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Writes Matt Yglesias, in
"Math needs a phonics-style reckoning
Teachers should teach students how to do stuff correctly."There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it.
A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown.... You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping.... [T]he best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it....
Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea.
From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them....
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72 ટિપ્પણીઓ:
…was it a secret better way to teach or did they just stop teaching because A) I have seniority and it’s impossible to fire me and 2) left-wing politics and sentimentality that grades and teacher performance metrics are icky…
"There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it."
The old war: expositional teaching v. letting the student find his/her way around a subject.
The first way works. The second way is the choice of the leftists running the public schools, producing what we currently have.
Subject: How to cross a street.
Expositional: Stop at the curb's edge. Look both ways. If clear, cross.
Self-learning: A bunch of dead or crippled former pedestrians.
It might be a simple liability fear.
"...suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them....".
I would suggest that after the last couple of decades of watching our students math and reading skills tank, while the rest of the world laps us, shows that actual teaching, not theories of how to teach, is how you share knowledge from generation to generation.
We've created a generational knowledge gap. The known knowns that get passed down from generation to generation have skipped a generation and a half. Sure- there are scores of young people highly skilled in technology. Or parts of it. But even that is going away as all that will be needed is to, well...just ask Chat or Grok. And the rest of the young have no idea how things work. Just that someone is always there making things work for them. And if it all breaks down? Well...it'll stay down.
As is, our kids cannot read. They cannot add. They cannot complete a paragraph in proper English. And they cannot think for themselves.
But our education system is filled and run with people who have theories.
Rousseau is one of the most baleful influences in the self destruction of western civilization. He invented the fantasy of the Noble Savage. His philosophy was the reason the French Revolution ended up with the Terror, instead of a high trust republic. He is the godfather of every crackpot utopian dreamer from Marx on down to the present day. If I could go back in time to murder someone in his cradle, I wouldn't waste my time with Hitler or Stalin or Mao. I would head straight to France for baby Jean-Jacques.
I can see Iglesias taking a class to learn "knife skills." Snort.
But he's not wrong about education.
I wish we'd switch to Singapore Math. It both covers the basic fundamentals and understanding of broader concepts. It's got a good track record. And, from a personal perspective, I used it in homeschooling my son from grades 3 through 5, and it made a big difference. I knew a bunch of homeschooling families who also switched to it with success. Of course, that's anecdotal, so FWIW.
Actually, through grade 6.
My son was in a private school before that, so he didn't start out on Singapore Math, but rather the sort of curricula we're discussing (decrying). I wish he had.
My theory, from looking at some of the math teaching materials, is that they are trying to introduce underlying concepts and then from there they want the students to, somehow, create the algorithms needed to solve the problem themselves. Which is great, if you happen to be mathematically inclined. But a frustrating mess if you aren't. For those who aren't mathematically inclined teach them the damn algorithm. For the mathematically inclined, teach them the algorithm and introduce them to the underlying concepts.
"Rousseau is one of the most baleful influences..."
If it hadn't been him, it would have been somebody else. Perhaps we are lucky that he was the one to write about these things. Or do you think he wrote too beautifully?
Obviously, natural talent can't be beat. But, I also think part of the problem--as I sense it, I'm not around a lot of young children anymore--is that kids aren't getting natural, hands-on, everyday training through task that they used to. I'm thinking of cooking with direct training by parents in measurements, etc.; working around the house on repairs and building, with the corresponding training in the math parts of it; crafts that require preparing the materials themselves (measuring accurately, counting stitches and rows, mixing paint colors; etc.--I'm sure you get the gist). I think there are often too many kits and not enough making from scratch, so to speak. These things help build skills...***from scratch***. I truly believe that these skills and the awareness they bring dovetail into maths preparation. And they demonstrate in real life terms how we do, in fact, use algebra and geometry all the time! It's problem solving in precise terms in tasks that matter in real life.
