In other news today...


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @rhywden said in In other news today...:

    You only learn something like that through rote repetition - repeat until you do it right. There really isn't any other way.

    That is ... wow. "Wrong" doesn't even begin to describe the magnitude of the incorrectness of that sentence.

    Rote memorization is certainly one way to learn, but it's often considered one of the worst options.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @topspin said in In other news today...:

    Maybe some kind of mob system where you pay protection money for the things police/fire department/military protects you from, because it'd be a shame if something happened? 🚎

    @ScholRLEA mentioned how that historically used to actually be the way fire departments worked, but it's unfortunately not all that historical. I recall hearing of cases as recently as 3 years ago, in the USA, where fire departments refused to put out someone's house because they hadn't paid their protection money.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @jaloopa said in In other news today...:

    Is shootimg people a lawful purpose?

    Sometimes.



  • @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    @rhywden said in In other news today...:

    You only learn something like that through rote repetition - repeat until you do it right. There really isn't any other way.

    That is ... wow. "Wrong" doesn't even begin to describe the magnitude of the incorrectness of that sentence.

    Rote memorization is certainly one way to learn, but it's often considered one of the worst options.

    As a teacher, there's several ways to learn. The best way depends on context. For things like basic facts (an essential part of being able to go on, like math facts), there is no substitute for memorization. Trust me. I see kids who went through the "newer" methods who can't divide 1000 by 10 without a calculator. Because they have no number sense. Kids who can't really read, because they never put the drill in. Kids who can't do higher-order stuff because they don't know what those words mean in that context.

    You can't build a house without a foundation. The foundation of the house of knowledge and skill is on carefully memorized facts.



  • @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    @topspin said in In other news today...:

    Maybe some kind of mob system where you pay protection money for the things police/fire department/military protects you from, because it'd be a shame if something happened? 🚎

    @ScholRLEA mentioned how that historically used to actually be the way fire departments worked, but it's unfortunately not all that historical. I recall hearing of cases as recently as 3 years ago, in the USA, where fire departments refused to put out someone's house because they hadn't paid their protection money.

    The well-known case was one where the owner had

    a) refused to pay, multiple times, with explicit warnings that they wouldn't cover him, because
    b) he lived outside the tax jurisdiction that paid for the fire protection and
    c) had been engaged in a legal battle with the fire department to get them to cover him for free.

    No sympathy there.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @scholrlea said in In other news today...:

    The idea of 'limited government' is a fantasy created by one group of alpha personalities (the 'Founding Fathers') to smear their rivals (Parliament), and has no real substance. The fact that they drank their own Kool-Aid (as evidenced by the existence of the Constitution in first place) doesn't change that.

    I don't think it was a propaganda/fantasy matter; they seem to have been quite sincere about it. They had seen the problems that having too powerful, immutable, and unaccountable of a government caused. The problem is, even these truly brilliant men were still human, and they suffered from the all-too-human tendency to overreact, particularly to traumatic events.

    Remember that the Constitution was not the government that the Founding Fathers established after the Revolution; the Articles of Confederation were, and that system failed hard because the central government was far too weak to effectively govern. So they got together and established America 2.0, the Constitution. They pragmatically expanded the powers of the federal government to cover necessary functions, but they remained somewhat shell-shocked after British oppression and the war that arose from it, and kept trying to cling to their small-government ideas (which had already failed once!) as much as they could, in defiance of reason and human nature.

    They did surprisingly well, as evidenced by the past 200+ years, but a lot of their efforts would have been better spent on establishing firm principles of accountability and transparency rather than decentralization; all of human history teaches us that that's the exact opposite of what actually works, and a lot of the messes we've ended up in in this country spring directly from that one root.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:

    As a teacher, there's several ways to learn. The best way depends on context. For things like basic facts (an essential part of being able to go on, like math facts), there is no substitute for memorization. Trust me. I see kids who went through the "newer" methods who can't divide 1000 by 10 without a calculator. Because they have no number sense. Kids who can't really read, because they never put the drill in. Kids who can't do higher-order stuff because they don't know what those words mean in that context.

