Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 167 posts

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#151

Post by chmod775 »

123894893 wrote: post #64
jrockway wrote: post #17

I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound like they're a product of their time but are still relevant today. I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school, but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my day to day work. (Though in base 8, I h…

The song "New Math" is actually funny to listen to, I think most people don't pay attention to what's happening in it. In the first verse, he's mocking the idea of teaching kids the concept of borrowing, as if it's a bizarre and confusing concept that almost no one would understand. He was completely wrong, of course, and it's the way almost everyone - at least in the U.S. - does subtraction now. The "right" way that…

As someone who learned the "right" way in German public school about 20 years ago, the statement "teaching people what was actually happening with subtraction" is completely indecipherable to me. Maybe I never learned what subtraction is. To me it's like advocating for not using a ruler because that would somehow forego teaching people what measuring actually means.

Both "measure" and "subtract" can mean doing any number of things in mathematics, depending on what you're dealing with. Intuition for things in the physical world specifically shouldn't be a goal of teaching mathematics at school. It's a prerequisite. If a child already can't grasp the concept of taking away from something, throwing mathematics and numbers at them is not going to help one bit.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#152

Post by thaumasiotes »

123894893 wrote: post #144
thaumasiotes wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borrowing isn't even a New Math idea. Here's an American Old Math mathematics textbook from 1931: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.509299/page/n2... Beyond the intriguing assumption that an adult man might purchase this book, a manual of basic arithmetic, for the purpose of self-improvement, it's pretty much indistinguishable from what we have today. This is the treatment of subtraction: > If any figure…

> Borrowing isn't even a New Math idea. Borrowing and base 8 weren't created by New Math. Teaching them to students, at least according to the song, was part of New Math. Lehrer specifically says this. In the intro he gives the way it was taught ("Now, remember how we used to do that…Three from two is nine, carry the one"), then he says "But in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what…

> Borrowing and base 8 weren't created by New Math. Teaching them to students, at least according to the song, was part of New Math. Lehrer specifically says this.

No, he doesn't.

So first, we can observe with our own eyes that borrowing and carrying are the same thing, with only the label being changed.

But we can also observe that what was taught to students, as reflected in their textbooks, is the same thing that was taught under the label New Math and the same thing that is still taught today. Go ahead and look at the textbook.

The part that is specific to the New Math is the conversion of the problem to base 8. If you want to stick closely to the lyrics of the song, you might notice that they specify that the base-8 subtraction is the only problem posed by the New Math textbook; the base-10 version is something that Tom Lehrer provides to the audience to aid their understanding of the base-8 version.

This isn't just the clear message of the song, it's also what you'll learn if you read retrospective or contemporaneous coverage of New Math. You can see discussion in precisely these terms on the rather perfunctory Wikipedia page.¹ But most importantly, you might notice that working in alternative bases is actually new, in that - unlike the working of the base-10 problem in the first verse of the song - it doesn't appear in textbooks written a hundred years before the New Math was developed.²

The joke in the first verse is just that it's hard to follow a rapid patter. One specific joke in that verse is the set of lines "And you know why four plus minus one plus ten is fourteen minus one, 'cause addition is commutative. Right." Again, there's nothing new about this material, it's just that the explanation is superfluous to the process and paced in a manner that makes it hard to follow.

¹ Admittedly, the page's view of what was salient in New Math is pretty likely to have been influenced by Tom Lehrer's song, but that's still a radically different and more plausible interpretation of the song than what you're pushing for.

² That far back, it's all carrying into the subtrahend, but the approach of "here's an example showing each step of the process in detail, accompanied by a theoretical discussion of why it works" is already present. To get carrying out of the minuend, you need to go to just decades before the development of New Math, as the patter notes.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#153

Post by ska »

noneeeed wrote: post #132

I can't imagine many things worse than being famous. I guess if you are the kind of super-rich where you can completely avoid interacting with the rest of society that it would be fine, but not being able to just walk down the street or go to the pub without someone stopping you must get tedious. The kind of quiet fame that Lehrer managed, known to a smallish segment of the population, for being really good at someth…

> While they don't have the science/maths background that makes Lehrer an obvious win for the HN crowd,

True, but they did one on thermodynamics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#155

Post by 082349872349872 »

fragmede wrote: post #148
BizarroLand wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite will always be poisoning pigeons in the park, introduced to me courtesy of Dr. Demento. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

The sun is a misama of incandescent plasma, by They Might be Giants for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA A 2009 follow-up to their original song from 1993, the sun song, in which they erroneously claimed the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, to weigh the follow-up song is a correction.

My current song pedantry fave is Nanobot, perfected by a video with 18 numbered [refs]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc

(presumably Brian May would have had his phases of astral matter correct in the first set of lyrics?)

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#156

Post by riedel »

BizarroLand wrote: post #139
noneeeed wrote: post #132

I can't imagine many things worse than being famous. I guess if you are the kind of super-rich where you can completely avoid interacting with the rest of society that it would be fine, but not being able to just walk down the street or go to the pub without someone stopping you must get tedious. The kind of quiet fame that Lehrer managed, known to a smallish segment of the population, for being really good at someth…

My favorite will always be poisoning pigeons in the park, introduced to me courtesy of Dr. Demento. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

I only knew the Austrian 'version' by Georg Kreisler [0] and only now learned about Lehrer now. Thanks.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Kreisler

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#158

Post by bitwize »

andrepd wrote: post #93
bitwize wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more. It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficien…

Amazing how this comment is diametrically opposed to the truth :) It's in fact the very contrary! "Drilling maths" into kids is how you get everyone except the most pre-disposed to "hate maths" with a passion. Because they grow up thinking mathematics is deathly boring busy work of repeating the same busy-work ad nauseum. Teaching rote memorization is useless and wastes time that could better be used exploring ideas…

I can guarantee you that Lockhart drilled in the basic arithmetic problems until he knew his times tables and such by heart. He couldn't do things like algebra without this fundamental knowledge ingrained into the fiber of his being.

You can't play a Chopin sonata, at least not smoothly and beautifully, without having played lots of boring scales and finger exercises. And you can't get to the fun, creative, beautiful bits of mathematics without having drilled in the fundamentals. Not unless you're Gauss or somebody.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#159

Post by rufus_foreman »

noneeeed wrote: post #132

I can't imagine many things worse than being famous. I guess if you are the kind of super-rich where you can completely avoid interacting with the rest of society that it would be fine, but not being able to just walk down the street or go to the pub without someone stopping you must get tedious. The kind of quiet fame that Lehrer managed, known to a smallish segment of the population, for being really good at someth…

>> I can't imagine many things worse than being famous

"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job."

-- Bill Murray

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#160

Post by coryrc »

vundercind wrote: post #146
coryrc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core Have you actually looked into it? I was skeptical too, but then I saw they were trying to teach kids the way I do math. For example, what's 4001 - 3989. The old way would be to borrow and carry three times. But change question to 1+4000-3990+1 and the answer is perfectly simple. Kids I went to school with would litera…

> Have you actually looked into it? I’ve had three kids go through the early grades with it. I was on the fence at first. It turned out to be awful. The kids hate it. We hate it. There’s weird unhelpful bullshit vocabulary everywhere (“let’s use ‘number sentence’ in kindergarten before we’ve taught kids what a regular sentence is, that’ll surely help!”). Solving the same problem five ways which is infuriating to a ki…

I feel everything you said applies to every subject in US public schools.
Post reply on HN