Yeah, I'm on my soapbox.
You learn by doing. By trying, by failing, and then taking the feedback about why you failed and trying again.
Proper knife skills are a beautiful thing, by the way. I highly recommend them.
serious question:
which states are doing a better job Actually Teaching kids to read?
And good knives are also beautiful things! Both an art and engineering achievement.
As for reading, I think a rich, literate environment is important, and it starts at home, in how you speak with children from their earliest ages. It's doable, though it may take some self-consciousness. One of the things, IMO, that can really help is if you early on teach children that words on a page (or screen, if you insist) are just pictures of the words they say and that others say around them. Using phonics is just a way to decode the written word and help bridge the gap between spoken language and written language. There are other tools, and I would employ a number of them, so long as they are consistent and focused. BUT, if you have a "natural" "whole reader," don't force the phonics thing. It's just deeply frustrating and limiting for those students. But teachers need to be able to discern the difference and adapt! I question that ability in too many cases.
They don't seem to teach kids how to hold a pen/pencil now. You see all sorts of cramped up styles using 3 or 4 fingers plus the thumb, and kids look like they are trying to carve the letters into the page. With modern pens, a light touch is much easier and gives you much more freedom.
Nobody else I've talked to has noticed this.
I suspect that many of you learned some basic math very early simply by, for example, watching change being made and learning how to know if you got the proper change back. My parents made us figure this out for ourselves very early, back in the days when a 10-cent allowance was a big deal--and penny candy was still available. You literally learned how to count your pennies!--a very useful skill in both math and life. And there was a physical component to it, which I think is very important in early childhood training.
Gerda: Yes!
In Japanese calligraphy the brush is held lightly. Someone should be able to pull the brush from your hand easily.
I’m a numbers guy and my wife is a numbers woman and we fail the make change test at the doctor’s office. In our world there’s cash but no physical currency and everything is rounded to nearest dollar or 000s. A nickel? what’s that?
In third grade I got in trouble with the penmanship witch what kept trying to angle my paper like I was right-handed. She had not a clue how to teach a left-handed child, got flummoxed and took it out on me. I learned to constantly question authority. It brought mixed results…
This may be controversial, but I think in the early grades we're mostly looking for good skills for pretty much everyone. I think sometimes the emphasis on "excellence" can be a problem. For the talented or the interested, it's a whole different story (but they need the basics first, most of the time), so adjustments must be made. But for most kids, most of the times, "good" would be sufficient. Now it seems as if there's this big gap, rather than a continuum. (I could be wrong about this, of course.) Too often it seems as if it's "excellent or deficient." But what's wrong with being in the average range? This used to take us quite far.
…the checker wants me to type right handed but corrects and wants left-handed. Bigot…
There's not many things more satisfying than chopping up vegetables using a kitchen knife that one has hand forged out of a Chevrolet truck leaf spring scavenged from a metal recycler in the remote hills of central New Hampshire. The weaponization of this simple kitchen utensil is completed with a carved maple firewood handle shaped in the classic asymmetric Japanese style finished with Shou Sugi Ban and a Johnson wax paste finish. Machomaxxing, lol 😂
The only thing I like better than chopping with a kitchen knife, is slicing down trees with my ax.
"Rousseau is one of the most baleful influences..."
Well, he came along at a time in the Enlightenment where people were longing for a simpler, purer existence. Perhaps like some of our preppers. And of course, you're right, tyrants are going to tyrannize, regardless of the philosophical underpinning they use to justify their actions.
Pertinent to a recent discussion about Nikole Hannah Jones' article about her intentional mis- education of her daughter, Rousseau lectured the world about his theories of the proper education of children, but was extremely neglectful of his own.
I also believe that the romanticization of Native Americans and racial identity Marxism can be laid at his door.
Howard: I love that. That's cool.
RCEOCEAN II: I don't use axes and hatchets myself, but I do love to admire the good ones. Very satisfying and beautiful.
