Hacker News Reader

I am occasionally critical of every profession I've ever been a member of, including software developers (get me started on how well we understand the typical user someday), salarymen (get me started on... anything), translator (get me started on professional ethics), research assistant (get me started on code quality in an academic setting), and while I don't have a specific complaint about "seasonal order entry operator" if you give me a minute I can probably come up with one. I'm not even a very negative person -- I actually like teaching quite a lot. If it isn't obvious, pick a different set of two comments from me to generalize from and you'd assume that I'm a rabid fanatic about it.

Do you really want to play the "you're only allowed to have opinions on pedagogy if you're a real teacher" game?

The bias I perceive in you is not based solely on two comments you've made. It's just two comments that I've responded to.

I'm not playing

"you're only allowed to have opinions on pedagogy if you're a real teacher" game

as you put it. Anyone is allowed to have opinions about anything. Some opinions have more merit than others. Some people have worthy opinions on topics that they don't have direct involved with.

I've met lots of people with strong opinions on teaching. I've found that what superficially seems obvious to non-teachers often times miserably fails when you've got a class of 30 students with varying abilities and interest in learning. Anecdotally I'd say a majority of opinions from non-teachers about what would be great in the classroom only holds true if the classroom contains people desiring to learn.

Well, I asked about your experience in the classroom because I wanted to know if the thoughts and ideas you've expressed about what is not useful in the classroom is based on your teaching experiences on your student experiences.

I used to have strong feelings about k-12 teaching. Two years ago I was in a project that paired a college teacher with an 8th grade teacher at a local school. It took one day in the 8th grade class to realize that I don't know squat about k-12 teaching.

In that case, most of my teaching experience was at the K-12 level, in small groups and classes of 25 through 40. Some in a classroom, some outside. I also tutored college students for a bit. Many kids wanted to learn, some not so much.

Your turn. Do your opinions come from actual experience or do you have a bias against elementary schoolteachers?

You taught in k-12?

I have no experience in k-12 teaching other than the project I was on two years ago. The project I mentioned in my previous post. I definitely have a negative bias toward what is done in k-12 but my experience two years ago made it clear that my views on what should be done to fix k-12 education were not based on sound evidence.

I do have 17 years of teaching experience in higher education.

I once co-taught a class with a colleague. She taught the first 8 weeks. I taught the second 8 weeks. It was calculus II. Students getting Cs and Ds under her did quite well with me and vice versa for the A/B students. Personality plays such a great role in the whole issue that I've begun to think that there is no way to fix education. I think it is a hugely complicated issue and that positive results are local to a classroom and the personality of the students/teacher.

This is the second time in 2 weeks someone has chimed in on an HN thread to change a discussion from "something involving education" to "whether Patrick McKenzie has a bias against teachers".

If you disagree with a thought someone expresses on HN, address a comment to the thought. Redirecting the discussion towards the motives of the commenters isn't simply uncivil; it's boring. No. Worse. Hygroscopically boring. It sucks all the juice out of the whole thread.

I am partly irritated by this because I know Patrick does not have a vendetta against teachers. I am partly irritated because I know the "bias" Patrick is displaying here is a hacker trope: if you interviewed 100 hackers, 95 of them would say the same thing about secondary education. But I'm mostly irritated because it's a clear example of a superficial argument. "Hacker vs. teachers". Who could possibly care? He's not biased against teaching... but if he was, so what? In what sense would the thread possibly be different?

He makes a product geared toward teachers. He made a comment about busywork in the classroom and, what appeared to me, to be against this and against activities that hold brighter students back. I find it interesting because using bingo cards in the classroom can easily fall into this category. My comment addressed this apparent disparity. There was nothing uncivil about making an inquiry into this.

It's too bad you don't see something interesting in this. I do and hence made the comment I made. I strongly disagree with your view that my post was inappropriate or should not have been made. I'm not planning to change.

You don't appear to understand how Bingo Card Creator works. Go visit the website. I'll wait.

