4 ms·

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Without commenting on the dir

by gumby 3y ago

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biology are even worse in this regard) and so on. Even literature and history are not taught as an exploration and inquiry of possible themes but as structured topics (often one per book) that you learn as being "right" or "wrong". The emphasis on testing, and in particular standardized testing, has made this worse, since teachers who don't "teach to the test" are often penalized.

WalterBright 3y ago
Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology". > teach to the test How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?" > standardized testing There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery of them.
- gumby 3y ago
  > Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology". That's an excessively reductio view of the practice of science, and frankly dangerous. I think you know better than that. I mean, is newtonian mechanics "right" or "wrong"? It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should. Most science is working on the edge of what is known. The idea that there are "right" and "wrong" answers in practical science is what has supported peoples' belief that "hey, I heard of someone getting the vaccine and yet they got sick anyway -- what a scam!" or "Scientists said not to bother with a mask but to wash hands furiously, and now they want us to wear masks -- they don't know anything". The reason I put "experiment" in quotation marks is a lot of "experimentation" in high school is at the level of "pour the solution from the bottle into a beaker, put a strip of litmus paper in, and record the pH." Everybody uses the same bottle of solution so there's one correct answer. That is not "experimentation" that is simply practicing a lab procedure. "Experimentation" is open ended, and involves debugging. "Make a solution that has a pH of 7.2. How did you determine that? What attempts did you make and what went wrong." Or "reproduce the Millikan oil-drop experiment. What's the charge of the electron? How did it compare to Millikan's result and why?" The "science is about facts" attitude is a pernicious meme in the public consciousness. It's just as bad as the deterministic teaching of history.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should. Newtonian mechanics gives unique and right answers within the domain where it applies. It doesn't apply to relativistic or quantum mechanics, but that is not relevant to high school physics. Saying Newtonian Mechanics doesn't give correct answers is way overly pedantic. There's not remotely enough time in high school science classes to derive much of newtonian mechanics from experiments, let alone quantum mechanics from oil drop experiments and long term experiments like testing vaccines. Heck, high school science struggles to simply teach the heliocentric model of the solar system. Most of the students don't understand what an ellipse is, and they hardly have the time to make observations over a year period to then guess at what laws govern their motions. Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class.
    - gumby 3y ago
      > Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class. And it took a long time for people to figure that out (or how you see, or tons of other "intuitive" concepts). IMHO, if you had to chose only door one or door two, it would be better for students to leave school with an understanding of what the scientific process is (not even baconian scientific method) rather than the idea that science has some sort of weird epistemology of "facts" and "non-facts". The worst and loudest Gradgrinds of STEM education policy clearly have no idea of this.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        The people who just learn facts with no understanding don't do well on tests, either. That's kinda the point of the tests. I've seen this in action plenty. The idea that tests can't test "real" knowledge is simply wrong. P.S. at Caltech, the science & engineering examinations were all open-book open-note. No need to memorize anything. But you were doomed if you didn't understand the material. Even for a multiple guess test, the wrong answers are ones one would arrive at if one suffered from the usual misconceptions about how the problem should be solved. The wrong guesses are not random. The people who compose the tests aren't fools.

by gumby 3y ago

WalterBright 3y ago

Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology". > teach to the test How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?" > standardized testing There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery of them.

gumby 3y ago
> Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology". That's an excessively reductio view of the practice of science, and frankly dangerous. I think you know better than that. I mean, is newtonian mechanics "right" or "wrong"? It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should. Most science is working on the edge of what is known. The idea that there are "right" and "wrong" answers in practical science is what has supported peoples' belief that "hey, I heard of someone getting the vaccine and yet they got sick anyway -- what a scam!" or "Scientists said not to bother with a mask but to wash hands furiously, and now they want us to wear masks -- they don't know anything". The reason I put "experiment" in quotation marks is a lot of "experimentation" in high school is at the level of "pour the solution from the bottle into a beaker, put a strip of litmus paper in, and record the pH." Everybody uses the same bottle of solution so there's one correct answer. That is not "experimentation" that is simply practicing a lab procedure. "Experimentation" is open ended, and involves debugging. "Make a solution that has a pH of 7.2. How did you determine that? What attempts did you make and what went wrong." Or "reproduce the Millikan oil-drop experiment. What's the charge of the electron? How did it compare to Millikan's result and why?" The "science is about facts" attitude is a pernicious meme in the public consciousness. It's just as bad as the deterministic teaching of history.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should. Newtonian mechanics gives unique and right answers within the domain where it applies. It doesn't apply to relativistic or quantum mechanics, but that is not relevant to high school physics. Saying Newtonian Mechanics doesn't give correct answers is way overly pedantic. There's not remotely enough time in high school science classes to derive much of newtonian mechanics from experiments, let alone quantum mechanics from oil drop experiments and long term experiments like testing vaccines. Heck, high school science struggles to simply teach the heliocentric model of the solar system. Most of the students don't understand what an ellipse is, and they hardly have the time to make observations over a year period to then guess at what laws govern their motions. Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class.
  - gumby 3y ago
    > Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class. And it took a long time for people to figure that out (or how you see, or tons of other "intuitive" concepts). IMHO, if you had to chose only door one or door two, it would be better for students to leave school with an understanding of what the scientific process is (not even baconian scientific method) rather than the idea that science has some sort of weird epistemology of "facts" and "non-facts". The worst and loudest Gradgrinds of STEM education policy clearly have no idea of this.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      The people who just learn facts with no understanding don't do well on tests, either. That's kinda the point of the tests. I've seen this in action plenty. The idea that tests can't test "real" knowledge is simply wrong. P.S. at Caltech, the science & engineering examinations were all open-book open-note. No need to memorize anything. But you were doomed if you didn't understand the material. Even for a multiple guess test, the wrong answers are ones one would arrive at if one suffered from the usual misconceptions about how the problem should be solved. The wrong guesses are not random. The people who compose the tests aren't fools.