    You can't build a house without a foundation. The foundation of the house of knowledge and skill is on carefully memorized facts.

    This. Memorization works well for the most basic things, because there's really no good alternative, but once there are good alternatives, like leveraging the way the brain fundamentally works to construct principles out of simpler principles, they tend to work a lot better.



  • @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    That is ... wow. "Wrong" doesn't even begin to describe the magnitude of the incorrectness of that sentence.
    Rote memorization is certainly one way to learn, but it's often considered one of the worst options.

    Unless the context is doing a physical action. You know, like this context right here we're discussing. Muscle memory is only built one way, and it isn't by not practicing.



  • @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    @benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:

    As a teacher, there's several ways to learn. The best way depends on context. For things like basic facts (an essential part of being able to go on, like math facts), there is no substitute for memorization. Trust me. I see kids who went through the "newer" methods who can't divide 1000 by 10 without a calculator. Because they have no number sense. Kids who can't really read, because they never put the drill in. Kids who can't do higher-order stuff because they don't know what those words mean in that context.

    You can't build a house without a foundation. The foundation of the house of knowledge and skill is on carefully memorized facts.

    This. Memorization works well for the most basic things, because there's really no good alternative, but once there are good alternatives, like leveraging the way the brain fundamentally works to construct principles out of simpler principles, they tend to work a lot better.

    This is not a replacement--it's an addon. We memorize and we make mental constructs. Or we memorize through association, but that requires a large bank of knowledge already constructed. Especially through elementary school, but also through high school, we do far too little knowledge work and too much "higher order" thinking that's just the blind leading the blind.

    These are the "inquiry" brainworms that are currently the rage in science education. It's a lazy way of making claims of "good learning" non-falsifiable. Fact is, the most important predictor of a child's learning (through high school) is not the teaching method, it's not the tech or the eduspeak, it's not even the amount of practice. It's the relationship between the teacher and the student. Because people learn anything true through faith:

    • Hear the word
    • Trust the teacher enough to experiment
    • Do what's asked (perfect repetition, repetition, repetition)

    This, if the word is true, brings forth fruit. Not total knowledge, just a single layer of bricks in that house of knowledge. Without the trust, the cycle is stillborn.



  • @magus said in In other news today...:

    @karla That image really... serves a different purpose than probably needs to be served.

    Of course there's room to be yourself; these days that's pretty universally agreed upon. But at the same time, horrible, boring repetition is useful for learning control. Balance is important.

    For 4 and 5 year olds?



  • @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    I am a firm believer that learning until age 6-7 should be through play. And apparently she is delayed in fine motor ability, because she can't print her name legibly or cut well yet. I attribute this to her being left-handed but still using her right hand a lot. I've had a lot of the same problems. I still can't cut well.

    Making a nice, straight, clean cut (I assume from the context that we're talking about paper here) is actually very easy:

    I repeat my last post:

    For 4 and 5 year olds?



  • @karla said in In other news today...:

    I repeat my last post:
    For 4 and 5 year olds?

    Why not ?

    Just keep YOUR hands away from the blade :face_with_stuck-out_tongue:



  • @karla Hey when I was a kid they didn't have that guard to prevent finger-thickness items from getting under the blade.



  • @karla It's a large part of why play works. But you need proper motivation. @Rhywden recommended a coloring book: The goal is to make something look better by staying in the lines. That's a challenge a kid can find fun, while still training muscle memory. Motivation is kind of at the core of it though: if a kid knows they will get better if they keep trying, and they want to get better, they'll do it.



  • Edge is safer than Google Chrome

    Really



  • @timebandit But does that mean that they aren't safer than Chrome? Even with those vulnerabilities?

    Posting an article about some known vulnerabilities is different from the statement you seem to want to make.

    And feel free to actually make your point, no one here will be offended. I'm just pointing out that you really haven't.



