hey dude

Odradek

If you form the opinion "famous work X sucks" or "famous philosopher X sucks" in a literature 101 course or a philosophy 101 course, your opinion does not count, and will never count, and if anybody tries to make this thread be "which books from school did I like/dislike" I will empty threat you

Imipolex G

hey dude, don't make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better

Obā-san

i understand the latter

but in a literature class you kinda like... have to read the whole book, and think about it

and future literature classes probably wont have you reading that same book again

Bee

I hated my 101 lit class because basically all it did was masturbate over flowery language without actually discussing the greater themes and meaning.  And like, I actually appreciated flowery language at that point, but I don't need to take a required and rather expensive college class for it.

300 lit was much better.

Bee

So I dug around in my box of old shit and actually found my notes from 101 Comparative Lit.  They were rather short.

In hindsight I'm rather disappointed with myself that I can only follow about half of my E&M notes today.  Like, I know what it's doing but hell if I remember how to get there.

Calica

I see you pile electrodynamics though

Salix Babylonika

hey so why are we doing the thing that Odie specifically asked us to not do in the OP

Bee

I like lit.  I'm shitting on that particular lit class because it wasn't a lit class -- it was reading comprehension at a seventh grade level, except it was required and cost several thousand dollars of tuition and materials.  The whole semester I was kind of baffled they managed to go through stuff like Gatsby and Divine Comedy without actually analyzing what's going on.  I'd read most of those same books in more depth and with more discussion in high school.

Klinotaxis

honestly i think we just suck ass at education, as a civilization.

like, math, since i know math. pretty much everybody hates math. they think it's hard and boring. why? because k12 math classes are hard and boring. nobody likes that shit. in several math classes i'd do perfect tests but get a failing grade because i just didn't do homework. i'd go home and be like, huh, thirty more root-finding problems. pass and program my calculator or read a terrible sci-fi novel.

math is nothing like that. in math you are creative. but creative doesn't work for k12 so you get a bunch of work problems that no actual mathematicians do. they fobbed that shit off to computers years ago. it's like if you went to become an architect and the teachers were like, cool. for the next four years you are going to be digging ditches. this is essential background development.

same thing with what they called "language arts", as far as i can tell. I don't really remember the reading part of it too much, but writing? Remember that "topic sentence" shit? Five paragraph essays? Three sentence bodies? Fuck that noise. Nobody writes like that. Writing is obviously creative. You develop your own structure or avoid previous ones.

In both cases what is accomplished is that the student performs the actions - does some arithmetic or writes some nonsense - and you can grade it easily with a rubric. you can give the students "grades" and run "performance metrics" on the teachers and "test" with formulaic sheets and so on and so forth. It's like a learning factory.

The product is students that can do these things on a bare minimum, mechanical level. We can "do math" or "read" or "write", but it's kind of a shambling zombie parody of the actual activities, stumbling around and having to move our arms manually. It is a basic level of competence perfect for an industrialized but undigitized society, where you have to get people to do all the tedious work of civilization. However because we are not in fact robots, we end up just fucking loathing everything we were made to do, and understand our skills as the real deal, because of course that's what we were told.

If anyone is masochistic, stubborn, or pressured enough to go into higher learning, what they really have to do is unlearn all that nonsense. Not just the lies-to-children stuff, but really unlearn that fields of study even work like we were taught in school. I've gotten into a lot of arguments with STEM type people about, let's say, infinity. In school you learn that infinity is bigger than any other number. In the early 1900s Cantor developed a concept of infinity in which some sets had infinite cardinalities that were greater than those of other sets. The prospective student doesn't just have to learn that fairly simple fact, but has to unlearn that there is a thing "greater than" and that all numbers are related by one and only one "greater than" relation. Mod 4, 2*2 = 0. Wow! It's like a different multiplication operation! Yes, because the world is not made of these ridiculous mechanical truths you learned when you were eighteen, and all the concepts we fuck with all the time are constructed and deconstructed by societies regularly as they want! Wow! Wow!! Wow fucking wow!

IT SUCKS

vtk

Klinotaxis said:

honestly i think we just suck ass at education, as a civilization.

like, math, since i know math. pretty much everybody hates math. they think it's hard and boring. why? because k12 math classes are hard and boring. nobody likes that shit. in several math classes i'd do perfect tests but get a failing grade because i just didn't do homework. i'd go home and be like, huh, thirty more root-finding problems. pass and program my calculator or read a terrible sci-fi novel.

math is nothing like that. in math you are creative. but creative doesn't work for k12 so you get a bunch of work problems that no actual mathematicians do. they fobbed that shit off to computers years ago. it's like if you went to become an architect and the teachers were like, cool. for the next four years you are going to be digging ditches. this is essential background development.

same thing with what they called "language arts", as far as i can tell. I don't really remember the reading part of it too much, but writing? Remember that "topic sentence" shit? Five paragraph essays? Three sentence bodies? Fuck that noise. Nobody writes like that. Writing is obviously creative. You develop your own structure or avoid previous ones.

