
What if We Gave Toddlers an 'F' in Walking? (Why Math & Science Ed is Absurd) - theodpHN
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/yung-tae-kim-tony-hawk-shred-game-physics/Content?oid=2699227
======
imurray
_The persistence and the dedication needed in skateboarding—that's what we
need to be teaching. No one says to a toddler, 'You have ten weeks to walk,
and if you can't, you get an F and you're not allowed to try to walk anymore.'
It's absurd, right? But the same thing is true with math and science
education. If you want to learn trig or calculus, it's set at such a pace in
schools that it guarantees that only the absolutely best students will learn
it._

Reminded me of the essay _"Everyone Should Get an A"_ :
[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/abstracts/exams.ht...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/abstracts/exams.html)

~~~
Confusion

      If you want to learn trig or calculus, it's set at such a
      pace in schools that it guarantees that only the absolutely
      best students will learn it.
    

The usual complaint against the school system is the inverse: stuff is set at
such a pace that even the worst students will learn it. They can't have it
both ways.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Sure you can, it's been done, it's not rocket science.

The problem with today's school system in America (and likely elsewhere
throughout the industrialized world) is that it's very much aimed at teaching
the wrong people the wrong things in the wrong way (and that's when teaching
doesn't take a back seat to day-care). The main goal is for everyone to
memorize as much of a broad swath of "material" as possible, it's very much a
teaching-to-the-test least-effort system. It's not geared toward maximizing
each individual student's learning. Nor is it geared toward teaching
competency and fully mastering basic yet key skills. Nor is it geared toward
teaching useful skills that are key building blocks in the workplace, as a
member of society, and as a functioning citizen of a democratic republic.

The steps necessary to improve this situation are fairly straightforward. As a
start, reduce class sizes and hire better teachers, which is possible without
increasing per-student expenditures provided the bloat in non-teaching staff
and unnecessary expenditures is cut back (per-student spending has more than
doubled in the last 3 decades, adjusted for inflation, the money has not gone
to improving education, it has been frittered away). End the farce of
overstuffed curricula. There is a monomania about covering as much material as
possible, so long as students can retain enough to pass a test, but students
don't retain much of the material and when the fundamentals are neglected they
miss out on that too. Take the basics back to basics, emphasize the
fundamentals (reading, writing, mathematics, fundamental science), learning
them, knowing them, mastering them. Continue to refresh and test students on
those fundamentals throughout their _entire_ K-12 educations. And provide
enough funding to allow gifted students to work at a faster pace, either
within existing classes or in classes of their own.

I could go on, but that's a good start. Unfortunately, the biggest impediments
aren't knowing how to improve, it's all of the interests and bureaucracy
protecting the status quo.

~~~
CWuestefeld
You make many assertions, but you haven't provided any reason to think that
your approach is any better.

 _As a start, reduce class sizes..._

This, in particular, is something that I've done a fair amount of research on.
Although the jury is still out, the best conclusion I've been able to arrive
at is that for most kids, class size isn't strongly correlated with
achievement, at least not within a reasonable range. Class size only seems to
make an appreciable difference for kids that are "at risk", i.e., those that
don't get much academic support at home.

So I might be jumping on you for just one small aspect of your opinion, but
from the part of it that I do know about, I have the impression that you're
just jumping on board with conventional wisdom that hasn't had much testing.

You _might_ be able to improve some things like this, but to deliver it as a
factual answer is a disservice.

~~~
gaius
Well, is it surprising that the teaching unions advocate employing more
teachers?

------
terra_t
The best physics class that I've seen (and that I've taught) is the Physics
101 autotutorial class. Students get three chances to take each test, but they
need to get a passing grade on each unit before they move on to the next. This
is contrast to the usual physics course, where the average grade on a test
might be 35, but they do it on a curve so that 35 gets you a B-.

The class is aimed at premed students, and experience shows that Physics 101
students do better on the MCAT than students who take a conventional class
aimed at premeds. Because it's aimed at premeds, there's a heavy dose of fluid
mechanics and other subjects that often get missed in intro physics.

It's particularly fun, as a teacher, to work with students to "debug" their
thought process. So often I'd hear "I understand the concepts but can't do the
problem" but then once they started explaining how they tried to solve it, I'd
see that they missed important concepts.

