Those of you with a programming inclination would probably be interested: it requires the use of some very clever techniques (so you can calculate such beastly numbers as 4000 factorial relatively quickly), and best of all, you can use any programming language you’d like.

So far I’ve solved 21 of the problems. I’ve mostly been brute-forcing the solutions (”guess and check”), but as I work my way into more complex problems which would take hours to brute-force, I’m being forced into cleverer and cleverer programs. It’s very intellectually stimulating.

If you’re up for it, try it out with your programming language of choice. It’ll help both your math skills and your programming skills — there’s nothing like trying to find the best way of calculating 4000 factorial in Lisp to make you learn about the language.

The amount of violence and gore has frankly shocked me. People are dying left and right here, and the worst part is that half the time it’s all okay. Their deaths are religiously sanctioned. On the other hand, it all seems to serve the same central point: follow God. Really, really faithfully. Or he’ll have a lion eat you.

It’s all part of the tactics, I suppose. I’m looking forward to reading the New Testament and the preachings of Jesus. Unfortunately I’m only halfway through the Old Testament (ouch).

We’re making definite progress. Our goal now is to increase our growth rate even more so SFN can be a productive and vibrant community. My personal goal is 500 posts per day — 15,000 posts per month.

Hey, we might be able to pull it off.

But reading the Bible probably isn’t going to help me understand Christians any more than I do already. A few days ago I posted a thread on TheologyOnline asking them which chapters of the Bible they believe would be the best for an atheist (like me) to read.

Then I get this response from “OMEGA”:

You can buy a 2 CD set in the USA for about $15.00

that will have the bible read to you so, you can Listen to it at your convenience.

and a short while later:

I hope that my suggestion helps because I am not sure that you atheists have evolved far enough to be able to READ.

Okay, so I might not have gotten into the New Testament preachings about kindness and love yet. But isn’t this hatred a little, well, un-Christian?

I mean, seriously. If you look through the rest of the thread I linked to you’ll see several posts honestly recommending chapters of the Bible. Then OMEGA pops back in:

That’s because your an Atheist and you are not permitted to understand the Glory of God’s Word.

2Ti 3:7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

As I pointed out in the thread, that’s not helping much. (Though it is directed at someone else, it still irritates me.)

I can understand a general disdain for atheists. On SFN we have a general disdain for crackpots who don’t follow the “orthodox” ideas put forth by science. But we try to be patient with them and explain why they’re wrong — we only ban them because they refuse to listen and learn more about what they think is wrong.

Not so here. I got hate lobbed at me and I was actually expressing an interest in learning about their religion. It wasn’t “I’m an atheist. I hate you.” It was “I’m an atheist. Let me learn about your religion” — if we had crackpots on SFN saying that about special relativity, we’d love it.

What is going on inside the minds of OMEGA and others like him? To me, it runs contrary to Biblical principles (love, kindness, all that good stuff) and plain common sense: if you want to save the unbeliever, don’t treat him like scum. You won’t exactly attract him to your religion that way.

(Disclaimer: I realize that most Christians aren’t like this. But take a look around TheologyOnline and you’ll see quite a few that are.)

The RUP works in a fashion similar to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. The idea is simple: at any given time in a two-person relationship, you cannot simultaneously know each party’s feelings for the other and how those feelings are changing.

Perhaps an example would help explain it.

Suppose Alice and Bob are in a platonic relationship. Bob, infatuated with Alice, professes his love to her, but she tells him he’s “only a friend.” Each party now knows the other’s feelings — but neither party knows how the other’s feelings have been changed by this epiphany. Upon learning how the other’s feelings have changed, each person will inevitably experience a change in their own feelings.

So there’s an element of uncertainty in all human relationships. We have to operate blindly, essentially.

When I first wrote the RUP, I was only semi-serious. It made sense in the world of my contrived example (different than the one above, which is actually hypothetical — really!), but I didn’t really apply it to the real world. Only today did I stop and think about it, and wow, I think the Principle fits perfectly.

Like this guy:

I’m often asked questions about things that are out of my area of expertise. Rather than make stuff up, like Mr. LHC Guy, I at least admit that I’m not sure. (My refusal to be absolutely certain has gotten me in trouble in the past, because when you’re trying to sell things it pays to be confident in yourself. Oh well.)

(To be fair, I act like an expert on things I’m probably not an expert on, but I’ve never yet caught myself being a complete and utter moron.)

Is there a psychologist around that can explain why people don’t recognize when they’re utterly out of their depth and shut up? I think that needs to be a mandatory skill.

(Video shamelessly noticed at Splendid Elles.)

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.

This isn’t to say that teachers shouldn’t grade students’ work and that students could never fail a class because there’d never be a measure of “failing.” What I mean is that students would still take tests, and teachers would still grade them, but the student’s feedback would no longer be “You got a 74. Try harder.” It would be “You need to work more on your antiderivatives.” Numeric grades would be kept hidden away in a computer somewhere.

But before I go into the details, let’s take a closer look a the problem.

The Grade Delusion

High schools (or at least the ones I’ve seen) are incredibly grade-oriented. Most students (but not all) worry about their grades, always striving to keep grades above a certain threshold so their parents don’t apply whatever punishments parents apply these days. (Some kids, and parents, don’t care at all, of course, but that’s a separate problem.) I’ve watched students get exceptionally frustrated because they received an 89.9% average in a class instead of a 90% — the difference between a B and an A.

But why should they care about that tenth of a percent? Shouldn’t they be more concerned with learning stuff?

