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My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

theatlantic.com

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Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#341

Post by eru »

mistercow wrote: post #132
comex wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my impression that doing basic mental arithmetic effectively tends to depend on understanding what happens to the magnitudes of numbers after various operations and making good approximations, which has very little resemblance to the brute force long multiplication/addition/division that is taught, but is teachable; yet approximations are almost never acceptable in school, despite being very useful in real life.…

The first thing you described is what is called "Fermi estimation". Basic mental arithmetic is being able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in your head. That kind of arithmetic is strictly a prerequisite for Fermi estimation. The main purpose of Fermi estimation is not to make the calculation easier (although it can be used for that too), but to get answers while not having very good data. For…

Metric would have made your indoor pool example way easier.

4 foot is around 1.2m,so you have around 1.2 metric tons of water per square meter. Most buildings are designed for at most a few 100kg per square meter.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#342

Post by greenyoda »

tptacek wrote: post #133
acabal wrote: post #19

What stood out for me from this article wasn't the homework load, which only seems slightly more than what I remember from my own youth, but rather that: 1) a teacher can accuse a parent of "cyberbullying" for an email sent in purported confidentiality to others, and that the claim can be taken seriously. Obviously I didn't read the email, but the author seems well-read and reasonable, so I'm inclined to conjecture t…

The "cyber-bullying" thing seemed janky when I read it. We don't know exactly what he wrote to the other parents, or the tone of the conversation they had. We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration. It may have been nastier than the author is crediting it for.

"We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration.'

There is no evidence that the parent who forwarded the e-mail to the teacher (not the school administration; apparently the teacher did that) was "alarmed" by it. They merely disagreed with it. Here's the quote from the article:

"Back in California, when I raised the issue of too much homework on that e‑mail chain, about half the parents were pleased that someone had brought this up, and many had already spoken to the math teacher about it. Others were eager to approach school officials. But at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the teacher in question."

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#343

Post by vacri »

tptacek wrote: post #136
vacri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I don't hold her to be the slightest bit representative, it's just that such a simple mathematical process is just... automatic. I'm not mathy at all - I've abandoned several online crypto intro courses because I can't follow at a reasonable speed when the notation comes out - but when it comes to manipulating single-digit numbers? In her case it was significantly affected by her lack of motivation, but i…

I'm enjoying your comments. Regarding the crypto: that's too bad, because a big chunk of crypto involves de minimis math, and that chunk is the most useful; crypto is as much algorithms and computer science as it is math. Consider letting us beat you over the head with crypto challenges sometime; we wrote them in ASCII text, so there's no notation. :)

I forgot that you have the ascii crypto challenges - I'll certainly look into them, ta.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#344

Post by cac04 »

joe5150 wrote: post #326
cac04 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logical positivism doesn't strike me as a concept with much logical positivist value.

Yeah, sure, but that doesn't make "those who were never born" any more meaningful to argue about than, you know, the present bald King of France or whatever.

I know, I was just being facetious. It amuses me that logical positivism fails its own verification principle.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#345

Post by PeterisP »

mcdougle wrote: post #298
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then just skip it! The lying is the issue. If you judge the homework as not being worthwhile, then don't do it, say you didn't do it, and move on.

The problem with that is that, in society currently, your grades are what matter -- at least if you want a normal job at a normal company. To get a job, you have to have a college degree and a good GPA. To get that, you have to get good grades in college -- which means doing the homework and taking the tests. To even get into a decent college you have to have a good GPA in high school -- which, again, means doing the…

Does anybody really care about your GPA when applying for jobs? Resumes are filtered by many random criteria, but I've never seen grades being one of them - most jobs that require a degree won't particularly care about what you majored in, they want someone who can provably do the job - so experience matters, connections matter and can replace experience; knowledge and skills matter, but grades? Not really.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#346

Post by joe5150 »

cac04 wrote: post #344
joe5150 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure, but that doesn't make "those who were never born" any more meaningful to argue about than, you know, the present bald King of France or whatever.

I know, I was just being facetious. It amuses me that logical positivism fails its own verification principle.

"Logical Positivism" has been roundly debunked, but I think some of its principles, and those of the movements that came before and after it, are important and applicable. I call a lot of these "logical positivism" more by habit than by way of endorsing the philosophy as such.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#347

Post by kazagistar »

hobs wrote: post #229
Karawebnetwork wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While everyone thinks "What an idiot." While you are 100% right that you dont NEED to know that Paris is the capital of France, displaying that ignorance for all to see is just bad form. While your analogy makes sense (bolivian capital no one knows about), knowing that Paris is the capital of France is incidental knowledge when you spend any time looking at western history for the last several hundred years.

That is a cultural problem, and one that is going away. Trivia used to dominate what people thought of as intelligence, but since it is so utterly useless in the era of online search, that particular brand of intelligence is a complete waste.

People who have absurd volumes of trivia in their heads seem like less intelligent these days (at least to me) simply because it means they are not smart enough to allocate their learning time to things that are actually valuable.

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