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How Old Is The Shepherd?

robertkaplinsky.com

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Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#11

Post by sailfast »

jcutrell wrote: post #6
NoPiece wrote: post #3

Especially 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.

Agreed - it would be interesting to run the numbers with "questions may not have an answer" as a qualifier. If I try to put myself back in my young student mindset, I would only expect to be correct with a non-answer response for a specific kind of test, or with a certain type of teacher that asked non-structured problems. If given this problem in a structured environment such as a standardized test I would likely look for a possible answer, realize none was possible, write a number as a guess with some notes about the median age of shepherds, and then be extremely frustrated at the test designer haha.

I get that this is supposed to outline the differences between structured / unstructured learning, thinking, and classroom conditioning, but it's not quite fair to draw a conclusion that doesn't take that conditioning into account.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#12

Post by kbenson »

nimble wrote: post #5

This 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.

This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom.

Yes, the superior abstract reasoning that the computer imparts would definitely solve this!

(I'm also fairly skeptical of this finding).

From the article:

The “How Old Is the Shepherd?” question was popularized by an essay written by Professor Katherine K. Merseth in 1993 and was based on research by Professor Kurt Reusser in a paper presented at the 1986 American Educational Research Association annual meeting. It is noteworthy that Professor Merseth wrote that “researchers report that three out of four schoolchildren will produce a numerical answer to this problem.” Twenty years later that statement still held true.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#13

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> I think there is an unfortunate temptation to look at the students and think "how stupid are they?"

I don't see any evidence of that in the comments on the original article or here. All of it seems to be focussed on the process of education and the habits it forms and the psychology of teacher/student (or more general authority figure) relations.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#14

Post by MBCook »

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…

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.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#15

Post by PavlovsCat »

lasermike026 wrote: post #10

We 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.

> how to think and process. The idiots that run this country do not want that

"No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them." -- Assata Shakur

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#16

Post by thomaswmeyer »

arbitrarilyHigh wrote: post #8
nimble wrote: post #5

This 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?

Well, they could google "How old is the shepherd" and find a link to articles discussing that there's no answer...

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#18

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

I know there are at least some curricula that have word problems with at least 1 bit of extraneous information to try and train that. It can be somewhat amusing to see kids try and fit the extra number into their calculations.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#19

Post by nimble »

arbitrarilyHigh wrote: post #8
nimble wrote: post #5

This 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?

That was sarcasm. My point was that if this level of critical thinking deficiency is really present, then there is something seriously wrong with the way kids are being taught, and calls that you hear for extra funding to pay for things like laptops in the classroom are really a giant waste of money until we fix whatever that is.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?

#20

Post by j2kun »

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…

I agree wholeheartedly that students need to spend more time dealing with the setup of a problem (thinking about how best to express a vague idea mathematically) and in dealing with problems that don't have any known answer.

I think this is a huge part of "mathematical thinking skills" that we claim we want to instill in students. It's a sad thing that most people don't really have a good definition of what a "mathematical thinking skill" is in the first place. Figuring out how to adequately and precisely pose questions is one of the MOST mathematical skills, but it rarely shows up in discussions of standards and curricula.

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