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How Old Is The Shepherd?

robertkaplinsky.com

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Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#81

Post by pflats »

yongjik wrote: post #73
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* ... but you are not being critical. You're just being obtuse.* // I disagree. One is being critical. If however you try to use that as an excuse not to perform the calculation then you're definitely being obstructive. It is absolutely right for a student performing such calculations to realise there are issues with it not being realistic. They should understand that it's an approximation and understand that even i…

> I fear you're making the calculation the end in itself (we have computers for that!) Well, I have to disagree. Of course it's rather silly to make the calculation the goal in itself, but one needs to have a decent "feeling" of what would happen in a given domain. In math (up to college freshmen) or physics, that involves a lot of number-crunching. Until you get familiar with it. It's same as CS students implementin…

You can grok most sorting methods remarkably well, though, by lining up a bunch of office junk on a big table and working through the sorting algorithm physically.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#83

Post by JshWright »

bentcorner wrote: post #78
MBCook wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the last kid was extremely revealing. There are two numbers, and they didn't say "product", "sum", or "difference", so it must be division. Clearly the problems she gets in school are extremely rote and don't really require reading the problem much. Just look for a keyword or two and you can 'solve' it.

I feel bad for this child. Clearly she has gotten through her schooling through sheer brute force without applying very much understanding. She is likely at a grade level where building the basics back up is not possible without 1:1 attention.

Welcome to Common Core. Obviously there won't be non-sensical questions on the test, so why bother exposing kids to them in class?

Teachers are being forced, now more than ever, to optimize for test scores, at the expense of real learning.

This isn't a video about stupid kids, it's a video about a stupid education system.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#85

Post by phaemon »

pfarrell wrote: post #41

the 12th fibonacci number is 144. Assume some of the sheep didn't make it through a winter or that one of the dogs attacked some of them and had to be put down. So, 125 sheep left from a potential of 144 after 12 years of shepherding seems possible. Assuming the shepherd lives in a country that still has shepherding as a profession, we'll assume s/he started at 15. The shepherd is 27 years old Q.E.F.

What's scarier than the kids in that video are the number of people on HN who don't seem to have grasped the concept of where "lamb" and "mutton" come from. :-)

EDIT: Too harsh! Tone down!

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#86

Post by hibbelig »

hyperpape wrote: post #7

I 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…

The students aren't stupid, just badly trained.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#87

Post by dredmorbius »

cunac wrote: post #77
mikeash wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the whole point? We are teaching children badly by always giving them clear-cut problems that always have an answer, when the world is full of fuzzy problems that may not have an answer. Given the environment, why wouldn't the children guess? For years, we give them homework and tests where a guess is always equal to or better than no answer at all. But that's nearly the opposite of how the world works, so…

everything has answer we just don't know what it is :-)

For a given problem, can you write a program to determine whether or not it has an answer?

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#88

Post by acheron »

JshWright wrote: post #83
bentcorner wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel bad for this child. Clearly she has gotten through her schooling through sheer brute force without applying very much understanding. She is likely at a grade level where building the basics back up is not possible without 1:1 attention.

Welcome to Common Core. Obviously there won't be non-sensical questions on the test, so why bother exposing kids to them in class? Teachers are being forced, now more than ever, to optimize for test scores, at the expense of real learning. This isn't a video about stupid kids, it's a video about a stupid education system.

Opposition to Common Core? You must be a "white suburban mom"! [1]

[1] http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/22/no-arne-duncan-white-s...

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#89

Post by jessaustin »

mistercow wrote: post #33
jessaustin wrote: post #27

I think many eighth graders would be sophisticated enough for some dimensional analysis if it were presented in the right way. It's hard to imagine students who had been taught that, making these sorts of mistakes.

But dimensional analysis is just another mathematical process turned into a rote method which does not require deeper understanding. The problem is not the pile of rote techniques is too small, but that students aren't learning how to actually think mathematically.

I find this "think mathematically" concept you invoke to be a bit fuzzy. Even geniuses (not me, but I've met some) can be caught out by novel constructions if they haven't had time to consider them carefully. Much mathematical sophistication consists of adding to "the pile of techniques". If a student has too shallow a pile, the goal of educators should be to pile on more. If we suspect the research under discussion represents something real and not simply a series of methodology blunders, then it points to an improvement that educators could make. It's likely that basic dimensional analysis is not a complete answer, but I suspect that an admonition to "think mathematically" is not even wrong.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#90

Post by Dru89 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #62
Dru89 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think perhaps a better setup to the problem for a child might be to make a question that is possible to answer, but has extraneous information. Something like: "There are 12 children, 3 bats, 15 balls, and 2 swings. If everyone is holding a ball, how many balls are left over?"

Filtering out extraneous information is an important and related skill, but its slightly different thing than identifying when the problem as phrased does not have the information needed to support an answer. While it may be the case that the education system fails to do enough at both of these, I suspect it does better at getting students to identify extraneous information and use only what is necessary than it does…

That's a great point. I suppose the problem that I see here is that schools often present problems as always having a solution, even when there's none to be found.
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