Same here. Teach your kids to read at age 3 and you know what they’ll do in preschool and kindergarten, where all they get are picture books? They’ll never shut up. Pure boredom put me in the corner a LOT.
I remember how excited I was to start kindergarten, because I would learn to read and write. Turned out it was just daycare, and I had no use for it. I was a very alienated five-year-old.
I had (and still have) a rather indiscriminate palette when it comes to reading, so I was quite happy to read the picture books while I was there, and then go home and carry on with The Hobbit.
The problems started when they ran out of “age appropriate” books…
(I also once bewildered my Gran with a shapes tray, because my Dad had taught me the words “rhombus” and “parallelogram”.)
I was very fortunate as a kid: there was a used bookstore within walking distance of school that I could get a paper grocery sack full of Analog magazines for a couple of bucks. Spending a Saturday scavenging glass bottles to return for deposit would keep me reading for a couple of weeks. But this was well post-K, probably 4th grade or so.
My kindergarten teacher sat with each of us individually once a week to make a new vocabulary flash card targeted at our reading level. While most of the class was using words like “ball” and “cat,” I was using words like “hibernation.” Eventually the teacher moved me up to full sentences. I was glad of the new challenge, but I remember feeling self-conscious and uncomfortable at being treated differently from my classmates in that regard. (That didn’t stop my teacher, though, for which I thank her.)
I was just happy to be in school. I think I fell into the trap of assuming that if accredited teachers taught it, that somehow made it “more official,” which led to the following conversation on the way back from preschool:
“Today we learned the letter H! :D”
“(name), you already know how to read.”
“Yeah, but it was fun!”
According to my parents, I could read long before I got to school, and was obsessed with numbers as a toddler. Don’t remember feeling bored- I reckon I just enjoyed the “games” with letters, numbers and pictures we were “playing” in class.
It wasn’t preschool, but in elementary school me, my brother and two other kids were so far ahead of everyone else in math that for that part of the class they put us in a storage room with all the worksheets they had and we self-taught at our own pace. Ah, those were the days.
My parents tell me that as a baby, I would correct them if they made an error while reading to me. I have since matured significantly and moved on to arguing with strangers on the Internet over the plural of “penis”.
Awwwwwwwww… Cute young’un! Wonder what her first Mad Experiment was? Probably involved Duplos, paste, a kite, and a thunderstorm… I miss Tog’l’s- they make Legos and Duplos look lame!
I don’t know if any of my classmates ate paste, but in high school the jocks all got a’s and b’s that they nearly had to get someone else to read to them… That kind of school. I wasn’t about to work hard to earn grades knuckledraggers got for free, so I didn’t…
Somehow I see her putting her Duplos together to form a life-size brain, and then she drew little plans of her removing it from someone’s head and putting into a jar somewhere to study. She tried to use every crayon in the box in her drawings, much to the delight of her parents and the other kids, and to the deep, deep disturbance of her teachers and other staff (who bear the scars even now).
There’s so many uses for trig IRL, I have to wonder why so much of that class in high school was spent calculating the length of flagpole’s shadows and vice versa.
She does have a very good point. Trig (and math in general outside basic arithmetic) do have a myriad excellent applications – absolutely NONE of which 99% of people will ever, ever, ever encounter / have a need to apply during their entire adult lives. So while one may argue at length how useless learning any of it is, it’s undeniably a great surprise to encounter any honest, real-life situation where some math you happen to know actually does come in handy.
Actually, everyone encounters applications to which math applies on a daily basis. Most people just don’t realize it, because school taught them not to understand math.
Things that require some use of math to come into existence, absolutely. Things that require you to apply any math using them? Nope. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch.*
*fine, machinists get a pass. Everyone else though – still valid.
Knowledge of math is critical! Recently, on an airline waiting to depart, a professor was working on an algebra problem. The woman sitting next to him could not understand what he was writing – so reported him as a terrorist. All that adds up to the flight being delayed for two hours. Ignorance may be bliss… but ignorance and action together cause problems!