~~~
scott_s
"The code is right but something is coming out wrong" was one of the favorite
things I would hear from my intro to programming students.

I would call them out on it, too. The attitude they had was part of why they
couldn't debug their program. They needed to adopt a question-and-test-
assumptions approach, which can be intellectually uncomfortable. I hoped that
by explaining to them why that comment was obviously wrong that they could
start to learn the debugging process without me walking them through it,
constantly asking pointed questions.

------
protomyth
Uhm... Early Childhood Educators do give F's in walking and block stacking and
a variety of gross motor, fine motor, cognitive skills. They might not call it
that to the parents, but that is exactly what it is. They do screenings like
the Denver, LAP, and eLAP that tell where a child is in development and point
to exercises to do or the very real need to get specialized help for the
infant / toddler. Failure to get help could cost us taxpayers big bucks (1M+)
over the course of the kids life.

So, yes, your child can flunk walking or block stacking.

~~~
dgabriel
It's true. I failed something called "Running, Skipping, and Jumping," when I
was in kindergarten. I was a clumsy child, and I also had difficulty
understanding what the gym teacher was barking at me. My parents found it
hilarious.

I can do all three of those things just fine now, by the way.

------
dkarl
_"There was a lot of pressure from my family not really to have a career path
in mind, just to get good grades. Getting something less than an A wasn't a
disappointment, it was an outright failure. I didn't consider that a very
nurturing environment."_

Funny how many smart and successful people come from this kind of background
but don't want to share it with anyone else.

~~~
techbio
98th percentile on the SAT's--"you could have done better."

Well, yeah. So what.

~~~
dkarl
When you're raising a brilliant kid and want him to have a good academic work
ethic, you have to hold him to standards that don't have any other pragmatic
justification. They raised their standards to a level that made him work hard
in school, which is perfectly appropriate. There are other things they could
have done, such as home-schooled him, pushed him to excel at academic
extracurriculars (if they were available), or forced him to abandon his
friends and attend university early, but they may not have been aware of those
options, and pushing him to do well in school is a decent approach. Holding a
kid that smart to "reasonable" standards means allowing him not to work at
all, which means he's in for a big shock when he gets to the real world and
realizes that sitting around being 20% smarter than everybody else isn't
actually rewarded (or rewarding).

He doesn't say precisely what he's complaining about. Since everything else
seems to have worked out well for him, I can only speculate that maybe he has
some personal problems he attributes to the way he was raised -- but who
doesn't? It's much easier to understand how our own problems could have been
avoided than to imagine the problems we would have had if we were raised
differently.

P.S. Any other mistake parents make -- like making a kid feel deficient or
unloved -- is separate from holding them to high standards and making them
work hard. If a kid's feeling of being loved or being a valid human being
hinges on what his parents say about his grades, they've screwed something
else up already, and they can't fix it just by giving a thumbs-up to his
grades.

P.P.S. Just wanted to clarify I'm not presuming to talk about details of the
real Kim here; I'm talking about a situation we've extrapolated from a few
words in the article, which is as good as hypothetical.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Telling your kid that they "could have done better" is not the same as telling
them they're a failure.

------
jbermudes
So many times at college in computer science I heard the idea that math ==
computer science and that it is impossible to grok one but not the other.

I've heard the famous Dijkstra quote "Computer Science is to computers as
Astronomy is to telescopes", but one aspect of computer science education
strikes me as fundamentally different than math education: The technological
revolution brought by the compiler. While it's true that a compiler can't tell
you if your algorithm is correct and is thus useless for algorithm analysis
(although there are other tools for that), its ability to check syntax, etc.
makes it an invaluable tool for the beginning programmer who once he is
comfortable with programming can use it as a tool to explore computer science.
The compiler is like a computerized instructor giving feedback for elementary
programming in the same way that a human instructor gives feedback to students
for elementary math. Of course in advanced math the student must reason out
complex proofs, but at the beginning stages of any algebra or calculus course
there’s a lot of "You must do X before Y" and its that kind of basic rules
that are analogous to programming language syntax and grammar.

The compiler in computer science education is different from a calculator or a
system like matlab or even those online assessment tests like "Webwork" found
in higher math education because those tools are only binary in their
feedback: "Either you're completely right or completely wrong, and I'm not
going to tell you why you're wrong. Good luck!" If you had worked the problem
out on the board with an instructor hopefully they tell you “You were close,
but you messed up here, you can’t take the square root of that without doing
this other thing first” or "you used the chain method incorrectly over here"

It is my goal to one day develop an open source "math compiler" that allows
you to write out the steps of your problem line-by-line (either through pen
input or some sort of math symbol input system) and let the compiler give you
that sort of feedback that would otherwise take a dedicated tutor to give. I
know that there’s a million ways to solve a given math problem, but math
textbooks usually teach things in certain orders, so you more or less know
what the student will know at that point in the semester, and if someone is
already thinking beyond the material then they don’t need this helper at this
point anyway.

It’s a crazy idea, but it is my hope that in the years to come we will see
technology not necessarily replace human educators, but rather supplement
them, allowing feedback that would normally consume all of one instructor’s
time and being able to simultaneously provide that to an entire classroom.

