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My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

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Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#331

Post by smsm42 »

wintersFright wrote: post #145

I'm surprised he is so open about the weed. Especially since his daughter will read that. I thought the USA was all gung ho on the war on drugs?

USA is absolutely insane on war on drugs. Same person can openly admit in his youth he was using marijuana and cocaine and advocate decades-long mandatory sentences on people who are found in possession of the same now. I tried to understand what's going on in the heads of those people but I've given up. It looks like when it comes to certain subjects, people are just switching off their brains and think with some other organs, I dare not guess which ones.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#332

Post by smsm42 »

Afforess wrote: post #52
anigbrowl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.' As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. 5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at th…

I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.' Name a situation where solving a polynomial is something the average person has to do? The only one I can think of is compound interest.

As noted, compound interest is exponential, not polynomial. Which brings me to one of my favorite pet peeves - I don't think schools still have any basics of financial literacy - like understanding how compound interests work, what present value and net present value is, how to estimate value a cash flow, etc. And those are things which you can encounter every day - taking a loan, negotiating a raise, figuring out if you can afford a new car, etc. Much more useful than knowing how exactly crystals which 99.999% would never see in their life are built.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#333

Post by bjterry »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #166
lgieron wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it. As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".

To which he answer "the capital of France" and everyone keep going. If I tell you that you need to go to Sucre for a meeting, do you know where that is? Probably not. You will google it, spend 5 seconds on the internet and boom, you know where it is. Putting countless hours to learn all of them is useless. This is time that could be spent learning things that are important in the modern world. The computers aren't go…

According to the author of SuperMemo, the lifetime cost of learning a particular fact for life, in a perfectly structured spaced repetition system, is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes[1]. Thus, you should never memorize a fact that will come up so rarely and is trivial enough to look up that it doesn't exceed that lifetime threshold. The vast majority of state and national capitals fall into the "not worth it" category.

Also, most students don't have nearly the efficiency of learning that a spaced repetition system affords (Especially Wozniak's highly optimized system wherein he has a database that he habitually has quizzed daily for years), so for them the cost is dramatically higher.

1: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/useless.htm

> lifetime minimum cost of remembering a single well-formulated piece of knowledge can easily be estimated to fall into the range from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (minimum cost is the cost that is achieved using the optimally spaced repetition schedule). This estimation can be used in cost-benefit analysis in deciding which mission-critical pieces of knowledge should be subject to learning based on spaced repetition

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#334

Post by bjterry »

cookiecaper wrote: post #11
rwallace wrote: post #4

There comes a point when an institution becomes so badly broken that the only rational course of action is to get the hell out, and look elsewhere for a solution to your problems. It looks pretty clear from this article that the US school system is well past that point.

Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level. There's such a broad range of individual personalities and skills along varying axes that the idea of "let's put all the kids born within 10 months of each other in our geographic area in a classroom, and threaten force on people who don't want to cooperate" is never going to function well. I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of on…

You may find this economics paper by Lant Pritchett to be interesting. It is one of the most enlightening I've read this year. It discusses the ways that a system wherein the state provides the majority of education services at every level of education fails to support the stated goals of education from an economic perspective (although that is actually not explicitly what he's trying to prove, which is that just because a schooling system exists a certain way doesn't mean that way is optimal, i.e. basically efficient markets hypothesis doesn't apply to provided government schooling). He makes the statement that he's not talking about developed economies, only developing, but it's transparently applicable to developed economies as well. This is one of the rare papers that teaches much more than it claims to.

1: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/11943/1/ber-02...

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#335

Post by edtechdev »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #168
edtechdev wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually every class focuses on memorization and not conceptual understanding, unfortunately. That's what students have to do to survive high school and college courses, because that's how they are taught and assessed. A recent study of calculus courses found for example that almost 80% of the test questions simply involved recalling and applying a procedure (i.e., "plug and chug"). http://www.maa.org/sites/default/…

I don't know how much stock I'd put in self-reported reasons for attrition. At my school the undergrad professors for calc are all excellent - well reviewed by students, winning awards, etc. Still, a lot of STEM students drop out when they're taking first-year calc, because STEM programs are also just very hard. Even if we axed the first-year math requirements, I suspect those people would make it two or three years…

Student ratings actually negatively correlate with learning

I think maybe I'll trust the decades of research on math education rather than your intuitions. For example, there is research showing that many more students succeed in calculus when the math is taught in context, not abstractly and plug and chug. One set of studies showed that such a course increased calculus pass rates from 60% to 90% (see the Wright State engineering math course, and see the ENGAGE Engineering project). Another large set of studies shows that student learning can double and graduation rates triple when active, participatory learning techniques are used by the instructor instead of traditional lecture (The PCAST report - Engage to Excel cites it).

