Where is balance? -- Re: Academic priorities
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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
From: Stan Barr on 1 May 2005 16:14 On Sun, 1 May 2005 11:12:03 -0400, Bill Leary <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote: > >> But then, I learned out to learn. > >"out" should be "how" Strangely enough the original makes a sort of sense in North of England dialect! I learned owt (ie nothing) to learn... -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com (Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.) The future was never like this!
From: Steve Richfie1d on 1 May 2005 17:07 Barb, > [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. Less than 1% of such knowledge is ever taught in schools. Sure it might be nice to have this particular 1%, but at what cost?! Certainly at the cost of NOT learning SEVERAL percent (with plenty of overlap) by other means. > 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? I believe that either of my kids could diagram an atomic weapon, and reasonably estimate blast and flash distance from yields. They certainly understand special relativity as we have discussed how ridiculous shows like Star Trek are in completely ignoring Lorentz transformations and other aspects of relativity in their plots. The kids could get credit for *EDUCATIONAL* TV time by explaining the holes in the physics in the plots of the shows (like Star Trek) that they watched, so this became a bit of a competition between the kids to see who could first find the holes. No holes - no credit. Similarly, when watching shows like "Cops" the competition is to call out the causes of action as the police go around violating people's rights. In short, TV here is NOT an entirely passive exercise. Have you watched the Discover and Science channels on TV? The material there is generally MUCH better than I ever had in school, and there is considerably more of it each day. There is generally a better science education to be had on TV than there is in our schools! Steve Richfie1d
From: Andrew Swallow on 1 May 2005 17:26 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: [snip] > 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? [snip] Euclidean geometry assumes a flat surfaces. Hill sides are not flat so farmers ploughing and builders need to be able to use triangles whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. Andrew Swallow
From: glen herrmannsfeldt on 1 May 2005 18:06
jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: [snip] > 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". They might use systems that depend in it, though. GPS only works because, I believe, both special and general relativity are taken into account. -- glen |