Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

I'm firmly of the opinion that kids are naturally born geniuses, and that our [lack of] child-rearing and educational systems traumatizes them into dullards before they get a chance to grow into their full potential.

Clearly, it's possible to do much better than the status quo, E.g.:

"Squeak Etoys, Children & Learning", Alan Kay

> The projects developed in Squeak use a different and simpler kind of incremental mathematics that allows very young children to understand some of the key ideas in calculus. We have found that more than 90% of 5th graders not only understand “Galilean gravity” but are able to derive the mathematical “formulas” (actually 2nd order differential equations) using this alternative mathematics, and author a simulation that matches up very well with the experimental data.

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf

Or László Polgár

> László Polgár (born 11 May 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

Probably true. My daughter finished 2nd grade behind in math and with a deep dread of it. I had been too busy to realize what was happening.

So I bought the California Common Core books for 3rd grade to understand the requirements. In our 10 minute car rides to and from camp every day, I was able to teach her all of it, without books or writing anything down.

The way they teach this in schools is just so far from optimial it's heartbreaking. To give one concrete example, a huge part of 3rd grade here is memorizing the times and divide tables. After some quick experiments, it was obvious that all she'd need to do was learn to count each number series, which is MUCH easier than memorizing flashcards, and can be done anywhere. Once you can count the number series, times and divide problems fall out naturally with practically no memorization needed.

The second big thing this year is word problems for those math facts. These word problems are so easy if you give the child the vocabulary and concepts to break them down in into their key parts. Instead, schools just leave it up to the courage and interest of the student to keep hitting their heads against the wall.

We're on to 4th grade math now and she's a week into 4th grade. I'm keen to check the Alan Kay link. :)

>learn to count each number series, which is MUCH easier than memorizing flashcards, and can be done anywhere. Once you can count the number series, times and divide problems fall out naturally

Can you describe this process a little more clearly?

I'm guessing - instead of memorizing "7*9=63" (and numerous other products), you memorize that the multiples of 9 are "9,18,27,36,45,54,63..." and the 7th one in that list is the one you want?

And pick whichever one comes to mind easier.

I am generally very good at taking tests but that was learned behavior. My origin story was a conversation about timed math tests with multiplication tables, and I was hit with the twin observations that you don’t have to do the answers in order, and if you can’t recall 7x9 but you can recall 9x7 it’s the same answer.

All of a sudden I wanted to know what other tricks there were and boy did I look for all of them.

Yep, and it's oven more overpowered than that, becaause she has a deep understanding of the relationships of the numbers to the tables.

First, you just learn to count them fluently. After that, you already know all the anwers, which is a huge head start.

I would have her count up and down. So now, just to learn the counting series she also had to do a bunch of addition and subtraction too.

After she could count the series, she could actually guess many of the answers the first time through a set of flashcards. And it only took a couple repetitions to get them all right.

And then, if you forget one, you can landmark off of easier ones, likes 5s and 10s. Since you deeply understand that 6x6 is just one more 6 past 5x6, you go 30+6.

It was fun and cute to see her working out the answers when she didn't know it off the top. And even if you have to count from 0, you're quick at it so it's not a big deal.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32694614

I knew a kid who would practically melt down doing math homework a 8 years old. Originally contemplated a career in music or art. Somewhere along the way something clicked, and now they’re applying to engineering programs for college.

I was also about eight when I figured out how to enjoy math, and I think it had something to do with realizing the teachers aren’t authorities. There is no “way” to teach things and you don’t have to like their strategies for teaching it.

That love for math came at the same time I started running a dialog in my head, stepping out of myself, observing my own mind, and being my own coach.

Years later I encountered this idea in the context of meditation and mindfulness, and while I had always felt like maybe I was doing something others were not, the ways that mindfulness sometimes belabors the point made me realize that maybe there are quite a lot of people who don’t figure this out.

Thanks for this story, inspiring to hear. After last year, it was satisfying to hear my daughter come back from her first day of math yesterday: "My teacher made us show our work, it was soooo boring."

*week into 3rd grade, I should have said

Just read the wiki. What a great inspiration Mr. Polgar. I have quiet a few nephew and nieces (all below 10) and that allows me to see the pattern. I see that we need to create a list of skills that a kid should know by a certain age and teach them- it sky rockets their level of confidence and they are able to achieve more faster in any sphere of life. Specialising in a few areas sounds good and till now I have thought about making my kids specialise in astronomy as I think by the time they turn 20, we would have landed on Mars and lots of ISS and talented people would be required to run them / go there. The second option is - AI ( but don’t know if we attain AGI, would the world need any talent in this space) So yes, I think about fatherhood even though I’m not there yet. Talking about education system, it’s we the people who have created it to outsource the job of rearing the kid to the schools. So they can learn the skills demanded by the world to survive. We do that to focus on our career, dreams, or just to chill. And schools are doing a terrible job world over. In

> I'm firmly of the opinion that kids are naturally born geniuses

Do you mean that, relative to kids' intelligence today, everyone could do a lot better but not necessarily equally better? Or do you mean that everyone is born with roughly the same ability and that only some people succeed due to our child-rearing and educational systems?

Both. I don't actually know, of course, and there are obviously people who are born idiots, or savants, or both, eh? But generally speaking, yes, every more-or-less normal child could do a lot better. Could they all do equally better? Is everyone born with roughly the same ability? I believe so for two reasons:

First, the ability to learn new abilities is the defining characteristic of being a human being. Humans are universal learners in the same way that Turing Machines are universal machines. So yeah, it seems to me that any human should be able to learn to do anything any other human can do (modulus raw physical parameters, of course. But even there there's a lot of flexibility.)

Second, I believe that the spark of genius is a metaphysical or spiritual thing that is universally available to all people, you just have to learn how to "tap into it". Since genius is not intrinsic to the individual (no more than gravity or the Sun) we all have equal access to it, although not all of us realize it or make use of it in our daily lives.

>I'm firmly of the opinion that kids are naturally born geniuses

Well, your opinion goes against the basics of genetics and reality.

>and that our [lack of] child-rearing and educational systems traumatizes them into dullards before they get a chance to grow into their full potential.

Incredible how that only some people get to be traumatized and others do perfectly fine.

>László Polgár

What is never mentioned in László Polgár's story is that he made the sister choose the activity they already enjoyed and were good at (natural talent, in other words), and by doing that he completely invalidates the results he would have liked to obtain: I bet that if he were to force the sister to study Physics or Chemistry or Literature or whatever he would have not achieved the same "extraordinary" results.

Are dogs also naturally born geniuses and its our lack of pup-rearing and educational systems that traumatizes them into dullards before they get a chance to grow into their full potential?

Unlikely, though dogs can appear stupid due to being dogs, hence having different drives in life. This may apply to anything besides dogs.

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