We Should Teach Music History Backwards • Hacker News Board

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#41

Post by olavk » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #19

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…

I think it is a valuable approach to art history, but I am doubtful it will work for history in general. Going backwards, looking for the causes of what happens later, is very prone to hindsight bias.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#42

Post by skellera » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

ellius wrote: post #34

tsenkov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with some…

I think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place?…

I think it only sounds like a good idea because you already know the details of what comes before. If you had absolutely no knowledge of history, I think this method would not work well.

There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events.

I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#43

Post by dgellow » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #19

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…

History is about what happened, not what could have happened. You can then speculate on how things could have been given some specific changes, but the fact is that we don’t know how the alternate universe would develop and evolve, and you are now closer to fiction than history.

In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#44

Post by bredren » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

linkmotif wrote: post #32

This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn a…

>The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place.

Music history is an elective required for music majors in US liberal arts colleges. For example, at Colorado College[0]: MU150 Music in Western Culture, MU212 Mozart and his Age, MU284 Beethoven, MU285 Music of the Baroque & Classical Eras, MU286 Romantic and Early Modernist Eras. [0] https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog...

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#45

Post by bredren » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

olavk wrote: post #40

linkmotif wrote: post #32

This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn a…

It is not a question of beeing "tricked" into learning. It is just that we lean best when we start somewhere we can understand and relate to our current experiences and understanding of the world. Then learning from this point will expand the frame of reference allowing us to learn more and more. This is not due to capitalism, this is fundamental for humans.

Indeed, the existence of Swift Playgrounds does not degrade a person interested in computer programming. Nor iPhone's skeuomorphic UI origins degrade those who desired access to mobile computing.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#46

Post by dgellow » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

dghughes wrote: post #6

As a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even weaving looms.

Curious about this. How do you do that? Shouldn’t you still have to read the statement forward to then be able to read it backward? I can see in lispy languages how you could do that, because of the structure of S-Expressions, not sure how you would do that with more conventional syntaxes (let’s say C-like).

I think that personally I do a lot of back-and-forth in-between forward and backward reading to construct the program logic in my working memory.

Edit: maybe, could you describe what you mean by reading backward? I read it originally as “reading from the first expression to be evaluated to the last one”, but I see now that you are talking about statements. If that’s the case I see a lot of issues related to the context/scope of a statement. Do you read, let’s say, from the last statement before closing a function, then up?

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#47

Post by slx26 » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #23

more simply, start by teaching things that people are currently interested in, and work back from them. if you like something, you are curious about where it came from

I couldn't agree more. It's very difficult, but in my opinion the most complicated part in teaching is getting the attention and grabbing the interest of students. If you have that, as long as you do it ok, people will learn. First, find the connections between the subjects and the students. Then, you can start teaching.

Of course, teaching some things in order might be important or useful, and students have some decent degree of attention too. And sometimes you need to explain boring things. Ok, but people learn the most when they want to learn. Curiosity can be induced.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#48

Post by Retric » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #43

bambax wrote: post #19

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…

History is about what happened, not what could have happened. You can then speculate on how things could have been given some specific changes, but the fact is that we don’t know how the alternate universe would develop and evolve, and you are now closer to fiction than history. In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could…

Unfortunately when we have no idea why things happened there is zero predictive power. So, history without context is little more than a story and at best interesting.

Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.

So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#49

Post by tpurves » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

dghughes wrote: post #6

As a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even weaving looms.

As a product manager, I have often found it beneficial to write requirements backwards. Start first with the desired result of a feature or flow and work backwards to the necessary steps, options, preconditions, actors, setup/enrollment steps etc. that would have been required required to get there.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#50

Post by jancsika » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.

That reveals a problem with learning backwards-- rampant epicism in which students would rarely choose to learn about, say, dead ideas like sonata form.

Rather than requiring the student to learn linearly through time, the professor ought to select a handful of musical periods and/or case studies and then randomize the order in which they are taught. Make a big spectacle of picking numbered ping pong balls from a bingo machine in the lecture hall. In the U.S. these are usually elective classes so they are essentially an institutional form of entertainment, anyway.

In other words-- it shouldn't matter how you pick a period/style/composer. What should matter is that students improve their ability to use their ears and their growing knowledge to investigate any music, no matter its origin or time period.

Publicly using randomness to select from possible periods/cases would show good faith that the professor is skilled enough to leave the chosen topic up to fate. That would make it harder for profs who aren't fully comfortable with all the material, which is probably why nobody teaches this way. :)

Edit: clarification