…and shove it.
Narrow intellectual gatekeeping is omnipresent in academia. Want to know why the government wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on math and science programs that never seem to improve the test scores of American students?[3] Part of the reason for this is that today’s K-12 educators—unlike educators in other high-scoring countries of the world—refuse to acknowledge evidence that memorization plays an important role in mastering mathematics. Any proposed program that supports memorization is deemed to be against “creativity” by today’s intellectual gatekeepers in K-12 education, including those behind the Math and Science Partnerships. As one NSF program director told me: “We hear about success stories with practice and repetition-based programs like Kumon Mathematics. But I’ll be frank with you—you’ll never get anything like that funded. We don’t believe in it.” Instead the intellectual leadership in education encourages enormously expensive pimping programs that put America even further behind the international learning curve.
I hope that Climaquiddick turns out to cause people to question a lot of previously unquestioned institutions and authorities.
I have never understood why memorization and repetition has such a bad reputation. It works, everywhere it is tried. That is how the brain gets wired for new data.
The same schools use it heavily, on the football team. But, that affects alumni contributions.
I think a lot of these academic fads start merely because they can create and support a large ecosystem of new academics. Nobody’s interested in research that indicates the current paradigm is correct in an almost trivial new way (you won’t get food on the table that way much less tenure). But a new, sexy paradigm with plenty of avenues for publication? A lot of hungry grad students will jump on it.
Dunno I am of two feelings of this, I never traditionally memorized the multiplication table even when they were saying to memorize it in elementary school, just remember/did a few tricks, tricks with 9 and 5 is easy enough , can fairly quickly do 2 and 3 by counting and some what 4 , then for 6 8 I just do multiplication of 3 or 4 and double it , leaving the square of 7 to memorize, and they never expected 12. But in college i had trouble with proofing and some of the abstract math symbols and abstract idea that I never got a good hold of . (Though most part just how my memory works lousy short term , very good long term if I could understand/put in my own words)
Also know lots of the Indians , I knew from college, that went to school in India did a lot of memorization. but seem quite a few who had trouble extrapolating from what they know to something new. Though I haven’t dealt with IIT grads yet, know most of the Indians in the US colleges are IIT rejects.
Multiplication tables…. I learned the squares and figure the rest out from there….as needed…
Basic Physics…. I remember studying with others that created pages and pages of formulas for every odd case… I just learned to do a proper free body diagram and everything can be done with f=ma and a little calculus…
Is the goal to create creative effective people or robots that can ace the standardized tests?
As the effective computing tools get better and better for doing math like things, I think its far more important to teach some form of idea creation/creativity. Effective engineering creativity has to be grounded in basic physics, so math and repetitive problem solving has a place in learning the basics, but engineering candidates far more often fail in the inability to create than in the inability to regurgitate.
We should be behind the curve! We don’t have to produce anything — Obama sez we can finance everything with public debt. Borrow our way into prosperity from China and such. That can go on forever, right? /sarc
https://themerckindex.cambridgesoft.com/TheMerckIndex/AdditionalTables/tables/Fundamental_Physical_and_Mathematical_Constants.pdf
I remember formuals and constants being thrown at me. What I wanted was someone to explain what makes a constant a constant.
Science only progresses when the old scientists die and take their obsolete theories with them.
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Some people are smart enough to figure it all out. Most people need to do some memorization. Unfortunately, far too many kids are skating through the system without either a conceptual understanding or the rote facts.
Education should be the most conservative of all disciplines, because its experiments are performed on our children and the results take 20 years to discover. Instead, it is a wasteland of gimmicks, fads and social activism. How many of you spotted this article yesterday?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,579846,00.html
The education department at the University of Minnesota is entertaining the suggestion from one task group that:
Every faculty member at our university that trains our teachers must comprehend and commit to the centrality of race, class, culture, and gender issues in teaching and learning, and consequently, frame their teaching and course foci accordingly.
In other words, actual course content must take a back seat to identity politics and the cult of the victim.
Our schools would be better off if the education departments of our universities were simply disbanded. My wife is a high school teacher. She will tell you that practically nothing she was taught in her college education classes is of value to her as a teacher, which at the same time they failed to teach her the most basic skills of pedagogy.
