Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom

I’ve talked to quite a few people who agree that high school students focus too much on grades and too little on the actual learning — that students aim to improve their numbers, not their understanding. A good example would be the high school students who take vast numbers of college-level classes not because they care about the material, but because the classes may help their GPA or just look impressive. As an even better example, in the state of Texas, the top 10% of each graduating class (usually ranked by GPA) gets automatic admission into state universities, no questions asked. Students vying for top places add and drop classes to gain extra points and move up in rankings. Surely education shouldn’t be a competition where the person with the most points wins. School is about education and learning, not strategy — right?

Ideally. I generally agree with the anti-grade crowd. I’m more pro-learning. But what can be done?

I was talking with a friend about this on Saturday, and she suggested a rather creative solution.

Ditch grades altogether.
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Science is limited by what scientists are capable of measuring. Our understanding of reality can only reach as far as our best experiments. If you were to ask any physicist, they’d tell you that physics stops at what we can measure: beyond that, we reach metaphysics, the land of unfounded speculation about why physics works. It is literally impossible to ever test a hypothesis in metaphysics because, by definition, no experiment can enter the world of metaphysics.

Someone go tell that to an English professor.
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I think education needs to take a hint from the Internet. Peer-to-peer communication, using protocols like BitTorrent, forms a significant share of all of the traffic on the Internet. No longer is the Internet a simple client-server model — content can be shared from user to user.

How does that relate to education? Well, teaching has been client-server for a long time, with the “client” being your average student and the “server” being your average teacher. It’s a server-push system: the server pushes content to the client and hopes that it accepts and understands it correctly.

That’s kind of dumb.
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If you expect me to solve your computer problem, you will have to tell me more than “I tried to go to the website and it didn’t work.”

I’d rather like to know what exactly happened when you tried to go to the website and what error message, if any, you got. Error messages, after all, do have a point: they tell you what went wrong. That can be helpful.

Michael Shermer wrote a book called Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, which I own and have read several times. I always find it fascinating, but recently I’ve been thinking about Shermer’s main point: why, in fact, people do believe weird things.

Shermer’s point can be summed up with a few quotes:

More than any other reason, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting.

Immediate gratification. Many weird things offer immediate gratification.

And finally, Shermer lists the last reasons as: simplicity, morality and meaning, and “hope springs eternal.”

I disagree.
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Over on SFN, we’ve been interested in figuring out how to stimulate growth and post volume to allow SFN to expand. It’s an interesting challenge — we have four large competitors (that I know of), and there is no simple “how to get more posts” procedure that we can follow. It’s a seat-of-the-pants venture.

To get a better handle on what we’re dealing with, I’ve compiled a graph and some handy statistics.
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I recently bought Michael Shermer’s latest book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.

The book starts off highly interesting: it brings up points about free trade few people have likely considered before, and in general makes interesting observations. Readers of Shermer’s other works, however, will notice a common theme between books — Shermer brings in evolution and intelligent design for yet another battle, and some of his examples from Why People Believe Weird Things are used over again in the new book.

While it is interesting, The Mind of the Market seems to suffer from a catastrophic failure to make a point. Shermer brings in studies and stories and numerous interesting facts, but yet never draws these studies together and offers his own hypothesis or uses them to make a broad point about economics. One can’t help but think that the book is more a compilation of interesting evolutionary economics rather than Shermer’s attempt to advance his theory. There just doesn’t seem to be a common thread between the stories.

So while the book is interesting (like all of Shermer’s work), it seems like it needed some more work and perhaps a strong-willed editor. If you’re looking for an interesting read, get the book — you’ll learn things you’ve never heard before. If you’re looking for a persuasive discourse on evolutionary economics, look elsewhere.

I hear people say they aren’t good at taking tests all the time. “I understand the material, but when I take the test, I fail!”

I can understand this problem for people who get excessively nervous and can’t think when they take the test. But for people who take the test with a sound mind?

I think this is a problem of understanding. I don’t think “not being good at taking tests” is a fair excuse; the problem is far deeper.

Refer to my earlier post for details.

PowerPoint seems to be a popular teaching aid. After all, it saves lots of messy writing on the board or the use of boring overhead projectors. And who doesn’t enjoy bulleted lists swooshing on screen complete with sound effects and little clipart stick figures?

I don’t.
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For those of you interested in how many people visit your blog, go to your blog admin panel and click Plugins. You should see a plugin called FireStats enabled — just activate that and head to Dashboard->FireStats and you should be able to see all the stats you’d ever desire. (It only starts counting when you enable it, so you’ll see 0 hits at first.)

Have fun.