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Old 2012-07-29, 19:19   Link #22701
Dhomochevsky
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Germany
You say they struggle, but then you talk about lazy people, so how much did they struggle, really?

I have 'struggled' with french for example. Never got good grades, hated it. But I learned english just fine. That's because I needed it for playing english video games... both are languages. Motivation was the only difference.
I'm specialised now into a technical profession, but that didn't have anything to do with talent either. Nothing I ever tried was hard. I mean really tried and put effort in.
I could have done anything else, without any problem, if I had wanted to. But some things just weren't fun, so I got 'not so good' grades there. But in order to pass, I had to work on these things too. If that happens to be maths (and it was for me, for some years), you still need to get through that. It is not a wasted effort and it certainly won't hurt you.

And that's how I believe it works. You are motivated, you put in some effort, you become good at it. At anything.
Talent has nothing to do with that. Talent is needed to become great. But not for reaching a passing grade in school.

Of course there may be exceptions, but he's talking about 50% of the population failing maths.
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Old 2012-07-29, 20:00   Link #22702
Vexx
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http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...ests/?src=recg

More spotlights on the suppression of Occupy Wall Street protests by unlawful police tactics including illegal violence, threats, and abuse of innocent bystanders, reporters, and random people making the "bad judgement of recording the abuses"

Quote:
During Occupy Wall Street protests New York police officers obstructed news reporters and legal observers, conducted frequent surveillance, wrongly limited public gatherings and enforced arbitrary rules, a group of lawyers said in a lengthy report issued on Wednesday.
The group, called the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, which included people involved with the law clinics at New York University School of Law and Fordham Law School, said that they had cataloged hundreds of instances of what they described as excessive force and other forms of police misconduct said to have taken place since September, when the Occupy Wall Street movement began.
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Old 2012-07-29, 20:06   Link #22703
Bri
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky View Post
You say they struggle, but then you talk about lazy people, so how much did they struggle, really?

I have 'struggled' with french for example. Never got good grades, hated it. But I learned english just fine. That's because I needed it for playing english video games... both are languages. Motivation was the only difference.
English and German are part of the same language family. That's about the smallest step to take when it comes to languages. Going from German to say Arabic, Mandarin or Japanese, that is a world of difference. You still need motivation, but some people will not be able to bridge that gap.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky View Post
And that's how I believe it works. You are motivated, you put in some effort, you become good at it. At anything.
Talent has nothing to do with that. Talent is needed to become great. But not for reaching a passing grade in school.
It's true that the most important ability to have in education if perseverance and to extort effort. However I doubt that more than a fraction of all undergraduates would be able to handle a pure physics or mathematics bachelor program, even if they gave it all their effort. At some point ability does start to play a role. Take that down to high school level and I can imagine a lot of students would struggle simply to grasp basic calculus or elementary algebra. If that locks the door to art colleges I'm not sure if that is a good thing. Off course with a lot of effort exams and problems can be memorized, but then it's a waste of time.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky View Post
Of course there may be exceptions, but he's talking about 50% of the population failing maths.
I agree for the need of basic education in math for anyone with an interest in an academic career, even if it's just to be able to have a general understanding numerical data. Just like any academic needs a basic level of language skills. However not everyone will have to put in equal effort to acquire these skills.

Last edited by Bri; 2012-07-29 at 20:27.
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Old 2012-07-29, 21:39   Link #22704
TinyRedLeaf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RRW View Post
this person think we should remove algebra from US education system: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/op...=1&ref=opinion

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ithekro View Post
I'd done some pre-algebra in 6th grade and more or less got it. Switching to public school for 7th grade, they were slightly behind where I had been, so I got bored and hated homework (procratinator). So I started doing poorly in math classes. Not poorly on test per say, but since a large part of our grade was the homework, I was doing poorly there. By the time we got back to algebra, I hated it because I didn't care for thing that are not tangible. By the time we got to geometry, I did perfectly fine. There I had something I could consider real as oppose to a concept of something being "x", now I had an object and specific formula to work with.

I still don't care for algebra and never got a calculus class due to the track I was on. It became more a lack of caring than not understanding. Likely why I needed to go for social sciences in college. Well that and I enjoyed History. I had wanted to do scientific work when I was younger, and the mathamatics involved usually didn't throw me, but my grades did. (I took a few college science courses and did fine with the exception of microbiology...but that was mainly because we switched teachers after two weeks in a six week summer course...the class kind of collapesed after that).
I fully empathise with your experience and I think this is something a lot of educators fail to grasp, that certain people are able to grasp "abstract" concepts better than others. Conversely, there are people who are able to work with "concrete" ideas better than others.

