no other program has results anywhere near this. Everyone in this thread agrees that parents have a far greater responsibility to raise their children than school does, right? Is it surprising that intervening with parents and children would have a large effect?
'aggregate dude'? o_O
Two biases: these are generally voluntary programs, meaning that the parents who participate are those already more inclined towards supporting their children's education. And, of course, it's possible that we are only observing the successful programs after the fact.
Which doesn't imply anything about HCZ in particular; it just means that surrealitycheck's citation of an empirically controlled, and presumably double-blinded, animal control study is considerably more persuasive about whether epigenetics is a relevant human phenomenon.
no other program has results anywhere near this. Everyone in this thread agrees that parents have a far greater responsibility to raise their children than school does, right? Is it surprising that intervening with parents and children would have a large effect?
'aggregate dude'? o_O
Two biases: these are generally voluntary programs, meaning that the parents who participate are those already more inclined towards supporting their children's education. And, of course, it's possible that we are only observing the successful programs after the fact.
Which doesn't imply anything about HCZ in particular; it just means that surrealitycheck's citation of an empirically controlled, and presumably double-blinded, animal control study is considerably more persuasive about whether epigenetics is a relevant human phenomenon.
Oh god no it isn't
human beings develop a huge amount outside the womb compared to other animals.
and these are still parents that have to essentially be taught that beating your child isn't effective, you shouldn't shout at them, making them read a book is better than TV, etc.
I mean the sheer number of people that aren't even aware that their nutritional intake during pregnancy affects the health and well being of their child is mind boggling. There is a staggering number of people who simply don't know how parent.
is whether this is voluntary really important? This program should be available to every single parent that wants to volunteer for it, if this is the results it has with people who want to do the program.
but again, we'd rather pay for jail time than education
no other program has results anywhere near this. Everyone in this thread agrees that parents have a far greater responsibility to raise their children than school does, right? Is it surprising that intervening with parents and children would have a large effect?
'aggregate dude'? o_O
Two biases: these are generally voluntary programs, meaning that the parents who participate are those already more inclined towards supporting their children's education. And, of course, it's possible that we are only observing the successful programs after the fact.
Which doesn't imply anything about HCZ in particular; it just means that surrealitycheck's citation of an empirically controlled, and presumably double-blinded, animal control study is considerably more persuasive about whether epigenetics is a relevant human phenomenon.
Oh god no it isn't
human beings develop a huge amount outside the womb compared to other animals.
See, this is a valid logical response to the epigenetic issue. And since I am out of my depth on the issue, I shall leave it to you and surrealitycheck to fight it out.
and these are still parents that have to essentially be taught that beating your child isn't effective, you shouldn't shout at them, making them read a book is better than TV, etc.
I mean the sheer number of people that aren't even aware that their nutritional intake during pregnancy affects the health and well being of their child is mind boggling. There is a staggering number of people who simply don't know how parent.
is whether this is voluntary really important? This program should be available to every single parent that wants to volunteer for it, if this is the results it has with people who want to do the program.
but again, we'd rather pay for jail time than education
And this bit might all be true - it's a good idea, etc. - and irrelevant to the objective point. My point on whether it was voluntary was not over whether it was a good idea; it was over whether there would be self-selection bias effect. And of course there will be. There might be such an effect and be a good idea.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
also making learning fun is yet another red herring. you cannot make learning fun to a child that never learned how to read or is simply unable to.
Why? As I said above, literally everyone enjoys learning given the proper subject matter. If you can find what it is about these things that excites and interests a given person, you can try to expand that to include more traditional and useful subjects. Turning learning into its own reward is not a red herring at all. It is pretty critical, I think.
I do agree with most of the other things you said, though.
I'm really not sold on the idea that "learning is its own reward". I think learning, for those outside of educational professional tracks, simply doesn't matter too much. As a net-gain for society, the guy who knows Moby Dick inside and out is of no larger societal use unless that person is placed in a situation where they are able to usefully impart that knowledge to better their community.
The age of the intelligentsia is far past, and we as a society hardly care about actual pursuits of knowledge past the fairy-tale that is general education. Not to mention the backlash against actually being "book smart", students are simply better served learning to be productive members of society.
I tend to subscribe to a more traditional European model. That if we were better, through a mixture of assessment and choice, at actually teaching to varying needs and styles we'd be a more functioning society. Knowledge is power, but most high-intellectual pursuits are close to worthless when you're trying to get a job or make money to feed your family. We should always reach for the skies, but making kids who have no interest in being academic lecturers learn Moby Dick is a waste. Teach them to carefully read contracts or to understand the civic place of taxation and democratic representation.
And this isn't even getting far into how little we value actual intellect outside of schooling. The drive to "make it fun" decreases discipline as well as placing an inflated societal value on knowledge that the wider American populous views distrustfully. Not only does it incorrectly conflate "fun" with "work", but it also creates a contradiction of societal goals and aims.
The problem with learning as its own reward is you're trying to instill that on people that are 10-16 who are going through enough personal issues and growth that they're too short sighted to think of it in that context. If i was bribed into working hard in school, I would have probably done a whole hell of a lot better.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
no other program has results anywhere near this. Everyone in this thread agrees that parents have a far greater responsibility to raise their children than school does, right? Is it surprising that intervening with parents and children would have a large effect?
