4 ms·

I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university,

• CodeMage 1y ago
  "When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't. Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful. Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.
  • ksenzee 1y ago
    If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
    • Aeolun 1y ago
      I’m not going to use force against him. Threatening to take away the computer or tablet is generally plenty. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a precondition to using these things is ‘go to school’.
      • ksenzee 1y ago
        I’m referring to governments, not parents. If I don’t send my child to school, the state of Washington will have a word to say about it. There are laws.
    • CodeMage 1y ago
      I don't see any part of my comment where I blamed the kids. I explicitly said that it's a flaw in the way our society approaches education.
      • ksenzee 1y ago
        Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was arguing with you. It was more vehement agreement.
        • CodeMage 1y ago
          My bad, I didn't realize :)
    • lelanthran 1y ago
      > If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? Agreed. > I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us. Disagree. The justification for why they should learn $FOO may never be understood by a mind that we are teaching $FOO to. There's good justification for learning to read, but not one that would be understood by a 6 year old. There's similarly good justification for teaching Maths, but you'd be hard pressed to convince a 16 year old of the value in practicing abstract reasoning, using Maths as the vehicle. Sometimes, the only good answer to give a kid is "you'll see the value when you're older".
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    > One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. I think the truth is a lot simpler. Most kids won’t use trig in real life.
    • melagonster 1y ago
      Because they can not go to the department that uses trig in university. This is the basic design of society; people want to remind these kids they are not good enough forever.
    • ponector 1y ago
      There was a popular joke during my studies in university: Advanced math came in handy just once in my life. My keys fell in the toilet, and I realized the best tool was a wire bent like an integral.
    • CodeMage 1y ago
      That was pretty much my point. Most kids won't use trig in real life, so making trig more interesting is only half of what we need to do. The other half is making kids more interested in learning.
      • a96 1y ago
        Kids are interested in learning. Adults are interested in learning. The human brain is interested in learning. It becomes tremendously happy when it learns and so do the humans. The problem is that the brain doesn't like effort and is very good at thinking about things that are more fun to learn. There's skills that can help with directing it back, but they need to be learned.
      • bonoboTP 1y ago
        Or drop the idea that everyone has to be forced to learn the same academically-inclined curriculum. Of course this is a non-starter, because it sounds like "giving up on" some kids.
  • andai 1y ago
    I asked my math teacher for applications and she just mumbled something, embarrassed. Took me until a while later to realize that most of my teachers had never stepped foot outside a school in their entire life. Later at university I complained about the lack of applications in the textbook, and my classmates became very upset. One of them responded, "we are mathematicians, we do not concern ourselves with applications."
    • a96 1y ago
      Posing was the application for them :)
    • bonoboTP 1y ago
      That's a bit of a caricature, but would you ask the same of an English major or an art historian? Math is an intellectual activity that's about sharpening and chiseling the mind, and the satisfaction of figuring things out and seeing things fall into place neatly. Thinking about real things out there in the world in math ways (~= applications) can also be fun. Just look at software. It's undeniably useful with many applications. Still, some people treat it playfully and in an enjoyable way, they learn about algorithms they won't ever use, just for the elegance, read Knuth, even if reading some React handbook may be more useful for their day-to-day. There are more considerations than "but how will this make my employer richer?"
  • Terr_ 1y ago
    There's also the distinction between "I know that X% of this will (not) be useful" versus "I know which X% of this will (not) be useful." Especially when "useful" includes "to get a future job" or study something else much more useful and interesting later."
