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You can replace chemistry with math in his article (and he sort of mentions this in context near the end). I can't remember once being shown the physical proble

• madengr 7y ago
  What I hated was having to memorize orbitals in freshman chemistry, then after taking modern physics as a junior, the orbitals were deduced easily. Anyway, I hated chemistry, as it seemed all rote memorization. Physics was so much better. It’s also more applicable to RF.
  • jcims 7y ago
    Totally agree. The idea that chemistry is separate from physics is pretty dumb anyway. I'm kinda talking out of my blowhole here, but it seems the reason chemistry and biology are distinguished from physics is that there are a lot of emergent phenomenon that we didn't and in many cases still can't predict from the fundamental physics. But, it's still there. Maybe chemistry should be called molecular dynamics or something like that. Jazz it up a bit. Also, more explosions and experiments with fart gas.
    • Koshkin 7y ago
      This old adage is called ‘reductionism.’
      • jcims 7y ago
        TIL! Thanks
      • izacus 7y ago
        And the obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
        • jcims 7y ago
          Nice!
    • tsimionescu 7y ago
      But some sciences really do require a lot of memorization, and even if we could understand the entire world from first principles, biology would still remain a separate science from physics, especially in the area of anatomy and ecology. Perhaps one day we will be able to account for each biological process starting from physics, but that still won't help us find new species of orchids and which bees pollinate them. Even for chemistry, sure, you can use quantum mechanics to predict what combining hydrochloric acid with caustic soda produce, but that is far, far more difficult than remembering some valence for the few common elements.
    • Supermancho 7y ago
      > The idea that chemistry is separate from physics is pretty dumb anyway. Applying reduction to say "everyone young person should know everything" is hubris. It's a practical division, at multiple levels. eg Specialization, profession, etc. Renaming (Molecular Dynamics) is just adding to the soup. Yes there is some overlap, but it's not worth trying to jam into the minds of students who dont have the drive or aptitude. re: Trying to teach everyone software development or CS
      • 7y ago
  • ghaff 7y ago
    One of the challenges with curricula generally is that there are a lot of dependencies and you sort of have to use a certain amount of rote memorization to jumpstart things. Organic chemistry in particular, which I did not get along well with, I recall as requiring a lot of memorization because at that level you just don't have the tools to figure out how reactions will progress from first principles. Even physics, if you haven't had calculus yet, you end up having to memorize a lot of formulas because you don't know how to derive them.
  • perl4ever 7y ago
    In high school chemistry, we had to memorize the periodic table in the sense of symbol <=> name. I hated memorizing stuff, but I found a way to make it enjoyable - I wrote an adaptive flashcard program to use.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      My highschool chemistry class required us to memorize that stuff, but they also let us use graphing calculators on every test... Memorizing it still pays off because it saves time, but I think a load of students didn't bother and just 'cheated.' (I'm not really convinced this is truly a form of cheating since if you look up the answer frequently enough you'll end up memorizing it by accident anyway. You can only look up Pb so many times before you start to remember it means lead.)
• edge17 7y ago
  Being much older now, it's very apparent to me that whatever aptitudes I had as a younger student were driven by whatever good teachers I was fortunate to have at the time. In my case I had the good fortune of wonderful math teachers. As a younger student my Physics teachers did not engage me. It is only in my 30's that I appreciate Physics (largely due to personal effort, exposure to important historical problems, and understanding that my own learning style involves needing to empathize with the motivating problem)
• esoterica 7y ago
  Boring is subjective. Many people find ”practical applications” boring but pure math fun. They would find your proposed curriculum deeply uninteresting.
  • criddell 7y ago
    If a teacher takes the practical applications angle, you can always ignore that part and just do the math. The reverse is more difficult. My linear algebra teacher didn't ground the work in anything and as student I had no idea that the vectors and matrices could be used for, say, computer graphics.
    • chongli 7y ago
      you can always ignore that part and just do the math No, not really at all. Most of applied math is raw calculations. A student interested in pure math is going to be bored to tears by that. They need challenging problems and proofs to work on. It’s like putting a gifted programmer in a data entry class and telling them to “just focus on the typing” as though people like programming for the keyboard work. For example, in linear algebra, I found Gaussian elimination boring as well. I was far more interested in learning how to prove things about vector spaces, subspaces, the fundamental theorem of linear algebra, the spectral theorems, and so on.
      • mennis16 7y ago
        I would guess students that are more interested in pure math are a minority though. I definitely don't think this group should be ignored, but perhaps the core classes could be more "practical" while still offering advanced pure math electives (potentially through a magnet type school that services multiple "regular" school districts). I believe it is already pretty common for universities to have multiple offerings of the same general math subject to this end, although this might be limited to schools with larger STEM programs. IME K-12 math wasn't taught in a very engaging way regardless of whether one was interested in theory or applications. The people I knew that were into math all did after school and/or summer courses, although I don't know whether the interest came before or after their parents enrolled them in these supplements. Personally I did not think math was interesting until undergraduate, where I first gained an appreciation of the applied work and subsequently found myself interested in some pure math areas as well. I wish I had realized how cool math can be earlier on in my education- I do recall enjoying very early math, but I think by 5th grade I was unfortunately jaded. I guess I ultimately wish high schools had a bit more diversity in classes. I don't know if this is feasible, but I feel by grades 11 and 12 it would be greatly beneficial if students had more choice between a number of focused electives. Even at my high school which was generally considered high quality, the upper level courses were largely the standard AP curricula, which at least in the case of biology was still very much a survey course. I don't think this helped students decide what they wanted to pursue enough, and it seems that freshman year of college for most people was largely a repeat. Why not let students get some sense of a couple subfields before they have to actually commit to something? Online courses can maybe help but I feel they will have to be grounded somehow in the high schools to be fully effective. Anyways this got a bit off topic, but if anyone has any related information/thoughts I'd love to hear it- I am certainly interested in education but don't have much practical knowledge/experience outside of my own bubble at this time.
