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When I was in elementary school my dad constantly pointed out that they were teaching me nothing but lies. Sometimes he'd ask me what we were learning and then

by TipVFL 9y ago

When I was in elementary school my dad constantly pointed out that they were teaching me nothing but lies. Sometimes he'd ask me what we were learning and then he'd give me questions to fluster the teacher. Teachers either loved it, or hated it (most hated it). For some topics it makes sense to start with a simplified view, but I don't understand the general trend of insisting it's actually correct while they do it. It's already hard to convince some kids to learn, when they later find out that most of it was lies it has to sap their motivation further. The simple solution, when you're dealing with a simplified/incorrect version of something for educational purposes, admit that's what you're doing, and why. An example of this madness: in my high school physics/chemistry class the teacher asked how many states of matter there are are, I raised my hand and said 4. She said, "Wrong, there are three." I said, "Solid, water, gas, and plasma. Four." Her response, "Look in your book, what does it say? THREE: water, solid, and gas." I told her that plasma is the most common form of matter in the universe and a textbook wouldn't change that. I got detention. I got detention for insisting plasma exists, in a high school science class.

euyyn 9y ago
You got detention for not counting Bose-Einstein condensates mate.
zbyte64 9y ago
Weird, I had some stupid opinions but never got detention for them. But I also never interrupted class to say science was wrong about radiometric dating and evolution \-0-/
jacobolus 9y ago
This is a general problem with organization and counting of abstract categories. All of my science, history, and social science courses in middle/high school were pretty much garbage, and as far as I can tell that is the norm in the US (and many other places; not through special fault of the teachers, but because the curriculum/textbooks are insipid). “State of matter” is not a perfectly defined property, but only a simplified model of high-level aggregate behavior/interactions; individual particles have simpler interactions which are not categorized the same way. Scientists are happy to admit a new “state of matter” whenever they manage to observe a situation that doesn’t behave according to their previous models, and are happy to admit that the states of matter are just a simplified model, but some petty bureaucrats (like, sadly, many teachers) can’t handle this. You can similarly get into trouble arguing about how many “kingdoms” there are of eukaryotes, or how many Romance “languages” there are, or how many “continents” there are, or the difference between crops and weeds or a fetus and a person or plagiarism and research. Quizzing students on how well they can memorize and recall labels (and even worse, punishing them for knowing additional labels) is not just an incredible waste of human time and attention, but is actively harmful insofar as it disempowers students to ask and investigate their own questions and discourages them from seeking a deeper understanding of what they are learning. I really appreciate the beginning of the MIT electronics textbook https://amzn.com/1558607358 https://amzn.com/1558607358 which explicitly describes the abstractions used and their limitations, up front. Rare economics textbooks also do a decent job of this.
- franciscop 9y ago
  Oh yeah, I got that in University. If I remember correctly from thermodynamics, high pressure and heat above the triple point [1] makes the change from liquid to gas to be a continuum and not a discrete jump. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point
franciscop 9y ago
I was also on the science/rebellious side, which was really cool learning since of course ~80-90% of the things I disputed I was wrong, which only made me learn and be more motivated! I built my model of why I thought something was not correct, if I thought it was strong enough I'll ask some key questions and then I'd learn about it. I don't fully agree with no simplification though, but I agree your teacher reaction was wrong. I think saying something like "yes, there are more states, but these are the ones commonly found in nature" would be the best. I've taught programming, and for example in Javascript I would just teach that there is a type that is Number. But I wouldn't go into detail between int, float, different bases, etc since it doesn't make sense in a really basic level when general knowledge is more important. At points some people would ask me more advanced or old-school questions, like table layouts, then I would acknowledge those exist but there are better alternatives nowadays and that I would teach that.
- TipVFL 9y ago
  I didn't say no simplification. I said, it can be useful, but at least admit what you're doing. So, I think we're in full agreement. I think part of the issue is teacher ego, some teachers feel like they only have authority if they're always right. On the first day of my AP history in high school we were going over the dawn of man. My teacher listed a bunch of proto-humans, and then got to homo habilis, and said that homo habilis was a fully modern human. This piqued my curiosity, so I raised my hand and asked, "If they were fully modern humans, what is the distinction between them and homo sapiens?" My teacher yelled, "Are you trying to make me look like an idiot!?", and ran out of the room crying. I asked less questions after that.
dredmorbius 9y ago
See Wittgenstein's "Lie-to-Children". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children It's often easier to come up with a simplified (and more wrong) model than a more complex (but less wrong) one. If you're lucky, when the time comes to swap the second for the first, there won't be too much transactional cost or confusion in the process. It's also useful to keep in mind that a major component of educational pedagogy is in fact the cultural normalisation that it entails. Ideally the keepers of that pedagogy (as with your high school science teacher) would be aware of this, would be aware of at least the next step along that conceptual ladder, and would acknowledge it when raised. That isn't always the case. There's the point that accommodating constant challenges to a common model of understanding even if that model is wrong and a specific challenge is correct is expensive and disruptive. A major element of the investigations I've been pursuing over the past few years have concerned models, their accuracy, their adoption, their costs, and most especially, the process by which old models are replaced by new ones. The name Thomas Kuhn may mean something to you. Worth reflecting on (or reading, if you haven't).