  • vnorilo 1y ago
    When I was in third grade, I decided I want to make computer games to get more of them. Dad got me started with GW-Basic turtle graphics and I made pictures with them - usually non-functional title screens for my games. At some point I had made a small space ship and was able to make it turn around with the wonderful angle command [1]. However, I could not figure out how to make it move "forward" regardless of the angle. I was also attending an after hours computer graphics club, mostly about Deluxe Paint, taught by a 20-something student (who much later went on to found a GPU company and got acquihired by ATI/AMD). He would help me occasionally, and in this case he took a tiny slip of paper and wrote down a couple of lines about sin and cos. No questions, no explanations, no gatekeeping. Just like that I internalized this foundational piece of trig - later when it arrived in school maths it was easy and obvious for me. I had a practical application, but even more I think was because it started as a need I had, and when given to me, felt like a gift and an enabler. Still much later I studied Seymour Papert's pedagogy and understood I had lived it. I consider myself fortunate. 1: http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/draw.html http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/draw.html
  • watwut 1y ago
    It is also a fallacy. Interesting and practical are two different things, especially for kids. Kids will happily learn completely useless things and will dislike clearly practical and important subjects.
  • theptip 1y ago
    I agree this is a problem. The best reason I can come up with is “because it is fun/beautiful/interesting” (to some people). But IMO that pushes you to making the curriculum more flexible and not forcing every student into the same sequence where math is the core IQ test for STEM. If a kid doesn’t find it interesting I struggle to justify forcing them. Personally I also think trig and calculus are far inferior to statistics for most people. If you have an intuition for probability distributions, precision/recall, and a few other basic concepts, you’ll be guaranteed to apply them everywhere in your life. Of course if you are interested in STEM then calculus must be available too, but it’s pretty specialized in practice.
• locococo 1y ago
  All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry. Your suggestion is interesting but I am not convinced that a student would be helped by aligning the examples with their interests. I could see a student asking how trig relates to computer games and the example the LLM generates becoming much more involved. I see no problem with the examples being boring. The people that developed these techniques had such fundamental problems to solve and the wonder to me is the human mind that came up with these methods. All this to say, maybe we lack appreciation for the fundamental sciences that underpin every aspect of our modern lives.
  • II2II 1y ago
    > All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry. The trouble is a lot of those practical examples fall into the, "why would I care category". I had a high school physics teacher who described his university antics, one of which included a funny story of a bunch of his friends climbing on top of each other to measure the height of a flag pole. I guess the profs got tired of dealing with students scaling flag poles because I was measuring the height of mountains on the moon at the same university a couple of years later. The thing is nobody really cares about the height of a flag pole, while only a few would care about the height of the mountains on the moon. The reality is the interesting applications are much more involved. They either require a depth of thought of process or a depth of knowledge that isn't appropriate for a textbook question. Take that trigonometry in games example. The math to do it was in my middle school curriculum, but it becomes obvious that computer graphics is more than trigonometry the moment you try to frame it as an example. I had linear algebra in high school. That will take you pretty far with the mathematics, but it will also be clear that a knowledge of computer programming is involved. Even knowing how to program isn't going to take you all of the way because few are interested in rendering verticies and edges ... And that is just the obvious progression of knowledge in a simple application. Physics itself involves buckets full of trigonometry in extremely non-obvious ways, non-geometric ways.
    • amluto 1y ago
• huflungdung 1y ago
  [dead]
• graemep 1y ago
  The "trig in real life" is a common question, but its deeply flawed. You can use trig in real life - I used it last time I bought a monitor because I wanted to compare the areas of models with different aspect ratios and I only had the diagonal size and aspect rations. There are much deeper flaws in this question: 1. That you only learn what you are guaranteed to use in everyday life. Education should leave you with choices. You learn trigonometry so you can later choose to do things that require it. 2. That everything you learn in school has to be something that is likely to be useful. When did you last use history or literature or art?
• hdctambien 1y ago
  To be fair, the applications of geometry that most people might end up using in real life are going to be boring to a 15 year old. How many paving stones do I need to buy for the walkway I'm building in my backyard? How far from the top of the roof should I start attaching this gutter so that I still have roof to nail it to 30 feet later? How big of a ladder do I need to get to that branch I want to cut down in that tall tree? Will I be able to get this couch up the stairs, around the corner, and through the door?