4 ms·

Wow. That author sure loves to talk about herself. I kept reading, but the whole article feels like an overdrawn introduction without payoff. If you want to kn

Wow. That author sure loves to talk about herself. I kept reading, but the whole article feels like an overdrawn introduction without payoff. If you want to know how you can become better in math and rewire your brain to be math compatible I‘m afraid you will be none the wiser after reading this.

eviks 3y ago
Maybe one needs another brain rewiring job to become fluent in learning from blogs like this
- chankstein38 3y ago
  Or the author needs to rewire their brain again to learn to write in a way that actually teaches lol
- DarkNova6 3y ago
  Oh. Do please enlighten me a put the deep wisdom that lies just beneath the surface a pleb like me doesn’t understand.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I tried reading one or two of her books and found them similarly lacking. I don't give up on many books, but I left hers for greener pastures.
dimitrios1 3y ago
Quite dissapointing, because I found the authors book "A Mind For Numbers" to be good.
dailykoder 3y ago
>If you want to know how you can become better in math and rewire your brain to be math compatible [...] ... then you just have to do it. And keep working on it, even though it feels awful
- DarkNova6 3y ago
  No shit
keybored 3y ago
I skipped the purely biographical paragraphs. Some important parts: - Memorization and rote practice are important for learning, not just the current Zeitgeist (2014) of “understanding” without the former. This becomes the foundation that allows you to focus on higher-level things like understanding and applying formulas. - Experts develop “memory chunks” which allows for example chess masters to draw on thousands of different past games, openings, variations.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  Memorization happens naturally through repeat exposure, and works better if this is exposure in some meaningful context rather than through cramming via flash cards or whatever. The best kind of practice is practice that you are motivated to do because is inherently interesting. The less "rote" you can make this the better. For a primary school example, if you can solve basic arithmetic problems in service of a fun and challenging logic puzzle, that is more motivating than solving a page of arithmetic problems one after the other. More generally, while mathematics certainly requires putting in time and actually doing the work of thinking a whole lot about a variety of hard things in the service of solving hard problems, very little of that is memorization per se. > In the United States, the emphasis on understanding sometimes seems to have replaced rather than complemented older teaching methods that scientists are—and have been—telling us work with the brain’s natural process to learn complex subjects like math and science. The older teaching method also sucked. In my opinion, the single most important thing primary school math education should be teaching is how to attack and solve nontrivial word problems. Unfortunately we did not have any of that before, and still do not have any now. Cf. https://cs-web.bu.edu/faculty/gacs/toomandre-com-backup/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf https://cs-web.bu.edu/faculty/gacs/toomandre-com-backup/trav...
  - kaitai 3y ago
    It's important that we marry viewpoints when looking at what we call "meaningful". I spend a lot of time right now with a 6/7 yr old. This child does not care about meaning. This child likes to solve arithmetic problems one after another. It's motivating -- it's like a game -- the kid gets them right and gets a thrill. Word problems? Well, the math ability is outstripping the reading ability right now so 2000 x 2000 x 2000 is way more fun than reading some stupid sentence about tulips. I've spent plenty of time on math (PhD in algebraic geometry) and educating people, and for sure when I taught college freshmen and master's students I spent a lot of time challenging folks to engage their minds, spirits, and intellect. At the same time, we have to admit there is a stage of childhood where kids just love memorization and facts. Dino facts, shark facts, math facts, Pokemon facts, My Little Pony facts, whatever. Let's not force kids to reckon too much with meaning when they're in the facts for facts sake stage -- and once they've got their impressive facts list, they'll make sense of the meaning much more easily, as discussed in the article and here!
