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The examples in the textbooks are not representative of real world problems

101 points by luu 5y ago

Lamad123 5y ago
They probably don't have to be!! Training for actual warfare doesn't mean you have to be killed during that training!! But I am with the opinion that the more you're exposed to real world stuff and the more "battle-hardened" you are, the better!
tgv 5y ago
Real world examples tend to have a huge amount of unpleasant details which hinder transfer of the underlying concepts. We teach one step at a time, and even then 99.999% of the people leave before finishing. Suppose you start teaching arithmetics by introducing 5 year olds to elliptic curves…
- TrailMixRaisin 5y ago
  In high school I had a chemistry teacher that came from the industry. His examples and test questions were motivated by his real world experience. While this was very interesting at the same time it brought another level of complexity. One example was that we were learning about elements by mmol of substance and had to calculate how much of the input substances we needed to end up with the needed amount of end product. (My explanation might be of because this is some time ago!) Here we were not asked how many liters or kg of stuff we needed but always worked in metric tons or cubic meters. These uncommon volumes made it harder to develop an intuition about the results to quickly understand if a result was reasonable. So many of the surrounding elements that came from the real world made it harder to concentrate on the problem core.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    On the other hand, gradually increasing the complexity and level of detail (including distraction with irrelevant details and like taking away your intuition crutches) is a great way to start learning to apply your knowledge in a more sophisticated way.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Mol as a chemical unit of measure is part of the first year chemical curriculum at Bavarian Gymnasiums (in three tier school system, those are the ones paving the paths to university). I remember I hated calculating in mol, but then we also expose students to all kinds of units of measure in physics.
  - chaxor 5y ago
    I'm not sure I understand... This seems typical, and perhaps somewhat simplified, for chemistry courses. ?
    - exmadscientist 5y ago
      It's the weird units. Students don't like weird units. I remember I once, many years ago now, had a chemistry professor give temperatures in Fahrenheit for a thermodynamics problem, which to solve needed absolute temperatures in Kelvin. On a final exam. The class was not happy! (I didn't care, I both know the conversion and have a calculator that can do it.) He just wrote a table on the board with five entries: the boiling point of water in °F and °C, and the freezing point of water in all three systems. Can you imagine that the students got even more upset at this? He eventually gave in and just did the conversion for everyone. I learned more than one thing that day. Now I'm in industry and completely unfazed by this kind of thing. Sometimes shit's in Fahrenheit, that's just the way it goes, you just have to deal with it. Don't sweat the easy stuff!
      - mjevans 5y ago
        So strange, I remember the Fahrenheit (32, 212) and Celsius (0, 100) numbers, but the precise Kelvin number (which is hard-required for all the good physics equations I've forgotten), that is how much lower than 0C absolute zero is, I only vaguely remember as 272 something. However that's just a well known constant. Very reasonable to include it in the reference dataset.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        273 something. For a good while it was defined as exactly 273.15, but as of a couple years ago it's now based on a specific number of Joules.
        exmadscientist 5y ago
        The difference between Kelvin and Celsius is still the same. But the Kelvin scale itself has shifted a bit, taking the other scales with it.
- shantnutiwari 5y ago
  >Real world examples tend to have a huge amount of unpleasant details which hinder transfer of the underlying concepts. This. I hate all these blogs, where they are teaching, for example, Django , and start by asking us to setup Postgres/Mysql "because it is a real world database". And I just quit, as I dont want to deal with the hassle of setting up Postgres, or spend hours setting up Docker on my personal Mac. And many blogs for beginners will spend 20 minutes teaching them to setup Git "because it is good for you". And I know many beginners just get overwhelmed and quit Standard Reddit/HN condescending response "But everyone should know git/mysql etc! Are you not a REAL engineer?" to which I say: Fine, teach them separately.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    If it’s worth learning, it’s worth dedicated teaching resources. Otherwise, it’s not worth clogging up the tutorial with unnecessary bookkeeping.
onion2k 5y ago