  • @magus said in In other news today...:

    I'm just pointing out that you really haven't.

    That puts me on a par with Edge's marketing team 🧘🏽♂



  • @magus said in In other news today...:

    @karla It's a large part of why play works. But you need proper motivation. @Rhywden recommended a coloring book: The goal is to make something look better by staying in the lines. That's a challenge a kid can find fun, while still training muscle memory. Motivation is kind of at the core of it though: if a kid knows they will get better if they keep trying, and they want to get better, they'll do it.

    OK I can see that. Though, don't kids just decide to start keeping in the lines? And she is still using both hands.

    The main drills I was talking about was the repeating printing the letters over and over again. This I won't make her do because to me this is a good way to cause her to hate school.

    Right now she loves school. In the beginning, when I asked her what she did she would say play. Now, its good stuff and other good stuff.

    I remember having to trace my name in 1st grade. My last name has a 2nd capital letter but no space...what I was given had a space so I would pick up the tracing paper to fix.



  • @timebandit said in In other news today...:

    @magus said in In other news today...:

    I'm just pointing out that you really haven't.

    That puts me on a par with Edge's marketing team 🧘🏽♂

    Setting a high bar for yourself, there.



  • @hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:

    Setting a high bar for yourself, there.

    I can't fly, but I can swim underwater :face_with_stuck-out_tongue_winking_eye:



  • @ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:

    Now, I won't say all or even most charter schools are bad... no, wait I will say that, otherwise it would imply that good schools exist in the US... and certainly the public schools have been in serious trouble almost from the day they were introduced. But the fact is, they are for the most part the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. The argument that capitalism is more efficient is completely without merit if there is no competition, or if the competition provides no consistent advantages from one over another - the way chartered schools in most districts that use them are set up is in essence designed to prevent free enterprise, being more a form of graft than a competitive business market.

    But mandatory public schooling also eliminates competition. Many private and charter schools are good schools, but having good students is largely a result of having parents who are engaged with their children's lives. I think most of the problems in schools aren't because of a lack of funding (some of the worst schools in the country have the most funding), but because of a degradation of the value of family in society that allows both parents to distance themselves from the raising of their kids; they let daycares and schools (teachers and peers) raise them.

    @ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:

    The fact is, the general attitude of many in the US is not (little-d) democratic or (little-r) republican, but rather anarchist - the assumption is that government is inherently evil, and not even a necessary evil. While I won't argue that point myself (I usually go with 'government is a hallucination, business is a hallucination twice over', but that's me), it has led to some serious contortions in how US society sees, and approaches, public life and actions. The fact that those who hold such positions don't really understand their own psychological motives in that view (hint: it has nothing to do with government or business) is simply amusing to me.

    And that lack of self-awareness means that the next generation of teachers will come from the current crop of narcissistic students so the whole cycle will continue to repeat in a downward spiral until the whole academic-political-social system collapses. The Judeo-Christian (religious) ethic has historically been the only social pressure to reverse that gravitational pull.



  • @Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:

    @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    @topspin said in In other news today...:

    Maybe some kind of mob system where you pay protection money for the things police/fire department/military protects you from, because it'd be a shame if something happened? 🚎

    @ScholRLEA mentioned how that historically used to actually be the way fire departments worked, but it's unfortunately not all that historical. I recall hearing of cases as recently as 3 years ago, in the USA, where fire departments refused to put out someone's house because they hadn't paid their protection money.

    The well-known case was one where the owner had

    a) refused to pay, multiple times, with explicit warnings that they wouldn't cover him, because
    b) he lived outside the tax jurisdiction that paid for the fire protection and
    c) had been engaged in a legal battle with the fire department to get them to cover him for free.

    No sympathy there.

    Unless he could prove that the fire department was responsible for setting the fire, in which case they do owe him damages. But I'm pretty sure that that's not what happened.



