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> Nobody broke the kids, they were doing exactly what they were taught to do.

I would say that the fact that that's what they were taught to do is what broke them. In other words, trapping them in the system (and I agree with you that they are trapped--I certainly felt that way when I was in school) is breaking them.

> what do you remember about high school trigonometry?

Everything. But that doesn't really contradict your point, because (a) I have actually used trigonometry many times since high school, both for work and for fun, and (b) I didn't actually learn trigonometry from my high school trig class; I already knew it (or at least most of it), because my Dad had given me a book on trig some time before and I had read through it on my own, because I was interested in the subject matter.

In the same line of thinking, I can remember most of my classes from high school. But that doesn't mean just being able to recall something made it a good use of my time.

For example, Spanish class. Now some people are fine with the language classes effectively just being a deep social studies curriculum around one culture where most of the time is spent on rote memorization for arbitrary reasons, but while I can remember my vocabulary, I can't speak real Spanish at all. But then again, I never did in class either. 5 years of Spanish, including two required semesters in college, and if I hear a Spanish conversation I'm completely lost. If they slow down I can translate the words in my brain bank and figure it out, but I never spoke the language.

In the same line of thinking, I read Shakespeare, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, Uncle Toms Cabin, etc and never actually got anything more than factual recall of the story plots to show for it.

Of course I remember the math, because I liked the math and specialized in the math and went into software in part due to the math. But the entirety of HN is deeply biased because almost anyone here is an intellectual who likes knowledge in general, so they didn't mind the English and Reading and Social Studies classes even if they didn't directly contribute to their future employability or character.

But most kids are not like that. It requires both luck and intellect to realize that you should make the most of the prison you are stuck in for your childhood. Many don't get lucky, and the mental synapses that would lead them to embrace the education system to extract value from it have a hostile reaction and abandon it.

And that doesn't mean they are dumb, it means they didn't get the right combination of random teachers to inspire them. If they could be inspired at all - it requires a specific brand of personality to be compelled into a repetitive environment and find value in it. Some just won't be able to no matter what.

None of it changes the fundamental flaw in modern education, which is the need to inspire children to learn the things that interest them most and learn about that. And to try to inspire them to find interest in all the things we routinely parrot from their textbooks and lectures onto tests for them to have a "placement" on. And if they don't? The parroting is rarely doing any good, and is only doing long term damage to the childs ability to reason and have a passion for learning. I don't think knowing the plot to Uncle Toms Cabin is worth that.

>But the entirety of HN is deeply biased because almost anyone here is an intellectual who likes knowledge in general, so they didn't mind the English and Reading and Social Studies classes even if they didn't directly contribute to their future employability or character.

Out of curiosity, was this what it was like for most people here?

by contrast, I virulently hated any course that didn't pertain to computer science. I had my speciality picked out at a young age, and my frustrations with the education system subsist almost entirely on it being unwilling to accommodate that choice.

I assumed that was a common sentiment here. Maybe not?

I remember everything about highschool trig. And chemistry. And physics. And certainly the rest of math. We might waste the time of the kids that are going to end up flipping burgers, but we don't waste the time of the brighter kids. If anything we move too slow.

Just because someone isn't good at mathematics (or whatever subject) doesn't lead them to a life of flipping burgers, nor does it mean they're less bright.

It certainly can mean that they are less bright.

It could mean they're more intelligent and more creative too, just perhaps not having the patience or mental structure for learning and applying mathematics, chemistry, whatever. So that makes comparisons a bit of a moot point, and so the focus should be a) getting people into activities where they're learning things they're motivated and interested in learning about, and b) treating everyone kindly, which means having compassion which means having understanding about how intelligences work, how people work, and not using language that tells a person what they're be or not be if they do one thing versus another. If you tell someone that they'll do well at something, they'll do better at it than if you tell them they'll do badly.

Yes, schools train and select for obedience. Certainly not intellectual excellence. (Such as contradicting what the fool in front of the class says; or deciding for yourself whether attending one day is an effective use for your time, compared to reading an engrossing book.) If intellectual excellence were the goal, the institution would look very different.

Those who succeeded in such a system tend to enjoy thinking it's a meritocracy, and implicitly consider themselves bright. Others obviously have a different perspective.

Well put.

And then they go to lives of selecting against people with more gumption. It may be good for institutional stability, but not so great for organizational innovation and adaptability.

As a parent of three bright children with excellent development reports your comment makes me want to do you considerable violence. Regardless of whether my children were skilled in mathematics or not, if I overhead your derisory attitude to kids learning abilities I would probably punch your teeth out.

