Who Invented Homework? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#121

Post by tropo » Fri, May 06, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

pflats wrote: post #119

tropo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a horribly complicated way to do 17 + 35. The sane way is to try matching against a pattern, then if that fails you fall back to the traditional algorithm with the numbers lined up one over the other and doing the carries. Yes, you can run the traditional algorithm in your head, for this and for much larger things. Fully in memory, 4-digit plus 4-digit is quite doable. (can your method handle that?) While sta…

>(can your method handle that?) It's not "my" method. I'm not quite sure what I did to merit attitude and hostility, but to answer your question: Yes. Third-graders are expected to do it with 3-digit numbers. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm capable of adding 4-digit numbers. http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/3/NBT/#CCSS.Math.C...

What hostility? Come on, you have to admit that a procedure which expands the problem out to the sum of 5 numbers is pretty insane.

BTW, my shortcut got mangled by Hacker News. Multiplication turned into italics. I did 17 times 3, which is great, but I don't think that anybody should be expected to see that path to a solution.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#122

Post by tropo » Fri, May 06, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

hdctambien wrote: post #114

michaelbuddy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could teach somebody how to 'carry the 1' and get this done in a less mentally taxing way, being faster and still understandable. This looks like a brain dump of how 'somebody somewhere' conceptualizes math and now we're all supposed to put it in play en masse because it 'shows the work'. I look at this math and if I was in 3rd grade, I would know in my gut this is BS. Does anyone actually think that more writ…

I'm not impressed when my students can add two numbers together. I want to know if they understand the math behind the algorithm. You like "the old way" because that is how you learned it. But when push comes to shove, I bet you actually use pflats method to do math in your head. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/abou...

Really I don't. I do "the old way" unless I happen to spot a nice pattern.

(in this case the pattern involves knowing that 17 times 2 is 34 and that 17 times 3 is 51)

My speed and reliability allowed me to focus on understanding higher-level math. With little effort, I easily blew past my peers for years afterward.

Using pflat's method, my reliability would drop. There are too many extra numbers to account for.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#123

Post by lordnacho » Sat, May 07, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

pflats wrote: post #115

lordnacho wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to get the input of a teacher on this, I appreciate it. Have you checked with kids who are several years out of education? My sense from talking to people is if they didn't give a shit in school, they will not know it once they're out. And they could have done perfectly fine in tests, because of course they were forced to study. In general, I get the feeling the kids who retain things after school are ONLY the o…

>You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me. Public schooling (in the US) will always feel like it's torn between the two extremes of giving a strong liberal arts, "learn for life" education and giving a strong vocational, "useful in the real world" education. In my experience, it's actually neither. Education is an equalizer. >What I'm getting at is whether you…

>It is incredibly important to force people to learn stuff that they might forget even existed in a few years. A free and appropriate public education is one of the greatest things we as a civilization can provide to our citizens. Education is possibly the greatest civil right we possess.

I believe in this ideal as well.

But I do wonder how it can be that there are TV shows filled with people who appear to have learned absolutely nothing in school. How can it be that even though schooling is free in most of the west, I've personally interviewed fewer people who knew the expectation of a dice roll than people who didn't (by a gigantic margin)? And that's selected from people with degrees in STEM. I wonder whether the problem is how schools are organized, what values they instil in the kids, which people teach the kids.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#124

Post by ownagefool » Sat, May 07, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

c1641287 wrote: post #56

ownagefool wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My physics teacher attempted some reverse psychology on me and banned me from doing homework. After a while, I think when he figured out I was happy with that, he got fed up with that routine and started asking for the homework again but I still didn't bother. In hindsight my grades probably suffered, but only as far as the fact I didn't have all this still drilled into my memory. I doubt it made me any less smart, a…

I'm still waiting for the "highly paid" part.

This probably just requires you to move. However, try not to spend it all living the life if you do, otherwise you'll be no better off in the end.