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Z the IVth posted:This is how you breed Tory MPs. Eh, not really. The private school/PPE conveyor belt works to convince people they have a decent grounding in all of that when really they've gone through a very selective crash course specifically designed to make them ideologically 'correct' imperial administrators. There's a reason the actual academic humanities trend left, or at the very least liberal in most cases, and also a reason why pure STEM people can often be some of the most politically dubious people you'll ever meet. Also, I'm not saying science isn't important - people should learn all they can/want - but in everyday life as a non-specialist worker it is much more important in 99% of cases that you're able to dissect and contextualise current events and the arguments around them than it is, for example, to know how protons and neutrons and electrons interact at the atomic level. Like I say, a basic grounding in that stuff can be useful, but I'd much rather have a school system that cultivated a desire for knowledge rather than one that attempted to instil particular types of knowledge.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:01
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Rarity posted:XR are giving up protesting lol And going to what, armed struggle?
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Jan 4, 2023 17:02
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big scary monsters posted:Maybe I've been blanking out just how poo poo maths was at school. I do have a memory from I think Year 2 where I'd figured out a way to do subtraction that made more sense to me than how it was taught and the teacher marked my work as wrong because while the answers were right I wasn't following the proper steps. Much later most of my A level further maths courses we'd go across the road from school and get nicely stoned before doing 3 hours of rote SODEs or whatever. I genuinely cannot remember any of the maths I was taught at school, in fact it was so terrible that I did not answer half my GCSE maths paper and still got a B, and then I forgot entirely how algebra works to the point of not being able to do the basic equations that were needed for A level chemistry, which I also did abysmally at. I still don't know how to do algebra. I was taught it at some point but there was never any sense of why or how it fit into anything else. The idea of maths as an "art" is utterly baffling to me although a lot of people do claim it to be. Perhaps it is an art like modern art is art, which is to say I don't understand it and it isn't aesthetically pleasing either.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:03
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Long division can gently caress off
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Jan 4, 2023 17:04
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forkboy84 posted:No, it's Kia IRA, obviously. Yeah, this. If teaching English Literature to 18 was mandatory, that wouldn't solve the illiteracy problem that's still lingering around because the problem takes hold before that. If people are innumerate at 16, an extra two years of more complex maths isn't going to help. Maybe addressing the shortage of maths teachers, supporting schools other than posho private schools better generally, as well as ensuring pupils aren't coming to school hungry and aren't freezing cold at home would help people learn more maths in school. But I guess that's not a Tory solution. Danger - Octopus! fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 17:05
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I think it's been a real shame that Classical Studies is basically dead in schools today. It has this reputation of being too posh, too elitist, too old and stuffy, but I think it's the subject which is closest to the ideal we want in education. A good education in the classics is part history, part geography, part politics, part foreign language, part literature, part drama, part religious studies, even potentially part basic mathematics, and critically it's help you see how those things connect to each other--you learn about the geography of Greece, how that played into the politics of Athens and the Delian League, how that played into the history of the Peloponnesian War, and then you can take all of that and read a play like Lysistrata and see how all those things influenced the play. Compared to shoving all those subjects into little silos, I think that's much more engaging! It's a subject which changes in a radical way month to month, one lesson builds on another but the category of one lesson doesn't constrain the category of the next.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:05
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History Comes Inside! posted:Long division can gently caress off just use a calculator we invented these hell devices originally to crunch numbers faster so we should use that as long as we understand why we press the buttons we're pressing it's fine
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Jan 4, 2023 17:06
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Rarity posted:XR are giving up protesting lol Extinction Resignation
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Jan 4, 2023 17:07
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big scary monsters posted:I do have a memory from I think Year 2 where I'd figured out a way to do subtraction that made more sense to me than how it was taught and the teacher marked my work as wrong because while the answers were right I wasn't following the proper steps. Hah this sounds very much like me dealing roulette. A straight up winning number pays 35:1 and a split (between winning number and an adjacent one) is 17:1. You're taught to use "picture bets" - so, for a VERY simple example, if a punter has three straight ups and one split a dealer is encouraged to see a straight up+split instinctively as 52 then add the two additional straight ups (52+70=122). Brains are wired differently so I always go separately on the two things: three straight ups is 105 plus the 17 is 122. The difference to your situation is that nobody gives a gently caress as long as you pay out correctly!