'aggregate dude'? o_O
Two biases: these are generally voluntary programs, meaning that the parents who participate are those already more inclined towards supporting their children's education. And, of course, it's possible that we are only observing the successful programs after the fact.
Which doesn't imply anything about HCZ in particular; it just means that surrealitycheck's citation of an empirically controlled, and presumably double-blinded, animal control study is considerably more persuasive about whether epigenetics is a relevant human phenomenon.
Oh god no it isn't
human beings develop a huge amount outside the womb compared to other animals.
See, this is a valid logical response to the epigenetic issue. And since I am out of my depth on the issue, I shall leave it to you and surrealitycheck to fight it out.
and these are still parents that have to essentially be taught that beating your child isn't effective, you shouldn't shout at them, making them read a book is better than TV, etc.
I mean the sheer number of people that aren't even aware that their nutritional intake during pregnancy affects the health and well being of their child is mind boggling. There is a staggering number of people who simply don't know how parent.
is whether this is voluntary really important? This program should be available to every single parent that wants to volunteer for it, if this is the results it has with people who want to do the program.
but again, we'd rather pay for jail time than education
And this bit might all be true - it's a good idea, etc. - and irrelevant to the objective point. My point on whether it was voluntary was not over whether it was a good idea; it was over whether there would be self-selection bias effect. And of course there will be. There might be such an effect and be a good idea.
Or even more simply; "See what happens when you let people self select? They flourish!"
It can, but that wasn't my point. My point was that parents self-select into such programs so such programs are not representative of the average student background. It's still possible that it does improve outcomes, we just don't know whether it does based on considering it alone. It's called selection bias.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
It can, but that wasn't my point. My point was that parents self-select into such programs so such programs are not representative of the average student background. It's still possible that it does improve outcomes, we just don't know whether it does based on considering it alone. It's called selection bias.
Right.
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ElJeffeNot actually a mod.Roaming the streets, waving his gun around.Moderator, ClubPAmod
The problem with learning as its own reward is you're trying to instill that on people that are 10-16 who are going through enough personal issues and growth that they're too short sighted to think of it in that context. If i was bribed into working hard in school, I would have probably done a whole hell of a lot better.
It's definitely the case that the longer you wait to instill the proper academic mindset, the harder it is to do. Not impossible, but I'd assume it does get to the point that it becomes implausible to expect schools to do so.
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I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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ElJeffeNot actually a mod.Roaming the streets, waving his gun around.Moderator, ClubPAmod
no other program has results anywhere near this. Everyone in this thread agrees that parents have a far greater responsibility to raise their children than school does, right? Is it surprising that intervening with parents and children would have a large effect?
I think we can all agree with that, sure. But that's more or less irrelevant, because it's pretty much beyond our control to affect. We can encourage, subsidize, and target-program good parenting skills, but at the end of the day, the schools are stuck with the students they get. To misquote Rumsfeld: You teach the students you have, not the students you want to have.
So, given what teachers have to work with, how should we teach these kids? That's the question. Yes, it's true that we want parents to be actively involved with their children's education, and we should give them as many of the tools to do so as we can. But what then?
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
The problem with learning as its own reward is you're trying to instill that on people that are 10-16 who are going through enough personal issues and growth that they're too short sighted to think of it in that context. If i was bribed into working hard in school, I would have probably done a whole hell of a lot better.
It's definitely the case that the longer you wait to instill the proper academic mindset, the harder it is to do. Not impossible, but I'd assume it does get to the point that it becomes implausible to expect schools to do so.
It's something we can go around in circles all day about really.
I've read this before, and every time my objection is always the same:
(1) his proposal isn't anything like how countries which do teach math very well (according to the TIMSS international survey) do it
(2) he implicitly assumes an enthusiasm for playing with the abstract concepts he likes, which is just fine for him because he's a mathematician. But it doesn't seem generally applicable.
I mean, I can see where his criticisms are aimed at. I did my primary and secondary education in Singapore, where they unsurprisingly do the whole Singapore Math thing, and everyone could always tell when the teachers had decided to teach a few topics using materials from the United States because all the notes would be very beautifully drawn, but it would be full of the 'cutesy' story problems Lockhart decries and would engage in all sorts of extraneous irrelevance and side problems that didn't seem to go anywhere (we were dimly aware it was from the US due to the imperial units and references to American cities, but the light bulb only really went on in my head when I read Feynman's autobiography, and he described math textbooks that teach number base systems for no real reason and then I realized why that topic never reappeared after Primary Four).
But Singapore's own teaching method is almost totally the opposite of Lockhart's; it is, if anything, even more regimented and practice-based, lacking even the breadth that US textbooks seem to enjoy covering. Students here sitting A levels (12th grade standardized exams, set by OCR in the UK) do practice papers they call TYS: ten year series; the past ten or twenty years of exam papers and practice exam papers from multiple schools all compiled together neatly in a booklet, which students find ways to 'acquire' despite school opposition. And this practice is considered relaxed compared to what students in Hong Kong or Taiwan do.
no other program has results anywhere near this. Everyone in this thread agrees that parents have a far greater responsibility to raise their children than school does, right? Is it surprising that intervening with parents and children would have a large effect?
