The Rule of 72 (2007)

Re:The Rule of 72 (2007) by jerf on Thursday June 23, 2016 @02:18PM (#11963201)

On the flip side of your point, I find myself taking weird positions on issues of what should be in curricula. It seems to me that most people carry around a mental model of schooling such that schools just pour knowledge onto a hard drive that then retains it for the rest of that person's life. But this doesn't stand up under 5 minute's examination if you look around in the world. All those polls about how 60% of $FIRST_WORLD_COUNTRY can't even name the number of $SUBDIVISION they have (state, province, whatever)? They all went to school, too. Is it really a crisis if we remove something from the curriculum that 90%+ of 40-year-olds can't recall anymore? Curricula debates should be grounded in reality, not some fantasy where we apparently spend 12 years downloading a couple dozen megabytes of text into people's brainharddrives and set the read-only bit.

Also: It is impossible to understand the solution to a problem you don't have: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2943

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Re:The Rule of 72 (2007) by snowwrestler on Thursday June 23, 2016 @03:17PM (#11963654)

I'm with you on this. I would rather have schools spend more time on problem solving and critical thinking, and less on memorizing facts that can be looked up later.

The major obstacle is that it is much more difficult to teach thinking than it is to teach facts. So it's harder to find, train, support, and retain teachers who can do that well.

"Common Core" math (the stuff you might see mocked on Facebook) is trying to move toward teaching kids how to think mathematically, rather than memorizing equations and formats. But it's hard going (again, see the mockery on Facebook), and may not actually the right direction.

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