Comments on: Take This Paradigm

By: mathman

mathman — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:38:34 +0000

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.

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:04:03 +0000

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.

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:51:58 +0000

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.

By: Karl Hallowell

Karl Hallowell — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:18:39 +0000

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.

By: Mike Lorrey

Mike Lorrey — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:35:56 +0000

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.

By: Jonathan Card

Jonathan Card — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:14:03 +0000

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.

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:59:15 +0000

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.

By: Jeff Mauldin

Jeff Mauldin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:17:03 +0000

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.

By: Grizzled Wrenchbender

Grizzled Wrenchbender — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:02:14 +0000

Kelly, as any programmer knows,

1) Variables won’t
2) Constants aren’t

Glad to help

By: Dennis Wingo

Dennis Wingo — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:44:05 +0000

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.