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Jan 4, 2023 17:09
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Reveilled posted:I think it's been a real shame that Classical Studies is basically dead in schools today. It has this reputation of being too posh, too elitist, too old and stuffy, but I think it's the subject which is closest to the ideal we want in education. A good education in the classics is part history, part geography, part politics, part foreign language, part literature, part drama, part religious studies, even potentially part basic mathematics, and critically it's help you see how those things connect to each other--you learn about the geography of Greece, how that played into the politics of Athens and the Delian League, how that played into the history of the Peloponnesian War, and then you can take all of that and read a play like Lysistrata and see how all those things influenced the play. 
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Jan 4, 2023 17:11
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Darth Walrus posted:https://twitter.com/murchut/status/1610377542254399488?s=46&t=Tp1mL2atdv4I7HLX_ZFWLQ
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Jan 4, 2023 17:13
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Tesseraction posted:just use a calculator I wonder if there was a prediction of the future more widespread and more wrong than the aphorism "you won't always have a calculator on you when you leave school".
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Jan 4, 2023 17:14
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franco posted:Hah this sounds very much like me dealing roulette. A straight up winning number pays 35:1 and a split (between winning number and an adjacent one) is 17:1. You're taught to use "picture bets" - so, for a VERY simple example, if a punter has three straight ups and one split a dealer is encouraged to see a straight up+split instinctively as 52 then add the two additional straight ups (52+70=122). Brains are wired differently so I always go separately on the two things: three straight ups is 105 plus the 17 is 122. The difference to your situation is that nobody gives a gently caress as long as you pay out correctly! If they'd said at school that people who wanted to get into gambling (not me) or tabletop gaming with complex stat calculations and lots of different dice (extremely me) would benefit from being better at maths, I'd have probably paid more attention. I'm not very good at any mental arithmetic beyond addition and subtraction, so I'm always in awe of the friends who could rapidly calculate the chance of success on complicated dice rolls with all sorts of modifiers and options to swap in other dice or whatever in games. And also got amused by their absolute outrage when game designers used different types of dice just for the sake of it without having seemingly understand how this would impact on the chance of success. Because I'd got no idea and just nodded when they said it was better to roll these dice and add something rather than roll those other dice and subtract.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:18
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Reveilled posted:I wonder if there was a prediction of the future more widespread and more wrong than the aphorism "you won't always have a calculator on you when you leave school". when my uncle worked at TI he saved up a month's wages to buy their latest calculator, which these days is comparatively an abacus yes he writes instruction manuals for a living
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Jan 4, 2023 17:19
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I agree with the general feeling and Foucault drop but I have to ask: what does a better maths education look like? even basic numeracy skills are generally very poor across the population - are they actually not all that necessary, or is there a better approach to teaching these skills, or...? the answer is probably having a better society in general, of course
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Jan 4, 2023 17:23
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OwlFancier posted:I still don't know how to do algebra. I was taught it at some point but there was never any sense of why or how it fit into anything else. The idea of maths as an "art" is utterly baffling to me although a lot of people do claim it to be. Perhaps it is an art like modern art is art, which is to say I don't understand it and it isn't aesthetically pleasing either. Still somehow managed to get a B at O-level, but it was never a subject I enjoyed or had any interest in.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:24
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My only real school maths memory is using decimals in some “welcome to secondary school here’s a test to sort you out into ability sets” test and getting a bollocking since I must have used a calculator and cheated, because they l’d expected us to use fractions instead? I feel like I’d learned decimals way before going into year 7 though so I was very wtf about the whole thing. Had to sit and do a few more sums with decimals in front of the teacher before they’d believe it was just a normal thing for an 11 year old to know in the 90s 
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Jan 4, 2023 17:28
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https://twitter.com/eli1ah/status/1610564128111828993
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Jan 4, 2023 17:31
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THE WINDY MAN THE LONG MOVER 
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Jan 4, 2023 17:43
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ThomasPaine posted:Also, I'm not saying science isn't important - people should learn all they can/want - but in everyday life as a non-specialist worker it is much more important in 99% of cases that you're able to dissect and contextualise current events and the arguments around them than it is, for example, to know how protons and neutrons and electrons interact at the atomic level. Like I say, a basic grounding in that stuff can be useful, but I'd much rather have a school system that cultivated a desire for knowledge rather than one that attempted to instil particular types of knowledge. Partly because lab is fun and if you're going to be using the whole thing as a glorified daycare then at least that gets you some variety, and partly because the kind of people who think that all science is just made up also tend to be weirdo theocrats or David Icke fans or flat earthers, and those are people who have rejected both the education system as a whole (often because it was poo poo at engaging with them) but also rejected the idea that there are some material things that you can test for yourself (and other things that you can assume based on those results, and other things that you can assume based on assumptions made by tests done by others and so on from the shoulders of giants). I do agree that being able to contextualise current events and the arguments is also very important in dealing with the above too, but that's maybe also something that can be wound in with teaching some broader philosophy of science instead of 'the sciences' being taught as blocks. big scary monsters posted:I went to a state school with pretensions and did take Classics. I had a great teacher and it was really fun! Most recently revealing my knowledge of amphora art got me roundly mocked by my partner, who is an anti-intellectual boor. 