The trouble, as I see it, is that we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that grades are indeed a measure of learning, and thus that high grades mean lots of learning. (Unless learning isn’t the actual goal of school.) That is not necessarily the case. Most high school teachers give grades for various worksheets, projects, and even for “class participation,” rather than just for test performance. The final grade is then an average containing test performance (perhaps the best measure of learning we have), various worksheets that measure learning in different amounts, projects that may just measure how well one can insert information from Google into a PowerPoint, and how much the student is willing to talk in class.

Extra credit points (like teachers who give out points for students who donate books or take their textbooks to faraway locations) often don’t reflect learning at all — more often extra credit assignments are just extra work — and I think the whole idea sucks anyway.

Life Without Grades

So suppose we decide we want to encourage learning rather than grade-mongering. The two don’t always go hand-in-hand.

Step 1 on the road to learning: Remove grades from the picture.

If grades are removed from students’ view, students should no longer feel an obsessive need to get the highest grades possible — simply because they won’t get feedback. Exam grades should still be recorded, I think, but the student should receive subjective results (”you need to work on concept x”) rather than numeric ones. Those would be saved for later.

Where does the motivation to perform go?

Grades would still be released as part of transcripts to colleges, so colleges would know how well a student has learned in particular subjects. (Without grades, there’s no longer an inclination to add worksheets and funky projects into the grading system. One might say this would encourage students to not do them altogether, but I think a bit of freedom is good for teenagers anyway.) This means that a student would be inclined to do well on tests, but not obsessively inclined to be absolutely perfect all the time.

(This does, of course, bring up the question of “why not just make grades exam-based but still public?” Easy. Because then kids will still focus on their grades rather than learning. The thrust of the point here is that we need to make students obsess about understanding everything rather than scoring every point possible by picking out the easiest classes to take. Grades, though they are secret, will become a means of seeing how successful a student is at achieving this goal. Essentially, by removing grades, we remove the desire to maximize points, allowing for students to actually understand things and choose classes they’re interested in, rather than classes that will give them the greatest GPA advantage later on.)

Report cards, then, would be different: teachers would send home notes explaining what concepts the student is good at and what the student needs to work on. Parents would punish kids if they slack off and get told they’re not understanding everything, rather than if they fail because they left their homework assignment at home accidentally.

The whole paradigm shifts. Grades go from primary importance to being a secondary measure of success. World hunger ends. Climate change stops. Birds start chirping. You get the idea.

Open Questions

1. Will students lose motivation without direct qualitative feedback? They might. Qualitative feedback from teachers on how well the student is performing would have to be constant and detailed.
2. Does this mean we have to resort to having teachers pick the valedictorian? (Oh noes!)
3. Is it feasible to instill motivation to understand? This would have to be a ground-up change — start with young kids — and parents would have to evaluate qualitative report cards similarly to quantitative ones.

Someone go tell that to an English professor.

The field of English literature, as far as I can make out, has a lot to do with the “deeper meaning” of literary works. Read a book carefully, look at the techniques the author uses as part of his or her literary style, and you can make out the true purpose of the book. (Update: Perhaps I should make it clear that I am attacking is the “let’s find what the author intended” sort of analysis. Just analyzing the text, or seeing how the reader responds to it, makes sense. But you can’t extend that to find out what the author’s subtle purpose was.)

Sounds like metaphysics to me.

I may be corrupted by my science education, but seriously, I have several problems with literary analysis.

The first is, of course, simple: what if the author just wanted to tell a #($*ing story? The central axiom of literary analysis seems to be “it has a meaning — just find it!” Well, maybe it doesn’t. I know I’ve written pieces of poetry and then gone back and found all sorts of literary devices pointing at some central meaning, and I only found the meaning after I had written the stupid thing. It’s pretty easy to do.

The second problem is that literary analysis smells like metaphysics to me. Rather than looking at the testable — what happened in the book — we’re looking at the unverifiable: what the author was thinking when he wrote the book. We, of course, have absolutely no way of knowing (unless the government’s been doing things I haven’t heard about yet), but that never stops anybody. The literary analysis just keeps going, regardless of the fact that the author is probably dead already.

A scientist must always prove that his experimental findings are outside of the possibilities of random chance. He or she might run the experiment several times and then do a statistical test to see if the results could just be a fluke. Only when results are almost certainly not a random fluke are they reported.

Not so in literary analysis. Spotted an interesting use of parallelism and diction in the second paragraph? The author’s probably commenting on the unequal social status of women in the time period. Notice repetition of a few key words? They’re probably being emphasized to bring the emotional point home and highlight the cruelty of society. Never mind the fact that the author might just have decided those words sounded kinda cool there.

Let’s not forget the chance that the reader is picking out meaning where there is none due to predispositions and the human ability to find patterns everywhere. If people think there’s a face on Mars, they’ll think there’s a deeper meaning in a book, regardless of whether the author meant it.

So I think my problem with literary analysis is threefold: we have no way of knowing that the author actually meant what we think he meant, we don’t know if what we find is a coincidence, and it’s likely we’re finding patterns where there are none. And it’s boring to do, anyways.

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.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) communication is more efficient in that it avoids the major bottleneck at the server end by distributing the teaching load among numerous nodes. This would be analogous to students teaching students (not students giving answers to students) what the teacher didn’t adequately explain.

Being one of the nodes in this P2P network, I see the benefits of it all the time. Students find it much easier to learn from their peers — when you have just learned the concept, you find it much easier to explain it to your peers. You still remember the thought process it took to get that concept to make sense.

But P2P learning, though I practice it regularly, is never truly encouraged. Students are supposed to go ask their teacher for help when they don’t understand — but why not encourage them to go ask that nerdy kid? It offloads the burden from the teacher and gives the school nerd some social skill practice. Teachers usually give their substitute teachers worksheets or videos to show — but why not encourage them to have the nerdy kid teach the lesson from the textbook while they’re gone?

It could work. It would certainly boost that nerdy kid’s ego.