Tag: Learning

Learning anew

How much I hated the rote learning of formulas, especially when it came to trigonometry & calculus!

For one, I didn’t understand why it was remotely useful for those of us who’d taken up accounting / commerce as our primary learning area (no, we couldn’t do double degrees – one was bad enough!) Worse still, was the (now apparent) lack of understanding of some teachers themselves, in so far as being unable to explicitly tie the things we were learning to something in the visible world.
There was neither the intrinsic motivation to learn, nor did it seem relevant or important to just get on with it, & get an intuition for it.

There may have been a few of my fellow students who innately understood it in relation to their technical interests, but I strongly suspect they cared about as much as I did, which was very little.

A couple of weeks ago, Rasmus Baath, a researcher, tweeted a link to a 100+ year old Calculus text book, which he followed up by tweeting that his one post that went viral was a book on maths, not cats! I was curious why that may have been so, & spent a little time looking for the pdf of the book that is now clearly out of copyright, & therefore freely available.

Two pages in, & I was hooked. I mean, how could you not be, when the book is titled: “Being a very simple-est introduction to those beautiful methods of reckoning which are generally called by the terrifying names of the differential calculus and the integral calculus by the RFS”.

The quote on the next page simply states: “What one fool can do, another can” (Ancient Simian proverb)

The prologue is even more relevant: “To deliver you from the preliminary terrors, which chokes off most (kids) from even attempting to learn how to calculate”, with a lucid explanations about the dreadful symbols for differentiating & integrating!

I’ve now spent at least a good few hours of my time learning about the fascinating teaching style of the author, a man named Silvanus Thompson! I know he’d have gotten an incredible amount of needling from the boys he’d have taught (if my classmates were any reflection of the cruelty reserved for teachers). I’m grateful that he took the time to write as he has, & that the book is still available.  I know it is, because I bought a used copy off one of my favourite online bookseller.

The Power of Patience: the value of deceleration & immersive attention [Article]

Professor of history of art & architecture, Jennifer L Roberts describes the experience that her students go through when required to write an intensive research paper based on a single work of art of their own choosing.

Before doing any research in books or online, the student would first be expected to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, where it hangs, and spend three full hours looking at the painting, noting down his or her evolving observations as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations. The time span is explicitly designed to seem excessive. 

What have we learned? asks Charlie Stross [Article]

I somehow missed this article by Charlie on September 11, 2013:

Today is September 11th, 2013.

Twelve years ago today, a cell of angry, highly committed, and (by the standards of their peers) extremely well trained young men executed the simultaneous hijacking of four airliners, and used them to mount a suicide attack on those they perceived as their enemies.

What have we learned from this?

The comments at the bottom of the article are enlightening.

Why kids around the world can’t read [Article]

This western-world view at why kids in developing countries can’t read.

Of the world’s population, about 7 out of 10 live in a country where pretty much every child completes primary school. The proportion of secondary-school-aged kids who are in classes has climbed from about half to two-thirds over the past 15 years. The trouble is, a lot of those enrolled appear to be learning very little. In India only a little more than a quarter of the children who complete primary school can read a simple passage, perform division, tell time, and handle money—all skills that should be mastered by the end of second grade. And while eighth-grade enrollment increased to 87 percent from 82 percent of school-aged children in the country from 2006 to 2011, the fraction of enrolled children who could do long division fell to 57 percent from 70 percent—suggesting that despite more of them going to school, fewer kids actually learned basic math over that time.

Sure, but what about access to food, electricity, rest/sleep, books, teachers, housing etc.. ? Realities on the ground don’t usually make their way into these explanations – the pat answer from most armchair economists seems to be “if you can’t afford it, don’t have kids”.

Is schooling absolutely necessary? [Article]

This will upset the apple-cart for a lot of folks – and that’s exactly why it’s worth a read:

Think about how we learn as adults: do we need to learn things by a certain time? Maybe, but only if that is tied to something real — you’re applying for a job that requires certain skills, or you’re working on a project that requires that you learn certain things. But most of the time, learning goes at your own pace, based on what you’re interested in and how much time you have and all kinds of other factors unique to your life situation. 

Then why do we insist that kids MUST learn certain things by the time they reach a certain age?

How weird is the English language, really? [Article]

English is terribly confusing to a lot of non-native speakers but how hard is it really? Is the world’s most difficult language to learn? For example, guess how “Ghoti” is pronounced? The Economist weighs in and comes up none the wiser:

That doesn’t settle a bar bet along the lines of “Is English hard to learn?” But any topic worthy of a good long argument—”Who’s the greatest boxer of all time?” “‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or ‘The Wall’?”—should have that element of taste and subjectivity to keep it fun.

The Pipe Dream of Easy War [Article]

An interesting view by Maj Gen. H. R. McMaster, a US military commander on the misinformation about war:

Our record of learning from previous experience is poor; one reason is that we apply history simplistically, or ignore it altogether, as a result of wishful thinking that makes the future appear easier and fundamentally different from the past.