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Comment by wingmanjd | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't as cool as this kid, but I wrote a binomial expansion program in TI BASIC back in high school that I was pretty proud of. Teacher said it was neat, but then banned calculators on our tests/ quizzes after I demoed it.

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I had a maths teacher who accused me of cheating because we had coursework to solve a particular problem, I solved the problem for that case and then the general case using math she hadn’t taught me even had a pascal program that you could enter parameters and it’d give you the answer.

She literally couldn’t get her head around a student going to the library, taking out a book on maths and teaching themselves because they where curious.

The UK has a very strange educational system, curiosity isn’t encouraged, you learn like a good little peg in a round hole.

Left a very bad taste in my mouth but at least she did eventually apologise.

"Never let school get in the way of your education" is roughly the philosophy my parents raised me on. Precisely to encourage what you had done vs. what school expected.

Wow, my parents were willing to sacrifice my entire education if it meant I participated in school in the ways they cared about.

Your way sounds better.

Mine too, well mostly. My Grandmother worked through my mother to get that done without invoking other fairly painful, in the consuming too much time sense, family dynamics (Father was a mess and mostly out of this part of the picture.), but I digress save to say me too.

They want to encourage self directed learning and I am glad they did. If nothing else, boredom becomes a good thing more often. The seeking begins and with that can often come some real learning and insight as it may be applied.

Not unique to the UK. This is common all over the world. It's the most efficient way to educate the masses cheaply.

Among college-educated professionals, primary and secondary school teachers are near the bottom for intelligence, as measured by SAT scores. https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-...

The pay is shit, so intelligent people decide to pursue other passions instead of teaching.

Also, the profession seems to attract the kind of people who like to exercise arbitrary authority over other people. Not a majority of teachers, but a substantial minority.

Once I realized these things, a lot of negative experiences I had with teachers made more sense. For what it's worth, I also had some great teachers along the way.

Isn’t the biggest or one of the biggest indicator of SAT scores is how wealthy/well off the test taker is?

Similarly, the IQ test is flawed too. Neither are representative of intelligence or what is required to be a good teacher

No. SAT is in fact fairly resistant to preparation. Not as much as some other tests, and not as much as the older versions of the SAT, but it's still largely an intelligence test.

Families making $200K+ do 400 points higher than families making $40K or $20K or less. I forget the exact figure. This study is widely available. 400 point difference is so massive it shows it’s not largely an intelligence test nor is it resistant to prep.

> The UK has a very strange educational system, curiosity isn’t encouraged, you learn like a good little peg in a round hole.

That was the feeling I had after one week in a UK school through an exchange program. Because my original exchange partner quit on me after seeing my picture, I got assigned a different one who was 2 grades higher. I was pretty average in math back in Germany, but in that class, 2 years above mine (11th while I was 9th), their math riddle that was supposed to take them the whole week was solved by me in one lesson.

This was around 20 years ago, though.

25ish for me.

I have a step-son who is (nearly) 13 and about to start seriously in on his GCSE's - the situation hasn't improved, the non-higher tier papers are just embarrassing, the foundational tier he could have done well by the time he was 10 - he likes maths and I always wished I'd pushed it harder when I was young but a spectacularly shitty home-life ensured while I did decent in my GCSE's I didn't do what I could have done - I make sure he doesn't have the same problem.

I remember my teacher banned the use of software on calculators (not the calculators themselves) but left an exception for me because she knew I was writing all the software I was using and didn't want to discourage me using that to learn about both algorithms and the underlying math.

It was a while ago, and my memory sucks for those kind of things, so maybe it was you! Anyways, programming anything in the space of 5 minutes is hard enough for me, so I'm still amazed at that binomial expansion (which I had to look up, myself).

We're you in eastern PA in high school? Would be wild if we were in the same class!

I was in the opposite side of the country, but let’s pretend, haha.

I wrote programs too. Even had them print out the work.

Checked with the teacher at the beginning of the year and she said no problem. After rampant cheating, mostly people just writing notes in the programs section, she instituted a policy of deleting everyone’s calculator before any test. but let me keep mine too, I had asked to not delete it and I’d take a class calculator if she insisted.

Waaaay back at school in the 90s, that was the policy in our public exams, we were allowed the calculator but it would be wiped on the way in to the hall.

So I memorised my quadratic-solver-with-intermediate-steps and tapped it back in while we were waiting for the test to start :)

The calculation was not hard, but it was still faster just to run my program and scribble down the steps it spat out than to do the solving manually each time it came up. IIRC I had one for simultaneous equations too.

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