41–50 of 80 posts
This is sad. Really sad. My personal opinion is that Americans just dislike academic matters so much that they are incapable of forming a coherent solution for their children's schooling. Let me tell you some personal anecdotes. I moved to Minnesota during my High school senior year from Vietnam. It sucked: I couldn't hold on to conversations, and people couldn't understand my pronunciation; so I was bored and very l…
This is sad. Really sad. My personal opinion is that Americans just dislike academic matters so much that they are incapable of forming a coherent solution for their children's schooling. Let me tell you some personal anecdotes. I moved to Minnesota during my High school senior year from Vietnam. It sucked: I couldn't hold on to conversations, and people couldn't understand my pronunciation; so I was bored and very l…
Back to problem of American math schooling. Here is my prescription: just make the damn students do it. Require them to work on math. Forget about the whole, um, personality and uniqueness and whatnots. You know where these things are from? The toil of work (for students, that's studying) builds personality, values, and one's importance and uniqueness. You know where self esteem is from? It's from holding a piece of…
On one end you will hear people equate math to calculating, this is almost exclusively how math is taught in school today, and on the other, people like to talk about math ideas, and how we shouldn't really teach people how to calculate anymore since we got computers for that. Like in many aspects of life, learning math is about balance. In truth, people should learn from both areas simultaneously, since they are mut…
This is sad. Really sad. My personal opinion is that Americans just dislike academic matters so much that they are incapable of forming a coherent solution for their children's schooling. Let me tell you some personal anecdotes. I moved to Minnesota during my High school senior year from Vietnam. It sucked: I couldn't hold on to conversations, and people couldn't understand my pronunciation; so I was bored and very l…
The people who are genuinely interested in math would still be doing that. We've tried teaching computation but the retention rate just isn't there, and isn't practical anyway. Why not do something useful with that time instead?
I think he argues from the wrong point. Yes, we need to teach math, not calculating. No, the argument is not "because we can do calculating with computers today". Lockhart got it right in his famous lament - the problem is that we face a system of self-sustaining bullshit that actually thinks it's teaching math. My guess is that Conrad Wolfram probably plans to conveniently also sell the accompanying software for thi…
I don't see why the software used is particularly important. The point should be the mathematics, rather than specific tools. I don't know how hard it is to transition from Wolfram Alpha, to, say, Matlab, but I don't think it's difficult.
This is sad. Really sad. My personal opinion is that Americans just dislike academic matters so much that they are incapable of forming a coherent solution for their children's schooling. Let me tell you some personal anecdotes. I moved to Minnesota during my High school senior year from Vietnam. It sucked: I couldn't hold on to conversations, and people couldn't understand my pronunciation; so I was bored and very l…
I have a number of questions/thoughts:
1. With the type of schooling you went through, how many people actually like math at the end of their schooling? I realize you did, but then again there are people in American schools that also like math. How many, really?
2. How much of that math that everyone has to learn is actually useful for the average person?
3. You say "Forget about the whole, um, personality and uniqueness and whatnots." -- This is basically the approach that has been taken throughout most of history, grounded in the idea that we're all empty cups to be filled. However, the "empty cups to be filled" idea is flawed. It's true that in America people hate to be called the same, enjoy their uniqueness, etc. -- however that idea is more than just a skin-deep preference. Young people are different, have different hobbies, different values, personalities, and have different ways of learning. One can apply one method and ignore all that (ie. your prescription), or another is to realize that differences do exist and structure the learning environment to cater for it. The former is a proven way of producing decent outcomes (though very varied); the latter is in many respects unproven/unsolved, and so I believe has much greater potential. Just as HN'ers pursue innovation through technology (in most cases), the latter pursues innovation with learning outcomes.
This is not, in fact, true for polynomial equations of order greater than four. From Wikipedia, "the Abel–Ruffini theorem states that there is no general algebraic solution... to polynomial equations of degree five or higher." This is often featured as one of the main results in an undergraduate abstract algebra course.
I'm all for automating calculations, but the algorithms behind calculations and their proofs are important and often fascinating. Handing students an implementation of such algorithms, e.g. Mathematica, takes away their opportunity to code up the algorithms and understand them deeply.
Edit: Wording
This is sad. Really sad. My personal opinion is that Americans just dislike academic matters so much that they are incapable of forming a coherent solution for their children's schooling. Let me tell you some personal anecdotes. I moved to Minnesota during my High school senior year from Vietnam. It sucked: I couldn't hold on to conversations, and people couldn't understand my pronunciation; so I was bored and very l…