There's a parallel here that I've seen with new developers. Universities and bootcamps tend to focus on single journeys through software - "when the user does X, Y, and Z display this result". Then the dev comes to the horrible Real World where users do "X, X, X" or "Z, Y, X" or "X, Y, Volkswagon, Potato, Z" and they argue that The User Is Wrong, because they've only been taught about the happy path where users do what you thought they should do. I'm not suggesting that compsci teaching should change, but that there shouldn't be too much expectation that the theory taught to students probably should reflect the real world. The real world is too noisy. It'd be impossible to learn anything. Leave those lessons to experience.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  Grossly off-topic, but your "Volkswagon, Potato" reminded me of Borges' riff on taxonomy[0]. This is probably exemplary of the kind of rabbit hole one can get lost in if attempting the "real world" application during the learning of difficult concepts. Best be introduced in a sterile environment, and leave it to the workplace to destroy one's worldview in order to for it to be rebuilt according to the reality of the local context. The list divides all animals into 14 categories: Those belonging to the Emperor Embalmed ones Trained ones Suckling pigs Mermaids (or sirens) Fabled ones Stray dogs Those included in this classification Those that tremble as if they were mad (this one's my favourite) Innumerable ones Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush Et cetera Those that have just broken the vase Those that from afar look like flies [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole... It's mind-altering. Re-visiting this list always reminds me of the infinite potential of absurdity.
  - kgwgk 5y ago
    The number of categories reminds me of this footnote in another of his stories: "The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite."
taeric 5y ago
As you can see, I have no overarching theory here; it just seems like a topic worth thinking about. Pulling this quote in because I think it is important. The post is a signal amplification of something worth talking about. Not a call to tear down some institute of textbooks. On the topic called out, though. I'm sympathetic. I recall in grade school a classmate missing the question "without air resistance, what happens to a piece of paper you throw out the window of a moving car?" To me, it was somewhat clear that the "without air resistence" part was important, but my classmate missed it. Others ridiculed them for missing the point, but the more interesting question, to me, was what caused something thrown out to fall behind the car, and how did that relate to the question? That is, on hearing the wrong answer, I was more interested on following up with "and why is that?" Not jumping to "stupid! That is air resistance!" How do you pull this to interesting topics, though? Programming, in particular, is interesting in that moving to "first principals" is stupid hard for anything graphical. Unless you are wanting to build an engine, you are far more productive using an existing environment. And, basic environments are much harder to force people into today; compared to when the computer booted to a prompt and didn't really store anything for when it was turned off. Then there is modelling and general ML. Turns out, simple models still dominate all but the most advanced engineering today. And there is no real reason to think that will change. Sure, with enough data, I think deep learning is borderline magic. Turns out, even places that have terabytes of data often have far less relevant data. I'm convinced there is a Nyquist/sampling relation out there for most data. But... I have no idea what that would be. So, we are stuck with simplistic housing price models for the time being. All the while, real estate is basically "whatever sold in the neighborhood recently is what you can expect."
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  > simplistic housing price models I'm pretty sure the next step here will be to build algorithms that pull in colorized 3D data of comparable resolution to what Google Maps has today. Then the algorithm should be able to classify stuff like "this is a nice garden with sunlight all evening", "this has a nice view from the living room", "this one has windows facing the neighbour's windows" etc. I recently pulled down Google Maps data for my neighborhood into Blender (using Chrome+RenderDoc and a plugin for GMaps import). To a human, the resulting colorized 3D model is more than enough to understand most there is to know about the exterior of a property.
Planktonne 5y ago
Realism in teaching examples/questions is a bit of a red herring. Corporate education particularly loves the buzzword of 'business-relevant', but I think it's often actively harmful. When you're teaching something new, you want to be able to isolate that concept/technique and focus in on it. A simplified example, or a question with strict parameters, both allow the student(s) to concentrate on the key idea. If you want to teach someone about SELECT in SQL, for example, it's useful to abstract away the database setup for that particular lesson. It's also useful to use a simplified database concerned with familiar entities, so that SELECT remains the focus rather than one new element of many. Of course, these simplified examples shouldn't be used in isolation. Instead, you should have a number of them, eaching illustrating/assessing some small point or idea. Once the students have absorbed those ideas, then you start combining the initial building blocks into more complex ideas, just as you'd take a tiered approach when testing software; start with unit tests, then build up. Effective education moves in steps.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I disagree with this traditional pedagogical approach. Learning is much easier when motivated by a complex problem to solve that requires learning and applying multiple "building block" concepts. Start big, then learn small.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I dont see how it is easier. Maybe it is motivating for someone, but I never found it easier to deal with complex problems first and only then moving to simple one. For me, it was easier to learn simple things first. And "do simple thing first" also seems to work much better at my kids, no matter what I am teaching them.