I never enjoyed maths, though I didn't start to struggle with it until I was in Secondary 3 (the equivalent of Grade 9, I believe, or whatever grade you're supposed to be at 15). The main reason was that I couldn't "visualise" the way the equations or formulas worked. Whenever I asked classmates to explain, I would get puzzled stares, followed by the inevitable reply: "Just apply the formula, lah, why make things so difficult for yourself?"

There is a funny scene in the Ghibli movie, Omoide Poro Poro (Only Yesterday), in which the protagonist, a little girl in elementary school, was struggling with maths, specifically the division of fractions by fractions (eg, 1/2 divide by 1/2 = 1). Her elder sister, having been ordered by their mother to tutor her, quickly got exasperated, and scolded the protagonist for being dumb. "Why can't you simply apply the formula?" the sister demanded. The crestfallen girl meekly demonstrated her confusion by drawing a circle.

She said: "I can understand how dividing a circle in half gives you two pieces, but how do I draw the division of a half by a half? I don't understand how I get one whole circle again. Shouldn't it be one quarter?"

Her elder sister was momentarily dumbstruck, and protested weakly: "No, that's the multiplication of fractions (1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4)."

That only confused the poor girl further. "Ehhh.... how can that be?" she wailed. "Why does multiplication make the fraction smaller?"

(It would later turn out that the girl was a gifted actress and potentially a great writer but, alas, her father never allowed her to develop her artistic talents.)



The above, in a nutshell, encapsulates the problem I had with maths. A lot of the time, it was just a matter of teachers and fellow classmates telling me not to be dumb, just follow the rules and get your result, end of story. No further questions needed. No need to know why, just do.

It's the reason I'm so much more interested in literature and history because, quite simply, I'm someone who needs to know the "why", rather than the "how". Stories, be they fiction or non-fiction, are much better vehicles for such answers. (Incidentally, I find the history of mathematics far more interesting than mathematics itself. I may not understand Fermat's Last Theorem but, by golly, the quest to solve the puzzle certainly made for good reading!)

Well, now you know why I hate engineers. Most of the time, I find them to be uninteresting people who are good only at following formula, but not so good at asking questions, particularly bigger philosophical questions that require knowledge of history and of human emotions and motivation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
I was a political science professor, and believe me, Andrew Hacker and I are poles apart on what our supposedly shared discipline should be about, as well as on the role of mathematics in the social sciences. I used to teach the statistics sequence for graduate students, comparative voting behavior, and a little choice theory, so you can guess where I come down on the value of math. You don't get very far in the behavioral wing of political science without a decent background in statistics, and you would find it impossible to contribute to the theoretical literature in game and choice theory without a lot of training in, and a flair for, math.
That said, there are many times I do feel handicapped by my rudimentary grasp of mathematics. The above is one such occasion. It is true that, like it or not, maths plays a very important role in many kinds of analyses we rely on. And it's definitely true that many journalists are absolutely hopeless with numbers, and therefore allow themselves to be easily hoodwinked by newsmakers, unable as they are to verify the numbers on their own.

I'd say that it's just a case of "learned helplessness" though. As I'd just told Chain Legacy recently, in response to journalists saying that if they were good with numbers, they'd had become accountants or engineers instead, one acerbic senior copyeditor quipped: "Yeah, right. Let me dock your pay and bonus, then I'll see just how good you really are with numbers."
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Old 2012-07-29, 21:54   Link #22705
DonQuigleone
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I think foreign language education is probably the weakest part of modern education. As far as I'm aware, education does little to engender any lasting knowledge of a language. Real motivation is needed to successfully learn a language, and a lot of time. Far as I can see, the only successful method I've seen work for foreign language is immersion. Teach everything to the student through the language, from a young age, and they usually pick it up more more easily.One of the most successful examples of foreign language instruction is India, where many Indians have an excellent standard of English (especially when compared to neighbouring China). I think a big element of this is that many Indian schools carry out tuition almost entirely through English.

In Ireland every child receives 12(!) years of instruction in the Irish language. On graduating secondary school, how many do you think are able to functionally speak it? My sister got an A on it, and by now can barely speak it. This is largely because the language is totally useless in everyday life, and no one has the motivation to learn it. A 10th to a 6th of every Irish students time in school is spent on the Irish language, and that time seems to be wasted, as almost no students ends out being actually able to speak it functionally at the end.

