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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#171

Post by mattchew »

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…

It's worth contemplating. We homeschooled our kids and it was a good choice for our family.

I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#172

Post by Pxtl »

graycat wrote: post #159
jstummbillig wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, can you name a b2b or b2c product that you feel is truly great but overlooked?

B2B: (1) The scripting language Rexx. (2) The text editor KEdit with macro language KEXX much like Rexx. (1) and (2) are far and away my two most important tools in computing, from IBM mainframes to PCs, DOS, OS/2, Windows, and my startup on Windows 7 64 bit Professional on an AMD FX-8350 64 bit 8 core processor at 4.0 GHz with Microsoft's .NET. E.g., I typed in the 100,000 lines of text for the software for my start…

> Robocopy

I don't get ms. There's a good kind of copy and a bad kind of copy. Why is the bad kind the default?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#173

Post by raldi »

Hacking tests is a lesson much older than modern schools. It's a fundamental part of being human, or indeed, an animal.

When a peacock is being judged for his feathers or song or mating dance, these are all being used as proxies for the actually important thing, the quality of his genes. And it's not just a male thing; women do all kinds of work to appeal to arbitrary male preferences.

On the other hand, survival of the fittest is an honest judge, so maybe these peacock tests work better than we think?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#174

Post by gerbilly »

>For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college.

Well I never had this problem in school.

I remember a high school calculus exam where I got the answer to the derivatives of the fundamental functions wrong (simple memorization - boring!) but I got the delta epsilon part of the test perfect.

I got a C- on the exam, but the teacher wrote a comment that always stuck with me: "You understood the most complicated part , as usual!"

Same thing in University, I never did homework in groups. I wasn't looking for the answer to the questions on my problem sets, I wanted a unique answer, or a more elegant answer.

I would outdo the professors sometimes. One time I saved a ton of busywork on a problem by setting up a homomorphism with another vector space, proof done in 5 steps!

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#175

Post by cjp »

kaymanb wrote: post #135
daly wrote: post #66

I got into "computer science" before there was a CS degree. Our CS classes were taught in the math dept (fortran), business dept (cobol), or engineering (assembler). The profs were literally 1 chapter ahead of the students. I, however, was in love with the subject. I was the "student advisor" in our "machine room". We had 5 teletypes connected to a remote mainframe at Rutgers. I lived and breathed CS. I wrote tests f…

I think I fall into the "don't get it" category. Could you explain what I should be taking away from this? I understand that being at the leading edge has benefits, but it's not feasible to understand the state-of-the-art across an entire CS curriculum.

Of course, no one can understand everything, but he said, "pick a subject". Just one, not everything. I'm reminded of this description of a PhD:

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#176

Post by mentos »

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -Charles Goodhart

I've read most of PG's letters but I think this is now my favorite because while I've noticed each of these issues separately I've never connected them together through this common flaw in our education system. I find it really profound.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#177

Post by jacquesm »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #160
jtbayly wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every free (as in speech) program is written by somebody that said that. But they are generally not entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur is by definition somebody that cares about money.

An entrepreneur to my mind (en-gb native) is "a person who takes on the risk and reward of a new business venture, particularly a novel business (in the geographically area they are in)".

No idea why this is downvoted, that's an excellent definition.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#178

Post by jtbayly »

jacquesm wrote: post #177
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An entrepreneur to my mind (en-gb native) is "a person who takes on the risk and reward of a new business venture, particularly a novel business (in the geographically area they are in)".

No idea why this is downvoted, that's an excellent definition.

Agreed. And as he says, it's a business venture at heart, meaning that money is involved.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#179

Post by jacquesm »

rb808 wrote: post #112
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…

> Gates, ... - all were not in a conventional school wikipedia said he went to a regular private school then went to Harvard which sounds pretty conventional. Yeah he didn't finish, but worry about that later.

Private schools cost lots of money, there is nothing regular about them.
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