I think we can all agree with that, sure. But that's more or less irrelevant, because it's pretty much beyond our control to affect. We can encourage, subsidize, and target-program good parenting skills, but at the end of the day, the schools are stuck with the students they get. To misquote Rumsfeld: You teach the students you have, not the students you want to have.
So, given what teachers have to work with, how should we teach these kids? That's the question. Yes, it's true that we want parents to be actively involved with their children's education, and we should give them as many of the tools to do so as we can. But what then?
that's what you do. these weren't exactly kids that were expected to graduate. One of the more heartless aspects of this program is that does essentially give up on some people. But I honestly think the problems the poor and uneducated face in this country are worth doing whatever is possible to end the cycle of poverty. The guy who formed this program used to try and save students one at a time, you know, inspirational movie type stuff, and was frustrated by how little he was accomplishing. He reasoned there had to be an easier way to lift people out of poverty, and rather than trying to save the adults, he could try and save their children.
I think the question of what to do with the next generation is more important.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
(1) his proposal isn't anything like how countries which do teach math very well (according to the TIMSS international survey) do it
To be fair, he would argue they don't necessarily teach mathematics very well. Certainly nobody from the "good" countries ever wins a Fields medal :P
They do certainly take rote learning of mathematics to its logical conclusion, with no mercy.
(2) he implicitly assumes an enthusiasm for playing with the abstract concepts he likes, which is just fine for him because he's a mathematician. But it doesn't seem generally applicable.
Well, isn't an enthusiasm for play a fairly reasonable assumption to make about children? That is what play is; children learning. If children are willing to play with maths they will learn it!
Of course it's probably true some children won't like it, just as some children don't like art lessons - but probably more than like our current maths syllabus. I like maths, but I loathed maths lessons; I completely sympathise with his argument.
Selection bias certainly plays a part but I don't know of a specific solution to that. If a parent doesn't give a fuck about their child's education no amount of funding is going to help that.
One major advantage of charter schools is that competition drives them to succeed. Another important factor is that they are decentralized and autonomous. Their curriculum can essentially consist of whatever the school desires within certain guidelines. This empowers parents and teachers and not the supervisor of the school board who gives kickbacks to textbook publishing companies in exchange for campaign money. Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
(2) he implicitly assumes an enthusiasm for playing with the abstract concepts he likes, which is just fine for him because he's a mathematician. But it doesn't seem generally applicable.
Well, isn't an enthusiasm for play a fairly reasonable assumption to make about children? That is what play is; children learning. If children are willing to play with maths they will learn it!.
It's a reasonable assumption that children want to play, but not, I think, to play with the particular things he supposes. He fancies whole classrooms of students attempting to find the area of a triangle; does that sound like that will hold interest? Would it continue to hold interest after someone yells "oy look guys, it's half base times height, my brother told me so"? (and this is one place mathematics differs from art - there really are definite answers, and the appeal of discovery can vanish just like that. Then you get one student with the inspired idea and nineteen others with the memorized answer)
Or his high school math example, that one was even more egregious: show that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle. Really? Do you suppose students will willingly chase after problems like these every day? I doubt even mathematicians are universally fans of the Euclidean approach to geometry. And this one problem took several days.
And you know, even with all that, at some point students are going to have to memorize collections of facts (for which they'll invent their own names, since Lockhart condemns their formal names as useless terminology) - just so they can go on to proving things which are non-obvious enough to require sub theorems. We are demanding that students work themselves through more than a thousand years of mathematical insight over what things we can use as axioms and what we can't, and what must be proved and what can be regarded as 'obvious'.
And that is just in Euclidean geometry. What about, say, calculus? Shall we demand that students stumble through all the millions of ways in which the fundamental theorem can be expressed and fight their way out of all the philosophical pitfalls that held even Leibniz at bay? Students are going to want to know why infinitesimals work, at what point can we say "you can stop asking now, I'm not going to walk you through undergraduate analysis, just take this at given"?
And maybe they can do all this with some very good teacher guidance. But it doesn't seem plausible to suggest that this will be able to cover what existing curricula do at a reasonable rate (colleges already complain that incoming students are mathematically illiterate, so compromise here isn't acceptable), nor to suggest that the teaching quality will be acceptably even (the kid who got the idea first is likely to keep getting it, plus we have no way of detecting whether other kids understood the idea). And especially not that this will consistently maintain student interest.
Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
And this starts us down the merry road of urban poverty entrenchment.
Reminder: not everyone lives in a two-parent nuclear family with a homemaker and breadwinner, three and a half kids and a dog. You cannot rely on parental enthusiasm nor availability of their time.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
In comparison to what they currently do? Yeah, sure.
I mean, I didn't know a single person who enjoyed maths lessons. Not one. And there were 260 people odd in my year. Sure, you have to know some terminology - but consider how long we spend doing basic arithmetic. Or, as he mentions, stuff like quadratic equations. I must have spent hours wasting time on different methods of solving quadratics, only to never use any of them when it came to actual hard integration.
I suppose I wouldn't quite go as far as him, but the underlying point really is kind of relevant. An awful lot of the stuff you learn at school isn't necessary or useful for maths, it's not necessary or useful for life - so why are we so insistent on people learning it?
