Hard News: The Demon E-Word
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Re the memory vs "learning how to learn": false dichotomy. Rote learning is a valuable and useful skill which is essential to higher learning. Not only are your times tables useful but the processes you experienced in learning them are useful too.
I agree that memory vs process is a false dichotomy, but rote learning vs active learning is not. Rote learning too often renders facts into mere factoids, sound bites to be parroted on demand, with no knowledge of the relationships between them, let alone of how we've come to accept them as facts or how we might challenge them.
There are of course occasions when a fast and reliable memory is essential, rather than just knowing how and where to find the answer. I'd prefer a surgeon to be able to distinguish the hippocampus from the corpus callossum without referring to Grey's Anatomy, and a pilot to be able to tell a cumulus from a cumulonimbus without doing a Google image search. But I'd have less confidence in those professionals who reached that competence via forced memorisation rather than through practice, exploration and understanding the underlying deeper structures of their fields.
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Stephen, I so agree. I don't see how you can learn a foreign language without a massive degree of rote learning. But other mental skills are of great value too. And they are sooo interrelated. Problem solving is 90% memory, in my job. Of course you need a system to establish which of the 200 already known problems this particular one might fit into, or to prove it's a new problem. But you also have to remember the 200 known problems. You could develop a system, but it's usually just easier to fix the problems. Naturally you have memory-aids like your database of problems, your help texts, your paper notes, your diary, Google, etc. But the difference between being skilled and not in some support role comes down to having done it for a while and got good at remembering how your system works, how it should work, how people are using it, etc. That speeds up your use of the supporting tools hugely.
Even with a foreign language, the outcome we are seeking is not to be able to measure how many words the kids have learned. It is to get them to be able to use that language in a useful way. It surprised me when I went to Germany that they considered me extremely fluent, when I only just passed first year Uni German. It surprised them, when they heard that was the first time I'd ever been to Germany and had only learned it at school. Until they heard that in 7th Form I had the luck to get 1-1 language classes from a 'heisse Fraulein'. That cracked them up bigtime, and it was only later that I remembered that heiss=hot, but not when you are talking about people. In that context it actually means 'horny'. But I'm happy they think I was luckier than I really was. Can you put a price on understanding German humour? Can you measure it? Can you teach it? Should you teach it? Certainly I would fail a test as a translator.
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Teach them something interesting and they'll lap it up and think as well. ... The kids see through the BS for themselves
How do you ensure that something is "interesting" to all kids? I was bored to tears by English and art at school, and didn't get interesting in such things until after University. Others were bored rigid by maths and science, while I lapped it up. Just because a kid laughs at something, doesn't mean they've "seen through the BS".
And what are you suggesting is wrong with history teaching? It's a long time since I've been there, but I'd suggest that what I learned then about the processes of historical research and about assessing historical writing through inquiring into the paradigms and motivations of the writers has been of much more use to me in my personal and professional life than any amount of reciting dates of battles. Knowing that history is an active process of enquiry has to be more engaging than having it presented as a fixed and dusty canon of events between kings and kaisers.
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Well we had our 12 year old daughter come home from school laughing that they had been taught that man has never landed on the moon. If that isn’t seeing through BS I don't know what is.
Point taken about history although my kids never got anything as useful as what you describe and I certainly did not get from my history that there was much else going on other than in Europe and NZ.
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Ben, that is a good point. The current science curriculum is far too rigid in being "selected topics in science" and being able to opt in and out of little modules is ludicrous. Science, and I suspect learning, just doesn't work like that.
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And heres a question:
Who does it benefit and who does it make feel good to (a) write something like this and (b) leave out the word “knowledge”?
“The New Zealand Curriculum identifies five key competencies:
• thinking
• using language, symbols, and texts
• managing self
• relating to others
• participating and contributing. “I’m interested in you guys opinions because out of all my extended whanau and friends I have no-one to ask these questions because none of them have a wit idea why the politicians come up with the non-solutions to the problems.
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Richard, in NZ we already have the system where a random selection of the papers goes to another university to get remarked. We have reasonable quality control and I was just saying the quality control would have to be very carefully audited if we brought in a system of fully funding our brightest student.
I am actually a New Zealander. I was educated in New Zealand, and was among those who railed against higher student fees and loans.
The irony is that all this talk of quality control and cross-marking is simply absent at top-drawer American places. One could be truly cynical, and suggest that an emphasis on the external validation of your procedures is effectively an admission of your second-tier status: elite institutions don't need to be reassured they are getting it right. (I am not actively advocating this position, but I think there is an element of truth in it. I recall a story that final exams from the University of New Zealand were routinely sent back to the mother country to be marked by genuine English Dons. However, when the ship carrying one year's exams was torpedoed during WWII they decided to keep the reviews internal to New Zealand. I don't know if this true, but this cross-marking has been going on for a long time, and may well have its historical roots in this sort of colonial insecurity, for all that it resonates with modern ideas about quality control and the external validation of academic assessments.)
