Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#61

Post by emmelaich »

synicalx wrote: post #37

Personally, I think math should start at teaching kids useful stuff that 100% of them are going to use such as; taxes, credit products/home loans, budgeting, investments etc. I'm sure calculus is useful and great, but the reality is only a small percentage of kids are going to use it so it doesn't make any sense to force it on EVERYONE.

Yep, my Dad was a educational psychologist who dealt with kids who had problems with learning.

But it was often a matter of motivation because the same kids would be able to calculate the return on a bet at the horse races in their head.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#62

Post by eli_gottlieb »

roceasta wrote: post #21
jonnybgood wrote: post #2

I have no doubt they can. There's so much negative cultural conditioning towards mathematics by eliciting negative emotions that it's ridiculous (i.e. math is scary, math is hard, math is for smart people, etc.). I believe kids who excel at math is not due to them being smarter but due to the bypassing of the cultural conditioning. The bypassing can be due to the parents, teachers, some mentor, or their particular fa…

The fact that school math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' is not the issue. Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard. For instance, they contain monsters and are difficult to complete. They even have objective grades (scores). What makes the difference is that video games aren't compulsory. So they represent true play . Which is what makes them educational, unlike a school curriculum, however much it…

Video games also don't have social promotion or enforced curriculum "progression". If you die in the first level of a video game, you play it repeatedly until you legitimately merit entering the second level.

If you get a mediocre grade on a math test, even a failure, we shove you into the next subject in the curriculum. When you start failing that because new math builds on mastery of old math, we tell you you're not a math person and should probably major in Literature.

Then we go complain to the other math teachers that students are lazy and apathetic, and ask each-other how it is that math PhD students manage to spontaneously generate from such piles of shit.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#63

Post by _pmf_ »

roel_v wrote: post #31

Anyone commenting on this (whether saying 'yes' or 'no'), please first read the article. What it considers 'calculus', none of us here would consider calculus. Because very few 5 year olds are capable of understanding even something as basic as a line plot (or '2d graph' or however you want to call it). They simple do not have the neural matter to comprehend fairly advanced (from an evolutionary point of view) abstra…

"Children understand that things change over time and can interpolate to some degree" would be a non-clickbaitey, but also very boring title.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#64

Post by sp332 »

roel_v wrote: post #31

Anyone commenting on this (whether saying 'yes' or 'no'), please first read the article. What it considers 'calculus', none of us here would consider calculus. Because very few 5 year olds are capable of understanding even something as basic as a line plot (or '2d graph' or however you want to call it). They simple do not have the neural matter to comprehend fairly advanced (from an evolutionary point of view) abstra…

The map is not the territory - charts are just one way to represent an independent and a dependent variable.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#65

Post by eecc »

Ntrails wrote: post #58
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats the kind of BS math they shouldn't bother teaching. Most of math is about concepts, and if 5 year olds can grapple with super-basic calculus how about teaching 10 year olds proof-based math and concepts (closer to college level) than memorization? Its kind of dumb how arithmetic is seen as a precursor to math when its really not. You could do an ENTIRE college-level course in linear algebra or calculus or graph…

Of course understanding fourier transforms isn't reliant on my ability to do 6x7 - but arithmetic as a lifeskill is actually valuable. It's like saying that grammar and spelling aren't important because spellcheck will sort it out. Splitting out arithmetic from "Maths" doesn't seem terribly sensible to me. Times tables aren't really problematic, and they do provide opportunities to teach valuable concepts (5x6 = 6x5)…

No, you're straying away from the original point which was: there's no need to make rote memorization of arithmetic tricks and multiplication tables a hard prerequisite to everything else about math. Nobody claimed that arithmetic is absolutely useless

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#66

Post by odessacubbage »

roceasta wrote: post #21
jonnybgood wrote: post #2

I have no doubt they can. There's so much negative cultural conditioning towards mathematics by eliciting negative emotions that it's ridiculous (i.e. math is scary, math is hard, math is for smart people, etc.). I believe kids who excel at math is not due to them being smarter but due to the bypassing of the cultural conditioning. The bypassing can be due to the parents, teachers, some mentor, or their particular fa…

