I agree that the "they were never taught" fallacy is common among new teachers- as is the attempt to cover years worth of material in a few short weeks at the beginning the syllabus. I see this all the time with new teachers, and often have to insist that they are taking the wrong approach- students who can't add fractions aren't going to acquire it in two weeks.
Where I disagree is the idea that these student can't learn the material (they just can't catch up to the material in a few extra weeks of time)- I've known a few teachers whose students consistently perform better then their peer group, and retain the information into their next few courses. For one fifth grade teacher we tracked, by highschool his students were moving into advanced math courses at a much higher rate than students who passed through other fifth grade teachers at the same school. The value-added teacher research bares out the facts that good, experienced teachers can produce long-term learning gains in most of their students.
My suspicion is that many grade-school level teachers don't understand the material they teach (a surprising number of grade school teachers are essentially mathematically illiterate) and can inflict a fair amount of damage to student's understanding.
I have heard anecdotally from a number of teacher acquaintances that thick adults consistently start as thick kids. It's possible that the apparently-thick 5yo will turn out to be a genius, and that the apparently-bright 5yo will turn out to be a doofus, but it's not the way to bet.
The other problem with educational snake-oil appears to be that it tends to be tested on bright kids - who would learn to read off cereal packets and street signs. So whatever woo you put them through, they'll do not too badly. The woo then fails when average or thick kids are put through it.
Charles Murray wrote an excellent book title "Real Education" where he explores such issues rather closely and in particular what can be done to improve education systems in light of this information. I found it well written and meticulously researched, I very much recommend it to fellow LWers.
In relation to his book he also did this talk which is a ok overview off his key points.
But then, a few weeks later, the kids go back to ignoring the difference between 3-5 and 5-3. Furthermore, despite hours of explanation and practice, half the class seems to do no better than toss a coin to make the call on positive or negative slopes.
This seems like basic neurophysiology. Short-term memories and skills dissipate. It takes time to rewire the brain for permanent storage of a given isolated unconnected uninteresting memory. Maybe someone can find the links?
From my tutoring experience, it takes a lot longer than "hours" for rote memorization to take permanent hold. And rote is how math is usually taught, or at least how children with low math aptitude learn it. For an abstract concept like line slope, not related to anything intuitive, it would take about 1000 problems solved by such a student, with spaced repetition over several weeks, before the relevant memory decay rate increases from minutes or hours to months.
In contrast, a person with high aptitude for math will easily fit the new memory into her existing jig saw puzzle of other memories ("oh, this makes perfect sense, given A, B and C!") and, in effect, has to memorize a lot less random data, so the required amount of repetition is probably an order of magnitude less.
Reading the blog post that this one links to made me immediately think of SRS - isn't that exactly what it's design for? Don't focus on the stuff you just learned, but on the stuff you are about to forget. Maybe we should be doing many-year SRS for our students and doing more cumulative testing and practice. Or maybe I'm still naive and blaming the teachers! I guess I'm just not a cynic.
Education is full of irrationality. You can't say anything with bad connotations about children, because that's a big taboo. You can't say that a child is too stupid to understand something. You can't say that if a child always refuses to cooperate, it is impossible to teach them. The official hypothesis is that each child is perfect, so if they don't become Einstein, it's someone else's fault, and we should express moral outrage about such loss of a talent. In recent years, the consensus seems to be on blaming the teachers. So it is refreshing to hear an alternative explanation.
But I think that difference in IQ is only part of the story. It explains why some people will always fail. But it does not explain why recently more people fail at school (at least in my country it seems so). Here is an interesting comment from Scott Adams' blog:
...Coincidentally, my sister raised this topic last month. She works as an Early Childhood Educator caring for 2,3 and 4 year olds. She has worked at it for over 25 years and in the last 10 years she and her coworkers have noticed that increasingly even 3 year olds kids are unable to amuse themselves or self organize into games where they make up the
Here's the comment I posted on gnxp.
Teacher quality does matter.
A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes. Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.
From the underlying paper (pdf):
...The results suggest that the ef
Reading this, two comments occur to me immediately:
Is there a simple explanation of how they estimated the "teacher quality" variable? The paper is written in a very complicated and abstruse way, and I don't have time to wade through it, but surely the basic idea, if valid, should be explicable in a paragraph of plain English.
Even if we take the findings of the paper at face value, the "$100 trillion" estimate is a complete non sequitur. Can the entire effect really be purely because better teachers impart greater wealth-producing skills? Or could it be, at least partly, because they impart advantages in zero-sum signaling and rent-seeking games?
Honestly I don't have much commentary to add to this since I agree with Razib's argument. The comment section is usually worth reading too since he moderates it vigorously. Despite this still being the case with this particular post I found myself rolling my eyes at some of them which is also why I giggled at Gregory Cochran's comment:
Those kids are dumb, but they’re probably not as crazy as most of the posters here.
Don't ever change! (^_^)
Update: Razib emailed me saying I am unbanned. When I asked why, he said it was due to this LW thread.
See my Google+ summary.
(I'm only ~80% sure I was in the right, so I kind of regret bringing it up here: doing so reminds me too much of various malcontents online who get what they deserve but then go around eternally whining about it, making them look even more like prats than the original errors did.)
Why should most students even bother with algebra? Their parents almost certainly don't use it. It's more-or-less a hazing ritual. And it's entirely reasonable to not want to put up with being hazed.
Sure, I've got to understand algebra because I program computers. But not very many people do anything like that.
Imagine that instead I were opening a cupcake shop. High school algebra is full of problems like this one: My fixed costs for my cupcake shop are $100,000 per year. My cost of ingredients for a cupcake is $0.30, and I think I can sell 100 cup...
I think anyone who finds themselves fully agreeing with this article (in particular the assertion that teachers "can not abolish human difference") owes it to themselves to read MindSet by Carol Dweck (or at least familiarize themselves with her research; I actually didn't like the book that much). She argues that in almost all cases, initial differences in intelligence among children can be virtually erased by fostering a "growth" rather than "fixed" mindset (definitions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(book) )
The ...
She argues that in almost all cases, initial differences in intelligence among children can be virtually erased by fostering a "growth" rather than "fixed" mindset (definitions here)
Erase the difference, are you sure? I agree that it's pretty likely that the growth mindset is more beneficial than the fixed mindset, but is there any evidence that the addiitional benefit of the growth mindset doesn't improve smart kids as much as it improves dumb kids (on average!), leaving a difference still there?
(Your link is broken btw)
The lowest quartile presumably would never have been able to master many of these rules in the first place. Some of the information resembles the stuff that a friend of mine experienced when he went in to do tutoring for disadvantaged students in Boston when he was getting his doctorate at MIT. At first my friend was totally taken aback at the level of ignorance (e.g., the inability to see the relationship between 1/10 and 10/100).
Again, from my experience, most can master it, given some 100x the effort and time investment by both teacher and student, c...
I'm not sure I buy into this narrative very much. If this were the case, one would expect that one would see similar educational problems in other countries. One could claim that that's due to different gene pools but if that were the case, one would expect to see schools which have homogeneous populations to be similar to their home countries. But one doesn't see this. For example, schools with predominantly Irish background don't have data that looks like Irish schools.
As a matter of anecdote (I've done some teaching and a lot of math tutoring), there ...
One could claim that that's due to different gene pools but if that were the case, one would expect to see schools which have homogeneous populations to be similar to their home countries. But one doesn't see this.
I don't know if we see this for homogeneous schools or not, but I do know that on things like PISA scores when broken down by ethnicity, American students do reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came from.
Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai, China's financial capital.
White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out of PISA's 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.
You might want to be careful about posting links to VDARE, lukeprog and some others here consider this crimethink.
I haven't studied these issues, but I will note that Steve Sailor and VDARE.com are considered by many people to be racist bigots. Here, for example, is a VDARE article defending white supremacy:
One of the many reasons I have been spending less time on LessWrong (sic) recently.
Steve Sailer is not a racist or a bigot. I can't speak for all of VDARE's material, but all of Steve's articles there are ok. Also I've seen lots of other posters mention him.
There used to be lots some familiar names here from the old gnxp site. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending the dudes with the genetic origin of Jewish intelligence hypothesis did a Q&A here. As long as we stick to the science of the thing and avoid the politics this should be a ok for rationalist to discuss, like we did here. I guess someone might stretch Steve to be inherently political because he advocates limits to immigration, so even when he isn't directly discussing it he is still persona non grata.... but really? Really?? What if we applied the same sort of standard to Libertarian, Socialist or Liberal writers?
