisite to everything else about math. Nobody claimed that arithmetic is absolutely useless
      - Ntrails 9y ago
        It is never hard blocked on arithmetic though (in the UK at least). A bunch of simple numerical solving will be harder without being able to do multiplication in your head - but certainly someone could get through without. I'm honestly dubious of anyone who claims that the reason people hate maths is because of times tables.
- roceasta 9y ago
  >Learning the time tables for example - you just have to do lots of exercises to get used to multiplying. No way around that. Learning how to perform mental arithmetic with the aid of pencil and paper was a way to escape from the grind of farm work. One could get a respectable job as a clerk. However with the advent of electronic cash registers and smartphones a way around this later form of grind has also been found. So no need to make it compulsory. Which isn't to say that people don't choose to practice specific things they personally consider useful. Even gamers do that.
  - ajuc 9y ago
    Can't understand modern world without understanding statistic, can't do that without algebra and basic calculus, can't do that without being at least adequate at mental multiplication (for calculating parameters in equations and understanding how they change without interrupting your train of thought every 3 seconds). So yeah, I think you still need to grind these multiplication tables, even if you have perfect version of Wolphram Alpha on your smartphone. It won't tell you what question to ask.
    - roceasta 9y ago
      Have you noticed that most adults don't know what nine times seven is? If you ask them on the street they'll mostly either get it wrong or tell you quite rudely to go away. This is despite (and because of) a decade of grind at school. Or have you noticed that people are unable to hold a conversation in a foreign language despite years of 'study' in a classroom? Whereas an enthusiastic individual can pick up basic conversation for themselves in a matter of months. This is because coercion in education is: (1) painful, (2) prophetic, (3) it doesn't work! What happens in real life is that if somebody needs to know something because they are keen to do something else then they will learn it efficiently, 'just in time' and precisely to the extent needed. Assuming their creativity is relatively intact... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
      - ajuc 9y ago
        Not really (but then I never asked random people to multiply for me :) ). But I can kinda understand why, you almost never have to multiply 9*7 by hand. If you're doing algebra or any symbolic calculations you rarely use digits other than 0-4. In real world Benford's law + usual rounding greatly reduces the need to multiply by 7 or 9 (or 8 for that matter).
- jacobolus 9y ago
  > Learning the time tables for example - you just have to do lots of exercises to get used to multiplying. No way around that. The way around is to just not do that. Students get huge amounts of practice with basic multiplication if they are assigned more interesting problems/projects that use multiplication as one step, and will inevitably memorize all of the same basic facts, assuming they actually do the work. Memorizing multiplication facts for their own sake is a soul-sucking waste of time that turns kids off from math for good. Similarly, the way to get good at spelling is by reading engrossing books for hours every day and writing about subjects of personal interest. Studying lists of spelling words in school is beyond pointless. These are not skills like sports or playing musical instruments, where there is a particular physical technique involving fine muscle coordination, where practicing incorrectly will establish wrong movements. Instead we’re talking about simple verbal/linguistic recall of previously seen information.
jonnybgood 9y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you. 'Scary' and 'hard' becomes an issue when that's all that's being said about math. Video games are 'scary' and 'hard' but... they're also fascinating and fun. The popular math narrative is incomplete unlike video games. Why is that? Dr. Eugenia Cheng says it much better and has a good answer as to why [1]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/video/math-is-amazing-and-we-have-to-start-treating-it-that-way-1503102025/ http://www.pbs.org/video/math-is-amazing-and-we-have-to-star...
iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
Hard and scary carry differently meanings in those contexts though, surely? Video games are safe e.g you can always try again, you can do incrementally well. Video games are scary in an exhilarating way, you blood will pump and your pupils will dilate but at the end you can put it down, turn the lights on and watch funny cat videos to recover. Math (at school) is hard because you get one shot. Finite lives. After enough retries society says "nope, you're done". It's hard because you can't test yourself when ever you want and your study is not directly related to your tests. Math is scary like anxious scary. Like stay up at night dreading your exam or don't sleep for a weekend to finish your report scary. You can't watch cat videos and hope it goes away because it won't. You can't buy a new math or try it again in a few years. You get one shot. You get little to no feed back. That's hard and scary.
- occultist_throw 9y ago
  And you succinctly put why I despise "School". I love learning new areas and new techniques. And when Im teaching myself, I can fail and I go back a step or 2. Not the end of the world. If I do similar in a class, then I set myself further back with a slowly growing chance of doing badly (D or F). And in College, then its another 1-4 credit hours to pay for the privilege. They not only fail me, but demand more money. Edit: misspelling that looked bad (dong=>doing)
  - roceasta 9y ago
    I think this also explains why driving tests aren't as bad as school: they are pass/fail and one can re-take as many times as wanted.
  - iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
    I must have attempted to implement a lisp many times before I got it "right", or a "simple" perceptron etc. Without the pressure I'm not scared of revisiting hard things, I'm driven to actually. Edit: to indicate that a "simple" perceptron isn't actually that simple.
    - 9y ago
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Video games also don't have social promotion or enforced curriculum "progression". If you die in the first level of a video game, you play it repeatedly until you legitimately merit entering the second level. If you get a mediocre grade on a math test, even a failure, we shove you into the next subject in the curriculum. When you start failing that because new math builds on mastery of old math, we tell you you're not a math person and should probably major in Literature. Then we go complain to the other math teachers that students are lazy and apathetic, and ask each-other how it is that math PhD students manage to spontaneously generate from such piles of shit.
odessacubbage 9y ago
videogames also encourage a learning process based around experimentation and failure, both of which were highly discouraged during the course of my math education. effective learning is a process of repeated failure & incremental improvement that stands at odds with the present incentives in the american education system.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
> math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' > Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard Those statements seem related because of the ambiguous definition of "scary". In relation to math, "scary" causes anxiety, whereas in relation to video games, "scary" causes excitement. As soon as you grasp the different meanings, you can clearly see that even though both statements are about the same word they are still orthogonal.
- roceasta 9y ago
  Yes, it's complicated. Yet I don't think I committed an equivocation. As I said, what makes the difference is compulsion/coercion, which causes us to interpret scariness in one context as bad (e.g. falling off a ladder), and scariness in another as being good and part of the fun (e.g. skydiving).

