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biggest mistake in the early 2000s was using those yellow and orange books for remedial course, since it already requires the student already knowing how to do it in the first place, and word problems tend to be more advanced because they havnt learned how to do the simple problems yet. this led to people not even doing hw in our school.
Ideally they could just stop using AI to generate both the text and practice problems.
Math should be fun no matter it has practical applications or not. Math is an art, not a trade to make money. For those narrow minded ‘practical’ people, even pure math has sooner or later some applications.
This is the most important part, especially when teaching math to children. The practical aspects of math (beyond arithmetic counting with basic addition and subtraction) are not going to be fully realized until one is an adult, so they aren’t going to be a motivator for learning math.
It needs to be fun and engaging for them to want to keep learning and engaging with it.
Excellent meme, more like this please!
Forgive me, I’m not super versed on Dewey’s mathematics ideas. Quick skimming of some articles and papers seems to suggest he was very practical and wanted kids to tie into the real world. How does that differ from the pink side? Both, to me, seem the opposite of classical logic training.
From reading some of the comments here, it seems that some people think learning is a net negative or neutral for whoever is doing the learning and that one should learn as little as possible.
They seem to think that because they don’t literally write down the equation of “x²+6” that they never use it in their lives and so it is pointless to learn.
There are also people who seem to think that basing your education off of what could help you not being taken advantage of, or misunderstanding the world around you, is silly and you should only follow what is in your heart. Learning what interests you and nothing else.
I don’t understand either of you, idiots.
Debate me, I guess.
Debate me, I guess.
As per your instruction, I shall.
I am a certified flight instructor, I have studied the fundamentals of instruction and can speak with authority on the subject.
it seems that some people think learning is a net negative or neutral for whoever is doing the learning and that one should learn as little as possible.
Learning is an active process. There’s a reason for turn of phrases like “spend time” and “pay attention,” these actions aren’t free. Any act of learning comes with a real cost in time, energy and likely money. It also comes with an opportunity cost. The time and effort a student spends learning could always be spent doing something else; resting, playing, working, caring for family, or learning something else. It is possible for those costs to be so great as to be a genuine net negative for the student. Especially when the reality of formalized school comes into play.
One of Edward Thorndike’s six fundamental principles of learning is the Principle of Readiness. This ties into Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. As a teacher, you have to always ask yourself “Where on their pyramid does my lesson fit? Is everything below that on their pyramid of needs well taken care of?” Your students will not be willing to pay attention in algebra class if they’re hungry, thirsty, sleepy, freezing or scared, because their needs for homeostasis and security aren’t being met well enough for an intellectual lesson such as higher math.
Okay, we got the kids fed, rested and secured. Now they should pay attention right? Nope. That isn’t good enough. Where on their pyramid does this lesson fit? What need of theirs will learning this satisfy? Genuine curiosity about the universe and its workings are always always always at the stabby point of the very tippy top of the pyramid, you want to satisfy that need you’ve got to categorically solve every other need these kids can have from romance to personal prestige. Schools and universities love the image of the career scholar, the men with SI units named after them who conducted experiments for the good of humanity…the reality is the very few extremely privileged people who got to play that game were old money wealthy, they owned land and had servants if not slaves to take care of all their material needs.
When a child asks why they have to go to school, they’re told that school is where they learn the skills they need to survive as adults. though Elementary school, you can take this argument seriously. Learning how to add and subtract is necessary for the basic act of paying for things, reading is the most OP skill you can have, reading clocks and calendars is demonstrably important, etc. That argument starts falling apart when you’re preventing people from going out and earning money to live so they can generate standardized test scores in pre-calculus algebra, or being told not asked what the symbology of the blue curtains in some novel is.
Because here’s another thing about the principle of readiness: It is the teacher’s responsibility to inform the students of the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “Someday algebra will save your life” is meaningless; we live in a world with quiz game shows, literally any trivia knowledge can be life changing. You have to be specific and realistic. Otherwise your students aren’t going to spend the effort, they’ll merely go through the motions, like pretending to be sad at a great aunt’s husband’s funeral.
Especially on Lemmy I’ve seen the argument that education shouldn’t be mere job training, it should be about ultimate enlightenment. Except we need to achieve a world where everyone can afford rent before we can play that game, Tiffany. And we haven’t. Survival skills come before abstract beautiful truths and if we’re honest we’re doing a piss poor job of both.
I agree with just about everything you said. Well put and reasoned. But it doesn’t really wrap back around to what should be taught to the children. Do we let them decide everything for themselves or regiment what is necessary to live in our
hellscapesociety?Then you can ask what is necessary to live in this society? Is it comp sci degrees? Everyone thought so. Now they’re basically useless. That has happened to every generation for the last 30 years or so.
