Where is balance? -- Re: Academic priorities
|
From: jmfbahciv on 1 May 2005 09:18 In article <aOSdnSTygtFmcunfRVn-rA(a)giganews.com>, "Bill Leary" <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote: >"Bill Leary" <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote in message >news:AeGdnXi0xIIbcOnfRVn-og(a)giganews.com... >> "Roland Hutchinson" <my.spamtrap(a)verizon.net> wrote in message >> news:ry5de.3130$c86.2761(a)trndny09... > >Sigh. I may have "learned how to learn," but I'm still not too good and proof >reading my own material. > >From my previous message... > >> But then, I learned out to learn. > >"out" should be "how" > >> I just which I'd learned that in school rather than >> being forced to pick it up later. > >"which" should be "wish" > >And Lord alone know what I've typo'd, and can't see, in THIS message. ROTFL. What's really weird is I read what you thought you wrote. /BAH Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
From: jmfbahciv on 1 May 2005 09:40 In article <58qdnff4doQ4c-nfRVn-gg(a)giganews.com>, "Bill Leary" <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote: ><jmfbahciv(a)aol.com> wrote in message news:nuadnbBSmeBeQ-nfRVn-qA(a)rcn.net... >> In article <7cqdnYVvCdkOTunfRVn-jA(a)giganews.com>, >> "Bill Leary" <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote: >> ><jmfbahciv(a)aol.com> wrote in message >> news:pcydnR8gjrM7UOnfRVn-gg(a)rcn.net... >> >> Reread what he said. Steve said that _he_ couldn't find >> >> real world problems for his kids. >> > >> >I saw that. The context was learning by things they encountered. >> >> Exactly. The range of knowledge they're going to be exposed to >> is a minimum. My whole point is that it should be a maximum so >> they have a list of things they do not know. The knowledge >> that gets lost is all the knowledge that people don't know about. >> The knowledge has no caretakes and nobody to hand it down from. > >But he also said that he taught them, using this method, how to learn what they >needed when they needed it. [frustrated emoticon here] I've been trying to explain for a thousand posts but can't seem to manage. If a person is not aware of a piece of knowledge, then that person will never learn they need it when they could use it. An example [may the bit gods forgive me if this attracts gnats] People never use general relativity nor special relativity. Some people even believe that this is all nonsense and refuse to learn about it. However, their lives depend on people who, not only know about it, but use it in their "real life". If the principles and theories are never encountered by home school kids (and in some case they are not), then none of these kids will know that their geometric assumptions and knowledge are wrong. All their lives they have used Euclidean geometry without any problems. How are they going to know that their real life experiences are based on wrong assumptions? > >> >.... Using that >> >method, he'd have to find examples that THE KIDS would encounter as they >> went >> >along. >> >> NO. At grade school level, sure. But not as pre-college >> training. > >That would fall under "learn what they need, when the needed it." If the knew >how to do this well, it would work. Sure. But they also have to know areas of knowledge that already exists. If they're never exposed to exotic knowledge, they are doomed to reinventing it. The whole point of a formal education is to learn about what you don't know and wouldn't have imagined that didn't know. > .. The "when," by this definition, would be to >look over the pre-requisites for the courses they wanted to take, then study >those subjects in preparation for doing so. It would NOT be sitting in class >and discovering they didn't know how to use a cosine. > >> > .. That is, see them encounter some issue, then help them learn from it. >> >In that context there aren't many situations a kid will run across in >> >their normal lives which will require anything but rather basic math skills. >> >> EXACTLY!!! That is my point. >> >> Go reread that 3000-post long thread we just finished. > >I particpated in it. I'm not not understanding you, I'm disagreeing with you. [very grateful emoticon here] > >You (seem) to be saying that knowing these bits of information is of paramount >importance. The existence of that knowledge is of paramount importance. > . I'm saying that knowing how to manipulate the bits is paramount. A >person who knows how to think, how to learn, how to "find out," can do so in any >situation. A person who only knows the bits can't get anywhere if the situation >doesn't fit what they know. I am claiming that _both_ sides of this learning has to be done. Eliminating one part is not a solution nor is it very efficient. From what I'm watching, it's getting downright dangerous. > >> >> I don't expect the kids >> >> to find them, but he sure could have, especially if he >> >> was so hot at math. >> > >> >I don't think so. I've raised three now, and the number of cases where >> > they had to do anything beyond very basic math (usually money related) >> > before they got into their twenties approaches zero. The few cases >> > where they did were school assignment related. >> >> EXACTLY. His kids are home-schooled so they didn't get the sniffs >> that your kids got through school assignments. > >But my kids forgot that stuff as soon as they handed in the