The Lesson to Unlearn • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#51

Post by daly » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:51 PM UTC

I took a class from John White at UCONN. He gave us a couple dozen CS papers at the start of the year. Every class had 3 paper presentations, 20 minutes each. A random student was picked for each presentation.

So you had to read and understand each of the upcoming 3 papers because there was a random chance you would have to present one of the three.

The result is that you eventually read all of the papers well enough that you could give a 20 minute presentation.

There were no grades. It was pass/fail.

It was one of the best classes I ever took.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#52

Post by username90 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:51 PM UTC

gcc_programmer wrote: post #19

TL; DR; Einstein said sth along the lines of "Don't let your education get in the way of your knowledge." Finish uni with high grades then spend the rest of your life learning.

> Finish uni with high grades then spend the rest of your life learning.

I'd rather not waste 30% of my life on that nonsense. Better to use uni for what it is meant for: Learn whatever seems interesting and don't mind the grades.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#53

Post by volume » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #45

volume wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable" For me, I had to unlearn self judgement. This has helped so much over the last few years.

How did you do that? It seems to be a big stumbling block to many.

it can boil down to "doing" vs "being". It's a topic often discussed in spiritual circles. You can consider it a thought experiment if that works for you. Or if you are Steve Jobs fan read some Yogananda.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#54

Post by volume » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:53 PM UTC

volume wrote: post #53

tomjen3 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you do that? It seems to be a big stumbling block to many.

it can boil down to "doing" vs "being". It's a topic often discussed in spiritual circles. You can consider it a thought experiment if that works for you. Or if you are Steve Jobs fan read some Yogananda.

of course then some will say there is no $this vs $that, but start somewhere.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#55

Post by shotashotashota » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

What about socializing?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#56

Post by watwut » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #2

> If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class. It is the professor's job to decide which parts of medieval history are the most important to learn. Therefore, those are what I need to study. Maybe not all professors do this effectively—but as long as we're talkin…

Yeah, this came across to me as overly simplistic not really thought out argument too. I dont think that college medieval history not being the "students can pick any part of it and anything you learn about medieval history is good to go" is some kind of massive issue with medieval history course.

It does not mean that you did not learned or that grade does not measure learning. It just means the topic is not whole medieval history (which would be ridiculously broad) but only selected parts of it.

It is kind of like complaining that algorithms 101 are allowing students to pick any algorithms to learn and require everyone to learn the same set of algorithms.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#57

Post by vntx » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

fhennig wrote: post #24

This is a very interesting thing to think about, I thought about it a bunch of times already, and have a couple of thoughts about it too. First of all, once you're 55, it's easy to say stuff like that, because you won't be tested anymore. And I think there is a good chunk of survivorship bias: "Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!" Although that is probably not true for a big chunk of the pop…

> For example, it would be nice to have tests at university where I can google things, just like in the real world.

One of the best professors I had at university for a Linux course always said: “If you don’t know something, google it!”

He backed up his words by allowing googling on the actual coding part of his exams. You had to understand the underlying concepts but you never had to memorize syntax. One time, he had us write a small program in C that involved threading during a proctored timed exam. Everyone ran out of time for that part.

His course and exams were _rigorous_. You could never cram for his class and expect to pass and indeed I know of one student repeatedly failing his course.

This was one of the courses in university where I gained the bulk of my useful knowledge and practical skills I use to this day. I can count the courses that were of similar quality I took at university on one(1) hand. The rest of my degree involved hackable tests, apathetic professors and were massive time-wasters. I learned nothing from them, obviously.

The good professors made me realize how bad the rest of my degree was and how much of a racket higher education could be.

I look back at my undergrad days and wonder how much more I would have learned if I had not focused so much on grades. I’m still actively trying to unschool myself.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#58

Post by watwut » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:02 PM UTC

thepete2 wrote: post #7

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #2

> If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class. It is the professor's job to decide which parts of medieval history are the most important to learn. Therefore, those are what I need to study. Maybe not all professors do this effectively—but as long as we're talkin…

> And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question.

In classes I have seen, things you could ignore were minority of it and usually side stuff like funny anecdotes, minor players that are there for you to get feel for the context, famous nun dick tree and such.

This stuff helps you learn important stuff and makes it all less dry, but it absolutely does not make sense to penalize students for not learning it actively.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#59

Post by bonoboTP » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #2

> If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class. It is the professor's job to decide which parts of medieval history are the most important to learn. Therefore, those are what I need to study. Maybe not all professors do this effectively—but as long as we're talkin…

Right, I had a similar reaction.

Autodidacts often end up reading a bunch of stuff from here and there with sub-par results. One of the main benefits of a (university) course is focus and guidance. That the prof or teacher selects specific topics they deem important for that stage of education. As a student it can be difficult to judge that yourself.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#60

Post by ynniv » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

Artificial "hackable" tests are opportunities to see progress at scale. While I appreciate the recognition that bespoke, perhaps Montessori, education might better prepare people for the open ended ness of life, there aren't enough unicorn startup opportunities in the world to use that as a primary means of knowing how well you know things. Evaluation through essays is better than multiple choice, the Socratic method is better than essays, but we don't know how to scale those things yet. Perhaps some day we will have a Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, but until then we have hackable tests.