With total immersion, most people can learn a language to a high degree within 2 years, particularly children and teens.

I don't see how requiring a foreign language is a good idea in schools.

Another one I've never gotten is poetry. What do I get out of learning about Iambic hexameter? Or memorizing The Daffodils for the 10th time?
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Old 2012-07-29, 22:33   Link #22706
Ithekro
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We have foreign language requirements in California, but they limited the choices by the time I got there to Spanish or French (before they had had German as well). I had no interest in French at all and didn't really want to learn Spanish either dispite the state having an increasing number of Spanish only speakers. I maintained a C average for the four years I took Spanish in Middle and High Schools. Enough to pass and make the college entrance requirement without needing to take more in college.

I've forgotten most of my Spanish (mostly on purpose, but also because I don't use it) I can probably get one word in ten presently. At the time (7th grade) I would have much rather have taken German. I probably would have done much better as I would have been more motivated to learn. If it had been later I might have taken Japanese (if offered) for anime related reasons.

What is odd is that I learned some Spanish when I was very little because back in the late 70s and early 80s Sesame Street taught Spanish words as well as English words. So I would pick up some Spanish here and there. But in the 10 or so years between that and 7th grade I forgot everything.

A former girlfriend of mine on the other hand was a linguist. She just wanted to keep learning new languages in college having conversational Spanish, German, Swahili and others down before she gradated and I think was making up her own language using what she learned.
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Last edited by Ithekro; 2012-07-29 at 23:18.
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Old 2012-07-29, 23:17   Link #22707
TinyRedLeaf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DonQuigleone View Post
Another one I've never gotten is poetry. What do I get out of learning about Iambic hexameter? Or memorizing The Daffodils for the 10th time?
Bragging rights?

More seriously, yes, such information is not very useful unless you're training a potential poet or writer. I believe that's why my practical criticism teacher avoided overwhelming us with technicalities. She would tell us what it is, and how it affects the way a poem sounds. More importantly, she wanted us to focus on the more "tangible" aspects, like a poem's imagery and themes, and how it relies on meter, rhyme and structure to support its artistic intent. And, if necessary, she'll tell us a bit more about a poem's historical context (most of the time, though, she'd avoid doing that, as the whole point of "practical criticism" is to appreciate a poem on its own merits, separate from the context that engendered it).

Even so, it took most of my class more than a year to finally grasp what she was trying to show us. Many of us, including me, flunked in the first year. In my case, I had an epiphany sometime between the end of the first year and the start of the second year of junior college. It suddenly "clicked". For the first time, I thought of approaching poetry the way I would music, be it classical or pop music. Poetry, after all, is meant to be read aloud. Rhyme and rhythm matter because of how they affect the way a poem sounds. Once I noticed that, I found that I could tune in effortlessly to the importance of the words, why they were used and why they are placed where they are in a poem.

In effect, I could picture a "movie" or "short film" in my mind through the poem, complete with sound and special effects. If a poem can't do that, then there is likely to be something wrong or ineffective about it. Most of the best poems, the kind we study in school, are unlikely to have such glaring flaws.

Is such insight useful? I can't say for sure. It's certainly extremely useful for what I do today. Even among editors, there are those who are good with visualising information and those who aren't. The advantage usually goes to those who can.
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Old 2012-07-30, 01:41   Link #22708
Anh_Minh
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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf View Post
I fully empathise with your experience and I think this is something a lot of educators fail to grasp, that certain people are able to grasp "abstract" concepts better than others. Conversely, there are people who are able to work with "concrete" ideas better than others.

I never enjoyed maths, though I didn't start to struggle with it until I was in Secondary 3 (the equivalent of Grade 9, I believe, or whatever grade you're supposed to be at 15). The main reason was that I couldn't "visualise" the way the equations or formulas worked. Whenever I asked classmates to explain, I would get puzzled stares, followed by the inevitable reply: "Just apply the formula, lah, why make things so difficult for yourself?"

There is a funny scene in the Ghibli movie, Omoide Poro Poro (Only Yesterday), in which the protagonist, a little girl in elementary school, was struggling with maths, specifically the division of fractions by fractions (eg, 1/2 divide by 1/2 = 1). Her elder sister, having been ordered by their mother to tutor her, quickly got exasperated, and scolded the protagonist for being dumb. "Why can't you simply apply the formula?" the sister demanded. The crestfallen girl meekly demonstrated her confusion by drawing a circle.