In both cases what is accomplished is that the student performs the actions - does some arithmetic or writes some nonsense - and you can grade it easily with a rubric. you can give the students "grades" and run "performance metrics" on the teachers and "test" with formulaic sheets and so on and so forth. It's like a learning factory.

The product is students that can do these things on a bare minimum, mechanical level. We can "do math" or "read" or "write", but it's kind of a shambling zombie parody of the actual activities, stumbling around and having to move our arms manually. It is a basic level of competence perfect for an industrialized but undigitized society, where you have to get people to do all the tedious work of civilization. However because we are not in fact robots, we end up just fucking loathing everything we were made to do, and understand our skills as the real deal, because of course that's what we were told.

If anyone is masochistic, stubborn, or pressured enough to go into higher learning, what they really have to do is unlearn all that nonsense. Not just the lies-to-children stuff, but really unlearn that fields of study even work like we were taught in school. I've gotten into a lot of arguments with STEM type people about, let's say, infinity. In school you learn that infinity is bigger than any other number. In the early 1900s Cantor developed a concept of infinity in which some sets had infinite cardinalities that were greater than those of other sets. The prospective student doesn't just have to learn that fairly simple fact, but has to unlearn that there is a thing "greater than" and that all numbers are related by one and only one "greater than" relation. Mod 4, 2*2 = 0. Wow! It's like a different multiplication operation! Yes, because the world is not made of these ridiculous mechanical truths you learned when you were eighteen, and all the concepts we fuck with all the time are constructed and deconstructed by societies regularly as they want! Wow! Wow!! Wow fucking wow!

IT SUCKS

Great rant.

vtk

Yipee kaiyaiyea
Like the cowboys say
Yipee kaiyaiyea
Til the break of day

Hey, dude

Bee

I totally agree with the thrust of that, though I'd quibble almost all of the details.

In math you really need to know what the hell's going on before you stick it into a calculator.  If you don't, you might put it in wrong and not be able to sanity-check yourself.  My AP Calc class for instance would run tests in two halves -- the first was without a calculator to show procedural knowledge by hand, and the second required one because it was practical application and couldn't always be reduced by hand (though most of them would have a trick that you might miss if you tried to just blindly slam it into the TI-89).  Hell, one time I was asking an engineer neighbor for help on a roller coaster problem, and ended up solving a key integral for thermal loss by hand while he was still looking for his book of integrals to look it up.

The same kind of thing goes for language arts.  The five paragraph essay and stuff seems unnecessary to those of us who picked up on basic competence early.  But like, a lot of people didn't, and they struggle to put together and convey basic reasoning and argument.  It's horrendously rudimentary, but a pretty reliable way of forcing you to at least have a bare focus and a few different pieces of evidence.  My writing 121 class was told to write a three-page rough draft persuasive essay with at least three key arguments.  When we peer edited them, the one that got handed to me was less than one page, a single unbroken wall of text, of incoherent bitching about some shit that happened on Facebook.  This is a college class of presumably grown-ass adults.  Being able to develop your own style is important, but you kind of need to know some basic rules before you start treating them like guidelines and start breaking them more freely.

(I assume these are the people my awful Comp Lit class was designed for, but then, the class failed to actually study or analyze anything at all.  It might as well have just been a daycare for people with hangovers.)

Even having the architects dig ditches can have a purpose.  Watch what happens when all the soft dirt around it gets rained on the next night, then start talking about ways to preserve ground integrity around it.

Honestly the problem is threefold:

1) Classes tend to teach rote lessons, not as a scaffold for future exploration, but as the entirety of their subject matter.  The thirty root-finding problems, yes that's absolutely bullshit.  The Comp Lit class was just going through the motions of reading the story and making no effort to digest its meaning or purpose.

2) These lessons are rarely grounded in practical application.  Not only does this make them feel useless in a real-life sense, but without some kind of concrete analogue, only the people who most naturally think in the right kind of abstract are likely to grasp them.  Going back to the root-finding, try wrapping a couple of them in a ballistics problem or something.  This is why physics classes are awesome -- we demonstrate real-ass things!

3) Little to no effort is made at higher levels of education to filter students by proficiency -- required college curriculum is most often one-size-fits-all, which is a waste of time to both the advanced students and the ones who got screwed previously and fell behind.  The root of this, honestly, is that colleges have financial incentive to waste your time and force everyone through expensive classes, and that's probably not going to be solved without some manner of regulatory intervention.

