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“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” — Frank Herbert in Dune, 1965.
Relevant as ever
So funny to be like AI can retrieve facts in .3 seconds. First of all, no it can’t. Second of all, can’t search engines do this? Haven’t they been doing this for years? Like AI is slower, less accurate and more wasteful than duckduckgo. Shouldn’t all her points have been true years ago?
forgive her, she’s been outsourcing all mental activity for a while.
they’re sending kids to school to learn things that are already in books! and if they wanted to know them they could just learn them from a book! why even bother to learn from a book when they could learn it from a book?!
Throw the book at 'em!
Duckduckgo uses Ai now too right? Better use startpage, it’s AI free and privacy based under eu law.
It has a kill switch for all AI features. It also has a toggle for AI generated images in image search
I’m not fond of the results ddg gives me. Startpage results are more like Google used to be back in the days when it was a proper search engine. Like over 10 / 15 years ago.
The results are definitely terrible, mostly due to the AI slop sites that have been popping up in the last 3 years. I’ll give startpage a go, but I think we are already in dead internet theory territory. I’ve also heard good things about Kagi
I think we are already in dead internet theory territory.
Yup, I believe you’re right with that one, and that there’s no return now with the current progress of AI. The internet is broken and it doesn’t look like the ones responsible for it have any intension of fixing that. They only will make everything much worse.
When they filmed the movie ‘Van Helsing’ in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn’t have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.
We went to dance classes all throughout I think eight grade and learned a few of the classical dances. Waltz, Foxtrott, Cha-Cha, Tango. That’s Eastern Germany in the early 2000s.
Now I’m imagining Mel Brooks doing a black-and-white German Expressionist scene of nine year olds in tuxedos and gowns doing the tango.
Dance classes in a normal German secondary school? Wow, we never had that. We had a private dance school for couple dancing in town, it was popular at about age 13.
It wasn’t in school, it was an after school thing at a dancing school. It was relatively affordable - I think it was at least in part paid for by the ministry of education - and we all went there together after regular lessons. I never heard of anyone not attending.
My middle school in the us made us learn to waltz in gym class. I’m ass at it, but it was fun.
My elementary school PE did a couple weeks every year where we did square dancing and line dancing. I guess that’s the southeastern US coming in. Sometimes we did some other more traditional English dance where the boys and girls would be in rows facing each other where there were some set steps and then the couple at one end would dance down between the lines to the other end, there would be more steps and then the next couple would move, and so on. It was like something out of a Jane Austen movie.
I learned square dancing in high school in Ohio. I was the only boy in a class of all girls, because I had broken my wrist and couldn’t play basketball. I would love to tell the story of how this helped me get girls, but I was much too big of a loser to take advantage of the situation.
You can thank Henry Ford’s bigotry for that.
No, really. He hated seeing his employees dance to jazz (the popularity of which he blamed on ‘the Jews’, because of course he did), so much so that he pushed to have “proper” dances taught in public schools, dances that were old-fashioned even in his time.
What the fuck man I got told off for six years because I didn’t know how to jump rope
I mean I also got publicly humiliated by my inability to run far or fast so often it fucked with my head. But we had 6 months of learning to dance before returning to the shame gauntlet
Ah so, it’s not only Finland where the point of Physical Education is to humiliate all the joy of athletics out of the vast majority of generations of people.
Except the up and coming hockey players the washed up sportsman/woman who was hired to teach as a sort of social program gives all their attention to. Guess those have different sports abroad.
But really it seems so efficient that the state makes schools focus on competition, subsidize competitive team sports heavily, and hire subsidized people from professional sports to further the subsidized hobbies of the maybe future professionals.
The end result is billions in subsidies and that most people who can’t hack it professionally just quit sports alltogether in their teens or even earlier.
I just quite can’t see how are they actually trying to go public health first with which the tax expenses are excused.
Yeah I get what my schools were going for. And it was private school, so while taxes pay for actually a worse version by all accounts, my parents paid for mine.
Like, they tried to have a variety of things within budget. We did calisthenics, we did sports like basketball, flag gridiron football, and even occasionally some international football, we had American classics like dodgeball. In high school we even did pickleball and weight lifting.