paper. Did they forget that the knowledge exists? I don't believe that. Another point: if kids aren't exposed to different areas of knowledge how are they going to find out what interests them the most? > .. And their >ability to learn what they need to know when they discover they need something >isn't very good. That is the part that is missing from the educational system which people tried to solve by doing homeschooling. To fill in one gaping gap, the created another gap which I think is more dangerous. > .. I'd have far preferred them to have learned HOW to learn than >to have learned to just get a series of check marks on a paper next to problems >which were meaningless to them. > >> >> <sheesh> To have somebody learn something without examples >> >> is useless, and this includes pure theory. >> > >> >He was using examples. The ones they encountered day-to-day. >> >> And he limited their education severely. > >What's "education"? Learning basic tools so that the person is able to become and be productive as an adult. > ..I'd want kids to learn to BE problem solvers rather than >just solve a predefined set of problems. Note that the former is what is >SUPPOSED to happen from those lessons in school. The later is what actually >DOES happen far too often. Assuming that his representation that they can >learn what the need quickly and efficiently is accurate, I think they probably >got a pretty good "education." They haven't. He couldn't find examples. There were other problems, too. > >> One of the problems >> with home-schooling is that these kids are limited to the biases, >> beliefs, and knowledge of parents and are never exposed to >> other kinds of thinking, experience and knowhow. > >On that point we agree. This can be countered (thought, I think, in a limited >way) by involving the kids in other activities which encourage this sort of >interaction. That doesn't work because the activities and other people to interact with are chosen by the same parents who will unconsciously exercise their biases, ignorance, and limited knowledge. > .. On the other hand, just because he didn't mention taking steps to >deal with this, doesn't mean he didn't do it. He stated that he couldn't find any examples. The conclusion was that those kids got no exposure to things that he couldn't personally do or explain. This isn't ringing alarm bells? /BAH Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
From: Del Cecchi on 1 May 2005 11:49 "Bill Leary" <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote in message news:58qdnff4doQ4c-nfRVn-gg(a)giganews.com... > <jmfbahciv(a)aol.com> wrote in message > news:nuadnbBSmeBeQ-nfRVn-qA(a)rcn.net... > >> One of the problems >> with home-schooling is that these kids are limited to the biases, >> beliefs, and knowledge of parents and are never exposed to >> other kinds of thinking, experience and knowhow. And one of the problems with "Government Monopoly Schools" is that the kids are limited to the biases and knowledge of the teachers and curriculum consultants. :-) > > On that point we agree. This can be countered (thought, I think, in a > limited > way) by involving the kids in other activities which encourage this sort > of > interaction. On the other hand, just because he didn't mention taking > steps to > deal with this, doesn't mean he didn't do it. > > - Bill > >
From: Roland Hutchinson on 1 May 2005 14:20 Steve Richfie1d wrote: > I was at one time the top freshman calculus student at the University of > Washington after getting a perfect 800 on the College Entrance > Examination Board's Advanced Math test. In the following ~40 years, the > *ONLY* practical use I have made for non-numerical calculus methods is a > couple of times for computing optimal methods, e.g. how to divide up the > bins in a complex sort to make it run as fast as possible by > differentiating an equation for the total effort, setting the first > derivative to zero, and solving for the minimum/maximum conditions. I > have not recovered nor will I EVER expect to recover the time I put in > learning all that stuff, as I could have even done these couple of tasks > numerically at the cost of another couple of hours of work. It seems to me that the point of teaching kids a bit of rigorous mathematics (with proofs and everything) has more to do with their intellectual development than with practical applications. A person who understands what a proof from a set of axioms accomplishes has a model of what unassailable reasoning and knowledge-to-a-certainty looks likes -- or would look like, if we possessed anything like it in other domains. In addition to being an aesthetic experience, this furnishes a yardstick against which all other sorts of argument and demonstration can be measured. It instills a capacity for healthy but measured skepticism towards conclusions and claims put forward by anyone in the domains of the natural and the social sciences, the humanities, theology, and the whole rest of human thought and enterprise. Practical applications?: well, among other things, maybe they will be better voters for being able recognize utter bullpucky when they see it and knowing the difference between assertion and argument. -- Roland HutchinsonýýýýýýýýýýýýýýWillýplayýviolaýdaýgambaýforýfood. NB mail to my.spamtrap [at] verizon.net is heavily filtered to remove spam.ýýIfýyourýmessageýlooksýlikeýspamýIýmayýnotýseeýit.
