341–350 of 437 posts
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There is a game called dragonbox algebra which I'm currently working through with my son and is an absolutely fantastic approach to this problem. Sadly its now part of a horrendous subscription service and is hard to access. I find it really sad that we've had computers for decades and there are so few good maths games like this.
My kids all lived dragonbox games; the algebra and geometry one
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> Education has a problem with scaling, especially at the elementary level. Not if you actually provide the money. Europe gets this down decently well - although I'll admit, in rural areas in Germany we got some serious consolidation issues thanks to urban flight. But at least our teachers are well paid government jobs and the job is decently attractive.
There's plenty of money thrown at schools in the US, but the issue is that the students that live in poor socioeconomic conditions tend to not do well. The "simple answer" that addresses the root cause would make individuals not subject to poverty and whatnot. But throwing money at institutions is already on the ropes in the US, let alone throwing money at the "undeserving". (Yes, this is a political opinion. No, do…
I'd do no such thing because you are completely correct - the only thing I'd add is that poverty, while being very dominant, isn't the only issue that desperately needs to be fixed.
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…
I roughly classify parents in two groups: (1) like the author of the article, (2) like you. Based on my limited observation, neither can be claimed to give optimal results, and it more boils down to "see what actually works for your kid in the long term" which unfortunately far too often can only be definitely said in hindsight.
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"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…
> the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us My parents forced me to play the piano for more than 10 years because they were obsessed with the piano, and because they had a piano. I hated every second of doing that in order to please them, and I never got higher than beginner level because it was a torture for me. Being a beginner for 10 years should be considered as abus…
I agree, and it's more than 'sometimes', kids have a right to be heard and that hearing should be fair and reasonable. Clearly, in your case it wasn't.
What you experienced was unacceptable by any measure, and in my opinion the fact that your parents were oblivious to your predicament is a damning indictment on their parenting skills.
Your extreme situation isn't what I was referring to, so let me explain by briefly describing what I experienced.
I learned the piano because I wanted to, not because my parents forced me. In fact, whilst my parents were both musical we didn't have a piano when I was young—so I started late and that's been to my disadvantage. I mention that to let you know I understand what you went through.
Whilst I like the piano learning it was no bed of roses and it's difficult for all but the most talented (anyone not wishing to learn it would be an unmitigated drag). For me, those fucking Czerny scales used to drive me to distraction, I'd goof off and play whatever took my fancy whenever I could. Also, my teacher used to reprimand me regularly for not reading score timings as written, I'd play the tempo as I felt felt like it and that always casued a ruckus.
At no time did my parents force me to take subjects that I did not like. That said, gentle persuasion was used. I was never much good at languages and despite my ambivalence for the subject I took French not so much at my mother's insistence but rather her desire that I do so (her sister married a Frenchman and was living in France and she thought it would be useful). Learning French used to drive me crazy, it's not that I detested it (I understood its value), rather the problem was that I wasn't much good at the subject. I'd sit on my bed at home doing my French homework and bash my textbook up and down on the bedclothes whilst tying to learn those fucking French nouns with their damn random genders—why the fuck can't they all be 'la' or 'le' and not random? Having a single 'the' in English is immanently sensible.
Well, despite being not much good at the subject in hindsight learning French turned out to be a blessing when I was living in Europe. I could never have foreseen that situation when I was at school.
Another example, my father used to nag me about not taking Latin, my usual retort being why the hell would I want to learn a dead language (although that was more in jest at his persistence). I sort of had a paltry excuse as my school didn't teach Latin but there were arrangements to do certain subjects by correspondence under teacher supervision in the library. So I never took the subject at school, so nowadays my Latin is at best a mess.
That was a fucking mistake of the first order on my part for reasons too long to describe here. It's only the wisdom of hindsight that I now know I should have taken my father's advice.
BTW, I understand your frustration over not having access to a computer, I'm an IT professional and I managed an IT department for years (I was one of those nerds university security would regularly chuck out of the computer room at 10pm at night). If I'd been in your position, I'd have been mightily pissed off at your parents' miserable attitude.
> Without realizing it, he was doing algebra. A friend of mine taught remedial math at UW to incoming freshmen. She would write: x + 2 = 5 on the blackboard and ask a student "what is the value of x?" The student would see the x, and immediately respond with x means algebra, algebra is hard, I cannot do algebra. So she started writing: _ + 2 = 5 and ask the student to fill in the blank. "Oh, it's 3!"
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.
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"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…
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…
The school system today uses elements, structures, and clusters, the same techniques used in real torture. Its embedded into the structure of by-rote pedagogy starting in the late 1970s, and it also goes by another name starting in the 90s, where Administrators, NEA representatives, and Teachers, call this "Lying to Children".
