I believe that the most important thing I can show my kids is how I pursue the things I enjoy. That I make time for myself and that I handle setbacks and dips in motivation. So that they will know that when you do find something that interests you, that is how you pursue it in the long run. I show them how to not quit.
Don't force your kids to do math
351–360 of 437 posts
Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't hate it. They dislike being bad at it, they dislike working hard at things, and they like video games and scrolling on their phones. And yes practicing will result in them getting better.
The primary design goal for most traditional instruments was making them as loud as possible. I was briefly made to play violin as a child, and I definitely hated it (fortunately my parents recognized this and didn't push too hard). The reason is in retrospect obvious: violins are loud and piercing and played close to the ear. Nobody considered hearing protection back then. I learned recorder as an adult and the loud…
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Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parenting, having and raising children, including but not limited to the act of giving birth is the ultimate example. There are many "piano lessons" along that journey. Sometimes you have to eat a shit sandwich.
Sure, but you don’t have to accept that they’re the only thing on the menu.
Sure, you can take off at 2am and leave a screaming 2 month old child in a room and never come back, because you have been trying for hours to stop it from crying and it is just too fucking hard - just like you can walk out of your piano lesson and never go back.
Or you can reach for the sandwich.
Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't hate it. They dislike being bad at it, they dislike working hard at things, and they like video games and scrolling on their phones. And yes practicing will result in them getting better.
The primary design goal for most traditional instruments was making them as loud as possible. I was briefly made to play violin as a child, and I definitely hated it (fortunately my parents recognized this and didn't push too hard). The reason is in retrospect obvious: violins are loud and piercing and played close to the ear. Nobody considered hearing protection back then. I learned recorder as an adult and the loud…
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Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#356Very 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 think there's also a significant cultural dimension to this discussion.
For example, in many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures (pardon my generalization here), there's an ingrained expectation that children should be pushed, often quite hard, especially in areas like mathematics, science, engineering, and law. Hence the old cliche: "You have three career options: doctor, lawyer, or engineer.".
I've seen this firsthand as a Middle Easterner (I was born in IRAN). My father is an engineer, and both my parents were relentless when it came to academic discipline. I ended up in computer science, and my brother became a pharmaceutical researcher after obtaining his PHD.. There's no question that this kind of structure and pressure produced tangible results. But I'd be lying if I said it was an easy or joyful process. It ended up costing me plenty of social anxieties and now I struggle with social dynamics.
That said, I have mixed feelings about it. While the rigor pays off in terms of career and technical competence, it often comes at the cost of creativity, intrinsic motivation, and the space to explore things like literature, music, and the arts. I sometimes wonder what paths we might have followed if exploration had been valued as highly as performance.
So I _partially_ agree with you that some degree of external motivation is necessary, especially with children who haven't yet developed discipline. But I also think we should be careful not to frame this solely as a matter of "lazy" vs. "good" parenting. Upon reflection, I think that there's a balance between encouragement, discipline, and allowing for the development of intrinsic interest. Different families, cultures, and even individual children may need to strike this in different ways.
Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
This is like trying to change English or arguing that we should all speak Esperanto. Mathematical notation isn't the way it is to save ink or make it look difficult. It's that way because it works. Notation isn't set by committee, it's just a way of communication that works. If you read cutting edge research you'll find notations being invented all over the place. Most of them will never go anywhere, some will become…
I think this is a very limited take for a hacker forum. We talk about how useful accurate names for variables are all the time, or generally how working to encode more natural/context-related semantics to code helps anyone reading it understand what the goal is better than an extremely terse symbology.
Yeah, lots of existing math texts will forever exist with greek alphabet soup, but we don't have to rely on those as our be-all-end-all teaching tools.
To operate at a high level in mathematics I would agree that having the skill of easily abstracting complex things into compact symbols is a necessary skill, just as I would agree to the same concept applied to software engineering or really any complex engineering system; by the same token, we don't have to START on hard mode with all of our students. Math is infamously difficult for some, largely (I think) because we make it unnecessarily opaque out of some misguided sense of traditionalism.
If we want to have lots of people who are good at math we should embrace whatever pedagogy is effective.
Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, no. Universities are great places to learn math. You’re misrepresenting the genuine passion for teaching that many university instructors have.
Sorry, no. For whatever reason, many University programs use high level math classes as a filter to weed out 1st year students from that program. If university instructors had a genuine passion, and ability, for teaching high level math then they wouldn't accept that as an outcome.
Sorry no.
You are misrepresenting what's happening. Other departments use beginning math classes as a way of weeding out students they feel won't succeed in their fields because they can't pass basic mathematics classes. Most math departments would absolutely love to have more students in them.
The problem is that these students aren't prepared properly by K-12 mathematics courses and math builds upon itself. If you don't have a good grasp of algebra, you just won't succeed at calculus. We're sticking people in the equivalent of Spanish 4 without having learned Spanish 1 properly.
Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probability/Statistics is a good excuse to learn mathematics, because paying a little attention one finds lots of day-to-day situations where is possible to apply it. For example, see the secretary problem[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
I wish I couldve excluded everything past basic algebra and hopped right to statistics at a young age - I *loved* everything about the practicality of it, how it explained tangible relationships and illuminated the world. Algebra and calculus were so un-engaging I had those teachers calling me everything but a stupid child.
Except you can't really understand statistics without calculus.
Re: Don't force your kids to do math
#360As someone who just finished school, I’m trying to figure out how to get genuinely interested in mathematics. I’ve never been particularly strong at it, yet I’m planning to enter a university program that demands a high level of math. The problem is, it’s hard to motivate myself to study math for its own sake. For example, I loved learning programming because it’s hands‑on—I can build something and immediately see th…
I feel like a lot of platitudes are being said here.
If anyone had a guaranteed way to make people enjoy math, we'd already be applying that method.
Just read ahead to figure out what you'll need to learn, and do some advance reading. Anything thag make the courses easier will tend to make them more fun.