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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 4 - Less Wrong
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Dredging this up from deep nesting, because I think it's important: wedrifid says
Yes. Never tell anyone that what you're teaching them is hard. When you do that, you're telling them they'll fail, telling them to fail.
But if you tell them it's easy, then they will be embarrassed for failing at something easy, or can't be proud of succeeding at something easy.
Telling them it's easy is also a bad idea.
It strikes me that giving no information about the general difficulty of the subject is also a bad idea. (I imagined myself struggling with a topic where I had no information on how hard others found it, and my hypothetical self was ashamed, because clearly if it were something everyone found hard, they'd warn people and teach it more slowly, so it must be easy for everybody else but me.)
Ideally, you'd teach the student not to be concerned with how well or how quickly they learn compared to others, which is a general learning technique that can apply to any field.
Simply telling people not to worry about that doesn't... actually work, does it? That would genuinely surprise me.
Math anxiety is actually very common, and one of the ways to reduce it is to make students aware of the problem. It's not as simple as saying "just don't worry", but in my experience as a tutor, it can be helpful to give gentle reminders that everyone learns at their own pace and that it may take some effort to understand a concept.
Math is all about trying many blind alleys before you figure out the correct approach, and teaching using examples where you try many wrong approaches first can help students understand that you don't have to "get it" immediately, and it's ok to struggle through it sometimes. It's less "this is hard" and more "this often takes some effort to understand completely, so don't panic".
When I teach, I don't say anything about "easy" or "difficult". I just teach the material. What is this "easy", this "difficult"? There is no "easy" or "difficult" for a Jedi -- there is only the work to be done and the effort it takes. "Difficult" means "I will fail". "Effort" means "I will succeed".
You are torturing yourself by inventing fictional evidence. You have an entire imaginary scenario there, shadows and fog conjured from thin air.
I don't think Alicorn's evidence is completely fictional. It's a simulation. It's not as much evidence as if she had experienced it in real life, but it's much better than, e.g. the evidence of Terminator on future AIs.
This is a distinction without a difference. "Terminator" is a simulation -- the writers didn't make it up out of nothing. Granted, their purpose is to tell an entertaining story, but the idea that this is what future AIs would be like has been around for a long time, despite Asimov's efforts to create a framework for telling stories of friendly robots.
Or to put it the other way round, Alicorn's scenario is as fictional as "Terminator". It is made out of plausible-sounding elements, as Terminator is, but the "clearly" and "must" and "everybody else but me" are signs that far too much belief is being placed in it.
Right, and there's the issue of whose fault the difficulty is. Sure, the student might not really be trying. But also, the teacher may not be explaining in a way that speaks to the learner's natural fluency. A method that works for the geeky types won't work work for more neurotypical types.
For my part, I never have trouble explaining high school math to those who haven't completed it, even if they're told that trig, calculus, etc. is hard. It's because I first focus on finding out where exactly their knowledge deficit is and why the subject matter is useful. Of course, teachers don't have the luxury of one-on-one instruction, but yes, how you present the material matters greatly.