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A new school curriculum

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Re: A new school curriculum

#21

Post by japhyr »

I would argue that a well-run school addresses many of the items on this short list. I learned most of these in my schooling, and I saw most of these things being taught in the reasonably-run schools I have been a part of in 25 years of teaching middle school and high school in the US.

That said, I also know there are many schools that are so poorly run that very little of this comes up. So the larger, and much harder question becomes: What do we do politically to make more schools well-run?

The answer to that question is critical, but probably isn't covered in a 2-min read.

Re: A new school curriculum

#23

Post by nextos »

I would also add many things that are taught have a lot of historical cruft.

For example, calculus. What is taught currently by most high schools is a horrible mess that mixes infinitesimal calculus as devised by Newton-Leibniz with late 1800s epsilon-delta formalisms. Clarifying this would shed a lot of light into student understanding.

Same thing can be said about linear algebra, where lots of algorithmic stuff hides a simple abstraction that is rarely mentioned. Matrices encode linear transformations.

I was taught way too many algorithmic tricks without proper conceptual motivation.

Re: A new school curriculum

#24

Post by mywittyname »

shantly wrote: post #8
whatshisface wrote: post #3

> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…

Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion o…

I realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae. Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to complete the sample questions at the end of each chapter. I just had to memorize a lot of them, as the derivation was not something I was capable of doing.

Being able to quickly recall facts is really important for problem solving, even though we live in an era where you can search online for just about any fact known to humanity.

Re: A new school curriculum

#25

Post by [deleted] »

shantly wrote: post #8
whatshisface wrote: post #3

> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…

Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion o…

[deleted]

Re: A new school curriculum

#26

Post by tboyd47 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
tboyd47 wrote: post #10

"How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill." "How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia." This is "learning about learning" to you?

> "How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill." Why not?

Being "friendly" and "well-liked" sound like the kinds of goals children would come up with on their own because they crave attention and positive reinforcement, not what adults should be teaching them.

Re: A new school curriculum

#27

Post by heynk »

> absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only 0.01% of people end up learning it in time!

I find it dubious that you can only learn this by age 7 - although I'm sure it's easier if you're younger. Is there science behind this claim?

I am not a musician, but I have recently started learning to play piano, and training my ear is something I'd really like to learn. I've used some apps to practice ear training, and I'm able to discern intervals decently, but I can't recognize and identify a single note on its own. I do hope I can get there with more deliberate practice.

Re: A new school curriculum

#29

Post by whatshisface »

mywittyname wrote: post #24
shantly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion o…

I realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae. Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to complete the sample questions at…

Bear in mind that memorizing trig identities was something you had to do for exams. If you want to get any use out of trig identities in "real life" you will need the kind of understanding that comes with being able to do the derivations yourself. In the time before computers there was a lot of value in being able to do the mechanistic kind of problem solving you're describing, but now that we have Mathematica, the only useful professional tasks that are left for humans to do involve the kind of knowledge it takes to do a derivation.
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