    - afarrell 5y ago
      I find it motivating to have the story of how someone uses the skill to solve a complex real-world problem. I think you are right that it is overwhelming to start out by solving that complex large-scope problem first.
traceroute66 5y ago
To this day it has always been my biggest beef that textbooks don't reflect reality. If we look back to our school days in maths classes with Sir getting all excited about teaching the class how to do y = 2x - 2, solve for x. All your average kid does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the **ing point, I'll never use this junk in real life". Then decades later, people like me occasionally find myself (trying to) understand interesting sounding papers on machine learning, but the maths just flies right over my head. I'm all for a practical approach to teaching. Its more interesting to learn and as a result it leaves you with a higher chance of the theory sticking in the student's head. Its better than the alternative approach of just whacking students over the head with dry theory books in the hope that some of it sticks.
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  The basketball excitedly coach asks the team to do 50 pushups every training session. All your average player does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the *ing point, I'll never do a pushup in a real game". The purpose of mathematics is to train your mental muscles in a very specific way. Irrespective of whether you use those particular calculations in your later life, doing mathematics generally makes you a better quantitative and formal reasoner. That's the point. And I think a lot of students who are good at mathematics intuitively get this idea. And therefore are excited about studying just math for the sake of math.
  - eldenwrong 5y ago
    No, the point is to produce constant stream of mediocre workers that support power. The way they teach math in highschool and most colleges is retarded. People succeed despite it and not because of it
    - tgv 5y ago
      Don't you think it would be much easier to teach e.g. astrology or medieval scholastics if you want to produce a stream of mediocre workers that support power? Dictatorships relied on those kind of methods to keep the people in line. We teach math just in case someone gets it, not to make everybody understand it deeply. And we don't only teach maths, but also languages, geography, biology, physics and all the rest. The system is far from perfect, but there are not enough people to teach everybody well. Yet here we are: people are fairly well educated, we can create mRNA vaccins, build tiny supercomputers, and huge vertically landing rockets, and today we read about the relation between one-way functions and Kolgomorov complexity. I think the situation is not that bleak, although the golden age of education might indeed be behind us.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I've developed teaching modules (for real-world stuff; not academia). It's a huge amount of work, and needs to last a long time, because changing it is a bear. Also, It. Cannot. Be. Wrong. Very often, the students I'm training are smarter and more experienced than I am. This tiny little corner of things is the only place that I have anything to tell them. This means that keeping examples as small as possible, is to my advantage. I usually consider any class I take, or give, as a "starting point." All I do, is plant the seed. I think teaching good techniques and heuristics is more important than teaching rote.
mleonhard 5y ago
Textbooks should be living documents, continuously revised. We need a github for coursework.
pwr-electronics 5y ago
I don't understand why so many people think that real-world problems and "true learning" or whatever have to be mutually exclusive. My applied probability and statistics course for engineers was all about manufacturing quality control. We didn't have magic urns with colored balls that no one cared about. But we did pull samples off the line for destructive testing. Imagining myself troubleshooting a manufacturing problem made me more creative, tenacious, and engaged than if it was a sterile math problem with no context. Point is, you don't necessarily have to lose anything when making a topic more relatable. University education, in general, suffers from the implicit assumption that everyone should think like a savant. It's even worse when a topic was invented or discovered to solve a real problem, as opposed to base research, and the teaching strips all context and motivation from the presentation. I see some other comments criticizing classes that teach certain software tools at the expense of concepts. And yeah, that's training, not education.
- sjmm1989 5y ago
  I've literally been told by a person before that because my example used in a discussion had no relevance to anything that might happen in THEIR life, that it was a pointless and useless example. They later toned it down to "not as good as theirs", but I digress. If I could tell the world one thing right now, in regards to this topic, it would be this. "You, yes you, have NO RIGHT to diss or judge an example made by someone else; when the sole reason of said example is to try to share understanding of a certain lesson or fact. Even if the example is not as great as it could or should be, the act of yourself judging that example completely ignores the fact that YOU didn't fucking know anything about that thing in the first place; hence why an EXAMPLE was needed. That's all it is, now get over yourselves. P.S. Also stop trying to be moral police, none of you have any right to do that either, hypocrites." I say this in regards to the world, because while it was just that one person who did that, that day; I have heard similar arguments as per the article title and my own experience of running into a fuckwit like that fellow, just with other people over the years. I don't know why these people think they have a right to judge everything, since they know barely anything. Which means they have a right to do fuck all, and that's that. P.S. The hypocrite part was added because a large populous on earth always needs to be reminded of that. Always...