Are we really getting that brain-dead PC? I don't use that term lightly mind you. Some posters I know have been complaining about the unwelcoming and stifling atmosphere with rules of no politics being selectively employed but I assumed this was just "old forum member thinks it used to be better" syndrome.
(;_;)
Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn't post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was writing for respectable mainstream conservative papers. The trouble is, once you've written too openly about certain topics, you will be ostracised from the respectable media, and these limits of acceptability are getting ever stricter and narrower. And once you've been placed under such ostracism, unless you're willing to restrict yourself to writing for free on your personal blog, you can only write for various disreputable outlets where you'll have to share the URL or column space with less seemly people.
Amusingly, Razib's post does not include the word "genetic". I can't tell if that was intentional, but in any case, when a trait is highly heritable, that doesn't mean it's genetic. One nice example is accent. It's also a nice example of a trait that a teacher would find really hard to change, unles given huge authority over the kid's entire life. Maybe basic math aptitude is similar.
ETA: this comment is wrong by the technical definition of heritability, see Vladimir_M's replies. I should have said something like "has high correlation between parents and children".
Can you explain in more detail?
You can take any of the usual lines of evidence for heritability, and the result will be negative. Unrelated kids growing up in the same linguistic environment end up with the same accent, while related kids, even identical twins, growing up in different linguistic environments end up with completely different accents -- with no more similarity between them compared to the other randomly selected kids from these different environments.
In contrast, with IQ, you get dramatically different results. If you discover a lost twin brother who grew up in Hungary, his accent won't be any more similar to yours than a random Hungarian's -- whereas his IQ test results would be similar to yours with much more than random chance.
(I am ignoring here some minor factors like e.g. speech impediments due to hereditary conditions. But clearly the context is normal linguistic variation.)
I don't know that much about heritability, but would be pretty surprised if Shalizi turned out to be wrong on a question of fact.
When it comes to sheer intellectual ability, I admit that I'm not worthy to sharpen Shalizi's pencils. Unfortunately, he is not reliable on ideologicall...
Yeah, the point that genetic != heritable is really important- religion is highly inherited but obviously there's no gene for being Christian.
Interestingly, how seriously people take religion appears to be genetic.
easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful
I realize and confess that my sentiments are unusual, that my thinking on this subject is grossly distorted by ideology and therefore not to be trusted, and that I don't myself know how to set up a learning environment that will actually work for actual children, but I must beg the community's forgiveness, because I want to say this anyway: I think this ideal of "discipline" causes tremendous harm (which of course I understand is not to say that it doesn't also have benefits, but those benefits are not the subject of this comment). I consider it a monstrous tragedy that so many millions of people grow up (as I grew up) without any conceptual distinction between learning important things and being enrolled in a school and obeying the commands of the designated "teacher", with no idea of there being a difference between morality and obedience.
Personally, I've mostly recovered from this phenomenon to my satisfaction. I now have an explicit notion that it is morally righteous to learn great ideas and train useful skil...
If this analysis is correct, there seems to be an easy fix -- just throw the disruptive students out of the classroom, and you can have rather good results with large classrooms too.
The reason this isn't implemented is that children are forced to attend school. If they could get out of classes without consequent punishment, not just one or two 'disruptives' but many students might opt out. A school doesn't have anywhere to keep such a group; classes are in large part make-work to occupy students.
On the other hand, if you punished disruptive students but did so outside of class, the habitual disruptives would spend a lot of time in punishment sessions, and would definitely not learn their lessons / pass end of year exams / etc. Schools in the US* prefer to have everyone barely pass exams, to 80% passing with high scores and 20% failing irretrievably. The failing students' parents have too much political power over the schools.
What is your source for per capita rates?
France has 4x Fields medalists per capita as the US. (and the UK is the geometric mean). (or try wikipedia) For science Nobels, the UK beats the US, which beats France.
Personally, I think it's harder to learn arithmetic than to learn algebra once you already know arithmetic. The amount of memorization that you need to do to be able to calculate 247 / 15 is a lot more than the amount of memorization that you have to do to go from being able to calculate 247 / 15 to being able to solve (2X + 3) / 5 = 13.
"Some children are more athletic than others, and some children are more intelligent than others. Starting among conservatives, but now spreading to some liberals, is a rejection of this premise via blaming teachers. "
That some people will be naturally better than others does not mean there are no low hanging fruit that could make people on average much more athletic and/or more intelligent. He doesn't explicitly claim otherwise but just to spell it out: that humans are not identical does not mean they are reaching anywhere near their potential. ...
