Are you smarter than a 4th grader?
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Some things. I've always been into math. I remember learning to write cursive at the time, repeating the letters over and over. Other lessons, not so much.
The other thing I remember from those days about math is they taught us some basic axioms about addition and subtraction, such as one number plus another number is the same as the second number plus the first number. The hardest one they taught to grasp (I don't recall how it was phrased as they didn't use letters for variables) was something like a times (b+c) is the same as a x b + a x c.
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Also, your tears are delicious.
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Gurgeh
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Also asking to memorize is a good way to measure the effort put in studies by a student. And whenever you measure efforts put in by the students, you get embarassing results for the left, i.e. the main reason poor kids, and even more so, "minorities" (as in not white/asian/jew) fail is the lack of effort. And this lack of effort comes from bad parenting. An Asian kid knows that if he failed a test due not memorizing something, death is preferable to coming back home (and I mean that quite literally... look up suicide rates in japan/korea/china...)
It is definitely not acceptable for the left that an easy way to improve outcomes for "underpriviledged" students is to pressure parents into pressuring their kids into making efforts into studies. They want the parents as much as possible out of the educationnal loop.
It is definitely not acceptable for the left that an easy way to improve outcomes for "underpriviledged" students is to pressure parents into pressuring their kids into making efforts into studies. They want the parents as much as possible out of the educationnal loop.
Yeah, we'll know everyone's pitching in and we're learning math correctly when our kids are killing themselves at the proper rate.
You guys must enjoy pain. I got damn near zero benefit from memorization. If it's a byproduct of repeated problem solving, fine, but bulk memorization as a primary learning device can go fuck itself in the ear.
Gurgeh
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Literally no one is saying memorization should be the bulk of education, but trying to get entirely rid of memorization at any cost is retarded, period. All technical skills require both memorization and understanding to master them. And testing if a student was able to memorize something, is a great way to measure efforts he's puting into his studies.
Asia go totaly overboard with that, but their worst students are also the best there are... Which should be what the left should like, I guess.
No one is really saying this, either. What's being proposed is that balance be pushed towards exercises that teach conceptual relationships.
It's a great way to measure how well he can memorize things, which is not the same as how well he understands the subject. I'm intimately familar with the difference. I have an econ degree from a top five school and didn't realize until years later that I'd powered through a lot of shit I didn't really have an intuitive handle on.
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Gurgeh
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Err... how is that related to my post, I'm saying that if you want to measure the effort put in by a student, testing the memorization is a great way, because it's less corelated to "talent/IQ" than being able to manipulate abstract concepts. As for balancing between "brutal memorization" and "reasoning", it depends on the student. The outcome of heavily "reasoning" for around or below average student is catastrophic. Just look how all international testing went for the west since we moved out from the good old memorizing heavy teaching.
The truth is probably that you need to separate the bottom 70% from the top 30% fairly early and teach them differently, and among those top 30% you need to separate the bottom 70% from the top 30% later on... The problem is that on this board, probably everyone is top 30% and most top 10%... and their only interactions with sub 100 IQ people are at the checkout of their walmart. 60 years ago, even the dumbest of the dumb had a full mastery of writing/reading/basic algebra at age 12. Now, 30% have learnt absolutely nothing at school at 18. They can barely read, not write at all, and maths, lol. It is entirely our fault as it is something that is not happening in Asia, even in the developped countries (Japan/Korea/HK/ Singapor)
Sorry, I was assuming that you were using effort as a proxy for understanding, which I would have said was the point of education. If we just wanted to have people who could tip at restaurants without a calculator we could just teach a couple heuristics and be done with it.
The general lack of conceptual understanding is a much bigger problem than people not being able to execute some hand-picked operations by rote, IMO. The world would look very different if we had an intuitive handle on ideas like how to evaluate risk, interpret polls and scientific data, and basic financial analysis.
Eh. Our performance isn't amazing, but the results haven't changed to a statistically significant degree since testing started.
What international test scores reveal about American education | Brookings
Has U.S. school performance been improving over the past two decades? The results of two international tests—the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Assessment (TIMSS)—shed some light on this question. Both were administered...
www.brookings.edu
This is definitely not my experience with people in that age bracket.
I'd definitely agree that any one size fits all solution is sub-optimal for nearly everyone. If I could wave a magic wand I'd want to see a lot more multidisciplinary project-based work, with the teachers mentoring and guiding students to learn in the ways that work best of them. I've got no idea what the path between here and there looks like, though.
Gurgeh
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Don't forget who the people doing the teaching are... Even if some very bright people design a super smart way to teach kids, the bottom line is that it's mostly being applied by not-so-amazing teacher. That's why the so simple it's dumb system in Asia is outperforming ours, what we're trying to do only work in a laboratory not in the real world. The old way of teaching is quite robust on the other hand, you can have dumbasses students, teachers, parents, it somehow works. Not optimal in a perfect world, yeah, sure.