I wish whittling would come back! We tried with our son but it didn't take.
Planned Parenthood vocational interview.
Yeah, the problem is Rosseau, its the feeling that he tapped into. You can't blame teachers for coming up with new exciting ways to teach students. You can blame them for continuing to use them when they've failed.
"New Math" is now almost 50 years old, if not more. Of course, "Math" is probably the most overrated subject ever. I'm good at it, but with computers never have to use it. And when does anyone in real life - aka 90 percent of us - ever use algerbra or Geomentry? Oh wait, just yesterday I had to solve square footage of triangle along with X= Y + 2z. Yep.
Yeah, education maxxing is a false god that insecure parents look to to boost their own self-esteem. The most important education for kids in preschool and the early elementary school years are arts and crafts and physical education along with basic reading, writing and arithmetic. Kids can learn enough about history from Looney tunes on the boob tube. Also, story time is very important, however, it should just be limited to the classics instead of new fangled politically correct Indoctrination feel good, warm and fuzzy bland pablum that The liberal maxxing education technocrats want to force down into the subconscious minds of our susceptible youths.
yeah I want one of those Howard…
You got to be fucking kidding me. Math, especially algebra, is the most important subject to learn. Ignorance of algebra is how con man take money out of the pockets of the unsuspecting undereducated.
Yeah and I spent a career as a applied scientist and engineer and industrial hot rodding mechanic and everything that I worked on and designed and built, I was able to calculate rough answers before constructing computer models to calculate the precise results. Estimation is the ultimate bullshit detector being able to predict ballpark numerical results so that when you build your computer models you can easily debug the problem areas that inevitably rear their ugly heads.
"Direct instruction" is frowned upon by the education establishment. When pressed, they admit that it works and there is plenty of research backing that up.
They prefer "Discovery" lessons. I pointed out that it took hundreds of years to get from Isaac Newton to the Laws of Thermodynamics, and I don't have that kind of time.
Other then keeping kids busy, and teenagers off the streets, I'm beginning to wonder what the point of the US Education system is. It seems the vital stuff, the 21st century versions of reading, writing, and rithmiatic can be taught in fairly small time period. The point used to be to make people good citizens, patriotic, and incoculate the values of Western Civilization. But that went away along time ago.
Rosseau: Man is born free, but still needs his diapers changed.
rehajm: and I wish I wasn't such a fat Fingered klutz that I could actually work on a Swiss watch rather than be an expert at hammering, the s*** out of metal and digging holes in the ground. I have an old heavy Seiko self winder that my brother bought for me when he was on r&r in Taiwan back in 1969. It hasn't worked in over 40 years. No way I could ever fix that sucker.
In old England money evolved without the decimal system, There were 20 shillings per pound and 12 pence per shilling, so 240 pence per pound. And a guinea was 21 shillings. This made people think on their feet about math because money matters to everyone. This was decimalized in 1971 and many claimed that children no longer had to think about different math ranges and became less agile, less able to do mental math. So blame the French, and Tom Jefferson.
Ability at mental math is a characteristic of a quick high speed mind, and that can be trained. There is a place for having children discover principles of math on their own. The two can coexist. But if each child is forced to recreate the entire theoretical corpus that’s going to take a long time, so these teachers are just creating an artificial simulacrum, just letting them dabble in a few things and calling it a deep intellectual experience. They would get to the Pythagorean theorem in 10th grade. We don’t make kids create their own languages.
In advanced math in grad school the instructor covers the theorems and the homework is in formally proving various statements, they don’t just ask students to develop a framework and theory of different classes infinity, for example. If that is good enough for advanced students it’s good enough for kids.
Providing state supported daycare for future felons is dangerous enough already without also having to be boring. It's not like you'll ever get any backup from administration if the identities of you and the child that ignores or insults or attacks you don't fit the prescribed hierarchy of intersectionality.
