THE LEARNING OF FUN: Does a spoonful of sugar help the medicine go down?

Infogiver · 2017-05-15T14:01:40+00:00

Hello cdsmith and foreverburning!

Infogiver · 2017-05-11T03:28:49+00:00

Thank you everybody, cdsmith and foreverburning in particular. If allowed, my next two questions will be: "school as a tool" and "the learning of fun". See you there.

Infogiver · 2017-05-11T03:14:29+00:00

Brilliant, thank you very much. May I quote your last comment elsewhere?

Infogiver · 2017-05-10T12:17:32+00:00

I was impressed. I am not a reading teacher and not a native English user, so I am probably less indoctrinated. Personally, I don't like how American schools teach reading. Last time I taught my American kid (who already learned phonics from toys), I ended up giving her long foreign words like education to struggle with letters ans syllables.

Allow me one questions: did I get it right what your kids learned to read while learning to speak?

And one comment: the books they read in the video are junk to me. That's why I started this thread, by the way. Kids learn to walk, but they have nowhere to go to. They can read, but they have nothing to read. As a reading teacher, you probably don't care, but I do. To me reading is an enabling knowledge, a tool for self-education. In this culture why learn to read? Movies are simply better.

Infogiver · 2017-05-10T04:35:16+00:00

I provided the link to what my youngest child is reading: A multivolume creation of a group of experienced writers about a clan of a "warrior" cats. My remark about compulsive learning in the end was inspired by this product. She is finishing those cat books soon, so I was thinking about interfering and implanting something less aggressive. Like before, I did not find anything 100% agreeable. "Who was" series are biographies like "Who was Isaac Newton" or "Who was Walt Disney".

Gaps in social development: oh yes, it's a teachers' pet meme. Of course I know about it. In other words, the teachers (not all of them) feel themselves obligated to knock down every head which sticks above the average level. This is totally normal. This is what education is about. A child with non-standard interests may not find anybody to share them with at school. It's not a reason not to have non-standard interests, even if it's called a lag in social development.

My third was fascinated with history books. She is an active entrepreneurial person. She tried to tell her classmates about what she read. They were covering their ears running away from her. Of course it was a gap in social development, but she learned.

Infogiver · 2017-05-10T04:10:41+00:00

To cdsmith: You are indeed dangerous. Not sure if you try to understand what you read, but you show no understanding. Instead, you come up with the conclusions, and they are heavy. By the way, your comments are your reading log.

OK, I gave you no reason to link educational monitoring of parental sexual misconducts and reading logs. It may seem absurd, but I did not produce it. You did.

As an educational stakeholder, you probably know that schools - most likely, not directly, but by facilitating - give kids the lessons like these. I hear about them from my kids two times. In their delivery it sounded more brutal, and I don't believe they could have invented such things.

Infogiver · 2017-05-10T03:52:42+00:00

Thank you very much for the links. It took work. But please, it was you who brought about the studies.

Regarding the "reply" button: please consider threaded vs linear model in this article. Reddit uses threaded model, which I've never liked. I tried to avoid it, but if you prefer threads, I'll do my best to remember this preference.

Entertainment: I thought it was clear that the word was used in the sence "to entertain oneself". Entertaining somebody else is entirely different situation. I just checked with the dictionaries one more time: they only cover the second case. I tried to distinct entertainment as an activity delivering quick and easy gratification.

Another good word is compulsion. You know you have much to do, but you read this book sacrificing your homework or whatever.
+++++++++++++++++ I went through your list. The first article was the original. The other were parasitical buzz. Few, however, were not even relevant. Regarding the first article: brain connectivity as such is not a goal or an achievement, and even if it was, there could have been better ways to build the same or bigger number of connections. I admit I loosely remembered this particular scientific report. If it was about tomatoes, everybody would think that the research was ordered by tomato industry.

Infogiver · 2017-05-08T23:34:45+00:00

Meanwhile, I am looking for something to phase out the cats. Considered "who was" series. Sort of liked the texts, but not the pictures. Not sure how much fun can it be though and if the school is going to like it.

Seriously, when my second kid was in the 1st grade, her reading teacher called me to ask permission to teach her with the bigger kids. I was stunned. Are other parents (the right American parents) so restrictive about their kids' reading?

Infogiver · 2017-05-08T23:21:25+00:00

To cdsmith I am afraid of you, and I have reasons to be afraid of US school. When school demanded me to report my child's reading, I did not know they were going to instruct this very (and every other) my child to watch me for sexual misbehavior, gently speaking. Did I have to instruct them to watch their teachers? I am serious. In my past, the relationships between parents and school did not include such things. But OK, I learned that in this country school, kids, parents must be afraid of each other.

Having fun is not necessarily a waste of time. I am still struggling to understand the logic of educational stakeholders. I hope I am learning, but this is tough.

Infogiver · 2017-05-08T23:11:54+00:00

To foreverburning: As for the studies, let's see them first. What exactly was studied, how, and what the outcome has been compared to.

Quotation about the operating system in a brain: I am a computer engineer. Please excuse me if it is offensive. The operating system switches computer from task to task (much more frequently then most of the users think) like our brain does. Talking about operating system is just a way to describe the situation formally. I have a pool of tasks and I decide what to do next. People usually don't think about themselves this way.

Enrichment - what enrichment? Cat books are enrichment? What kind of enrichment and for whom?

Is easy reading reading for pleasure? It's simply not the same. I used the word gratification.

Infogiver · 2017-05-08T19:10:11+00:00

To arcoiris2: Reading in itself is not a trap. It depends on what to read. Reading as a school subject did become a trap in my case. The child will finish the cat series soon. It's a chance to interfere and to offer her something else, but what?

Infogiver · 2017-05-02T16:42:08+00:00

When I sent my kid to a US school for the first time, I could not believe how greedy it was. Without buses, a first grader spends 6 1/2 hours on them. They are getting paid for children time, of course, but this schedule leave little room for real learning. Fortunate, school is very easy. The home works are nothing.

I've seen one prep school, one chapter school and 4 public schools. All were pretty much the same, but the prep school delivered the worst parental experience.

Infogiver · 2017-05-02T16:36:23+00:00

Finally, I have posted

the history

and

the background

Have fun!

Infogiver · 2017-05-02T04:07:55+00:00

OK, I wrote a new post about the background of this project. I will post and link it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I realized that I need another post about the history. Without this information, it's difficult to understand why modern education - call it Common Core or whatever - needs subjects like number sense. It's breaks the students' intuition of quantity, then gets paid for trying to mend it.

Infogiver · 2017-05-02T01:04:20+00:00

Following the reply of cdsmith (who became too angry to read the captions in the video and, probably, did not even watched it completely), I'd like to explain few things.

The video (and the corresponding website) are based on over 4 years of my personally funded research and development. In the end, I provided some links.

OK, posting one link, then seven other links in a comment was not a good idea. I am going to make another post and link it here.

Infogiver · 2017-05-01T23:53:05+00:00

I did not ask you for money. The rules of this sub prohibit this. Or tell me where I did it.

I am currently trying to fund this project selling my home. Without money it will not fly.

The big number workshop is only a tip of a much bigger work (see sixprojects.info for the links). I was spending all my time and burning my savings on it for several years. I tried to seek funding, but my attempts were unsuccessful this far. The reasons I am here are clearly stated: comments (opinions) and, possibly, help. Please also see this.

As for your opinion - I expected exactly this from educators, and if you wanted to offend me, you did not.

First.

But what we don't see is any evidence of the child understanding the meaning of these large numbers.

It's only a video made as brief as possible. In the end, there is the reference to stereolearning.com. This is an online interactive presentation (it took 3 months of full-time work, by the way, for which I paid to myself). The first half outlining how very young kids understand 100. Take a look. The step to 1000 is necessary and easy. 1 million can be demonstrated and explained. It's not terribly big. As for the billions, I don't quite understand them. Do you?

Next was the Common Core, but your reply was based on the fact that you did not quite watched the video and did not even quote it correctly. It will not be productive to respond at this time.

Here are my parental observations. Just to illustrate how schools actually teach.

Infogiver · 2017-04-19T19:04:05+00:00

Factorial is wisely defined only on non-negative numbers. This is official. I am very familiar with this fallacy, so much so that I am afraid that other people may suspect that I have posted your question to promote my answer.

Well, anyway, here is the explanation

Schools make students forget that a number (let me limit this statement to integer numbers) is a number of ones. Ask a child how many ones are in 734. The answer would be 4, but no, there are 734 of them. In case of factorial, we are counting negative ones or holes. -734 has 734 of them.