The fact that school math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' is not the issue. Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard. For instance, they contain monsters and are difficult to complete. They even have objective grades (scores). What makes the difference is that video games aren't compulsory. So they represent true play . Which is what makes them educational, unlike a school curriculum, however much it…

videogames also encourage a learning process based around experimentation and failure, both of which were highly discouraged during the course of my math education. effective learning is a process of repeated failure & incremental improvement that stands at odds with the present incentives in the american education system.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#67

Post by occultist_throw »

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #60
roceasta wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that school math is thought to be 'scary' and 'hard' is not the issue. Plenty of video games are known to be scary and hard. For instance, they contain monsters and are difficult to complete. They even have objective grades (scores). What makes the difference is that video games aren't compulsory. So they represent true play . Which is what makes them educational, unlike a school curriculum, however much it…

Hard and scary carry differently meanings in those contexts though, surely? Video games are safe e.g you can always try again, you can do incrementally well. Video games are scary in an exhilarating way, you blood will pump and your pupils will dilate but at the end you can put it down, turn the lights on and watch funny cat videos to recover. Math (at school) is hard because you get one shot. Finite lives. After eno…

And you succinctly put why I despise "School".

I love learning new areas and new techniques. And when Im teaching myself, I can fail and I go back a step or 2. Not the end of the world.

If I do similar in a class, then I set myself further back with a slowly growing chance of doing badly (D or F). And in College, then its another 1-4 credit hours to pay for the privilege. They not only fail me, but demand more money.

Edit: misspelling that looked bad (dong=>doing)

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#68

Post by novalis78 »

jv22222 wrote: post #17

Jason Roberts has been doing an awesome job rolling out a high level math program in the Pasadena school district. 6th, 7th, 8th graders learning Calculus. They even have an anual competition at CalTech called Solve. Info and video of kids in action here: https://www.mathacademy.us/solve/ Direct link to video: https://vimeo.com/224720563

Very inspiring - wish more schools would offer programs like this.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#69

Post by g00gler »

jamesrcole wrote: post #59
jonnybgood wrote: post #2

I have no doubt they can. There's so much negative cultural conditioning towards mathematics by eliciting negative emotions that it's ridiculous (i.e. math is scary, math is hard, math is for smart people, etc.). I believe kids who excel at math is not due to them being smarter but due to the bypassing of the cultural conditioning. The bypassing can be due to the parents, teachers, some mentor, or their particular fa…

> cultural conditioning I suspect that mathematics being poorly taught is also a major contributor.

Right. My sister is always having a hard time with math and it seems like the teachers are always focusing on solving equations rather than explaining the reasoning behind it.

It's pretty simple when you realize it's (mostly) all about lines.

Re: Five-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus (2014)

#70

Post by roel_v »

porsager wrote: post #52
roel_v wrote: post #31

Anyone commenting on this (whether saying 'yes' or 'no'), please first read the article. What it considers 'calculus', none of us here would consider calculus. Because very few 5 year olds are capable of understanding even something as basic as a line plot (or '2d graph' or however you want to call it). They simple do not have the neural matter to comprehend fairly advanced (from an evolutionary point of view) abstra…

> They simple do not have the neural matter to comprehend fairly advanced (from an evolutionary point of view) Do you have some links to research on this? Sounds interesting.

Most books on child development has (a) chapter(s) on neuroplasticity and neural development, and how that relates to actual skills. I've only read one and skimmed a few, the one I read was a Dutch language one called 'Oei ik groei' so that's probably not much use to you. If you start reading any book on this I'm sure you'll find plenty on it, and they'll probably point you in the direction of dozens if not hundreds of others.

But if you're referring specifically to the 'evolutionary point of view' part in my sentence, I don't even remember what I meant by that - it doesn't make much sense, re-reading my sentence. I guess I just meant that brains develop in a way that makes them, early on, incapable of doing some things that adults can. Similar to how until the frontal lobe is fully grown (18/20 years old), children/youth can't control their impulses the same way someone with a grown, healthy frontal lobe can. So it's useless punishing children for some things because they literally can't change some behaviors; it's like beating a quadriplegic until he walks because 'he should just try harder'. (This is obviously a very simplistic and probably in many ways wrong description; I'm just using this as an analogy for what I was getting at).

Post reply on HN