91–100 of 447 posts
In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a tragedy that he died so young.
The stories of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who claimed to have derived complex partitions and identities in dreams, have always captivated me. It's as if their minds were tapping into some hidden reservoir of knowledge. I'm curious what drives these intuitive leaps. Was Ramanujan's brain quietly processing patterns during sleep, leveraging its default mode network in ways we're still struggling to unders…
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
The stories of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who claimed to have derived complex partitions and identities in dreams, have always captivated me. It's as if their minds were tapping into some hidden reservoir of knowledge. I'm curious what drives these intuitive leaps. Was Ramanujan's brain quietly processing patterns during sleep, leveraging its default mode network in ways we're still struggling to unders…
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
Agreed. It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are the best of both world and a much rarer combination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program. Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication a…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School
The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program. Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication a…
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency. Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
> and do so with relative competency I dispute this on the grounds that students are going through American schools and many of them don't even know how to read.
The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that "many of them don't even know how to read".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States