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What would I do?
I would focus on teaching now to learn. Instead of filling the school with silly playtime like high-school football, drama clubs and show and tells just teach kids how to find and verify information, some logic so they can evaluate different arguments and train their memory by making them memorize stuff. What exactly they learn is not that important. Most will forget the dates and formulas anyway. The skills will stay with them.
So your ideal school has no physical activity, no culture, and is filled with memorization of things that don’t matter. Wow sounds like you’ve spent at least 15 seconds thinking about this. Thanks for sharing!
I didn’t say NO physical activity. Just don’t make it more important than actual school. No idea where you took “no culture” from. You think you can’t research information on culture? Just again, don’t make drama clubs more important than school. Memorization should definitely be present, I didn’t say school should be filled with it.
What I was trying to describe is similar to project-based learning used in Finland. If you haven’t heard about it it’s worth researching.
I agree that project based learning is great. Your initial description isn’t really a summary of perfect based learning though.
you said drama club was pointless :( thats culture
National level fixes almost never work. Give schools and teachers and districts money and power for the win.
Isn’t this just resigning ourselves to shitty religious “charter schools” in like half the states? Feels like it’d be a massive assault on public education, in practice.
One of my math professors sugggested adding a formal logic class to early childhood education.
The human brain is not capable of formal logic at this stage.
One of my math professors told us that when he started elementary school they tried starting maths classes with logic and combinatorics, because they were most essential maths and in principle could be experienced by children by seeing, feeling etc. He said it was a stupid approach. I say he turned out a math professor, so maybe it worked.
It is sad that the general population is unable to see learning math as good in of itself. Not everything must be solely “practical.”
Not really. Not everyone enjoys advanced mathematics the same way not everyone enjoys english literature or engineering, or arts and crafts. People have different interests, aptitudes, and skills. That’s how the world works.
Yeah, not understanding math and statistics makes propaganda so easy! I’ve seen so many people invest their savings into things that were mathematically or physically impossible from the get go. Gambling too!
Did you actually read what I wrote or the context behind it? I don’t think you did.
I am saying not everyone wants to learn these things just for the sake of it. Some people want to learn the parts of maths that are more practical and want to be given practical examples. I don’t see a problem with accommodating those students or looking down on people who think that way like the original commenter was doing.
What I am not saying is that no one should learn any maths at all. I don’t know how you got that from my comment. It’s like you are deliberately trying to misinterpret what I am saying.
they still should learn them.
you need to know how the world works a bit to be a good citizen capable of critical thinking.
Did you actually read what I wrote or the context behind it? I don’t think you did. I am saying not everyone wants to learn these things just for the sake of it. Some people want to learn the parts of maths that are more practical and want to be given practical examples. I don’t see a problem with accommodating those students or looking down on people who think that way like the original commenter was doing.
Math education is basically a Time waster designed to justify hierarchies, it’s tangentially related to math but not really in purpose, there’s just numbers involved
Wow, that’s one of the worst takes on math education I’ve ever heard.
It’s based on my personal experience being burned by the system. Endless math drills that could have just been a calculator in order tobget grade points to get into a “good college” and a job, if you’re lucky. There’s a reason people come away from contemporary math education completely burned out
Maths education is pointless overcomplicated. We need to simplify and streamline it. And also add in more practical real-world examples.
Especially when you’re forced to use a complicated method to do basic calculations with. People should be allowed to learn different ways to get to the same answer.
Ideally they could just stop using AI to generate both the text and practice problems.
The method is irrelevant when there are too few teachers in either case.
I’m always for the feckless hippie over the neoliberal sellout tbh.
What about feckless hippies that sold out to the neoliberals?
I mean, that’s the sellout part
It’s because they ran out of fecks
or the commie that runs out of martyric protest
new words: martyric
heard it here first folks
Except a lot of those switched to antiscience antivaxers, and some bridged from there to facists. While I do also prefer hippies, antiknowledge and antiscience types scare me.
How’s the pink guy a neoliberal sellout?
“Teaching practical skills” is code for producing lots of ‘human-capital’ with a highly standardized skill set that is useful and predictable for capitalists. Catering to individual interests is not required, neither is actually understanding math, just being able to blindly follow an algorithm.
Math should be fun no matter it has practical applications or not. Math is an art, not a trade to make money. For those narrow minded ‘practical’ people, even pure math has sooner or later some applications.