zero-sharp 3y ago
I never really know what people mean by "rewiring your brain". You just have to spend a lot of time studying it. The hard part as an adult is probably making the time, especially if your work is already mentally taxing.
- joelfried 3y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Thoughts flow through my brain like electrons through wires, both at a speed I cannot truly comprehend. The paths of my thoughts, the way words connect together, the emotions they evoke, the feelings that are associated with - these are all malleable. I have been working to rewire myself away from pessimism and towards optimism for years now. It's not easy, and sometimes I fall back into old patterns. As years have passed, though, I've found the new pathways easier, the new roads getting more familiar. My thoughts have previously wanted to go one way, and I spent time yanking at them to go a different way. I spent enough time at it that I now on good days more naturally go they way I want to go. It's not just sitting and repeating a single thing over and over again, it's working with your own natural inclinations so that you can recognize when you experience X and naturally reach for Y that perhaps Z is what your preference really is, upon reflection. If you can practice that enough then, in the moment, you can sometimes find yourself not following the old pathways but the new. Rewiring seems like a pretty good analogy as when you rewire a house you work hard -- it is dirty, dusty work. Pulling wire is hard and thankless because when you're done you cover it all up and, if you're lucky, it works! Then at the end you're . . . back in a state where nobody but you knows any different what is happening behind the walls. Things work, and others might have no idea anything changed at all. But you put in the hard work and you know how things actually work on the inside now and it's exactly how you want it, not how it was before. If you've got a better analogy, I'd love to hear it.
chankstein38 3y ago
Right?! I want to know "How they rewired their brain to be fluent in math" but so far all I've seen is a bunch of talking about how great they are. This article sucks.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  Most people just call it practice.
- criddell 3y ago
  There's a chance that the author isn't the person responsible for the title. I searched for rewire on the page and the only instance is in the title. The author, Barbara Oakley, has a free Coursera course that is pretty good: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
vunderba 3y ago
This was my experience with the article which could be consolidated down to a single sentence: "Manipulate and play with concepts you intend to internalize, rather than relying on rote memorization". I would think that would be obvious to anyone that merely memorizing something like 'f=ma' would be meaningless without deliberate attempts at application (both theoretical and practical). There was a kludgy attempt at tying the study of foreign languages to STEM, but it just amounted to, everything is ultimately a craft. You have to practice to perfect it.
intended 3y ago
feel bad that this article ended up on Hacker News (HN), since it seems additional context is needed. Currently, the emphasis in training and education is on ensuring students understand the material, and rote memorization is viewed as a failure mode. The author acknowledges this but introduces an argument that rote memorization is critical to achieving fluency. I suspect that stating this position among typical education-focused circles will result in pushback. To lend credibility, she adds her lived experience as a way to explain what she means—and to clarify that she isn’t saying everyone is wrong, just that we may be too harsh on memorization. This is apparent to me because, frankly, if it weren't for the additional content she added, I wouldn’t have spent more than a few seconds before dismissing it. The article even made me concerned about an internal project I am involved in, prompting me to verify that I hadn’t overlooked some issues. If you want a TL;DR, the golf analogy matters: If you want to learn math, you need to understand it and then practice it so much that it becomes second nature.