Strictly speaking, everyone who can see does trigonometry the entire time their eyes are open. That’s how depth perception works. (The brain uses shortcuts and approximations to make this possible, though.)
So you claim that the derivatve over time of occasions which mathematics can be applied to any non-machinist comes across is a set with cardinality zero?
It’s the same with why “history is boring” and “science is for nerds”. Public schools are severely outdated and go about teaching quite a few subjects ass-backwards. It’s a wonder that they even bother with the table groupings of desks in elementary schools now instead of keeping with the old problematic desks arranged in columns and rows.
Then there’s the textbooks and varying half-truths within, changing up what the kids are taught about some event in each school level with increased complexity. One shouldn’t have to wait until they take an optional 300 level history course in college to learn that the Pilgrims were actually Brownist Separatists and not Puritans, or that Tisquantum (Squanto) and Samoset were slaves in Europe arriving back in America only a couple of years before the Pilgrims showed up. Not to mention that plague that wiped out 60-90% of the Native American population. That last one should have at least been mentioned in high school history.
Then there’s the utter BS we’re taught “for the sake of tradition”. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Teach the truth of it instead. Granted, then the kids might be interested in the subject matter and free thinking might get encouraged. For example; the participants in the Boston Tea Party were all incredibly drunk. And there was so much tea dumped in the harbor that to this day it still can’t support fish. Another example: Sam Adams was basically a mob boss.
When I was a math tutor, and (briefly) a classroom teacher, most of my work was undoing damage from earlier math teachers who had made it mysterious.
_IIUC_, some new teaching methods are fixing this. At least I hope IUC. I’ve heard from middle-school math teachers that kids coming out of Common Core are having some of the same “Oh, of course it has to work like that, because…” reactions to polynomials that I did. (I was a Montessori child.)
I occasionally teach high school physics, a junior-year course which is about 90% story problems solved by trig and algebra. Trig and algebra are of course taught freshman year, using story problems so dumb the kids immediately conclude the subjects are worthless and do a complete brain flush after the final exam.
True story: Many years ago I was visiting some friends who I’ll call Amanda and Ian. It was a few weeks before their second Christmas as a married couple, and Ian, who had a basement workshop and a background in carpentry, wanted to make a star for their tree. Ian and I promptly grabbed a pencil and paper and sat down at the kitchen table to work out exactly what angles we’d need for a perfect five-pointed star using what we remembered from high-school geometry. The process took maybe three minutes.
Meanwhile Amanda spent those entire three minutes, and then five more after that, gaping at each of us in turn. Somehow, despite knowing us for as long as she had, she still could not believe her husband and friend were such colossal nerds that they would do math on purpose instead of just eyeballing the thing and calling it good enough. Ian and I were at least as proud of her reaction as we were of the star itself.
So there you go: Math lets you make things and astonish your friends.
Or alternatively, if you can’t lay your hands on a protractor, you can get a pretty good pentagon (and then draw lines outwards to turn it into a pentacle) by taking a strip of paper of constant width, tying a simple overhand knot in it, and then very carefully tightening and flattening the knot. Honest. This is also how you get the starting shape for making Japanese paper stars…
It’s still maths, just maths with physical objects.
Triangles are the fundamental unit of 3D video game graphics in most systems. So they’re OK in my book.
This… cuts a little too uncomfortably close to home for me, except it wasn’t math in my case.
Same here. Teach your kids to read at age 3 and you know what they’ll do in preschool and kindergarten, where all they get are picture books? They’ll never shut up. Pure boredom put me in the corner a LOT.
Word. I was reading Mark Twain by the age of 5. Early schooling was just… sad.
I remember how excited I was to start kindergarten, because I would learn to read and write. Turned out it was just daycare, and I had no use for it. I was a very alienated five-year-old.
I had (and still have) a rather indiscriminate palette when it comes to reading, so I was quite happy to read the picture books while I was there, and then go home and carry on with The Hobbit.
The problems started when they ran out of “age appropriate” books…
(I also once bewildered my Gran with a shapes tray, because my Dad had taught me the words “rhombus” and “parallelogram”.)
