Great video on our terrible education system

[tommo]

[cmind]

Good video, I agree with most of what he said. My one objection is the statement that group work makes for better learning, which in my experience at the college level is clearly false. Students who study in groups (at least in science) tend to do much worse than independent students. But aside from that, good points made. Unfortunately, you will never, ever, ever, see any changes made to public education because it's run by the state.

[Universal Mind]

That sounds kind of neat on the surface, but I don't understand how it could really work in reality. How exactly is a math or science class supposed to be taught? You can't be that creative with the answers to math problems. Fun games with those subjects can be played, but how much divergent thinking can be involved in finding an angle measure or balancing a chemical equation? There is an answer to each problem, and that's it. Those answers are not subject to personal interpretation or expression. They are what they are. However, there is a SERIOUS problem with attention and motivation these days, and something needs to be done. Mainly, parents need to start raising their fucking kids instead of spoiling them into oblivion. That's the real problem.

[Xei]

The way maths is currently taught is pretty awful actually. By a vast margin, the most important thing about mathematics is that it teaches you how to solve novel problems in a creative but rigorous fashion. You currently see virtually none of this at school level. Kids are just given a specific set of symbolic problems (solving quadratics, for instance), and then a specific method that will solve all problems of exactly that type if you follow it to the letter. This totally misses the point. These algorithms aren't maths; they're the result of previous people having done maths. Barely any people will actually use this stuff in their adult lives. It's no surprise that kids aren't motivated when they're given no context at all. There's no real world impetus, there's no indication of why you'd even want to do it, or how it's related to anything else in maths, or how it might be extended, and certainly there's no attempt to explain how you might ever come up with such a thing. Nobody came up with it; it's just some obscure, independent, boring thing which you have to learn. This kind of thing is largely pointless for a number of reasons. For a start, it's not even achieving its narrow goals, which is the teaching of algebraic skill. Take factorisation, where you try to put the quadratic in the form (x + a)(x + b) by inspection. For this you need an understanding of expansion. Students learn some boring algorithm for this, normally a 'crossover' method where you multiply the first pair of terms and then the first and second terms and so on. But what would happen if you asked the student 'why'? I bet that less than 5%, quite probably less than 1% even, could give you a decent answer as to why this works. And if they don't even know the basic 'how', there's no way they're going to understand why they're actually factorising it. But more importantly, it misses what's valuable about maths. 'Maths' isn't really a noun; it's a verb. The important bit, anyway. Although it's quite important to have basic familiarity and aptitude with the basic body of knowledge, what's far more important is an understanding of how and why this knowledge came about in the first place. In other words, the ability to abstract a problem from a circumstance, and to use both analytical and creative thought to tackle it. This skill, along with the appreciation of rigour in arguments, is the valuable skill, for pretty much anybody. How could it be taught practically? In the obvious way really, by providing students with novel problems and them trying to solve them, in groups and as individuals. And this encompasses the teaching of material like quadratics. Think of a problem that requires the solving of a quadratic. Get the students to abstract it. Ask them if they can solve it. Ask them why not. Ask them how they might try. Ask them what kind of problems they can solve and how this new problem could be made to relate to that knowledge. They get to experience first hand where the issue comes from, how it relates to other things, and their understanding of the method itself will be far stronger considering they took active part in working it out. And then of course you can ask what further questions this raises, and how one might extend it. That covers a lot of how I feel about the education system, though I have more to add which is more general. A good essay by a mathematician about this same issue can be found here.

[cmind]

However, there is a SERIOUS problem with attention and motivation these days, and something needs to be done. Mainly, parents need to start raising their fucking kids instead of spoiling them into oblivion. That's the real problem. Or maybe if mothers stayed home and actually raised the kids instead of shipping them off to pre-pre-pre-school at the ripe old age of 2. And then when the kid has emotional problems as a result, they get spoiled with a heavy dose of drugs.

[Universal Mind]

Xei, I agree with you. However, I have personally tested what you are talking about, and I still had a problem with too many completely unmotivated students. I stirred up a good bit of controversy as a math teacher because I tried to get the kids to actually understand what the Hell they were doing. A lot of them, as well as their parents and my bosses, bitched that I needed to quit explaining what and why it is instead of just working problems over and over so the students could memorize patterns. The good students liked my technique, and the bad students despised it. They didn't want to think! They just wanted the easy way out. But... I have seen a lot of students since their graduations, and some of the whiniest pains in the ass I taught have thanked me for getting them to understand what math really is. They said it made college math and standardized tests much easier. Lack of understanding why math works the way it does is the reason so many of my seniors had trouble doing basic things like adding fractions and solving equations. They had to be retaught that stuff every year because they never got a mental hold on what is happening. cmind, you might have a point there. I have seen kids grow up very well although they started daycare at 2, but I think some kids need constant parenting until they are about 3 or 4. Those are the years when the most psychological shaping occurs.

