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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

One of the ironies here is that it's actually much easier for the smartest kids to excel in school if they have a healthy level of disrespect for it.

Intrinsic motivation is the dominant factor. A student that's actually driven by curiosity and a desire to master everything he or she can is tens or hundreds of times more effective than someone acting out of extrinsic motivation -- the carrots and sticks of grades and punishments.

It is so much easier to learn this way that the other kids who are just slogging it out seem to be moving in slow motion. Staying far enough ahead of them to get good grades takes very little effort when you've actually internalized that learning is something you do for fun.

The real trick of course is igniting the desire in the first place. Which has been obvious for at least two millennia:

    "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - Plutarch

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The smartest kids I knew were those with very intellectual, but hands off, parents.

I always thought it was misguided to advice parents to demand homework be done at a certain time or enforce certain metrics (test scores, volunteer hours, etc), rather than just having intelligent conversations about, well, anything!

> The smartest kids I knew were those with very intellectual, but hands off, parents.

Parents are one part of it, but teachers are another. I grew up in a very rural but fairly rich community, not because the people were rich (quite the opposite actually), rather because there was a nuclear power plant in town that paid 98% of the towns taxes.

I don't remember the exact prompt but I do recall writing a paper for 10th grade english class about quarks. My english teacher went and talked to one of our science teachers because she thought I made up the entire thing, she didn't think quarks were real.

That in itself is fine, this was 1998, I doubt many english teachers would be aware of them. What bothers me is that I'm fairly sure that the only reason my paper wasn't just thrown out was that we were lucky enough to get a science teacher who was an ex-Harvard associated researcher whom moved 'out to the sticks' for family reasons. It was this chap that my english professor asked, thankfully, since I'm relatively certain that no one else in the school, let alone the rest of the science department, would have had a clue. Without that stroke of luck I'd have probably been given an F and not even considered writing outside the box papers again, or at least delayed writing another one.

Side note, but this random teacher I had was amazing, he really changed a lot of the way I look at things. From his profession (biology), to thinking entrepreneurial, to learning the basics of the stock market when I was 14...I learned a lot from that guy. All because we were just lucky enough to have someone of his caliber there to glean knowledge from. It's amazing what a single teacher can do to change someone very early in their life.

Quarks were proposed in 1964 and observed in the lab pretty unequivocally by 1977. By 1998 they weren't some weird new theory.

Which is to say, your (depressingly typical) English teacher shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt on this. She probably had a dictionary sitting in her classroom that could have told her what "quark" means and that they come in six flavors. But she didn't even think to reach for it. Nevermind actually going to the library like she probably orders her students to do.

Nobody can be faulted for not knowing everything, but not even trying to learn is unforgivable in an alleged teacher.

She was a 50 year old high school english teacher in 1998 rural America. If you expect her to keep up to date with high energy particle physics then your expectations are ridiculous.

But you should expect her to retain the ability to browse a dictionary, no?

Assuming it was in the dictionary. We're not talking about a time when going to webster's dictionary website was really an option, as in the internet wasn't really much of a thing still, at least not in my area. They had the ability to dial into their e-mail (a BBS called First-Class) via modem, that was about it. The dictionary in the library was about 5 inches thick and probably 25 years old, I doubt it had 'quark' in it.

This is completely at odds with my memory of 1998.

Not only did people use online dictionaries, but we also used online maps (mapquest.com), movie listings (moviefone.com), greeting cards (bluemountain.com) and hundreds of other online services. Netscape had already hit its peak and was on its way down. High school textbooks spoke of the internet. I don't think I knew students who hadn't used instant messengers like Yahoo!, AIM or ICQ.

I was in a town of about 100,000 people in Colorado.

Fits well with my memory of rural MO in 2000

It takes a theory at least 10-15 years to make it into university textbooks, let alone a general English dictionary.

I still have my high-school dictionary, and it has this entry:

quark n. (Phys.) one of several (orig. three) hypothetical components of elementary particles.

That's from the 7th edition (1982, reprinted 1984) of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, about the size of a thick hardback novel.

Granted, there's not much there, but enough to prove that a student's not just making something up.

Keep in mind that monks in Carolingian France knew the Earth was round in the 8th century. It took a few hundred years for this knowledge to work its way into popular literature (but was present by at least the 13th century). If the paper had been thrown out, this would have made a great topic for a follow-up.

8th century nothing. It was known in ancient times. Eratosthenes correctly computed how big it was around 240 BC, and Posidonius confirmed his measurements in the 1st century BC. The story of how a certain Christopher Columbus came to read these results 1700 years later and disregard them is fascinating[1]

What I don't understand is, if there was such confusion over units, why didn't they simply use known values for the distances involved? I imagine angles weren't a problem. Or, god forbid, do their own measurements now that they had the technique? If it was repeatable to that degree of precision 240 years apart nearly 2000 years earlier, I should have thought they could at least settle the gross magnitude error that misled Columbus.

[1]1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographic...

> 8th century nothing. It was known in ancient times.

I was referring specifically to the pattern of how long it took in the Middle Ages for literature folks to get ahold of the idea. The fact is those 8th century monks got the idea from classical sources.

The subtext of the paper would be "you English teachers can't expect to know about scientific discoveries of the last couple hundred years, can you?"

to be fair, she DID take the trouble to approach a science teacher on a subject she didn't know much about, instead of making a grading decision with insufficient knowledge.

Absolutely, and given that Gell-Mann was corresponding in 1978 with editors at the OED, it's likely that said English teacher (if she had an ounce of self-respect (I speak as a teacher myself)) would have had at least a relatively recent dictionary in her possession, and would have found quark in it. Still, kudos to her for at least caring enough to ask the science teacher.

Good point. Small data set, but.... The #1 and #2 ranked students in my high school class both were single kids (no siblings) with helicopter parents who would intervene when they got poor grades. Both underperformed later in life.

The outperformers did get a few Bs along the way (or many) but to your point had intellectual parents. In some cases they enforced studying. In others it was providing early access to computers.

Problem is kids are are built differently - the whole nurture vs nature. I'll see some kids that are just naturally wanting to excel, and others given the option would do nothing - my kids being in the middle. I could let them fail, and maybe that's the right choice, but in today's competitive college admissions, failure isn't really an option that I would wish on them.

I wonder how intrinsic motivation is developed or cultivated. Another question I have is if intrinsic motivation can he created by external influence.

It's extremely obvious that it is.

Good on you for attributing the saying to Plutarch.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/28/mind-fire/

Yes, to your substantive point, learning is easy (comparatively) when the motivation is intrinsic. Trying to preserve intrinsic motivation in my four children is why I keep slogging along in homeschooling.

I had no competitive sports involvement in my youth, nor did my wife, but we've encouraged our children all to be involved in our local soccer club, and I LOVE that they have had early experience in shrugging off defeats and continuing to improve their skills on the field. One loss (or even a bunch of losses) does not end a playing career.

I have been building up a quote file for many years. :-)

And I'm a homeschooling parent too, though my son is still quite young and we will play it by ear.

For me, it was Scouting more than sports that gave me something meaningful to succeed and fail at. There are many good ways beyond classrooms.

Different people have different motivations. There is no One True Way to educate any sizeable demographic. Pointing at an autodidact and saying "see how much she learns when she's left alone" (or whatever) doesn't tell you anything about how to educate those who are not autodidacts.

I think you just eloquently argued for abolishing one-size-fits-all mass schooling, which I would wholeheartedly support.

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