6 ms·

"Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any signific

by jerf 7y ago

"Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight?" Also possible is that what the kid actually understands and what the parent thinks they are understanding are two different things. The kid is quite likely still wrong in some critical way. But that is where we all start with new things. I've got two boys in 3rd & 5th grade right now and I'm actively fighting with both of them the idea that "learning" is a matter of being told the correct answer and then they forever after know the correct answer in its every nuance. (Not just since the lockdown. It's been a theme for the past six months with me.) The older one has just started learning Spanish with school... well... nominally with the school, that's actually going very badly, but I started him on Duolingo in the meantime... and that's been a very good doorway into the idea that you can't just be exposed to a single isolated fact once and then have it just magically be internalized, you need to be re-exposed to it over and over, use it, practice it, and discover how your initial impressions were wrong over time.

thomaslkjeldsen 7y ago
> I've got two boys in 3rd & 5th grade right now and I'm actively fighting with both of them the idea that "learning" is a matter of being told the correct answer and then they forever after know the correct answer in its every nuance. So there is a difference between insisting on being right and acknowledging the possibility of being wrong. However, this reminds me of the book "Factfulness" where Hans Rosling shows how most of us rely on outdated information (that we were taught decades ago) when asked about the current state of the world. We simply fail to update our knowledge. The book is highly recommended.
- dmurray 7y ago
  I think he goes further than that: even young people have outdated knowledge in accordance with some predictable biases. We rely on the information because it fits some narrative we believe about the world, not because we learnt it when it was correct 30 years ago.
ummonk 7y ago
I’d be willing to bet you could, for example, explain to a smart 6 year old what the “composition machine” or the “inversion machine” does.
jonahx 7y ago
These concepts -- at the level of detail described in the article -- are well within the grasp of a bright six year old.
darkerside 7y ago
Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies Could you be swayed to the more optimistic "Education is a series of decreasingly incomplete truths"? I'm a math professor, and we do tend to be able to tell our students the truth, nothing but the truth, but very much not the whole truth, at least in every part of the curriculum that I've seen. (That we're able to do so doesn't mean no math teachers lie, but it's not as integral—ha!—a part of the curriculum as in physics, say.)
  - wolf550e 7y ago
    In my school, I was lied to by teachers instead of just saying "we will get to that later" or something. For example: Q. how much is 3 - 5? A. nothing because you cannot take 5 out of 3. Q. how much is 2 divided by 3? A. nothing because you cannot divide 2 by 3. Q. what are the roots of the quadratic function ...? A. this quadratic function doesn't have roots because you can't take the square root of a negative number I believe it's possible to not lie when teaching math, but I guess it's harder to do.
    - JadeNB 7y ago
      To be sure, there is a habit to make the teacher's life easier by lying, and I certainly believe you when you say that you were lied to; but all of these can be rescued, as a sequence of decreasingly incomplete truths, just by adding quantifiers. Since the human brain is (excessively) good at ignoring quantifiers, a skilled teacher (not me, in this context—I'm a college teacher, so am not claiming that this is the right language for primary schoolers, just that it's true) can speak truthfully without impairing the pedagogy: Q. how much is 3 - 5? A. taking 5 out of 3 does not give a whole-number answer. Q. how much is 2 divided by 3? A. dividing 2 by 3 does not give an integer answer. Q. what are the roots of the quadratic function ...? A. this quadratic function doesn't have real roots because you can't take a real square root of a negative number

by jerf 7y ago

thomaslkjeldsen 7y ago

> I've got two boys in 3rd & 5th grade right now and I'm actively fighting with both of them the idea that "learning" is a matter of being told the correct answer and then they forever after know the correct answer in its every nuance. So there is a difference between insisting on being right and acknowledging the possibility of being wrong. However, this reminds me of the book "Factfulness" where Hans Rosling shows how most of us rely on outdated information (that we were taught decades ago) when asked about the current state of the world. We simply fail to update our knowledge. The book is highly recommended.

dmurray 7y ago
I think he goes further than that: even young people have outdated knowledge in accordance with some predictable biases. We rely on the information because it fits some narrative we believe about the world, not because we learnt it when it was correct 30 years ago.

ummonk 7y ago

I’d be willing to bet you could, for example, explain to a smart 6 year old what the “composition machine” or the “inversion machine” does.

jonahx 7y ago

These concepts -- at the level of detail described in the article -- are well within the grasp of a bright six year old.

darkerside 7y ago

Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies

JadeNB 7y ago
> Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies Could you be swayed to the more optimistic "Education is a series of decreasingly incomplete truths"? I'm a math professor, and we do tend to be able to tell our students the truth, nothing but the truth, but very much not the whole truth, at least in every part of the curriculum that I've seen. (That we're able to do so doesn't mean no math teachers lie, but it's not as integral—ha!—a part of the curriculum as in physics, say.)
- wolf550e 7y ago
  In my school, I was lied to by teachers instead of just saying "we will get to that later" or something. For example: Q. how much is 3 - 5? A. nothing because you cannot take 5 out of 3. Q. how much is 2 divided by 3? A. nothing because you cannot divide 2 by 3. Q. what are the roots of the quadratic function ...? A. this quadratic function doesn't have roots because you can't take the square root of a negative number I believe it's possible to not lie when teaching math, but I guess it's harder to do.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    To be sure, there is a habit to make the teacher's life easier by lying, and I certainly believe you when you say that you were lied to; but all of these can be rescued, as a sequence of decreasingly incomplete truths, just by adding quantifiers. Since the human brain is (excessively) good at ignoring quantifiers, a skilled teacher (not me, in this context—I'm a college teacher, so am not claiming that this is the right language for primary schoolers, just that it's true) can speak truthfully without impairing the pedagogy: Q. how much is 3 - 5? A. taking 5 out of 3 does not give a whole-number answer. Q. how much is 2 divided by 3? A. dividing 2 by 3 does not give an integer answer. Q. what are the roots of the quadratic function ...? A. this quadratic function doesn't have real roots because you can't take a real square root of a negative number