  • @djls45 said in In other news today...:

    @Benjamin-hHall said in In other news today...:

    @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    @topspin said in In other news today...:

    Maybe some kind of mob system where you pay protection money for the things police/fire department/military protects you from, because it'd be a shame if something happened? 🚎

    @ScholRLEA mentioned how that historically used to actually be the way fire departments worked, but it's unfortunately not all that historical. I recall hearing of cases as recently as 3 years ago, in the USA, where fire departments refused to put out someone's house because they hadn't paid their protection money.

    The well-known case was one where the owner had

    a) refused to pay, multiple times, with explicit warnings that they wouldn't cover him, because
    b) he lived outside the tax jurisdiction that paid for the fire protection and
    c) had been engaged in a legal battle with the fire department to get them to cover him for free.

    No sympathy there.

    Unless he could prove that the fire department was responsible for setting the fire, in which case they do owe him damages. But I'm pretty sure that that's not what happened.

    Yeah. The best part was that they showed up and kept the fire from spreading to his neighbors, who had paid their subscription. And they had basically no sympathy for him either.



  • @blakeyrat said in In other news today...:

    @karla Hey when I was a kid they didn't have that guard to prevent finger-thickness items from getting under the blade.

    The guard might not prevent child-finger-thickness items from getting under the blade, anyhow.



  • @djls45 said in In other news today...:

    The Judeo-Christian (religious) ethic has historically been the only social pressure to reverse that gravitational pull.

    I am straining with all my might not to respond, as anything which I say (beyond these two sentences) will be unacceptably harsh even by the standards of this group. This may just give me sufficient reason to force myself to leave here for good, in fact, something I should have done a long time ago.



  • @scholrlea One person's opinion shouldn't make you feel you need to leave. We've had people here who have gone crazy and overreacted to things they assumed people meant in situations like this, assuming everyone here thought them. The fact is, it's very likely that even the opinion you are straining against is not quite what you think it is, and is not universal here.



  • @ScholRLEA I am not easily insulted, so if you think I'm ignorant, please educate me; if you think I'm biased, I'll freely agree that I am, but I do like to see opposed opinions and philosophies, because they help me to refine my position, they make for good debates, and all of it helps to educate others; if you don't want others to engage, you can PM me; or if you don't mind providing a spark for something that might become a flamewar (not that I'll flame anyone), you could copy a reply to a new Garage topic.

    Please don't just leave because we happen to disagree about something. On the other hand, if you do feel you need to leave, please don't become a stranger. I think you provide an interesting viewpoint, especially in regards to your bureaucracy theory of government and business*. And I think you might be surprised at how much I agree with people's complaints about what most people call Christianity.

    * Not to mention the unrelated technical computer stuff that forms the primary actual purpose of this site.


  • Considered Harmful

    @scholrlea Reply as topic to the garage, and then say everything you want. That is the purpose of the category, you know.



  • @polygeekery said in In other news today...:

    @topspin said in In other news today...:

    @polygeekery said in In other news today...:

    @topspin said in In other news today...:
    Careful with that strawman. Be a shame if something were to happen to it...

    Might not actually be your opinion, but it's not quite a strawman either. Or what do you think of "I get my wages from the taxpayer, but taxes are stealing"?

    I think that is pretty hypocritical, FWIW. But I also don't think that taxing wages is the only way for a country to fund its government.

    I think the view that it is hypocritical is reasonable, but I disagree with it. I see nothing hypocritical in wanting the rules to be changed but playing by the existing rules. You may think that the Designated Hitter rule (baseball) is a bad rule, but that doesn't mean you're obligated to disadvantage your team by not having one. The position has already been budgeted - if you don't apply (or quit if you're already employed by the government), the only one it hurts is you. You've already paid your share of taxes for it.



  • @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    Making a nice, straight, clean cut (I assume from the context that we're talking about paper here) is actually very easy:

    Oddly enough, there's a shortage of those in kindergartens.



  • @karla said in In other news today...:

    I remember having to trace my name in 1st grade. My last name has a 2nd capital letter but no space...what I was given had a space so I would pick up the tracing paper to fix.

