I'm not sure whether this is particularly unique to me or whether it's a common occurrence with everyone, but I'm a huge fan of starting projects. Now this doesn't mean that I get a lot done. On the contrary, most of the people you talk to about me would say that I am quite lazy. However, I enjoy starting things without any regard as to necessarily finishing them.
To that end I am starting up yet another feature called "Rant Corner". This one's mainly just for me to voice my various opinions on any number of things. So, the intro isn't completely useless. I'm not so scatterbrained to begin writing and suddenly change my thoughts... Anyways, this episode of "Rant Corner" is about coding, a topic close to my heart.
It is my opinion that computer programming, coding, hacking, or whatever you want to call it is not that hard. People make coding out to be difficult and cumbersome. However, I think that that's a misconception. While it isn't necessarily easy, coding, like anything worth doing, is about the work you put into it. Of course there are people better than you, but that goes for everything else as well. My thought is that through whatever experience, people get this notion that coding is hard and that there's no way that they can get better or understand it. This obviously doesn't apply solely to coding, but it is definitely a factor in how people react to coding. Of course I'm biased but I really do think that anyone can learn how to code and others do too.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Failures of Education in the Current Era
As I was browsing the internet, I came to thinking about the state of education in the US. In particular I found that this video on YouTube held many of the same views that I have. To this end, I felt that it would be interesting to explore more into my views of why education fails in the US and perhaps elsewhere in the world, as this is out of my experience I cannot comment well on it.
To keep this post brief, I will touch upon the one thing that I feel is the most important reason as to why our education system has failed. To me, the main reason for our education's failure is our view of intelligence. I'm not quite sure when society began to shift in this way, surely it has been such since before I was born 20 or so years ago, but there is this extreme push towards test results. It seems as though test results are a better indication of intelligence than anything else.
Tests, however are often an incredibly poor indicator of intelligence. For one, most standardized testing can be boiled down to an extremely small handful of types of questions. This means that the most prepared and most studied often are awarded with higher scores than those who are truly intelligent. Arbitrary facts and contrived passages, that are quite frankly dull to the majority of society, constitute what it is to be intelligent in our minds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gauging mathematical and verbal reasoning. However, the current system is about tricks and strategies that just aren't generalizable to more interesting problems. Not to mention that they only test the lower bound for those that have already learned further. For example, given a high school student who is studying multivariable or multivariate calculus, the SAT/ACT are almost insulting in their simplicity.
It shocks me how many people cannot reason about relatively simple things. For example, most sequences of numbers are relatively easy to understand. Given the numbers 0,1,1,2,4, and 7, it should not be difficult to see that the next number should be 13, the sum of the previous three numbers. By the time you get to 4th or 5th grade, such a thing should be able to be abstracted out. Unfortunately, our schooling system is too focused on rote arithmetic to teach the minor critical thinking skills to find patterns in simple numbers.
To me, intelligence is about understanding what one does not know and getting to knowing those things. Intelligence should not be measured by arbitrary facts. Instead it should be bolstered by those facts to gain new insight into how systems work.
--CsMiREK
To keep this post brief, I will touch upon the one thing that I feel is the most important reason as to why our education system has failed. To me, the main reason for our education's failure is our view of intelligence. I'm not quite sure when society began to shift in this way, surely it has been such since before I was born 20 or so years ago, but there is this extreme push towards test results. It seems as though test results are a better indication of intelligence than anything else.
Tests, however are often an incredibly poor indicator of intelligence. For one, most standardized testing can be boiled down to an extremely small handful of types of questions. This means that the most prepared and most studied often are awarded with higher scores than those who are truly intelligent. Arbitrary facts and contrived passages, that are quite frankly dull to the majority of society, constitute what it is to be intelligent in our minds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gauging mathematical and verbal reasoning. However, the current system is about tricks and strategies that just aren't generalizable to more interesting problems. Not to mention that they only test the lower bound for those that have already learned further. For example, given a high school student who is studying multivariable or multivariate calculus, the SAT/ACT are almost insulting in their simplicity.
It shocks me how many people cannot reason about relatively simple things. For example, most sequences of numbers are relatively easy to understand. Given the numbers 0,1,1,2,4, and 7, it should not be difficult to see that the next number should be 13, the sum of the previous three numbers. By the time you get to 4th or 5th grade, such a thing should be able to be abstracted out. Unfortunately, our schooling system is too focused on rote arithmetic to teach the minor critical thinking skills to find patterns in simple numbers.
To me, intelligence is about understanding what one does not know and getting to knowing those things. Intelligence should not be measured by arbitrary facts. Instead it should be bolstered by those facts to gain new insight into how systems work.
--CsMiREK
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)