This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What blows my mind is how anyone can think the whole word method is a good idea. If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb. If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.
Right, but this is literally how we learn spoken language, and also one of the best ways to learn second spoken languages. So it's not obviously wrong or mindblowing that one might use it for written language too.
Here's a comparison: people innately learn the weird and complex rules of english grammar intuitively, just by listening, despite not being able to immediately describe them. Often, they're taught explicit 'rules' of the grammar separately, and much later. "If someone suggested teaching grammar without explaining the rules but just showing people sentences and hoping the funny rules eventually make sense"... except that actually works!
Spoken language is unique. It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.
Writing is a few thousand years old, and since the invention of writing the majority of people have been illiterate. Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught.
... sure, but written language shares that language and grammar, so it seems reasonable to expect some of that to transfer to written language. Compare to sign language - it's also quite recent, and uses physical motions that are seen with the eye (as is writing), but has the same complexity of grammar as normal language, also using the "same brain regions" (but take that with a grain of salt, because what do those regions actually mean)?
Eh. Driving could be learned by experimentation and experience if not for the strict societal rules. And math is just really complicated and novel. Whereas the fairly close correspondence between written langauge and spoken language suggests they might be learned in the same way!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Elementary education is the worst paying end of a mediocrely paying field with few career prospects by the standards of a field with limited upward mobility to begin with. Most elementary school teachers are either robotic in their slavish conformity to pedagogical fashions, planning on not coming back after maternity leave, or a radical who doesn’t care if the methods work because that isn’t the goal.
It is the latter group that dominates curriculum writing for obvious reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
Those sound absurd, but it's more ambiguous which style is better for things like musical instruments (learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right) or foreign languages (memorize conjugation tables or just watch Netflix in the target language with subs and start speaking on day 1).
These are just variants on "whole word instruction for music". Take the Gary Karpinski pill, start with takadimi and scale degree syllables/movable-do solmization. Absolute cheat code for music, much in the way that phonics is the cheat code for the written word.
More options
Context Copy link
Music and spoken language are two unique categories of learning because evolution has been optimizing our brains for language and music acquisition for at least hundreds of thousands of years. These are basic human social technologies that our brains are tuned to acquire quickly.
More options
Context Copy link
With languages, I find the absorption style often leads to embarrassing situations.
It's the awful realization that the person you're talking to has no idea what the word they just spoke actually means. It's clear that they heard it in a similar-but-importantly-different context, made incorrect assumptions about its meaning, and are now re-using it liberally. Or worse, they haven't even guessed at its meaning, but are merely using the word or phrase because they want to sound impressive or charismatic, and other impressive/charismatic people say it so... ugh.
And what's even worse than THAT is that it's socially forbidden to correct them! It's insulting to point out their error - especially if they're a native speaker and it would make them look foolish.
More options
Context Copy link
Language and music existed before writing and sheet notation. You can obviously learn to speak or play an instrument without being able to read.
You really can't learn to read without reading though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is that really what "whole word learning" is about?
sounds a lot more like the practice part of learning to drive. Especially considering that kids will probably have been observing from the passenger seat for years by the time anyone lets them drive the family station wagon. It also doesn't preclude teaching the "rules of the road;" both approaches occur after an alphabet-training phase. The article starts with an example of a child who can clearly parse those funny symbols, but isn't (yet) trained to do it past the first phoneme.
The whole word method seems like a good idea 1) from a traditional perspective and 2) generalizing from how few adults explicitly use phonetics. That doesn't rule out phonetics as a more efficient strategy; I'm not sure it was obvious.
Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves. Over hundreds of hours, effortful mental activity becomes intuitive. The question is how this intuition is best paved.
It's nice to be able to fall back on a rote system to check one's work. I'm sure Magnus Carlsen can calculate chess moves explicitly.
I might intuitively feel the correctness of some quick mental math, but I can show my work in my head by laying out the calculations to prove it to be doubly sure.
When paving that intuition with a more holistic approach, how does one explain why a thing is correct?
More options
Context Copy link
Sure. My point is that either method seems more akin to how we actually teach other skills (like driving) than to just throwing them in the deep end.
More options
Context Copy link
It's truly remarkable how many chess patterns are internalized by world-class chess players. Here's a video of a chess grandmaster solving simple chess puzzles in real time, as he narrates. What's amazing to me is how quickly the professional recognizes the solutions - often before I have any sense at all for the position. For him, it's like playing "Where's Waldo" if every non-Waldo character were dressed in all black - the correct result seems to just pop-out without any conscious processing.
So, I agree with the overall thrust of this comment. But it's also absolutely the case that top chess players often perform deep calculations, even in rapid games.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well...
You have to understand, it was the cold war. At least we got a song out of it.
It's worth noting that this "new math" is the basis for all the contemporary complaints about Common Core math. Most of the parents complaining about it aren't aware that the "old fashioned" way of doing things that they learned was actually controversial when it was introduced in the 1960s. A lot of new math stuff like other base systems was eventually ditched, but new math subtraction is all most people who went to elementary school from the 1970s–1990s really know.
deleted
I don't know that much about it, just that the New Math that Tom Leherer talks about in the song is the way that they were teaching subtraction at least as late as the mid-'90s (and probably later), and that Common Core subtraction is different enough that the people who learned subtraction they way I did complain about it. But I'm not a teacher or a curriculum expert or anything like that.
To me, the whole "You can't take three from two, two is less than three, so you look at the four in the tens place" etc. always seemed close to the way I do maths in head, expect just sung fast in an overtly complex way to make it seem sillier than it actually is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link