Tatterhood

Bee said:

2) These lessons are rarely grounded in practical application, and only the people who most naturally think in the right kind of abstract are likely to grasp them.  Going back to the root-finding, try wrapping a couple of them in a ballistics problem or something.

I realize that as a mathematician I'm the last person to have insight into how normal people learn math, but wrapping bullshit problems in "application" just adds the tedious extra step of figuring out what the problem is before actually solving it. It's worth giving the ballistics application in class to motivate the problem, but a pile of formulaic problems with just the numbers changed is a pile of formulaic problems with just the numbers changed, regardless of whether you throw some words in there too.

In any case, I feel like the question of how to adequately teach people to find roots kind of misses Klino's point here, which is that whether or not you think it's valuable to learn that, it has essentially nothing to do with the actual practice of mathematics or science.

Odradek

The paunchy noble's sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance. His lips trembled with malicious rage, while emitting a muffled sibilant gibberish. His sagging flabs rolled like a tub of upset jelly, then compressed as he sucked in his gut in an attempt to conceal his softness.

The prince regained his statue, then spoke to the soldiers surrounding Grignr, his face conforming to an ugly expression of sadistic humor.

"Take this uncouth heathen to the vault of misery, and be sure that his agonies are long and drawn out before death can release him."

"As you wish sire, your command shall be heeded immediately," answered the soldier on the right of Grignr as he stared into the barbarians seemingly unaffected face.

The advisor seated in the back of the noble slowly rose and advanced to the side of his master, motioning the wenches seated at his sides to remove themselves. He lowered his head and whispered to the noble.

"Eminence, the purnishment you have decreed will cause much misery to this scum, yet it will last only a short time, then release him to a land beyond the sufferings of the human body. Why not mellow him in one of the subterranean vaults for a few days, then send him to life labor in one of your buried mines. To one such as he, a life spent in the confinement of the stygian pits will be an infinitely more appropiate and lasting torture."

The noble cupped his drooping double chin in the folds of his briming palm, meditating for a moment upon the rationality of the councilor's word's, then raised his shaggy brown eyebrows and turned toward the advisor, eyes aglow.

"...As always Agafnd, you speak with great wisdom. Your words ring of great knowledge concerning the nature of one such as he ," sayeth , the king. The noble turned toward the prisoner with a noticable shimmer reflecting in his frog-like eyes, and his lips contorting to a greasy grin. "I have decided to void my previous decree. The prisoner shall be removed to one of the palaces underground vaults. There he shall stay until I have decided that he has sufficiently simmered, whereupon he is to be allowed to spend the remainder of his days at labor in one of my mines."

Upon hearing this, Grignr realized that his fate would be far less merciful than death to one such as he, who is used to roaming the countryside at will. A life of confinement would be more than his body and mind could stand up to. This type of life would be immeasurably worse than death.

"I shall never understand the ways if your twisted civilization. I simply defend my honor and am condemned to life confinement, by a pig who sits on his royal ass wooing whores, and knows nothing of the affairs of the land he imagines to rule!" Lectures Grignr ?

"Enough of this! Away with the slut before I loose my control!"

Bee

And see, I've had to tutor people who fell behind because they don't think in the same terms that I did when I learned it.  People like us rolled our eyes at story problems because we latched onto the abstract quickly enough that we already knew or could easily see the application, and it was just an extra annoying step to get at the inner wiring of the puzzle.  But most people think in more concrete association, and the way we teach math almost never starts with that.

I'd often have to frame algebra in terms of finance, or geometry in terms of farmland or construction or fabric, etc., before it clicked with them what the hell they were ever supposed to use it for.  There were a couple students I had to bring out the counting beans because that was the first time they'd ever been led to consider algebra as a way to operate on quantities instead of just abstract numbers, or even to think of a variable as a quantity itself instead of weird magic.  One of them responded to thinking of an equation as a set of scales, where you were trying to isolate the unknown weight by slowly stripping out everything else.  One was more of a creative writer, and had trouble dissecting large blobs of algebra until they started thinking of equations as sentences, parentheticals as clauses, etc. -- basically, that it's a language with syntax.

My favorite story is that one of the kids was just so intimidated by seeing variables at all, that I just replaced the variable with a question mark.  And in his head, that made it stop being Scary Letter Math and reduced it to a puzzle long enough to stop panicking and realize he actually had a decent train of thought to deal with it.  And the only reason I thought of it was because that same AP Calc teacher I mentioned before did that to me back when I was in 5th grade.

Once those first connections were made, most of them started picking up on the abstract really fast.  Math works in a big chain, and before you can teach someone you usually have to identify where that chain first broke, or at least where it needs to be attached.