chii 9y ago

There are some aspects of doing math that isn't fun, because it is grinding. Learning the time tables for example - you just have to do lots of exercises to get used to multiplying. No way around that. Just like in sports, where you must also do a lot of basic practise to get good. Making the practise like a game can be done to done degree, but ultimately, a kid is going to see through that after a while, since it gets boring.

Micoloth 9y ago
Maybe they could present kids with timetable After showing them more variate and interesting concepts, so that at that point they have both the spark of interest and the maturity to understand multiplication is important and the attitude at learning that makes it not a torture. I'm just making things up tho
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Thats the kind of BS math they shouldn't bother teaching. Most of math is about concepts, and if 5 year olds can grapple with super-basic calculus how about teaching 10 year olds proof-based math and concepts (closer to college level) than memorization? Its kind of dumb how arithmetic is seen as a precursor to math when its really not. You could do an ENTIRE college-level course in linear algebra or calculus or graph theory or even combinatorics perfectly well even if you have no idea what 11*15 is off the top of your head and have to look it up every time. Its just a ridiculously backwards approach to teaching. We don't teach CS by testing people on memorizing syntax and API calls - they are rightly relegated to "google it when you need it, eventually you'll remember it". Of course algorithms are more interesting and building things is more fun so we focus on that. Current way of teaching math is just a historical accident IMO. No real reason it couldn't be conceptual and interesting from the start if there wasn't so much inertia around current systems.
- tttt5 9y ago
  Being able to recognize that 11 * 15 = 10*15 + 15 may be related to success in higher level math courses like linear algebra and calculus.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    I never learnt my times tables when I was little I just learnt how to do the multiplications in my head on the fly. Years later when I worked in a shop I used to cost complex print jobs in my head and co-workers though it was magic. The way maths is taught in the UK is largely how and very rarely why.
- Ntrails 9y ago
  Of course understanding fourier transforms isn't reliant on my ability to do 6x7 - but arithmetic as a lifeskill is actually valuable. It's like saying that grammar and spelling aren't important because spellcheck will sort it out. Splitting out arithmetic from "Maths" doesn't seem terribly sensible to me. Times tables aren't really problematic, and they do provide opportunities to teach valuable concepts (5x6 = 6x5).
  - eecc 9y ago
    No, you're straying away from the original point which was: there's no need to make rote memorization of arithmetic tricks and multiplication tables a hard prerequisite to everything else about math. Nobody claimed that arithmetic is absolutely useless
    - Ntrails 9y ago
      It is never hard blocked on arithmetic though (in the UK at least). A bunch of simple numerical solving will be harder without being able to do multiplication in your head - but certainly someone could get through without. I'm honestly dubious of anyone who claims that the reason people hate maths is because of times tables.
roceasta 9y ago
>Learning the time tables for example - you just have to do lots of exercises to get used to multiplying. No way around that. Learning how to perform mental arithmetic with the aid of pencil and paper was a way to escape from the grind of farm work. One could get a respectable job as a clerk. However with the advent of electronic cash registers and smartphones a way around this later form of grind has also been found. So no need to make it compulsory. Which isn't to say that people don't choose to practice specific things they personally consider useful. Even gamers do that.
- ajuc 9y ago
  Can't understand modern world without understanding statistic, can't do that without algebra and basic calculus, can't do that without being at least adequate at mental multiplication (for calculating parameters in equations and understanding how they change without interrupting your train of thought every 3 seconds). So yeah, I think you still need to grind these multiplication tables, even if you have perfect version of Wolphram Alpha on your smartphone. It won't tell you what question to ask.
  - roceasta 9y ago
    Have you noticed that most adults don't know what nine times seven is? If you ask them on the street they'll mostly either get it wrong or tell you quite rudely to go away. This is despite (and because of) a decade of grind at school. Or have you noticed that people are unable to hold a conversation in a foreign language despite years of 'study' in a classroom? Whereas an enthusiastic individual can pick up basic conversation for themselves in a matter of months. This is because coercion in education is: (1) painful, (2) prophetic, (3) it doesn't work! What happens in real life is that if somebody needs to know something because they are keen to do something else then they will learn it efficiently, 'just in time' and precisely to the extent needed. Assuming their creativity is relatively intact... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
    - ajuc 9y ago
      Not really (but then I never asked random people to multiply for me :) ). But I can kinda understand why, you almost never have to multiply 9*7 by hand. If you're doing algebra or any symbolic calculations you rarely use digits other than 0-4. In real world Benford's law + usual rounding greatly reduces the need to multiply by 7 or 9 (or 8 for that matter).
jacobolus 9y ago
> Learning the time tables for example - you just have to do lots of exercises to get used to multiplying. No way around that. The way around is to just not do that. Students get huge amounts of practice with basic multiplication if they are assigned more interesting problems/projects that use multiplication as one step, and will inevitably memorize all of the same basic facts, assuming they actually do the work. Memorizing multiplication facts for their own sake is a soul-sucking waste of time that turns kids off from math for good. Similarly, the way to get good at spelling is by reading engrossing books for hours every day and writing about subjects of personal interest. Studying lists of spelling words in school is beyond pointless. These are not skills like sports or playing musical instruments, where there is a particular physical technique involving fine muscle coordination, where practicing incorrectly will establish wrong movements. Instead we’re talking about simple verbal/linguistic recall of previously seen information.