But at the end of the day I got winded after a few meters of running and so running a mile (1069m) as is something most people were expected to be able to do was an exercise in me exhausting myself and slowly trudging along after everyone else finished. Fortunately I’ve always been really strong for my exercise level so for strength type stuff I regained some of the dignity I lost being lapped by fat smokers.
The thing is, nothing will ever make running something I’m willing to do if I can help it. I get the runners high and still hate running. And it would be an expensive disaster if schools did my preferred cardio of bikes or hikes. But also they didn’t even teach us proper running form. They just assumed “people know how to run, and the weird nerd won’t be athletic anyways”. Fortunately I’ve become fairly athletic in adulthood (though I fell out for a year and a half and am now hurting getting back into it)
We got line dancing -_-
Just as the Lord Jesus commanded to Noah
Every kid in Scotland is taught how to ceilidh. Some of us even learn to enjoy it!
Street clothes or gym shorts?
To graduate from my (American) high school, you needed a given number of gym points, and you were given one gym point per day of gym class. But, I learned, you earned one and a half gym points per day of dance class! I figured this was a great scam: I already hated gym class, so I’d get my points out the way faster.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I’m working harder than I ever was in gym class, I’m enjoying myself more, and I’m hanging out with girls in leotards first thing every school day. There was literally no downside.
Clearly, the system working as intended.
Not just Soviet days. Today, it’s expected (although not mandatory) to attend a course on ballroom dance and etiquette around the age of 16. It’s usually not in school PE classes, but evening lessons in dedicated ballrooms or community centers with professional lecturers.
There are also similar courses for adults commonly available. It’s considered a fun hobby for couples.
I was lucky enough to go to a summer camp where we learned dance.
I think a lot of my fellow americans would benefit from learning etiquette and dancing.
Is this where I subscribe for more Van Helsing facts?
Theres a reason American slaves weren’t allowed to read or write. Why little girls in Afghanistan aren’t allowed to go to school past 3rd grade.
What’s going to happen when you can’t read agreements or reports. And just have to believe what someone else tells you it says.
?
Whats worrying is that im already in that situation now with all the 50 page user agreements. Like fuck am I reading that every time.
You know, I do research and there are rules that the informed-consent documents have to be written at an 8th grade reading level.
No jargon. No technical writing.
Simple and clear. So that when people agree to be in a study, they actually do understand what that involves.
Otherwise they can sue the hell out of you for misleading them.
Why is this also not a requirement for “terms and service”?
They intentionally write it in “legalise” so that the average person cannot understand it.
I think it should have to follow the same rules as informed-consent documents.
I just looked at that woman’s twitter and it’s an absolute nightmare. AI really makes some stupid people think they are smart.
Or is it just some AI bot trying to promote AI?
Very possible. The whole purpose of the account is to grift. White trash looking woman claiming to have financial freedom due to AI.
she wrote a comment that a bot could have written better
Who’s to say it didn’t?
“Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health”
(via)
We can’t have people forming their own ideas.
I warned ya! Didn’t I warn ya? That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself.
tsk tsk
Only idiots read books, smart people think for themselves!
People reliant on LLMs are just participating in an any% dementia speedrun. It’s a social experiment, of sorts.
More like:
Claude solve this for me
It goes in the square hole.
Sheesh. Spoilers, man.
Thanks Claude. Still doesn’t seem to be working though as the corners on the object are in a different place to the corners on the hole. It’s like they’re rotated. Can you break this down for me, step by step? Or is this impossible?
Cut off corners, problem solved
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
That essay will almost never be good enough to be relevant or published; no one expects it to be. The goal is to engage with the material, and learn to synthesise and present your ideas logically.
We must grade the process of writing an essay, never the final product; especially not based on how “good” an essay that final product is.
We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves why people don’t have AI complete video games for them, but do so for essays. It’s because in one case, the value is in the process, while in the other, the value is believed to be the result, but it shouldn’t be.
If people understood this, it would make no sense having AI write students’ essays. You can blame people for wanting to take shortcuts, but I believe our society and culture at large play a much bigger role in that trend.
Waay back in high school I had a teacher who just aimed for getting an essay written at all. He had one assignment per week: a 5 paragraph essay due every Friday.