    Hmm. A lassie.



  • @chozang said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    I remember having to trace my name in 1st grade. My last name has a 2nd capital letter but no space...what I was given had a space so I would pick up the tracing paper to fix.

    Hmm. A lassie.

    No space. Typical Irish last name.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    the way the brain fundamentally works

    The way the brain fundamentally works is by both memorisation and association. Both encourage the formation and strengthening of synapses and their reinforcement through myelinisation. In fact, at a low level the two processes — memorisation and association — are identical; they're both about establishing correlations between neural firing patterns to make something that produces the right answer most of the time.

    The neurons themselves don't care about whether you think association or memorisation is good or bad. They just do their thing and it all works (and that's actually pretty damn amazing and not yet fully understood; real frontiers of neuroscience stuff here, guys).


  • Considered Harmful

    @karla But you're not Irish Girl?


  • Garbage Person

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    Though, don't kids just decide to start keeping in the lines?

    Encouragement is warranted. Best phrased as a question: "How well can you stay within the lines?"

    Praise the effort, not the result. But give details: "I can see you worked really hard. I like how you filled the space."

    The main drills I was talking about was the repeating printing the letters over and over again.

    Keeping it fun is so important.

    Anyway, this should be a separate thread.



  • @pie_flavor said in In other news today...:

    Irish Girl?

    Irish Girl doesn't have purple hair.



  • @greybeard said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    Though, don't kids just decide to start keeping in the lines?

    Encouragement is warranted. Best phrased as a question: "How well can you stay within the lines?"

    Yeah, I can do that.

    Praise the effort, not the result.

    This...I am completely in agreement. I actually had a really tough time when I was moved to a gifted and talented program in 4th grade because prior to that I didn't need to work hard. It was all easy.

    But give details: "I can see you worked really hard. I like how you filled the space."

    The main drills I was talking about was the repeating printing the letters over and over again.

    Keeping it fun is so important.

    Yes.

    Anyway, this should be a separate thread.

    Probably.

    @mods


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    Probably.
    @mods

    Oye! Flag the top of the chain, don't mention people! ⚒


  • Fake News

    Sadly there are no numbers:



  • @dkf said in In other news today...:

    @masonwheeler said in In other news today...:

    the way the brain fundamentally works

    The way the brain fundamentally works is by both memorisation and association. Both encourage the formation and strengthening of synapses and their reinforcement through myelinisation. In fact, at a low level the two processes — memorisation and association — are identical; they're both about establishing correlations between neural firing patterns to make something that produces the right answer most of the time.

    The neurons themselves don't care about whether you think association or memorisation is good or bad. They just do their thing and it all works (and that's actually pretty damn amazing and not yet fully understood; real frontiers of neuroscience stuff here, guys).

    That's why I said that for these types of tasks (motor control and stuff) you need repetition.
    I mean, yes, you can explain why the letter "A" looks this way and what other ways there are to write it and what words it can be used with.
    At the end of the day this doesn't help you an inch with actually writing the letter A.

    It's related to the other trap my pupils regularly fall into: I don't make them memorize the formulas. So they think they don't have to learn them.

    And then they discover on a regular basis that they still need to learn what the formula means.

    With motor skills it's training, training, training. E.g., you won't get any kind of belt in Karaté if you don't memorize and train the movements repeatedly.


  • BINNED

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    @chozang said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    I remember having to trace my name in 1st grade. My last name has a 2nd capital letter but no space...what I was given had a space so I would pick up the tracing paper to fix.

    Hmm. A lassie.

    No space. Typical Irish last name.

    I thought those are Scottish.

    TIL (assuming I'm even thinking of the right thing)



  • @rhywden I'm the same (with the formulas). Turns out it's really a trap--if you're doing it right with enough proper practice, you will end up memorizing the formulas anyway.

