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Don't force your kids to do math

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Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#281

Very poor take. The author clearly has very limited experience with raising kids. Most kids won't do difficult things if you don't push them. Playing music, learning to spell correctly, doing mathematics, and so on. A very small minority of kids will do all of that easily and for the fun, but you can't rely on it. If you don't push your kid to do their 20 minutes of piano every day, they will half-ass it and will sto…

what does it mean to "push" ?

they used to beat the living shit out of us india when were growing up. is that what you mean?

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#282
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But kids are going to have setbacks, they will reach a plateau in their craft (music, painting, art, sport, ...). You need also as a good parent to help your kids go through, to not give up, because even joy to do is not always enough. This is the hard part. From my modest experience of being a ski/snowboard instructor and trying to raise 3 boys (now 12, 16 and 18).

why does a child need to break through a plateau at anything? Of my five sample size of five, expose them and support them, some things can’t even hook you until your brain grows enough .. The musical one is in a band now the nerdy one likes inhaling solder. I did force both boys to Hockey but just to have passable skills so that he can enjoy that all that comes with the sport as an adult

> why does a child need to break through a plateau at anything?

If for no other reason than to teach them that some things are worth persevering for.

You can't teach kids to give up at the first sign of adversity...

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#283
My claims are as follows: - most math programs in the US schools are behind where children’s math abilities are - most school math programs do an abysmal job connecting math with real life - you can completely turn off a child to a subject/sport/activity by pushing it too hard -being numerate is a real long term advantage in life

It’s balancing these things that’s hard, if your children are above “pace” math wise, see the value of math in their everyday life, and are on track to be numerate, yes don’t push, otherwise not pushing is the disservice

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#284

Very poor take. The author clearly has very limited experience with raising kids. Most kids won't do difficult things if you don't push them. Playing music, learning to spell correctly, doing mathematics, and so on. A very small minority of kids will do all of that easily and for the fun, but you can't rely on it. If you don't push your kid to do their 20 minutes of piano every day, they will half-ass it and will sto…

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…

> "Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood."

I don't get it. you'll be a beginner in something that you weren't pushed to in your childhood. so what?

are you planning to only do things you were pushed to as a child? I learnt skiing in mid 30s , never even saw snow as a child. Its my fav thing to do all winter and spent like 40 days a season on snow. Not sure if i would've enjoyed it the same if i was "pushed" skiing as a child and hated it.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter if you “plateau” at a hobby? I have lots of hobbies and skills I’ve learned then plateaued at. It doesn’t bother me in the least.

Yes, it’s been very frustrating because there’s things (songs, techniques) that are beyond my reach at the moment due to large gaps.

I get that. It’s satisfying to overcome those hurdles and frustrating to be blocked. Speaking for myself though, if I find I’m getting really frustrated by something that I’m supposedly doing for fun, it’s a sign that I might not be approaching it in the best way psychologically. I’m usually much happier when I try to have more of a zen ‘putting in the reps’ mindset. Then the periods of progress are like icing on the cake, not something I need to enjoy the thing.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#286

Very poor take. The author clearly has very limited experience with raising kids. Most kids won't do difficult things if you don't push them. Playing music, learning to spell correctly, doing mathematics, and so on. A very small minority of kids will do all of that easily and for the fun, but you can't rely on it. If you don't push your kid to do their 20 minutes of piano every day, they will half-ass it and will sto…

Double-edged sword IMO. I was mandated to a half hour of piano practice early on, and I came to dread it. But in my experience that was less having to do with being pushed to practice, and more I loathed my parents overhearing my piano playing and thinking they'd come down and criticize me for not trying hard enough. This was an uncommon occurrence, but it occurred enough to plant the seeds of anxiety in my mind.

The nature of pushing needs to be considered in the sense of the overall parent-child relationship, and not just being handed a Mikrokosmos and an egg timer. If my parents were more proud of my ability to push forward and took interest in the piano and my playing beyond just performing good at recitals, I probably would have grown up to truly enjoy performing music. Today I'm left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that would require conceited effort to overcome. So I guess my parents weren't "lazy" in your terms but a bit too strict for me to conclude I would be "good at music" that early.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#287

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.

