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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

A good example of why well educated parents is more important than getting into the "the best schools".

Uhm, no - asking students to prove theorems and lemmas and answer all the "whys", instead of just applying a set of problem solving rules was one of the main reasons why the high school I went to was so good at math education. Our physics teacher constantly told us not to memorize the formulas, but to understand the logic behind them so we could just figure them out if we needed them. It's a better way to learn math and physics indeed, but a good teacher can do it too.

I think the order related subjects are taught isn't always the best. Once I learned calculus, a lot of things I memorized in physics stopped being something I had to remember. Velocity is just dt/dt. Acceleration is just dv/dt. Give me a graph of velocities and I can find the distance traveled by integrating.

This became especially apparent during my first year of university where I took a macro economics course. Because I had already had a bit of calculus, so many of the mathematical problems in that course were almost trivial. Friends that didn't have any calculus found the course a lot more difficult because they had to memorize so many equations.

I have kids now and I watch them memorizing things and I can't help but think that's a waste of time. Remembering what the terms in the quadratic equation isn't nearly as important as remembering what the uses of the quadratic equation are. When do you deploy it? What does it give you? That's how I wish it was taught.

Everyone should be well-versed in linear algebra and calculus before learning quantitative physics, economics, etc. It just makes the subjects so much easier.

Isn't that just a matter of chicken and the egg timing tautology? The parents are well educated presumably because they went to good schools.

Not necessarily - many parents highly value education and encourage their kids despite and/or because they don’t have much themselves. Recent immigrants are a good example of this phenomenon.

I don't disagree with that statement, but rb808 specifically cited "well educated parents".

No, I think you’re getting the relation backwards. Many parents who were well educated have the opportunities to send their children to good schools, regardless of whether they went to a good school themselves, because they realize that it makes it easier to be well educated there.

How would someone be well educated at a bad school? I feel like that loses any reasonable definition of good.

A school's "rating" is merely an average of the quality of education students there receive. It's entirely possible to "get lucky" and have an exceptional teacher or participate in an optional extracurricular that helps them learn more than their peers. And, of course, there's also the chance that the student did well despite going to a bad school, by self-studying.

the best teacher(s) in a 'bad' school overlap with the worst teachers in a 'good' school. Keep in mind that there is a relationship between student and teacher and that clicking with one teacher isn't guaranteed or that after a year of growing up, you might click with a teacher you didn't get on well with the year previous.

Aggregate test scores say more about the student/neighborhood population than the instruction. “Bad” schools become “good” as their neighborhoods gentrify, for example.

And so it's turtles, all the way down?

I think a good education is more about the student than the university. The reason for the strong correlation to the contrary is because good universities get to hand pick from those overachievers whom would achieve with or without said university. And that character development happens long before one's applying to universities.

That said a top university, its resources, and atmosphere of being surrounded by other top students, certainly helps foster even more success - but I expect if you take the average merit admitted MIT student and transplanted them into Party State U after 4 years you'd still find an extremely 'well educated' individual. By contrast, transplant your average Party State U student into MIT and you'd find a dropout.

My parents both hated math but I loved it and excelled at it through public school. That was due 100% to my own interests and having two PhD math teachers in high school.

Thanks for this comment. I said something similar in another thread. Resources should be spent on making sure there are qualified teachers teaching math.

No. It's an example of why it is important to have parents devote time to helping their children study. This used to be much more common in the past.

>This used to be much more common in the past.

Source?

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