jonnybgood 9y ago

I'm not disagreeing with you. 'Scary' and 'hard' becomes an issue when that's all that's being said about math. Video games are 'scary' and 'hard' but... they're also fascinating and fun. The popular math narrative is incomplete unlike video games. Why is that? Dr. Eugenia Cheng says it much better and has a good answer as to why [1]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/video/math-is-amazing-and-we-have-to-start-treating-it-that-way-1503102025/ http://www.pbs.org/video/math-is-amazing-and-we-have-to-star...

iovrthoughtthis 9y ago

Hard and scary carry differently meanings in those contexts though, surely? Video games are safe e.g you can always try again, you can do incrementally well. Video games are scary in an exhilarating way, you blood will pump and your pupils will dilate but at the end you can put it down, turn the lights on and watch funny cat videos to recover. Math (at school) is hard because you get one shot. Finite lives. After enough retries society says "nope, you're done". It's hard because you can't test yourself when ever you want and your study is not directly related to your tests. Math is scary like anxious scary. Like stay up at night dreading your exam or don't sleep for a weekend to finish your report scary. You can't watch cat videos and hope it goes away because it won't. You can't buy a new math or try it again in a few years. You get one shot. You get little to no feed back. That's hard and scary.

occultist_throw 9y ago
And you succinctly put why I despise "School". I love learning new areas and new techniques. And when Im teaching myself, I can fail and I go back a step or 2. Not the end of the world. If I do similar in a class, then I set myself further back with a slowly growing chance of doing badly (D or F). And in College, then its another 1-4 credit hours to pay for the privilege. They not only fail me, but demand more money. Edit: misspelling that looked bad (dong=>doing)
- roceasta 9y ago
  I think this also explains why driving tests aren't as bad as school: they are pass/fail and one can re-take as many times as wanted.
- iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
  I must have attempted to implement a lisp many times before I got it "right", or a "simple" perceptron etc. Without the pressure I'm not scared of revisiting hard things, I'm driven to actually. Edit: to indicate that a "simple" perceptron isn't actually that simple.
  - 9y ago

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

Video games also don't have social promotion or enforced curriculum "progression". If you die in the first level of a video game, you play it repeatedly until you legitimately merit entering the second level. If you get a mediocre grade on a math test, even a failure, we shove you into the next subject in the curriculum. When you start failing that because new math builds on mastery of old math, we tell you you're not a math person and should probably major in Literature. Then we go complain to the other math teachers that students are lazy and apathetic, and ask each-other how it is that math PhD students manage to spontaneously generate from such piles of shit.

odessacubbage 9y ago

videogames also encourage a learning process based around experimentation and failure, both of which were highly discouraged during the course of my math education. effective learning is a process of repeated failure & incremental improvement that stands at odds with the present incentives in the american education system.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

> math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' > Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard Those statements seem related because of the ambiguous definition of "scary". In relation to math, "scary" causes anxiety, whereas in relation to video games, "scary" causes excitement. As soon as you grasp the different meanings, you can clearly see that even though both statements are about the same word they are still orthogonal.

roceasta 9y ago
Yes, it's complicated. Yet I don't think I committed an equivocation. As I said, what makes the difference is compulsion/coercion, which causes us to interpret scariness in one context as bad (e.g. falling off a ladder), and scariness in another as being good and part of the fun (e.g. skydiving).