[geeks] Education

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 @ 11:34 -0500, Michael Parson said:

> Right.  The homework I hated the most in grade-school days was pure
> busy work.  Copying down the vocabulary words and looking-up/copying
> the definitions out of the glossary in the back of the book.  

Yeah, and doing literally hundreds of multiplation problems, sometimes
*YEARS* after I had mastered it.

> People learn different ways.  I learned to read by learning the rules
> of the English language.  The whole 'i before e except after c' type
> stuff.  That worked for me.  Won't work for everyone, some people do
> better with (the ironically named) phonics.  

I never understood it from the rules point of view, however I suspect it
was because of the way the rules were taught.  I can remember a lot of
frustration in English because the rules were often different from
teacher to teacher, or at least were presented so differently that I had
a hard time learning them.

However, I could read from encyclopedias and the KJV bible when I was
four.  My mother taught me, and I learned a lot, believe it or not, from
watching television.  I somehow picked up on words on the screen, and
what people were saying, even if the program was not educational.

It was not until fifth grade that the school curriculum caught up to my
level of reading.

I *HATED* reading in school, and it led to a general hatred of English
until I got into college.

I was reading sci-fi, technical rags, and lot's of stuff in my grade
school years.

But in the classroom, I was sitting there reading things like "Jane lies
on the grass.  The grass is green.  Jane looks up at the sky.  The sky
is blue."

I had to sit in school waiting on kids who took 10 minutes to write
their own name.

I was a terrible student in junior high and most of high school, mostly
because I was bored to tears, and because the conformity brainwashing
didn't sit well with me.

Going to college was like waking up from a nightmare though, and up
until I started having to work a lot, I suddenly became a straight-A
student.

> When I went to school, most
> people were taught the same way I was, so I did OK with that, but a lot
> of kids didn't.  These days, we have a strong push for phonics, which
> will catch those that got left behind when I was a kid, but might not
> work so well on kids that learned like I did.  Blanket approaches don't
> work so well.

I hate blanket policies.  It's a classic wrong answer given by
government and organizations in the place of doing the job right.

> Whatever method that most math teachers use to teach higher mathmatics
> didn't work very well on me.  I'm fine with arithmatic and basic
> algebra, but once I got into trig and calculus, I was lost.  Doing
> the 'homework' didn't do me any good when I didn't understand the
> fundamentals.  

I took calculus in college three times.  The last time my professor was
different from the others in that he was a lot smarter, and he paid
attention to individual progress.

He took me into his office since I was having trouble and started
quizzing me on fundamentals, and found out that even though I had made
good grades, I really had not been taught what I needed in the previous
three years of math classes.

The guy was an excellent instructor, and he started testing me from
basic mathematics through calculus, and teaching me everything I was
missing.  He did this in about 2.5 hours in his office.  Most of it was
fairly simple things, that no one had ever taught me before, and there
were very basic fundamentals that I just didn't have.

It was a crash course that changed my grades from failing to almost A
average by semesters end.

Everything in calculus started making sense after that.  


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["People should have access to the data which
you have about them.  There should be a process for them to challenge any
inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller]