Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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> It consisted of going to some Indian dude’s house for an hour every Saturday for a summer. If that’s a game changer what does that say about American K-8 math education?

Ironically, this is scouting round a theory I have long espoused – the failure of American K-8 math education has nothing to do with teaching, and everything to do with culture.

Sure, going to some Indian dude's house every Saturday for a summer and prepping is not objectively hard in itself. But think of how many cultural factors had to be overcome for that to work out:

- Your family bothered enough to think about sending you there, rather than spending time keeping up with the Joneses for the latest model of garden sprinkler

- Your family quietly put down one thousand(!) dollars towards additional education instead of complaining about the schooling endlessly over $15 bottomless mimosas on Saturday

- You were extremely uncool by the standards of American culture for doing any kind of test prep. On Saturdays at that. The cool kids were off skateboarding or something, right?

- You stuck it out for a whole summer. Who does that? It's cool to blow it off, man. Chill out!

I think the big problem is that most Americans completely ignore these cultural factors, end up having bad outcomes in math, and then often blame it on the "terrible" school system. Asian-Americans just happen to have enough counteracting factors in their own culture that nullify some of these influences that drive away people from math in the United States.

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Edit: Just to make it clear, the takeaway from my comment is intended to be "We should value STEM fields more in American culture, start paying your classroom teachers $200k", not "Every kid should be forced into test prep". Test prep is terrible and should be replaced by teaching the fundamentals of math and science much better. Maybe that would have caused 'rayiner to work at NASA instead of being a lawyer!

I’ll quibble: paying teachers $200,000 an hour wouldn’t solve the problem. Doing well at math just takes memorization and practice, and Americans just think that’s beneath them.

And test prep is fine. For the most part, it’s teaching you intuition about numbers, vocabulary, and logical reasoning skills. I’d much rather my kid drill SAT questions than study half the stuff in the school curriculum these days.

Criticizing culture is off limits, so here we are...

- Your family bothered enough to think about sending you there, rather than spending time keeping up with the Joneses for the latest model of garden sprinkler

- Your family quietly put down one thousand(!) dollars towards additional education instead of complaining about the schooling endlessly over $15 bottomless mimosas on Saturday

You really think economically disadvantaged families are sitting around sipping mimosas and worrying about garden sprinklers? Wow.

> You really think economically disadvantaged families are sitting around sipping mimosas and worrying about garden sprinklers? Wow.

None of my comments were scoped to economically disadvantaged families – in fact my thesis is explicitly focused on culture, not economic circumstances or the education system. There are plenty of economically advantaged families whose kids are doing poorly at math.

His analogy was sound. When we’re talking about these elite schools, we’re talking about competition within the middle to upper middle class. The median income of every racial group in Fairfax County, for example, is $100,000-150,000. The most underrepresented group at TJ is actually white people, who have the highest median income.

I always wondered if these parents raising test ninjas are doing their kids favors. We have google now. I don't need to know the capital of Ukraine - I can just google it. STEM is great to study, but most of the academics in it after 8th grade are not particularity useful. I still haven't been asked to solve a differential equation at work. I have never been asked what school I went to during an interview (i wished they cared).

Build a raseberry pi robot with a friend, start a club with friends, figure out how to build a fort in a tree, sell lemonade, build a website with friends, find out what you like to do <- I feel like these will be more important job skills compared to memorizing Boyle's law [ a relation concerning the compression and expansion of a gas at constant temperature 1662 ].

You will have decades of sitting, staring at broken SPA apps - smelling someone cook fish in a microwave. You will never get that 3rd grade summer back.

I don't think that it is waste. Learning to be test ninja means that you have to learn to concentrate and spend effort at a single task for a period of time over a period of time.

That skill you can later use to do any of the mentioned activities far more efficiently.

At least that is how is see. I thought myself to be a test ninja during high school and I still follow the same basic pattern when doing work related stuff or for hobbies.

pretty sure the test ninjas build Google

At this point, that could either be advocating in their favor or not so much.

> I still haven't been asked to solve a differential equation at work.

I wish this trope would go somewhere to die. First, university level education is catering to a variety of outcomes. Some people in your class have gone on to use differential equations. If not explicitly, at least in understanding how capacitors and inductors introduce periodicity to the circuit. More importantly, the people that are doing research and advancing new technology do have to use these tools. In my view, at the university level, we want to optimize the absolute ceiling of potential for a thin sliver of the population. That's how we get scientific progress. Imagine if Einstein did not have access to higher level math because it was deemed mostly not useful. The collateral damage here is that some people need to take courses to justify the professor's course.

While I do agree that well-rounded individuals are more important you are missing the fact that the takeaway of STEM courses is not "to memorize Boyle's law". If that is how you approached your studies, then I can understand how you feel the education was a waste. But the more important aspect is learning the process in which one solves a problem. Being exposed to a variety of domains exposes you to slightly different initial conditions and thus shows you a broader range of problem solving methods. Likewise, I can generate an equally silly list like yours of life lessons learned in STEM class from my own public education that are more important than the material: build a Rube-Goldberg machine with a friend, start a study group with friends, figure out how to build a rocket, sell cookies (ok not from a STEM class), build a video game with friends, find out what you like to do.

Agreed. And test taking may not be the best criteria to judge people by.

I put in an explicit edit at the bottom of my post now to clarify – I think test prep is terrible to. The important part was cultural factors valuing STEM enough to pay for test prep, not the prep itself.

> I think test prep is terrible to.

Since this is not a mix-up I make very commonly, I obviously meant "...terrible too".

> I can just google it. STEM is great to study, but most of the academics in it after 8th grade are not particularity useful.

Respectfully, I couldn't disagree more. Understanding the basics of calculus allows one to grok the underlying principles of the universe.

I studied hard science (geology) which included quite a bit of chemistry and physics, which helped me when buying a house (in a location not prone to natural disasters) and remodeling my house (understanding the physics in load-bearing walls and behavior of water in structures).

I also majored in English literature, studying overseas, which trained me to become a much better writer than I otherwise would have been.

Saying "just Google it" shows a very shallow understanding of applied theory which makes one a much better problem-solver, imo.

> We have google now. I don't need to know the capital of Ukraine - I can just google it.

That's not the point. The point is to be able to retain that memory so you can form a unified view of the world and not have to resort to Google all the time. Did you think encyclopedias, dictionaries, and world maps didn't exist before Google?

> I still haven't been asked to solve a differential equation at work.

The skills you used in figuring out which method to apply and the accuracy in not making mistakes during integration, etc. will help you every day.

> Build a raseberry pi robot with a friend, start a club with friends, figure out how to build a fort in a tree, sell lemonade, build a website with friends, find out what you like to do <- I feel like these will be more important job skills compared to memorizing Boyle's law [1662].

...and, it is this sort of reductive thinking that's causing the US to fall behind in STEM. I will leave it to the reader to figure out how Boyle's Law literally applies to rocket science.

> You will have decades of sitting, staring at broken SPA apps - smelling someone cook fish in a microwave. You will never get that 3rd grade summer back.

Again, a false dichotomy. You can have plenty of fun in 3rd grade summer without needing every second of it needing to be some kind of Elysian playground.

Sounds like the first step towards the world described by Issac Asimov in "The Feeling of Power": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

Interestingly enough, he apparently had issues understanding how integration by parts worked.

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