[geeks] Education

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 11:18:49AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Thu, 29 Sep 2005 @ 23:56 +0000, wa2egp at att.net said:
>
>> What you may call busywork, I call practice.  
>
> Bad assumption.
>
> What I call busywork is exactly that: zero value as practice, or
> anything else.

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.  Pure
worthless busywork.  Verbatim copying of definitions does not mean
you're learning anything other than pattern recognition and duplication
(copy the symbol for this letter from here to there).  It does not mean
reading comprehension.  And getting points off for mis-transcribing
proves nothing regarding your ability to learn what that section of
learning was supposed to teach you.

> There *is* such a thing as overkill, even in practice.
>
> Also, not everyone practices in the same way.

Nor does everyone learn the same way.

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.  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.

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.  When I asked for help, all the teacher did was give more
examples of the same.  It wasn't till my 4rd semester in college that I
finally got a math teach that was able to put things in terms I could
understand and I was finally able to work that math w/o struggling.
Many of my peers had no issues at all with how math was taught and did
fine with HS level calculus and left me behind early on.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org