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I'd like to know what education reformers would say to the subtitle > Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need. It seems nee

by dguest 2y ago

I'd like to know what education reformers would say to the subtitle > Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need. It seems needlessly confrontational, and misses what the article is about. The article asserts that practice and repeated use of math is important. I don't think it's really suggesting that we should go back to how math was taught in the US 40 years ago. But maybe I'm just out of touch with math education reform: In high school I was graded on how fast I could do matrix multiplication, and thought matrices were kinda stupid. Then I learned about linear algebra and coupled oscillators in college and thought they were awesome. So I'd assumed the educational reform was about removing the busy work from math and focusing on what you'd actually use it for. Am I wrong?

detourdog 2y ago
I had a same experience with you but there was no algebra at art school. I learned why math was interesting from trying to figure out how a computer works. I know I have huge gaping blind spots but I can use math for what I need. I'm now trying to avoid math and only using the shapes of math.
caddemon 2y ago
I didn't even know what a matrix was until I got to college, and I went to a supposedly well-ranked high school and was on the higher level math track. This was about 10 years ago. I think some of the education reform might've removed concepts altogether instead of actually improving the presentation? Though I suppose in order to present things well you might need to cut back on the total number of topics covered, I'm not sure I'd describe what I did learn as well-presented either.
deltarholamda 2y ago
I remember hearing an interview with a woman who was doing charter school-type work in the UK (IIRC), where most of her students were thought of as "underperforming". She was successful because they emphasized drills, lots of drills, and more drills. Teachers and students hate drills. Teachers, because they're tedious to grade, and students because they're boring. But they work. It's no different than doing the same Super Mario Bros. level again and again until you time your jumps just right. I've often thought that gamification of drills would be a great way to get kids to learn their math facts or whatever, but there seems to be an allergy to doing this in the US education system. What the US education system seems to be addicted to is moving from one hype/fad to the next, as that's where the money trough seems to be.
- dvaun 2y ago
  I have my oldest son on some membership plan of a game[0] they let the kids play at school. While maybe not ideal, it’s something I like as it puts problems into the game as a required mechanic for success. [0]: https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/ https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    There is definitely a market for this in the same realm as MMOs. Provide children educational problems to solve and then reward them with items that allow them to increase their ability to interact or decorate the world around them. Let the parent company guide the actual curriculum and allow kids to become creators ala Roblox to increase the number of assets available to them. They end up wanting to learn in order to get the shiny thing, and the company who puts it out gets a motivated audience.
- huygens6363 2y ago
  I love learning high-level knowledge using conceptual overviews and I remember them very well too. I’m just not wired to remember the nitty-gritty of things and I found drills are the only way forward provided they are implemented intelligently like Anki. My view on them changed as well. First I found them stupid and mind-numbing. Now my life is busy and chaotic and drills are one of the few easy, zen-like moments. Maybe students need harder lives to actually come to appreciate their repetitive and simple nature.
barfbagginus 2y ago
Teach category theory, and if you can't, then don't bother teaching math at all. Because you'll be teaching the awful wasteful rote math that everyone hates and can't use, instead of the nice universal stuff that lets you transfer intuition and see how ideas communicate between different knowledge domains far beyond what was traditionally seen as math. The 20th century gave us real new ideas in math. But our primary math education is still 200 years out of date. Until that changes, math education will remain a deadening cargo cult that throws away far more human potential than it develops.
- inanutshellus 2y ago
  Is this comment still taking into account all the ~8 yr old common core changes to math curricula around the country? Even that's 200 years out of date? What're we supposed to be doing with five year olds that's so much better?
  - ducttapecrown 2y ago
    I feel like 5 year olds could appreciate dots and arrows.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    Common core has a lot of potentially useful stuff for learning basic math in an intuitive and fun way. But the math it teaches to a 8 year old is never under 2000 years old. We could be teaching 8 year olds how to use crayon drawings to solve differential equations, graphically analyze back propagation, analyze electronic circuits, and validate quantum teleportation protocols. This stuff is fun and relevant to understanding the technological world all around us. It would be about as easy and fun as common core. We have a lot of new math from just the last 15 years that shows us how to present these really complicated subjects in a simple way by doodling diagrams that are so simple that even a kid could learn it. For an example, look up "Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics" by Abramsky and Coecke. They only joke about teaching it to kids. But I think that kind of stuff is definitely how we'll teach our kids 100 years from now, when quantum computers might be important for even kids to understand.
- 2y ago
zzzbra 2y ago
This actually is a fairly controversial stance in education, so there's reason to be combative about it. A lot of education tends to emphasize meeting students where they are to the point that it can completely subsume the irreducibility of complexity when confronting some knowledge conceptually; one _can_ be better served instead by attempting to memorize some bulky, impenetrable abstraction and instead make sense of it through its application. A lot of knowledge only becomes clearer when one forges ahead with a dim appreciation of what is being articulated but the confidence, willingness, and (most crucially) feedback mechanism for testing it out anyway.
cjs_ac 2y ago
On UK Teacher Twitter, there are two factions that disagree noisily but civilly: the 'trads' and the 'progs'. Both factions have educational psychology research to back up their claims: the progs lean mainly on research from big institutions, often international; the trads often do research in their own classrooms. The trads' pupils seem to do better in the UK's public examinations, but that might be an artefact of those exams. It's also worth noting that half of all teachers leave the profession leave within five years. Forty years thus represents about eight generations of teachers being trained with their own biases, refining their ideas in classroom practice, and then training the next generation. On top of this are the cycles of trendiness in the various schools of thought in educational psychology, as well as the varying policy platforms of governments. Educational practice from four decades is less historical and more archaeological.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
When I was teaching university level mathematics, there were many people in my classes who couldn't do fast matrix multiplication or even fast multiplication. The inevitable result was that they had to constantly drop from the higher level of abstraction that we were trying to learn, to the lower level abstraction of arithmetic, and failing to learn the higher level of abstraction. On this forum, I will say, imagine your object-oriented programming language can build all sorts of abstractions but can't multiply numbers. So every time you have to multiply numbers in your algorithm, you have to instead write a few lines of assembly code that do the same thing. How much efficiency would you lose. Just practice multiplying numbers.
anon291 2y ago
You naturally memorize that which you are exposed to, but to say that that means we should discourage memorization in favor of purely exposure (which is the current status quo AFAICT), is completely misguided. Yes, you will almost certainly memorize anything with enough exposure, but targeted memorization is also useful, if the former's not going fast enough.

by dguest 2y ago

detourdog 2y ago

I had a same experience with you but there was no algebra at art school. I learned why math was interesting from trying to figure out how a computer works. I know I have huge gaping blind spots but I can use math for what I need. I'm now trying to avoid math and only using the shapes of math.

caddemon 2y ago

I didn't even know what a matrix was until I got to college, and I went to a supposedly well-ranked high school and was on the higher level math track. This was about 10 years ago. I think some of the education reform might've removed concepts altogether instead of actually improving the presentation? Though I suppose in order to present things well you might need to cut back on the total number of topics covered, I'm not sure I'd describe what I did learn as well-presented either.

deltarholamda 2y ago

I remember hearing an interview with a woman who was doing charter school-type work in the UK (IIRC), where most of her students were thought of as "underperforming". She was successful because they emphasized drills, lots of drills, and more drills. Teachers and students hate drills. Teachers, because they're tedious to grade, and students because they're boring. But they work. It's no different than doing the same Super Mario Bros. level again and again until you time your jumps just right. I've often thought that gamification of drills would be a great way to get kids to learn their math facts or whatever, but there seems to be an allergy to doing this in the US education system. What the US education system seems to be addicted to is moving from one hype/fad to the next, as that's where the money trough seems to be.

dvaun 2y ago
I have my oldest son on some membership plan of a game[0] they let the kids play at school. While maybe not ideal, it’s something I like as it puts problems into the game as a required mechanic for success. [0]: https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/ https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  There is definitely a market for this in the same realm as MMOs. Provide children educational problems to solve and then reward them with items that allow them to increase their ability to interact or decorate the world around them. Let the parent company guide the actual curriculum and allow kids to become creators ala Roblox to increase the number of assets available to them. They end up wanting to learn in order to get the shiny thing, and the company who puts it out gets a motivated audience.
huygens6363 2y ago
I love learning high-level knowledge using conceptual overviews and I remember them very well too. I’m just not wired to remember the nitty-gritty of things and I found drills are the only way forward provided they are implemented intelligently like Anki. My view on them changed as well. First I found them stupid and mind-numbing. Now my life is busy and chaotic and drills are one of the few easy, zen-like moments. Maybe students need harder lives to actually come to appreciate their repetitive and simple nature.

barfbagginus 2y ago

Teach category theory, and if you can't, then don't bother teaching math at all. Because you'll be teaching the awful wasteful rote math that everyone hates and can't use, instead of the nice universal stuff that lets you transfer intuition and see how ideas communicate between different knowledge domains far beyond what was traditionally seen as math. The 20th century gave us real new ideas in math. But our primary math education is still 200 years out of date. Until that changes, math education will remain a deadening cargo cult that throws away far more human potential than it develops.

inanutshellus 2y ago
Is this comment still taking into account all the ~8 yr old common core changes to math curricula around the country? Even that's 200 years out of date? What're we supposed to be doing with five year olds that's so much better?
- ducttapecrown 2y ago
  I feel like 5 year olds could appreciate dots and arrows.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  Common core has a lot of potentially useful stuff for learning basic math in an intuitive and fun way. But the math it teaches to a 8 year old is never under 2000 years old. We could be teaching 8 year olds how to use crayon drawings to solve differential equations, graphically analyze back propagation, analyze electronic circuits, and validate quantum teleportation protocols. This stuff is fun and relevant to understanding the technological world all around us. It would be about as easy and fun as common core. We have a lot of new math from just the last 15 years that shows us how to present these really complicated subjects in a simple way by doodling diagrams that are so simple that even a kid could learn it. For an example, look up "Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics" by Abramsky and Coecke. They only joke about teaching it to kids. But I think that kind of stuff is definitely how we'll teach our kids 100 years from now, when quantum computers might be important for even kids to understand.
2y ago

zzzbra 2y ago

This actually is a fairly controversial stance in education, so there's reason to be combative about it. A lot of education tends to emphasize meeting students where they are to the point that it can completely subsume the irreducibility of complexity when confronting some knowledge conceptually; one _can_ be better served instead by attempting to memorize some bulky, impenetrable abstraction and instead make sense of it through its application. A lot of knowledge only becomes clearer when one forges ahead with a dim appreciation of what is being articulated but the confidence, willingness, and (most crucially) feedback mechanism for testing it out anyway.

cjs_ac 2y ago

On UK Teacher Twitter, there are two factions that disagree noisily but civilly: the 'trads' and the 'progs'. Both factions have educational psychology research to back up their claims: the progs lean mainly on research from big institutions, often international; the trads often do research in their own classrooms. The trads' pupils seem to do better in the UK's public examinations, but that might be an artefact of those exams. It's also worth noting that half of all teachers leave the profession leave within five years. Forty years thus represents about eight generations of teachers being trained with their own biases, refining their ideas in classroom practice, and then training the next generation. On top of this are the cycles of trendiness in the various schools of thought in educational psychology, as well as the varying policy platforms of governments. Educational practice from four decades is less historical and more archaeological.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

When I was teaching university level mathematics, there were many people in my classes who couldn't do fast matrix multiplication or even fast multiplication. The inevitable result was that they had to constantly drop from the higher level of abstraction that we were trying to learn, to the lower level abstraction of arithmetic, and failing to learn the higher level of abstraction. On this forum, I will say, imagine your object-oriented programming language can build all sorts of abstractions but can't multiply numbers. So every time you have to multiply numbers in your algorithm, you have to instead write a few lines of assembly code that do the same thing. How much efficiency would you lose. Just practice multiplying numbers.

anon291 2y ago

You naturally memorize that which you are exposed to, but to say that that means we should discourage memorization in favor of purely exposure (which is the current status quo AFAICT), is completely misguided. Yes, you will almost certainly memorize anything with enough exposure, but targeted memorization is also useful, if the former's not going fast enough.