Future teachers should spend their college years studying the subject they intend to teach. In place of a degree in education I would institute an apprenticeship program for teachers, run by the school districts themselves. Practical information about lesson plan preparation, instructional techniques and behavior management would be transmitted directly from practicing classroom teachers to apprentice teachers, in a hands on environment.
At one time music was used to teach many things, in many cultures. However, as schools came to ape the church’s sermons over the centuries where the Church ran most schools, it seems to have become demeaning to a teacher to sing, instead of lecture. After all, the choir director had less status than the Bishop, in a Cathedral. This was especially so in “higher education”, it seems.
Over 20 years ago, I had heard that a teacher on Alaska’s Little Diomede island had settled into the local Inuit culture by accepting that memorization was not to be disdained, but cultivated. Previous teachers had sometimes been driven from the community with violence, for insisting that creativity came first, in a culture where not doing tasks right the first time could get someone killed in the harsh conditions of the Bering Sea. He did that through music, as the Inuit often did, inventing songs about the math and science subjects he wanted his students to learn.
Later, having brought his students to the point of winning national level science competitions, he formed a company in California to help students everywhere memorize what they needed to, through songs. I remember thinking their fees at the time were rather high, but knew little about how they were doing financially. I don’t know what happened to them. I see companies with websites that are trying this today, like http://www.singscience.com.
It seems however, that most of them are selling to homeschoolers, and to religious schools, almost exclusively. Basically, any curriculum the NEA can control seems doomed to dis memorization. One more thing affecting this was told to me by a friend familiar with music schools.
I had asked him about hiring music school students to write songs in coordination with science and math teachers. He said it would be treated with hostility, because music schools were all about music theory, and how to get on an orchestral company hiring list. The combination of these 2 constraints may be what keeps the music/memorization techniques from more general application. It once again seems that competent teaching techniques must await the dissolution of the NEA-dominated public school system.
I can tell you that where I live, the times tables are handed out, on a printed sheet, in 3rd and 4th grade on an as needed basis. Not that memorizing them would help.
In 5th grade, and beyond, they use CALCULATORS to do all but simple math.
I’ve wondered if the teachers knew them, or if they rely on a calculator for all their math too.
One of my favorite teachers from High School used the following phrase quite a bit: “Repetition is the ugly step-mother to learning,” especially when he would be in the process of making us memorize something for his Economics class.
To this day, I still remember most of the things he had us memorize, and, of course, now I also understand the principles and concepts behind those things.
But, when it comes down to it, memorization on at least some level is still a pretty key part of learning.
Without a deep and highly developed theory of everything I find creativity is just random and highly annoying noise. Creativity must be informed.
I never understood everything the teacher said at the time they said it – with memorizing the basics one is able to gradually fill in the conceptual understanding over time. I am not that good at higher math but quite good at mental arithmetic (practice), I know a lot of formulas and constants and can get a rough estimate for most engineering stuff as I am doing it. I spend sleepless nights with my eyes shut solving design problems in my head – a very useful trick that allows one to cover an awful lot of ground.
Feynman had a trick he used to do on command, the solution to a math problem within 10% and one minute. In the old days, the trick was to know a lot of numbers. Knowing a lot of numbers greatly helped one see reality directly.
No matter what people say about teaching the creativity thing, the fact is that test scores and student comprehension has declined over the last 30 years that people quit memorizing things.
Kelly, as any programmer knows,
1) Variables won’t
2) Constants aren’t
Glad to help 🙂
I’m annoyed with this ‘everyday math’ they are now doing at my children’s schools. I’m thinking it’s going to look good too, because I (and other parents) are supplementing to make sure the necessary memorization occurs. Thus they are getting some exposure at school and then our additional work at home.
The kids are at school 6 or 7 hours a day. That should be more than enough to learn to read and the basics of math.
Here’s one of my pet theories about why memorization is necessary. I’ve tutored algebra for a couple kids who have no understanding issues at all in the prerequisites for the math we are working on. So we try to do a simple algebra equation. The have to multiply both sides of the equation by, say 7. The 7 has to distribute onto a few constants inside some parenthesis, say 3 and 8. But they have to stop and think about what 7 times three is and what 7 times 8 is. By the time they do this they’ve lost the thread of what they were doing and thus haven’t really learned the concept of “multiply both sides of the equation by a number.”
In other words unless you have the basics memorized, you can’t concentrate on the next higher level concept. And the same goes for higher levels of math. If you have to work to recall how to manipulate algebraic equations, it’s really hard to learn the concepts of calculus.
