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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

I always struggled (and still struggle) with math.

A couple of years ago, randomly browsing YouTube, I came across this home made video asking how they figured out the distance to the moon before modern technology. The host starts out small scale showing he can calculate the distance to things in his back yard using trigonometry and then scales it up to the moon.

My mind was blown, because no one ever told me that. It was simple, anyone could understand it. When I was in school, all I was told was to memorize abstract formulae like calculating the length of sides of triangles based on angles and known length of one side. It was never contextualized to any actual, let alone interesting or fascinating, applications.

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I think you've highlighted well an outcome of the modern drive to "learn to pass exams" in many places. The original intention to "learn" has been lost or corrupted over time in a multi-century gradual example of Goodhart's Law in action.

I had a similar experience earlier in my education. "Learning" sine and cosine was nothing compared to understanding it well enough to use in a 2d game. I went from struggling with standard algebra classes to getting 5s on AP Calculus BC and Physics.

You may be interested in an Astrophysics course. I took one in college taught by an Astronomy professor and was surprised most of the content was focused on what we could determine about stars, galaxies and such based on what we could measure from them. In retrospect that seems obvious but I guess I had assumed the content would be like really heavy theories of stellar formation or gravity or something.

In my course we basically progressed from the traditional OG methods of measurement to increasingly sophisticated methods. It’s amazing how much you can learn about stars and galaxies just from combining models of black body radiation, spectral lines, and red shift with the wavelengths of the light they emit.

Yeah, a lot of schools do a poor job of tying math to practical applications. And no those absurd word problems in elementary algebra are not what I mean. Calculus, for example, makes way more sense if it's presented alongside physics.

When I was in school everyone hated word problems, but to me, they were the most clear examples of the answer to "when will I ever use this". Sure, maybe you don't care that a train leaving New York traveling at 55mph while a car leaving Philly traveling at 35mph did any thing, but they were definitely real world examples.

I had a physics teacher that had a unique way of providing examples that always revolved around a little monkey that he liked to draw on the overhead. The monkey was usually on/in/near a tree, and we had to use those dreaded equations to figure out whatever was being asked. As dorky as it was, it definitely helped illustrate in way it sounds you never got. I always enjoyed his class, and he is definitely one of the three teachers I had that was on a different level from the rest. Each of those three teachers set me on a path of where I am now that none of the others did.

I had a calculus professor that asked a physics problem on a quiz, and all the students that understood physics got the problem "wrong". It was something dumb about pulling a wheeled suitcase up an incline at a constant speed, and wanted to know the total torque on the wheels...

Which video?

Harder to find than it should be due to YouTube enshittification of their search but

https://youtu.be/ohdysfFWO4w?si=iEz-HcFabRFc1kID

This is an unfortunately very uniform problem with "school", I'd say (in the US system / nomenclature) from about post-elementary up to "undergrad". Too much of the junior high school and high school classes end up as "piles of facts". The vast majority of attempts to improve education* never deal with this underlying issue, and, thus tend to just make the problem even worse. (Most likely, for various reasons including 'difficulty', attempts are made to avoid this issue.)

You can impose any standards you want - if all you're training on and testing for is ~regurgitation of facts, that's what's going to be optimized for - all of the forces at play will push even the best of teachers (those who might try to provide something other than the driest most immediate-term "goal-oriented" course / experience) towards this terrible (minimum) "standard".

At this point, I highly doubt this will ever be fixed - and certainly, can't see that happening in my lifetime. In the past few decades, hostility, and outright MARKETING of hostility, towards education has increased dramatically. Education is perennially underfunded and massively inequitable from locality to locality (and at even "finer grained" levels). Most of the fights around education these days are so far removed from questions of SERVICE and ARE WE DOING THE BEST WE CAN FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS? that there's just no way to imagine any serious or appropriate attempt can be made to address the real inadequacies of our recent & current system.

It's truly a shame. We'd all be far better off if there was more investment in, respect for, etc. education, teachers, STUDENTS (our kids), etc. Partly, this is a generational issue that even gets at the voting power of generations ... It is possible that Gen X, in part by being a smaller "generation" and in part because of their own experiences of being comparatively ignored and pushed to the side by the priorities of other generations [particularly, the older generations] across their own "lifecycles", will actually help swing things back a little towards student-oriented service (so-to-speak). But, I'm not 'optimistic' either regarding intention or, even more so, actual action.

It's a kind of tragedy, blasting people IN THEIR FORMATIVE YEARS with piles of facts in such a way as to kill off INTEREST and the possibility of real UNDERSTANDING, guaranteeing we end up with a far less informed, engaged, and healthy COMMUNITY and PEOPLE than we might otherwise have.

* Most, seemingly, quite ill-advised, unfortunately. Ill-advised based on research and the experiences of people who have spent years studying (sometimes, even, with a methodical empiricism!) "pedagogy" and "child psychology", and those who have worked on and refined models that tend to have real advantages (e.g., "Montessori" comes to mind - the data is mixed but generally supportive of the benefits of this comparatively grounded in science method, see, e.g., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7). Part of this is because of various "stakeholders" engaging in the usual tug-of-war BS where only lip-service is paid to the actual target population this essential SERVICE is supposed to be CENTERED ON...

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