As for the USA, you've constantly dropped in the ranking from 28th in 2003 to 40th in 2015, same for most western country, France from 15 to 26. Programme for International Student Assessment - Wikipedia
sleevedraw
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Mist
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Read the post just above yours. It's about the difference between engaging the chimp parts of your brain vs the human parts of your brain.
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Aldarion
Egg Nazi
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We're not arguing here but its an interesting discussion about how memory works. And maybe it works different for different people. But I actually think numbers are even easier to memorize than the strict comparison of bits accounts for; the comparison of bits was just a way to illustrate it in terms of information content.
Numbers are fundamentally easy to memorize because they can be represented symbolically without the inefficient "translate into English" step. When I remember a number, the verbal parts of my brain arent involved at all. Its more like remembering a picture. Memories that are accessible without effort.
If one has memorized the tables, when the brain is asked "what is 7x9", the retrieval process is the same as when the brain is asked "whats the letter between A and C?" or "What color is between red and yellow in the rainbow?" Retrieve the array, look at the relevant part of the array, print answer. A single effortless step - simply look at the answer.
If one has not memorized the tables, Mist would have us instead retrieve a string of text. This is a fundamentally harder process. It is asking you "what is the second line in Hamlet's soliloquy?" Yeah, you can retrieve the answer, but it takes more time and effort than retrieving "what is the color between red and yellow in the rainbow?"
THEN after retrieving the answer, one still has to do three mathematical operations: subtract, subtract, concatenate. What a scam! I had to memorize something harder, then after retrieving it I still had to do arithmetic.
That is the discussion, as far as I can see. The old way allowed students to simply look up the answer in their heads. The new way is asking them to perform an operation akin to remembering the second line of Hamlet's soliloquy, then performing three simple operations, to get the same answer.
It just makes no sense to me, replacing something easy with something harder, in order to satisfy some educator's desire to impart this nebulous thing called understanding when they are unable to assess understanding in the first place...
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iannis
Musty Nester
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Yeah. It may be ten facts, but it is one process. The algorithm is one fact, but three processes.
It's easy for me to say memorization is better when memorization has always been a personal strength. I do think it is true, but it's also easy to say.
I think you start with it, filter out the children that respond to that method. The ones that dont... Develop alternatives. In a hypothetical perfect world. That will never work in the context of a public classroom.
Although, it's exactly what advanced math classes were for. They were segregating. They shouldn't stop an effective method.
It's easy for me to say memorization is better when memorization has always been a personal strength. I do think it is true, but it's also easy to say.
I think you start with it, filter out the children that respond to that method. The ones that dont... Develop alternatives. In a hypothetical perfect world. That will never work in the context of a public classroom.
Although, it's exactly what advanced math classes were for. They were segregating. They shouldn't stop an effective method.
Void
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I don't know why I'm bothering, and this is assuming that your statement is actually true (I have no idea, I don't study the brain) without seeing any actual proof, but now you're making me ask why engaging both parts of our brain is a bad thing. We still clearly use parts of our "chimp" brain for a lot of things that are instinctual and "gut reaction" vs. reasoning it out with the human part. So why is it bad that, if the human part of my brain has already learned how to manipulate numbers the way you supposedly do, I now teach the chimp part of my brain to respond instantly with the answer, saving time and processing power for when the solution can't just be instantly accessed? I clearly know how to do it your way (which still involves memorization, just not as much), why do I have to "prove it" every single time I want to multiply something that doesn't have a 2, 3, 10, or 12 in it? Like I said before, there is no cap on how much "instinctual" memory we have (as far as I'm aware at least), so why is it bad to fill it up with something incredibly useful like multiplication tables?
I really don't understand why you can't see the usefulness of pairing both methods together, because unless you've got some proof that constantly starting with 3x8 and then doubling it to figure out 6x8 is stimulating your big brain to stay sharper or come up with better ideas or anything actually tangible, it just sounds like you are purposely tying one hand behind your back for no other reason than to say your way is "smarter" and thus better. Meanwhile, the rest of us are using both hands and finishing the task faster. And still fully capable of doing it with our hand tied behind our back just like you, if we were ever forced into that situation. But we aren't, and we never will be. There is never a situation where someone is going to make you NOT recall a memorized multiplication table to figure out an answer. So you are needlessly handicapping yourself because it makes you feel superior maybe? That makes no sense. Unless you literally cannot memorize things, then sure, your way is the only way. But I'm fairly certain you're capable of it, so I just don't get it.
LachiusTZ
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You seem really invested in a topic that has nothing to do with you since:
Your a nihilist.
You will not have kids.
You dont care about the future.
Believe existence is 100% deterministic.
Are a broken product of a corrupted portion of our culture.
Mist
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LachiusTZ
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