4 ms·

Interesting view, but I wonder if it applies on so large a field the author seem to believe. Piano may be a good example: some wrong notes can be bugs but

by gbog 14y ago

Interesting view, but I wonder if it applies on so large a field the author seem to believe. Piano may be a good example: some wrong notes can be bugs but if the kid do not enjoy playing music and take it as a chore, no amount of bug fixing will help. Same for math, no-one said everyone must love them, because it is not that lovable, and to be good at it math lover have a head start. So before getting to the learning disability bug fixer you might want to make your kids fall in love with math or grammar or whatever. That's how I remember my love affair with math: one day a math teacher did trigger love for math in me. It was a mix of telling me I was good at it, showing me how powerful and wonderful a machine it is, and so on.

scholia 14y ago
But the basic point is correct. Generally, most people would rather get something right than get it wrong, even if they don't care very much. Calling them stupid doesn't help them get it right next time. Finding the source of error does. This goes back at least as far as W. Edwards Deming in the 1930s.
- calinet6 14y ago
  A shame more people haven't read Deming. Brilliant stuff. Thanks for sharing. This is indeed right up his alley.
  - scholia 14y ago
    Agreed. It's sad that he is so neglected in the west, though he's still a hero in Japan.
shuzchen 14y ago
The premise still applies in this case. If a student consistently has poor performance in piano and you can attribute that to lack of motivation, then that would be the bug (contrast with the notion that the student is stupid or bad at piano). If you can fix that one bug, you stand to gain a whole range of performance improvements.
- gbog 14y ago
  When we say bug, I guess we just mean "avoidable issue" of a relatively modest importance, but that can have big impact, right? Then, if you learn singing or violin, and you are "tone-deaf" or near tone-deaf, then it is not a bug, it is an inability to love and learn music, and no amount of patching will fix it for real, even if it could hide the problem under the carpet for a while, in the case of piano learning. (Because a "tone-deaf" could play piano relatively well, but probably won't be able to play violin.) I would love to be convinced that "math-deaf" do not exists or is only very rare, but it simply do not match with my experience. To take an example: When I was young, and still now: I find the "open" and "closed" segment symbolised by ]----[ and [----] to be a very enlighting and powerful piece of mathematics. But when I tried to explain it to people who are not in love with math, I just get blank stares: they would understand it, be able to use it, but would never have tears in their eyes when trying to explain it to someone else. I think they just don't see the beauty of it. Not seeing the beauty in math is not to be considered a defect or a bug. I'd say on the contrary: seeing beauty in math is borderline psycho and an anomaly, just like seeing music graphically or being haunted with stories (Balzac was). But it helps a lot for math studies, just as loving music will help learning music. And math studies are important for most scientific or engineering careers. To wrap this up, it means that nature is not fair: some kids are gifted, some are not. In fact I do not see any reason for nature to be fair, and many events show enough it isn't (See Lisbon earthquake). The "bug theory" of the OP is trying to hide this fact, as is the "learning disability" movement. Fairness is an invention of human beings.
DeepDuh 14y ago
You do have a point, but I wonder what's behind that 'love in math' you're talking about. I tend to think that curiosity is the only basic character trait needed to fall in love with something as basic as math, grammar, music or physics. However, the way this kind of love is triggered doesn't necessarily correspond to how it is taught in lower classes. At least when I went to primary school in the 90ies, 'math' was really just numerical algorithms (which are IMO not at the root of what math is, it's just one sub field). What can it be applied to in our daily lives? (considering someone doesn't take a higher math education) Knowing the price total in supermarkets, that's about it. Couldn't we include symbolic math at a much earlier age? Children enjoy the building block properties of Legos starting at age 7 I'd say. How about we give them basic problem solving tools in math at age 10? I think we need to bring the potential feeling of achievement with mathematical tools to a much lower age. That could be geometry or color theory or basic physics (calculations with distance, velocity and time as an example).
- gbog 14y ago
  > What can it be applied to in our daily lives? I can only speak for myself but for me, the fact that math did not have any daily life application was one of the greatest reason to love it. I despised physics even if I was fairly good at it. I considered physics was taking pure math virgin to a mud field and raped her there with "daily life" problems.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    I understand what you mean, I think I'm wired in a similar way. However I'm skeptical whether you can spead that kind of 'love' to a wider audience without coming from the applied side of things. I believe the power to describe some daily live phenomenon in a mathematical model and then use mathematical tools to predict behavior could be a very eye opening experience for many children - and I think we could design exercises that follow such a path, even with very basic algebraic tools. Simultaneously we could also come from the other end - describing a new world in a structured language (programming) - in order to awaken desires to learn new expressions. I remember, when I was a kid I wanted to program an 'Asteroids' clone, but I couldn't get the flying behavior quite right. I was excited when I learned about vector geometry - finally I had the tool I need to model that.