eviks 3y ago

Maybe one needs another brain rewiring job to become fluent in learning from blogs like this

chankstein38 3y ago
Or the author needs to rewire their brain again to learn to write in a way that actually teaches lol
DarkNova6 3y ago
Oh. Do please enlighten me a put the deep wisdom that lies just beneath the surface a pleb like me doesn’t understand.
gnicholas 3y ago
I tried reading one or two of her books and found them similarly lacking. I don't give up on many books, but I left hers for greener pastures.

dimitrios1 3y ago

Quite dissapointing, because I found the authors book "A Mind For Numbers" to be good.

dailykoder 3y ago

>If you want to know how you can become better in math and rewire your brain to be math compatible [...] ... then you just have to do it. And keep working on it, even though it feels awful

DarkNova6 3y ago
No shit

keybored 3y ago

I skipped the purely biographical paragraphs. Some important parts: - Memorization and rote practice are important for learning, not just the current Zeitgeist (2014) of “understanding” without the former. This becomes the foundation that allows you to focus on higher-level things like understanding and applying formulas. - Experts develop “memory chunks” which allows for example chess masters to draw on thousands of different past games, openings, variations.

jacobolus 3y ago
Memorization happens naturally through repeat exposure, and works better if this is exposure in some meaningful context rather than through cramming via flash cards or whatever. The best kind of practice is practice that you are motivated to do because is inherently interesting. The less "rote" you can make this the better. For a primary school example, if you can solve basic arithmetic problems in service of a fun and challenging logic puzzle, that is more motivating than solving a page of arithmetic problems one after the other. More generally, while mathematics certainly requires putting in time and actually doing the work of thinking a whole lot about a variety of hard things in the service of solving hard problems, very little of that is memorization per se. > In the United States, the emphasis on understanding sometimes seems to have replaced rather than complemented older teaching methods that scientists are—and have been—telling us work with the brain’s natural process to learn complex subjects like math and science. The older teaching method also sucked. In my opinion, the single most important thing primary school math education should be teaching is how to attack and solve nontrivial word problems. Unfortunately we did not have any of that before, and still do not have any now. Cf. https://cs-web.bu.edu/faculty/gacs/toomandre-com-backup/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf https://cs-web.bu.edu/faculty/gacs/toomandre-com-backup/trav...
- kaitai 3y ago
  It's important that we marry viewpoints when looking at what we call "meaningful". I spend a lot of time right now with a 6/7 yr old. This child does not care about meaning. This child likes to solve arithmetic problems one after another. It's motivating -- it's like a game -- the kid gets them right and gets a thrill. Word problems? Well, the math ability is outstripping the reading ability right now so 2000 x 2000 x 2000 is way more fun than reading some stupid sentence about tulips. I've spent plenty of time on math (PhD in algebraic geometry) and educating people, and for sure when I taught college freshmen and master's students I spent a lot of time challenging folks to engage their minds, spirits, and intellect. At the same time, we have to admit there is a stage of childhood where kids just love memorization and facts. Dino facts, shark facts, math facts, Pokemon facts, My Little Pony facts, whatever. Let's not force kids to reckon too much with meaning when they're in the facts for facts sake stage -- and once they've got their impressive facts list, they'll make sense of the meaning much more easily, as discussed in the article and here!

zero-sharp 3y ago

I never really know what people mean by "rewiring your brain". You just have to spend a lot of time studying it. The hard part as an adult is probably making the time, especially if your work is already mentally taxing.

joelfried 3y ago
Ok, I'll bite. Thoughts flow through my brain like electrons through wires, both at a speed I cannot truly comprehend. The paths of my thoughts, the way words connect together, the emotions they evoke, the feelings that are associated with - these are all malleable. I have been working to rewire myself away from pessimism and towards optimism for years now. It's not easy, and sometimes I fall back into old patterns. As years have passed, though, I've found the new pathways easier, the new roads getting more familiar. My thoughts have previously wanted to go one way, and I spent time yanking at them to go a different way. I spent enough time at it that I now on good days more naturally go they way I want to go. It's not just sitting and repeating a single thing over and over again, it's working with your own natural inclinations so that you can recognize when you experience X and naturally reach for Y that perhaps Z is what your preference really is, upon reflection. If you can practice that enough then, in the moment, you can sometimes find yourself not following the old pathways but the new. Rewiring seems like a pretty good analogy as when you rewire a house you work hard -- it is dirty, dusty work. Pulling wire is hard and thankless because when you're done you cover it all up and, if you're lucky, it works! Then at the end you're . . . back in a state where nobody but you knows any different what is happening behind the walls. Things work, and others might have no idea anything changed at all. But you put in the hard work and you know how things actually work on the inside now and it's exactly how you want it, not how it was before. If you've got a better analogy, I'd love to hear it.

chankstein38 3y ago

Right?! I want to know "How they rewired their brain to be fluent in math" but so far all I've seen is a bunch of talking about how great they are. This article sucks.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
Most people just call it practice.
criddell 3y ago
There's a chance that the author isn't the person responsible for the title. I searched for rewire on the page and the only instance is in the title. The author, Barbara Oakley, has a free Coursera course that is pretty good: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

vunderba 3y ago

This was my experience with the article which could be consolidated down to a single sentence: "Manipulate and play with concepts you intend to internalize, rather than relying on rote memorization". I would think that would be obvious to anyone that merely memorizing something like 'f=ma' would be meaningless without deliberate attempts at application (both theoretical and practical). There was a kludgy attempt at tying the study of foreign languages to STEM, but it just amounted to, everything is ultimately a craft. You have to practice to perfect it.

intended 3y ago

feel bad that this article ended up on Hacker News (HN), since it seems additional context is needed. Currently, the emphasis in training and education is on ensuring students understand the material, and rote memorization is viewed as a failure mode. The author acknowledges this but introduces an argument that rote memorization is critical to achieving fluency. I suspect that stating this position among typical education-focused circles will result in pushback. To lend credibility, she adds her lived experience as a way to explain what she means—and to clarify that she isn’t saying everyone is wrong, just that we may be too harsh on memorization. This is apparent to me because, frankly, if it weren't for the additional content she added, I wouldn’t have spent more than a few seconds before dismissing it. The article even made me concerned about an internal project I am involved in, prompting me to verify that I hadn’t overlooked some issues. If you want a TL;DR, the golf analogy matters: If you want to learn math, you need to understand it and then practice it so much that it becomes second nature.