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Vladimir_Golovin 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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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.