Back? Did you notice, on the website, the near total absence of advocacy for using bingo cards in lesson plans? Or even how classroom bingo works? Patrick sells BCC passively. His entire marketing system presumes a continuous feed of people who already wanted bingo cards.

The pain point he solves isn't "how to automate classrooms with bingo cards".

It's "how to automate the bingo cards for your classroom bingo day".

There's exactly one argument you can make about Patrick's business that would even be germane to your argument: that classroom bingo is so radioactively evil that simply enabling teachers to do it is harmful. I don't think you believe that. Instead: you didn't like something someone said on a message board, so you went looking for reasons to discredit them. In this case, you failed.

You should have more confidence in your own opinions. You have actual K-12 educational experience; it should be easy for you to use actual logic to refute things people say about it.

Wow. Your logic is quite bad.

1. Man criticizes worthless activities in the classroom. 2. Man creates product to help teachers with their bingo day. 3. Bingo day can be considered to be a worthless classroom activity (I'm such a person. I'd never use bingo in the classroom.) 4. I point out an apparent disparity.

It's ironic that a person who decries worthless classroom activities creates a product to make it easier for people to engage in a worthless activity. I made this clear in my previous post.

What I wrote is quite logical and reasonable. Your second to last paragraph contains assumptions not supported by the evidence.

Next, Mr. Taylor announces it's time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

For whatever the data point is worth to you, I don't think you have a strongly-held opinion about bingo in classrooms. I think you have strongly-held opinions about anyone who criticizes standard K-12 education orthodoxy.

Bingo obviously can be considered a worthless classroom activity, but so far that seems to be nothing more than your personal opinion, which is not binding on Patrick or other teachers.

I would say it is worthless only if you do not value the students' enjoyment. Teachers usually turn to bingo to help keep students engaged, which is the opposite of what Patrick seemed to be referring to as "busy-work." Accusing somebody of hypocrisy because he violates your standards is not remotely fair or reasonable.

Of course it's my opinion. I think it is a worthless activity. I would never use it. Others would be successful with it. That was my point to Patrick. He found some activities worthless and abstracted that to an opinion about worthlessness in the classroom. In a classroom with 30 people some are going to find virtually any activity worthless. You can't please everyone and so making a general statement about worthless classroom activities is not helpful.

I didn't accuse Patrick of hypocrisy. I accused him of irony. Big difference.

  >> Have you taught much? When was the last time you were in a classroom?

I have spend at least 20 years in classrooms as a student. I think this qualifies me to have an opinion on what teaching methods I found effective, and observed to be effective with others.

I don't believe that having been a teacher is a requirement in order to have come to valid conclusions.

It qualifies you to have a worthy opinion about what works for you.

Are you sure that what works for you scales well? I don't remember much of day to day activities in elementary school. I did go to elementary school. But I don't think my opinions on elementary school teaching necessarily are accurate even when applied only to myself as a youngster.

One doesn't have to be a teacher to come to valid conclusions. I think though that most conclusions that don't include an acknowledgement of the importance of the teacher's personality coupled with students' personalities is most likely not valid.

  >> One doesn't have to be a teacher to come to valid conclusions.

I apologize if I misunderstood you, but your previous post gave the impression that that is precisely what you thought.

>> Have you taught much? When was the last time you were in a classroom?

Wait - I thought -4^2 was 16 not -16. But then the 2^3^4 discussion here lost me as well.

-4^2 is -16. (-4)^2 is 16.

Order of operations. -4^2 is equivalent to -(4^2).

heehee, programmer's error. -4 is assumed to be the value, and not seen as -1 * 4, which i believe is the interpretation.

order of operations is a useless source of confusion -- we should just use parens always and avoid ambiguity. #toomuchcprogramminglately

I tend to agree, and always did explicit parens for that sort of thing. Then again I use parens in ruby code, too, so maybe I just like them a little too much.

You could argue from consistency that the standard convention is more aesthetically appealing, though. I tried writing this in a HN post but it boiled my brain so I sketched it on the back of an envelope instead.

http://images2.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/arithmeti...

