Posts by Tom Beard
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Comeon Russell, Craig, you’d call it in if the mitten was on the other paw. If its good enough for the goose and all that.
What, was the nun wearing mittens? Whose paw? And there was a goose involved?!?
Wow, I gotta start watching this show! Thanks for the heads-up, Kevin.
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I can't believe no-one's picked Kevin up on this:
The Northern Island situation is a good analogy because it is an example of a wealthy country that had to go through 30 years of violence for no better reason than the poliktical elite stirred up a tiny minority of nutbars for their own political purpose.
Presuming that "Northern Island" = "Northern Ireland", which seemed to be the case from the context, that seems a bizarre and offensive statement. The Troubles were purely stirred up by a political elite?! So, hundreds of years of colonisation, plantations, Black & Tans and sectarian conflict had nothing to do with it, then?
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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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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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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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that is a major problem for our economy if you want your kids to stay here and for us to be anything more than a retirement home for PJ and his Hollywood mates
What I don't see is how not
"learning how to learn", but learning passively and prioritising memory and fact over problem-solving and method, is going to produce the deep, innovative thinkers we'll need in order to remedy it. Surely, to be leaders rather than followers in a competitive global economy, it's better to find new facts and create new memories rather than repeat old ones? -
Kevin, with every line you write, I understand you less.
Though I did appreciate this brilliantly Joycean piece of imaginative wordplay:
"they reworded their countires a thousandfild"
And Kevin, as for the fact that your co-workers have great memories, well so do I and my colleagues. However, I suspect that their internal memory banks didn't come from chanting HTML entity codes in some Victorian classroom, but from coding on a day to day basis: the dreaded "active learning". And that starts with the confidence and imagination to seek out your own sources of information, experiment, look at the source, ask questions on fora and, most of all, understand the fundamental reasons why you're doing it in the first place.
The best people have memory/knowledge plus problem solving ability.
I don't doubt it for a moment, but with the best people, their knowledge and memory have come through the day-to-day application of their problem-solving ability, not from rote learning of disconnected and uncontextualised facts.
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"learn how to learn", "dont remeber, just derive", "problem solving skills are better than memory", "method is more important than fact", "active learning" - all this BS I can remember was being held up as the way forward when I was at school in the early 70s. How long do governments need to stick to failed initives before they given it up.
Are you serious? "Learn how to learn" and "active learning" are BS and failed initiatives?! How on earth do you expect anyone to learn anything unless they learn how to learn in the first place?
As for "dont remeber, just derive" (apart from the value of remembering how to spell "remember" and deriving the reason why there ought to be an apostrophe in "don't"), that's one of the most valuable things that my mathematical education taught me. In a complex analysis exam, we'd have to reproduce long and complex proofs that were impossible to memorise, so we had to derive the proofs on the fly. Remembering and regurgitating a series of epsilons and deltas would not have been learning; but having to analyse the proofs for the salient points and techniques so that one can repeat the process later gave us much more insight into the way that mathematics actually works. Surely as someone working in science you can appreciate that?
The other thing NZ needs to get over is this BS that "only an academic carreer is success". The education system is highly slanted towards the "academic" rather than the "practical" because its cheaper and easier for the teachers.
Really? I've always found NZ grindingly anti-academic and dourly anti-intellectual, and that's one thing that's helped hold us back as a nation. Even in research, we tend to confine ourselves to making new types of sheep or kiwifruit, leaving small matters like understanding the fundamental workings of the universe to dreamers and eggheads overseas.
One of the great problems with the system at present is that there is this push for "independent thought", "problem solving", "individual research", active learning and the like before the pupils have even been given the tools to do this with.
Someone with greater practical experience in child development might be able to say with more confidence than I, but I'd have thought that these skills would have been kicking in by the age of two or three.
The problem is that science and technology requires discipline, memory, problem solving ability, dedication, entrapreneurship etc
I thought you'd just spent the last few comments sneering at "problem solving". I work in technology, and while I'd agree that memory is important, problem solving is vastly more so. It makes me marginally more efficient to remember that the EPSG code for the NZ Transverse Mercator projection is 2193, but if that escapes my recall I can search our wiki in a couple of seconds and I'm sorted. Not being able to understand why we should use that projection in specific circumstances, or work out a faster algorithm to re-project coordinates, or think about the most efficient and flexible way to maintain them in a spatial database, would make me pretty much useless in my job.
Similarly, being able to remember the JavaScript operator for a bitwise XOR could make someone a better code monkey, but unless he or she can understand a user's requirements, design a suitable data structure, make a conceptual leap to a more flexible algorithm and question why we're writing code from scratch rather than re-using a library, that coder will never become a software engineer or business analyst. And certainly not an innovator or entrepreneur.
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I think Little Rodney would feel right at home at the Ayn Rand School for Tots.
Anyway, thank you for a post that was both hilarious and life-affirming: by which I mean that it has thoroughly affirmed my life choice to be a childless bachelor.
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24 hour off-licences
Where?! The last time I tried to buy a bottle of wine on the way to a party, everything had closed at 11pm.