She said: "I can understand how dividing a circle in half gives you two pieces, but how do I draw the division of a half by a half? I don't understand how I get one whole circle again. Shouldn't it be one quarter?"

Her elder sister was momentarily dumbstruck, and protested weakly: "No, that's the multiplication of fractions (1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4)."

That only confused the poor girl further. "Ehhh.... how can that be?" she wailed. "Why does multiplication make the fraction smaller?"

(It would later turn out that the girl was a gifted actress and potentially a great writer but, alas, her father never allowed her to develop her artistic talents.)



The above, in a nutshell, encapsulates the problem I had with maths. A lot of the time, it was just a matter of teachers and fellow classmates telling me not to be dumb, just follow the rules and get your result, end of story. No further questions needed. No need to know why, just do.
Which is something I'd interpret as laziness. There is no universal, communicable, easy way to visualize formulas. Before understanding the "why", you have to expand your mind to make the formulas fit - that's actually the easy shortcut. That still takes effort, but is far easier than building the theory from scratch (which would also be a pre-digested approach), something very few high schooler have the patience or interest for.
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Old 2012-07-30, 01:57   Link #22709
SaintessHeart
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf View Post
I fully empathise with your experience and I think this is something a lot of educators fail to grasp, that certain people are able to grasp "abstract" concepts better than others. Conversely, there are people who are able to work with "concrete" ideas better than others.

I never enjoyed maths, though I didn't start to struggle with it until I was in Secondary 3 (the equivalent of Grade 9, I believe, or whatever grade you're supposed to be at 15). The main reason was that I couldn't "visualise" the way the equations or formulas worked. Whenever I asked classmates to explain, I would get puzzled stares, followed by the inevitable reply: "Just apply the formula, lah, why make things so difficult for yourself?"

There is a funny scene in the Ghibli movie, Omoide Poro Poro (Only Yesterday), in which the protagonist, a little girl in elementary school, was struggling with maths, specifically the division of fractions by fractions (eg, 1/2 divide by 1/2 = 1). Her elder sister, having been ordered by their mother to tutor her, quickly got exasperated, and scolded the protagonist for being dumb. "Why can't you simply apply the formula?" the sister demanded. The crestfallen girl meekly demonstrated her confusion by drawing a circle.

She said: "I can understand how dividing a circle in half gives you two pieces, but how do I draw the division of a half by a half? I don't understand how I get one whole circle again. Shouldn't it be one quarter?"

Her elder sister was momentarily dumbstruck, and protested weakly: "No, that's the multiplication of fractions (1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4)."

That only confused the poor girl further. "Ehhh.... how can that be?" she wailed. "Why does multiplication make the fraction smaller?"

(It would later turn out that the girl was a gifted actress and potentially a great writer but, alas, her father never allowed her to develop her artistic talents.)
Simple explanation to the math : multiplication means to "repeat the set no. of times, then total it up". If you repeat half a set by half, i.e you half a set of half of two, you get one out of the intended four; which is a quarter.

I do enjoy math and science until secondary school, where it becomes a total bore. The teachers refused to explain why (a^2 + b^2) = a^2 + 2ab + b^2 and simply told us to apply; when I discovered the Pascal's Triangle through the net, I was told "it wasn't in your syllabus, don't bother with it".

And I still don't get why the Times consistently rank Singapore the top few in math and science when our factories schools are so bloated and overrated, filled with sheningans in the syllabus planning rooms of MOE who don't want to bother with anything that goes beyond the textbook.

We can study on our own just fine with the textbooks, so why do we even need teachers? Job-creation is an absolute lame excuse when teachers have no intent on teaching the students how to think critically and laterally; even the National Library Board would have generated significantly more productivity than the Ministry of Education.

Quote:
The above, in a nutshell, encapsulates the problem I had with maths. A lot of the time, it was just a matter of teachers and fellow classmates telling me not to be dumb, just follow the rules and get your result, end of story. No further questions needed. No need to know why, just do.

It's the reason I'm so much more interested in literature and history because, quite simply, I'm someone who needs to know the "why", rather than the "how". Stories, be they fiction or non-fiction, are much better vehicles for such answers. (Incidentally, I find the history of mathematics far more interesting than mathematics itself. I may not understand Fermat's Last Theorem but, by golly, the quest to solve the puzzle certainly made for good reading!)

