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Old 04-07-2013, 01:33 PM
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Default How is This Possible?

New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

A computer might be able to check grammar and look for key words, but how could it evaluate quality of thought?
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Old 04-07-2013, 03:19 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

It's hard to make an argument without actually seeing the software and what it's looking for, but that doesn't stop me from being confident that it doesn't work.

You could certainly write software that could identify common markers of an average essay or something, but it's probably not going to be much better than a word processor in identifying grammatical elements or reading level or anything; and it'd be useless for evaluating the content of a paper.

I'm not surprised that someone had that stupid idea and is trying to sell it. I am surprised that people aren't laughing at them enough. Their studies look absolutely ridiculous.
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Old 04-07-2013, 03:58 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

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Originally Posted by sadie View Post
New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

A computer might be able to check grammar and look for key words, but how could it evaluate quality of thought?
Probably better than you're thinking, not as good as they're selling it (for now).

Yes, it's trivial for a computer program to check spelling - your phone probably does it right most of the time. It's a little harder but still reasonably established that a computer can check grammar.

In my larger 100-level classes, if I wrote a paper which coherently strung together certain key words and phrases and cited my references, a TA would probably grade that paper an 'A' or a 'B.' Who knows? A computer program might actually be more discerning than an overworked graduate student.
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Old 04-07-2013, 05:18 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

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Originally Posted by sadie View Post
New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

A computer might be able to check grammar and look for key words, but how could it evaluate quality of thought?
Probably better than you're thinking, not as good as they're selling it (for now).

Yes, it's trivial for a computer program to check spelling - your phone probably does it right most of the time. It's a little harder but still reasonably established that a computer can check grammar.
That's actually not well established. Grammar is much harder than that. All a computer can really do as far as I'm aware is to check an extremely small subset of artificial rules, and they're not even that great at that.

It's actually easier for an artificial intelligence system to mimic human language than it is to provide it rules.

Regular machine grading of student work would likely lead to students 'writing to the computer,' which would be horrible. Computers are stupid.

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In my larger 100-level classes, if I wrote a paper which coherently strung together certain key words and phrases and cited my references, a TA would probably grade that paper an 'A' or a 'B.' Who knows? A computer program might actually be more discerning than an overworked graduate student.
This is also true. It is almost impossible to efficiently and accurately evaluate student comprehension and ability on a large scale like that. It's a problem with grading and testing and a lot of stuff. But maybe the solution at least for the time being is to not have as many freeform assignments when you don't have the resources to evaluate them.
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Old 04-07-2013, 06:01 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by specious_reasons View Post
In my larger 100-level classes, if I wrote a paper which coherently strung together certain key words and phrases and cited my references, a TA would probably grade that paper an 'A' or a 'B.' Who knows? A computer program might actually be more discerning than an overworked graduate student.
This is also true. It is almost impossible to efficiently and accurately evaluate student comprehension and ability on a large scale like that. It's a problem with grading and testing and a lot of stuff. But maybe the solution at least for the time being is to not have as many freeform assignments when you don't have the resources to evaluate them.
Indeed. I agree with the OP that while current software could check for keywords and maybe some grammar rules, we are still far from making a program that could accurately evaluate quality of writing or thought. However, if you look at how writing is currently evaluated in lower-division courses and standardized tests such as NCLB (link and link), they are required to adhere to a very strict rubric in order to ensure consistency across graders. Rubrics suffer from the exact benefits (objectivity, consistency) and drawbacks (easy to game, not actually good for evaluating quality) that computers have, so I think the concept is not all that far-fetched, nor all that far removed from our current system, fucked up though it is.
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Old 04-07-2013, 06:43 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

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That's actually not well established. Grammar is much harder than that. All a computer can really do as far as I'm aware is to check an extremely small subset of artificial rules, and they're not even that great at that.
I'm not well versed in natural language processing to be able to know the current state of grammar processing, and I haven't taken an AI class in numerous years, so I can only see what I know from commercial software. Probably my "reasonably established" standard is more permissive than yours.

