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8 comments:
Totally awesome. I love this.
Great ideas here, I think.
Does anyone find the animations by the RSA give the ideas expressed in these talks an unfair advantage? Maybe they just choose perfect and persuasive talks, and maybe really do think in pictures, I but I can't ever recall disagreeing with any ideas ever expressed in an RSA Animation.
I think he's really smart too but the animation makes it more compelling. I always think he's going to run out of room for the drawings or accidentally erase part of the dry erase marker with his hand but it never happens.
Maybe we can persuade him to illustrate 10 minutes of a Glenn Beck broadcast to test Pony's theory.
I don't agree with what I think is an implied point here--that education can somehow be remade so that it's not a drag. Getting good at stuff takes work, which requires discipline, which is no fun for anyone, but especially kids. No one would suggest that the average tyke could become a good pianist or short stop without plenty of boring drills. Why would math or computer science be any different?
As adults, it's easy to project our own superior reasoning skills on kids. Why make them recite boring old multiplication tables when we can teach them the principles behind multiplication? Well, for lots of different reasons.
1) Those principles will likely go over many of their heads.
2) We have to educate shitloads of kids, and teaching principles requires way more interaction and time than rote brain-drilling.
3) With a solid foundation in the rote crap, a kid is likely to go on to understand (or even discover for himself) the principles.
So let me be the Dickensian taskmaster and break the news: we've all gone soft. We're too afraid of telling these little bastards to siddown and shuddup.
Fear will keep the local administrators in line.
Kali ma.
I agree with your central point--that Robinson is laboring under the conception that school, and in fact, being engaged with school is in many ways voluntary. It makes sense that he's advocating the removal of any stumbling blocks we place in the way of engagement; medication, schools built in image of factories, etc., but yeah. Another brick in the wall; deal with it.
Here's a question, though--Is there any connection between mastering multiplication tables and understanding them? Both seem like useful, but completely separate exercises. Knowing multiplication tables has only made math operations faster for me, not smarter.
I think there is a connection, but I have no proof. Having that rote knowledge foundation helps you see patterns and make connections that you otherwise might not, maybe.
Maybe! At the very least it speeds up the number of operations you can do in an hour, which may lead to insight faster. On the other hand, knowing it by rote might be enough to make you completely ignore it conceptually, the way we ignore all the little things a key has to do to open a door.
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