I’m closer to the typical mind than most people here with regard to math. I deeply loved humanities and thought of math and mathy fields as completely sterile and lifeless up until late high school, when I first realized that there was more to math than memorizing formulas. And then boom it became fun and also dramatically easier. Before that I didn’t reject the idea of learning using mathematical intuitions, I just had no idea that mathematical intuitions were a thing that could exist.
I suspect that most people learn school-things by rote simply because they don’t realize that school-things can be learned another way. This is evidenced by how people don’t choose to learn things they actually find interesting or useful by rote. There are quite a few people out there who think “book smarts” and “street smarts” are completely separate things and they just don’t have book smarts because they aren’t good at memorizing disjointed lists of facts.
This is hard to test. What we need here are studies that test different methods of teaching math on randomly selected people.
Of course people self-selecting to participate in the study would ruin it, and most people hate math after the experience and wouldn’t participate unless paid large sums.
On the other hand, a study of highschool students who are forced to participate also isn’t very useful because the fact of forcing students to study may well be the major reason why they find it a not fun experience and don’t study well.
I’m closer to the typical mind than most people here with regard to math. I deeply loved humanities and thought of math and mathy fields as completely sterile and lifeless up until late high school, when I first realized that there was more to math than memorizing formulas. And then boom it became fun and also dramatically easier. Before that I didn’t reject the idea of learning using mathematical intuitions, I just had no idea that mathematical intuitions were a thing that could exist.
I suspect that most people learn school-things by rote simply because they don’t realize that school-things can be learned another way. This is evidenced by how people don’t choose to learn things they actually find interesting or useful by rote. There are quite a few people out there who think “book smarts” and “street smarts” are completely separate things and they just don’t have book smarts because they aren’t good at memorizing disjointed lists of facts.
This is hard to test. What we need here are studies that test different methods of teaching math on randomly selected people.
Of course people self-selecting to participate in the study would ruin it, and most people hate math after the experience and wouldn’t participate unless paid large sums.
On the other hand, a study of highschool students who are forced to participate also isn’t very useful because the fact of forcing students to study may well be the major reason why they find it a not fun experience and don’t study well.