This is the most important part, especially when teaching math to children. The practical aspects of math (beyond arithmetic counting with basic addition and subtraction) are not going to be fully realized until one is an adult, so they aren’t going to be a motivator for learning math.
It needs to be fun and engaging for them to want to keep learning and engaging with it.
Forgive me, I’m not super versed on Dewey’s mathematics ideas. Quick skimming of some articles and papers seems to suggest he was very practical and wanted kids to tie into the real world. How does that differ from the pink side? Both, to me, seem the opposite of classical logic training.
If you are talking about school curriculum, nearly the entire population will keep not learning it as long as it doesn’t have some practical application so people can understand WTF the teacher is talking about.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Having practical applications for higher math makes that shit stick like glue when otherwise it would get forgotten immediately after the test.
They’re getting downvoted because there’s a lot of esoterical people demanding that we learn stuff either for the joy of it (which many are not at all having btw) or because it “purifies character” or sth.
Practical applications are felt like an impurity to that.
Apparently knowing people learn differently and that mathematicians are a tiny minority is neoliberal…
Welcome to the Fediverse, I guess.
I use Arch btw.
As the experts say: “Use it or lose it.”
Citation needed.
Seriously, though, that’s not what the research is showing. Peter Liljedahl’s research, for example, supports that a very effective way to teach mathematics is by having students actually think about math, instead of just passively receiving info dumps (as is common in most traditional math classes). See Building Thinking Classrooms for details but, in short, it’s a method of getting students playing with math concepts for almost the entire class time every day.
No “practical applications” needed. Counterintuitive, but it’s a highly effective practice.
What’s core to practical applications working is student motivation, and practical applications are one way to induce motivation. But it’s often not the best option, especially for inherently abstract skills.
Peter Liljedahl
So… From the publications, looks like he uses problem solving, not “having students actually think about math”.
You want students think about what exactly if you don’t give them an application?
Anyway, thanks, I’m listing his work as evidence supporting my claim.
If by “practical application” you mean “motivation for learning the skill”, which is I think the way you’re using it, then yes. But that’s not the usual definition in math education, and not what most people mean by it.
Like, for example, to introduce quadratics, a good progression might be to challenge students to build a table of values and graphs for x², then x² + 3, then graph x² – 5 without a table of values, then 2x² vs. 5x² vs. ½x², –x², etc.
And if you have a Thinking Classroom, every student in the class is working on figuring out that progression collaboratively in small groups. The teacher guides students to discover the math themselves through a series of examples, and mostly interacts with the students by asking questions, never giving them the answers.
That’s not “a practical application of quadratics”—at least not in the usual definition—that’s a learning activity sequence (paired with a set of interrelated pedagogical practices).
A good, practical application of quadratics is more like a Dan Meyer “3 Act Math” lesson on predicting the trajectory of a basketball shot. Also cool, good teaching. But not a great way to introduce quadratics.
(P.S. Yes, I use and like em dashes. I’m not a robot.)
motivation for learning the skill
I mean motivation for why somebody cares about the idea at all, but I think that is less strict so yes. A hole in theory or something emerging from an activity are perfectly fine. But there has to be something there.
To be honest, i’m not sure what you want.
Like, if i was the student, i think i would be extremely confused from this lesson. I would not know what you want from me. I have had my fair share of teachers trying to get me to “just think about something and figure stuff out myself” which mostly amounted to me sitting there in classroom, staring into the air, confused about what the task is, and mostly waiting till the hour is over.
My brain works differently. When i learn something, before i even start caring about what the topic is, i ask why I’m learning this; and i need to have a proper reason to learn something. The reason needs to be strong enough, and is only strong enough if it is derived from some other, stronger reason. For example, i learned maths because i understood how important it is to grasp the universal, those things that cannot be taken away from us. I grew up in a kinda abusive household, and my mother had a habit of taking away the things that were most precious to me, so i clinged on to maths because i knew that maths was eternal and not dependent on the whims of my mother. That is a clear, practical reason. Maths gives me mental stability, like a skeleton gives stability to the body. It does not shake nor break; for it’s eternal.
Now, if you want me to play around with polynomials, idk what i would do.