From: Steve Richfie1d on 1 May 2005 14:43
Barb, >>I saw that. The context was learning by things they encountered. > Exactly. The range of knowledge they're going to be exposed to > is a minimum. My whole point is that it should be a maximum so > they have a list of things they do not know. The knowledge > that gets lost is all the knowledge that people don't know about. > The knowledge has no caretakes and nobody to hand it down from. Ordinarily I would agree with you, but we have gone to extraordinary efforts to get the kids to look at all identifiable sides of things, some of which typically require some serious analysis to see if they are real. >>.... Using that >>method, he'd have to find examples that THE KIDS would encounter as they >>went along. > NO. At grade school level, sure. But not as pre-college > training. With a top-down education, the order is almost reversed - what people would ordinarily think as college prep often comes very early. >>.. That is, see them encounter some issue, then help them learn from it. >>In that context there aren't many situations a kid will run across in >>their >>normal lives which will require anything but rather basic math skills. We treated our kids as nearly as adults as possible, which presented some real challenges. However, their range of experience has actually been wider than any adults that I know, so their education has been similarly wide. > EXACTLY!!! That is my point. My point is that adults have even LESS need for math skills than kids raised this way. >>> I don't expect the kids >>>to find them, but he sure could have, especially if he >>>was so hot at math. Note the one of my kids, Eddie, is the co-author of my FP proposal <http://www.smart-life.net/FP>. He has more grasp of what is in a number than some PhD mathematicians I know. However, he still can't do a simple calculus problem, except numerically, though he can tell you what the equation means in words. He just picks up what he needs as he needs it. >>I don't think so. I've raised three now, and the number of cases where >>they had >>to do anything beyond very basic math (usually money related) before they >>got >>into their twenties approaches zero. The few cases where they did were >>school assignment related. Most kids who construct things end up wanting/needing trigonometry, which is exactly when they need to learn it. > EXACTLY. His kids are home-schooled so they didn't get the sniffs > that your kids got through school assignments. No, they get very different "sniffs". Eddie is working on an unsupervised neural network and is learning as he goes. Why waste a precious year or two on calculus when you can get it all from a table of integrals, when he can use that time to learn some really USEFUL things. My daughter can make an HP financial calculator do EVERYTHING in its repertoire and she understands all these things MUCH better than I do, though she can't do hardly any of the computations without the calculator. However, most of these computations are SO complex that you couldn't do them without a computer or calculator either! She sees her own future in management. In short, the curriculum in our schools is about a century out of date. Numerical methods now usually work better than analytical methods, yet our schools spend years teaching analytical methods and usually *NO* time on the subtleties of numerical methods. I didn't learn Runga Kutta until COLLEGE! This should be taught just after algebra. >>><sheesh> To have somebody learn something without examples >>>is useless, and this includes pure theory. >> >>He was using examples. The ones they encountered day-to-day. > And he limited their education severely. One of the problems > with home-schooling is that these kids are limited to the biases, > beliefs, and knowledge of parents and are never exposed to > other kinds of thinking, experience and knowhow. You OBVIOUSLY haven't looked at schools lately. They have RADICALLY transformed into a propaganda conduit. Many points of view are now ILLEGAL to discuss in schools. Our basic method of broadening their exposure was to demand "equal TV time" where half of what they watched had to be some sort of semi-educational TV show (the definition was intentionally broad, e.g. including fictional movies set in historically accurate settings, but not "series" shows like "Little House on the Prairie"). This meant that if they wanted to see a movie, that they had to scan the schedule to identify equal time in educational programs that they liked. Given the hundreds of channels on Satellite TV, there was never any shortage of suitable shows, with History and Discovery channels being the most popular. We had special rules for sitcoms and anything with a laugh track. To watch these shows, they had to first give a brief (1-2 minute) presentation before the show regarding what sorts of hidden messages there might be, and another brief presentation after the show discussing what hidden messages there actually were - similar to Table Topics at a Toastmasters meeting. Once they learned to watch for the hidden messages, it started becoming VERY clear how these mess up our collective social thinking. In summary, the problem is the other way around - being stuck in school, kids CLEARLY don't get enough exposure to the world. This underlies some really serious things, like our society's present insane support for the "War On Terror". Steve Richfie1d |