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Jan 4, 2023 17:47
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big scary monsters posted:I'm surprised to see so many people ITT bringing out the classic "maths at school is pointless, I've never needed to solve for x in real life lol". Oh I agree. I have a degree that was one module different from an applied maths degree, and I adored maths at school especially calculus etc, and did double maths A-levels. But having worked now for approaching 40 years, I would argue that many adults today are WORSE at maths than they were as 10 year olds. I remember interviewing clerical staff for jobs which involved doing % calculations. At interview I set a short test: I said they could use a calculator or do it in their heads or on paper, however they felt comfortable and it wasn't strictly timed, and that if a question seemed easy it was because it was! Q1 - what is 15% of 100? All but one person (out of maybe 20-30 people who had the test over a couple of years) put down 6.67. It took me ages to figure out why. Eventually I decided it was because they learned that to get 10% you divide by 10 so wrongly adapted that to if you want 15% divide by 15. Q2-Q7 variations on what is the net cost excluding VAT of something that cost X amount with VAT, what is the VAT on an item that cost Y amount etc. Q6 - if inflation was 6% last year and is 5% this year are prices (a) still going up (b) staying the same (c) coming down. Again almost everyone picked (c). I would watch their faces surreptiously so in a few cases I could see that they realized they had put the wrong answer but weren't sure why (so I put that down to interview nerves) but most were blithely unaware. When I worked in rail, my boss for a couple of years was our area's performance manager (asset performance not people) and he had no idea how to work out a %. I also realized that many people, including senior mgt, had no idea how to read a graph - but were never going to own up to that, so I told my team that no graph was to be released from our department without 3 bullet points on it explaining exactly why it was interesting (or not). I also fervently believe that one of school's jobs is to teach a whole range of subjects so people can perhaps discover an interest and/or aptitude for something they never get the chance to at home. (eg My dad detested maths and was bitterly against it. I had long long rows about being allowed to take double maths A-levels - he wanted me to do RE & history.) I don't think forcing maths on 16-18 year olds will do that though. As others have said, maybe different ways of teaching maths are needed or different teachers - if a teacher has done the school - uni - teaching route, they may not have any real understanding of how it might be used 'in the real world' especially as has been mentioned maths in many cases is being taught by non-specialists. It's also a point of pride to many Brits to be bad at maths and they boast about it in a way they would never boast about being illiterate.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:47
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:It's also a point of pride to many Brits to be bad at maths and they boast about it in a way they would never boast about being illiterate. cant count, 'ate nonces, simple as
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Jan 4, 2023 17:51
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Tesseraction posted:cant count, eight nonces, simple as
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Jan 4, 2023 17:54
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Jan 4, 2023 17:55
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Can count, 10 nonces?
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Jan 4, 2023 17:56
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:It's also a point of pride to many Brits to be bad at maths and they boast about it in a way they would never boast about being illiterate. I often state that I am bad at maths because what I knew 20 years has completely atrophied but hey, at least I'm not as bad the as the person who can't work out what 15% of 100 is. And just to check I've been doing it right, I'd do 15 divided by 100, which would give me 0.15, or 15%. Obviously that's an easy one but the fundamental remains correct, yes?