Considering this software is supposed to be machine learning, I'm assuming that the grammar is not entirely rules based, but more letting the computer figure out patterns for good grammar and bad grammar. As such, it's only going to be good as its input.

It might have yielded surprising results. I'm suspicious that if it did that the input data was chosen for how well the computer evaluated it.
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Old 04-07-2013, 07:24 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

This is relevant to what I'm currently studying. It will be better than what lisarea says. My old roommate used to work at a company that did this. They can train models that use more complicated rules. And every few months they would pay teachers to come in and grade a batch of essays to test their updated models on.

But I agree, they can't really go beyond grammar (which is not necessarily as simple as lisarea suggests), essay structure and topic. It can't judge coherence or logic or accuracy, etc.
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Old 04-07-2013, 07:33 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sadie View Post
New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

A computer might be able to check grammar and look for key words, but how could it evaluate quality of thought?
Indeed. How do humans evaluate quality of thought? Coherence or relevance? Consistency or novelty? Insight? A computer might eventually get quite good at coherence, consistency and novelty. Not so sure about relevance and insight. If what goes on in the brain is information processing, and processing information is what computers do, then it should, in principle, be possible for a computer to do this.

It seems that AI and neuroscience are inspiring each other in terms of research. AI has been inspired by the plasticity of the brain, in particular what is called cross modal plasticity. How an area of the brain responsible for tasting can be re-purposed for seeing. The possible implication is that there are common algorithms or methods of processing in the brain that essentially work for any task and that specific specialization is simply the dedication of similar processing units to a specific task using a similar algorithm. This is one of the major ideas behind machine learning. The same algorithm is used to teach a computer to fly a helicopter or read the zip code off your letter.

But then neuroscience is taking these ideas from machine learning and AI and trying to find the algorithms that brains uses.

It is all very speculative and new but there have been (IMO) some startling discoveries. The work by Geoffrey Hinton is fascinating. He uses Reduced Boltzmann machines to learn in ways very similar to humans. His video on how he taught his network to mimic humans as they try to express various personalities and animals is very interesting.


Brains, Sex, and Machine Learning - YouTube

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~gwtaylor/pub...hmublv/videos/

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Old 04-07-2013, 07:46 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

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That's actually not well established. Grammar is much harder than that. All a computer can really do as far as I'm aware is to check an extremely small subset of artificial rules, and they're not even that great at that.
I'm not well versed in natural language processing to be able to know the current state of grammar processing, and I haven't taken an AI class in numerous years, so I can only see what I know from commercial software. Probably my "reasonably established" standard is more permissive than yours.

Considering this software is supposed to be machine learning, I'm assuming that the grammar is not entirely rules based, but more letting the computer figure out patterns for good grammar and bad grammar. As such, it's only going to be good as its input.
That would be a super horrible idea, though.

Either it's using some old-timey style rule based grammars, in which case it would be ridiculously simplistic and inaccurate; or it's using machine learning to detect structure, in which case it's still going to be simplistic and inaccurate, but also unarticulated and indefensible. Either way, it would require students to write to comply with the machine's incomplete and inaccurate models. It's been a while since I've known stuff about natural language processing, too, but I have not seen any indication that the field has progressed anywhere approaching the point that a computer could be trusted with evaluating and rating actual human language.

And it could well be that its ability to grade work is on par with that of an overworked, possibly underqualified TA or other evaluator. But only those that are required to comply with some extremely rigid model themselves. And that is a bad system that maybe needs to be reevaluated at another level if the standards are so low. That sort of dullness and rigidity is pretty much the opposite of what students should be learning.

Thing is, most 100 level college classes (as I recall from 1892, and I didn't even take a lot of 100 level classes then) are like high school redux. Evaluators are required just to ensure very basic levels of understanding of the material.

But if they can't accurately evaluate high school students, with relatively small class sizes and some insufficient but minimal level of resources, maybe it's not plausible for that to be accurately evaluated en masse without more resources. For that case, as bad as multiple choice standardized testing is, it's probably considerably better at gauging student progress than freeform writing assignments.

