4 ms·

This is a recurring but stupid theme. Look people in the past/in other country/in other school know how to solve problems which are unfamiliar to us! We have no

This is a recurring but stupid theme. Look people in the past/in other country/in other school know how to solve problems which are unfamiliar to us! We have no clue and they do it pretty easy. They must be very smart and learned? Take aways: - You never learned to solve problems, just apply familiar patterns. This is sad, you wasted youth. - Those people probably didn't either, but they were given a different set of patterns. Doesn't make them smarter. - Anyone with actual solving skill looks at all of you with amusement.

z2 12y ago
Agreed that the news articles tend to dramatize these differences as some daunting gap in competence, and the subjects tend to be cherry-picked to illustrate that point. Still, patterns can differ in complexity and depth too. Say it's geometry question--recognizing a 3-4-5 right triangle is one matter. Creating a general proof of perpendicularity in a 3D object that contains right triangles is objectively more advanced. (I'm referring to another hyped-up article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm )
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  I had to solve tests not unlike the chinese one from the article you refer (less complex, but closer to first one than to second) to get accepted into university - and never had any use for any of those skills. This called "admission math" and despised by people who are into real math. It's all grinding values without understanding where they lead. I had a whole class failing to apply basic logarithm2 in a bisection algorithm and they had no idea what's going on. They didn't see logarithm as a tool! They solved a lot of questions with half dozen of uneven logarithms, but they had no idea when they met one in a real life. http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg I'm talking about craziness like this.
mwfunk 12y ago
What is "solving skill"? Where can I get some of that? Why do the people who have it look at the people who don't with amusement, are they jerks? Should those of us without "solving skill" rise up against them? This changes EVERYTHING people!
- zeroonetwothree 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  I don't know where. Where do you get some of foreign language knowledge? I don't have such place ready for you, yet here I am writing to you in a language that is foreign to me. "Why do the people who have it look at the people who don't with amusement?" Because people who don't have it consistently praise the wrong thing.
  - imgabe 12y ago
    You get foreign language learning by looking at examples of the patterns used in a language and learning how to apply them. By your logic there should be a general "language skill" that anyone could use to immediately apprehend any language. No such thing exists.
    - vegedor 12y ago
      That's an open question, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
    - guard-of-terra 12y ago
      You also learn how to infer new patterns. When I started to learn English any non-normal form like 'ye olde' or 'lotsa' threw me into stupor. Now I can derive meaning from context while gaining better understanding.
imgabe 12y ago
What are the "actual solving skills" that allow you to generally solve problems that you have never seen a prototype of before? Pretty much all learning is recognizing what types of patterns there are and how to apply them. People who are good at solving logic puzzles like this tend to have seen a lot of them before. In the real world "applying the method used to solve a similar problem" is a solving skill used to solve actual problems. If there are generalizable skills, why aren't we teaching them? And how would we teach them if not by showing examples of problems where they are applied?
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  We are not teaching actual solving skills because it's hard to check for them. You can't just give a new problem to a bunch of kids and expect them to yield a measurable result. Some may be already familiar with this kind of problems, other may be only able to get ideas when bouncing them against other kids. It's a mess. Solving a hundred of similar questions? That gives you real performance score - how children concentrate under stress while doing boring repetitive tasks. Grading is evil.
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    While I share an awful lot of your antipathy to grading there's an entire discipline devoted to how to measure capabilities and knowledge, psychometrics. http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics While devising excellent tests is difficult, okay ones aren't that hard either.
barry-cotter 12y ago
In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them -- John von Neumann The "actual solving skills" you speak of are a product of talent and application, in various proportions. What I know of the psychology of expertise speaks strongly against your thesis. Experts see things effortlessly that others have to really work at, and things others can't see without massive handholding because the basic chunks of understanding they work with are so much larger than those of novices or the merely competent. Problem solving skills are developed. You are not born with them. Some people have talent, they learn faster and most of them hit the wall where they have to grind later and some people have sufficiently little talent that trying to learn a topic or skill is a waste of their time but everybody has to work at it.

z2 12y ago

Agreed that the news articles tend to dramatize these differences as some daunting gap in competence, and the subjects tend to be cherry-picked to illustrate that point. Still, patterns can differ in complexity and depth too. Say it's geometry question--recognizing a 3-4-5 right triangle is one matter. Creating a general proof of perpendicularity in a 3D object that contains right triangles is objectively more advanced. (I'm referring to another hyped-up article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm )

guard-of-terra 12y ago
I had to solve tests not unlike the chinese one from the article you refer (less complex, but closer to first one than to second) to get accepted into university - and never had any use for any of those skills. This called "admission math" and despised by people who are into real math. It's all grinding values without understanding where they lead. I had a whole class failing to apply basic logarithm2 in a bisection algorithm and they had no idea what's going on. They didn't see logarithm as a tool! They solved a lot of questions with half dozen of uneven logarithms, but they had no idea when they met one in a real life. http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg I'm talking about craziness like this.

mwfunk 12y ago

What is "solving skill"? Where can I get some of that? Why do the people who have it look at the people who don't with amusement, are they jerks? Should those of us without "solving skill" rise up against them? This changes EVERYTHING people!

zeroonetwothree 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It
guard-of-terra 12y ago
I don't know where. Where do you get some of foreign language knowledge? I don't have such place ready for you, yet here I am writing to you in a language that is foreign to me. "Why do the people who have it look at the people who don't with amusement?" Because people who don't have it consistently praise the wrong thing.
- imgabe 12y ago
  You get foreign language learning by looking at examples of the patterns used in a language and learning how to apply them. By your logic there should be a general "language skill" that anyone could use to immediately apprehend any language. No such thing exists.
  - vegedor 12y ago
    That's an open question, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    You also learn how to infer new patterns. When I started to learn English any non-normal form like 'ye olde' or 'lotsa' threw me into stupor. Now I can derive meaning from context while gaining better understanding.

imgabe 12y ago

What are the "actual solving skills" that allow you to generally solve problems that you have never seen a prototype of before? Pretty much all learning is recognizing what types of patterns there are and how to apply them. People who are good at solving logic puzzles like this tend to have seen a lot of them before. In the real world "applying the method used to solve a similar problem" is a solving skill used to solve actual problems. If there are generalizable skills, why aren't we teaching them? And how would we teach them if not by showing examples of problems where they are applied?

guard-of-terra 12y ago
We are not teaching actual solving skills because it's hard to check for them. You can't just give a new problem to a bunch of kids and expect them to yield a measurable result. Some may be already familiar with this kind of problems, other may be only able to get ideas when bouncing them against other kids. It's a mess. Solving a hundred of similar questions? That gives you real performance score - how children concentrate under stress while doing boring repetitive tasks. Grading is evil.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  While I share an awful lot of your antipathy to grading there's an entire discipline devoted to how to measure capabilities and knowledge, psychometrics. http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics While devising excellent tests is difficult, okay ones aren't that hard either.

barry-cotter 12y ago

In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them -- John von Neumann The "actual solving skills" you speak of are a product of talent and application, in various proportions. What I know of the psychology of expertise speaks strongly against your thesis. Experts see things effortlessly that others have to really work at, and things others can't see without massive handholding because the basic chunks of understanding they work with are so much larger than those of novices or the merely competent. Problem solving skills are developed. You are not born with them. Some people have talent, they learn faster and most of them hit the wall where they have to grind later and some people have sufficiently little talent that trying to learn a topic or skill is a waste of their time but everybody has to work at it.