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Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

No. This is how you get kids to love math, if you do it right.

There's an American theory that math problems should be doable, that kids should score 90+% if they're doing well, and that struggle makes people hate things.

That's contradicted in American sports, where coaches push people really hard, boot camps, frat hazing, and cult indoctrination.

There's an Eastern European theory that math problems should be hard, interesting, involve struggle, and often too difficult to solve.

On the whole, Eastern Europeans seem to do better for turning out kids who love math.

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> This is how you get kids to love math, if you do it right.

No. This is how you encourage kids who already love math. If they're not interested (yet), this is an awesome way to turn them off.

If you do it right, you'll incorporate these into everyday life (walk down the street, see something that you can turn into a similar problem, then pose that to the kid).

Source: loved these as a kid[1], now parent who wants to encourage a healthy sense of wonder in math/sciences.

[1] Here's one for you I loved back in the day: A hen and a half lay an egg and a half in a day and a half. How many eggs do six hens lay in six days?

> This is how you get kids to love math, if you do it right.

...

>If you do it right, you'll incorporate these into everyday life (walk down the street, see something that you can turn into a similar problem, then pose that to the kid).

So you agree, this is how to get kids to love math IF you do it right?

The point is this: you hand out problems that the kids can solve after some struggle with the problem to give them confidence that they can solve the problems that come their way. That's actually a concept in German pedagogy.

The American way is to drill the kids with an algorithm and then hand them 20 more problems that are solved with the same algorithm, no insight required.

Classic Eastern European pedagogy is different. You give kids problems many /can't/ solve a lot of the time to build resilience.

Kids in the West come out with a fear of failure. Good problems in Western pedagogy are the German style ones, where kids struggle for a bit and then get it, to "build confidence."

Kids in the (Soviet-era) East come out understanding there are problems which are easy to solve, hard to solve, and impossible to solve, and you'll face all three in school and in life. You won't know which one you've got until you've tried.

This particular word problem is a clever one that can be sold a with different mental models (variable in an equation, imagining a brick being split, and probably other ways I haven't thought of). But it's a dumb problem with no reasonable analogy to real life. Who weighs things in comparison to a fraction of themselves plus a basic weight unit? I wonder if the problem is confusing not because of the wording, but because people rely on inferred context to understand language. This context is asinine, so people might think, "Clearly, that cannot be the intended meaning. I must have misread it."

Exactly. If the problem does not involve the "Aha! moment" the kids won't love it. And there's no way to have both "Aha!" and 90+% scores.

I actually got to hate math in grade 3 with such problems. Nobody explained to me that I could just write down an equasion, at least my father (physicist) could not. And all I saw in the magazines were cryptic answers like "it's plain obvious that for Jose-Rammstein conjuncture, x = 10"

I also met the problem #9 at an interview, and was asked to write the solution in pseudocode, as a kind of fizz-buzz test. (A peasant must take a wolf, a goat and a cabbage across a river in a boat. However the boat is so small that he is able to take only one of the three on board with him. How should he transport all three across the river? The wolf cannot be left alone with the goat, and the goat cannot be left alone with the cabbage.)

I would not blame the problems here, but rather the lack of support.

No, because this is written in broken English, and is ambiguous. If you want to make kids think that math is all about "ha, gotcha! Technically this question could be interpreted to mean X" then by all means this is an excellent question. Anyone with a basic understanding of English would have phrased the question differently, unless they were a Russian with a mediocre understanding of English syntax, or were purposely trying to be clever and ambiguous. Both are probably true in this case.

But the actual math in these is fairly trivial. The entire challenge is in deciphering the wording.

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