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Comment by felipe | Hacker News Reader

I am a western (Brazilian-American) living in China.

All this drilling and tests may sound crazy, but I do think it teaches an important value that is missing in the west's education: discipline

My wife is a teacher. She taught kids in the US (California) and here in China. One difference is that in the US a huge amount of her preparation time is spent on making lessons interesting to students, otherwise they disconnect. In China she is more focused on the lesson's subject matter, rather than tweaking the lesson for entertainment / attention value.

True, Chinese education does not value creativity or self-expression like in the west (and Chinese students are aware of that). But the lack of discipline is not the way to go IMO.

Jean Hsu's post is wonderful, by the way.

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> in the US a huge amount of her preparation time is spent on making lessons interesting to students, otherwise they disconnect. In China she is more focused on the lesson's subject matter, rather than tweaking the lesson for entertainment / attention value.

I came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and went to a U.S. college. The introductory science textbooks were all guilty of this. The biology textbooks especially were simply unbearable to me. What makes learning material interesting to an American kid is not necessarily going to make it interesting to someone outside of the American culture. Also, some smarter kids are simply bored by the lame attempts of textbook publishers to add "pizzas" to make the material appear "interesting." Smarter kids just want content, in the most concise form possible, so that it would not take a lot of time to read and understand it.

The thing that struck me most about American education: kids carrying around huge heavy backpacks with huge heavy glossy textbooks in them (those books would have cost a month's salary from where I was originally from) that were full of either cartoon-like drawings in poorly chosen colors or "stories" in colored boxes that all had very little to do with actual content and talked down to me as if I were mentally challenged. Oh, and those textbooks were published like every year or so in a new edition, so that you could not resell once you bought one and used it for the course. I was extremely happy when I got to graduate-level courses because it meant no more of those retarded textbooks.

This reminds me of Why The Lucky Stiff's response to a critique of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080526055424/redhanded.hobix.co...

"The problem here is: the author of the article is trying to do academics, to gain knowledge, to build a career. And my cartoons and stories have patronized him, belittled him, by treating him as if he wasn’t a real professional. This is a terrible breach of conduct. He has accolades innumerable. He has done no small deed. His peers are all gathered around him, wishing him the best and swelling with nothing but respect and esteem for him. NOW WHAT IS THIS CARTOON BOOK DOING HERE??"

On a more serious note, it sounds like you were just above the level of material that the textbooks were trying to teach, or maybe the format just didn't work for you. But why shouldn't learning be fun?

Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is sooo not like a typical introductory biology textbook that it's not even a comparison. W(p)GtR is hip, to-the-point, artistic, witty, with a distinctive voice, intelligently executed, and actually fun. A typical introductory biology textbook is usually designed by a committee with no actual UI design experience and has all the sex appeal of a fifty-something guy with male pattern baldness and bear belly who wears pleated khakis with a cell phone holster on the belt repeating a few slang phrases he memorized in order to seem cool.

It's like Calvin and Hobbes comic vs Microsoft Bob -- sad, really.

Basically the lesson is that if you don't know your audience (also when your audience consists of the entire young population of a country as diverse as the U.S., which is the case with textbooks), do not try to pull off cool and fun, because many people's idea of cool and fun is very different from yours. And if you must try to be cool/fun, hire some people who actually know how to be cool/fun in the first place.

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