Additionally, as a child I was driven to learn because I was genuinely curious despite crushing depression. It has left me grasping to understand how others approach the world, because let me tell you, it is not how I do so. I would need to look at some good data about how students/adults learn generally, which I have not done much of admittedly.
Specifically what should be in the curriculum? Well, the way I see it, school gets more and more useless the older students get. Elementary school is mostly on the money because reading, writing and arithmetic. We probably need to shake out some of the whitewashing that’s done in social studies class; all the “And then the Indians showed the pilgrims how to plant a fish with the corn seeds to act as fertilizer” shit but I think you get it.
Throughout middle school, they started letting kids choose the electives they wanted to take. For me this started out as “do you want to take Spanish, Band, Orchestra, Chorus or ‘Career Studies’?” There was one period a day that we didn’t ALL share in common. We need to do more of that, cater to students’ interests better. I think high school should have majors like college does.
The best education I find is when the environment simulates or actually is real work. Auto shop class in which real maintenance and repair is done to real roadworthy vehicles, conducted in an environment that simulates a service station is vastly superior to “Here are five random cars the owners abandoned with the school as a tax write off. They were broken when they got here and nine classes before you broke them worse. Take the wheels off and put them back on I guess.” My high school carpentry shop teacher treated us like employees of a general contractor, and we built a house. We would go to the job site, divide into work teams and work on a section of the building, from girder beam to shingles. I came out of high school not only with a head full of theory, but I was ready to walk onto a job site and work because I knew the job.
Shop classes have been disappearing. Students who didn’t take those, who took AP classes and such…what did they emerge from high school ready to go do as an adult?
I’m also of a mind to reject the notion that, you spend the entirety of your childhood and adolescence on school, and maybe even early adulthood if you go to college, and then once you’re done that’s it, no more learning now you work. That’s insane. “I’m in school.” “I’m out of school.” “I’m going back to school.” This notion of everything having to be multi-year curricula that must be entirely completed to earn a certificate and those four semesters of chemistry and physics don’t count because you failed persuasive writing so no future for you…it’s psychotic.
You know shit’s fucked when The King In Yellow, the very manifestation of the idea that knowledge can kill, is having to defend the value of education.
Every day we stray
further from godtoward lost CarcosaSong of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa.
I agree with you on both points, and the third (these people are idiots), but I’m happy to debate you anyways.
I think that we must actively dismantle traditional forms of knowledge (copyrights, private libraries, most of education) in favor of developing new completely open archives and internet based methods of organizing, developing, and interacting with knowledge.
Does that do it for you?
I mean I like your ideas but that doesn’t really address the “how” of educating. As in how are those materials presented to people?
How do we ensure that children are actually being educated and not just glazing their eyes over as the info flows past? How do we ensure that that education is not just “God did it, now shit up.” How do we get people to be interested in learning and not just stop the second someone isn’t pointing a gun at their head?
I guess we’ll have to learn how to do that.
For a lot of people, education is “we will hold a gun to your head until you pass the exam”. For a lot of people, education is seminary school, and in many circles the priests are the best educated folks around.
If I don’t send my kids to school, a nice lady with a uniform and a gun comes around, and this is ‘civilization’?
It sounds like you’re worried education will, ‘become Bible school at the point of a gun’, but where I am it already is, and these aren’t the new models I’m talking about.
I’m talking about free access and communication as the pillars of education.
What would I do?
I would focus on teaching now to learn. Instead of filling the school with silly playtime like high-school football, drama clubs and show and tells just teach kids how to find and verify information, some logic so they can evaluate different arguments and train their memory by making them memorize stuff. What exactly they learn is not that important. Most will forget the dates and formulas anyway. The skills will stay with them.
So your ideal school has no physical activity, no culture, and is filled with memorization of things that don’t matter. Wow sounds like you’ve spent at least 15 seconds thinking about this. Thanks for sharing!
I didn’t say NO physical activity. Just don’t make it more important than actual school. No idea where you took “no culture” from. You think you can’t research information on culture? Just again, don’t make drama clubs more important than school. Memorization should definitely be present, I didn’t say school should be filled with it.
What I was trying to describe is similar to project-based learning used in Finland. If you haven’t heard about it it’s worth researching.
you said drama club was pointless :( thats culture
I agree that project based learning is great. Your initial description isn’t really a summary of perfect based learning though.
National level fixes almost never work. Give schools and teachers and districts money and power for the win.
Isn’t this just resigning ourselves to shitty religious “charter schools” in like half the states? Feels like it’d be a massive assault on public education, in practice.
Neither. Math builds a lot on other math. And the curriculum is very standardized. That’s why, when people just happen to miss something at any point, because maybe they have more important stuff going on in their live right now, they never catch up. We should drop the requirement that everyone has to learn the same math at the same time, hire more teachers and allow students to flow freely between courses to focus on the stuff they can learn with the math they already know. This will allow students to catch up and, paradoxically, produce a higher over all level of math knowledge, if less standardized and predictable for employers.
