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"but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.” So painfully spot-on. My m

"but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.” So painfully spot-on. My mathematical education was horrible. Meanwhile I had been writing code since I was a little kid. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized how much math I had been learning while programming. And worse, that I had been completely miseducated about what math actually is.

gxs 13y ago
Interestingly, the converse is also true. I was always into computers and tech but never really programming. I was a math major in college, however, and after graduating I started programming. The transition was almost seamless, I picked up programming really quickly, it was surprising to me how much the "ways of thinking" are alike.
- saraid216 13y ago
  One of the key mistakes of educational strategy is dividing up knowledge into a bunch of subjects like "Language", "Math", and so on. You can find linkages in just about everything; this siloing really only serves to make people think they're particularly good at one thing and not another, when really it's a preference for one perspective over another.
  - nsphere 13y ago
    I completely agree! By other's perspectives my hardest semester was when I took PDEs, Geometry Space-time (Minkowski), Algorithms, P-chem (Quantum Mechanics), and Analysis. However there was so much over lap with all the materials and topics. A few weeks after midterms all the course work just fit together like a 100 piece puzzle.
    - banachtarski 13y ago
      Taking as many physics courses as I have, I was getting worried for a while that there was nothing more to life than solving a boundary value problem in some domain or another.
  - marcusf 13y ago
    So the pragmatists question is then naturally, how do you teach it? How do you shard the curriculum if not by subject? It seems a bit overbearing to ask each teacher to have the proper renaissance man's education of knowing a bit of everything.
    - calibraxis 13y ago
      Classes are already discrete, and can thus be taught by different teachers. As I understand, classifying classes into "disciplines" is for the convenience of administrative systems, like university deans. This classification is not a law of the universe, nor of the human mind. One can imagine the negatives of fitting learning into hierarchical administrative models.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      To me, a teacher's proper role isn't having knowledge and dumping it into someone's brain. It's knowing where to find that knowledge. My three Rs are "reading, research, and reflection": a teacher's job is to (1) provide useful material to consume, via lecture or homework or whatnot, (2) point towards larger resources for further exploration, and (3) guide thought processes to make useful conclusions. A teacher's job is not to teach. It's to provide a space in which a student can learn. A focus is useful for this, but the focus doesn't need to be an abstract subject. It's a MacGuffin; it can be anything.
- dmlorenzetti 13y ago
  Can't vouch for this book, but coincidentally just read about it today-- "The Essential Knuth" by Knuth, Daylight, and DeGrave. Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected! -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a mathematician, I was doing integrals or maybe was learning about Fermat's number theory, but I wasn't manipulating symbols the way I did when I was writing a compiler. With Chomsky, wow, I was actually doing mathematics and computer science simultaneously."
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    > (...) while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961 Which makes you wonder, what kind of person reads this stuff on the honeymoon.
    - stephencanon 13y ago
      Someone who chose the right person to marry.
arkj 13y ago
In India this too never happens. The article is a 1000 times valid here.

gxs 13y ago

Interestingly, the converse is also true. I was always into computers and tech but never really programming. I was a math major in college, however, and after graduating I started programming. The transition was almost seamless, I picked up programming really quickly, it was surprising to me how much the "ways of thinking" are alike.

saraid216 13y ago
One of the key mistakes of educational strategy is dividing up knowledge into a bunch of subjects like "Language", "Math", and so on. You can find linkages in just about everything; this siloing really only serves to make people think they're particularly good at one thing and not another, when really it's a preference for one perspective over another.
- nsphere 13y ago
  I completely agree! By other's perspectives my hardest semester was when I took PDEs, Geometry Space-time (Minkowski), Algorithms, P-chem (Quantum Mechanics), and Analysis. However there was so much over lap with all the materials and topics. A few weeks after midterms all the course work just fit together like a 100 piece puzzle.
  - banachtarski 13y ago
    Taking as many physics courses as I have, I was getting worried for a while that there was nothing more to life than solving a boundary value problem in some domain or another.
- marcusf 13y ago
  So the pragmatists question is then naturally, how do you teach it? How do you shard the curriculum if not by subject? It seems a bit overbearing to ask each teacher to have the proper renaissance man's education of knowing a bit of everything.
  - calibraxis 13y ago
    Classes are already discrete, and can thus be taught by different teachers. As I understand, classifying classes into "disciplines" is for the convenience of administrative systems, like university deans. This classification is not a law of the universe, nor of the human mind. One can imagine the negatives of fitting learning into hierarchical administrative models.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    To me, a teacher's proper role isn't having knowledge and dumping it into someone's brain. It's knowing where to find that knowledge. My three Rs are "reading, research, and reflection": a teacher's job is to (1) provide useful material to consume, via lecture or homework or whatnot, (2) point towards larger resources for further exploration, and (3) guide thought processes to make useful conclusions. A teacher's job is not to teach. It's to provide a space in which a student can learn. A focus is useful for this, but the focus doesn't need to be an abstract subject. It's a MacGuffin; it can be anything.
dmlorenzetti 13y ago
Can't vouch for this book, but coincidentally just read about it today-- "The Essential Knuth" by Knuth, Daylight, and DeGrave. Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected! -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a mathematician, I was doing integrals or maybe was learning about Fermat's number theory, but I wasn't manipulating symbols the way I did when I was writing a compiler. With Chomsky, wow, I was actually doing mathematics and computer science simultaneously."
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > (...) while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961 Which makes you wonder, what kind of person reads this stuff on the honeymoon.
  - stephencanon 13y ago
    Someone who chose the right person to marry.

arkj 13y ago

In India this too never happens. The article is a 1000 times valid here.