One would hope that the teaching process might soon be automated online. This could solve a great many problems, including making a good education free(ish) to everyone. It could take some of the politics out of education. Most everything could be tested.
I actually just this morning listened to a fascinating podcast on this subject on EconTalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/10/willingham_on_e.html
Russ Roberts interviews a specialist in memory and they get into this very conversation. They also talk about why Ed. schools are so screwed up. I used to teach in a corporate environment and the actual literature on pedagogy and curriculum design doesn’t use any of the stuff you hear about. You just can’t use the stuff out of education schools. I found some of the best stuff in books on how to teach bible studies to small groups, actually.
Mr. Billings, that’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that. I’ll bet that it works very well. I don’t think it has much to do with the Church, however; I’ll bet it has to do with the rise of literacy and the printing press replacing oral cultures. After all, there’s a lot of that technique used in the Catholic Church services. What I find interesting, actually, is that often the Church allowed professors to become minor clergy so that they could be tried in Church courts instead of secular courts for heresy when they made a new discovery; the Church courts usually dismissed charges or gave lighter sentences. Non-clergy scientists, prosecuted by secular politicians with sanctimonious postures (I’m looking at you, Huckabee), were more often imprisoned or killed.
To tell the truth, we do have our hero Feynman to blame for some of this as well. In his writings on his sabbatical teaching in Brazil he attacked the foreign schools dependence on rote memorization at the university level and that it prevented students from thinking creatively about solutions to problems.
Unfortunately the education establishment has taken this, like DuChamp took Greenbergs maxim on avant garde art, to its literal, logical, and absurd conclusion, deciding that creativity is needed at all levels, and that you dont need to memorize a lot of information before you can start getting creative.
The fact is that it is the purpose of rigorous classwork to get us to memorize information, and the purpose of the arts, music, drama, etc to stimulate creativity. It is not an accident that the most talented scientists are also creative in the arts.
In the arts, repetition seems essential. For example, I once looked through a daily desk calendar of Magritte doodles and art. Let’s just say that he’s overwhelming fond of a few themes. An unbelievably common one is a man in a tailored suit and bowler hat. After you’ve seen a few dozen paintings with men and/or bowler hats, you become quite jaded. But they’re quite creative standing on their own. It’s only when you see the pile of variations he created on the theme, that you get some idea of the evolution of his art over a period of time, just using the same, basic elements.
I think the same goes for most artists. There’s a few things they do well. But once they get those right, then they can make a number of distinctive pictures, sometimes through incremental changes in their art.
Jeff Mauldin has I think the right idea. These artists, for example, get a working technique first, including how to correct mistakes. Then they can explore ideas and tricks later.
I would not say that the arts are any more or less creative than the sciences in the rigorous sense (humans being the common denominator) – they can be a lot more creative in the climatology sense…
It takes a genius for hard creativity to bring about a new paradigm in the hard sciences.
When my daughter, of average intelligence, was in eighth grade the math teacher was making all the kids use calculators for everything. After a bit of a discussion with the teacher we agreed that she would be allowed to use a calculator but would only be given it when she asked for it. Until then she would be allowed to work the problems without it. About a week passed and I asked her how math was going. She said that she was always the first to finish every assignment and test since she quit using the calculator. She could figure the answer out quicker than the other kids could punch the keys.
The infallible rule of bureaucracy: one gets to a high position by playing according to the rules of the agency. The rules of the agency are unrelated (for the most part) to the activity of the agency. One is not a school administrator because of demonstrated excellence in teaching. The post is obtained by politics.
Thus administrators are not dependent on their knowledge of what works; rather, they depend upon what they remember from their college instruction. And they are suckers for quick fixes.
It is unfortunate, but also true, that there is no human endeavor which can be undertaken without basic knowledge and memorization. In order to communicate upon any subject whatever, a shared vocabulary must exist. There is only one way to acquire this shared vocabulary, and that way is memorization. Creativity consists in what is done with the acquired knowledge. Such is the secret of the guild system, which continues today in the apprentice / journeyman / master system.
I am reminded of the famous quote given to Alexander the Great by his tutor: Sire, there is no royal road to geometry.
So do not expect any future quick fixes to work any better than the current crop. And stop picking on Feynman. Read what he said.