_ehqz 5y ago
In regards to Bayes Theorem in the XKCD comic being used in the 'real world'... I haven't ever really learned about the theorem except in passing through some articles and a brief mention in highschool once. Even so, I still ended up basically using Bayes Theorem to successfully do something IRL. What was it? Hunting ghosts in a game called phasmophobia. Some friends and myself were playing it on discord and were having a hard time figuring out which ghost it was we were supposed to be hunting. That is, until I started trying to figure out the negatives before figuring out the positives. The others were curious as to what I was doing, as it seemed to be working finally, and so I told them; "I'm fairly certain this game is using a rudimentary form of Bayes theorem, which is how we are finally getting these correct." And correct we were, time and time again; despite never having gotten all the respective 'positive' clues. So, in regards to the comic... I understood it well enough?
gerbilly 5y ago
I think that 'real life' examples are often worse. Learners can get too caught up on adventitious details in the example like the wording or certain irrelevant details. If the example is a real life example they are familiar with it could lead them away from the essential features the example is trying to reason from. It's a common trope in movies to have a sassy kid show up the teacher by pointing out how artificial their example is and then proceeding to solve the problem realistically most of the time involving street smarts. While this can be amusing this is also missing the point. The example is there as a learning aid to learn a particular concept.
sourabhsybero 5y ago
I agree but this can help to understand and clear the concepts. And trust me gaining knowledge will always work for you.
jerf 5y ago
Part of the problem is that the entire point of textbook problems is to not be representative. Failing all else, even all the also-excellent points described by other people in other comments, they have to be pedagogical. The vast bulk of almost all jobs, tasks, problems, etc. are highly stereotyped, and trying to give some sort of "uniformly random" sample of some task set would produce problems that are simultaneously 1. too boring to be worth using to teach with and 2. too complicated to be useful. If that seems paradoxical, the resolution is that it would be generally the same complication, over and over and over, from whatever problem set you're drawing from. We have to present simplified problems, and in order to get a sampling across many possible complications that our students could be going out into the world and seeing (because while all of them are likely to end up solving stereotyped problems in some domain, we don't have any idea which ones they are yet!), we need to sample things in an unrealistic manner. It is an unsolvable problem. I still have my opinions about how education is done; I think one of the most fundamental errors it makes that is not talked about is that it is virtually impossible to provide a solution to someone who doesn't have the problem in the first place, and our entire system is top-to-bottom structured around providing solutions. This, I think, is an even more fundamental view of the disconnect underlying the issue of textbook problems not being representative... "textbook problems" are a misnomer, really, because they aren't problems. I don't care if Sally does or does not get her 1/7th of an apple, and the technique of connecting a grade to whether or not I answer correctly is really quite clumsy and of dubious effectiveness. But it would take a top-to-bottom rethink of the curriculum of the sort I've never really seen anyone try. I've seen people peck around the edges and I've seen people throw the baby out with the bathwater but a problem-first-centric education would be such a radical departure that I don't think people can even think it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
__mharrison__ 5y ago
Writing exercises is hard. This might sound like a cop out, but I'm my latest book, Effective Pandas, most of the exercises are phrased like this: Using a dataset of your choice [apply some principle from the chapter]. For example it might say find the missing values, plot a bar chart, etc. I'm a firm believer that you learn more when you act, and you act better when you use a dataset that interests you. The funny part is that I keep getting people all me for the solutions to the exercises...
m-p-3 5y ago
The world is a messy place, having simple examples in a "perfect" scenario does help understanding basic concepts, which then can be applied in more complex scenarios as you build upon that knowledge. It is however important (in my opinion) to explain the drawbacks and benefits of the methodology used early on.
sam-s 5y ago
You (almost) never have to do pushups in RL, but you do them in a gym. Examples and exercises in textbooks are for _conceptual learning_. They have to be simple - and thus unrealistic.
- taeric 5y ago
  Before elevated beds? :)
ouid 5y ago
this is not a reasonable use of the word representative. Humans generalize from small amounts of data, even as little as zero.
FredPret 5y ago
I’ve yet to encounter spherical cows in a vacuum but never say never

