Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't force your kids to do math

blog.avocados.ovh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 437 posts

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#391

Post by serbuvlad »

Izkata wrote: post #385
serbuvlad wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought when I read sum(x+3, 1, 4) was x+3+1+4. Also it should be sum(x+3, x, 1, 4) since you need to encode what the iterator variable is as well.

I thought that was it too, but you're saying it's not..? I've been thinking about it for a few minutes now and I still can't figure out what other meaning it could have. Edit: Oh wait, someone else mentions map/filter, did they mean this as a combination of range->map->sum and the latter two numbers are the range portion, like sum(map(x+3, 1..4)) ? Edit2: And now I'm remembering sigma. I think it would have been more…

Yep. I agree and now we've basically reinvented sigma. Take the x=1 and put it below, take the 4 and put it above take the x+3 and put it to the right.

Granted I always found sigma a bit quirky for separating the range ends like that. Either x below and 1..4 above, or x=1..4 below/above would have been more intuitive.

But it's just a notation you learn once and then you know it.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#392

Post by clove »

jerkstate wrote: post #288
clove wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progra…

Thanks.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#393

Post by elteto »

margalabargala wrote: post #321
hkpack wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you personally tried to keep a teen away from a screen? If you did with a success, I would really like to hear your story and what has worked for you. Looking at my kids friends / classmates, almost all of the parents just gave up, with the exception of a small group that is still trying with the discussed approach.

"Keeping teens away from screens"? And why are there screens? Sugar is addictive. One would not necessarily expect a teen to healthily control their sugar intake; accordingly, we don't put bowls of candy around the house, and if we did we certainly wouldn't be shocked when they emptied themselves, and then thrown up our hands and said "can't keep kids from candy, what can you do?". Our kids aren't teens yet, but the…

There are screens because their entire social circle has phones, sometimes from an early age. If your kids don’t have them then they are the odd ones out, and excluded socially, which has their own extremely negative consequences.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#394

Post by blitzar »

anon-3988 wrote: post #367
blitzar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Teaching them piano is probably the worse thing you can do if you want them to get paid lol. You should be teaching them plumbing instead.

You don't want to put them off plumbing for life!

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#395

Post by blitzar »

kif wrote: post #233
laurent_du wrote: post #102

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’m not a parent myself, but something I’ve seen happen with an American family I know, is that they push their kids way too much to learn and do as many things as possible. They have their music lessons, their many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo. At some point you have to stop and wonder whether you’re taking their childhood away. These kids barely have any free time.…

> At some point you have to stop and wonder whether you’re taking their childhood away.

At some point you have to stop and wonder if a great childhood is doing - music lessons, many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo etc.

They are occupied, they are trying new things, learning new skills, running around outside, interacting with their peers.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#396

Post by meekaaku »

I don't get why people take it so negatively when a parent mandating kids to do/learn things they don't like.

But the entire notion of public education is rested upon mandating that kids wake up and go to school, sit down and learn things they don't necessarily like. I am pretty sure there isnt a single student who loved/found joy in all the subjects all the time.

Yet when a parent does it, there is backlash?

Humans respond to carrot and stick, and so do kids. To excel at anything, requires healthy mix of enjoyment, love, discipline and motivation. Some of these come intrinsically, others extrinsic.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#397

Post by globular-toast »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #357
globular-toast wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many programs are at a much higher level of abstraction than mathematics. If you are implementing domain logic then you should definitely use names from the domain. But when implementing an algorithm often the most meaningful name is a single character. I find it odd when people try to force the "no single character" rule everywhere.

But I've got to say, the short names are not the problem. If you rewrote F=ma as "force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration" this wouldn't suddenly make it more accessible to swathes of the population. People who are good at maths anyway have no problem with this.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#398

Post by florbnit »

sublinear wrote: post #81
WalterBright wrote: post #63

> 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.

> People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value.

The way I was taught it and the way that worked now for my now 3 year old is just to say pirates buried a number under the X, and that we need to guess what they buried. If the concept of a number being hidden is a barrier to understanding for anyone they have seriously bad teachers.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#399

Post by Izkata »

Buttons840 wrote: post #72
zmgsabst wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always found that an indictment of math education — and spent many, many hours discussing it. When teaching addition, workbooks commonly use a box, eg, “[ ] + 2 = 5” — and first graders have no conceptual problem with this. Somehow, we lose people by the time we’re trying to formalize the same concept in algebra. There’s been many times I’ve written a box around letters in a problem and asked students “what’s in…

Go from "[ ] + 2 = 5" to writing it "box + 2 = 5--what is box?". Then "b + 2 = 5--what is b?" then "x + 2 = 5--what is x?".

You skipped a step. One of the problems is more obvious with a different operator we learn when in the "box" stage:

> Go from "[ ] x 2 = 10" to writing it "box x 2 = 10--what is box?". Then "b x 2 = 10--what is b?" then "x x 2 = 10--what is x?".

From memory, we didn't switch from "x" to dot for multiplication until at the exact same time we started using symbols. If we'd done it earlier (or even right from the start) it might not have been as much of a problem.

Post reply on HN