I got an A in nonlinear controls. Nonlinear differential equations are the hardest thing in math, the most impressive. (I'm explaining to a shrink.)
Actually, nonlinear PARTIAL differential equations might be the hardest. Inseparable nonlinear partial differential equations... controling them. Yeah. Good enough. ROFLMAO
It dawned on me that fuel slosh in a rocket might be tough.
Download SimStructure http://www.losethos.com/files/SimStrSetUp.ZIP for fun with control systems. Use L00-W10-M70 as product key. It has my first C compiler built into it. Took a year to write SimStructure 2000-2001. LoseThos took 9 years.
----
Statistics--suddenly fuzzy numbers? Economics? Federal Reserve. God said He is most better than us in Economics.
My second grader has a ton of anxiety over the confusing and disorganized lessons & homework that are coming out of the "Everyday Math" textbook that his teacher is using.
Hmm, I wonder who wrote this Everyday Math curriculum...oh, look at that. It's the University of Chicago.
I'm going to side with you here. Loved math as a kid. My high school then used the Chicago series, and I barely got past “Functions, Statistics, and Trigonometry”. I later got a bachelors and masters in mathematics from pretty good schools, reveling in abstraction and structure.
(Said logic compels me to say it's impossible to know whether the Chicago textbook series was responsible for that earlier poor performance, and not the more likely issues of the specific teachers, family, or adolescence. But! Anecdote.)
Don't see why you were downvoted. My daughter had the same experience with Everyday Math in a top-tier private school: intense anxiety. Now she's in a good public school with Houghton Mifflin. Say what you want about public school and Houghton Mifflin, but her standardized test scores have gone from 'needs remediation' to 'consider advanced placement' and while she still doesn't rank math as her favorite subject, she doesn't actively combat it.
Who says you have to follow the school's curriculum. Send your 2nd grader to Kumon Math. It's relatively affordable and your child will be out achieving the other kids in no time.
My school district is a pretty well regarded one in my state. I also contribute over $7,500 yearly in property taxes to fund this district. "Relatively" affordable is a complex idea as far as I see it.
How does the amount of property taxes you pay matter? It seems to me that it's your responsibility to see that your child gets a good education. The school is just a vehicle for that. If something is lacking then you have 2 choices: work with the school to fix things or supplement your child's education out of pocket. Kumon costs around $100/month/kid. You can judge for yourself whether that's affordable. Btw, many of the kids at my children's Kumon Center had teachers as parents. While it may feel nobler to battle the bureaucracy and to try to get your $7500 worth, your kid will likely have graduated long before you can effect any change.
That makes me so angry. We live in the 21st century, we fly to the moon and rovers to Mars and build microchips yet we can't teach our kids math effectively.
I have seen these books, I have seen this "everyday"-type approach to math also in college for non-technical majors. I looked at Everyday Math links.
They are a disaster. It is simpler to explain the goddam subject than to find round-about "simple" problems and "games" that somehow distantly refer to math but are meant to be "easy" when in fact they are nothing but confusing. They build their own "easy" terminology that is non-standard and they go and apply it.
The decimals for example. They go about in 10 round-about ways (base-10 block, wtf are those?) before finally showing a number line and asking students to order them. The number line is probably the most useful. I remember learning this from exercises. No base-10 blocks, no "math facts" (why not call them theorems and axioms). Just lots of exercises. Eventually the student internalizes the relationship and builds an internal abstract model.
The confusing part is all these "easy" terminology that tries to help in the end it all looks like an onslaught of random stuff pushed onto the student. They don't know that the author is trying to carefully orchestrate this long and drawn out process of presenting "math facts" so in the end the student reaches an "aha" moment and gets. He gets lost among orange circle with blue borders, playing coin-top-it and base-10 blocks in the end never really reaching the intended "aha" moment be she got stock at the "Decimals All Around Museum"
Teaching and learning often occur in supportive, nurturing environments where mistakes are made, lessons are learned, and people grow. Testing usually occurs in the same room, but often has a cold, authoritarian feel to it. The human who used to happily answer your questions now quietly and soberly tells you to go back to your seat, that providing the same warm answers to your questions would be very wrong. Mistakes are punished and even talking is not allowed. Learning feels like love. Tests feel like prison.
Is there a way other than testing to measure a student's progress?
I think it's important to get an objective feedback on your newly gained knowledge. While nobody wants to hear that they are not getting better after putting in reasonable effort, it's important part of learning.
Now if you use that test score to punish students, that's different...
Very good point - objective feedback is important. How can we provide students with objective feedback without putting them through that intimidating testing environment?
Life is full of intimidating circumstances. If a child suffers anxiety from a "test environment," then it's good to identify that early rather than try to remove all stress from a child's life.