Well, now you know why I hate engineers. Most of the time, I find them to be uninteresting people who are good only at following formula, but not so good at asking questions, particularly bigger philosophical questions that require knowledge of history and of human emotions and motivation.
I do respect engineers because they are the ones running the first part of the problem solving process; writers just write about it in the second part - if there is no first part, the writers would come up with the theory and just leave it hanging. [/sarcasm]

The reason why most local engineers are just "uninteresting" is due to the sissy risk-adverse nature of the Singaporean society; by the time the bureaucracy finishes, the engineers would have tucked into two courses of buffet over lunch and dinner at their own sweet time.

Mix with HVAC and Marine engineers and see how they solve problems; you'd be surprised how they work because they would die in one way or another, either literally (blown to bits by a decompression), laterally (lose their jobs because they can't fix the problems) or critically (the management refuses to endorse the unorthodox but highly effective solution - i.e mass welding the entire broken rail of the ship using the spare piping onboard, which is unaccountable in the books, instead of dry-docking the whole thing for repairs, which every cent is accounted for in the bill).

Let's face it, both of you writers and techies are the same people, just that you both think differently. Otherwise why would both of your heads turn when I yell "Lolis incoming!"?

Quote:
I'd say that it's just a case of "learned helplessness" though. As I'd just told Chain Legacy recently, in response to journalists saying that if they were good with numbers, they'd had become accountants or engineers instead, one acerbic senior copyeditor quipped: "Yeah, right. Let me dock your pay and bonus, then I'll see just how good you really are with numbers."
And Chemistry (rigging the exhaust pipe of your car to your air-con). And Physics (draining your braking fluid and replacing it with caramel).

It is kind of interesting that how people can perform things they usually can't under pressure. Either that or they undergo a spontaneous combustion.
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Last edited by SaintessHeart; 2012-07-30 at 02:07.
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Old 2012-07-30, 04:09   Link #22710
TinyRedLeaf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Anh_Minh View Post
Which is something I'd interpret as laziness. There is no universal, communicable, easy way to visualize formulas. Before understanding the "why", you have to expand your mind to make the formulas fit - that's actually the easy shortcut. That still takes effort, but is far easier than building the theory from scratch (which would also be a pre-digested approach), something very few high schooler have the patience or interest for.
No, it's not laziness. It's a failure in instruction. The reason few high schoolers (and few adults, for that matter) have little interest or patience for abstract calculation is that such information is very difficult to relate to concrete, real-life experience. Arithmetic is comparatively easy to learn because it is so easy to demonstrate with real examples.

Similarly, geometry can be fun if you demonstrate how it works with real-life buildings and structures, for example, using Pythagoras' theorem to calculate the height of a building given the length of its shadow and the angle of the sunlight.

Statistics seems scary but, again, if the teacher can show its application to real-life examples that matter to students, learning becomes fun, because the usefulness of the mathematics becomes clear and obvious.

Calculus, on the other hand, is tough. It's difficult to describe the measurement of change in concrete terms. The best I can think of is with graphs, which aren't a particularly appealing way to demonstrate calculus, since the graphs themselves are no less abstract than the mathematics. I suppose a better way would be to relate calculus with the measurement of things that matter to niche interests. Motorheads would be keen to learn how to calculate engine torque and power output per revolution and over time, for example.

Basically, the challenge is for educators to make learning accessible and relatable to real life. Too often, educators teach by rote, because that's the way they learnt the same stuff when they themselves were students. Not enough imagination and empathy were applied to teaching methodologies in the past, but I gather that this has been changing for quite a few years now.
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Old 2012-07-30, 04:39   Link #22711
ganbaru
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Special Report: In Himalayan arms race, China one-ups India
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86T00G20120730
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Old 2012-07-30, 08:37   Link #22712
Ridwan
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Meanwhile in the south, guys are preparing to face China as well
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Old 2012-07-30, 08:58   Link #22713
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remind me to my friend that having Malaysia National service
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Old 2012-07-30, 10:06   Link #22714
Ridwan
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My friends in facebook are all currently in orange mode right now. While we know the probability of a South China Crisis is still a bit far ahead, let alone WW3, people are seriously preparing their muscles at the moment, and it's quite disconcerting. The upside for me in it though, is that it's essentially a good thing for Indonesia's military improvement and general diplomatic standing.
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Old 2012-07-30, 12:17   Link #22715
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The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
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Old 2012-07-30, 16:34   Link #22716
Anh_Minh
I disagree with you all.
 