If you turned one in: automatic 75%, baseline. Turn in garbage each week? C grade free. He even said you could turn the same essay in each week. 75%. C.
If you missed it, 0% no make-up work.
A lot of the class failed.
Couldn’t they like turn in a blank page?
I get forgetting it. But you should have a paper somewhere that you could turn in, no?
He demanded at least you write something down. He had a formula for writing 5 paragraph essays and he said to use it, and accepted nonsense if you plugged it in. No pencil. Had to be pen or typed. I still actually use it when trying to write.
You’re right, but there’s no easy way to grade the effort without looking at the final result. That’s how you end up with a school system that prioritizes test results so much it ends up teaching students how to pass a test instead of learning and processing information.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but when I was in school for non-exam (i.e. timed) essays, they were split into outlines and drafts, and the drafts were individually graded as a portion of the entire essay grade, so there was a way to gauge the process rather than simply the final submission.
I always found that process frustrating, however, because English was easily my best subject and the teacher would get upset if I turned in a 2nd draft that was identical to the first because I was already basically there. Now that I’m older, I understand the reason for why the teacher structured the lessons in such a way.
I also think that essays in general are a much better metric for measuring true understanding of a topic, at least compared to multiple choice.
Oral exams are decent, but teachers have too many students
very well said
When I was in school, I was given a maximum time limit to write an essat. I was told beforehand what the topic would be. My teacher told me the best way to prepare was write an essay before the test and then memorize it so I wouldn’t actually have to create anything new during the test.
Yeah but the point of American school isnt to teach kids to learn and use information. Its too produce obedient and detail oriented workers. Memorizing and regurting information correctly only to dump it for the next project is much more profitable.
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
Surely people don’t really think that? I say that, and then I think about some of the colossally stupid things I’ve heard people say and say about education.
God forbid they learn how to think, when LLMs can do it (kind of) for them
I love how some people are ready to just give up on everything now that AI can do it
I mean, I was ready to give up everything before AI, it was just in a more flammable way.
Exactly. School isn’t really about memorizing facts, it’s about learning and honing Critical Thinking Skills. That’s how humans are supposed to think, and without it, people substitute chaotic thinking that makes them susceptible to manipulation.
Also, it teaches us how to interact with other humans, so our first instinct isn’t just to KILL them.
That’s why we go to school.
At least it should be this way, the reality might be different sometimes:/
In reality the vast majority of the workload may be formatting and word choice that is quite far from thinking.
And then you’re getting a bachelor’s degree and because you’re big dumb dumb who doesn’t really know anything, your task is to collate and paraphrase something not dumb people thought, maybe applying it to some case you have, but not thinking independently.
A masters thesis can have just a little bit of thinking as a, treat, but most leave school before they reach levels where one thinks when writing.
AI “retrieves” facts? Not my experience.
I was personally not able to reproduce this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/52tYaGQgaEPvZaHTb/was-barack-obama-still-serving-as-president-in-december but it should still provide an illustration of what AI’s ideas of retrieving facts looks like.
i recently got access to the paid version of Claude at my job. they wanted us to automate some routine tasks, fine. i had it make something, then asked how i could save it as a skill for future use. it said it doesn’t have skills or macros. i said what, yes there are skills right there in the customize section. it came back with the usual “you’re right! let me check… oh yes indeed there is such a function. my bad. here’s more information from the web: …”
like… oh my god. imagine if this were an unpaid intern. they would be immediately shot into the atmosphere. but instead we pay for this shit.
Yes, such things can happen… I once asked an LLM a few questions about me (under my real name) that was publicly available on the Internet (i.e. should be in its training data). It answered a simple yes-or-no question wrongly. Then I asked it a followup question, which it answered more correctly, but the answer contradicted that wrong answer and it went “this seems to contradict my previous answer that…”.
Sherlock AI
but instead we pay for this shit.
Yes, but not nearly as much. :(
In my experience Microsoft Copilot is wildly inaccurate about facts describing aspects of Microsoft software products like Teams, or even Microsoft Copilot itself.
All AI does is generate plausible-sounding text. It doesn’t care about whether it is true or false.
