Guessing the Teacher's Password

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/guessing-the-te.html

by t0pj • 18 years ago

54 30 18 years ago

aneesh• 18 years ago

This sadly is how the world works. In school, even in high school and college, the students who guess the teacher's password are rewarded. The (few) students who make an effort to discover and think through something on their own are criticized for wandering from the beaten path, even on the occasions when they're actually right.

High school science competitions (school science fairs, all the way upto Siemens-Westinghouse and Intel STS) particularly guilty of this.

boredguy84• 18 years ago

"The (few) students who make an effort to discover and think through something on their own are criticized for wandering from the beaten path, even on the occasions when they're actually right."

I remember I just -couldn't- accept that we can't take square roots of negative numbers. I mean, sure, two negatives multiplied together is a positive, but...there HAS to be a way! Numbers, to my 6th grade mind, weren't arbitrarily going to deny your ability to manipulate them.

Fortunately for me, I happened to be reading a book on Mandlebrot and in the course of discussing his work the author introduces the concept of imaginary numbers. So the next day in class I asked: "Are you suuuure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"Well, I was reading in this book and so-and-so says you can take the square root of negative numbers, you get 'i' for the root of -1 and..."

"Why don't you go wait outside."

Where I got told that although I move to the beat of a different drummer, when I'm in her class, I really just need to be quiet. That's when public education and I had a falling out from which our relationship has never recovered.

All of that to say: I think part of the 'problem' is that kids who do try to think on their own are often in a situation where they're challenging accepted rules without the social grace to do so constructively. But rather than being taught the social skills, they're just shut down. Very sad, actually. They could be taught how to 'wander well'.

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

Isn't sqrt(-1) = i an axiom though, and not a theorem? In other words, if you just started with the integers and the basic rules of arithmetic, you will never run into the need for imaginary numbers. It's only after you posit their existence that a lot of cool results flow from it.

Am I wrong there?

Alex39174• 18 years ago

Someone should write a book like the little schemer but for physics. One of the best classes I took in college was somewhat like this. We measured the period of the pendulum using our heartbeats, and we also measured how long it took things to roll down differently sloped ramps. From this we derived the period of the pendulum and the relationship between slope and speed. Eventually we used this to derive the universal law of gravitation using the period of the moon's orbit as the only given. It was pretty cool because there was no math involved. Instead of using calculus to derive the equations, we instead found them inductively by iterating over a couple thousand lines in excel and then looking for the pattern. The idea of the class was to understand physics by deriving all the equations the same way the people who discovered them did. It was pretty cool.

pchristensen2• 18 years ago

What school/teacher? I'd be interested in finding a curriculum or any references about that. I have daughters and I'm dying to find a good way to present science to them.

Alex39174• 18 years ago

Prof. Peter Stein at Cornell. The class is Physics 202. I can email you the class notes and problem sets if you'd like. I'll also email him and ask if he's thought about publishing the course materials online.

smanek• 18 years ago

Take a look at "The Road to Reality."

It starts assuming nothing more than basic arithmetic, and builds up to differntial equations, tensors, string theory, quantum relativity, etc.

I'm warning you up front that it's very math heavy. It takes some work to get through, but its worth it.

DaniFong• 18 years ago

Only tangentially related, but years ago, in elementary school, I decided to guess the password after the school restricted access to SimCity. I got it right on the first try, it was just the school name, but I told everyone 'I hacked it', for major props.

boredguy84• 18 years ago

I spend some of my time teaching at a private university. During a discussion with one student he said, "All I really know about Plato is that he thought the forms were transcendent whereas Aristotle thought the forms were immanent."

"Oh," said I, "that's interesting. What does it mean for a form to be transcendent or immanent?"

"I don't know, I just know that's what they thought."

We then had a discussion about whether or not he really knew that, and whether or not he was OK with paying over $25k a year to learn how to be a parrot.

The sad thing: he was OK with it, and probably rightly so. He realized that mostly what people want are parrots and you can get paid quite a decent amount of money for being a good parrot. Not a bad gig if you're fine being a cog. There are certain comforts it provides.

noonespecial2• 18 years ago

I remember the first time I got an F on an assignment even though I'd gotten the correct answer to every problem.

I hadn't reached my correct answers the "right" way.

boredguy84• 18 years ago

I loved calculus because about 4 weeks of teaching provided the foundation for everything else. My tests usually involved me having to derive something that was apparently derived in the book and then 'applied' on practice questions that got the 'right' way of doing things in by rote. I lost points for that.

I would also lose points for "not showing my work", but if you can't factor, say, x^2-9 in your head, maybe you have deeper issues.

xlnt• 18 years ago

Ugh I hate that. I got marked down a letter grade on a math test once for not showing enough intermediate steps even though my answers were correct.

I also once got an answer marked wrong because the teacher couldn't understand my intermediate steps, even though the answer (and steps) were actually correct. When I showed him, he refused to change my grade. That was at University.

cdr2• 18 years ago

If the teacher was teaching a process, and looking for evidence that you understood that process, it seems entirely reasonable to not count your work.

noonespecial2• 18 years ago

I had simply taken shortcuts I'd seen later in the book for factoring quadratics. They wanted to see it written exactly as it appeared in the current examples.

I realized that math in school was more like one of those simon games where you just mindlessly press the arbitrary sequence of lights you just saw, than actual mathematics. This analogy helped me suffer through "school math" while I perused real math on my own.

cdr2• 18 years ago

I've been thinking along similar lines since I've been interviewing; far too many interviewers are only looking for the password.

nsrivast• 18 years ago

overcomingbias is one of those websites you should read every article in, like paul graham's essays

jsomers• 18 years ago

yeah, although you'd have a lot more work to do. Not only are there multiple posts a day but some of Elizer's have dependency trees reaching months back!

Guessing the Teacher's Password

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