    Right now I give them a photocopied sheet with all the formulas and universal constants (and nothing else) for the entire semester on it for each test. I'm considering letting them use a handwritten one with anything they want on it, with the requirement that they wrote it themselves. For me, the process of writing it out in detail by hand was the most useful part of getting it stuck into my brain.



  • @benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:

    @rhywden I'm the same (with the formulas). Turns out it's really a trap--if you're doing it right with enough proper practice, you will end up memorizing the formulas anyway.

    Right now I give them a photocopied sheet with all the formulas and universal constants (and nothing else) for the entire semester on it for each test. I'm considering letting them use a handwritten one with anything they want on it, with the requirement that they wrote it themselves. For me, the process of writing it out in detail by hand was the most useful part of getting it stuck into my brain.

    For organic chemistry I used a somewhat different method - a box with five slots, big enough for cards roughly 8 cm by 20 cm. I wrote down all the important formulas, compounds and reactions on one card each (front: name / back: solution) and put those in the first slot.

    First day I'd take those cards, go through each of them. Every card I got correct went into the 2nd slot. The ones I got wrong went back to slot 1.
    I'd then repeat that every day - everything from slot 1 would be repeated daily, everything from slot 2 every two days, slot 3 every three days and so on. And a failure meant back into slot 1.

    While it was a bit of work to get going this reduced itself to about 10 minutes daily.

    And I aced that exam :)



  • @topspin said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    @chozang said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    I remember having to trace my name in 1st grade. My last name has a 2nd capital letter but no space...what I was given had a space so I would pick up the tracing paper to fix.

    Hmm. A lassie.

    No space. Typical Irish last name.

    I thought those are Scottish.

    TIL (assuming I'm even thinking of the right thing)

    As per this:

    "Mc"s are both Irish and Scottish.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:

    @rhywden I'm the same (with the formulas). Turns out it's really a trap--if you're doing it right with enough proper practice, you will end up memorizing the formulas anyway.

    Right now I give them a photocopied sheet with all the formulas and universal constants (and nothing else) for the entire semester on it for each test. I'm considering letting them use a handwritten one with anything they want on it, with the requirement that they wrote it themselves. For me, the process of writing it out in detail by hand was the most useful part of getting it stuck into my brain.

    I loved teachers that let me do that. Compressed physical media is fun sometimes!


  • 🚽 Regular

    This post is deleted!


  • @topspin said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    @chozang said in In other news today...:

    @karla said in In other news today...:

    I remember having to trace my name in 1st grade. My last name has a 2nd capital letter but no space...what I was given had a space so I would pick up the tracing paper to fix.

    Hmm. A lassie.

    No space. Typical Irish last name.

    I thought those are Scottish.

    TIL (assuming I'm even thinking of the right thing)

    However "Macs" are more likely to be Scottish.



  • @benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:

    @rhywden I'm the same (with the formulas). Turns out it's really a trap--if you're doing it right with enough proper practice, you will end up memorizing the formulas anyway.

    Right now I give them a photocopied sheet with all the formulas and universal constants (and nothing else) for the entire semester on it for each test. I'm considering letting them use a handwritten one with anything they want on it, with the requirement that they wrote it themselves. For me, the process of writing it out in detail by hand was the most useful part of getting it stuck into my brain.

    Not too long ago I had to do an applied math quiz, of which one question involved calculating the volume of a 3D solid shape... I think it was a right circular cone? Of course there's a formula for it, I was apparently expected to know what it was but I've obviously never memorized it and/or haven't had cause to use it for far longer than it takes for such things to completely escape my memory. So I derivedintegrated it, using the general formula for volume of an isosceles triangle in polar coordinates.

    And I work quickly enough that I wasn't even the last person to finish.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @anotherusername said in In other news today...:

    the general formula for volume of an isosceles triangle in polar coordinates.

    WTF is that even? You memorized that but you didn't memorize the formula for the volume of a cone?



  • @luhmann said in In other news today...:

    Sadly no details could be found about what kind of sausages where being smuggled.

    ... except the bit where it said:

    They turned out to be pork and salami sausages


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