I was very fortunate as a kid: there was a used bookstore within walking distance of school that I could get a paper grocery sack full of Analog magazines for a couple of bucks. Spending a Saturday scavenging glass bottles to return for deposit would keep me reading for a couple of weeks. But this was well post-K, probably 4th grade or so.
My kindergarten teacher sat with each of us individually once a week to make a new vocabulary flash card targeted at our reading level. While most of the class was using words like “ball” and “cat,” I was using words like “hibernation.” Eventually the teacher moved me up to full sentences. I was glad of the new challenge, but I remember feeling self-conscious and uncomfortable at being treated differently from my classmates in that regard. (That didn’t stop my teacher, though, for which I thank her.)
Thankfully, my mother had the foresight to pack real books for me to read.
My kindergarten teacher didn’t have a clue of what to do with a kid who was reading at a sixth-grade level and couldn’t write a word.
I was just happy to be in school. I think I fell into the trap of assuming that if accredited teachers taught it, that somehow made it “more official,” which led to the following conversation on the way back from preschool:
“Today we learned the letter H! :D”
“(name), you already know how to read.”
“Yeah, but it was fun!”
According to my parents, I could read long before I got to school, and was obsessed with numbers as a toddler. Don’t remember feeling bored- I reckon I just enjoyed the “games” with letters, numbers and pictures we were “playing” in class.
It wasn’t preschool, but in elementary school me, my brother and two other kids were so far ahead of everyone else in math that for that part of the class they put us in a storage room with all the worksheets they had and we self-taught at our own pace. Ah, those were the days.
My parents tell me that as a baby, I would correct them if they made an error while reading to me. I have since matured significantly and moved on to arguing with strangers on the Internet over the plural of “penis”.
♫♫
Mad Science Babies!
They’ll make their dreams come true!
Mad Science Babies!
Then sic them all on you!
♫♫
I would totally watch that.
Awwwwwwwww… Cute young’un! Wonder what her first Mad Experiment was? Probably involved Duplos, paste, a kite, and a thunderstorm… I miss Tog’l’s- they make Legos and Duplos look lame!
I don’t know if any of my classmates ate paste, but in high school the jocks all got a’s and b’s that they nearly had to get someone else to read to them… That kind of school. I wasn’t about to work hard to earn grades knuckledraggers got for free, so I didn’t…
“ooh, legos fit on top of duplos! And if i just do….. THIS, i can fit duplos on top of the quantum building blocks of the universe!”
Somehow I see her putting her Duplos together to form a life-size brain, and then she drew little plans of her removing it from someone’s head and putting into a jar somewhere to study. She tried to use every crayon in the box in her drawings, much to the delight of her parents and the other kids, and to the deep, deep disturbance of her teachers and other staff (who bear the scars even now).
I was picturing something more like the revival scene on “Young Frankenstein”… “Give my creation life!” “Mommy! Mommy!” “Quiet dignity and grace”…
D’aww, Lil Gin looks cute 😀
She really is adorable. Skin Horse Babies spin-off – the thing I didn’t know that I wanted very badly.
It’s not Skin Horse, strictly speaking, but you’re familiar with Li’l Mell, yes?
Every time I read Little Mell, my brain starts playing “The Gremlins Rag” for a soundtrack…
There’s so many uses for trig IRL, I have to wonder why so much of that class in high school was spent calculating the length of flagpole’s shadows and vice versa.
Bad examples in textbooks and teachers without the time (or experience) to make their own. You should fix that!
But would triangulation work if the the spores had multiple sources?
…and the cute-o-meter is redlining about now.
Yes but it stops being triangulation, you need more data points.
She does have a very good point. Trig (and math in general outside basic arithmetic) do have a myriad excellent applications – absolutely NONE of which 99% of people will ever, ever, ever encounter / have a need to apply during their entire adult lives. So while one may argue at length how useless learning any of it is, it’s undeniably a great surprise to encounter any honest, real-life situation where some math you happen to know actually does come in handy.
Actually, everyone encounters applications to which math applies on a daily basis. Most people just don’t realize it, because school taught them not to understand math.