I am not generally anti-AI, nor generally pro-AI. There are good uses of AI and bad uses. For example I used AI to generate my profile picture here; the creation of art (as long as there is human review) is one of the best uses of AI I can think of…
But asking it for factual information and expecting it to be correct, and making decisions based on it? Anyone who does that deserves all negative consequences it can have.
AI is good for quickly generating “realistic enough” stat sheets for pen and paper campaigns. Not for actual research that effects people.
… Isn’t less wrong where the zizians came out of
Sometimes advances in technology do mean that things that they teach in school are outdated and can probably safely be removed.
I’d say cursive writing is one of those things. Writing in general is important, and obviously kids need to learn how to write upper case and lower case block letters. But, with computers everywhere, a whole secondary set of characters that is designed to be linked together seems useless.
I also do think that schools probably focus too much on memorization. I absolutely hated history in school because that’s how it was taught. Memorize the name of these battles and the dates and then regurgitate them for the test. I didn’t actually learn anything meaningful. What would have been much more useful and much more interesting would have been to learn more of the backstory. What was going on in the country that led it to go to war. Were they trying to distract from something, or get the people to unite against a common enemy? Were they supremely confident that they could easily win and gain important territory or resources? Were they backed into a corner?
I’d support not memorizing as many things because it’s true that you can look them up (of course, AI is not how you should ever look anything up because it might just ‘hallucinate’). I think most teachers would agree. But, it’s also a lot harder to write and grade a good test when you’re not doing names and dates. So, I assume that’s another big part of the reason that memorization is the focus.
You know they don’t teach typing anymore either. Yeah Ive got 3 nieces and a nephew. None of them can use a keyboard properly. They type with their index fingers.
How old are they? I was never taught typing, just kinda made it up myself. I tried to learn a few times with Mavis Beacon and stuff, but I can never get the “proper” way to stick.
I had a typing class in middle school about 18 years ago (jfc)
Oldest niece recently 18, then 16 and a 14 year old. Nephew is like 11 I think.
All the girls are from my sister and nephew from my brother. I’m pretty sure that’s close to their accurate ages.
But yeah they don’t teach typing anymore and they expect kids to just learn it on their own but a lot of people don’t have home computers. Kids use phones and tablets.
But I can tell you at college level, most writing has to be typed out.
So it’s really setting them up for struggling
I remember typing class. I thought it was super boring and frustrating.
I never would have learned to type properly if I hadn’t been forced.
I’m sure that’s true for most kids/people.
The thing that helped me improve my skills the most was social media. Specifically messengers.
But kids don’t use computers anymore for sending messages back and forth.
I honestly think when these kids get into the workforce, there is going to be some serious problems.
They can’t use regular computers very well and they can’t type.Basically boomer level tech skills.
However they end up getting the data into the computer, it’s still in the computer. Cursive just isn’t useful in that world.
I think cursive was designed for feather dipped ink pens so they didn’t have to be lifted because that often causes blobs.
It’s also something you can learn easily on the side.
I think it’s primary benefit is if it’s taught to kids, it helps them develop fine motor skills.
We may see a decline in art drawing abilities due to this. (Among other issues that would contribute to this).
Poorer surgeons.
Loss of quality Craftsmanship in many detail oriented fields.
We learn skills like this better as kids.
That’s my only real argument why it should still be taught. Kids don’t really learn fine motor tool manipulation skills like this in their other activities.
Human hands are one of our greatest strengths. Shame to not develop this better in kids.
I think you’re reaching when you think that no cursive writing will mean poorer surgeons. Is there any evidence to back that up, or is it just supposition?
Besides, less time spent on cursive writing could be sent on drawing or painting. Or, the kids could have more time off which they could use to play video games, which give them better hand-eye coordination making them better surgeons later in life.
Yes there is evidence that humans have what is called “sensitive periods” and “critical periods”. Defined as specific development time periods where some skills are developed.
“Sensitive periods” are related to “critical periods” although they both sort of mean the same thing but the first one suggests it’s possible for some skill acquisition to occur at a later age but just severely restricted whilst critical periods mean the skill cannot be learned after after the cut off. The farther (in time) you move from the sensitive period for a given skill, the harder it becomes to learn it.
Handwriting sensitive period is 2-4.5 but is still developing at a slower rate from 4-8.
If a child has not figured out how to write by 8, they likely will not improve much more beyond the level they are at.