Typically, when i learn something, i want to know why but also how to learn something. Especially, to express it in an analogy, my brain is like the C programming language. I need to reserve memory manually, it does not happen automatically, and i need to know how much space will be needed beforehand, in other words i need to have a clear understanding of how big a topic will be before i actually start learning it. When i have no idea what i’m getting myself into, then i don’t get into it, because my brain is very very very (i hope i have made this clear enough) bad at learning many small incremental pieces of knowledge. In fact, it’s similar to if you had to put on your jacket, leave the building, go through the cold icy air into the neighboring building each time you want to get yourself a glass of water. Needless to say, you will not drink a lot of water. You will dehydrate. Obviously you would put yourself a large bottle of water into your room, for which you only have to leave the building once. The same applies to me and learning. I have to take very few, appropriately sized portions of knowledge into me at once. Not many many small ones.
I don’t have time to get into the full 13 (? iirc) steps of Liljedahl’s Thinking Classrooms approach, but it’s exactly designed to meet the needs of students like you. Since highlights:
- Students are randomly assigned to a new group of 3 daily
- All students work on vertical whiteboards, or equivalents
- The teacher presents a math task that starts easy-ish, but requires some work/thought to figure out
- If 30% of students in the room understand the task, then it will quickly trickle between groups
- The teacher circles exemplars of great thinking; students are not allowed to erase these until the next debrief
- The teacher regularly cycles back to get students to explain their work to the class, showcasing and explaining the bits the teacher circled
- Start over with a more advanced task/“next step”
It’s an incredibly effective teaching method for secondary math. And there’s clear motivation every step of the way for what you’re doing and why it matters.
And the teacher only explains about 5-10% of the material; everything else is explained by the students as the carefully curated progression of activities guides them through discovering the math themselves.
Anyway, thanks, I’m listing his work as evidence supporting my claim.
Remembering this for next time I clearly don’t understand something. lol
Neither. Math builds a lot on other math. And the curriculum is very standardized. That’s why, when people just happen to miss something at any point, because maybe they have more important stuff going on in their live right now, they never catch up. We should drop the requirement that everyone has to learn the same math at the same time, hire more teachers and allow students to flow freely between courses to focus on the stuff they can learn with the math they already know. This will allow students to catch up and, paradoxically, produce a higher over all level of math knowledge, if less standardized and predictable for employers.
Now, to ensure students also want to learn math, both abstract math courses and mixed seminars should be offered. Students could choose to attend either or both. In the seminars, math, physics and engineering would be mixed in challenges where students with different skills and preferences have to work together to produce a cool result (like a robot, a game, an experiment, etc.). The abstract courses shouldn’t be forgotten, because many students actually enjoy learning math. Instead of just teaching rules and how to follow them, they should involve a creative aspect, where students are encouraged to break rules by making their own definitions, formulate their own theorems and try to prove them (like actual mathematicians do).
Excellent meme, more like this please!
People who want school to be practical scare me.
I’m genuinely curious why, if this is serious. I feel like adulting badly needs to be taught better. I’m nearing mid twenties and still get so confused at a lot of adult things, especially government shit, because it’s just so much to figure out for the first time.
It’s definitely important to teach math and science and language, and to teach people how to do their own research, and think, and learn, etc. But are you saying practical skills shouldn’t also be taught?
If anyone taught you how to do your taxes at school age I bet you’d forgotten all about it by the time you needed it
As OP said, what’s important is to learn to learn
I interpreted it as a criticism of those who think there’s no point to learning something if there isn’t an immediately-obvious application for that knowledge. Like those who say, “What’s the point of learning history? I’m not going to become a historian,” as if learning needs to have a clear end-goal or else it’s useless. Or those who think it’s pointless to learn to play an instrument because you’re not going to become a famous musician. It’s a mentality that ties in with capitalism, where if you’re not being productive, you have no use.
A well-rounded education should equip students with skills they can apply independently no matter what they do. Learning history provides context for the world we live in, why it is the way it is, and can inform us on how to move forward. Learning to play an instrument builds new connections in the brain, strengthens fine motor skills, and (in the case of reading music) how to move information between abstract concepts and a tangible form.
These skills provide benefits to people that can be built upon in the future. They may not have immediate usage to a student, but they create a foundation upon which a student can reach higher as they progress in life. Not every lesson is practical in the moment, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have value to a growing mind.
yes, practical skills change year to year.
what’s important is to learn to learn.
