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A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

nytimes.com

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Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#31

Post by stan_rogers »

pnathan wrote: post #19

Well, there's a limit to the practical use of gadgets in the classroom. Learning human interaction, motor skills, and other parts of being human are best done with other humans. It's also pretty clear to me that equating computing to the use of Word, Excel, and Google leads one to the conclusion that computing is easy and not a big deal to pick up. Naturally, as a software engineer, I disagree vehemently with that. I…

Please don't diss the turtle. I was too old for the Logo scene (by quite a bit, actually) but I learned (and grokked) recursion reading an article about Logo and turtle graphics. I made Gödel, Escher, Bach a much easier read in '80 than it would have been otherwise.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#32

Post by Cushman »

Aloisius wrote: post #10

Maybe they don't let students use computers because when you search for information about the Waldorf schools, you get all sorts of stuff about them being some kind of cult. In my admittedly limited research, I found information about astral bodies, Atlantis, soul nourishment, clairvoyance and and a dislike of the left handed. From the Skeptic's Dictionary: Waldorf schools reflect Steiner's education theories, which…

Waldorf schools are based on some crazy-nutty voodoo philosophy.

They also, more or less coincidentally, work really, really well.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#33

Post by far33d »

pessimist wrote: post #11

“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.” In my experience this may be empirically false. My 4 year old could barely count, but after spending 2 months in the summer playing a couple of iPad games, he's adding 2 digit numbers and subtracting 1 digit numbers, and doing simple math puzzles. His elder brother couldnt do those till Kindergarten, and I dont thi…

Which apps? Would like to teach some basic math to my 4 yr old.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#34

Post by Alex3917 »

paul wrote: post #28

We send our kids to Waldorf inspired schools. Most schools (especially public schools) give me a sense of dread, like a twelve year prison sentence would. The Waldorf schools have a warm, human feel that actually makes me a little jealous of my kids. I would rather my kids be raised as whole humans, not little test-taking machines.

But if you don't waterboard your kids and beat them, how will they learn to function in the real world?

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#35

Post by adam »

Groxx wrote: post #21

“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.” Ugh. Also read as: "Something I haven't seen doing something I don't expect it to? Ridiculous!" The correlation between students at Waldorf schools and prestigious schools later is extremely easily explained by a single character: $ That said, something different than our current, standard public-school fare probab…

Your specific comment about "$" may be false. Waldorf schools in urban areas are indeed $15k+/year/kid, but there are Waldorf schools in rural areas that charge far less for tuition. Not having kids myself but knowing parents of kids who go to Waldorf schools, your second statement seems more accurate: from what they say the parents are very involved in the schooling - in fact the Waldorf methodology is insistent on it.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#36

Post by michaelochurch »

One thing that saddens me in education is the death of Long Division. I took a couple math-ed courses in college and I was shocked when I learned that most it's not being taught in most schools. It's "too hard" and it's "useless", some say, so it's being taken out of the curriculum.

Bullshit it's useless. Multiplication tables are memorized lookup tables. That's "rote" but important, but it's not when math starts to become interesting. Long multiplication and division are the first time people have to use an algorithm for a problem too difficult to do in any other way. And yes, it needs to be done by hand and if it takes a few months for the average student to get it right, fine. It's important. Not the actual skill of dividing 83914 by 203, but the process of carrying out a mechanical algorithm by hand.

Should computers be a part of education? Absolutely. Should programming be taught in school? Yes. Should we abandon the process of running algorithms by hand, as a mechanism for understanding rule-based computation at an early age? No.

Interesting fact: early computers (in the 1940s) were not competitive with human "computers"-- savants whose jobs were to do arithmetical calculations. They were actually slower. What made mechanical computers such a win was that they could keep going and remain reliable, whereas human computers would start making mistakes after 8 hours.

If you've gone through the humiliating process of trying to calculate a 6-by-6 determinant by hand and getting it wrong, you understand this, and you know why the rigor offered by mechanical computation is so important. If you haven't, it probably doesn't make sense to you.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#37

Post by dcrankshaw »

I went to this school for kindergarten through the first half of sixth grade. Being an elementary school student I was less familiar with their guiding philosophy than the actual execution. But I can say that they did some things really well for an elementary school child, one of which was not burdening their students with homework. This gave me free time to read everything I could get my hands on, which I think has been incredibly valuable to my development and later education.

But I left when we were covering fractions for the 3rd year in a row (when I was in sixth grade), and I felt completely stifled and unchallenged. I have no regrets that my parents sent me there, but at least when I was there, the execution of the philosophy began to fall apart when I turned 10.

For some context, I am now a CS and Physics major and don't feel that an unfamiliarity with computers when I was 8 hampered my math or computer skills at all.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#38

Post by gruseom »

tricolon wrote: post #30
paul wrote: post #28

We send our kids to Waldorf inspired schools. Most schools (especially public schools) give me a sense of dread, like a twelve year prison sentence would. The Waldorf schools have a warm, human feel that actually makes me a little jealous of my kids. I would rather my kids be raised as whole humans, not little test-taking machines.

Could the Waldorf schools be a reaction to the new concept of simply dumping one's child at a school to be raised?

The schools themselves have been going for about a hundred years, so they aren't a reaction to it. Perhaps some parents are. I hope so. Unfortunately, I think the social trend is the other way around. Where I live (Canada), debate tends to center around how wonderful it would be if children could be raised by day-care workers before being handed off to school workers, so the parents can go be workers someplace else.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#39

Post by gruseom »

jacques_chester wrote: post #8
gruseom wrote: post #4

My sister-in-law has taught at a Waldorf school for years. The school the article describes sounds typical. Waldorf is actually based on an extremely deviant philosophy. They get away with it because they deliver results. In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests.

> In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests. Out of every 10 tests they have 9 standardized tests club a randomly-chosen 10th standardized test to death?

I was going to write "dominate" but thought I'd go for a little something different :)

By the way, I hope I didn't sound like a believer in standardized tests. As far as I'm concerned they're for meat-packing plants. The fact that our schools are child-processing factories is a shame (probably the single thing I'd change about our society if I could). All I meant was that Waldorf schools would be a lot more vulnerable to mainstream condemnation if their kids didn't out-perform on those tests. You can't respond to criticism by saying, "just look at these children, they're happy and grounded". But you can sure say, "what part of the 99th percentile do you have a problem with"?

Where my sister-in-law teaches, their results are at the top of our province (Alberta), which itself has a reputation for having one of the best school systems in the world. We're usually compared to Finland in this respect - which scares me, because the truth is that our schools suck, so it's an indication of how bad things are elsewhere.

Re: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

#40

Post by gruseom »

Cushman wrote: post #32
Aloisius wrote: post #10

Maybe they don't let students use computers because when you search for information about the Waldorf schools, you get all sorts of stuff about them being some kind of cult. In my admittedly limited research, I found information about astral bodies, Atlantis, soul nourishment, clairvoyance and and a dislike of the left handed. From the Skeptic's Dictionary: Waldorf schools reflect Steiner's education theories, which…

Waldorf schools are based on some crazy-nutty voodoo philosophy. They also, more or less coincidentally, work really, really well.

more or less coincidentally

That's too easy. How can we know that? On the contrary, it would be surprising if how well the schools work were unrelated to their philosophy.

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