101 points by luu 5y ago

They probably don't have to be!! Training for actual warfare doesn't mean you have to be killed during that training!! But I am with the opinion that the more you're exposed to real world stuff and the more "battle-hardened" you are, the better!

tgv 5y ago

Real world examples tend to have a huge amount of unpleasant details which hinder transfer of the underlying concepts. We teach one step at a time, and even then 99.999% of the people leave before finishing. Suppose you start teaching arithmetics by introducing 5 year olds to elliptic curves…

TrailMixRaisin 5y ago
In high school I had a chemistry teacher that came from the industry. His examples and test questions were motivated by his real world experience. While this was very interesting at the same time it brought another level of complexity. One example was that we were learning about elements by mmol of substance and had to calculate how much of the input substances we needed to end up with the needed amount of end product. (My explanation might be of because this is some time ago!) Here we were not asked how many liters or kg of stuff we needed but always worked in metric tons or cubic meters. These uncommon volumes made it harder to develop an intuition about the results to quickly understand if a result was reasonable. So many of the surrounding elements that came from the real world made it harder to concentrate on the problem core.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  On the other hand, gradually increasing the complexity and level of detail (including distraction with irrelevant details and like taking away your intuition crutches) is a great way to start learning to apply your knowledge in a more sophisticated way.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Mol as a chemical unit of measure is part of the first year chemical curriculum at Bavarian Gymnasiums (in three tier school system, those are the ones paving the paths to university). I remember I hated calculating in mol, but then we also expose students to all kinds of units of measure in physics.
- chaxor 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand... This seems typical, and perhaps somewhat simplified, for chemistry courses. ?
  - exmadscientist 5y ago
    It's the weird units. Students don't like weird units. I remember I once, many years ago now, had a chemistry professor give temperatures in Fahrenheit for a thermodynamics problem, which to solve needed absolute temperatures in Kelvin. On a final exam. The class was not happy! (I didn't care, I both know the conversion and have a calculator that can do it.) He just wrote a table on the board with five entries: the boiling point of water in °F and °C, and the freezing point of water in all three systems. Can you imagine that the students got even more upset at this? He eventually gave in and just did the conversion for everyone. I learned more than one thing that day. Now I'm in industry and completely unfazed by this kind of thing. Sometimes shit's in Fahrenheit, that's just the way it goes, you just have to deal with it. Don't sweat the easy stuff!
    - mjevans 5y ago
      So strange, I remember the Fahrenheit (32, 212) and Celsius (0, 100) numbers, but the precise Kelvin number (which is hard-required for all the good physics equations I've forgotten), that is how much lower than 0C absolute zero is, I only vaguely remember as 272 something. However that's just a well known constant. Very reasonable to include it in the reference dataset.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        273 something. For a good while it was defined as exactly 273.15, but as of a couple years ago it's now based on a specific number of Joules.
        exmadscientist 5y ago
        The difference between Kelvin and Celsius is still the same. But the Kelvin scale itself has shifted a bit, taking the other scales with it.
shantnutiwari 5y ago
>Real world examples tend to have a huge amount of unpleasant details which hinder transfer of the underlying concepts. This. I hate all these blogs, where they are teaching, for example, Django , and start by asking us to setup Postgres/Mysql "because it is a real world database". And I just quit, as I dont want to deal with the hassle of setting up Postgres, or spend hours setting up Docker on my personal Mac. And many blogs for beginners will spend 20 minutes teaching them to setup Git "because it is good for you". And I know many beginners just get overwhelmed and quit Standard Reddit/HN condescending response "But everyone should know git/mysql etc! Are you not a REAL engineer?" to which I say: Fine, teach them separately.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  If it’s worth learning, it’s worth dedicated teaching resources. Otherwise, it’s not worth clogging up the tutorial with unnecessary bookkeeping.

