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

Don't force your kids to do math

blog.avocados.ovh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 437 posts

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#201

Post by Viliam1234 »

creatonez wrote: post #156
eastbound wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any proof of why it is best? I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much. Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, o…

> Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much. All that praise for education and yet you've fallen for the tabloid-fueled conspiracy theory that transgender science is a hoax

What do you mean by "science" in this context? For example, both biology and anthropology are sciences, but biology can tell us that people evolved from apes, while anthropology can tell us that a specific tribe believes that they were created by a flying serpent. Both of them are sciences, both of them can talk about the same topic (the origin of humans), but they take a completely different perspective on the topic.

Is the "transgender science" you talk about more like biology, i.e. describing how things are, or more like anthropology, i.e. describing what some (sub)cultures believe? Those are not the same things.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#202

Post by imtringued »

CommenterPerson wrote: post #37

Compare learning math to learning to bicycle. There is some some sweat and struggle that needs to be put in, before one "gets it". After this it can become enjoyable. I encouraged my daughter with practice exercises from a young age, but tried to avoid making it a drudge. She built up confidence and did well with it. She is also very hands on creative. She decided to study engineering and is working towards her PhD.

Learning math is equivalent to learning to cycling if you had to learn cycling from scratch with every bicycle.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#203

Post by cpursley »

paganel wrote: post #132
eastbound wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any proof of why it is best? I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much. Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, o…

Because "forced history lessons" doesn't help said kids understand what history really is about, it just helps them accumulate facts, if that. I'd say the same thing applies to math, where one can't really start understanding math until said kid is already an adolescent (unless they're a young Euler or something), so it always baffles me when I see parents filling their young kids with (fancy) arithmetics, most proba…

You’ve got it backwards: the future therapy patients are kids who are not taught discipline and persistence. Those who aren’t struggle as adults as the real world is harsh on vibe based living. Also, all those “useless facts” eventually build up on each other. They are prerequisites of knowledge and mastery.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#204

Post by theandrewbailey »

milesrout wrote: post #139
paganel wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world needs less Asian kids being forced to play piano since a very early age and it needs more kids (Asian and not only) that are left to explore the world. Without that exploration the kids won't make the world their world, at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.

Kids left to their own devices don't explore the world. They play video games and scroll on social media.

Any patch of woods seem to cast an irresistible call to explore on kids.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#206

Post by jjgreen »

Know what, brother? I tell you that studying the humanities in high school is more important than mathematics — mathematics is too sharp an instrument, no good for kids.

Stephan Banach quoted by Steinhaus in Through a reporter’s eyes, Roman Kaluza, 1995

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#207

Post by pipes »

imtringued wrote: post #193
pipes wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this comment. My secret shame as a programmer is that I haven't really learnt much maths, stopped at 16 in school. Writing out the sum function like you did makes perfect sense to me immediately. What I should really do is create myself a cheat sheet of symbols to code...

Just read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_mathematical_sym...

Thanks for this :)

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#208

Post by exe34 »

__s wrote: post #198
rerdavies wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really important thing is to teach kids to find their joy. At the end of my second year of piano lessons, my teacher took me into her living room, and we listened to Glen Miller records for most of the hour. And then we had a cup of tea, and she told me, "this is the music that I love. I play piano because I love that music, and I want to be able to play it myself. What kind of music do you like?" I didn't really…

You're using yourself as a refuting example, but at the end you disqualify yourself by being 4th out of 20000 in some undisclosed math ranking

his whole point was that once he found joy in it, he could excel. I'm confident there's loads of things I could be good at - I'm only good at the things that I enjoy putting effort into.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#209

Post by tasuki »

hilbert42 wrote: post #171
kleene_op wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was exactly my sentiment. My parents pushed me hard to do piano when I was around 10-12. After a year that went pretty well I was starting to get lazy and put very little work and investment into preparing for the next lesson. They still had me play piano a full year until they eventually gave up and bitterly told me what a waste my resignation felt to them. 20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can…

"20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years." One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did. My parents nagged me all the time about studying and ev…

> One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did.

I'm 40. I don't know, perhaps I'm still young.

I did not appreciate having to learn the boring parts. Learning things for the next exam so as to forget them in two weeks... I didn't see the point then and still don't.

I managed to get by with the minimum possible, fluked my CS education, then had a career earning an order of magnitude more than the average salary. Shrug.

Maybe I'm missing something else because of my lack of education? I don't know...

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#210

Post by Viliam1234 »

paganel wrote: post #132
eastbound wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any proof of why it is best? I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much. Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, o…

Because "forced history lessons" doesn't help said kids understand what history really is about, it just helps them accumulate facts, if that. I'd say the same thing applies to math, where one can't really start understanding math until said kid is already an adolescent (unless they're a young Euler or something), so it always baffles me when I see parents filling their young kids with (fancy) arithmetics, most proba…

You mention Eastern Europe, are you by chance familiar with the Hejný method of math education in Czechia? Because that introduces some "math beyond mere arithmetics" concepts to the elementary school education.

Sometimes, it is possible to create a less abstract version of a more abstract thing, and thus introduce the seeds of the concept to children much younger. For example, "solve the equation 2x+1=7" is abstract, but "Peter decided to use a # symbol for a specific number, and he didn't tell us which one, but we found in his notes that # + # + 1 = 7; can you figure out which number is # ?" is simple to understand for a very young child, even if the child can only solve it by trial and error.

Post reply on HN