• oefrha 7y ago
  > I can't remember once being shown the physical problems that drove progress in math until I reached calculus. Progress in math often (or usually) isn’t driven by physical problems, so there’s that. Just like progress in physics often (or usually) isn’t driven by “real world” problems. Discoveries are often made before applications are found. As a concrete example, number theory is an incredibly profound and fruitful branch of mathematics. It is also largely “useless” to this day (outside of cryptography, which uses only a small subset of number theory, and isn’t really “physical” to begin with). Another well-known example is non-Euclidean geometry, which came into being due to the purely intellectual pursuit of the Fifth Postulate, and almost magically found its place in the theory of gravitation long afterwards. It takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy mathematics as is, even if it seems “useless”. (Theoretical physicist who double majored in math and physics in college here. Definitely possess the “certain kind of personality”.)
  • thereisnospork 7y ago
    >Progress in math often (or usually) isn’t driven by physical problems, so there’s that. Just like progress in physics often (or usually) isn’t driven by “real world” problems. Discoveries are often made before applications are found. The use of math however is driven by physical problems for most people; teaching people how to use math (or physics, or chemistry) ought to be the point of most non-grad level courses? Anecdotally, I got more out of my math classes that were through the lens of either a solver e.g. matlab/mathmatica/R or a 'practical' subject like quantum chemistry.
    • chongli 7y ago
      That doesn't work for everyone though. I'm studying pure math and I find most applied math problems very boring. I also like solving puzzles, though. If a problem is little more than knowing which formula to use (with some manipulation) and then punching the values into my calculator then it just feels like I'm doing a computer's job. So I think if we gear our curriculum too heavily to the applied side of things, we risk alienating some very gifted students who might otherwise go on to become brilliant mathematicians.
• mathattack 7y ago
  I concur. I hated math until calc, when it explained physics. Now I love math. But most folks never get there - it’s taught too removed from both the application and the beauty. Looking at my children’s teachers, some make it come alive, some struggle with large classes, and some just don’t know the material well themselves.
• japhyr 7y ago
  I studied physics in undergrad many years ago, and it's been a long time since I used higher level math on a regular basis. I just picked up Mathematics: Its Content, Methods, and Meaning, on the recommendation of someone here. It's over 1000 pages, so it's going to be a lifetime reading project for me, but it's been wonderful to start reading. The first part of the book traces the earliest origins of math, and everything was grounded in real-world physical problems. I've been a high school math teacher for most of my life, and I have deep frustrations with how removed from meaning math is presented to most students. Just because the teacher knows and states the possible relevance doesn't mean students should be expected to take the relevance at face value. I was mostly focused on teaching algebra 1 classes, which is why I didn't use higher math all that often. But my understanding of higher math grounded my teaching of lower level concepts all the time, and I often spoke of higher level concepts with my students to help demystify math. My 8yo son loves math for now, and the moment school makes math meaningless to him I am planning to find some way to intervene. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486409163/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486409163/
• tmaly 7y ago
  I played with a lot of circuits from Radio Shack as a kid. I did not understand much of the math behind it till I got to college and took the electrical engineering courses. But I agree with you, it would have much more interesting to use electronics and computers to teach some of the math subjects.
• awayfromhomenow 7y ago
  funny you should mention that: I saw a YouTube video last week that went through some linear algebra real-world uses - edge-detection being one of them... it would have been awesome to have been told/shown that rather than just "study this".
• yters 7y ago
  My interest in math and all things STEMy stemmed from computer games. Then I realized basic solutions could be generalized, and that got me interested in more abstract aspects of mathematics. I think a curriculum based around game programming could provide a concrete context for many STEM disciplines. Then you get into the story, consistent gameworld, art and sound side of computer games and you can introduce humanities subjects such as the classics, philosophy, art, and music. So, in short, we could base an entire Uni curriculum, spanning the sciences and arts, all centered around creating a computer game. And best of all, the student's capstone will be something any person can play, instead of dragging themselves through pages and pages of hard to read writing.
• gumby 7y ago
  I told my kid that math might be boring perhaps through the end of high school because the time was taken up learning the “alphabet” of math, and see what the boring process learning the actual alphabet resulted in? I guess he believed me as he became a math major.
• techslave 7y ago
  race car dynamics is a great math application of interest. and good for algebra through diff eq
• laichzeit0 7y ago
  As a counter point, I am put off by practical applications to mathematics and even avoid such physics based exercises in math books. I prefer pure mathematics. I find it interesting because of its abstract beauty and that motives me to want to learn more.
• analog31 7y ago
  In my view, math suffers from getting pulled in multiple directions all at once. It is: * A tool for solving practical problems. * A sorting hat for the more lucrative college majors. * An introduction to formal thinking and abstraction. * A score in a tournament called high school. * A source of entertainment, mystery, and beauty. It's hard to convey all of these things at once, and there may be social or political pressures to prioritize certain aspects over others. I was a math / physics double major, and then went to gradual school in physics. I was propelled by different aspects of math at different times, perhaps as I passed from one mentor to the next, or was swayed by my many side interests (programming, electronics, music). I've tried explaining to my kids that the curriculum du jour, whatever it is, will give them practice with the mechanics of math, so that they're not bogged down in it when they're ready to meet math on their own terms.