I guess that leads back into us just sucking at education in general.  Most story problems aren't actually story problems to begin with -- they're just a tl;dr spelling out the same "substitute arbitrary numbers in the same shit you've already been doing, and we're probably going to also mislead you with extraneous information".  And the people who most need story problems are already so far behind because the rest of the teaching process is broken as fuck that it doesn't take for them either.  Lead off with at least a couple decent applications and frame them before you even introduce the mathematical concept to solve them.

Klinotaxis

Bee said:

I'd often have to frame algebra in terms of finance, or geometry in terms of farmland or construction or fabric, etc., before it clicked with them what the hell they were ever supposed to use it for.  There were a couple students I had to bring out the counting beans because that was the first time they'd ever been led to consider algebra as a way to operate on quantities instead of just abstract numbers, or even to think of a variable as a quantity itself instead of weird magic.  One of them responded to thinking of an equation as a set of scales, where you were trying to isolate the unknown weight by slowly stripping out everything else.  One was more of a creative writer, and had trouble dissecting large blobs of algebra until they started thinking of equations as sentences, parentheticals as clauses, etc. -- basically, that it's a language with syntax.

My favorite story is that one of the kids was just so intimidated by seeing variables at all, that I just replaced the variable with a question mark.  And in his head, that made it stop being Scary Letter Math and reduced it to a puzzle long enough to stop panicking and realize he actually had a decent train of thought to deal with it.  And the only reason I thought of it was because that same AP Calc teacher I mentioned before did that to me back when I was in 5th grade.

this is pretty much exactly what i meant. they were taught in some rote way where numbers were abstract and you have to memorize your multiplication tables, rendering it hard for them to make such obvious substitutions.

whether being able to rapidly remember small products is useful sometimes is irrelevant

Odradek said:

The paunchy noble's sagging round face flushed suddenly pale

So... the vaults are elementary school? Or maybe you're Grignr and I'm torturing you? Help me out here, i read this book in tenth grade and it sucks so i forgot all about it

Klinotaxis

wait, "flushed pale" and then "pastily red"? i think the eye of argon might not be very good

Odradek

A ball of feral red was rising through the mists of the eastern horizon, disipating the slinking shadows of the night. A coral stood before the pair, enclosing two grazing mares. Grignr reached into a weighted down leather pouch dangling at his side and drew forth the scintillant red emerald he had obtained from the bloated idol. Raising it toward the sun he said, "We shall do well with bauble, eh!"

Carthena gaped at the gem gasping in a terrified manner "The eye of Argon, Oh! Kalla!" At this the gem gave off a blinding glow, then dribbled through Grignr's fingers in a slimy red ooze. Grignr stepped back, pushing Carthena behind him. The droplets of slime slowly converged into a pulsating jelly-like mass. A single opening transfixed the blob, forminf into a leechlike maw.

Then the hideous transgressor of nature flowed towards Grignr, a trail of greenish slime lingering behind it. The single gap puckered repeatedly emitting a ghastly sucking sound.

Grignr spread his legs into a battle stance, steeling his quivering thews for a battle royal with a thing he knew not how to fight. Carthena wound her arms about her protectors neck, mumbling, "Kill it! Kill!" While her entire body trembled.

The thing was almost upon Grignr when he buried his axe into the gristly maw. It passed through the blob and clanged upon the ground. Grignr drew his axe back with a film of yellow-green slime clinging to the blade. The thing was seemingly unaffected. Then it started to slooze up his leg. The hairs upon his nape stoode on end from the slimey feel of the things buly, bulk. The Nautous sucking sound became louder, and Grignr felt the blood being drawn from his body. With each hiss of hideous pucker the thing increased in size.

Grignr shook his foot about madly in an attempt to dislodge the blob, but it clung like a leech, still feeding upon his rapidly draining life fluid. He grasped with his hands trying to rip it off, but only found his hands entangled in a sickly gluelike substance. The slimey thing continued its puckering ; now having grown the size of Grignr's leg from its vampiric feast.

Grignr began to reel and stagger under the blob, his chalk white face and faltering muscles attesting to the gigantic loss of blood. Carthena slipped from Grignr in a death-like faint, a morrow chilling scream upon her red rubish lips. In final desperation Grignr grasped the smoldering torch upon the ground and plunged it into the reeking maw of the travestry. A shudder passed through the thing. Grignr felt the blackness closing upon his eyes, but held on with the last ebb of his rapidly waning vitality. He could feel its grip lessoning as a hideous gurgling sound erupted from the writhing maw. The jelly like mass began to bubble like a vat of boiling tar as quivers passed up and down its entire form.

Klinotaxis

Are you annoyed? What?

Odradek

I was annoyed, and now I am just posting the eye of argon because it's the eye of argon

Klinotaxis

that's fair

Imipolex G

the hideous transgressor of nature

Imipolex G