Moreover, ANY system that awards money or slots at elite schools preferentially to some students will be "gamed". In some countries, access to elite universities is determined by brutally competitive examinations -- and you get students who are very good at sitting tests. In the United States, elite schools tend to put a premium on "breadth" so you get kids who are not just smart, but who have all sorts of eye-popping extra-curricular activities -- and there is a lot of pressure on high school students to be ostentatiously involved with community service in order to help get admission to top drawer schools. I am not sure which system works better, but both systems modify the behavior of students who are attempting to "win" at the game they are required to play.
The New Zealand education system is much more of a level playing field than that in the US -- it is not the cost of attending college that makes the system different (since that is subsidized in a variety of baroque ways), but the presence of a cohort of "top" schools which can turn away 90% or more of their applicants. It is worth reflecting that this group probably amounts to about 20 places (at a generous guess) -- often with comparatively small student populations. If you map this into the New Zealand scene, that would about to about 1/4 of a university -- since the US population is about 75 times larger. And 1/4 of a Harvard is not a Harvard at all, so this system will *never* take root in New Zealand, but it dramatically changes the "market" in the US.
In the long run the real issue may be average debt, rather than high-fliers somehow being discouraged by fees -- there are plenty of vital jobs that do not pay stellar salaries, and if a big chunk of your middle class is laboring to pay off student loans that cannot be good for your economy. (While it looked a lolly scramble at the time, my guess is that dropping the student loan interest may have eased a lot of the pain I was starting to see when I left New Zealand a dozen years ago.)
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Who does it benefit and who does it make feel good to (a) write something like this and (b) leave out the word “knowledge”?
“The New Zealand Curriculum identifies five key competencies:
• thinking
• using language, symbols, and texts
• managing self
• relating to others
• participating and contributing. “Because "knowledge" isn't a competency, or a skill if you want a less modish word. But knowledge comes through thinking, using language, symbols and texts, and participating and contributing. Managing yourself and relating to others come in pretty handy as well.
If you have the ability to think, read and participate, but currently lack knowledge, then you can find (and create) knowledge. If you have knowledge and not the others, then you are a parrot.
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To back up Tom's comment at 5.38pm, my mum always told me that if I could read and understand what I was reading I could teach myself (learn) anything. Now while that's a bit overly optimistic (I imagine I would learn welding much better by demonstration and practice than reading!) it does go to this idea that by learning how to learn and how to think* we can become knowledgable, skillful etc.
*Note: this is totally different from WHAT to think.
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Well we had our 12 year old daughter come home from school laughing that they had been taught that man has never landed on the moon. If that isn’t seeing through BS I don't know what is.
Really? I'd be very strongly complaining to the school if that's actually what happened.
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Absolutely Tom.
As you might notice from some of my posts, I'm a bit of a history geek. A good 50% of my reading is history books, and I like to think I've got a bit of knowledge on the subject.
I hated it at school. My learning style is basically to read, ask questions, understand (plus I also have my unique patent learning method where I build an incomplete model of the subject area and improve it by stepwise refinement). Plus, I like to see a purpose for any activity.
School history was mostly copying down the teachers notes from the board and then writing them up neatly with pictures. Marks were awarded for neatness and pictures. Consequently, I dropped it like a gun as soon as we were allowed to.
Now if you are the sort of person that thrives on that sort of thing, then I guess that might have motivated you to study history, and you might have moved on to pick up some useful skills (besides drawing and writing neatly).
It didn't help that in the early years of school you were taught the most remote and dull parts of history. Doing something more recent (particularly involving tanks and explosions) would also have helped engage the 12-year old mind.
I guess my point is that all children are different and education should align to different interests and learning styles. I know that teachers are actually taught about different types of learner, but wonder how much of this actually gets carried into the classroom. Because it's expensive. And it's a whole lot easier to concentrate on the kids it works for (who might become Kevin's elite students) and the big kids (who can be sent off to play rugby all day) and leave the lumpenproles to be "occupied" until it's time for them to leave school.
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Well we had our 12 year old daughter come home from school laughing that they had been taught that man has never landed on the moon. If that isn’t seeing through BS I don't know what is.
They do Baudrillard at 12 in NZ schools? Wow. I take it all back.
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Stephen, I so agree. I don't see how you can learn a foreign language without a massive degree of rote learning. But other mental skills are of great value too. And they are sooo interrelated. Problem solving is 90% memory, in my job
I'd agree in a slightly different way. There was a great review in the New York Review of Books of Blink, which pointed out that what it characterised as some innate ability to make snap decisions was in fact the fruit of experience -- or, to put it another way, the inscription of neural pathways.
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(three posts in a row, sorry)
With all respect to my American friends, I don't think you can hold the US up as a shining example of academic excellence. Their first degrees are, I understand, not that far ahead of NZ 7th form. Most professionals are expected to have a postgrad degree.
(To be a solicitor in England, you do a 3 year LLB and a 1 year practice course. In the US, it's a 4 year undergrad degree (in any subject) and 3 years at law school)
Of course, this doesn't hold the US back at all. I was trying to come up with the name of a great American-born physicist on a par with Rutherford just now, and I can't really think of one. Lawrence maybe, or Feynman. All the others (Fermi, von Neumann, etc) were emigres. They still manage to dominate the field.