I think we should largely get rid of grades. Schools should be about education, not about evaluation, but you need some evaluation entirely internal to the system.
for starting out my children, and then the Singapore Primary Mathematics materials (which now have an edition aligned to United States curriculums standards)
is a commerical online site (in which I have no economic interest) delivering personalized instruction in mathematics through precalculus mathematics. The ALEKS website includes links to research publications on which ALEKS is based.
I also recommend the Art of Problem Solving (AoPS)
(where I first took on the screenname that I also use here on HN) for more online mathematics instruction resources, and I also share specific links to specialized sites on particular topics with clients and with my children. I should note for onlookers that the articles on mathematics learning on the AoPS website
are very good indeed, especially "The Calculus Trap."
My children make quite a bit of voluntary use of Khan Academy (both watching videos and working online exercises) and I am gratified that my previous suggestions to the Khan Academy developers here on HN
have been followed up as Khan Academy developers have communicated with me by email about new problem formats available in their online exercises, which are becoming increasingly challenging.
Besides that, I fill my house with books about mathematics, and circulate other books about mathematics frequently from various local libraries.
I also recommend that all my students use the American Mathematics Competition
materials and other mathematical contest materials as a reality check on how well they are learning mathematics.
In general, I think mathematics is much too important a subject to be single-sourced from any source. Especially, mathematics is much too important to be left to the United States public school system in its current condition. I was rereading The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (1999) last month. It reminded me of facts I had already learned from other sources, including living overseas for two th...
Huh. For as long as I can remember, this has been me.
I remember when I was 6, sitting in a class-room with a Math test before me. If I got something wrong, I'd get severely yelled at however when people yelled at me for doing something wrong (and I didn't know what I was doing wrong) I'd get utterly confused, and because I'm deaf I'd get very anxious too. So I wasn't hearing the teacher right, and therefore applying what I heard wrong to the paper (thus getting it wrong, leading to me getting screamed at).
It eventually got so bad that year, I started to actually forget how to even think in numbers. When I was given a question like "5 + 5" I kept reading it like "five + five".
From there I went on to completely fail at Math in every possible way. However, I turned into a programmer somewhere along the way which is a bit weird! :D
Maybe I just live in a good school district. One day my son came home from either 1st grade and asked what a square root was. I can't remember if he knew multiplication already, but after I explained it didn't seem like it got very much of it. The next day he asked me what a cube root was. At this point, I had to find out what was driving these questions. It turns out there were a bunch of them on the playground trying to impress each other with their math knowledge. He begged me to teach him more math. Btw, these kids doing this on the playground, none of them would be considered nerds. They were all pretty physically able and most of the games they played were the typical variety.
I believe it's all about expectations and tone. If you fear math you can pass that anxiety on to your kids. I wasn't in my kid's 1st grade class, but I'm guessing they made it fun and not very intimidating. At home, even before he was school age, we would do math problems, so that he was comfortable with it.
23 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] threadhttp://www.losethos.com/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf
I got an A in nonlinear controls. Nonlinear differential equations are the hardest thing in math, the most impressive. (I'm explaining to a shrink.)
Actually, nonlinear PARTIAL differential equations might be the hardest. Inseparable nonlinear partial differential equations... controling them. Yeah. Good enough. ROFLMAO
It dawned on me that fuel slosh in a rocket might be tough.
Download SimStructure http://www.losethos.com/files/SimStrSetUp.ZIP for fun with control systems. Use L00-W10-M70 as product key. It has my first C compiler built into it. Took a year to write SimStructure 2000-2001. LoseThos took 9 years.
----
Statistics--suddenly fuzzy numbers? Economics? Federal Reserve. God said He is most better than us in Economics.
God says... appointing itch comprised Behold Lovely innate unteach adulterous equipment tongues meat processing loosen depend sat psalm fingers littles glide smelleth author incurable projected My toss masters argument paying cheeks insolently lingering undertook all Verity delusions haled faculty disperseth tire suggests mountain bought maintainers grievous Turn associated lesson deeds limits urged ornamenting formless Psalms Jerusalem unwearied receive unknown slaying tread nominally fresh
My professor said Kalman of kalman filter fame went into economics.
Hmm, I wonder who wrote this Everyday Math curriculum...oh, look at that. It's the University of Chicago.
(And yes, I'm opening that door.)
(Said logic compels me to say it's impossible to know whether the Chicago textbook series was responsible for that earlier poor performance, and not the more likely issues of the specific teachers, family, or adolescence. But! Anecdote.)
I will probably resort to some other method to make sure my child understand and possibly even enjoys math. I realize that.