Basically, assume high school algebra works the way you think it works. If we treat unary negation like it magically grabs the nearest integer prior to the exponent happening, things we assume are equal in high school algebra start to break catastrophically. You'd have to invent a new and perhaps uglier way to do algebra which would lose properties like "moving terms around the same side of an equation on paper for clarity is allowed because it doesn't change what they sum to."

Anyhow, if this ever comes up in my household, I'm going with "Yeah, that one's weird. Your dad didn't like it either, but convention is that -2^2 is -4. That's totally separate from math, it's just how we choose to represent math in squiggles, and this collection of squiggles is supposed to be read as -1 * (2^2) instead of (-1 * 2)^2 . Why did we pick that math-to-squiggles mapping? Long story and kind of boring, but it's sort of important that everyone read the squiggles the same way, for the same reason that we don't get into an argument over which side of a road should be called 'left' and then smash our cars into each other. Either way would have been a perfectly good 'left' because left is ultimately just squiggles, but now we're stuck with one of the squiggles."

At the risk of getting off in the weeds, I'd rather re-frame the problem here as to wether unary negation makes sense as an operation, at all!

In my ideal world, -EXPR would be a parse error, and it would only be valid to write -LITERAL * expr. (-1 * a.) So, you could have -4^2 is 16 because the - would not associate to the nearest constant, but rather be part of the 4-value.

The reason for this is that -a^2 is super confusing, and I believe it should be treated as invalid. I do not think that promoting the order of precedence of unary - is the best solution because it leads to the common confusion of thinking "well, a is already negative, so there is nothing to do". if instead this was explicitly -1 * a ^ 2, then you can always "plug and chug" with simpler rules.

Essentially, the confusion is because unary negation is the only operation that is confuse-able with the value definition.

Final qualm against unary negation: what does --4 evaluate to in ruby? 3? No. 4.

If I had my way, then --4 would clearly be invalid because the inner -4 could not receive the unary negation.

In more programming stuff, I think that mixed-type operations should be illegal (no implicit casts!) adding an int64 to an int32 and storing the result in an int32 should be a compiler error!

I've found that most people will correctly do

1 - 4^2

The answer is -15.

So what is

0 - 4^2

Most will say -16.

To be consistent we must agree that -4^2 is -16 since it is the same thing as 0 - 4^2.

It takes a while for students to understand this. I still get calculus students who mess it up.

I must say your chosen example is a bit poor since the precedence of unary negation vis a vis the binary exponent operator is arbitrary and varies according to the arbitrarily selected rule system selected for the task at hand.

Promoting one arbitrary choice over all others as if it is natural, obvious and correct is clearly the source of difficulties explaining to students. When I have taught this topic, I cover precedence rules as being arbitrary and show a chart of the rule system in play for western math textbooks. This clears up confusion, or rather prevents it from occurring in the first place.

"This clears up confusion, or rather prevents it from occurring in the first place."

Not in my experience and I venture to guess that you haven't taught developmental learners. Obviously one discusses the order of operations and the fact that the order is arbitrary. This does not prevent confusion from occurring in developmental learners.

I don't know about these "developmental learners". I've taught students in college, high school, and elementary school. Mostly bright kids in elementary, and a wide range of skill levels in high school and college. Your responses to others here consistently dismiss others' personal experiences and knowledge while touting yourself as the only reliable expert. Frankly your responses here to others are so argumentative and belligerent I'm having a hard time imagining you're really such an expert in the things you claim.

You are incorrectly interpreting what I've written if you think it has been belligerent. I'm not an expert and have not claimed to be an expert. I do have extensive experience with developmental learners of mathematics. Think adults who are innumerate.

I did preface my response to you with, "not in my experience". It is not a valid conclusion to say that my remarks have been belittling. Based on what you wrote above it looks like my guess that you haven't had much experience with developmental learners appears to be correct. I stated my experience was different than yours. What is there to be upset about?