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#336

Post by peripitea »

tptacek wrote: post #319
chris_wot wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's child is still a kid. I think she's in year 8? Here's my feedback: a. Let her be a kid. b. let her get enough sleep (it's hard to learn without enough sleep). c. Stop taking cannabis. It can lead to mental illness. d. If you are concerned about too much homework, do something about it. For real.

The weird thing about the cannabis mention in this article is how irrelevant it was to his story. He mentions smoking up so he can explain how hard it is to do algebra while high. Uh, and ? Is your daughter doing her algebra homework stoned? I got the impression that he mentioned it to signal that he's a "cool parent". But that hurts his point; it makes the rest of the argument seem like it might be the product of al…

The way I read it, the marijuana references tie back to his youth and are meant to contrast his youth to his daughter's. I actually found them pretty powerful. The feeling I came away with was: is this (ultimately low-value) homework causing her to miss out on opportunities to be a teenager and do teenager things, like smoking weed behind her parents' backs, making out with other teenagers, and making other irresponsible-but-ultimately-valuable decisions in her personal life? In a way it made me sad for her.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#337

Post by Perseids »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #214
altrego99 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Kids should not be penalized for knowing which is the capital of what, nor which part of Americas grows the most bananas. It is useless information unless the kid loves that kind of stuff. * Focus should not be on memorizing anything, unless they are a building block of something which they will understand later, and better, with the memorization. May be the Spanish language verb forms are one of those, I'm not sur…

> Focus should not be on memorizing anything I have to disagree. At that age the things you memorize get seared into your mind permanently. I can still effortlessly rattle off a few Shakespeare soliloquies a teacher had us memorize, for example. I think having 13 year olds memorize things is a great idea, but the things should be important and useful. I wish we had extensively drilled on mental arithmetic.

There are very different learning types. I for one am very bad at memorizing facts and forget them quite fast after not using them any more, no matter at which age I learned them first. Concerning mental arithmetic, I was quite good in 5th and 6th grade, but now I am painstakingly slow even with simple multiplications like 7•8 ("Seven times eight was something like fifty-six, right? Let's check, so seven times seven was forty-nine, forty-nine plus seven… yeah, fifty six"). I just don't typically have to solve such problems at this time in my life (the closest I've come to needing arithmetic in the last few months was when I was studying Galois theory). But at least I am confident, that I can train myself, should the need arise.

The most frustrating experience with memorizations in school were poems for me, because it always took so much effort and even while I was slowly mastering it I knew it was all for naught, because in a few weeks everything would be gone again, even with those that I actually liked.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#338

Post by djeikyb »

aestra wrote: post #184
madaxe wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the benefit of attending the British, German, and American school systems. Schooling in America has little to do with education, and much to do with indoctrination. Pretty much the only thing I learned was the pledge of allegiance - over which I repeatedly got suspended, as I refused to recite it along with the rest of the class, every morning. Everything else they "taught" was years behind what I'd been learni…

You cannot be suspended for not saying the Pledge. You cannot be compelled to say the Pledge. Your rights were violated. The Supreme Court of the United State has ruled that it is well within your right to not say it. See West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_Ed... Writing for the majority, Justice Jackson stated: "If there is any fixed star in ou…

In high school I repeatedly got in trouble for not participating in the pledge. I acquired a copy of this case. My government teacher told me I was reading it wrong, and actually the verdict was the pledge is required. It mostly ended one day in the principal's office when I politely threatened to contact the aclu.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#339

Post by mattchew »

callmeed wrote: post #198
mcphilip wrote: post #40

I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school. I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that th…

This might be a weird question and totally based on anecdotes but: are you a good speller? I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled and/or homeschool their kids. I've also hired some and gone to school with some. One thing I noticed about several of them is they're bad at spelling. I've always wondered why.

We homeschool. My son spells words fairly well and my daughter spells like a cat.

We've worked with both of them on spelling, in about the same way.

I wouldn't really call this a cause, but my daughter doesn't really believe spelling words correctly is anything she needs to get fussed over. She thinks it's funny to spell words wrong. Me too, sometimes--though I still hope she grows out of it eventually.

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