HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This is incredible! Such an amazing asset for thinking. I wish we had tools like this when we were kids. Reminds me of a TEDtalk by a math teacher, Dan Meyer: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover

He describes how we tend to remove all of the interesting stuff about actually solving problems- formulating questions, figuring out what framework to use, etc- and we just give people really boring questions.

> "I encourage math teachers I talk to to use multimedia, because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation; to let students build the problem, because Einstein said so; and to finally, in total, just be less helpful, because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways: It's buying you out of your obligation, for patient problem solving and math reasoning, to be less helpful."

> The professional educator dialect of English is not very approachable for the layman.

I think Dan's blog is largely pitched at other professional educators. All professions develop their own technical vocabulary.

As an analogy, I recently enjoyed an article about the implementation of the v8 garbage collector by Jay Conrod: http://jayconrod.com/posts/55/a-tour-of-v8-garbage-collectio...

Here's a sample paragraph:

"Distinguishing pointers and data on the heap is the first problem any garbage collector needs to solve. The GC needs to follow pointers in order to discover live objects. Most garbage collection algorithms can migrate objects from one part of memory to another (to reduce fragmentation and increase locality), so we also need to be able to rewrite pointers without disturbing plain old data."

I think the article is an excellent piece of technical writing, but it would also be reasonable to say "the professional compiler engineer dialect of English is not very approachable to the layman."

That said, good communicators need to be able to change their presentation based on the audience, and it's too bad that the people at the meeting you mention couldn't find a common vocabulary.

If you want to see something by the author of this post that is pitched at the layman, he made a very nice TedX presentation a few years ago:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover?...

⬐ Spooky23

Agreed. I've found that a lot of education officials hide behind that jargon, that's all. Totally get the domain specific jargon. I've seen my wife glaze in about 30s when I start muttering about tech stuff!

⬐ WalterBright

> "the professional compiler engineer dialect of English is not very approachable to the layman."

We compiler guys do that on purpose in order to keep our salaries high!

⬐ VLM

One sophistry problem is we will "ALL" theoretically take and pass Algebra, so the teacher does not have the luxury of specialized jargon, the teacher MUST be able to present it to the entire general public. A general education teacher is expected to present effectively to the general public as the core of their job, its not a nice to have or wouldn't it be interesting if it were possible.

On the other hand, only maybe 1% of the population has to suffer thru garbage collector theory in CS classes, and of that 1%, maybe only 0.0001% ever implement a GC "in the real world" and can understand that post. There just aren't that many GC programmers and there are a lot of humans in the general public. In that case jargon is perfectly acceptable, even expected. Also the core of a programmers job is rarely making public presentations.

⬐ jwmerrill

I didn't mean that teachers get a pass on opaque vocabulary when they're teaching students. I meant that, just like every other profession, they have a technical vocabulary that they use to discuss their own profession with other teachers.

Well, I find Dad Meyer's talk to be helpful in thinking about math school education: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover .

Really utilitarian math education would be good. The problem is that it's not even that. It's just test-oriented and boring.

See this twelve minute video: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_m...

Dan Meyer is the guy who gave this TED Talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover....

He taught high school math between 2004 and 2010, but became frustrated and is now studying at Stanford on a doctoral fellowship, with interests in curriculum design and teacher education.

I'm just glad that there's now a public debate about better ways to do math education.

⬐ warfangle

I really wish I'd had a teacher like him back when I was in high school. I had an algebra 2 teacher call me an idiot in front of the class ... and when I went for after school help, he simply made fun of me the whole time.

Ugh.

Now I write lots of code. Yay!

I watched a ted talk recently and while I don't recall it containing any data about the long term effects I was very impressed by the method/process used.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover....

Hopefully that will help to get some wheels spinning?

I agree, but I think that most problems have to be from the real world to keep non-geek kids interested. This method is actually being experimented by a math teacher named Dan Meyer. Here it's his TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover....

⬐ derwiki

This is fantastic. Can you download his course materials for free?