True story. Some years back, I was having trouble sleeping and decided I was getting too much light in the mornings. So I measured my bedroom windows, which were all different, odd widths, and went to Lowe's where they sell nicely opaque vinyl blinds. So I pick out the blinds I want, and go to the cutting machine and press the button to summon store help. The cutting machine turned the blinds, which were cut by a blade which screw clamps to a metal bar marked off like a ruler. There were no detents or slots, so any width could be cut by simply moving the b...
I think something very important to remember here is that different people learn differently. Genetics have a lot to do with that, and my (admittedly extremely limited) understanding is that US schools in general cater to different learning styles extremely poorly. Another thing to consider is raising. The most recent evidence suggests that how one is raised has an extremely significant effect on all aspects of mental ability - I think that that is likely to be far more important than anything which happens in school.
I think something very important to remember here is that different people learn differently
Weren't learning styles type ideas mostly debunked or rather turned out to be something for which very little evidence existed?
The most recent evidence suggests that how one is raised has an extremely significant effect on all aspects of mental ability - I think that that is likely to be far more important than anything which happens in school.
I would very much like citation since your most recent evidence conflicts with most of the other evidence I am aware of! From what I know early childhood interventions produce effects but these are temporary gains that mostly wear off over time, having very little to no effect on adult performance.
Having done some research, I find that you are correct, at least as regards to parenting and genetics. My 'cached' opinion was based on misleading information absorbed for what I though was good reason, but, on reflection, was just blindly following authority. Retracted.
Citing any key material you looked up might be useful for other people. Awesome job on actually checking out the literature yourself a bit and updating!
Rationalist hugs for you (if you want them)!
(^_^)
"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
It seems to me you are hypothetically placing anecdotes over data here. Any reason why?
Re: original post: I agree that many many kids are overeducated given their hardware.
You should calm down Murray isn't reactionary he's just a smart and data conscious moderate conservative thinker. He wants to give poor people enough free money so they can live decently with or without a job. I mean he doesn't even think democracy is a bad idea! Weak sauce! ;)
Damn, if I had the patience and the time, I'd have put a liberal spin on those same ideas to see how it would look
We're on good terms and I know you said this with good intent and I hope you realize I was just citing a relevant well researched book (which I think you really should read before judging) not pushing an agenda. Also remember LessWrong readers are smart, tolerant and sane enough to read material written by people with different politics without risking spontaneous combustion. If they want liberal spin I'm sure they can do it for themselves. And if reading relevant research on stuff can turn them "non-liberal" on that issue... well aren't you ok with people discovering their informed preferences or changing their ideas about how the world works?
The reason I'm writing out this comment is because what your wrote unfortunately seems a lot like a purely political take. I don't think that's cool since we don't see this sort of stuff for moderately left wing leaning authors, why should we for moderately right wing ones? The reason why I think this isn't ok is that just by mentioning the guy is blue instead of green you've reduced the probability of green people reading him. Especially since you exaggerated his blueness. And you are smart enough to know this.
Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% "Liberal"! People say "Wow" when they see someone being socially conservative.
Do we really need majority ideological biases and group feelings reinforced and further privileged?
You're very correct! And I'm just having a cranky evening, unfortunately. Some days I just seem to take so much issue with people's tone, to the detriment of addressing their point! And I want to seek out and challenge contrarianism, too... My intellectual behavior is very insecure, I'd say.
Also, when it comes to you personally, I'm very open to the darndest things you link and wouldn't take much issue if you showed me someone's endorsement of baby-eating (oops, you did actually propose a policy of baby-eating); I was trying to defuse a perceived bias only...
Post by fellow LW reader Razib Khan, who many here probably know from the gnxp site or perhaps from his debate with Eliezer.
A few days ago I stumbled upon a really interesting post. And I’m wondering if my readers are at all familiar with the phenomenon outlined here (it was a total surprise to me), The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”:
With all this I am not saying conditions which are non-hereditary are irrelevant. What I am saying is that we can’t ignore the shape of the pre-existent landscape before we attempt to reshape it to our own image. Excoriating teachers for having pupils who can’t master mid-level secondary school mathematics is in some cases like excoriating someone for the fact that their irrigation canals from the plains into the mountains are failures. You need to level the mountains before your canals can work (or, barring that design and implement a mechanical system which will move water against the grade). Easier said than done. E. O. Wilson said of Communism, “Great Idea, Wrong Species.” The reaction of Communist regimes to this reality was brutal and shocking. Obviously the modern rejection of unpalatable aspects of human nature are not so grotesque. But they have a human toll nonetheless. I’m skeptical that this generation will pass before we have to acknowledge these realities and calibrate our policies accordingly.