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…

Forced history lessons are just indoctrination and propaganda, since what you learn is dictated by the government. I wonder if there’s a single country on Earth that teaches e.g. the history of Israel-Palestine conflict in a way that even tries to approach objectivity.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#288
post #106
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can one learn more about this? I want to get some activities for my kids this summer…

Me too.

I guess these workbooks usually come in two different "shapes" - one, a guided workbook with a high-level goal that combines several concepts, and another would be a practice worksheet where we do a bunch of exercise of the same algorithm (say, long division, calculating summations, or matrix multiplication) over and over. For the "workbook" pattern, we first discuss with the LLM the final goal (e.g. a scratch program that can calculate a rocket's position using the rocket equation). Then we flesh out the steps towards the goal - is it reasonable to add the math for air resistance? air resistance that decreases with altitude? gravity turn? how do we integrate the velocity and position for each frame? How can we relate the integration by step size to the underlying integral, by showing that the result gets more precise (but slower to calculate) the smaller your delta-t is? Then, produce a Scratch code sample that implements the velocity and position calculation. Of course, there are things subtly wrong with the code sample (usually, if the math formulas are well-known, they're correct), which requires debugging - just another type of problem-solving.

The second shape, worksheets, is a lot more straightforward. Just define the type of problem you want to practice and have chatgpt make a bunch of problems. Then switch to one of the newer reasoning models and have it work the problems, and refine to get rid of any bogey problems (for example, for polynomial exercise, you could tell it to make sure the roots are integers)

The worksheets are more "hands off" - I run them through the algorithm once and check their work once or twice and then let them do the rest. The important thing is that the worksheets are connected to their high-level goal, and they understand that in order to solve the big, hairy problem that they're interested in, they need to build up certain specific skills.

Usually the worksheet goal is a pretty substantial conceptual stretch for my kids so they need to go through a series of fundamental worksheets. But the great thing about the LLM is, you can just tell it you're having a problem understanding some concept and to help build the scaffolding by listing all of the required skills to understand a concept, and picking the ones that needs improvement the most and practicing them.

My approach draws a little from "The MathAcademy Way" - https://www.justinmath.com/files/the-math-academy-way.pdf but instead of building fundamentals evenly in all topics before advancing (like expanding a sphere), we look only at the scaffolding required to support some higher-level goal - it's sort of like the masters/PhD process but guided through existing human knowledge: https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/the-illustrated-guide-to... . As a side note, I think it's really fun to include the history (mathematicians who contributed to the ideas) as well as the notation (using the greek letters, explaining why it's common to use them). When the kids notice the names like Pythagoras, Newton, and Euler reappearing frequently, and get a sense of the time scale these discoveries happened on, they treat the current state - and their ability to go learn thousands of years of math in months - with more reverence.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I commented in another post, piano gave you the foundation for learning classical guitar (and appreciating that genre of music). Very few guitar players can even recognize note names on a staff. You’re not going to get far with classical guitar without it.

It's not like learning to sight read is a "piano only" skill... In fact, I never actually learned to sight read until I started on guitar. All I remembered from the old days was "all cows eat grass"

Learning sight reading is the most natural on piano like instruments. The notes are literally arranged in the same order. Stringed instruments are much more difficult to learn sight reading from scratch on.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#290
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The semantic meaning of a blank is much better understood to everyone than an arbitrary letter like 'x'. People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value. They might even think how can 24 + 2 = 5? They just want something to grab onto and nobody is really teaching the concept of a symbol in a math class.

I will die on the hill that most of math would benefit from better naming, less short names and longer format. Yes, the crack math guys have no problems with terse symbols. But most people do. Good example is Greek letters for geometry. They are not really taught in school so an easy formula gets 'weird squiggly thing times another squiggly thing....' and that does not help understanding at all

For any given problem, you usually know what it is your studying, so writing out names doesn't have much benefit. On the other hand, a more visual language (which is what mathematical writing is) lets you easily look at specific portions of the picture and read off how it behaves, which is very useful. Basically, getting hung up on names means you're reading it wrong.
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