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If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it's very obvious from seeing how much education is struggling with cheating that the field has had

If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it's very obvious from seeing how much education is struggling with cheating that the field has had zero progress in the past century. We need to stop conflating social development, socialized childcare, and education systems. Here's my shitlist: * Children should attempt hard problems that they can make progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn't qualify as difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a wikipedia page and learn on their own. * Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. That is demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did I learn stoichiometry? There is something deeply wrong with education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics education, but are artificially prevented from having access during the exam. Why don't the tests correspond to real-world application of the subject? Oh, it's more convenient for you to evaluate it this way? That's tough shit, figure it out. * Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes learning isn't pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear that successful developers are the people who are able to maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems. Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms? * There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders. The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and going online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had to go wrong for us to get to this point -- answer banks exist because everyone uses the same textbook and the same curriculum. Cheating with other students exists because group-work is the natural state of humans. Students aren't excited about the work they do because they sense that there's a magical oracle on the internet with the solution to the simple problems they're solving. It's all going to fall apart and that's something to celebrate. The thing that I'm most afraid of is that Americans have lost the ability to take risks at aggregate and think radically about redesigning institutions. All of these problems that I'm talking about are just as bad in every other country in the world. Some country is going to figure it out and they're going to reap the rewards, and I'm afraid that America isn't brave enough anymore to be the first.

atq2119 6y ago
I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. This turned out to be false, but being able to do mental arithmetic is still an extremely valuable skill. The usability of your pocket calculator is really bad in comparison, and what the mental arithmetic gives you is a general automatic numeracy where you can ballpark the answer to numerical problems much faster than using a tool. This becomes a qualitative difference because you'll do more of those mental checks as a matter of course that you would never pull out a calculator for. Kind of like how git made merges so painless that they're now a standard part of most people's development flow. That's the kind of qualitative impact that mental arithmetic can give you. I admit that this is a point that's difficult to get across, and schools generally don't do a great job of it...
- dylan604 6y ago
  yes, being able to calculate the tip for your bar tab without needing to dig into a purse to find your "calculator" is a nicety. Being able to calculate the savings from the 20% sales price is also a useful trick. My favorite is just being able to round up the prices of items at the grocery store, and keep a running total in my head. I know I'm a nerd, but the concept calculating the tip by doubling the value after moving the decimal place one position to the right of the total flabbergasts me on how difficult it is for others to grasp. That's like 6th grade level math (at least it was when I learned it).
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  Don't you feel like you would have improved at this regardless of whether your schooling put a concerted effort into it? I've forgotten a lot of things from school -- doing math in my head isn't one of them because I use it all the time. Is that evidence that it's a good investment of time for 1st graders, or is it evidence that you would have learned it anyway due to the utility of it?
- mkasberg 6y ago
  Agreed! To build on your point - I used to teach Algebra 1 in a Title 1 school. What many people don't realize about "memorizing math facts" in elementary school is that if someone doesn't have a basic level of numeracy, it's really hard to learn more advanced concepts (like solving for x in a simple equation). You can't understand solving for x if you don't fundamentally understand how two numbers change when I subtract 5 from each of them, and you also don't have free working memory in your brain for learning if you're using all your working memory to do the subtraction. It's an anecdotal observation, but it's something that isn't often talked about in conversations about "memorizing facts". I guess what I'm trying to say is it's useful to be able to calculate a tip without a calculator or tally a grocery bill. But more importantly, it'll be a big hurdle to learning slightly more advanced math concepts if you can't do some of the basics in your head.

atq2119 6y ago

I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. This turned out to be false, but being able to do mental arithmetic is still an extremely valuable skill. The usability of your pocket calculator is really bad in comparison, and what the mental arithmetic gives you is a general automatic numeracy where you can ballpark the answer to numerical problems much faster than using a tool. This becomes a qualitative difference because you'll do more of those mental checks as a matter of course that you would never pull out a calculator for. Kind of like how git made merges so painless that they're now a standard part of most people's development flow. That's the kind of qualitative impact that mental arithmetic can give you. I admit that this is a point that's difficult to get across, and schools generally don't do a great job of it...

dylan604 6y ago
yes, being able to calculate the tip for your bar tab without needing to dig into a purse to find your "calculator" is a nicety. Being able to calculate the savings from the 20% sales price is also a useful trick. My favorite is just being able to round up the prices of items at the grocery store, and keep a running total in my head. I know I'm a nerd, but the concept calculating the tip by doubling the value after moving the decimal place one position to the right of the total flabbergasts me on how difficult it is for others to grasp. That's like 6th grade level math (at least it was when I learned it).
nickysielicki 6y ago
Don't you feel like you would have improved at this regardless of whether your schooling put a concerted effort into it? I've forgotten a lot of things from school -- doing math in my head isn't one of them because I use it all the time. Is that evidence that it's a good investment of time for 1st graders, or is it evidence that you would have learned it anyway due to the utility of it?
mkasberg 6y ago
Agreed! To build on your point - I used to teach Algebra 1 in a Title 1 school. What many people don't realize about "memorizing math facts" in elementary school is that if someone doesn't have a basic level of numeracy, it's really hard to learn more advanced concepts (like solving for x in a simple equation). You can't understand solving for x if you don't fundamentally understand how two numbers change when I subtract 5 from each of them, and you also don't have free working memory in your brain for learning if you're using all your working memory to do the subtraction. It's an anecdotal observation, but it's something that isn't often talked about in conversations about "memorizing facts". I guess what I'm trying to say is it's useful to be able to calculate a tip without a calculator or tally a grocery bill. But more importantly, it'll be a big hurdle to learning slightly more advanced math concepts if you can't do some of the basics in your head.