3 ms·
I generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the 'simple' example isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience. E.
by smallnamespace 8y ago
I generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the
'simple' example isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience.
E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer of abstraction to slog through.
My high school stats textbook would use classic problems from medicine (e.g. x/n people sampled are sick, what bounds can we put on the distribution of how many people are sick in population?), but that might not be particularly motivating to someone who has no interest in medicine or why an epidemiologist might care to know the distribution.
The best starting point to teach anything is the point that is closest to what the student understands and motivates them, but unfortunately that can vary a lot from person to person.
- newsbinator 8y agoWhat you're saying makes sense and is one viewpoint. I could see it the opposite way too: In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in reverse. The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk because he met a nice girl). I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone else. Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more importantly) why to bother.