"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
- Albert Einstein
Posted by a relative on Facebook from "Everyday Humor"
On the other hand, sometimes we are our own worst enemies for learning. How many people do you know who say, "I was never good at…" Consider most Americans image of their foreign language ability. If you ask them what a Mexican calls a hat or an afternoon nap, most can correctly answer (fill in the blank). Or how the French say "goodbye" or what a Swedish buffet is called, or … I guess that most Americans know at least ten words in each of at least ten languages. Da?
See "You can speak foreign languages".
Showing posts with label ability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ability. Show all posts
Friday, May 03, 2013
Monday, October 26, 2009
The End of Ignorance
I've long thought that all of us, myself included, don't learn all that we could as well as we could. Today I did have the importance of one learning tool reinforced - serendipity!
I was wandering around the web and decided to visit The Huffington Post, and I stumbled on a sidebar item, "Math is not hard: A Simple Method…" whose full title is "Math Is Not Hard: A Simple Method That is Changing The World", by Julia Moulden.
It is about John Mighton, a man who had his own struggles with learning. Mighton was a playwright who supplemented his income as a tutor. That led to his deciding to be a mathematician. But his struggles with the subject almost made him give up. Remembering some of his tutoring experiences, he broke things down into small increments and went on to get a Ph.D.
He started a not-for-profit organization to promote a different way of teaching math - http://jumpmath.org.
He has written two books whose title alone should lead us to rethink teaching and our own learning - "The End of Ignorance" and "The Myth of Ability".
If you read Julia Moulden's article, be sure to follow as many links as you can, including the one to Thomas Friedman's article, "The New Untouchables", New York Times, 2009-10-21. I was going to write a blog about Friedman's article but as usual didn't find a round tuit. Ah, that's the secret of learning, finding round tuits:)
I was wandering around the web and decided to visit The Huffington Post, and I stumbled on a sidebar item, "Math is not hard: A Simple Method…" whose full title is "Math Is Not Hard: A Simple Method That is Changing The World", by Julia Moulden.
It is about John Mighton, a man who had his own struggles with learning. Mighton was a playwright who supplemented his income as a tutor. That led to his deciding to be a mathematician. But his struggles with the subject almost made him give up. Remembering some of his tutoring experiences, he broke things down into small increments and went on to get a Ph.D.
He started a not-for-profit organization to promote a different way of teaching math - http://jumpmath.org.
He has written two books whose title alone should lead us to rethink teaching and our own learning - "The End of Ignorance" and "The Myth of Ability".
If you read Julia Moulden's article, be sure to follow as many links as you can, including the one to Thomas Friedman's article, "The New Untouchables", New York Times, 2009-10-21. I was going to write a blog about Friedman's article but as usual didn't find a round tuit. Ah, that's the secret of learning, finding round tuits:)
Math Is Not Hard: A Simple Method That Is Changing The World
The following is my comment to Julia Moulden's column of the same title. The above picture was added by the Huffington Post when I checked that I wanted my comment posted on my blog.
I've long thought that most of us can learn more than we do. Years ago I heard a radio interview where the speaker had a boy tell him, "I'm dumb" and the man replied, "Who told you that." Most of us have had people tell us that they were never any good in math, foreign languages, music, or whatever. The true answer is that they didn't have enough interest to invest some time in the subject.
I have proven it with my own increased singing ability. I once was told that I was hopeless. After years of my taking voice lessons, that same person is delighted with my ability. No, nobody is going to pay me to sing, but I have been asked back to sing solos.
I wrote about some of this experience in "Men Can Sing", http://www.cpinternet.com/~mdmagree/men_can_sing_2005-02-03.html
If you are interested in a subject, start somewhere. Read about it, get lessons on it, just do something. And be willing to change and correct yourself.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Why don't men sing?
A couple of years ago I wrote a column "Why Don't Men Sing" for the Reader Weekly. I gave various cultural reasons for men's lack of interest in singing. One I mentioned was our becoming more passive with respect to entertainment because of radio and TV. John Allen Paulos gave a broader look at this problem in Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.
He wrote that the averages in a small collection and a large collection are about the same but that the extremes will be wider in larger collections. For example, in a small town there may be some good singers, but in a large city there may be some even better singers. When the small town singers performed in their home town, people appreciated them. However, as people in the small town heard the better singers available in the big city on radio and TV, they were no longer satisfied with their neighbors' singing. This is even more discouraging to beginning singers because they are judged by a cruelly higher standard.
We can see the reverse in the performances of small children. Some indulgent adults go overboard in praising any effort by small children, even if half of them can't even be heard. That is, the wonder is not how well they sing, but that they sing at all. It's a pity that encouragement of effort won't last for more of their lives.
He wrote that the averages in a small collection and a large collection are about the same but that the extremes will be wider in larger collections. For example, in a small town there may be some good singers, but in a large city there may be some even better singers. When the small town singers performed in their home town, people appreciated them. However, as people in the small town heard the better singers available in the big city on radio and TV, they were no longer satisfied with their neighbors' singing. This is even more discouraging to beginning singers because they are judged by a cruelly higher standard.
We can see the reverse in the performances of small children. Some indulgent adults go overboard in praising any effort by small children, even if half of them can't even be heard. That is, the wonder is not how well they sing, but that they sing at all. It's a pity that encouragement of effort won't last for more of their lives.
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