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Jan 4, 2023 18:01
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That is correct, and when you divide 15 by 100 to get 0.15, that means if you want 15% of any number you can multiply it by 0.15. This happens whenever you divide by 100, as the 'cent' in the term is from the Latin for 100.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:04
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Yeah I think in large part what I'm arguing against is the siloisation of education. Making philosophy of science an integral part of a science class would do wonders, whereas at present it might get a mention only a philosophy class that most of the STEM types are going to ignore and consider a waste of time anyway. There is some evidence this is happening to some extent at least at the uni level - some medical degrees incorporate history/philosophy of medicine modules, though they I think kind of miss the mark by 1) often being optional and 2) sometimes being taught by medical doctors.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:05
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Just to follow up on my prior post: 500 x 0.2 = 100 420 x 0.2 = 84 1984 x 0.2 = 396.8 e: sorry skipped a step Tesseraction fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 18:07
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oh god 0.15 is 1% of 15 15 is 15% of 100
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Jan 4, 2023 18:08
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Tesseraction posted:20% of 100 is 0.2 My head hurts
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Jan 4, 2023 18:09
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stev posted:My head hurts lmao yeah no that was me posting extremely wrong maths, I've edited it
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Jan 4, 2023 18:12
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This thread is getting an F
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Jan 4, 2023 18:16
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drakeno: maths, science drakeyes: old story about a guy getting lost on the way home from a war
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Jan 4, 2023 18:19
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half the problem is the rote part is just endlessly writing "proofs" of basic equivalences (like seen above but with more graph paper) which have almost no value since induction is not actually a proof you end up using, ever, unless you're an engineer, maybe. you'd do better by just saying "yes this is one possible equivalence, yes it works, feel free to ask why or dont idc it does not matter right now, now use that to shuffle the numbers in these equations into as many different places as you can", which is the actually useful skill whenever you need to find an unknown or do a numeracy. The kids who end up "good at maths" without having actual savant abilities are almost always just recognising quickly that the rules are pretty simple and reliable, so everything will eventually boil down to 2, 3, 5 and 10 times tables and some basic addiction pretty much the entire way up to the irrationals and calculus.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:29
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The thing that I always have trouble with, maths wise, is working out price comparisons in supermarkets. Like, the labels in the supermarkets always give you a price/weight figure, so it'll be like: quote:Tin A is 391g at 82p which is £2.09 per kg I loving hate, hate, hate that supermarkets are not required to give the price/weight figure on their special offers and force me to do this same loving torturous operation multiple times per trip to the supermarket. Me, in the supermarket posted:OK so it's 400g x 8 which is...uh, 2.4kg, and so it's £7 per 2.4kg, so I divide it by 7 and I get...0.34, wow that's lots better than Tin A.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:33
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Spangly A posted:half the problem is the rote part is just endlessly writing "proofs" of basic equivalences (like seen above but with more graph paper) which have almost no value since induction is not actually a proof you end up using, ever, unless you're an engineer, maybe. don't do maths not even once.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:33
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Fun history thing I learned today: Many of you will have heard the story of Frederick Barbarossa, who amassed one of the most impressive crusading armies ever seen then promptly drowned crossing a river, leading most of them to shrug and go home. Well anyway, apparently, his heir decided to continue with a small loyal contingent and took his body along with them intending to bury it. Obviously it started to rot, but they decided to make do and adapt, so long story short they took his organs out buried them on the southern Anatolian coast, then when his flesh started to rot they took that off and buried it a bit further along, and then held on to his skeleton all the way to Lebanon where they finally buried that too. So the big lad has three separate graves. Bit grim, very pragmatic I guess!
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Jan 4, 2023 18:35
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Maths atrophies quickly with non use. I'm happy I get paid to do interesting mathsy stuff and average one integrations/differentiation every few years and it hurts my head every time. Basic algebra/equations are what people need to be taught well, as you have to do that level of maths for lots of non-tech jobs like plumbing.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:41
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Rarity posted:This thread is getting an F 
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Jan 4, 2023 18:41
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