The real problem that universities are having is that calculus has been shunted to something that you do for only 2 years when you hit 17 (this is in the UK mind you, and we are definitely having problems - most physics courses have gained a year at the beginning where they teach all the students remedial maths). One of the benefits of a looser approach is that you can address stuff like calculus really early on. I have taught 11-year-olds calculus; clever ones, admittedly, but all the algebra is there by that age.
And that is just in Euclidean geometry. What about, say, calculus? Shall we demand that students stumble through all the millions of ways in which the fundamental theorem can be expressed and fight their way out of all the philosophical pitfalls that held even Leibniz at bay? Students are going to want to know why infinitesimals work, at what point can we say "you can stop asking now, I'm not going to walk you through undergraduate analysis, just take this at given"?
That's just a function of time in the classroom; in the same way that every chain of inquiry has to eventually end at a "just because", the same is true of maths. I don't think that's a problem with the idea of teaching it in that way - it's merely a fundamental limit!
But it doesn't seem plausible to suggest that this will be able to cover what existing curricula do at a reasonable rate (colleges already complain that incoming students are mathematically illiterate, so compromise here isn't acceptable)
This part I definitely disagree with, simply because so much of the standard mathematics syllabus is totally irrelevant to maths as a whole. Most of it is like paddling in one end of a 2-mile long lake.
Certainly, you'd need to cover the stuff that lets you understand mathematics that went before (so notation etc), but very large amounts of the syllabus don't need to be taught as "things you must know".
Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
And this starts us down the merry road of urban poverty entrenchment.
Reminder: not everyone lives in a two-parent nuclear family with a homemaker and breadwinner, three and a half kids and a dog. You cannot rely on parental enthusiasm nor availability of their time.
pretty sure inner city harlem is not known for its stable middle class nuclear families. This program should be available to everyone that does want it. I think the number of people that want to help their children but feel they do not have the tools to do so would surprise you.
Look, I agree with the darkly hilarious summary of the standard K12 course he provides. I took all of it in Singapore, mostly exactly as described and even in the same order, albeit at a faster pace. And I can look back and say: yes, this was senseless at the time and misses out all the elegance of such and such (especially since I went on to study some undergraduate-level analysis). But I can do all that since I already know all that; I won't go "whuh?" if you tell me that trigonometric functions are essentially transcendental and that many beautiful things are going on the background. I know. But I wouldn't have been able to see any of this, without first having a knowledge of complex numbers, Taylor's theorem, analytic geometry, etc., or being able to competently work with sine and cosine without fouling it up.
In comparison to what they currently do? Yeah, sure.
I mean, I didn't know a single person who enjoyed maths lessons. Not one. And there were 260 people odd in my year. Sure, you have to know some terminology - but consider how long we spend doing basic arithmetic. Or, as he mentions, stuff like quadratic equations. I must have spent hours wasting time on different methods of solving quadratics, only to never use any of them when it came to actual hard integration.
...
The real problem that universities are having is that calculus has been shunted to something that you do for only 2 years when you hit 17 (this is in the UK mind you, and we are definitely having problems - most physics courses have gained a year at the beginning where they teach all the students remedial maths). One of the benefits of a looser approach is that you can address stuff like calculus really early on. I have taught 11-year-olds calculus; clever ones, admittedly, but all the algebra is there by that age.
See, with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you why you and I studied that. You see, a couple of decades ago, the course actually went on to do complex numbers, ordinary differential equations, and analytic geometry. And that's where everything suddenly collapses back into one broad understanding, and then you suddenly need those quadratic equations to solve second order ODEs like y'' = -y which has the two solutions sine and cosine and nothing else and the sine is (e^iz-e^-iz)/2i and suddenly you can see why e^i*pi = -1.
... yeah. Then at some point they simplified the curriculum by chopping the last few topics off. Singapore still uses the old GCSE/GCE system copied from the UK, and it still has those topics in (plus a few more - probability, statistical testing, and linear algebra); in the UK they chopped it off into a separate A level subject altogether called Further Mathematics.
K12 math, compressed into... 1-9th grade? The remaining three years cover those topics. In any case, the dismembered result that remains doesn't stand very well on its own. This goes some way towards explaining why UK universities have to teach yet another year of math.
Regardless, maybe it's cultural, but I virtually never met anyone who disliked mathematics in secondary school (SG: grade 6-10). Awful at it, sure. But the accepted notion seemed to be that understanding was easy but practice was lacking, so failure just indicated insufficient practice.
When I studied in the UK the situation wholly reversed; I was told that very few local students took Further Math. I never managed to figure out why. A old math teacher told me an anecdote that back when international students began pouring into the UK in large numbers, his international college teamed up with a larger nearby public school to find enough students for a full Further Math class to meet the spike in demand. Within five years they had three full classes of students from East Asia from their own college, and one local student from the public school.
I suppose I wouldn't quite go as far as him, but the underlying point really is kind of relevant. An awful lot of the stuff you learn at school isn't necessary or useful for maths, it's not necessary or useful for life - so why are we so insistent on people learning it?