The one for reading is around 11. Kids who haven’t grasped how to read, even dyslexic kids, have little chance of catching up to their peers if they haven’t caught up by age 11.
I myself was dyslexic but had a great special ed teacher who helped me catch up and then exceed my peers in a 1 year period. I was 6 or 7. If I did not get that extra support before I turned 10-11, I likely never would have learned to read fluently.
This is a big problem now with kids not being able to read. They won’t improve much later. The improvement needs to happen young. Before 10.
I am only hypothesizing that a lack of hand dexterity training early in life can reduce overall dexterity achievement level later.
But I’m not basing this on a hunch. I’m basing it on what we know of sensitive and critical development periods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period
Wikipedia lacks a lot of info on this so I suggest the first link if you are curious to learn more about this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5851374/
The effect of fine motor skills on handwriting legibility in preschool age children
Effect of Basketball Dribbling Practice on Cursive Handwriting of Primary School Children
They took out cursive from the curriculum for a while, but they are supposedly putting it back now. I think they are suggesting the brain learns a little differently with cursive so it’s still useful in that manner.
Also I think you’d enjoy the podcast I listen to, American History Tellers. I hated history for the same reasons you describe but this podcast really made me enjoy it. Usually they open a topic with something like “Imagine it’s in the late 1800s, and you are opening up shop. Times have been hard since [backstory], but you are getting by okay. You do worry about [current topic], and feel worse when you read today’s paper.” Even that small little setup kind of ropes you in to feel like it’s relatable.
I like that setup for learning history. Often history is told from the point of view of either an omniscient being who knows what everybody on every side is thinking, or from the point of view of the ruler of a country. It would be interesting to hear about it from the point of view of an informed but relatively powerless shopkeeper.
Based on my kid’s experience, the very particular details aren’t required, though enough to prove you aren’t just completely fabricating things.
Knowing roughly which century and what region things happened, and being called upon to take a cited scenario and then compare and contrast with a scenario of the student’s choice, constrained to a general region and area, that’s the nature of the history class.
I’m overall actually pleased at the blend of knowing enough but not getting carried away in trivial minutia. Has to be somewhat tethered because the teacher has to have some way of knowing whether they actually studied or just vaguely make up thoughts that sound right.
But it takes a while for grades to come back and there aren’t many grades, because it’s pretty much entirely essay, entirely handwritten (because typed is too risky for AI interference).
No complaints from my kid about “computers can do this anyway”, because it’s understood that we do “stupid human tricks” to foster our ability to think, so it sucks, but fine. A bit of the “I’m never ever going to use this” for the advanced math and chemistry, which is accurate, but balanced against “well we can’t specifically tackle what you will use, but we can vaguely get your brain to use these topics to get used to reasoning through things in ways you’ll have to reason through real stuff”.
When did you go to school? I don’t think I’d consider everything about the education I received to be ideal but by the time I was in high school it was very much not about memorisation and history in particular was taught basically exactly like what you described as what you would have preferred it to have been.
Cursive was interesting. I went to a lot of schools because my family moved around a lot. In Primary school, in the 90s cursive was inconsistently taught, and inconsistently valued and by the time I had reached the 6th grade it was simply considered obsolete and sometimes even actively prohibited because they wanted you to dispense with the idea.
As I moved to new schools around this time I noticed nobody else did cursive, also my cursive looked bad since I hadn’t really mastered it and also been taught about 3 or 4 different varieties of the “correct” way at different schools with no acknowledgement of there being different systems in existence. So I gave it up and printed like all my compatriots but then in French class in highschool the text book had a section on french culture showing “french writing” that they presumably taught there and I liked how it was kind of more complicated and daintier than the versions I’d learned so I tried to imitate those stylistic differences for fun and out of boredom in class. I now voluntarily write cursive for the hell of it because it’s more interesting and fun to do. I do this in my own bastardised hand learned in multiple different schools with multiple half remembered “standard” systems plus a few elements of the French system that I cherry picked from that text book all those years ago and a couple of things I looked up online because I wondered if some things might look better from other systems. Don’t know why, just kinda like it.