Which I do think is terrible, because I firmly believe that most adults should have a basic college level liberal arts education, and that'd be the way to start working toward that.
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Old 04-07-2013, 09:11 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

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But I agree, they can't really go beyond grammar (which is not necessarily as simple as lisarea suggests), essay structure and topic. It can't judge coherence or logic or accuracy, etc.
Just for the record, I didn't suggest that.

What I was trying to say is that there are two approaches to natural language processing: Rule based models, and heuristic models. Rule based models are necessarily simplistic, because they are limited to articulated models. Heuristic models, no matter how advanced, are unarticulated and subsequently indefensible. If you can't articulate the rules the system is enforcing, it requires human oversight so that less formulaic but acceptable writing styles aren't discounted.
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Old 04-08-2013, 12:01 AM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

I've posted this before but I'm doing it again and none of you can stop me. This is passage from the great If On A Winter's Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino.

Take it away, pomosI asked Lotaria if she has already read some books of mine that I lent her. She said no, because here she doesn't have a computer at her disposal.

She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. "That way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, "with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don't pay them any attention. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book."

Lotaria brought me some novels electronically transcribed, in the form of words listed in the order of their frequency. "In a novel of fifty to a hundred thousand words," she said to me, "I advise you to observe immediately the words that are represented about twenty times. Look here. Words that appear nineteen times:
blood, cartridge belt, commander, do, have, immediately, it, life, seen, sentry, shots, spider, teeth, together, your...
"Words that appear eighteen times:
boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until...
"Don't you already have a clear idea what it's about?" Lotaria says. "There's no question: it's a war novel, all action, brisk writing, with a certain underlying violence. The narration is entirely on the surface, I would say; but to make sure, it's always a good idea to take a look at the list of words used only once, though no less important for that. Take this sequence, for example:
underarm, underbrush, undercover, underdog, underfed, underfoot, undergo, undergraduate, underground, undergrowth, underhand, underprivileged, undershirt, underwear, underweight...
"No, the book isn't completely superficial, as it seemed. There must be something hidden; I can direct my research along these lines."
Lotaria shows me another series of lists. "This is an entirely different novel. It's immediately obvious. Look at the words that recur about fifty times:
had, his, husband, little, Riccardo (51) answered, been, before, has, station, what (48) all, barely, bedroom, Mario, some, times (47) morning, seemed, went, whom (46) should (45) hand, listen, until, were (43) Cecilia, Delia, evening, girl, hands, six, who, years (42) almost, alone, could, man, returned, window (41) me, wanted (40) life (39)
"What do you think of that? An intimatist narration, subtle feelings, understated, a humble setting, everyday life in the provinces ... As a confirmation, we'll take a sample of words used a single time:
chilled, deceived, downward, engineer, enlargement, fattening, ingenious, ingenuous, injustice, jealous, kneeling, swallow, swallowed, swallowing...
"So we already have an idea of the atmosphere, the moods, the social background.... We can go on to a third book:
according, account,body, especially, God, hair, money, times, went (29) evening, flour, food, rain, reason, somebody, stay, Vincenzo, wine (38) death, eggs, green, hers, legs, sweet, therefore (36) black, bosom, children, day, even, ha, head, machine, make, remained, stays, stuffs, white, would (35)
"Here I would say we're dealing with a full-blooded story, violent, everything concrete, a bit brusque, with a direct sensuality, no refinement, popular eroticism. But here again, let's go on to the list of words with a frequency of one. Look, for example:
ashamed, shame, shamed, shameful, shameless, shames, shaming, vegetables, verify, vermouth, virgins...
"You see? A guilt complex, pure and simple! A valuable indication: the critical inquiry can start with that, establish some working hypotheses..."What did I tell you? Isn't this a quick, effective system?"