That, I have no idea about. It does turn out enormously useful if you go on to do any hard science course, and even somewhat useful in any soft science course. I suppose there's an argument toward doing it anyway so that all students are at least exposed to the possibility of entering high-paying hard science jobs in the future.
And that is just in Euclidean geometry. What about, say, calculus? Shall we demand that students stumble through all the millions of ways in which the fundamental theorem can be expressed and fight their way out of all the philosophical pitfalls that held even Leibniz at bay? Students are going to want to know why infinitesimals work, at what point can we say "you can stop asking now, I'm not going to walk you through undergraduate analysis, just take this at given"?
That's just a function of time in the classroom; in the same way that every chain of inquiry has to eventually end at a "just because", the same is true of maths. I don't think that's a problem with the idea of teaching it in that way - it's merely a fundamental limit!
Okay on that - I suspect "just because" does entail "therefore, memorize what I just told you" - but that still leaves the question of how to present the basics of calculus without requiring that students learn the terminology at some point, or to somehow teach it in an appropriately inspirational manner that allows students to independently rediscover 'the simple and profound ideas of Newton and Leibniz'.
Lockhart condemns the choice of formalism but doesn't provide any alternative. What's yours?
But it doesn't seem plausible to suggest that this will be able to cover what existing curricula do at a reasonable rate (colleges already complain that incoming students are mathematically illiterate, so compromise here isn't acceptable)
This part I definitely disagree with, simply because so much of the standard mathematics syllabus is totally irrelevant to maths as a whole. Most of it is like paddling in one end of a 2-mile long lake.
Certainly, you'd need to cover the stuff that lets you understand mathematics that went before (so notation etc), but very large amounts of the syllabus don't need to be taught as "things you must know".
I think colleges will want to be able to slap down a simple equation - a first-order differential equation, say - and have their students understand it. These things appear in most sciences; a first-order ODE underpins anything with a decaying half-life (i.e., where the rate of decay is proportional to the amount that remains). And much of the existing curriculum Lockhart condemns builds towards this sort of facility with mathematics, except perhaps Geometry, which is the only topic he seems to like anyway.
Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
And this starts us down the merry road of urban poverty entrenchment.
Reminder: not everyone lives in a two-parent nuclear family with a homemaker and breadwinner, three and a half kids and a dog. You cannot rely on parental enthusiasm nor availability of their time.
pretty sure inner city harlem is not known for its stable middle class nuclear families. This program should be available to everyone that does want it. I think the number of people that want to help their children but feel they do not have the tools to do so would surprise you.
Okay, you've linked to that site for the third time. Would you kindly tell us what HCZ does that sets it apart from a million other programs, because when I go to that site it wants to sell me a brochure before it tells me.
Suffice it to say that I hope HCZ doesn't rely on parental involvement; otherwise, all it's done is drawn in the families in inner-city Harlem with proactive parents and done exactly jack to the city average success rate. But I shall rely on you to confirm whether it does.
Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
And this starts us down the merry road of urban poverty entrenchment.
Reminder: not everyone lives in a two-parent nuclear family with a homemaker and breadwinner, three and a half kids and a dog. You cannot rely on parental enthusiasm nor availability of their time.
I'm not really advocating for or against here (I happen to be for but that's an aside) I'm just explaining why these things work well with the same amount of government funding as the crappy school in the ghetto.
So yeah it's not a perfect panacea. When my wife taught in the ghetto she'd get maybe 2-3 parents showing up at the parent conferences. I already put out the proviso that if the parents don't give a fuck the school is going to fail. This is not a secret.
Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
And this starts us down the merry road of urban poverty entrenchment.
Reminder: not everyone lives in a two-parent nuclear family with a homemaker and breadwinner, three and a half kids and a dog. You cannot rely on parental enthusiasm nor availability of their time.
pretty sure inner city harlem is not known for its stable middle class nuclear families. This program should be available to everyone that does want it. I think the number of people that want to help their children but feel they do not have the tools to do so would surprise you.
Okay, you've linked to that site for the third time. Would you kindly tell us what HCZ does that sets it apart from a million other programs, because when I go to that site it wants to sell me a brochure before it tells me.
Suffice it to say that I hope HCZ doesn't rely on parental involvement; otherwise, all it's done is drawn in the families in inner-city Harlem with proactive parents and done exactly jack to the city average success rate. But I shall rely on you to confirm whether it does.
One of their programs, baby college, seeks out newly pregnant or new mothers and begins providing counseling and parenting courses. One of the basic ideas that they teach new parents is that you need to read to your child every night to accelerate his or her brain development and avoid corporal punishment. A program I listened to on baby college had quite a few testimonials from parents who took the course, saying things like "I learned it was wrong to call my children stupid" as well as the importance of reading to your children.
the reason I am linking this site is because you are asking questions and it is answering questions. How do solve the enormous dropout rate? How do get test scores up? How do we keep poor mostly black teenagers out of prison?
this doesn't take only proactive parents, it teaches parents to be proactive. Again, I think you underestimate the number of parents that want to do right by their children but simply lack the tools to do so. It's not like good parenting is instinctual for a lot of people, I don't think it's a stretch to say a lot of folks raise their children as they were raised, just as the abused tend to become abusers and so on.
