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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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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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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I spend quite a bit of my time helping high school students understand physics and mathematics concepts, so I’ve also spent some time wondering how I can better help them understand things. It’s a tough challenge, because I’ve never been like other people in terms of understanding — I’ve always been such a voracious reader that I can use my prior knowledge to make sense out of things.

I do not, however, see many other people doing the same.
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I’ve been active on the Internet for several years now and I’ve seen my fair share of teenagers and young ‘uns posting on the Internet. I’ve often read essays written by them, looked at school newspapers, and generally observed what they write. And I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: a significant portion of teenagers (meaning “high school students”), despite their extensive English education, still can’t write more than a few cohesive sentences.

To me, this is the result of outdated thinking on the teachers’ part.

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I’m often rather disturbed by how mathematics is taught in school. Take, for example, the way I was taught the following (important) equation:

Those of you familiar with calculus will immediately recognize what this means. Those of you who aren’t should know that the above set of squiggly lines means something very important in the upper levels of confusing math.

When I first was taught the equation I was taught it by being exposed to it exactly as I just exposed it to you: an equation. There were some words with it too, but they made just as much sense as the equation did at the time. A few moments later the teacher explained what the equation means: one can find the definite integral of an equation using its antiderivatives.

But we were never taught why that’s the case.

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Labs are a great idea for teaching students chemistry, physics, and all the other assorted sciences. They allow students to learn for themselves just how various laws and theories work, and to hopefully discover various phenomena themselves.

Okay, correction: Labs would be a great idea if they were used for the above purpose. But they aren’t.

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