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Vaniver comments on How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password? - Less Wrong Discussion

24 Post author: Petruchio 04 January 2013 03:18PM

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Tags: teaching education fake anticipation

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Comment author: Vaniver 04 January 2013 03:41:26PM 20 points [-]

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking.

It seems easy to disincentivize it. I'm not sure it's that easy to instill it. This is relevant, but targeted at college students.

One of the big things mentioned in the education literature for gifted children is "encourage asking questions," which is different from the default result for most people. A relevant Sagan quote:

But there’s something else: Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science.

There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: “I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.”

Comment author: fubarobfusco 04 January 2013 09:00:46PM 16 points [-]

One of the things I'm most glad that my parents taught me was to look things up. Even if they knew the answer, they'd give me a book or send me to the library instead of just giving the answer. What does "vague" mean? Look in the dictionary. Where does rain come from? Here's a book about weather.

Comment author: mwengler 04 January 2013 08:25:02PM 5 points [-]

I'm glad to see this quote. I often ask my kids what they think, and try to get them to figure out the answer, but very often I simply give them the best answer I can come up with. The result is they are totally willing to ask questions of me on virtually anything. I bend over backwards not to "teach" them my opinions, or at least to flag them as opinions when I mention them. Things like existence of god or political questions get flagged. Or even whether kids should be hit.

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 January 2013 01:19:39AM 2 points [-]

Do you thnk that flagging works?

Comment author: mwengler 07 January 2013 08:06:49AM *  1 point [-]

My kids do have opinions that differ from mine, and they do it matter of factly, without thinking it is a particular sin or threat to our relationship for sure. At least one of them, when I explained a cryonics thread, allowed as she believed in some sort of life after death and thought cryonics was irrelevant and even a negative in that light.

So yes, I think flagging "works" along with the other things I do which amount to treating my children as though they are independent intellectual actors. Just as I think flagging "works" in any conversation where values, judgements, and observations might get confused for one another, possibly even by the people who express them.

Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 04 January 2013 07:40:17PM *  0 points [-]

Regarding the Sagan quote: these days, when everyone has Wikipedia in their pockets, "I don't know the answer" is not a valid excuse (for most questions that a child may ask).

Comment author: handoflixue 04 January 2013 08:56:24PM 11 points [-]

"I don't know, but let's look it up" is an awesome answer!

It teaches the kid what their resources are, and gives them a handle on how to look stuff up independently in the future.

Plus, if you're going with (shudder!) Wikipedia, it means there's an adult to translate the ridiculously obtuse language that Wikipedia uses for all things science:

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields.[12][13] It has a diameter of about 1,392,684 km,[5] about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass (about 2×1030 kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.[14] Chemically, about three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. The remainder (1.69%, which nonetheless equals 5,628 times the mass of Earth) consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron, among others.[15] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

Any parent who STARTS with that is probably not helping any more than Calvin's dad explaining "Old photographs are black and white because the world didn't gain color until sometime in the 1920s" :P

Comment author: roystgnr 04 January 2013 09:48:55PM 10 points [-]

It's not a complete improvement, but for young children the Simple English Wikipedia is at least a little more comprehensible.

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