It's pretty simple. Get to the child early, intervene with parents that are willing to accept assisstance, and lift thousands out of a vicious cycle. I have never seen any program that has numbers anywhere close to this one, and once again, this is NOT taking the smartest, best, brightest kids with the best possible future. I have little doubt that in the regular schooling system these kids would have failed. hell man, you don't even see these kinds of numbers at wealthy schools that don't have early intervention programs
I think colleges will want to be able to slap down a simple equation - a first-order differential equation, say - and have their students understand it. These things appear in most sciences; a first-order ODE underpins anything with a decaying half-life (i.e., where the rate of decay is proportional to the amount that remains). And much of the existing curriculum Lockhart condemns builds towards this sort of facility with mathematics, except perhaps Geometry, which is the only topic he seems to like anyway.
And the thing is, alot of math and science DOES come down to memorization.
I mean, we all like to talk about how you can look anything up if needed these days, so memorization isn't important, but it's all a question of WHAT you need to look up.
Memorization and Repetition of exercises is very important for solving problems in math and science because it lets you look at a new problem and your brain clicks and goes "This looks just like something else I've done!".
To give an example, the people who memorized alot of trig identities were way better off in math/physics/etc then those of us who didn't because they could look at a problem and see which trig identities needed to be applied to it in order to solve it. The rest of us had to look them up and desperately start going through them 1 by 1.
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'aggregate dude'? o_O
Two biases: these are generally voluntary programs, meaning that the parents who participate are those already more inclined towards supporting their children's education. And, of course, it's possible that we are only observing the successful programs after the fact.
Which doesn't imply anything about HCZ in particular; it just means that surrealitycheck's citation of an empirically controlled, and presumably double-blinded, animal control study is considerably more persuasive about whether epigenetics is a relevant human phenomenon.
Oh god no it isn't
human beings develop a huge amount outside the womb compared to other animals.
and these are still parents that have to essentially be taught that beating your child isn't effective, you shouldn't shout at them, making them read a book is better than TV, etc.
I mean the sheer number of people that aren't even aware that their nutritional intake during pregnancy affects the health and well being of their child is mind boggling. There is a staggering number of people who simply don't know how parent.
is whether this is voluntary really important? This program should be available to every single parent that wants to volunteer for it, if this is the results it has with people who want to do the program.
but again, we'd rather pay for jail time than education
See, this is a valid logical response to the epigenetic issue. And since I am out of my depth on the issue, I shall leave it to you and surrealitycheck to fight it out.
And this bit might all be true - it's a good idea, etc. - and irrelevant to the objective point. My point on whether it was voluntary was not over whether it was a good idea; it was over whether there would be self-selection bias effect. And of course there will be. There might be such an effect and be a good idea.
The problem with learning as its own reward is you're trying to instill that on people that are 10-16 who are going through enough personal issues and growth that they're too short sighted to think of it in that context. If i was bribed into working hard in school, I would have probably done a whole hell of a lot better.
Or even more simply; "See what happens when you let people self select? They flourish!"
That... wasn't what I said.
I paraphrased liberally. Self selection can happen and lead to positive outcomes. Is that not where you were going?
Right.
It's definitely the case that the longer you wait to instill the proper academic mindset, the harder it is to do. Not impossible, but I'd assume it does get to the point that it becomes implausible to expect schools to do so.
I think we can all agree with that, sure. But that's more or less irrelevant, because it's pretty much beyond our control to affect. We can encourage, subsidize, and target-program good parenting skills, but at the end of the day, the schools are stuck with the students they get. To misquote Rumsfeld: You teach the students you have, not the students you want to have.
So, given what teachers have to work with, how should we teach these kids? That's the question. Yes, it's true that we want parents to be actively involved with their children's education, and we should give them as many of the tools to do so as we can. But what then?
It's something we can go around in circles all day about really.
I've read this before, and every time my objection is always the same:
(1) his proposal isn't anything like how countries which do teach math very well (according to the TIMSS international survey) do it
(2) he implicitly assumes an enthusiasm for playing with the abstract concepts he likes, which is just fine for him because he's a mathematician. But it doesn't seem generally applicable.
I mean, I can see where his criticisms are aimed at. I did my primary and secondary education in Singapore, where they unsurprisingly do the whole Singapore Math thing, and everyone could always tell when the teachers had decided to teach a few topics using materials from the United States because all the notes would be very beautifully drawn, but it would be full of the 'cutesy' story problems Lockhart decries and would engage in all sorts of extraneous irrelevance and side problems that didn't seem to go anywhere (we were dimly aware it was from the US due to the imperial units and references to American cities, but the light bulb only really went on in my head when I read Feynman's autobiography, and he described math textbooks that teach number base systems for no real reason and then I realized why that topic never reappeared after Primary Four).