Sometimes it's almost as if the offenders are graduated ignorant as punishment. "Here, let's see what reality does with/to you now." Meanwhile, jobs and pensions are allotted to constituencies, statistics are generated, and the beat goes on. These new techniques are fueling so many Ed.D theses that the techniques have to get the support of the "experts" to hold up the whole blob.
Good thing I'm not bitter or cynical about the system. Did I used to teach? Oh, yes.
The recent history of Education, say the last 50 years, has been a progression of crazy left wing “reforms” that slowly replaced every single thing that worked in the school room with ways to NOT teach those same skills. The onion example is excellent because it’s so simple even progressives can understand the relationship between rote repetition and skill acquisition. But let’s extend that analogy.
How about a different knife skills lesson? Imagine you go to the local dojo and enroll in a Knife Skills course called “edged weapons.” That course will also use rote repetition and build on skills learned in pre-requisite classes. Similar to how the other knife class built on your experience of knowing what an onion is and how to peel it.
New Math and Whole Language reading both approach the subject from a PHD perspective where experimental processes were ASSUMED to be able to teach with no empirical data showing it worked as well or better than what it replaced. Both methods also removed all the FUN IN LEARNING by introducing methods that purposely AVOIDED building on skills pupils already had.
Modern education has taken all the fun and excitement of actually learning and applying skills out of the classroom so that unless the student is exceptionally self-driven they become “bored” and disinterested. Then when they are offered “activism” as a way to earn extra credit they jump at the chance to do something —anything— to trade the drudgery of the classroom for the excitement of yelling at people and saving the planet.
Termites don't know they're destroying a house.
Knife envy is a real thing. Did that leaf spring have a high enough Rockwell hardness to keep an edge?
My contention remains virtually every education fad that comes up either promises to make teacher's jobs more interesting for the teacher than supervising skill drills or less work for the teacher than reviewing the results of skill drills, or both.
Do kids even stretch out their fingers instead looking like witches crooks?
Perhaps teachers get paid too much. Salary increases increase the quest for another. To get another increase you might feel you need to provide something new, a new way to do things. Whether that new thing actually improves student outcomes is not relevant if PTB aren’t watching and caring about the outcomes, which appears to be the case. The money, not pride in your students’ results, drives the profession generally. (There are great teachers too, of course.)
The left have destroyed everything. The teacher's union is a greedy anti-child anti-learning money grubbing demo-fraud corruption ring.
Dems demand we hand out participation trophies, confuse children with explicit sexual content, confuse children with they-them gender confusion and gender extortion. Drop testing and scoring and learning requirements. Pass failing students - so the corrupt left can lie about numbers.
Making everyone a whiney Bernie idiot/soviet cog is their goal.
Good theory, Chris. Every new curriculum or methodology change was presented to us in ECE courses as a way to engage different learning styles that were allegedly being left behind by the old way of teaching. None of it seemed designed to make the teaching or evaluation easier. But (mostly) I’ve been out of the classroom for the last 30 years and have been completely out of any continuing education for teachers.
Now NGOs write and distribute curricula.
I never understood the Matt Y popularity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rand viewed Rousseau as a primary source of the Counter-Enlightenment—a movement that sought to overthrow reason and individualism in favor of emotion and group conformity.
Rousseau was a political target for Rand, Kant was a metaphysical and epistemological monster. In her book For the New Intellectual, Rand labeled Kant "the most evil man in mankind’s history," arguing that he deliberately shut the door to human reason
Kids should know their multiplications tables cold, if so, everything else that follows from algebra to advance math, if they can make it to advanced math without learning their times tables, will be easier. For one thing, if you have a "strategy" to work out the answer without just knowing it by rote, this is one more mental operation for you to perform on top of whatever algebraic manipulations you need to do.
I think that one major problem with teaching is that the publicly funded retirement program keeps people teaching long after they have lost their passion for it. Just pay them more instead.