~~~
brazzy
_I heard the idea that math == computer science and that it is impossible to
grok one but not the other._

IMO that's bullshit. I started university majoring in math with CS as
secondary, but ended up switching as I was struggling to pass in math while
getting straing As in CS.

Funny thing is, I still had to take some "pure" math lectures and during an
oral test for one of them the professor asked which part of the lecture (group
theory) I found most interesting. I told him it was the algorithm for
ennumerating co-sets, since as CS major, algorithms were bread and butter to
me. He laughed and said that this was the part most math majors had problems
with...

------
ThomPete
I know I keep beating that horse.

But Seymore Paperts <http://www.papert.org/> book "Mindstorms: Children,
Computers, And Powerful Ideas"

[http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-
Powerful...](http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-
Ideas/dp/0465046746)

Is great

------
yardie
Forgive me for not knowing, but don't we already have pass/fail in some
courses. Some of the more radical colleges have gone completely pass/fail. The
premise being that once you've mastered the material you are qualified to move
to the next level and if not you try again until you understand.

BTW, In elementary school the only Bs I ever received were in Handwriting. It
didn't make sense to me then to give a grade on it and it doesn't make any
sense now. But now I live in a country (France) where some companies give a
graphology test to interviewees. A personality test based on your handwriting.

~~~
crpatino
In theory, yes... but there are a number of problems, the most obvious one is
that those "units of knowledge" used in the pass/fail process are extremely
coarse.

Grades are handed down per activity... and in general on a monthly or even bi-
monthly basis. In theory, this should provide feedback to the teacher to
adjust the pace of the learning. In practice, the study program is set in
stone and the students who cannot catch on their own will be left behind, no
questions asked.

The only pass/fail test is at the end of the year, where everything is
shoveled together. If the student completely fails to grok subject 3... but
excels at subjects 1, 2 and 4. This liability gets lost in the numbers,
remaining as a time bomb that will blow on his face in a couple of years when
subject 3 is a building block of more complex stuff.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that grading is extremely lax also.
This is my personal opinion, any grade less than "B" shows knowledge in either
immature (student needs to study more) or flawed (students have inaccurate
assumptions that need to be detected and corrected by instructor) stage. If C
and D students are allowed to proceed to later stages, they are being set to
fail, because the teachers there are unlikely to devote any attention to
correct deficits from previous years.

------
blutonium
Reminds me of John Medina's talks with Geoffrey Grosenbach.

(don't worry - barely any mention of Rails)
[http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-
medi...](http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-medina-on-
brain-rules-for-baby-part-i)
[http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-
medi...](http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-medina-on-
brain-rules-for-baby-part-ii)

------
theodpHN
Dr. Tae's Solution Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning
<http://vimeo.com/5513063>

------
stretchwithme
right on. our artificial reality education system has so many mistaken
premises. but fortunately, they are given forever to get it right.

The real problem, of course, is its coercive nature. This way of doing things
would never have achieved such a total monopoly without coercing students to
participate and taxpayers to fund it. Not to mention that you're turning your
children's minds over to the unions for indoctrination.

Murray Rothbard picks apart the whole system in chapter 7 of For a New
Liberty. mises.org has a podcast of the entire book.

------
techbio
No question about it--excellent question.

