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A comment on Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan. Parent comment

Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by barrettondricka on Monday October 21, 2024 @08:52PM (#41910123)
The best way to learn is to play and come up with stuff yourself. But playing doesn't get you anywhere specific. People who play around a lot, clearly know much more and in depth than everyone else, but when you hand them a random checklist, chances are they won't know a few.

Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing.

You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one."

Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it.

Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.

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Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by kiba on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:15PM (#41910241)
Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency.

Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.

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Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by coliveira on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:39PM (#41910344)
> and do so with relative competency

I dispute this on the grounds that students are going through American schools and many of them don't even know how to read.

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Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by kiba on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:49PM (#41910732)
92% of adults know how to read to varying level.[1]

The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that "many of them don't even know how to read".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

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Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by amenhotep on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @07:19AM (#41913177)
In terms of not being able to read, I would count 8% as "many"? Select a group of ten random Americans and you'd expect one of them to be illiterate - that's appalling.
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Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by coliveira on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @10:03AM (#41914400)
Right there you have 8%. But it is worse because it says they're able to "read to varying level", which includes 2nd grade level, or barely at all.
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Re:Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan by PlattypusRex on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @08:29PM (#41920257)
Over 20% of American adults have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1. This is defined as "difficulty using or understanding print materials" and "may struggle to understand texts beyond filling out basic forms." So 1 out of every 5 Americans is functionally illiterate. I would say that counts as "many of them don't even know how to read."
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