Comment by jerf

> "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have"

It's my main complaint with how maths and physics were taught in school. I didn't understand electricity, trigonometry, integrals etc until long after school when I started tinkering with microcontrollers and robots, and had to solve real-world problems. Then, suddenly all those concepts sprung into life and got real meaning with clear and observable effects.

The only standout was my biology teacher, a former agronomist at a major food producer (rare to encounter someone with real experience), who made us do all sorts of practical things. I particularly remember a display of sugar in drinks that we put together: each of us had to bring a bottle, and he gave us glasses and made us fill them with sugar to match the content written on the food label. That was the day I stopped drinking juice.

> I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have.

This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire for Disney's penchant to make kids think they need to be groomed for life in royal society when they have effectively a 0% chance of ever needing to learn those life skills in that context. I much more appreciate shows that explore how people need to learn to interact with their peers at home, in public, at school etc. I know it's tempting to also want to kind of detach the concept from actual people with animals and such, but my daughter is not an elephant or a car, she doesn't possess a magical amulet or the ability to fly or to submerge the whole state in sub-zero arctic winter. I know it's fun to dream and imagine, but I wonder sometimes if we're communicating: "the world around is impossibly complex and you need superhuman ability to solve it. You don't have those and so you're ill-equipped to do anything about it." Some days, that may be true, but I appreciate stories that emphasize we have a reasonable degree of power within our own human faculties and learning to leverage and use those faculties is far more effective than showing kids flashy superpowers or magical worlds they won't have or see. All this, from a guy who spent numerous of his childhood days imagining himself as Mega Man absorbing everyone else's superpowers, engrossed in Star Wars and TMNT. Shrug

> it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet

This is why I think really getting started on an activity is so important. Those imagined problems become real problems.

Traditional education tries to take a stab at this with “project based learning”. But the huge problem is actually trying to apply the skills you learned in a class will probably just show you how terrible the class is. So the projects get all twisted up or dropped.

I think this is very insightful. I hated higher level mathematics specifically because I couldn't see any use for it. Due to a variety of circumstances I ended up taking my math classes out of sequence with the physics and EE classes in my EE degree and as a result I'd get a concept introduced in math that had no apparent use, only to find out the next semester or year what you would use it for. Very frustrating at the time.

As I developed my 'self learning' style it became clear that I was way more successful (retained more knowledge with a better understanding) if I could "make up" some problems and then work them out with the thing I was trying to learn.

I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains know when it's a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick.

This is known in educational psychology as 'generation' and is considered an effective strategy for learning.

> "But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick."

i usually make this point this way: we're all experiential learners. experience is evolutionary pressure at work and is therefore the most reliable teacher. learning other ways relies heaviliy on our ability to simulate, be present in, and empathize with the problem, which is a larger ask of the learner, and why it's less successful (but not unsuccessful, as we have the capability).

Yeah definitely. Get the kids to plan a trip around south east asia. What do you pack, what languages do you need to learn learn, what customs should you be aware of? How much would you need to save to be able to afford the trip?

By the end of that they'll know where Laos is, you don't need to rote memorize that fact for an exam. It's a fake problem, but also a fun one, with learning being the side effect.

> it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet

I think this applies more so to adults who've had their childhood curiosity crushed.

Children are naturally curious. The problem with the educational system is that we want to apply the same lowest common denominator formula to most kids in most schools.

If you let kids do a little bit of what they actually want, you'd have chaos with a ratio of 20-30 kids to a single adult. That's what makes school suck - the only way to make school work is to crush children's natural urges and make them sit and be quiet.

This works well for producing obedient workers to send off to spend their life in factories.

Yuck, we don't even need that many factory workers anymore, so now we're sending everyone to do more schooling, to work in paper-pushing factories called corporate America. It's all quite unfortunate.

This comes with the assumption that everything worthwhile to learn is interesting.

Having boring stuff to learn has its own merits. If everything is fun to learn, how do people learn to learn? Or rather: How do they learn to find the interesting angle in a boring problem?

> I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have

An old office mate once quipped that: "Ham radio is just a conspiracy on the part of the world's geography teachers to make their subject interesting."