Things that require some use of math to come into existence, absolutely. Things that require you to apply any math using them? Nope. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch.*
*fine, machinists get a pass. Everyone else though – still valid.
Knowledge of math is critical! Recently, on an airline waiting to depart, a professor was working on an algebra problem. The woman sitting next to him could not understand what he was writing – so reported him as a terrorist. All that adds up to the flight being delayed for two hours. Ignorance may be bliss… but ignorance and action together cause problems!
Strictly speaking, everyone who can see does trigonometry the entire time their eyes are open. That’s how depth perception works. (The brain uses shortcuts and approximations to make this possible, though.)
So you claim that the derivatve over time of occasions which mathematics can be applied to any non-machinist comes across is a set with cardinality zero?
DINGDINGDING
Someone give the lad a prize!
It’s the same with why “history is boring” and “science is for nerds”. Public schools are severely outdated and go about teaching quite a few subjects ass-backwards. It’s a wonder that they even bother with the table groupings of desks in elementary schools now instead of keeping with the old problematic desks arranged in columns and rows.
Then there’s the textbooks and varying half-truths within, changing up what the kids are taught about some event in each school level with increased complexity. One shouldn’t have to wait until they take an optional 300 level history course in college to learn that the Pilgrims were actually Brownist Separatists and not Puritans, or that Tisquantum (Squanto) and Samoset were slaves in Europe arriving back in America only a couple of years before the Pilgrims showed up. Not to mention that plague that wiped out 60-90% of the Native American population. That last one should have at least been mentioned in high school history.
Then there’s the utter BS we’re taught “for the sake of tradition”. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Teach the truth of it instead. Granted, then the kids might be interested in the subject matter and free thinking might get encouraged. For example; the participants in the Boston Tea Party were all incredibly drunk. And there was so much tea dumped in the harbor that to this day it still can’t support fish. Another example: Sam Adams was basically a mob boss.
Well, f### me! I may just have been right two weeks ago?!? Look at the URL…
Her preschoolmates must never have laid out property boundaries…
Yup.
#include
When I was a math tutor, and (briefly) a classroom teacher, most of my work was undoing damage from earlier math teachers who had made it mysterious.
_IIUC_, some new teaching methods are fixing this. At least I hope IUC. I’ve heard from middle-school math teachers that kids coming out of Common Core are having some of the same “Oh, of course it has to work like that, because…” reactions to polynomials that I did. (I was a Montessori child.)
Whoops, forgot to escape brackets.
#include <old-math-education-rant.h>
I occasionally teach high school physics, a junior-year course which is about 90% story problems solved by trig and algebra. Trig and algebra are of course taught freshman year, using story problems so dumb the kids immediately conclude the subjects are worthless and do a complete brain flush after the final exam.
True story: Many years ago I was visiting some friends who I’ll call Amanda and Ian. It was a few weeks before their second Christmas as a married couple, and Ian, who had a basement workshop and a background in carpentry, wanted to make a star for their tree. Ian and I promptly grabbed a pencil and paper and sat down at the kitchen table to work out exactly what angles we’d need for a perfect five-pointed star using what we remembered from high-school geometry. The process took maybe three minutes.
Meanwhile Amanda spent those entire three minutes, and then five more after that, gaping at each of us in turn. Somehow, despite knowing us for as long as she had, she still could not believe her husband and friend were such colossal nerds that they would do math on purpose instead of just eyeballing the thing and calling it good enough. Ian and I were at least as proud of her reaction as we were of the star itself.
So there you go: Math lets you make things and astonish your friends.
Or alternatively, if you can’t lay your hands on a protractor, you can get a pretty good pentagon (and then draw lines outwards to turn it into a pentacle) by taking a strip of paper of constant width, tying a simple overhand knot in it, and then very carefully tightening and flattening the knot. Honest. This is also how you get the starting shape for making Japanese paper stars…
It’s still maths, just maths with physical objects.
And why? Because ‘Murica.
So, Dr. Lee is either the most brilliant sane ever, or she’s a mad who hasn’t gone nuts yet (or was slowly eased into it).