SarahC comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong

153 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 September 2010 07:02AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 08 September 2010 08:21:49PM 12 points [-]

I once taught middle- and high-school teachers who wanted to get certified to teach math. I was a TA for a class in geometry (basically 8th or 9th grade Euclidean geometry.) I had an incredibly hard time explaining to them that "draw a circle with center point A" means that A goes in the middle of the circle, instead of on the boundary. As I recall, it took more than a week of daily problem sessions before they got that.

Of course, I may have been a bad teacher. But I was trying.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 08 September 2010 08:27:42PM 2 points [-]

I find that very surprising; I thought of using "circle" to refer to just the boundary and not the interior as being primarily a mathematical usage... though I suppose not to the same extent as it is with "sphere".