Stage One: I will describe this stage for algebra I teachers, but plug in reading, geometry, writing, science, any subject you choose, with the relevant details. This stage begins when teachers realize that easily half the class adds the numerators and denominators when adding fractions, doesn’t see the difference between 3-5 and 5-3, counts on fingers to add 8 and 6, and looks blank when asked what 7 times 3 is.
Ah, they think. The kids weren’t ever taught fractions and basic math facts! What the hell are these other teachers doing, then, taking a salary for showing the kids movies and playing Math Bingo? Insanity on the public penny. But hey, helping these kids, teaching them properly, is the reason they became teachers in the first place. So they push their schedule back, what, two weeks? Three? And go through fraction operations, reciprocals, negative numbers, the meaning of subtraction, a few properties of equality, and just wallow in the glories of basic arithmetic. Some use manipulatives, others use drills and games to increase engagement, but whatever the method, they’re basking in the glow of knowledge that they are Closing the Gap, that their kids are finally getting the attention that privileged suburban students get by virtue of their summer enrichment and more expensive teachers.
At first, it seems to work. The kids beam and say, “You explain it so much better than my last teacher did!” and the quizzes seem to show real progress. Phew! Now it’s possible to get on to teaching algebra, rather than the material the kids just hadn’t been taught.
But then, a few weeks later, the kids go back to ignoring the difference between 3-5 and 5-3. Furthermore, despite hours of explanation and practice, half the class seems to do no better than toss a coin to make the call on positive or negative slopes. Many students who demonstrated mastery of distributing multiplication over addition are now making a complete hash of the process in multi-step equations. And many students are still counting on their fingers.
The author is involved in education personally, so is posting their own reflections as well as what others report to them. In personal correspondence they explain that this phenomenon is common among children of average intelligence. The lowest quartile presumably would never have been able to master many of these rules in the first place. Some of the information resembles the stuff that a friend of mine experienced when he went in to do tutoring for disadvantaged students in Boston when he was getting his doctorate at MIT. At first my friend was totally taken aback at the level of ignorance (e.g., the inability to see the relationship between 1/10 and 10/100). Today he works at a major technology firm as a scientist, but continues to be involved in mentoring “at risk” kids. At some point you have to muddle on. He does his best, and does not indulge in the luxury of shock and disappointment. That helps no one.
This matters because American society is notionally obsessed with education. All this isn’t too clear or important to be frank when you aren’t a parent. It’s somewhat in the realm of the abstract. That changes when you become a parent. Suddenly you become immersed in the data of your local schools, and begin to weight various options to optimize your child’s schooling experience. Of course the real differences in school metrics have not only parental relevance, they matter in terms of national policy and attention. Both the political Left and the Right have their own pet solutions. More money, reform teachers’ unions, charter schools, vouchers, etc.
But the biggest problem at the heart of the matter is the fundamental populist drive to ignore human difference. American schools were designed to produce the citizen, and the citizen has the same rights and responsibilities from individual to individual. In some ways the public school system as it emerged in the 19th century was a project by the Protestant establishment to assimilate white ethnics, in particular Catholics (who of course created their own alternative educational system to maintain cultural separation and distinctiveness). In the 21st century the drive to produce H. Americanus seems quaint, rather, we want to citizens of the world with skills and abilities to navigate an information economy.
What American society on a deep philosophical level, no matter the political outlook, detests acknowledging is that a simple and elegant public policy solution can not abolish human difference. Some children are more athletic than others, and some children are more intelligent than others. Starting among conservatives, but now spreading to some liberals, is a rejection of this premise via blaming teachers. The premise is bewitching because it presents tractable problems with solutions on hand. Here is John B. Watson, the father of behaviorism:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years
I think if Watson were alive today he’d have to admit he was wrong. Your ancestors are not destiny, but they are probability. If your father plays in the N.B.A., the probability that you will play in the N.B.A. is not high. But the probability is orders of magnitude higher than if you are a random person off the street.