History is intentionally taught wrong I think. Nobody really needs to know the exact date that something happened (outside of a few key events). What actually matters is what timeframe it happened in, what events led up to it, and what the consequences were. The “why” behind the events. History should be taught like his-STORY because it is a story. One of my favorite middle school history teachers taught us history as if it was a story book and the historical figures were characters, which made it interesting to listen to, while also being contiguous.
By teaching history as a disjointed series of dates and events, schools fulfill their obligations to have a class be taught without actually teaching the critical thinking people need to understand current events. How much of this is intentional to cause students to grow into adults who vote against their own interests, or simply a result of paying teachers less than McDonald’s workers I do not know.
It’s intentional, ofc.
Horace Mann, the father of public education, was a Puritan. An exerpt from a little article about Horace Mann here:
"It’s worth reminding ourselves now about the key characteristics of the industrial era, and how we can see them manifested in the education system that continues to operate across America to this day:
- Schools focus on respecting authority
- Schools focus on punctuality
- Schools focus on measurement
- Schools focus on basic literacy
- Schools focus on basic arithmetic
Notice how these reinforce each other. You enter the system one way, and are crammed through an extended molding process. The result? A “good enough” cog to jam into an industrial machine."
But school isn’t just preparation the “industrial machine”. It also serves as a propaganda machine. The master of Nazi propaganda, Joeseph Goebbels, saw schools as a place to indoctrinate the youth. That’s the purpose of history class in public education. To build the mythos, to encourage loyalty, to tell stories of brave soldiers fighting the ever-present enemies of the state.
Exactly! Learn those kids stuff ai can’t do! Send them to the mines!
sigh… how can one be so dumb? has to be a troll… right? pretty please.
Realistically, schools were designed to provide a trainable workforce that could read well enough to learn new tasks and do enough math to make sure the factory machines were properly maintained.
Many people these days don’t read a single book after they get out of school. The AIs are just making things happen faster.
From a broader perspective “school” has been a thing since before Socrates and humanity pendulums between “a broad education is the foundation for a strong populace” and “we need a giant pool of disposable labor”.
And the US public education philosophy is similarly inconsistent. At the earliest it was Puritans who wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible for themselves and so pushed for literacy. At times it has been guided specifically by the business economy but it’s inaccurate to say that schools were designed to produce factory workers.
Yeah, hell modern universal public education was partly a result of the working class fighting like hell for it
On the other hand, a lot of good ideas ended up getting co-opted to serve the State.
I don’t think the IWW was planning on ahving kids learn the Pledge of Allegiance.
Nor did the inventor of the pledge expect it to be used for anti communism.
But ultimately I don’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the public education system goes away the proletariat will suffer for it. Fascists are attempting to move the Overton window towards that. The solution as I see it is re-examining, reimagining, and reforming public education to serve the masses. But a big part of that is reconvincing the proletariat that education is valuable in its own right rather than just as job training.
Hear, hear!
Modern universal public eduction has its roots in prussian model and the idea was very much to make effective and loyal workforce. Im not saying modern education has the same ulterior motivations, but things like standarized curricula and grading are coming from there.
IIRC the goal wasn’t to have a loyal workforce, but to have an army that isn’t dependent on a small number of elites.
Basically “we won’t stop with the death of our officers, our soldiers can step up to the occasion”.
Which is a good philosophy outside of the military! That’s the same thing the Puritans wanted, for people to not be reliant on a few to do their thinking for them.
The people who don’t respect the value of school generally performed very poorly in school.
We mature too late in life to realize thats the last time anyone will ever teach us for free.
Life is teaching you all the time (for free) if you but listen.
Especially if you’ve learned to learn, and have critical thinking, things schools should be teaching (but often avoid in favor of quickly outdated ‘job skills’ or similar because some political ideologies do better with the poorly educated).
Nope, this is a common thought amongst those impressed by AI. And I can relate coz when I was in school, no one would give a good answer to why I needed to do any arithmetics without a calculator.