[Alric]

I think the age thing really applies to math though. Math is really hard and currently people are pressured to continually go up to a new math level every year, and that puts to much pressure on people. It also creates gaps in people knowledge, so even at high level math classes there are people who might not fully mastered basic math. People who struggle with high level math often get the high level part being taught but still totally mess up the basic algebra. It only takes one small gap in your knowledge, and you totally mess up the problem. Its that factory model they talk about. Where you go through math by levels, and everyone is expected to do the same. Ideally people should be given as much time as they need to work on the math and you shouldn't be stuck in one class. If you are stuck some where, you should be able to go back and study low level math, fill in the missing knowledge then come back. There shouldn't be any penalties with switching back and forth. All the math is connected, so you are still learning and improving even if you don't study math chapter by chapter straight through 10 years of school without ever deviating.

[tommo]

Xei, I agree with you. However, I have personally tested what you are talking about, and I still had a problem with too many completely unmotivated students. I stirred up a good bit of controversy as a math teacher because I tried to get the kids to actually understand what the Hell they were doing. A lot of them, as well as their parents and my bosses, bitched that I needed to quit explaining what and why it is instead of just working problems over and over so the students could memorize patterns. The good students liked my technique, and the bad students despised it. They didn't want to think! They just wanted the easy way out. But... I have seen a lot of students since their graduations, and some of the whiniest pains in the ass I taught have thanked me for getting them to understand what math really is. They said it made college math and standardized tests much easier. So how is that a bad thing? They obviously had bad teachers before you, which is why some of them were "lazy". And you just said that they thanked you for helping them actually grasp the maths. There will probably always be a very small percentage of people who just do not have the intelligence to get it. But that's not a detriment to the teaching method.

[Universal Mind]

I think the age thing really applies to math though. Math is really hard and currently people are pressured to continually go up to a new math level every year, and that puts to much pressure on people. It also creates gaps in people knowledge, so even at high level math classes there are people who might not fully mastered basic math. People who struggle with high level math often get the high level part being taught but still totally mess up the basic algebra. It only takes one small gap in your knowledge, and you totally mess up the problem. Its that factory model they talk about. Where you go through math by levels, and everyone is expected to do the same. Ideally people should be given as much time as they need to work on the math and you shouldn't be stuck in one class. If you are stuck some where, you should be able to go back and study low level math, fill in the missing knowledge then come back. There shouldn't be any penalties with switching back and forth. All the math is connected, so you are still learning and improving even if you don't study math chapter by chapter straight through 10 years of school without ever deviating. You really might be on to something with that. I haven't worked out the details in my head, but something like that needs to happen. You are right about how kids can understand the new material but not get much more basic stuff it is assumed they know. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they never truly learned the basic stuff. They just memorized steps for using it. That alone can get lost in a hurry. For example, a large chunk of my trigonometry students fairly easily learned how to apply the half angle formulas but didn't remember from previous years how to get rid of a radical in a denominator. So, my lessons on half angle formulas were mostly about how to do that. There were so many times I felt like saying to a student, "All right, you need to go to the other building and get a pre-algebra teacher to go over this with you while I teach the class about big kid stuff." Seriously, about a fifth of my seniors at the last school didn't know what the terms for decimal places meant. I would say they needed to round their answers to the nearest hundredth, and they would screw that up. They would say things like, "I thought that was three places to the right of the decimal. 100 has three digits." They were seniors! So how is that a bad thing? They obviously had bad teachers before you, which is why some of them were "lazy". And you just said that they thanked you for helping them actually grasp the maths. There will probably always be a very small percentage of people who just do not have the intelligence to get it. But that's not a detriment to the teaching method. It's bad mainly because the students didn't learn like they could have. In many cases, they learned just enough to get by, although they really understood what they did learn. Also, the mindset they came in with made teaching much more difficult than it had to be. The problem with math in private schools is that private schools are businesses. That is an advantage in the way that it makes adminstrators take their jobs very seriously, but it has the disadvantage of creating a "customer is always right" mentality. That does not belong in a school! The customer is often wrong as Hell. These days, rich kids in the U.S. are controlling their parents, who control the administrators who control private schools. In summary, kids are controlling private schools. The kids in way too many cases demand that they be taught the easy short term way instead of the real way, which involves harder thinking.