= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Open thread for December 24-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (207)
Connotational disclaimer.
Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right. If just a few of them are missing, the whole thing may start falling apart.
It is good to be reminded than an important or helpful piece is missing. The sad thing is that the following internet discussions often quickly move from "X is missing, we need to somehow integrate X into the system" to "just throw all the other useless pieces away and focus on X, that will fix everything". I am not saying it will happen here -- this is LessWrong after all -- just that this is a typical thing that happens. If someone would make a specific LessWrong site for educators, this effect should be one of the minor sequences.
So, it would calm down the anxious people like me, if all proposals of changes in education included an upper bound of the proposed change. Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching... in this specific case, the method of loci... assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject? Or just a lesson or two? (Or perhaps a new subject called "Meta", where this would be just a lesson or two among other learning-how-to-learn techniques, and the whole subject would be one hour per week during one year? And perhaps another year on a high school, to refresh the memories.)
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions. Assuming you have a lesson or two for teaching the method of loci, how would you do it? -- And please note that these lessons are actually quite easy to try in real life: Just do it with volunteers in the afternoon. That's not good enough to scientifically measure the impact of the method, but you get some rough estimates by asking the same students a year later whether they still use the technique, and whether they actually even remember it.
The idea of teaching the method of loci is that it will make it easier for the students to store information in their brain.
Few of the things taught are essential. There no reason why every student needs to learn calculus or trigometry.
I think go and look for all the information that most adults forget it. I have interacted with a few Go students from Korea. They went to a school that focused mainly on teaching them Go instead of teaching the usual subjects. The whole curriculum is Go.
They still survive as adults. Schools attempt to teach a lot that isn't essential and which students forget anyway soon afterwards.
My abilities of using Word wouldn't be worse if there wouldn't have been classes in school trying to teach students to use the program.
The first step to do something about education is to recognize that a huge part of what goes on in schools is either teaching stuff that gets forgotten after the next test or it's about teaching birds to fly.
But you wouldn't even do something as revolutionary as scrapping the existing curriculum. It's easy to throw enough year dates at students in history classes that a student who doesn't use mnemonics for them utterly crashes but a student who uses mnemonics can follow.
Then you do two years of that kind of history education for 9 and 10 year olds with the teacher reiterating mnemonics constantly.
You can teach the basic concept in a lesson or two but you don't teach the skill of actually using mnemonics on a habitual basis in that timeframe.