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Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do.

> “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned out to be a successful approach.”

Just imagine. You may be super smart who gets things easily and right away. Or, you may be average. Using this philosophy in life, one can excel further.

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I had a college friend that's super slow to learn. He would always get behind on classes and would not even get passing grades most of the time.

But! When he finally learned something new, he would never forget it. He would remember it in details, both the whys and the hows. I've always admired his skill.

I’m like this. I barely graduated school and failed out of college in the first year with a GPA whose square root was higher than the actual GPA. I had always been placed in accelerated classes only to be kicked out once I fell behind. I needed time to understand things, but in all modesty once I understand something I seem to understand it better than everyone around me. Until then though my mind is blank and I literally can’t force myself to do anything on the subject. I just stumble and can’t remember anything when asked. Some subjects are faster than others but some took a year or longer to understand. When mathematically inclined friends took algebra they flew through it and graduated high school completing calculus B AP with a 5, but it took me a year of failing it and being tracked before I finally clicked. But once I understood it other math courses were a breeze largely because my algebra understanding was beyond everyone else’s. But I was tracked and getting off the track in math is almost impossible. I likewise had challenges in geometry and trig until I “got it,” all of which meant when I finally hit calculus and got the concepts of differentiation and integration I took off like a rocket and never looked back.

After failing out of college I went out to the valley and was very successful. I went back to college in my late 20’s using a loop hole to transfer into a top CS school. I knew myself better now and studied all the time knowing I wasn’t stupid just learned differently. On things that weren’t yet clicking I would relentlessly keep studying it and practicing and trying until it did. I graduated highest in my class at a top public engineering program - which gives gentleman F’s to 70% of original freshmen unlike private schools.

My daughter is the same way, so I found a private school that is very careful about differentiating learners and letting them move their own pace. I was suicidally depressed about public education growing up as it ground me down for being different. She is thriving at the stages I fell off the rails.

I am a similar learner, though not quite the same. Mostly for me it’s a focus thing. If I’m focused in, I learn very quickly, but if not, I fall behind hopelessly. College lectures were next to impossible for me, as I had such a hard time focusing, ended up in academic probation and managed to turn it around enough to graduate.

Years later, I went back and got my MS online. That was incredible. Recorded lectures meant I could pause and rewind when I lost focus. I really enjoyed my classes because now the most stressful part of it was no longer an issue.

It’s incredible our entire public school system is based on the assumption every student learns things in the same way at the same rate.

But how can it scale if it doesn’t assume that? It really has to cater to some statistical center of gravity and at some point cut off the outliers. Otherwise you need to pay for a private education because essentially you’re asking for custom tailored schooling. The fact that my parents couldn’t afford private schooling is no one’s fault - I don’t blame the public school system for things being the way things are honestly despite the level of abject misery I felt in it. In fact I’m a huge fan of it - I learned more than I would have without it and value the fact that everyone no matter how poor gets access to it.

Some public schools try to do differentiation but it’s really expensive and impractical at scale. The quality of teacher, resources, and teacher training required if very high. I think every effort to try is worth doing, but the more you try without increasing the amount of funding, training, and selectivity in teacher hiring (which is impractical given the scarcity of high quality teachers relative to the population size) the worse you do for everyone.

I don’t agree vouchers and school choice helps this fwiw. The issues don’t go away by diffusing administration of schools to more organizations, you just end up spending a lot more tax payer money on a lot more administrative staff at a lot more schools with a lot less focus on that center of mass outcome.

The reality is despite how intolerable my childhood was I found my way - and I know many who do. People are resilient and overcome adversity all the time in many shapes.

I'm very happy that you've managed to fix the education system around your daughter!

I always wonder if people like him are able to learn faster if the courses are structured differently.

I'm like this, and yes, very much so.

The (US) academic system is not set up to accommodate anyone, really. It's designed to get someone just below average through their standardized testing and not much more. If you don't fit that mold you're shit outta luck. You either suffer through it like "normal" people, or you find it utterly intolerable and fail or drop out.

Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.

Generally speaking, once I understand a concept I have it forever. I usually only need the briefest of refresher on mechanics and formulae as I use them. Spending the first month of calculus class going over 9th grade algebra is an unbelievable waste of my time.

My final attempt at college was a CS degree. I made it through one semester and did not even get to a single CS concept. It was at least a year and a half of bullshit prerequisites that I had to pay for. I dropped out when I had to write a presentation to the board of my hypothetical company on the benefits of upgrading their printers. I'm not kidding. I paid real money for this.

I've totally given up on the educational system. I don't fit into the cookie cutter ideal of the average idiot grinding out a degree. I just can't do it.

I think probably the ideal way for me to learn is to spend a lot of time one on one with a domain expert that can show me the final concept and work backwards with me to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I don't want or need, nor can I tolerate spending time going over things I already know for the 30th time. I need to learn the things I don't know. School just doesn't work that way.

>Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.

Same, and at work too. I think it's because we think big picture and conceptually. Tell me the outline, and I'll seek out missing information and fill in puzzle pieces, until I can grok it. It's a slow process but learning from first principles I find absolutely boring and unengaging.

I found math in high school utterly meaningless, a set of drills and exercises to do again and again without explanation.

If you go to the gym and you want to do some exercises, you'll generally get a list and try to learn them correctly.

If math teachers taught sports, no one would ever do anything because they would never understand what the goal was. What's the end result? The complex end result should be made known so that we know why we're doing something.

With math it's, shut up and do your drills and if you don't you'll be punished with bad grades. See that guy in the corner with his head down and protractor? He loves it, be like him.

That's one area where I think LLMs will shine outside of the hype zone: they could boost a student's ability to make progress without supervision.

And I understand that there are great teachers out there and an LLM cannot replace that, but at the same time there are a lot of bad teachers wasting everybody's time.

Yup, I've actually gotten pretty decent results out of an LLM for subjects I'm already pretty familiar with. If we ever figure out the hallucination problem, LLMs could revolutionize education overnight.

I think that almost everyone would benefit enormously from having a focused and dedicated one-on-one tutor. Just imagine if you could call up the leading world expert in any field at any time to ask any question you could possibly have. We as a species would get so much more done.

At least that's what I want AI to be in the next decade or so. A tool to push humans to a much higher potential where we can solve our own problems more effectively. I'm afraid we'll skip that step, though and go straight to worshiping the AI that makes the most paperclips.

Anyway, I'm still experimenting off and on with local LLMs to get me closer to where I want to be. I'm not sure it's much faster to use an LLM and continually verify its output, but it does at least provide structure and guidance for my own self-teaching.

A bit reminiscent of John Carmack's method too; not only does he work for 10 hours a day (preferably uninterrupted) he also secretes himself away at some random location for a week at a time.

It's not the same, I know, but to remember things you have to establish and remember entire trains of thought. Not just remember individual milestones.

There's a story that an American football coach, after gathering the best players he could, would start each season just working on the fundamentals, saying you cannot do the simple easy you can't do complex.

One of his Hall of Fame players said that he woukd begin with "Gentlemen, this is a football"

This is true but players understood the goal - play better football.

With math it's what exactly?

If someone worked backwards from code on DAY 1 of high school math, I'd have been engaged... Instead it was mindless repetitive drills. Later as an advanced thing they'd ask you a real-world question: "Let's say you wanted to circumnavigate the Earth and you started here and had to blah blah". I think they should start and not end with that type of thing.

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