Now, to ensure students also want to learn math, both abstract math courses and mixed seminars should be offered. Students could choose to attend either or both. In the seminars, math, physics and engineering would be mixed in challenges where students with different skills and preferences have to work together to produce a cool result (like a robot, a game, an experiment, etc.). The abstract courses shouldn’t be forgotten, because many students actually enjoy learning math. Instead of just teaching rules and how to follow them, they should involve a creative aspect, where students are encouraged to break rules by making their own definitions, formulate their own theorems and try to prove them (like actual mathematicians do).
How’s the pink guy a neoliberal sellout?
“Teaching practical skills” is code for producing lots of ‘human-capital’ with a highly standardized skill set that is useful and predictable for capitalists. Catering to individual interests is not required, neither is actually understanding math, just being able to blindly follow an algorithm.
The method is irrelevant when there are too few teachers in either case.
One of my math professors sugggested adding a formal logic class to early childhood education.
The human brain is not capable of formal logic at this stage.
One of my math professors told us that when he started elementary school they tried starting maths classes with logic and combinatorics, because they were most essential maths and in principle could be experienced by children by seeing, feeling etc. He said it was a stupid approach. I say he turned out a math professor, so maybe it worked.
People who want school to be practical scare me.
I’m genuinely curious why, if this is serious. I feel like adulting badly needs to be taught better. I’m nearing mid twenties and still get so confused at a lot of adult things, especially government shit, because it’s just so much to figure out for the first time.
It’s definitely important to teach math and science and language, and to teach people how to do their own research, and think, and learn, etc. But are you saying practical skills shouldn’t also be taught?
I interpreted it as a criticism of those who think there’s no point to learning something if there isn’t an immediately-obvious application for that knowledge. Like those who say, “What’s the point of learning history? I’m not going to become a historian,” as if learning needs to have a clear end-goal or else it’s useless. Or those who think it’s pointless to learn to play an instrument because you’re not going to become a famous musician. It’s a mentality that ties in with capitalism, where if you’re not being productive, you have no use.
A well-rounded education should equip students with skills they can apply independently no matter what they do. Learning history provides context for the world we live in, why it is the way it is, and can inform us on how to move forward. Learning to play an instrument builds new connections in the brain, strengthens fine motor skills, and (in the case of reading music) how to move information between abstract concepts and a tangible form.
These skills provide benefits to people that can be built upon in the future. They may not have immediate usage to a student, but they create a foundation upon which a student can reach higher as they progress in life. Not every lesson is practical in the moment, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have value to a growing mind.
If anyone taught you how to do your taxes at school age I bet you’d forgotten all about it by the time you needed it
As OP said, what’s important is to learn to learn
yes, practical skills change year to year.
what’s important is to learn to learn.
Maths education is pointless overcomplicated. We need to simplify and streamline it. And also add in more practical real-world examples.
Especially when you’re forced to use a complicated method to do basic calculations with. People should be allowed to learn different ways to get to the same answer.
It is sad that the general population is unable to see learning math as good in of itself. Not everything must be solely “practical.”
Math education is basically a Time waster designed to justify hierarchies, it’s tangentially related to math but not really in purpose, there’s just numbers involved
Wow, that’s one of the worst takes on math education I’ve ever heard.
It’s based on my personal experience being burned by the system. Endless math drills that could have just been a calculator in order tobget grade points to get into a “good college” and a job, if you’re lucky. There’s a reason people come away from contemporary math education completely burned out
Not really. Not everyone enjoys advanced mathematics the same way not everyone enjoys english literature or engineering, or arts and crafts. People have different interests, aptitudes, and skills. That’s how the world works.
Yeah, not understanding math and statistics makes propaganda so easy! I’ve seen so many people invest their savings into things that were mathematically or physically impossible from the get go. Gambling too!
Did you actually read what I wrote or the context behind it? I don’t think you did.
I am saying not everyone wants to learn these things just for the sake of it. Some people want to learn the parts of maths that are more practical and want to be given practical examples. I don’t see a problem with accommodating those students or looking down on people who think that way like the original commenter was doing.
What I am not saying is that no one should learn any maths at all. I don’t know how you got that from my comment. It’s like you are deliberately trying to misinterpret what I am saying.
they still should learn them.
you need to know how the world works a bit to be a good citizen capable of critical thinking.
Did you actually read what I wrote or the context behind it? I don’t think you did. I am saying not everyone wants to learn these things just for the sake of it. Some people want to learn the parts of maths that are more practical and want to be given practical examples. I don’t see a problem with accommodating those students or looking down on people who think that way like the original commenter was doing.
