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

A new school curriculum

notes-txt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: A new school curriculum

#71

Post by war1025 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #53
wdevanny wrote: post #20

This is a common complaint that confounds me. Did other people go to schools with radically different curricula? I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits, using a planner, how to approach reading a book, using mnemonics, and using the internet for research projects. I had a health class that discussed good eating and exercise habits. I remember being encouraged to find an after school club/activity and a da…

I'm in the southeast US. Have been my whole life. Went to public schools in populated wealthy counties, and in a sparse, poorer county. > I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits... I had similar, but it wasn't part of the official curriculum, so didn't get the amount of focus it might have required to get students to take it seriously. Now that I'm an experienced adult, I know that I had a way of learning…

> "do you think you're smart enough for that?"

I've found, being a kid from a rural area with family that never went to college, that such people vastly overestimate how capable other people are, and vastly undervalue their own skills. I guess something about people telling you you're stupid and to know your place your whole life does that to you.

It turns out success isn't so much about being particularly smart as it is just knowing the right people.

Re: A new school curriculum

#72

Post by dr_dshiv »

nextos wrote: post #23

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 hid…

Completely agree. I think there should be a way to review and crit public curriculum... I guess I have to wait till my kids are in the class

Re: A new school curriculum

#73

Post by jagged-chisel »

wdevanny wrote: post #60
jagged-chisel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the southeast US. Have been my whole life. Went to public schools in populated wealthy counties, and in a sparse, poorer county. > I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits... I had similar, but it wasn't part of the official curriculum, so didn't get the amount of focus it might have required to get students to take it seriously. Now that I'm an experienced adult, I know that I had a way of learning…

> IMO, the entire problem with the US education that I experienced is the insistence on a bullet pointed list of things to cover, a minimum grade on how well the students retained that specific knowledge until the test, rather than gauging students' understanding and ability to learn and adapt. I 100% agree and I think the educators I've spoken to (several friends are teachers) would also broadly agree, but that's no…

> ... your school had many of these elements, but they weren't quality or weren't emphasized ...

Yes, that exactly. I hope I didn't come across as arguing back in the direction TFA, just adding my input to your input :)

Re: A new school curriculum

#74

Post by anon73044 »

jedimastert wrote: post #32

Ctrl-f taxes: 0 This might be under "how the world works" but I think there should be a separate "how to be a reasonable citizen" like how to deal with taxes, voting, civics in general, that kinda stuff. It has a pretty big impact on day-to-day life.

but taxation = theft.... according to the current Secretary of Education

But seriously, spending a week or so in a civics class to cover W2s, 1040s and 1099s would do wonders.

Re: A new school curriculum

#76

Post by japhyr »

DataWorker wrote: post #47
japhyr wrote: post #21

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 harde…

You ignore the problem of inputs. What if the unfortunate truth is that educational outcomes are mostly determined by the native capacities and attributes of the students. If the input determines the output and school or teacher level effects merely mediate some of that, then isn’t it all just a cruel charade designed to give the illusion that we live in a meritocracy. It seems like students and our society are the u…

Of course innate capacity has something to do with how much or how well any individual student can learn. But there is a world of difference between a well-run school and a poorly-run school. In the simplest comparison, a well-run school is a relatively safe place, and a poorly-run school is an extremely unsafe place.

If you take students from some of the more well-run schools and place them into poorly-run schools, most of them will learn very little. If you take students from some of the more poorly-run schools and place them into well-run schools, many of them will learn quite a lot.

Re: A new school curriculum

#77

Post by commandersaki »

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 think you might be confusing memorisation with intuition.

Re: A new school curriculum

#79

Post by hereme888 »

harperlee wrote: post #70
hereme888 wrote: post #38

Warning: comment strongly biased towards a specific type of learning technology :) At a molecular level, all memory (dendritic spines) declines at roughly the same rate. Some memories last much longer because the dendritic spines formed were much stronger (such as traumatic event, a well-formulated memory, or a memory strongly linked to other things such as a smell). But they all decline at the same rate nonetheless.…

Do you have a pointer to where do you get that children under seven have bad retention? Or is it a personal observation? (this is not a "citation needed", i'm genuinely interested as I look into spaced repetition from time to time).

Sure. It's from the personal wikipedia maintained by Dr. Piotr Wozniak, the guy who invented spaced repetition and put it into software back in 1986 (SM-2 algorithm) when computers became available to him.

The relevant part of the article starts here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Plasticity-vs-...

The summary of the article can be read here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Summary:_Child...

Re: A new school curriculum

#80

Post by 0xffff2 »

mywittyname wrote: post #49
whatshisface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a professor that loved to make simple substitutions to values in questions, where the original question would be incredibly difficult, but if you spotted the substitution, the amount of work you had to do was dramatically reduced. Think something like integrate cos x + i sin x dx, if you spot that cos x + i sin x = e^(ix), and perform substitution, the problem becomes trivial. Deriving information from facts is…

Every college math class I took gave me a sheet with those kinds of identities on it. If I was doing the kind of work where I actually had to do calculus involving trig functions, you can bet I'd pull up a similar sheet while I was working. Sure having it memorized would be a bit faster, but that's true for far more things than I can actually memorize.
Post reply on HN