onion2k 5y ago

There's a parallel here that I've seen with new developers. Universities and bootcamps tend to focus on single journeys through software - "when the user does X, Y, and Z display this result". Then the dev comes to the horrible Real World where users do "X, X, X" or "Z, Y, X" or "X, Y, Volkswagon, Potato, Z" and they argue that The User Is Wrong, because they've only been taught about the happy path where users do what you thought they should do. I'm not suggesting that compsci teaching should change, but that there shouldn't be too much expectation that the theory taught to students probably should reflect the real world. The real world is too noisy. It'd be impossible to learn anything. Leave those lessons to experience.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago
Grossly off-topic, but your "Volkswagon, Potato" reminded me of Borges' riff on taxonomy[0]. This is probably exemplary of the kind of rabbit hole one can get lost in if attempting the "real world" application during the learning of difficult concepts. Best be introduced in a sterile environment, and leave it to the workplace to destroy one's worldview in order to for it to be rebuilt according to the reality of the local context. The list divides all animals into 14 categories: Those belonging to the Emperor Embalmed ones Trained ones Suckling pigs Mermaids (or sirens) Fabled ones Stray dogs Those included in this classification Those that tremble as if they were mad (this one's my favourite) Innumerable ones Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush Et cetera Those that have just broken the vase Those that from afar look like flies [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole... It's mind-altering. Re-visiting this list always reminds me of the infinite potential of absurdity.
- kgwgk 5y ago
  The number of categories reminds me of this footnote in another of his stories: "The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite."

taeric 5y ago

As you can see, I have no overarching theory here; it just seems like a topic worth thinking about. Pulling this quote in because I think it is important. The post is a signal amplification of something worth talking about. Not a call to tear down some institute of textbooks. On the topic called out, though. I'm sympathetic. I recall in grade school a classmate missing the question "without air resistance, what happens to a piece of paper you throw out the window of a moving car?" To me, it was somewhat clear that the "without air resistence" part was important, but my classmate missed it. Others ridiculed them for missing the point, but the more interesting question, to me, was what caused something thrown out to fall behind the car, and how did that relate to the question? That is, on hearing the wrong answer, I was more interested on following up with "and why is that?" Not jumping to "stupid! That is air resistance!" How do you pull this to interesting topics, though? Programming, in particular, is interesting in that moving to "first principals" is stupid hard for anything graphical. Unless you are wanting to build an engine, you are far more productive using an existing environment. And, basic environments are much harder to force people into today; compared to when the computer booted to a prompt and didn't really store anything for when it was turned off. Then there is modelling and general ML. Turns out, simple models still dominate all but the most advanced engineering today. And there is no real reason to think that will change. Sure, with enough data, I think deep learning is borderline magic. Turns out, even places that have terabytes of data often have far less relevant data. I'm convinced there is a Nyquist/sampling relation out there for most data. But... I have no idea what that would be. So, we are stuck with simplistic housing price models for the time being. All the while, real estate is basically "whatever sold in the neighborhood recently is what you can expect."

semi-extrinsic 5y ago
> simplistic housing price models I'm pretty sure the next step here will be to build algorithms that pull in colorized 3D data of comparable resolution to what Google Maps has today. Then the algorithm should be able to classify stuff like "this is a nice garden with sunlight all evening", "this has a nice view from the living room", "this one has windows facing the neighbour's windows" etc. I recently pulled down Google Maps data for my neighborhood into Blender (using Chrome+RenderDoc and a plugin for GMaps import). To a human, the resulting colorized 3D model is more than enough to understand most there is to know about the exterior of a property.

Planktonne 5y ago

Realism in teaching examples/questions is a bit of a red herring. Corporate education particularly loves the buzzword of 'business-relevant', but I think it's often actively harmful. When you're teaching something new, you want to be able to isolate that concept/technique and focus in on it. A simplified example, or a question with strict parameters, both allow the student(s) to concentrate on the key idea. If you want to teach someone about SELECT in SQL, for example, it's useful to abstract away the database setup for that particular lesson. It's also useful to use a simplified database concerned with familiar entities, so that SELECT remains the focus rather than one new element of many. Of course, these simplified examples shouldn't be used in isolation. Instead, you should have a number of them, eaching illustrating/assessing some small point or idea. Once the students have absorbed those ideas, then you start combining the initial building blocks into more complex ideas, just as you'd take a tiered approach when testing software; start with unit tests, then build up. Effective education moves in steps.

nitrogen 5y ago
I disagree with this traditional pedagogical approach. Learning is much easier when motivated by a complex problem to solve that requires learning and applying multiple "building block" concepts. Start big, then learn small.
- watwut 5y ago
  I dont see how it is easier. Maybe it is motivating for someone, but I never found it easier to deal with complex problems first and only then moving to simple one. For me, it was easier to learn simple things first. And "do simple thing first" also seems to work much better at my kids, no matter what I am teaching them.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    I find it motivating to have the story of how someone uses the skill to solve a complex real-world problem. I think you are right that it is overwhelming to start out by solving that complex large-scope problem first.