And no, I wouldn't be sorry. Sometimes violence is the best teacher and learning not to refer to other peoples children that way is probably far more valuable a lesson in life than your highschool trig.

Just remember, for every child you refer to as a burger flipper - X probability will have fathers standing 6' 2", weighing 240 and a former linebacker.

Possibly excessive snark but I'm having a bad day so screw it.

I find it ironic that ZenPro is so quick to violence.

That said insulting people's children is never nice, but everyone is someone's child so sometimes it's a necessary evil.

I never said I was quick to violence. I am normally a very calm person.

That comment was ridiculous. In this regard we define "someone's child" as a non-adult. Technically an adult is someone's child but it is unlikely they require their parents protection in some way so in the spirit of the comment it is fallacious to include adults in the reasoning.

Simply insulting kids under the age of 10 and pigeon-holing what they will do in life based on a narrow prejudice deserves a hiding frankly. It also neatly sidesteps the phenomenal salaries that people in the fast food industry can earn if they want to progress.

In addition, Zen is not the opposite of violence. Actually, it is one of the aims prior to entering into martial combat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin

Your propensity for violence is likely the least impressive thing about you.

You are right. It is.

Thank you for the compliment.

> I remember everything about highschool trig. And chemistry. And physics. And certainly the rest of math.

Report back when you're above 22.

I'm 30. I don't remember everything, but I do know the basics, and most importantly I remember what it is and what problems it can solve.

I'm turning 29 in a couple weeks.

Couple of decades.

Anyhow, the important part about math isn't the memorization. It's the process.

Geometry and trigonometry aren't that useful by themselves. Even Algebra is marginal. Probability and statistics are way more useful. However, all of it comes together when you hit calculus which is VERY useful.

Can I integrate from memory anymore? No. Can I solve a differential equation from memory? No.

I'm going to use Mathematica if it's a one off. I will bone up on the process if I'm hitting it too often.

However, I'm always doing Bayesian probability estimates for all manner of things in programming, business, manufacturing, etc.

>I remember everything about highschool trig. And chemistry. And physics. And certainly the rest of math.

Who cares? Honestly? Do you think Jeff Bezos busts out his impressive high school trig in the middle of the day? Do you think Larry Page even remembers the formula for transfer of moment?

If all you learned for HS was the formula for conversion from moles to molecules and not how to apply logical thinking and abstract processes into practical applications you suffer from the same problem that the OP was complaining about.

I think your comments are misplaced and I think using billionaires as examples is a poor way to try to win an argument. Larry Ellison is probably not a very good person either, does that mean all the learning about treating people well in elementary school is a waste of time?

> We might waste the time of the kids that are going to end up flipping burgers, but we don't waste the time of the brighter kids.

I would have said we really waste the time of the brighter kids. (Though we waste their motivation more.) We just waste it in a different way. Bright kids could pick up the math they need in a very short period of time on their own, but we present the material only in drips and drabs at a glacially slow pace with lots of repetition, working on the assumption that they're not really paying attention and probably forget everything during breaks.

So I own a burger restaurant in the bay area.................

You would be surprised by both the number of people that can't do basic math (i.e. figure out what combination of coins leads to $8.72) and the number of people that want a minimum wage job while they already have a college degree (worst being one in CS...in the bay area? really? followed up by a foreign MBA...)

Also, one day I was standing at a bus stop near the restaurant waiting to go back home and I listened to 3 ~18 year olds talking about their college classes. This is roughly how the conversation went: "that fucking bitch (at the local college) won't let me take statistics. just because I failed algebra 2 doesn't mean I can't do math. I'm really good at math! I passed geometry and shit! why can't I just take that statistics class?" "yeah algebra is really hard. I took regular algebra in high school and i had a lot of problems...I think I have to do it again" "I'm really bad at math. I have to take a couple math classes to graduate, so I might just drop out of school. I can't do that shit, I don't know how you can go on about wanting to take statistics". Then they went on about how science, english, and other general education requirements are bullshit. So I'm standing there - went to college at 16, forgot more math than all of them combined will ever learn, read biochem texts for fun on holiday and I _want_ to have the luxury to study hard and go to med school. My parents sacrificed a lot to do everything they could for me too - their parents couldn't. Life is unfair.

I had flashbacks to high school where everyone in my program within an inner city school were in honors precalc or AP calc AB/BC and AP statistics classes, but we shared PE classes with the "regular" school and we helped a lot of our fellow students learn basic algebra to pass high school exit exams and tests in between activities. Makes me want to figure out how to overhaul education in the US - it's garbage and it's failing everyone - my program full of "geniuses" and the single parents working a job struggling to graduate high school alike.

