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Comment by nyanpasu64 | Hacker News Reader

I was taught math with the drill style. Being forced on a daily basis into repeatedly solving problems you struggle with, trapped with no ability to escape, by people with power over you (eg. parents), having your worth judged based on your ability to solve problems forced upon you, and once you learn a skill your parents find a new weakness to torment you with, is traumatic.

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That is not a problem with the drill style per say but toxic teachers and parents. You can make someone drill without tormenting them for failing. I think doing drills is good if done in a supportive setting, but it is also and should not be the only way to teach.

Do you know any kid that signed up for math drills? It's nearly always imposed by parents or teachers.

My kid would be super happy with it. His teacher as a 'reward' for doing his language-related stuff on time/quicker, lets him do math worksheets

I loved math drills. In first grade we would get a sheet of simple math problems and the teacher would give us 5 minted to complete as many as possible. I was good at it, and it was one of my first experiences of competition and being better at something than my peers. I don’t know if any of that is a good thing, and it definitely would have sucked if I had been slow at math.

I was certainly more excited by math drills more than attempts to make math "fun."

Funny enough, this is my current gripe with learning CS in K-12 settings. The mindset I have on it is "we're just teaching it to them at younger age because they can't say no".

Seems like a pretty poor way to really understand math anyway. If you memorize some formula you may learn how to do a specific problem faster but if you teach kids to understand how the formula was built from first principals, not only can they solve the problem, but they understand how to build the solution from scratch rather than pulling a premade solution from the memory bank.

Memorizing solutions isn't useful anymore. We have google to list out formulas. A deep understanding of problem solving is far more important and something you cant trivially search.

Right now there are students who have trouble opening up algebraic expressions or forget to cancel negatives in multiplication while doing exercises on advanced concepts. All for lack of practice.

Those kinds of kids were common 10, 20, 50, 100, and more years ago.

Now they are ubiquitous.

Downplaying it to 'dumb ones' is not helpful when they can solve polynomials without much trouble but are getting burned on concepts that should have been drilled down properly in middle school.

> Now they are ubiquitous

They were saying that back in the day as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Johnny_Can%27t_Add

The deep understanding comes after knowing the facts.

At a low level, you can point out all the patterns that are in multiplication tables, but they won’t be remembered until the student has internalized the facts.

At a higher level, teaching epsilon-delta proofs isn’t a good way to learn calculus. Memorizing the building blocks and the chain rule is.

You can't understand a formula without repeatedly applying it to great many problems, playing with it until you get a feel for how it behaves. Without that, you'll only be "understanding" your own imaginary version of a formula, a simulation in your mind with no grounding in reality.

Same with understanding anything else in life - you don't really understand anything until you get to the point you can, in your head, predict a specific outcome, test it, and be proven correct, repeatedly.

(At some point you may learn to gain robust understanding purely from simulating things in your head, deriving insight from lower-level principles. But this itself is a skill, a hard one, which few people master. It's not something a random kid, or adult, can do.)

That's more of a reflection on the people doing the teaching than the style of teaching itself I think. This is purely anecdotal but I absolutely hated most of my pre-university education as it felt like jumping through completely meaningless hoops. I'll still happily practice scales or musical fragments by rote on my guitar for hours on end though, and this is a very effective method for me. It took me a long time to figure out I actually love learning, it's just that there's a lot more to learning than the industrial-style process that goes on in the average British comprehensive.

If a person's approach to educating their kids is coercive ("jump through our hoops or you'll be working at McDonalds your entire life") or downright abusive ("you're a worthless child to us if you don't meet this grade") then the results can be catastrophic. For every success story, this kind of maltreatment will produce many people who give up on learning altogether or drive themselves headfirst into mental illness. I definitely think history will judge this period as a bit of a dark age in education, the fact that people who've long retired still report exam nightmares says a lot about the completely arbitrary and needless pressure we put our children under.

In my experience being "well-spoken" (ie having an accent that's fairly close to RP) and being quick at picking things up has served me far better than any qualifications I have, both in the tech industry and out of it.

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