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Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

I was disturbed by the "low income" vs. "white" separation. Does the white group also include low income white students? Or, to further their point, did they decide low income whites aren't really white?

Nobody should have to "rediscover" the Pythagorean Theorem. I'll go out on a limb and say Newton, Leibniz, Einstein, Descartes, etc. just went ahead and read Euclid, and they did pretty well for themselves.

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Learning to prove mathematical theorems is an important skill in mathematics. If you only learn to use what comes served on a silver platter, where will you learn to handle situations where you haven't had the theorem taught to you in advance? My impression of UC undergraduate students is that "find the correct formula and plug in the numbers" is the only type of math they know how to do, and encouraging that doesn't seem like a way forward.

> My impression of UC undergraduate students is that "find the correct formula and plug in the numbers" is the only type of math they know how to do, ...

I believe that Mass has come to his position against Discovery Math precisely because his students at the University of Washington can't even do that.

It is important to know how to prove theorems. However, I don't think the correct way to do it is to say "Here's some vague hints, now try to guess what we're talking about by playing with these blocks". The way I was taught, which I found pretty effective, was that we'd be given an theorem, then in some cases (not all, or we'd never get anywhere) prove that statement. When you hand over the theorem and then make the student prove it, he applies and synthesizes previous theorems to explain the new one.

Typically, this sort of pattern means that "low income" includes low income students across all races, that's the only selection criterion for that group. The "white" group will include all white students (including low-income), and the "black" group will include all black students (including high-income). Nothing nefarious.

That's what I was hoping, and that's how I'd structure it if I insisted on including a "low income" group when everything else was racially divided.

I hope that the authors did it as you described. Would I be flabbergasted if they pulled some shaky crap? No, probably not, but to quote Mulder's poster, I want to believe.

Well, they should have to discover something. There aren't a lot of undiscovered results that are accessible to an elementary school student studying math, so that discovery will usually be a rediscovery.

Is it foolish to write an interpreter as a pedagogical exercise because someone has written a better one?

I agree that kids should not have to discover the Pythagorean Theorem. But the way it is now isn't good either. Kids are just told to memorize lists of mathematical facts and taught how to apply these facts to solve math problems. This is supposedly more useful than learning why the facts are true.

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