traceroute66 5y ago

To this day it has always been my biggest beef that textbooks don't reflect reality. If we look back to our school days in maths classes with Sir getting all excited about teaching the class how to do y = 2x - 2, solve for x. All your average kid does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the **ing point, I'll never use this junk in real life". Then decades later, people like me occasionally find myself (trying to) understand interesting sounding papers on machine learning, but the maths just flies right over my head. I'm all for a practical approach to teaching. Its more interesting to learn and as a result it leaves you with a higher chance of the theory sticking in the student's head. Its better than the alternative approach of just whacking students over the head with dry theory books in the hope that some of it sticks.

abdullahkhalids 5y ago
The basketball excitedly coach asks the team to do 50 pushups every training session. All your average player does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the *ing point, I'll never do a pushup in a real game". The purpose of mathematics is to train your mental muscles in a very specific way. Irrespective of whether you use those particular calculations in your later life, doing mathematics generally makes you a better quantitative and formal reasoner. That's the point. And I think a lot of students who are good at mathematics intuitively get this idea. And therefore are excited about studying just math for the sake of math.
- eldenwrong 5y ago
  No, the point is to produce constant stream of mediocre workers that support power. The way they teach math in highschool and most colleges is retarded. People succeed despite it and not because of it
  - tgv 5y ago
    Don't you think it would be much easier to teach e.g. astrology or medieval scholastics if you want to produce a stream of mediocre workers that support power? Dictatorships relied on those kind of methods to keep the people in line. We teach math just in case someone gets it, not to make everybody understand it deeply. And we don't only teach maths, but also languages, geography, biology, physics and all the rest. The system is far from perfect, but there are not enough people to teach everybody well. Yet here we are: people are fairly well educated, we can create mRNA vaccins, build tiny supercomputers, and huge vertically landing rockets, and today we read about the relation between one-way functions and Kolgomorov complexity. I think the situation is not that bleak, although the golden age of education might indeed be behind us.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I've developed teaching modules (for real-world stuff; not academia). It's a huge amount of work, and needs to last a long time, because changing it is a bear. Also, It. Cannot. Be. Wrong. Very often, the students I'm training are smarter and more experienced than I am. This tiny little corner of things is the only place that I have anything to tell them. This means that keeping examples as small as possible, is to my advantage. I usually consider any class I take, or give, as a "starting point." All I do, is plant the seed. I think teaching good techniques and heuristics is more important than teaching rote.

mleonhard 5y ago

Textbooks should be living documents, continuously revised. We need a github for coursework.

pwr-electronics 5y ago

I don't understand why so many people think that real-world problems and "true learning" or whatever have to be mutually exclusive. My applied probability and statistics course for engineers was all about manufacturing quality control. We didn't have magic urns with colored balls that no one cared about. But we did pull samples off the line for destructive testing. Imagining myself troubleshooting a manufacturing problem made me more creative, tenacious, and engaged than if it was a sterile math problem with no context. Point is, you don't necessarily have to lose anything when making a topic more relatable. University education, in general, suffers from the implicit assumption that everyone should think like a savant. It's even worse when a topic was invented or discovered to solve a real problem, as opposed to base research, and the teaching strips all context and motivation from the presentation. I see some other comments criticizing classes that teach certain software tools at the expense of concepts. And yeah, that's training, not education.

sjmm1989 5y ago
I've literally been told by a person before that because my example used in a discussion had no relevance to anything that might happen in THEIR life, that it was a pointless and useless example. They later toned it down to "not as good as theirs", but I digress. If I could tell the world one thing right now, in regards to this topic, it would be this. "You, yes you, have NO RIGHT to diss or judge an example made by someone else; when the sole reason of said example is to try to share understanding of a certain lesson or fact. Even if the example is not as great as it could or should be, the act of yourself judging that example completely ignores the fact that YOU didn't fucking know anything about that thing in the first place; hence why an EXAMPLE was needed. That's all it is, now get over yourselves. P.S. Also stop trying to be moral police, none of you have any right to do that either, hypocrites." I say this in regards to the world, because while it was just that one person who did that, that day; I have heard similar arguments as per the article title and my own experience of running into a fuckwit like that fellow, just with other people over the years. I don't know why these people think they have a right to judge everything, since they know barely anything. Which means they have a right to do fuck all, and that's that. P.S. The hypocrite part was added because a large populous on earth always needs to be reminded of that. Always...