by gbog 14y ago

scholia 14y ago

But the basic point is correct. Generally, most people would rather get something right than get it wrong, even if they don't care very much. Calling them stupid doesn't help them get it right next time. Finding the source of error does. This goes back at least as far as W. Edwards Deming in the 1930s.

calinet6 14y ago
A shame more people haven't read Deming. Brilliant stuff. Thanks for sharing. This is indeed right up his alley.
- scholia 14y ago
  Agreed. It's sad that he is so neglected in the west, though he's still a hero in Japan.

shuzchen 14y ago

The premise still applies in this case. If a student consistently has poor performance in piano and you can attribute that to lack of motivation, then that would be the bug (contrast with the notion that the student is stupid or bad at piano). If you can fix that one bug, you stand to gain a whole range of performance improvements.

gbog 14y ago
When we say bug, I guess we just mean "avoidable issue" of a relatively modest importance, but that can have big impact, right? Then, if you learn singing or violin, and you are "tone-deaf" or near tone-deaf, then it is not a bug, it is an inability to love and learn music, and no amount of patching will fix it for real, even if it could hide the problem under the carpet for a while, in the case of piano learning. (Because a "tone-deaf" could play piano relatively well, but probably won't be able to play violin.) I would love to be convinced that "math-deaf" do not exists or is only very rare, but it simply do not match with my experience. To take an example: When I was young, and still now: I find the "open" and "closed" segment symbolised by ]----[ and [----] to be a very enlighting and powerful piece of mathematics. But when I tried to explain it to people who are not in love with math, I just get blank stares: they would understand it, be able to use it, but would never have tears in their eyes when trying to explain it to someone else. I think they just don't see the beauty of it. Not seeing the beauty in math is not to be considered a defect or a bug. I'd say on the contrary: seeing beauty in math is borderline psycho and an anomaly, just like seeing music graphically or being haunted with stories (Balzac was). But it helps a lot for math studies, just as loving music will help learning music. And math studies are important for most scientific or engineering careers. To wrap this up, it means that nature is not fair: some kids are gifted, some are not. In fact I do not see any reason for nature to be fair, and many events show enough it isn't (See Lisbon earthquake). The "bug theory" of the OP is trying to hide this fact, as is the "learning disability" movement. Fairness is an invention of human beings.

DeepDuh 14y ago

You do have a point, but I wonder what's behind that 'love in math' you're talking about. I tend to think that curiosity is the only basic character trait needed to fall in love with something as basic as math, grammar, music or physics. However, the way this kind of love is triggered doesn't necessarily correspond to how it is taught in lower classes. At least when I went to primary school in the 90ies, 'math' was really just numerical algorithms (which are IMO not at the root of what math is, it's just one sub field). What can it be applied to in our daily lives? (considering someone doesn't take a higher math education) Knowing the price total in supermarkets, that's about it. Couldn't we include symbolic math at a much earlier age? Children enjoy the building block properties of Legos starting at age 7 I'd say. How about we give them basic problem solving tools in math at age 10? I think we need to bring the potential feeling of achievement with mathematical tools to a much lower age. That could be geometry or color theory or basic physics (calculations with distance, velocity and time as an example).

gbog 14y ago
> What can it be applied to in our daily lives? I can only speak for myself but for me, the fact that math did not have any daily life application was one of the greatest reason to love it. I despised physics even if I was fairly good at it. I considered physics was taking pure math virgin to a mud field and raped her there with "daily life" problems.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  I understand what you mean, I think I'm wired in a similar way. However I'm skeptical whether you can spead that kind of 'love' to a wider audience without coming from the applied side of things. I believe the power to describe some daily live phenomenon in a mathematical model and then use mathematical tools to predict behavior could be a very eye opening experience for many children - and I think we could design exercises that follow such a path, even with very basic algebraic tools. Simultaneously we could also come from the other end - describing a new world in a structured language (programming) - in order to awaken desires to learn new expressions. I remember, when I was a kid I wanted to program an 'Asteroids' clone, but I couldn't get the flying behavior quite right. I was excited when I learned about vector geometry - finally I had the tool I need to model that.