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Would it help to point out that the US IMHO undermines undergraduate programmes with the use of the GRE.
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Tom: point taken about the need to understand what you have learned, and to engage with the material. All I was trying to say is that memorisation and recall are themselves skills that are a valuable part of your mental armoury, and rote learning, even of apparently useless things, is the best way I know of to practise them.
Your pilot ought to know about the significance and meaning of all the controls in the cockpit, but to fly, the pilot has to have learned their position and use by rote.
Anyway, I don't see it as an either/or thing.
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Meaning that it's of less relevance how and what you do at undergrad degree level because postgrad entry is dependent on a standardised test?
Which sort of raises the question - why do an undergrad degree at all (I presume you have to)?
I'm of the view that 3 years uni followed by on-the-job training is the appropriate background for most people. (Unfortunately the option for bright 7th formers to go straight into on-the-job training has been largely lost, which is a pity. I'd rather have done that and I'm convinced I could have learnt my "trade" of IT quicker and better that way).
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Would it help to point out that the US IMHO undermines undergraduate programmes with the use of the GRE.
That might be true - although it might not. If you did your undergrad degree at a 'bad' school, the admissions folks in the postgrad programme might not know how good you actually are based on your grades. I suppose that's the problem with having so damn many universities.
(Tangentially, I took the GRE ten years ago. I looked at practice questions for a couple of hours the afternoon before. Once you worked out the question formats - this is to that as blah is to blah - it wasn't particularly hard. I scored well, even in maths [which, I might add, I failed spectacularly in sixth form!].)
Rich, I agree with you about undergraduate degrees in the US. They do seem to cover the ground we cover in high school, in many ways - but on the other hand, their postgrad degrees are far more rigorous than ours. At least in history, which was my field: a PhD not only required a giant thesis and an extensive oral defence of it, but at least four years of coursework (in which you read several enormous books per week *and* summarised them in review essays, then went to three-hour discussion seminars) and a set of two-week exams which covered the entire historiography of your continent from go to whoa. It was hardcore. I often wondered why and how the enormous jump from undergrad to postgrad ended up that way. The sophomore essays and exams I graded over there were often barely literate! (I was not, of course, at a 'good' school - I was a rather mediocre scholar!)
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the pilot has to have learned their position and use by rote
I can't fly, but I certainly didn't learn to work a car, boat or computer by rote. I learnt by doing and being shown and hence picking up things like using Win-M to mimimise all windows, or how to use the kicking strap to flatten the sail when closehauled.
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Are we using different definitions of "rote?"
I mean "repeated practice", but I think you mean something else.
Indeed you do learn by doing - again and again and again.
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Stephen -
Provided that I have understood what you guys mean by rote.... I see what you are getting at but there is an issue about learning paradigms here.
Rote to skills
Acquiring skills from rote can be quite context specific and is quite slow in the long run But it does build confidence (in some) and quite robust task solutions, it also leads to boredom if not managed correctly. This leans more heaviliy on motivational skills for the instructors but less on resources and foresight.
Skills to rote
Skipping the rote bit at the start can be scary for the learner and doesn't always end up with the desired outcome (good and bad). Focus on the skill process and then allowing only necessary repetition to improve the skills is more economical and flexible but sometimes less robust (sometimes the skill is less efficient too). It also places more demands on instructors and resources.
nb. My issue is not with one approach or another but rather expecting to use one approach only and then getting upset when it doesn't always work. I should perhaps be more honest by posing this rhetorical question: Should we be teaching context specific skills in what is now a rapidly changing world ?
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I think of rote learning as writing stuff out on a piece of paper and rereading it until you remember it.
As opposed to performing a task with a tutor or manual until the latter becomes unnecessary - that isn't rote learning as far as I'm concerned - it's learning by doing.
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Danielle -Got to admit that I had a hissy fit when having achieved well at Uni in the UK I was being asked to do another set of exams to find out if I was good enough to study in the US. Cost me quite a lucrative scholarship at the time. I'm really gald you got something out of it though.
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Yay, I think Rich and I largely agree.
Should we be teaching context specific skills in what is now a rapidly changing world ?
A heavily qualified yes. Yes, because there is a "meta" level of learning: practice, discipline, patience, memorisation techniques.
(I suppose I'm biassed because having devoted a lot of my formative years to music and languages, which are inherently useless in everyday life outside a fairly narrow context, I still feel I got a lot out of the experience of mastering them.)
And kind of no, in that we should be honest that what we're teaching is either for its own sake, or because you're practising learning, and not pretend that of course being able to write Attic hexameters fits you to govern India.
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Interesting point Stephen. By learning classics, I guess the 19th century Brits picked up on both how an earlier empire had worked, and the basic skills needed to learn other languages.
I wonder if that actually worked better than if they'd studied Urdu with Imperial Administration or similar.
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