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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

The author should really remove the words 'simple', 'easy', and 'intuitive' from this article. They clearly know nothing of why most people detest math. If you're already familiar with the quadratic equation and you care about math and even enjoy it you might find this new equation interesting, useful, or intuitive, but I guarantee it is still a garbled mass of un-intuitive numbers and symbols to "[m]any former algebra students [who] have painful memories of struggling to memorize the quadratic formula."

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The key difference between this method and the traditional "completing the squares" technique is that there's no guessing involved.

Students get frustrated with trying out different numbers to get the right sum and product. It's easy for them to make a mistake or think they made a mistake.

This method is more mechanical and also looks easier than just chugging on the quadratic formula.

Is it dramatically better than well-taught and well-practiced traditional methods? Probably not, but I like it. It does seem slightly better, but then I'll never have to crank through a worksheet of these.

There is no guessing in the "completing the square" method either.

Yeah, you're right, the method I was thinking of is actually called "solving by factoring".

like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5MnP9da4EM&t=371s

It does involve writing down and checking combinations. It's roughly how I was taught back in the day and I think it's very popular even now.

No he should not. The words invokes the right connotations in a pedagogically minded reader. This can be the basis for better teaching. It depends of course on implementation.

I'm a "pedagogically minded" reader, and I find these words unnecessary at best, and off putting at worst. Math needs better marketing based on actual science, not egotism

Teachers & the educational system in general should give examples of why stuff needs to be learnt instead of being dictated to, because they have one of the largest influences on the future direction of a country's success. Teaching was a cop out, a cushy number for those who couldn't hack it in the real world and liked to take their failure out on pupils. Many teachers couldn't run a business the way they treated kids in the classroom so when they go on strike because they want more pay they are just demonstrating that bullying works, and hard work doesn't pay. Hypocrites!

One of the biggest source of bad ideas in education is that people think it would be better if it catered to the kind of person they thought they were when they went to school.

"Imagine if, instead of wasting time on phonics, we inspired white upper middle class students like myself by giving them real literature!"

"Imagine if they inspired students with the kind of problems I think I would have found interesting!"

"Imagine if they taught to my learning style" (learning styles are mostly bunk, but everyone thinks they would have done better if only the teacher catered to them better).

"Imagine if a class of 20+ kids who are forced to be there was managed the way a team of 5 adult professionals was managed!"

It's not just a "kind of person" who wants personal relevance to what they're learning.

It's human nature for learning to take place naturally and effortlessly when there is a felt purpose and relevance. For all humans.

The problem with this in schools, is that you can't actually generate this sense of purpose (which is a feeling, emotional) for arbitrary subject-student pairings. What do when it fails?

The strategy is, they TRY to generate the sense of purpose (maybe not try that hard, after years of failure and burnout), but fall back to the emotion of fear as primary coordinator/motivator for everything.

They make students afraid to look stupid in the short term, and afraid of an abstract "bad future" ("flipping burgers") in the long term. They introduce the system of grades for 3 whole years of middle school, when the grades serve no purpose (they're not used by colleges) but to generate the fear-based emotional economy of the school.

Fear is the primary emotional mechanism of the school. For every kind of person, this is worse educationally than felt purposeful engagement.

I was taught stuff at Primary School which I then got taught at Secondary school. Admittedly I moved around due to parents jobs but you could not get a consistence curriculum in the UK. AQA the main exam board was setup because private schools sat their pupils with exams from the easiest exam boards unlike state schools who just went with exam boards that suited them. From an employers perspective, a private school pupil with an A was like a state school C, but that's the sort of privilege having money can buy you and is perhaps why Uni's and some employers here in the UK are now waking up too. The class system in the UK is a very repressive system of control that infects every aspect of life to the detriment of the UK and the wider world.

Math is not an easy subject by any means. I see the same thing when people give programming tutorials and call it “easy” and “simple”. However, once the student starts to encounter difficulties with the subject later down the road, they feel stupid and lied to, since they were promised by their teacher that what they were learning was “easy”.

I agree that depending on the implementation, a subject can feel easy, but let’s not pretend that there are no difficulties in learning and teaching these concepts, and that it continues to feel “easy” later down the road.

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