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Comment by Tom4hawk | Hacker News Reader

I think this is much bigger problem:

> because my teacher was incapable of explaining it

Education is broken, and not "impulse-fixable", ie it will require years of collective concerted effort to affect change, if it is ever fixed at all.

"A dad who knows ____ and can teach it" is, on the other hand, a practically-attainable real-world solution.

> a practically-attainable real-world solution.

I can't be understanding this correctly. Please expand, I fear otherwise this is going to be at the back of my mind all day.

If you are a parent with a school-aged child, and you want to fix a deficiency you perceive in calculus education, it's easier to get strong at calculus and teach your child yourself than it is to reform the education establishment.

Thank you for the clarification.

Is it? Seems like pure luck, not like we choose our parents?

he would have learned it regardless of his dad teaching him - because he is smart. education can't do much to change the population distribution of intelligence.

I don't know about that. "Being smart" isn't a big enough hammer, sometimes.

I'm "smart". I taught myself how to program, and now I'm an architect-level developer that's respected by everyone I've ever worked with. But I'm also a college dropout. I had a terrible education ("Christian" "school" with no qualified teachers) and my parents were no scholars themselves; and I gave up on college because I couldn't get a CS degree without making it through Calc 1, which I didn't even get to until my second year of college because my whole first year (and the summer prior!) was spent in remedial math.

I worked every night in the math lab with the smartest tutor I've ever met. I stayed up until 2a every night trying to get my Calc 1 homework done. But it wasn't enough. I didn't have a strong enough foundation to pull it off. It was too little, too late.

Years later, I think I'd do much better, as learning how to develop enterprise-grade data warehousing and ETL solutions has taught me /how/ to learn. But at the time, I had no good "tools" to use - I just knew how to memorize, memorize, memorize. And it just wasn't enough.

If my stupid, fucking, batshit insane religious-maniac parents had just let me go to a public high school - like I begged them to - all of this could have, and would have, been avoided.

"Smart" often has nothing to do with actual IQ (if it can be measured), but with opportunities and possibilities.

I've had professors that I absolutely confirmed did not know the subject they were teaching. I had a web application development class during college where I had to dispute my exam grades every time because the professor would mark things wrong that were not wrong, and I'd have to go show him the code running.

Except for the final, I think he gave up trying to fight it and just gave me a 100 on that one, because I know I missed one of the CSS questions.

We never actually built a webapp in that class, either. Luckily for me, I'd been doing it for years already (older student, this time around), but I feel bad for the other students who were new to it.

That is definitely true, but misses my point. Most students have to deal with this "much bigger problem" but most students don't have a parent with the time, education and patience to teach their kid calculus. The GP just comes off as arrogant and out of touch when he laughs off the rigorousness of calculus while simultaneously humble bragging that his dad was his personal calculus tutor. He also didn't miss an opportunity to shit on normy parents who pollute their children's brains with such banal pastimes as sports, games and netflix. It's ridiculous.

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