The idea that Lotaria reads my books in this way creates some problems for me. Now, every time I write a word, I see it spun around by the electronic brain, ranked according to its frequency, next to other words whose identity I cannot know, and so I wonder how many times I have used it, I feel the whole responsibility of writing weigh on those isolated syllables, I try to imagine what conclusions can be drawn from the fact that I have used this word once or fifty times. Maybe it would be better for me to erase it.... But whatever other word I try to use seems unable to withstand the test.... Perhaps instead of a book I could write lists of words, in alphabetical order, an avalanche of isolated words which expresses that truth I still do not know, and from which the computer, reversing its program, could construct the book, my book.
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Old 04-08-2013, 01:06 AM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

So that's what coberst has been up to.
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Old 04-08-2013, 02:05 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Sadly enough, the fact that software cannot yet evaluate for cogency, clarity and argumentation -- indeed, there's a pretty famous proof that you can't strictly determine validity computationally -- doesn't mean that software can't do pretty much what lots of existing profs, teachers, TAs and graders now do. Viz., a high-speed scan for relevant keywords, 5 paragraph structure, an identifiable intro & conclusion, and basic grammaticality. If the computer's results were statistically indistinguishable from the general results of grading, w.r.t. placing assignments in the grade distribution, it would be more an indictment of current grading practices than an endorsement of the software. And it wouldn't much surprise me.
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Old 04-08-2013, 03:20 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

As I said, I am quite convinced the students would quickly learn how to outwit their computer evaluators....especially at the college level.

I am a tutor and my high school students have become quite proficient at Googling, cutting and pasting, then reassembling the sentences so their instructors will be unable to detect that they are plagiarizing. The smart kids intentionally include incorrect grammar. Related to this is the fact that many students do not read assigned literature anymore. They simply go to "Spark notes" and read the analysis and summaries of each chapter.

This saddens me....perhaps because my interests and talents are becoming increasingly obsolete. I also am concerned about a culture in which the educated no longer reads books that require any effort. Most kids today are simply incapable of reading books by Tolstoy and Thoreau, let alone Shakespeare.

But again, I may be just turning into an old sputtering school marm who hates change.
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Old 04-08-2013, 03:35 PM
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I would hope that somewhere along the path of an education the student learns that the only one they hurt by taking shortcuts is themselves. That said every generation, for better or worse, chooses what they care about and what they will reinvent and make their own. At the same time it looks to me that traditional education is changing to favor the autodidact. And if that is so, I say it's about time.
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Old 04-08-2013, 04:41 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

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I would hope that somewhere along the path of an education the student learns that the only one they hurt by taking shortcuts is themselves.
See, I disagree, for a ton of reasons I've articulated elsewhere. In a nutshell, what I do to reach a specific goal (pass a class to get a degree, or write a paper for work to get paid) is not really related to what I do for my own benefit.

If I shortcut my research for a work paper, but the paper relays the information required of it/meets the criteria set for it...that doesn't hurt me at all.

School does not equal education. If these kids are smart enough to beat the system, whether that system is human or computer, then they are smart enough to learn the stuff they want to know or need to know in order to live their lives.

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At the same time it looks to me that traditional education is changing to favor the autodidact. And if that is so, I say it's about time.
Okay maybe we do agree. Because I think learning is an internal and personal experience no matter whether you are doing it in a traditional setting or on your own.
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Old 04-08-2013, 06:42 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

The downside to autodidacts are the gaps, though. People--especially kids but adult learners, too--need a lot of guidance in forming their understandings. Without that, they'll leave things out simply because they don't know about them, or they'll skip ahead to things that interest them specifically without having a full grasp of the foundations.

I've had a lot of gaps where I wasn't in a directed school environment, and I still find weird gaps sometimes, even at the grade school level. I was in an 'open school' for I think third and fourth grade. I tested out at a grade level above what the school covered, so I didn't have any requirements at all, and could do whatever I wanted pretty much. So I missed geography drills and while I mostly know where places are, I have to think about it more than I probably should, and nobody ever taught me cursive or orders of operation. I taught myself cursive by copying down the way other people did it and cadging together a cheat sheet of random people's handwriting to use as a guide. (Young people: Cursive is an old timey writing system that people used to use. Read about it in a history book today!) That wasn't a huge deal, and my handwriting was legible, but when I went back to a regular school, I got dinged sometimes for that and had to relearn a lot of it. Orders of operation was probably the worst. I didn't even know what the convention was called, so I didn't know how to ask or look it up myself. I spent a pretty long time puzzling that one out on my own. I did eventually figure it out, but it would have been helpful if someone had just told me about it. I am about 75% sure, in fact, that I didn't even know the term orders of operation until I was learning programming much, much later.

