Re: broken schools

Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

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Too much screen reading if you ask me. But when I'm not working, I
read a lot of regular books, or on my eInk device, which is much
kinder to the eyes. Reading is one of my greatest hobbies. My wife
gets annoyed at the enormous number of books I accumulate. She
wants me to throw them away, but it would be like throwing away my
children. I cannot do it! =/

>
I don't know the two of you, but it does sound like a good idea to throw
it all away.  But I'm suspicious to say it because I often do it.  When

 
Ouch! My children! ;)
 

I was a freshman, I bought all the books I'd use at the university.  I
thought it was expensive, but it was worth it---I thought then.  On the
second semester, I couldn't spend that money again and decided to try to
just get the books from the library.  If the exact book wasn't
available, I'd take another one---a theorem should be the roughly the
same in every book, right?  From this experiment, I concluded that I'd
never buy another book (and that every student should do the same).  It
was wonderful to always look at other books perspectives.

 
I bought last years used books. Usually they weren't that expensive,
about 20-30 USD or so per book. But if you bought them new, the price
were at least double!

>
The entire university textbook market is one giant scam anyway. 
Publisshers make minor updates (often just changing the "exercises") to
create "volume 4", and then the professors state "vol 4" as the text
for the class, duping lots of students into paying full price.  One
wonders how much of a kickback the professors get for recommending the
"updated volume" that is 99.9% identical to the prior volume.

Disgusting indeed.  It's incredible how non-educational the educational
system is.  One of the very important things that should be shown to
students is precisely how we don't need any new books at all.  Taking my
chances here in being exaggerated, when I look at books such as Liber
Abaci by Leonardo Pisano, omg---what an important book to a student of
any intellectual area. 

Here's a test I sometimes do.  (I can argue that I have the privilege of
studying with the brightest students in the country.)  I ask students to
compute a subtraction; they do by putting one number on top of the
other.  I then ask them to explain whether they could reverse the
order---putting the numeral at the bottom on top---and to explain how
the method works.  But this question is merely a preparation to the
test; the real test is---compute the division of, say, 714 by 7, and
explain to me why you do what you do.  Even the brighest students
recognize that if they ever really understood it, it's hard to remember.

I do recognize that this test is questionable in the sense that it takes
people by surprise.  But my point is not that university students have
not a real mathematical education; my point is the complete failure of
the school system.  This test is to be applied to the population out in
the streets and you will see how people might even be able to compute
arithmetic, but they have no understanding at all of something
dramatically important as the number system we got from the arabs.

When I was in college, I discovered books such as the ``Discourse on the
Method'' and also ``Meno'', to name just a couple.  I thought they were
profound educational philosophies, even though they were not quite meant
as that.  They were key sources of studying strategies to me.

Considering all of science, what we study in school (including college)
is very little.  We don't need new books for that at all.  We can study
it all from public domain publications.