As a high school student, I can tell you that what kids (or at least I) REALLY don't have passion for is tedious, boring work and classes that are boring.
Some teachers give far more homework than is necessary to learn the material. I understand that not all learn as fast as I, but it really can get ridiculous and become a waste of time, which makes kids not just hate the homework but school in general. I like my calc class so much more this year because it's like many college classes--the homework is optional. I get A's on the tests w/o doing the homework, so why should I do homework?
Teachers need to make the material more interesting by applying it to the real world more. So many times in my calc class I've heard "Why do I care about whether this series converges?" and the like. Teachers need to come up with interesting ways to teach and show how it's actually used so that the students will care.
I like learning infinitely more when I'm building apps at home than at school, and it's not just because I like coding more than other stuff. I see it's use. The use of learning about lamdas is so that I can make x work so that this app will do what I want it to do.
Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have. It's not just about the tests.
> "Why do I care about whether this series converges?"
You can abstract anything to the point of irrelevance. Don't. Try to learn something from it. You're developing problem-solving skills, not merely finding the sum of a series.
"Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have."
I think that this is true, but after four years of working hard at a demanding high school I was actually substantially less able to "suck it up and get things done." I don't know if that's because high school burnt me out or because I changed mentally during high school or something else, but it makes me a lot less willing to accept that forcing people to work hard on boring shit makes them more likely to work hard on other boring shit in the future.
Agreed, that is a very important skill. But it's not always possible to avoid the grunt work ... even running your own business, someone still has to take out the trash (metaphorically), and the buck stops with you.
I've run into this a lot doing data analysis. Sometimes it takes 20-30 minutes to manually clean up the data (or more often, if it's structured enough, write a script to do it), but other people often overestimate the amount of work required, and decide that the grunt work isn't worth it. But it lets me make better conclusions from the data, so it's usually worth the effort.
" But it's not always possible to avoid the grunt work ... even running your own business, someone still has to take out the trash (metaphorically), and the buck stops with you."
An enviable skill is to be able to see past the grunt work to the value down the road.
The ability to not suck it up when you think it's definetely pointless is a great ability to have. It's what pushes some of us to choose challenging jobs or to go and create our own company.
There are sometimes when you have to do work that you don't like and you just have to suck it up and do it, but it's much easier and rewarding when this job is useful (example, researching a lot to finally decide which type of structure you'll incorporate with.
I actually have little issue w/ learning abstract concepts like rewriting functions as series. But my classmates often cite that as a reason they shouldn't bother putting in the time to really learn it.
I'm saying that a good way for teachers to engage students more is to show them examples that actually have some reflection on the real world, so that they can't say "this is totally useless. I won't bother learning it."
Teachers teaching well, making you realize the beauty and power of a converging series is what worked for me. If the teachers enjoys what they're teaching, it's infectious and makes you want to learn as well.
Not only that, but you should do homework because it forces you to learn the material through spaced repetition, which will create more access cues for your long-term memory.
> "But what doesn't make sense to me is that parts of our country are in serious economic decline and I am not aware of an uptick in engineering and science students in those regions."
There's a logical flaw in that line of reasoning.
The authors claim the following: "If a student has tackled a difficult subject, it is because s/he was motivated by economic hardship [or a passion for the subject]."
However, Fred seems to interpret this as the converse: "If a student is motivated by economic hardship , s/he will tackle a difficult subject" (This is NOT implied by the original statement), and base his argument on that. There are probably millions of people who are living proof that economic hardship & an opportunity to study doesn't automatically make you prefer difficult subjects.
His argument about passion, though, is spot-on. We do need to do more to encourage kids to develop healthy passions. I don't think you can make a kid love math overnight, but you certainly can kill a kid's passion for math by not supporting it. Supporting this passion for learning though, is easier said than done. It is much more of a family responsibility, than something that can be legislated by the government in a top-down fashion.
"In my house we give glory to achievement, self-respect and hard work. It's up to us to set these high expectations. And that means meeting those expectations ourselves.That means setting examples of excellence in our own lives."
That's a quote from earlier in the year, from our soon to be inaugurated President.
If you want people to study engineering/science, then there has to be jobs awaiting the graduates. Unless, of course, you merely want erudite cabbies and burger flippers. These fields have never been the route to serious coin, and now they've decamped for cheaper countries.
Unless there's strong economic or national security issues I'm unaware of, leave them to those interested in engineering/science. Hopefully, such people will actually know the subject matter and thus be able to actually deliver on their promise.
Yes supply massively outstrips demand for engineering graduates. Of my Mech Eng class most ended up in IT or banking. I estimate my salary now is at least 2x what I could be making as an engineer, and despite the economy being down at the moment I feel a lot more secure with my IT skillset than I would if my entire industry was in systemic decline.
I do wonder tho' if one day someone, a government or large corporation, will initiate grand engineering projects ("let's colonize Mars! Right now!") and I'll be left out for having abandoned the "true path". Nah, never happen.
Once a society gets too prosperous, the highest-paying jobs end up in fields like finance and law, far outpacing science and engineering. That's one reason for the decline in science -- the return on learning hard material is higher in other fields.
Also, you have a greater number of kids growing up in already-prosperous families, who don't perceive the need to become prosperous themselves, and so don't pursue higher-paying fields like finance, law, science or engineering.
I'm reminded of an article which referenced Japanese fan-mangas. They're technically illegal in Japan, but the industry does very little to cut them down. When the author asked a lawyer in Japan why this was he was told there just weren't enough lawyers.
To that end, we should coerce the government into changing laws that structure insurance and tax systems to be simple enough to reduce the demand for finance and law...
...I just can't decide how one would go about changing the insurance system, or what would be done if the new system required fewer jobs.
The problem with the prevailing method of education around the world is that its really inefficient in many ways. You have to be in class for a specific time of the day, you get interrupted every 40 minutes by recess, you have to change the subject very often and different subjects require different types of concentration. The working environment is not good for learning, its too noisy, and its not optimized for the individual paces of learning, that the different types of students have. You are also tormented socially in so may ways, you don't even need to be physically abused to feel miserable in school. All this even without mentioning that most teachers just plain suck, and even if they don't, very often they have to teach boring and tedious material, only because the system requires it. I spent the last 12 years in this hell, I'm literally suffocating intellectually!
"That's what I am talking about. We could use a similar dynamic in bioengineering, energy technology, and other important new technologies."
How about developing some simple hacking video courses for kids？ Children can learn the knowledge ,more importantly how to use the knowledge in this way. However, many teachers and parents don't have such skills. Maybe hackers here can work together for kids.
I think this is backwards. Children have abundant passion for learning. What we ought to do is stop stifling it.
Edit: what they don't have a passion for is (to paraphrase basically everybody) blah blah competitiveness blah blah global marketplace blah.