Most parents today seem to be simply too busy, treating school like daycare, or maybe they just don't love their children enough to put the time in to protect them and figure out what is actually happening to their kids.
Classic curricula followed the western philosophy of the greeks, you develop tools that let you reduce a working system to first principles (in guided manner), which are proven true, and then you use those principles to model the system accurate, and then predict the future parts of that system.
"Lying to Children" does the exact opposite in time. It starts with a flawed model that is useless teaching abstract concepts and includes other unrelated concepts that arise naturally from that flawed model. The student is then as mastery progresses forced to struggle to unlearn material that isn't correct, and then relearn the finer details with each new flawed model given in a progressive fashion, over, and over, and over, becoming more useful yes, but torturing themselves, and in a way destroying themselves in the process.
When questions or true insights occur, the flawed model breaks those insights requiring you to do things differently in earlier classes before you can use those, but not even this information is given so you can't leap frog the torture.
There are additional strategic structures that orchestrate failures to gatekeep technical fields like math. There is an Algebra->Geometry->Trigonometry sequence which uses a gimmick in undisclosed pass criteria between class 1 and class 3, so the student passes initially but then fails and has to go back to Algebra, but can't because its sequential. Its called burning the bridge.
Regardless, the student is blamed, no help is given (because there is no cure for torture). They are told, "maybe you're just not a math person, you should choose a career that doesn't use this if your having trouble.
This gatekeeper is orchestrated to induce PTSD towards math in general, and as all technical fields require math this prevents them from entering those fields. Some are able to pass and enter these professions, but never the best and brightest, only the most compliant with blinders.
The exception to this is if you bypassed the entire process through private boarding school, and Ivy league college straightaway. If your an elite, you get a decent education.
These structures follow a false ideology based in gnosis/gnosticism which is long refuted, but that hasn't stopped these things from being used for purpose, or allowed others to remove these.
There is an all out war that has been happening for years, a war on our children. Compare low attention spans and other things with the documented characteristics of torture from PoWs and you'll see there are parallels everywhere.
The thousand yard stare. Hollowed out feelings. Lashing out. These are often referenced in the material on torture.
The problem is unlike adults, once broken and distorted by torture children carry that forward their entire lives, unable to change because its not learning, its torture, and there are very few who ever recover.
Failing to see the reality of what is happening and calling it lazy and complacent without understanding is problematic and most definitely not the sign of a good parent if that means you let your children's minds be destroyed under a false belief that its just laziness.
For those parents that are unaware of what I mean by torture. You can read books on the subject matter by Joost Meerloo, or Robert Lifton. From the case studies you can derive the requirements and you would be shocked to find and recognize these things being used everywhere today without you knowing. Robert Cialdini touches on the psychological blindspots used which bypass your and your children's perception to the issue.
The elements are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove oneself from the situation. Some would argue this also includes time and exposure.
Structuring and Clustering, forces active engagement through specially designed circular trauma loops, forcing the psyche back on itself to destroy itself, and narco-synthesis and narco-analysis which in the 50s used barbituates to trigger dopamine are used today through associative priming through many ways including your phone (gamification uses many of these things learned from research on torture).
It is established that those who are drugged have less resistance to torture, and those with faith-based beliefs tend to resist torture better. One of the first things to go under torture is rational thought.
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Do you do things because someone force you or beacuse you have self motivation?
I spend at least 40 hr a week doing something I have no motivation for. Most people do. Even if you don't hate your job, would you actually do it if you weren't getting paid?
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Oh, I am obviously a racist, by glorifying indigineous teaching methods. But otherwise can you show, where this is documented? The natives tribes where I have some knowledge, don't force their kids to learn in the sense that is talked about here. No need to - the whole culture is about becoming a good hunter (for male individuals). So indeed lots of peer pressure, but no individual forcing.
> Oh, I am obviously a racist, by glorifying indigineous teaching methods. No, by calling people "savages", a pejorative, based on their ethnicity. Much like how it would be racist to call people "enslavers" based on their ethnicity, or "cotton pickers" based on their ethnicity.
So exactly what I wanted to talk about, when referencing "natural education".
I did not talk about any ethnicity at all.
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If the kid isn't enjoying the piano lessons, will forcing them to do it for 20 minutes every day really be beneficial? Sure, they will now be able to do something - something that they absolutely hate... (also, why is it always piano that parents try to force on children?)
> they will now be able to do something - something that they absolutely hate A valuable life skill if you want to ever have a job or get paid.
Honestly, I wish I had been taught that lesson early, so as to internalize it profoundly.
Even with a lot of discipline and self-control, going through each and every day without mind-altering substances at hand is pretty dang difficult.