As a math teacher, my suggestion to the students is during practice to try to do calculations without a calculator to invoke a bit of number sense so when they use calculators be able to notice in the result if they did a wrong input. It happens to input “14” instead of “41” . I feel like able to do mental arithmetic with double digit numbers can be helpful
In hindsight, I do think the right approach is not to use calculators till secondary school (about 14~15 years of age). Having a feel for numbers and how they should behave under addition/multiplication/exponentiation and ability to mentally do two digit calculations as you said is critical, and should be an “automatic” capability
I think it’s reactionary, too. A version of “anything to trigger the libs”. If so many people weren’t against AI, OOP might have taken a moment to think before they type. As it stands, they reached for the first hot argument to get their opinion out. And I don’t mean to absolve them from anything here, just analyzing.
They do have a point. School should be about learning and developing critical thinking skills rather than memorizing who the 30th president was.
I know my schooling had a ton of memorization. Funny to think about now that I know I have Aphantasia because I always excelled in math and science because they are less about memorization and more about learning a concept to apply.
They need to teach kids how to use AI. It’s like people that won’t let you use a calculator in math. “You aren’t always going to have a calculator in your pocket”
I’ve always been a big supporter of open book/note tests
There is no reason I should be able to recite as much of the Canterbury Tales as I can.
Facts are how you build up everything else. It pretty hard to reason about complex math if you don’t understand how to count to 100. It’s pretty hard to reason about how societies move in waves and cycles if you don’t memorize something about history.
I think people don’t understand that you don’t just start doing abstract work. You build it a bunch of facts that you memorize and then you can start building higher level things like patterns and abstractions.
I know this from trying to teach my child basic concepts like what money is. What exactly is a day. How magnet work. The entire concept of estimation. These are trivial to adults, but these are hard won concepts that were build from concrete ideas for my child.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
Counting to 100 is like learning to read. Yes both are basic tools needed to learn English or math.
Do I need to know that the Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644? Is anything about the Ming Dynasty relevant to my life? I cannot remember the other handful of dynasties so I guess the Ming Dynasty could be the only one needed to function.
Yes history is important and definitely worth telling people. But having them memorize stuff that you can look up in a textbook is dumb.
I could walk into any high school level history class and pass the test if it was open book and if I had enough time I’d probably find all the answers.
Anyone couldn’t walk into a Calculus class and pass the test with it being open book if they didn’t know how to do Calculus. Yes they could read the whole chapter and learn to do it then pass the test. But there’s no looking up the answers in the book. It’s not memorizing.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
Cultures are not missing whole concepts like particular colors or left and right. They just express it differently.
Light red is pink. But a light blue is still light blue, maybe baby blue or sky blue.
Russia has the word голубой for light blue. It’s equivalent to our pink. Are we missing the whole concept of light голубой? No.
The cultures understand them being a different color and even more so they understand how it’s a mix or part of a color group. Being able to point and say “orange” when equal red and yellow are mixed isn’t a necessary skill. Like what would you say if something was a mixture of equal parts green and yellow? You could say chartreuse. If you didn’t know that word are you really missing out on everything chartreuse?
The right and left thing I think you’re referring to the tribe that uses cardinal directions? Thinking in terms of cardinal directions instead of left or right is a bit bizarre and I don’t know exactly how deep it goes. Like if i wanted to tell you to hang the picture to the right of the fireplace, I would have to know the cardinal directions of your house? Cardinal directions are extremely useful to use in English. East side wall of your house tells you exactly what wall it is. Left or right doesn’t mean anything unless I say something like “facing your house”. If I knew your fireplace was on your north wall I could easily say “Hang the picture east of your fireplace” meaning hang it to the right.
I got a bad grade in history class because I couldn’t remember exact dates, only rough timeframes, like “world war 2 ended 1945” but I couldn’t say “8th May 1945”. This kind of stuff happened a lot of times in many different classes in different ways.
The statement is dumb but I it does have a hint of true. With new technologies comes a new way of life and this should be reflected in education. The traditional educational system was created when no technologies existed and children and parents lifes were very different.
That’s why every kid has “ADHD”. They live in a different reality! siting down in a class for hours listening to a boring class and then having a test on what was said does not fill todays kids needs anymore. The global traditional.school system needs an urgent upgradeedit I said Global because it’s not a specific country problem
Why learn to read and write while there’s speech recognition and text-to-speech apps nowadays?
I’m sorry, but can you please attach the youtok link to your comment. I need to hear what you said, since I can’t read…
Its also important we see their ghoulishly over expressive face, so that we know what to think.
Best I can do is TickTube.
