Hacker News Reader

During graduate school I interacted with academics working in math education who felt similarly, that math should be taught through essay questions, e.g. "explain the concept of a limit", and the like. I've always felt it was a deeply misguided pedagogy and I hope it does not become popular. Solving well crafted exercises requires a deep understanding of the material, it's unnecessary to check understanding in some other way.

View on HN

Well for one it's prompting you to make a meaningful linguistic exercise of the matter, which is at once a creative task and secondly it enforces a more dynamic approach to whatever problem is presented.

I wonder if you could get a professor to do anything more than plug and chug, and that's a skill we've long ago delegated to glass. Not only do I want to explain these things in my mother tongue, I expect to know why some variable is in some such place, and how a cube of some other variable is related to the problem at hand. Calculation is banal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com