_ehqz 5y ago

In regards to Bayes Theorem in the XKCD comic being used in the 'real world'... I haven't ever really learned about the theorem except in passing through some articles and a brief mention in highschool once. Even so, I still ended up basically using Bayes Theorem to successfully do something IRL. What was it? Hunting ghosts in a game called phasmophobia. Some friends and myself were playing it on discord and were having a hard time figuring out which ghost it was we were supposed to be hunting. That is, until I started trying to figure out the negatives before figuring out the positives. The others were curious as to what I was doing, as it seemed to be working finally, and so I told them; "I'm fairly certain this game is using a rudimentary form of Bayes theorem, which is how we are finally getting these correct." And correct we were, time and time again; despite never having gotten all the respective 'positive' clues. So, in regards to the comic... I understood it well enough?

gerbilly 5y ago

I think that 'real life' examples are often worse. Learners can get too caught up on adventitious details in the example like the wording or certain irrelevant details. If the example is a real life example they are familiar with it could lead them away from the essential features the example is trying to reason from. It's a common trope in movies to have a sassy kid show up the teacher by pointing out how artificial their example is and then proceeding to solve the problem realistically most of the time involving street smarts. While this can be amusing this is also missing the point. The example is there as a learning aid to learn a particular concept.

sourabhsybero 5y ago

I agree but this can help to understand and clear the concepts. And trust me gaining knowledge will always work for you.

jerf 5y ago

Part of the problem is that the entire point of textbook problems is to not be representative. Failing all else, even all the also-excellent points described by other people in other comments, they have to be pedagogical. The vast bulk of almost all jobs, tasks, problems, etc. are highly stereotyped, and trying to give some sort of "uniformly random" sample of some task set would produce problems that are simultaneously 1. too boring to be worth using to teach with and 2. too complicated to be useful. If that seems paradoxical, the resolution is that it would be generally the same complication, over and over and over, from whatever problem set you're drawing from. We have to present simplified problems, and in order to get a sampling across many possible complications that our students could be going out into the world and seeing (because while all of them are likely to end up solving stereotyped problems in some domain, we don't have any idea which ones they are yet!), we need to sample things in an unrealistic manner. It is an unsolvable problem. I still have my opinions about how education is done; I think one of the most fundamental errors it makes that is not talked about is that it is virtually impossible to provide a solution to someone who doesn't have the problem in the first place, and our entire system is top-to-bottom structured around providing solutions. This, I think, is an even more fundamental view of the disconnect underlying the issue of textbook problems not being representative... "textbook problems" are a misnomer, really, because they aren't problems. I don't care if Sally does or does not get her 1/7th of an apple, and the technique of connecting a grade to whether or not I answer correctly is really quite clumsy and of dubious effectiveness. But it would take a top-to-bottom rethink of the curriculum of the sort I've never really seen anyone try. I've seen people peck around the edges and I've seen people throw the baby out with the bathwater but a problem-first-centric education would be such a radical departure that I don't think people can even think it.

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__mharrison__ 5y ago

Writing exercises is hard. This might sound like a cop out, but I'm my latest book, Effective Pandas, most of the exercises are phrased like this: Using a dataset of your choice [apply some principle from the chapter]. For example it might say find the missing values, plot a bar chart, etc. I'm a firm believer that you learn more when you act, and you act better when you use a dataset that interests you. The funny part is that I keep getting people all me for the solutions to the exercises...

m-p-3 5y ago

The world is a messy place, having simple examples in a "perfect" scenario does help understanding basic concepts, which then can be applied in more complex scenarios as you build upon that knowledge. It is however important (in my opinion) to explain the drawbacks and benefits of the methodology used early on.

sam-s 5y ago

You (almost) never have to do pushups in RL, but you do them in a gym. Examples and exercises in textbooks are for _conceptual learning_. They have to be simple - and thus unrealistic.

taeric 5y ago
Before elevated beds? :)

ouid 5y ago

this is not a reasonable use of the word representative. Humans generalize from small amounts of data, even as little as zero.

FredPret 5y ago

I’ve yet to encounter spherical cows in a vacuum but never say never