How Old Is The Shepherd?
robertkaplinsky.com
How Old Is The Shepherd?
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Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#2I wonder if I do an abstract version of this in code sometimes when I'm being lazy...
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#3Especially with younger kids, when they are asked a question by someone with authority, there is a reasonable presumption that it can be answered. I'm all for teaching them to challenge that presumption, but I think you'd get a more fair result if the question was, "Can you figure out the age of the shepherd if you know how many dogs and sheep he has in his flock?"
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#4This is incredibly interesting to me, and points to a problem in our schools.
We traditionally teach children to solve problems that have solutions. In particular, eighth grade teaches pre-algebra and algebra, so the way students approach problems is directly connected to how the student decodes the language of a "word problem".
We need to change our conceptual understanding of what learning actually requires, and give students a situation in which they must write the problem themselves. Instead of "decoding" a predefined word problem, the student then must explore the situation and interpret the available information.
A good way to handle this problem is to allow students to write word problems for other students based on a set of data, and subsequently create the "answer key" that includes the mathematical proofs. Proofs should be taught from a much earlier age.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#5This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom. (EDIT: Sarcasm alert -- see my response below before you downvote me)
EDIT: Just watched the video. Scary.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#6Especially with younger kids, when they are asked a question by someone with authority, there is a reasonable presumption that it can be answered. I'm all for teaching them to challenge that presumption, but I think you'd get a more fair result if the question was, "Can you figure out the age of the shepherd if you know how many dogs and sheep he has in his flock?"
Agreed. I think this is also an issue with the way we teach; we should teach students to have the confidence to deny the solvability or soundness of a problem on their own (rather than forcing irrational thought in order to arrive at a solution).
This is the equivalent of teaching a programmer to "shut up and code", even though they may have objections to the proposed solution.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#7I thint there is an unfortunate temptation to look at the students and think "how stupid are they?", but I wonder if the issue is more about familiarity of tasks.
If students are going along solving word problems that always make sense, they have zero practice in identifying which questions are well posed and which aren't. It may not be that they're bad at reasoning through word problems, so much as they aren't used to word problems that make zero sense.
Given that context, it makes partial sense for a child to think "I must be making a mistake--I can't see how this problem works, but it must work somehow, because these problems always do make sense, even if sometimes I get them wrong, because I am not smart enough to understand them."
Is that a good attitude? Heck no. If nothing else, this experiment shows that we need to teach students that math problems aren't always going to be nicely set up so that they make sense. But that's different from thinking kids are dumb for not adapting to an unexpected wrinkle on a test.
An interesting companion experiment would be to prompt the students to explain the problem first, or see whether they could accurately determine which problems made sense and which didn't, when they knew that was what they were doing. My prediction is that the results would not be great, but that they'd be better.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#8This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom. (EDIT: Sarcasm alert -- see my response below before you downvote me) EDIT: Just watched the video. Scary.
Wait, how would having a laptop in the classroom prevent this situation?
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#9Especially with younger kids, when they are asked a question by someone with authority, there is a reasonable presumption that it can be answered. I'm all for teaching them to challenge that presumption, but I think you'd get a more fair result if the question was, "Can you figure out the age of the shepherd if you know how many dogs and sheep he has in his flock?"
While I think this is true, I see the same thing in adults in professional positions (when given information and asked to respond to a query based on it, they will recombine the information and use it propose an answer even if where there is no sensible relationship between the question and the information rather than seeking additional information or identifying that the information offered is not sufficient to support a response to the question given) disturbingly often.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#10We can learn from Descartes, Aristotle, and others to develop a curriculum teaching children how to think and process. The idiots that run this country do not want that. It's about the curriculum. We can develop the world we want by teaching the next generation.