by TipVFL 9y ago

euyyn 9y ago

You got detention for not counting Bose-Einstein condensates mate.

zbyte64 9y ago

Weird, I had some stupid opinions but never got detention for them. But I also never interrupted class to say science was wrong about radiometric dating and evolution \-0-/

jacobolus 9y ago

This is a general problem with organization and counting of abstract categories. All of my science, history, and social science courses in middle/high school were pretty much garbage, and as far as I can tell that is the norm in the US (and many other places; not through special fault of the teachers, but because the curriculum/textbooks are insipid). “State of matter” is not a perfectly defined property, but only a simplified model of high-level aggregate behavior/interactions; individual particles have simpler interactions which are not categorized the same way. Scientists are happy to admit a new “state of matter” whenever they manage to observe a situation that doesn’t behave according to their previous models, and are happy to admit that the states of matter are just a simplified model, but some petty bureaucrats (like, sadly, many teachers) can’t handle this. You can similarly get into trouble arguing about how many “kingdoms” there are of eukaryotes, or how many Romance “languages” there are, or how many “continents” there are, or the difference between crops and weeds or a fetus and a person or plagiarism and research. Quizzing students on how well they can memorize and recall labels (and even worse, punishing them for knowing additional labels) is not just an incredible waste of human time and attention, but is actively harmful insofar as it disempowers students to ask and investigate their own questions and discourages them from seeking a deeper understanding of what they are learning. I really appreciate the beginning of the MIT electronics textbook https://amzn.com/1558607358 https://amzn.com/1558607358 which explicitly describes the abstractions used and their limitations, up front. Rare economics textbooks also do a decent job of this.

franciscop 9y ago
Oh yeah, I got that in University. If I remember correctly from thermodynamics, high pressure and heat above the triple point [1] makes the change from liquid to gas to be a continuum and not a discrete jump. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point

franciscop 9y ago

I was also on the science/rebellious side, which was really cool learning since of course ~80-90% of the things I disputed I was wrong, which only made me learn and be more motivated! I built my model of why I thought something was not correct, if I thought it was strong enough I'll ask some key questions and then I'd learn about it. I don't fully agree with no simplification though, but I agree your teacher reaction was wrong. I think saying something like "yes, there are more states, but these are the ones commonly found in nature" would be the best. I've taught programming, and for example in Javascript I would just teach that there is a type that is Number. But I wouldn't go into detail between int, float, different bases, etc since it doesn't make sense in a really basic level when general knowledge is more important. At points some people would ask me more advanced or old-school questions, like table layouts, then I would acknowledge those exist but there are better alternatives nowadays and that I would teach that.

TipVFL 9y ago
I didn't say no simplification. I said, it can be useful, but at least admit what you're doing. So, I think we're in full agreement. I think part of the issue is teacher ego, some teachers feel like they only have authority if they're always right. On the first day of my AP history in high school we were going over the dawn of man. My teacher listed a bunch of proto-humans, and then got to homo habilis, and said that homo habilis was a fully modern human. This piqued my curiosity, so I raised my hand and asked, "If they were fully modern humans, what is the distinction between them and homo sapiens?" My teacher yelled, "Are you trying to make me look like an idiot!?", and ran out of the room crying. I asked less questions after that.

dredmorbius 9y ago

See Wittgenstein's "Lie-to-Children". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children It's often easier to come up with a simplified (and more wrong) model than a more complex (but less wrong) one. If you're lucky, when the time comes to swap the second for the first, there won't be too much transactional cost or confusion in the process. It's also useful to keep in mind that a major component of educational pedagogy is in fact the cultural normalisation that it entails. Ideally the keepers of that pedagogy (as with your high school science teacher) would be aware of this, would be aware of at least the next step along that conceptual ladder, and would acknowledge it when raised. That isn't always the case. There's the point that accommodating constant challenges to a common model of understanding even if that model is wrong and a specific challenge is correct is expensive and disruptive. A major element of the investigations I've been pursuing over the past few years have concerned models, their accuracy, their adoption, their costs, and most especially, the process by which old models are replaced by new ones. The name Thomas Kuhn may mean something to you. Worth reflecting on (or reading, if you haven't).