"[Education is] all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet" — I experienced this exact thing very acutely in college.

In the first year of my EE degree, I had to jump back a quarter in math to relearn some concepts I just hadn't grasped in high school. This complicated the rigorous schedule laid out for the first two years, as it meant I was no longer taking the prerequisite math classes the quarter before the required EE classes — instead I was taking them concurrently.

Despite the troubles I had with the college of engineer's registration process (I wasn't following their rules), taking the classes concurrently with the EE courses that actually applied that knowledge (for example, taking Electricity and Magnetism at the same time as 3D calculus) was a completely different educational experience! Maybe I was lucky in that the classes were paced similarly, but learning theory in math class and then going the next day to a practical application of that knowledge was an amazing experience.

In my senior year, I worked with the professor I was doing research under to give feedback to the engineering and math departments about my experience, but sadly I don't think anything ever came of it. It's really too bad too — it's a pretty small change to make in the scheduling and I think it would help the people who are more practically minded vs. theoretically minded (builders vs. thinkers). My education was much more tailored to the latter, despite me being squarely the former.

Yeah, I agree; I've found it's much easier to explain (or learn!) a concept if you start from "why are we doing this? What problem are we solving?"

> giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick

Well said :- )

How do I create a computer game with monsters and a hero? By learning how to program. Ok so I need to learn how to program

Leading off with the problem, caused years of intensive studies, in my case (long ago). But if instead starting with for loops and if statements, I'd think that would have seemed boring.

The example of git has another aspect to it - teamwork. If you are working on your lonesome then you really can have just the one branch and use git for backup purposes. You get a nice record of your work and you can roll back files to before the stage when you broke them. The rest of git beyond that seems a bit complicated, perhaps something that a genius linux developer might need but not necessary for your simple presence on the web. Heck, tarballs seem better suited to the task in hand and git really does seem to be solving a problem you think you don't have.

However, if you are working in a team with live code that needs to be updated in a formal way then the rest of git makes sense. It no longer seems to be theoretical mumbo jumbo, you have to learn this stuff to get work done and to stay on the team. At that stage you have someone such as a team lead who is able to actually teach you. It does relate to the project in hand and is not just some textbook example. You become a convert and git is solving problems you do have.

There is a slight chicken and egg with this though as you need to be able to use git to be in the team but learning it properly needs the team environment. It is like learning to play cricket all by yourself.

Maths is not something that the real world provides great examples for. Personally I get excited if I have to use basic trigonometry for work. If I have to use something like simultaneous equations I am ecstatic about it. Yet in maths education this real world 'advanced stuff' is just beginner grade. It doesn't even get a mention in the two inch thick maths textbooks from my undergraduate degree. The two inch thick maths textbook is utterly devoid of a single real world application, it is just symbols all the way.

If I was to make a TV series then it would be on the history of mathematics. In the day job I once used a formula that some Persian guy worked out 2500 years ago. I can't remember the specifics but I had a great feeling of standing on the shoulders of giants. This Persian guy didn't have a calculator, a computer, a biro, paper as we know it, the internet to quickly find answers or even the number zero. Yet his maths was neater than every example on Stack Overflow I found to help me with what I needed. So what was the problem he had to solve to come up with brilliant maths? How can we use his maths to solve problems in today's world? As soon as you start looking at maths with some incredible history telling the story it comes alive and is interesting. Importantly in this way of learning maths the actual formulas can be looked up rather than learned by rote. It is the application that matters rather than the abstract.

Trouble is, it's hard to get a class of 30 kids interested in the same problems at the same time for exactly as long as the mass-production curriculum allows.

> leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers

Sounds good, but how do you get them to grapple? You only turned "tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" to "tell people of a problem they don't have". I don't see how this (alone) will make a difference.

I know this sounds shallow and it is and I've out grown it (I think) but could a young person's 'problem they have' be parental expectations?

It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between this and a student's academic performance.

In education this is called “project based learning”. It can be difficult without a budget and often requires buy-in from administrators, but is definitely a thing.

What you describe is CPM math (com.org). I taught with this material for a few years right before common core came out.

I would love to see your training guide/tour.