But Singapore's own teaching method is almost totally the opposite of Lockhart's; it is, if anything, even more regimented and practice-based, lacking even the breadth that US textbooks seem to enjoy covering. Students here sitting A levels (12th grade standardized exams, set by OCR in the UK) do practice papers they call TYS: ten year series; the past ten or twenty years of exam papers and practice exam papers from multiple schools all compiled together neatly in a booklet, which students find ways to 'acquire' despite school opposition. And this practice is considered relaxed compared to what students in Hong Kong or Taiwan do.
http://www.hcz.org/
that's what you do. these weren't exactly kids that were expected to graduate. One of the more heartless aspects of this program is that does essentially give up on some people. But I honestly think the problems the poor and uneducated face in this country are worth doing whatever is possible to end the cycle of poverty. The guy who formed this program used to try and save students one at a time, you know, inspirational movie type stuff, and was frustrated by how little he was accomplishing. He reasoned there had to be an easier way to lift people out of poverty, and rather than trying to save the adults, he could try and save their children.
I think the question of what to do with the next generation is more important.
To be fair, he would argue they don't necessarily teach mathematics very well. Certainly nobody from the "good" countries ever wins a Fields medal :P
They do certainly take rote learning of mathematics to its logical conclusion, with no mercy.
Well, isn't an enthusiasm for play a fairly reasonable assumption to make about children? That is what play is; children learning. If children are willing to play with maths they will learn it!
Of course it's probably true some children won't like it, just as some children don't like art lessons - but probably more than like our current maths syllabus. I like maths, but I loathed maths lessons; I completely sympathise with his argument.
One major advantage of charter schools is that competition drives them to succeed. Another important factor is that they are decentralized and autonomous. Their curriculum can essentially consist of whatever the school desires within certain guidelines. This empowers parents and teachers and not the supervisor of the school board who gives kickbacks to textbook publishing companies in exchange for campaign money. Parental involvement helps a ton, instead of using precious funding resources for random tasks at the school you can get parents to do it for free.
It's a reasonable assumption that children want to play, but not, I think, to play with the particular things he supposes. He fancies whole classrooms of students attempting to find the area of a triangle; does that sound like that will hold interest? Would it continue to hold interest after someone yells "oy look guys, it's half base times height, my brother told me so"? (and this is one place mathematics differs from art - there really are definite answers, and the appeal of discovery can vanish just like that. Then you get one student with the inspired idea and nineteen others with the memorized answer)
Or his high school math example, that one was even more egregious: show that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle. Really? Do you suppose students will willingly chase after problems like these every day? I doubt even mathematicians are universally fans of the Euclidean approach to geometry. And this one problem took several days.
And you know, even with all that, at some point students are going to have to memorize collections of facts (for which they'll invent their own names, since Lockhart condemns their formal names as useless terminology) - just so they can go on to proving things which are non-obvious enough to require sub theorems. We are demanding that students work themselves through more than a thousand years of mathematical insight over what things we can use as axioms and what we can't, and what must be proved and what can be regarded as 'obvious'.
And that is just in Euclidean geometry. What about, say, calculus? Shall we demand that students stumble through all the millions of ways in which the fundamental theorem can be expressed and fight their way out of all the philosophical pitfalls that held even Leibniz at bay? Students are going to want to know why infinitesimals work, at what point can we say "you can stop asking now, I'm not going to walk you through undergraduate analysis, just take this at given"?
And maybe they can do all this with some very good teacher guidance. But it doesn't seem plausible to suggest that this will be able to cover what existing curricula do at a reasonable rate (colleges already complain that incoming students are mathematically illiterate, so compromise here isn't acceptable), nor to suggest that the teaching quality will be acceptably even (the kid who got the idea first is likely to keep getting it, plus we have no way of detecting whether other kids understood the idea). And especially not that this will consistently maintain student interest.
And this starts us down the merry road of urban poverty entrenchment.
Reminder: not everyone lives in a two-parent nuclear family with a homemaker and breadwinner, three and a half kids and a dog. You cannot rely on parental enthusiasm nor availability of their time.
I mean, I didn't know a single person who enjoyed maths lessons. Not one. And there were 260 people odd in my year. Sure, you have to know some terminology - but consider how long we spend doing basic arithmetic. Or, as he mentions, stuff like quadratic equations. I must have spent hours wasting time on different methods of solving quadratics, only to never use any of them when it came to actual hard integration.
I suppose I wouldn't quite go as far as him, but the underlying point really is kind of relevant. An awful lot of the stuff you learn at school isn't necessary or useful for maths, it's not necessary or useful for life - so why are we so insistent on people learning it?
The real problem that universities are having is that calculus has been shunted to something that you do for only 2 years when you hit 17 (this is in the UK mind you, and we are definitely having problems - most physics courses have gained a year at the beginning where they teach all the students remedial maths). One of the benefits of a looser approach is that you can address stuff like calculus really early on. I have taught 11-year-olds calculus; clever ones, admittedly, but all the algebra is there by that age.
That's just a function of time in the classroom; in the same way that every chain of inquiry has to eventually end at a "just because", the same is true of maths. I don't think that's a problem with the idea of teaching it in that way - it's merely a fundamental limit!
This part I definitely disagree with, simply because so much of the standard mathematics syllabus is totally irrelevant to maths as a whole. Most of it is like paddling in one end of a 2-mile long lake.
Certainly, you'd need to cover the stuff that lets you understand mathematics that went before (so notation etc), but very large amounts of the syllabus don't need to be taught as "things you must know".
AHEM
http://www.hcz.org/
pretty sure inner city harlem is not known for its stable middle class nuclear families. This program should be available to everyone that does want it. I think the number of people that want to help their children but feel they do not have the tools to do so would surprise you.