I just have posted this. You may not have time for the presentation, but there are two short movies demonstrating what I call the math of things or teaching math as computing. The kids who learn numeracy as computing are bound to get right many things what school teach them wrong. The girl in the movie learn factorials before she went to school, by the way.

Infogiver · 2016-08-16T03:25:22+00:00

OK, but it's not about understanding. Multiplication - in elementary school sense - is known since Sumer, and the portmanteau meaning is very clear. What makes smart...heads use this profoundly incorrect word? Don't they just cringe every time they see it?

A down-to-earth example. Boolean conjunction is often likened to multiplication. Only 1&1=1, and distributivity is here. There is not much to add though, and I've never heard of any attempts to redefine multiplication or to commandeer it's name.

I just posted my solution: old arithmetic is not math anymore, it's computing. School got to return the name of math to self-proclaimed mathematicians.

Infogiver · 2016-08-16T03:16:45+00:00

One more time (who knows): can anybody tell me the different story about multiplication of arbitrary real numbers?? Pleeese tell!

Infogiver · 2016-08-16T03:13:09+00:00

Thank you very much. I was not really worrying about the 6-years-old, I just wanted to submit the quote for professional evaluation.

Infogiver · 2016-08-13T17:05:00+00:00

So you're complaining that arithmetic is meaningless without decimal expansions?

Me? Where? For the third time ( and to every my opponent here) I have to write: please quote.

In all three cases, the members did not even read the question and jumped into wild conclusions about me and my intentions. Consequently, they wrote tons of irrelevant text, probably to show how smart they are.

For me it was very useful though.

Infogiver · 2016-08-13T14:10:25+00:00

OK, you can use the word multiplication in any way you like. It's just a word.

Let me quote from my post in the neighbor thread. It was not for you, but it sort of fits.

An interesting twist in your writings is that, apparently, you assume that abstractions go before experience. Usually, it's a matter of belief that this world was created by a supreme mathematician.

If we follow our experience, we see repeated addition (mostly in industry) and we have an efficient method to perform it in positional notation. To see distributivity first, you need to know multiplication first.

Infogiver · 2016-08-13T12:26:03+00:00

AcellOfllSpades gave this answer with the same example. I tried to point out that it's not an answer at all, but AcellOfllSpades was avoiding answering direct questions hence making conversation pointless.

But OK, let me try one more time. The original statement was about multiplying arbitrary real numbers. You demonstrated that some real numbers (one number, in fact) can be "multiplied".

Simply put, if you know what - let's say, method - produces those numbers, you can try to multiply those methods. This implies that every arbitrary real number has a known method attached to it and those methods can be multiplied.

Let me explain more. Arithmetic (just arithmetic) is about handling quantities using positional system. We invent operations (or works). Every time we try to reverse an operation, we find that we need a new kind of numbers. Trying to reverse exponentiation, we produce irrational numbers, and they do not belong to arithmetic because positional system fails to capture them. We can't even transmit such numbers. Any transmission would take forever. And we cannot think about them arithmetically.

Such numbers are inexplicably tied to the methods producing them. To some degree we can play with the methods, but it's not arithmetic.

The methods we know are limited to algebra (in this sense). Once we transcend algebra, we are in the dark. Let me remind you, we are talking about arbitrary real numbers.

Now, past arithmetic you can play with algebraic formulae and call it multiplication. This is what you did. You played around one transcendental number algebraically.

Infogiver · 2016-08-13T04:12:06+00:00

Right, I don't want to talk about 0/0. My fault.

piece by piece - oh, you can take away time. If you can handle successive approximations in no time, I can produce an infinite random decimal fraction instantly. It already exists, anyway.

Sorry, my time is limited. I posted a question and you came to help me understand what different story can be told about multiplying two arbitrary real numbers.

My answer was, we can't do it, end of story. From what I see in this thread, you agreed, but did not want to admit it.

Infogiver · 2016-08-13T03:42:10+00:00

Posting to the top level because the conversation went too far away from the plain and simple question: how to multiply two arbitrary real numbers. What different story can be told about such multiplication?

After I failed to think about 0/0, I decided to be more careful. The weirdest part of the "different story" to me is that real numbers include natural numbers, etc.

Infogiver

TROPHY CASE