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf View Post
No, it's not laziness. It's a failure in instruction. The reason few high schoolers (and few adults, for that matter) have little interest or patience for abstract calculation is that such information is very difficult to relate to concrete, real-life experience. Arithmetic is comparatively easy to learn because it is so easy to demonstrate with real examples.

Similarly, geometry can be fun if you demonstrate how it works with real-life buildings and structures, for example, using Pythagoras' theorem to calculate the height of a building given the length of its shadow and the angle of the sunlight.

Statistics seems scary but, again, if the teacher can show its application to real-life examples that matter to students, learning becomes fun, because the usefulness of the mathematics becomes clear and obvious.

Calculus, on the other hand, is tough. It's difficult to describe the measurement of change in concrete terms. The best I can think of is with graphs, which aren't a particularly appealing way to demonstrate calculus, since the graphs themselves are no less abstract than the mathematics. I suppose a better way would be to relate calculus with the measurement of things that matter to niche interests. Motorheads would be keen to learn how to calculate engine torque and power output per revolution and over time, for example.

Basically, the challenge is for educators to make learning accessible and relatable to real life. Too often, educators teach by rote, because that's the way they learnt the same stuff when they themselves were students. Not enough imagination and empathy were applied to teaching methodologies in the past, but I gather that this has been changing for quite a few years now.
Meh. "Why didn't they make it more interesting?" You can use that excuse for any subject. I should know, I've used it often enough for the literary ones. Why should maths always be the one to take the flak?

And really... cars? How many high schoolers would care? How many teachers, for that matter... And then, you'll tell me the teachers are paid, and that they should come up with 30 different reasons for 30 different students (per class) to care about every single formula they teach.

The truth is that there isn't always an application that students who already know and understand little will be able to grasp, let alone be interested in.
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Old 2012-07-30, 16:52   Link #22717
Ithekro
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I've known teachers my whole life. If they had the time and were not teaching based on the STAR or SAT tests, they would rather find those different ways to teach students. But because they are basically getting their hands tied by the state as to what they will teach and little help from parents, teachers are furstrated these days. (by 2000 they were told to turn in their coursebook for what they students would learn that year. Not what they would teach, what the students would learn. The arguement is that you can't force a high school student to learn. Especially the ones that don't want to be there at all. This among other reason was why my mother retired). You can only teach and hope they learn. Especially if you are teaching to tests.
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Old 2012-07-30, 17:02   Link #22718
Anh_Minh
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Originally Posted by Ithekro View Post
I've known teachers my whole life. If they had the time and were not teaching based on the STAR or SAT tests, they would rather find those different ways to teach students.
Unrealistic. You find two, maybe three ways to teach something. As for how many among your students will find that "relatable"... Or how useful it is... (I mean, for example, everyone knows, more or less, how heat spreads. It's not all that helpful in solving the differential equation when you've got it in front of you.)

Even if you have time for more, you'll just bore or confuse the students.

So, yeah. Teach and hope they learn.
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Old 2012-07-30, 17:16   Link #22719
ganbaru
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Russia signs tougher adoption deal with U.S.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86T15320120730

China-focused fund manager settles with SEC
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86T0UY20120730
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Old 2012-07-30, 17:27   Link #22720
Ithekro
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Most students learn by one of three ways. Visual, Audio, or Physical. Or a mixture of these. Some learn by seeing. Some learn by hearing what something is, and some only learn by doing or feeling.

If all the teacher does is present something and expect you to learn it, they aren't going everything possible, as some can't learn that way. The trouble with mathmatics is that some people can't learn it properly because they require a phyical means to understand it and usually that is not presented with something like algebra.

Similarly you can't teach History to everyone by just reading about it. Sometimes you need to present something physical for the students to grasp if the subject is important or not. Or use analogies and stories to show off particular individuals in history, or events.

I had one professor that liked the social aspects of history...the average people of the time, rather than the political or military figures and major events. I was bored in her classes because I generally did not care what a mid-18th century French family did every day before the Revolution. But still sometimes she made it interesting.

I prefered the professor that talked at length about Theodore Roosevelt, as those talks tended to be exciting and sometimes larger than life.

Science clasess work best when you can get either hands on experiance or can observe things happens, rather that just read about things or study formulas.

So mathmatics needs something observable or tangible to get the point across to some people.
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