But I believe I deserve a right to be upset because one path would give my son a decent education and the other will cost me $1000 a year to fix.
I have seen these books, I have seen this "everyday"-type approach to math also in college for non-technical majors. I looked at Everyday Math links.
They are a disaster. It is simpler to explain the goddam subject than to find round-about "simple" problems and "games" that somehow distantly refer to math but are meant to be "easy" when in fact they are nothing but confusing. They build their own "easy" terminology that is non-standard and they go and apply it.
This is the crap I am talking about:
http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/about/understanding-em/EM20...
The decimals for example. They go about in 10 round-about ways (base-10 block, wtf are those?) before finally showing a number line and asking students to order them. The number line is probably the most useful. I remember learning this from exercises. No base-10 blocks, no "math facts" (why not call them theorems and axioms). Just lots of exercises. Eventually the student internalizes the relationship and builds an internal abstract model.
The confusing part is all these "easy" terminology that tries to help in the end it all looks like an onslaught of random stuff pushed onto the student. They don't know that the author is trying to carefully orchestrate this long and drawn out process of presenting "math facts" so in the end the student reaches an "aha" moment and gets. He gets lost among orange circle with blue borders, playing coin-top-it and base-10 blocks in the end never really reaching the intended "aha" moment be she got stock at the "Decimals All Around Museum"
Is there a way other than testing to measure a student's progress?
(I don't have much time to type, so maybe this is too brief.)
Now if you use that test score to punish students, that's different...
I think we should largely get rid of grades. Schools should be about education, not about evaluation, but you need some evaluation entirely internal to the system.
For homeschooling, which for other parents on Hacker News could take the form of "afterschooling," I much prefer Miquon Math
http://www.keycurriculum.com/products/supplementals/miquon-m...
for starting out my children, and then the Singapore Primary Mathematics materials (which now have an edition aligned to United States curriculums standards)
http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...
followed up by the Gelfand textbooks
http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-Dover-Books-Mathema...
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathemati...
http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144...
appropriately supplemented by ALEKS
http://www.aleks.com
and EPGY
http://epgy.stanford.edu/district/info.html
ALEKS
http://www.aleks.com/
is a commerical online site (in which I have no economic interest) delivering personalized instruction in mathematics through precalculus mathematics. The ALEKS website includes links to research publications on which ALEKS is based.
I also recommend the Art of Problem Solving (AoPS)
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/
(where I first took on the screenname that I also use here on HN) for more online mathematics instruction resources, and I also share specific links to specialized sites on particular topics with clients and with my children. I should note for onlookers that the articles on mathematics learning on the AoPS website
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?
are very good indeed, especially "The Calculus Trap."
My children make quite a bit of voluntary use of Khan Academy (both watching videos and working online exercises) and I am gratified that my previous suggestions to the Khan Academy developers here on HN
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663
have been followed up as Khan Academy developers have communicated with me by email about new problem formats available in their online exercises, which are becoming increasingly challenging.
Besides that, I fill my house with books about mathematics, and circulate other books about mathematics frequently from various local libraries.
I also recommend that all my students use the American Mathematics Competition
http://amc.maa.org/
materials and other mathematical contest materials as a reality check on how well they are learning mathematics.
In general, I think mathematics is much too important a subject to be single-sourced from any source. Especially, mathematics is much too important to be left to the United States public school system in its current condition. I was rereading The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (1999) last month. It reminded me of facts I had already learned from other sources, including living overseas for two th...
Huh. For as long as I can remember, this has been me.
I remember when I was 6, sitting in a class-room with a Math test before me. If I got something wrong, I'd get severely yelled at however when people yelled at me for doing something wrong (and I didn't know what I was doing wrong) I'd get utterly confused, and because I'm deaf I'd get very anxious too. So I wasn't hearing the teacher right, and therefore applying what I heard wrong to the paper (thus getting it wrong, leading to me getting screamed at).
It eventually got so bad that year, I started to actually forget how to even think in numbers. When I was given a question like "5 + 5" I kept reading it like "five + five".
From there I went on to completely fail at Math in every possible way. However, I turned into a programmer somewhere along the way which is a bit weird! :D
Does anyone else wonder if this anxiety stuff ties into Dyscalculia? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia)
However, I'm great at putting Math into an algorithm, or using code to work out a problem (this was not acceptable in school...)
I passed compsci with good marks, went straight into jobs so I'm obviously not that bad!
I believe it's all about expectations and tone. If you fear math you can pass that anxiety on to your kids. I wasn't in my kid's 1st grade class, but I'm guessing they made it fun and not very intimidating. At home, even before he was school age, we would do math problems, so that he was comfortable with it.