Ask a mathematics professor to remember all the random formulas that kids are force fed in highschool trig. You are as likely to get a blank stare as an answer. Are they the "slow kids"?

No you're not. You're just making up tore own statistics. If mathematician can't recite it quickly, she can certainly develop the formula. Really, trigonometry? This is pretty simple stuff. Is it that the surprising to some of you that there are "programmers" on "HackerNews" that might, at whatever age, still know such elementary mathematics?

Like 3pt141597, I remember everything about high school trig. Not only do I remember it, but as it turned out, 10 years after leaving school, I actually started having to use it regularly (graphics programming). I also remember high school level calculus. Sadly I can't say the same for university-level maths, which I regularly have to break out the text books for when I need them (stats and probability, complex numbers being my two regular bugbears).

When I think about it, I struggle to find a single useless class from high school. If anything, I regret mostly that I didn't make enough of the opportunities that my school provided me - I really regret not having put in the effort in art classes for example.

I thought lightly of all the arts classes I had to take in school and that my parents wanted me to take for "a well rounded education". Drawing, painting, ceramics, piano... It took me almost 10 years after high school to realize how useful it's been for me in so many random little ways. Everything from being able to craft some of the things I needed for my wedding (designing my ring to sewing a ring pillow and painting table numbers) to just everyday mundaneness when I'm meeting with a client and I can just draw out what they're thinking and get the point across easily. The piano especially useful because it's so relaxing and good for taking my mind off stress/pain better than painkillers.

Never in a million years as a kid would I have thought sitting in an art history class or 10+ years of playing a piano would come in as handy as all the obsessive studying I did of science, english, math and other classes. I'm so disappointed courses like that are disappearing (along with home ec - never had that, but my husband can't mend clothes or cook...) but so many people are struggling with basic math/language skills that I can understand why.

Kids do what they're told. Problem is there are several types of learning. Among them are skill learning and another is exploratory learning.

For much of education's history - we teach skills. That we can test easily. That's fine - kids need skills. We also need to teach creative and exploratory thinking. But teachers must tell the kids to be mindful when they are working exploration mode.

Perhaps mornings are skill learning and afternoons are creative/exploratory. Perhaps you can test exploratory skills but don't ever give an evaluation to it back to the child - as they probably won't get evaluation for it in the real world.

In exploratory learning - you will need to test or check your own work. These kids need to learn that. There may not be one right answer - but a person should be able to evaluate their own hypothesis and not get upset if they're wrong. That is a life skill we could all use. Why do we have grade it anyway - a teacher can see when a kid is slacking off and grade on that.

Exactly.

When I follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion, I always reach the Sudbury model: let the kids figure out what they want to do and learn. Humans (and kids are human) are smart and savvy. Give them a system and they will learn to navigate it to their advantage.

But give them no system, let them find their own way, and they can achieve anything.

Teachers can see the symptoms that the system is letting down the students. But it is extremely hard for them to accept that it is the whole structure that is problematic requiring a massive redesign.

That completely ignores the fact that people don't know what they don't know, or tend to erroneously assume that something they don't know about isn't relevant.

There should be some allowance for self-direction, but humans are only "smart and savvy" over a period of several hundred generations and not any specific individual. By the time a kid figures out that he should have learned something, he'll have great-grandchildren (assuming he's still alive at all).

I remember trigonometry, I think must of us here do as well. You're talking about something. You're promoting this notion that kids should be uneducated because knowledge is useless and it's better to simply learn the lowest of material possible to help attain low-skilled jobs. This teacher is bemoaning the thinking patterns of kids, I think it is a very different issue.

You seem to have made quite a few assumptions about what I'm supposedly advocating based solely on the fact that I'm critical of the current system. (You might notice I've made no prescriptions here, only commentary on the status quo). But please, by all means continue to argue against this strawman you've constructed, don't let me ruin your fun.

Oh, sorry. But, it was a straw argument. You stated no one really remembers trig anyway. Just stating than any criticism is attacking a strawman does not imply the argument was not imply the argument was not made of straw to begin with. :)

They rarely think about what they are doing as long as at the end of the day their answer is “correct”.

Agree. These kids are just playin "THE GAME".

I don't know why this is bad. It shows the kids are smart.

At the end of the day, the only use of education is getting stuff.

The kids are focused on the "getting stuff", and see the eductation as hoop to jump through.

The truth is they are right.

> what do you remember about high school trigonometry? But you "learned" it right? Or did you, really?)

<aside>

Soh Cah To-ah

sin over hypotenuse

cos over hypotenuse

tan over adjacent.

I'm REALLY glad I learned that, That's helped me a lot. Though, it doesn't really take away from your argument.

</aside>