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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of drilling, change of curriculum, buckling down or backing off has had any impact. She has absolutely no interest in math. But the kid reads faster than I do, which is not slow at all.

The only thing I know about kids after having adopted 4 of them is that none of them are alike. The only time when you can really train them to do anything consistently is when they are babies. As a result all 4 have great sleep habits :)

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Have you come across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Teenage_Liberation_Handboo...

I read it (as a non-child), and a lot of my certainties about what young brains are and are not capable of got joyfully exploded. I'm not linking it to you proscriptively, or with a specific suggestion or riposte in mind whatsoever - you just might be interested in it.

School is very successful at convincing kids (and former kids) of two things: firstly, that the academic subjects they purport to teach are actually delineated by the school textbooks and curricula. And secondly, that the reaction people have to specific subjects within these school structures are the actual unchangeable nature of the person's relationship with the subject.

I hope one day our societies move past these two egregious and immeasurably damaging beliefs.

I haven’t read the book, but we have 100% had the “you don’t have to graduate if you don’t want to” talk with this one haha. She doesn’t want to drop out, but definitely isn’t interested in college. We want to keep that door open for her if we can, so we just remind her that staying in school requires doing some things she doesn’t like.

But yeah, at 15 it gets a little hairy. You have a kid who wants to be an adult, but in a lot of ways they are not prepared to make adult decisions still. Eventually she will have to make them, ready or not. But we have a few years left to help her, so the focus becomes how to best do that.

> School is very successful at convincing kids (and former kids) of two things:

Well, and thirdly, that your worth as a person is determined by your results in graded examinations, and by extension, your salary or some other numerical rating decided by someone else.

Absolutely, I think that's the other huge one. Thanks for chiming in to complete the thought!

Best advice I ever received is: You have to parent the kid you have - not the kid you want

This 100%

I have 5 and can say that this is the way.

I as a child, a teen, and a young adult thought I hated math, I got bad grades and it bored me. I dropped out of school. I later went to college and took remedial algebra twice.

Math in school was purposeless and rigid, a rote procedure to be followed by command because that's what kids have to do.

Now, I have grown older, and my curiosity drove me to learn because I wanted to make things, machines and software and probabilistic strategies. Things that necessitate math. If you can't rotate a vector, your guy walks faster diagonally. If you can't think mathematically and you want to lift a 2 jointed robot arm that weighs several tons, you're going to tip it over, and possibly die in the process. You can do it without trig but you can't do it without thinking about math.

Once I found purpose, I began to appreciate the beauty of the more elegant solutions. I kind of fell in love with math as an adult. Now I watch numberphile with my kids and make complicated machinery and software at work.

I think a lot more people love math than realize it, because they're conflating math itself and what school calls math, which is worksheets and demands, not beauty and creation.

With my kid in elementary school, I can see how math instruction is generally terrible: teachers rarely have any enthusiasm for teaching it. I only had one great math teacher (combining enthusiasm, skill and hard work) and I've been through special math programs (in high school and uni).

Again, it is a question of incentives: someone with enthusiasm for math would likely go with a higher paying job requiring higher level math.

Still, despite the crappy teachers, I was better than most to persevere at it until high school where I had the great teacher.

But this does not scale and we are losing kids to bad teachers: how can we fix this?

Yes. And it's the same when the kids come from the same parents too. We have one kid that's willing to go very deep on math. The only does what can be figured out in 3 seconds or less. Same genetic parents, same school system.

The original concept in the article of exploration is great. Some kids want to explore math, some science, some music, and some Starcraft.

> The only time when you can really train them to do anything consistently is when they are babies.

This is really stupid.

If you can’t recognize a little tongue-in-cheek humor then maybe you’re the stupid one ;)

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