Most people in regular jobs get up and leave if they get tired of the work.
RCO11 @ 7:40
God bless ya. Now do that for 10 hours and then go buy a chainsaw.
... and he didn't even go to law school!
Hiding the ball helps the students with law prof parents, those who can afford the study guides, and the people in the student organizations who have access to outlines for classes, and old tests where profs regurgitate the same questions every few years because they are lazy... (Tom Palay, Torts).
Children are blank slates and their natural instincts are to learn. Their first and most important teacher is you. I taught my children to read and do arithmetic before they started school.
We did that with old files, Howard.
Oh. And carbon steel is easier to sharpen than stainless. I think it holds an edge better. You can have the best knives in the world, but if you can't sharpen them they're useless. And dangerous.
"rcommal said...
Obviously, natural talent can't be beat. But, I also think part of the problem--as I sense it, I'm not around a lot of young children anymore--is that kids aren't getting natural, hands-on, everyday training through task that they used to. I'm thinking of cooking with direct training by parents in measurements, etc.; working around the house on repairs and building, with the corresponding training in the math parts of it"
You might like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
"The only thing I like better than chopping with a kitchen knife, is slicing down trees with my ax."
I used to love to do that when I was a young man too. I never should have dropped the habit, I would be a lot stronger now. Of course I wasn't doing it to clear forests, but we had a lot of woods, and nobody missed the occasional tree. I think we used them to make dams on the creek hoping for brook trout to gather—not sure that one ever worked, or for campfires, or to "build forts."
I went to a Jesuit high school. They made us take four years of Latin. The idea was that it helped to discipline the mind or some such thing I never really understood the reason why, and if it was of any use at all to me in later life, such use remains occult to me. .......I don't know to saddle a horse. I wouldn't have any idea of even how to start. In the nineteenth century such a skill was probably useful, but there's not much all for it nowadays. Maybe the same principle should be applied to long division.. Who needs to know how to do long division when you have a calculator?.........Perhaps AI can tell us what skills are useful and which are obsolete. The human mind is not up to the task.
One word: “PEMDAS.” Now help me finish running the cultivator through the collard patch, muck out the shed, and move the pumpkins down to the roadside stand. Unless you’d druther go inside and play thimble, thimble, who has the thimble.
"Kids should know their multiplications tables cold, if so, everything else that follows from algebra to advance math, if they can make it to advanced math without learning their times tables, will be easier. For one thing, if you have a "strategy" to work out the answer without just knowing it by rote, this is one more mental operation for you to perform on top of whatever algebraic manipulations you need to do."
If you don't know your multiplication tables cold (or at least lukewarm) "mathematics" cannot mean anything to you. It becomes an abstraction, like esoteric philosophy or sanskrit. You don't want to learn it because you don't see any reason for it, and "math nerds" are like druidical priests. When confronted with a proposition based on mathematical principles, you are unpersuaded, because what you are being told is mysticism to you. You fall back on how things "feel", which is a recipe for failure. (If you understand basic math you will have a better "feel" about whether something is correct or absurd).
I am not a math or science wizard by any means (heh). But I understand that basic math is the foundation for most of what we call "civilization" in this world. Kids especially need this grounding.
New math enters the chat.
There are only two ways to keep from crying while cutting an onion: 1. Refrigerate the onion first 2. Don't be such a little bitch.
Some people are simply destined to learn. They can’t be stopped. Regardless of how many educational barriers you put in their path.
Marcus, I’ve found that generous capsaicin or being pepper sprayed is a fine way to desensitize my eyes to something as benign as the sulphuric acid caused when onion fumes meet tears.
There are few results as consistently robust in the academic literature as those that demonstrate the superiority of phonics methods over alternatives like whole language. The fact that our "schools of education" usually consider these results to be "outdated" or "controversial" tells you that education is not their objective. The same is true for math pedagogy, too.
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