See, with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you why you and I studied that. You see, a couple of decades ago, the course actually went on to do complex numbers, ordinary differential equations, and analytic geometry. And that's where everything suddenly collapses back into one broad understanding, and then you suddenly need those quadratic equations to solve second order ODEs like y'' = -y which has the two solutions sine and cosine and nothing else and the sine is (e^iz-e^-iz)/2i and suddenly you can see why e^i*pi = -1.
... yeah. Then at some point they simplified the curriculum by chopping the last few topics off. Singapore still uses the old GCSE/GCE system copied from the UK, and it still has those topics in (plus a few more - probability, statistical testing, and linear algebra); in the UK they chopped it off into a separate A level subject altogether called Further Mathematics.
K12 math, compressed into... 1-9th grade? The remaining three years cover those topics. In any case, the dismembered result that remains doesn't stand very well on its own. This goes some way towards explaining why UK universities have to teach yet another year of math.
Regardless, maybe it's cultural, but I virtually never met anyone who disliked mathematics in secondary school (SG: grade 6-10). Awful at it, sure. But the accepted notion seemed to be that understanding was easy but practice was lacking, so failure just indicated insufficient practice.
When I studied in the UK the situation wholly reversed; I was told that very few local students took Further Math. I never managed to figure out why. A old math teacher told me an anecdote that back when international students began pouring into the UK in large numbers, his international college teamed up with a larger nearby public school to find enough students for a full Further Math class to meet the spike in demand. Within five years they had three full classes of students from East Asia from their own college, and one local student from the public school.
That, I have no idea about. It does turn out enormously useful if you go on to do any hard science course, and even somewhat useful in any soft science course. I suppose there's an argument toward doing it anyway so that all students are at least exposed to the possibility of entering high-paying hard science jobs in the future.
Okay on that - I suspect "just because" does entail "therefore, memorize what I just told you" - but that still leaves the question of how to present the basics of calculus without requiring that students learn the terminology at some point, or to somehow teach it in an appropriately inspirational manner that allows students to independently rediscover 'the simple and profound ideas of Newton and Leibniz'.
Lockhart condemns the choice of formalism but doesn't provide any alternative. What's yours?
I think colleges will want to be able to slap down a simple equation - a first-order differential equation, say - and have their students understand it. These things appear in most sciences; a first-order ODE underpins anything with a decaying half-life (i.e., where the rate of decay is proportional to the amount that remains). And much of the existing curriculum Lockhart condemns builds towards this sort of facility with mathematics, except perhaps Geometry, which is the only topic he seems to like anyway.
Okay, you've linked to that site for the third time. Would you kindly tell us what HCZ does that sets it apart from a million other programs, because when I go to that site it wants to sell me a brochure before it tells me.
Suffice it to say that I hope HCZ doesn't rely on parental involvement; otherwise, all it's done is drawn in the families in inner-city Harlem with proactive parents and done exactly jack to the city average success rate. But I shall rely on you to confirm whether it does.
I'm not really advocating for or against here (I happen to be for but that's an aside) I'm just explaining why these things work well with the same amount of government funding as the crappy school in the ghetto.
So yeah it's not a perfect panacea. When my wife taught in the ghetto she'd get maybe 2-3 parents showing up at the parent conferences. I already put out the proviso that if the parents don't give a fuck the school is going to fail. This is not a secret.
One of their programs, baby college, seeks out newly pregnant or new mothers and begins providing counseling and parenting courses. One of the basic ideas that they teach new parents is that you need to read to your child every night to accelerate his or her brain development and avoid corporal punishment. A program I listened to on baby college had quite a few testimonials from parents who took the course, saying things like "I learned it was wrong to call my children stupid" as well as the importance of reading to your children.
the reason I am linking this site is because you are asking questions and it is answering questions. How do solve the enormous dropout rate? How do get test scores up? How do we keep poor mostly black teenagers out of prison?
this doesn't take only proactive parents, it teaches parents to be proactive. Again, I think you underestimate the number of parents that want to do right by their children but simply lack the tools to do so. It's not like good parenting is instinctual for a lot of people, I don't think it's a stretch to say a lot of folks raise their children as they were raised, just as the abused tend to become abusers and so on.
It's pretty simple. Get to the child early, intervene with parents that are willing to accept assisstance, and lift thousands out of a vicious cycle. I have never seen any program that has numbers anywhere close to this one, and once again, this is NOT taking the smartest, best, brightest kids with the best possible future. I have little doubt that in the regular schooling system these kids would have failed. hell man, you don't even see these kinds of numbers at wealthy schools that don't have early intervention programs
And the thing is, alot of math and science DOES come down to memorization.
I mean, we all like to talk about how you can look anything up if needed these days, so memorization isn't important, but it's all a question of WHAT you need to look up.
Memorization and Repetition of exercises is very important for solving problems in math and science because it lets you look at a new problem and your brain clicks and goes "This looks just like something else I've done!".
To give an example, the people who memorized alot of trig identities were way better off in math/physics/etc then those of us who didn't because they could look at a problem and see which trig identities needed to be applied to it in order to solve it. The rest of us had to look them up and desperately start going through them 1 by 1.