And those are some things I know I missed. The worst part is that there are probably tons of little landmines like that out there that I'm oblivious to.

The other big thing is that people can tend to be goal-oriented. So if you want to know some fairly advanced material, you're probably going to focus on something very specific, and miss out on a lot of the foundational information you might need to put that information in its proper context. Which ties in to the pragmatism argument. Sure, you can skip ahead and find some specific piece of information to fill a need, or write some grand unifying paper to fulfill all of your course requirements or something, but education isn't really a specific goal-oriented thing like that. It's mostly practice.

No offense to any fourth graders here on FF, but the vast majority of the time, school projects aren't of much real value to the community at large. We don't really need the information supplied by scientific studies of how lima bean plants grow in various household conditions. The important thing about that is that kids are getting some practice in observing and reporting information; and realistically, that's pretty much K through bachelor's degree. For the most part, the things people work on are for practice. And it's also important that they have a little bit of expert guidance in putting that information into context and understanding how it fits into their general body of knowledge. And there is a lot of stuff in that general body of knowledge that probably isn't all that compelling in a practical, goal-oriented perspective, but is necessary all the same.

Overall, it is a really good thing that there's so much information available so easily now, but there are a lot of problems with that as well. Some of the information is wrong, of course, but apart from that even, it's not presented in an ordered, linear way. It's really easy to look up and draw conclusions from studies or other advanced material, but without some basic, foundational knowledge of how that information fits in with other information out there, it can lead to a lot of misunderstandings. This is pretty much most of the problem with science reporting and technical journalism, for example. You can present information that's technically accurate and still leave people with very mistaken impressions of its significance, sometimes simply because they don't understand how statistics works, or otherwise have the basic foundational information to put things in their proper context.

People really gloss over things that don't make sense to them. And not just explicitly, like, "ugh, this part looks boring," but also in the sense that you can very easily just plain miss key elements of something simply because you don't recognize them as being significant.

Some amount of self-directed learning is awesome, but I really don't think it can effectively replace guided learning overall.
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  #18  
Old 04-08-2013, 07:51 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

I was mostly self-taught in elementary and high school. I always said, "They taught me math and how to read; after that, I was self-taught."

But when I got to college, I quickly learned that there were some pretty big gaps in my education. (In fairness, that would have been true regardless, considering the primary schools I attended. I'd have been a lot worse off if I hadn't been a voracious "outside" reader.) I didn't know enough to understand how ignorant I was, and how undirected was my self-education.
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Old 04-08-2013, 08:14 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

I think guidance is great, but what is that guide or direction based on? There are going to be gaps because it's impossible to learn everything anyone thinks is important, and so the people creating the "guide" or whatever have to eliminate some things. What's included and what is eliminated will vary between people and so who has the final word on what should be taught?

See the OP in the "Fucking Education..." thread.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
The worst part is that there are probably tons of little landmines like that out there that I'm oblivious to.
Wait what? If you're oblivious to it, then is it really important for you in your life? As I said there will be gaps, that cannot be avoided, but luckily if you find a gap, you can fill it. That's how I've done things. I was never taught to count change in any math class or in school at all. My first couple of jobs didn't bother teaching me because the cash registers did it. I had to learn to do it when I was 18 and the registers went down and we didn't have enough calculators. I felt really stupid for about 5 minutes until I realized I wasn't the only one. When I became a manager, I ensured all my employees knew or learned to count change.

Kiddo will know how to count change because it's on my list of things he should know how to do. So yeah, I act as a guide, as do others in his life, but there is no all encompassing "Things all people should know" list that I am aware of.
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Old 04-08-2013, 09:00 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyShea View Post
I think guidance is great, but what is that guide or direction based on? There are going to be gaps because it's impossible to learn everything anyone thinks is important, and so the people creating the "guide" or whatever have to eliminate some things. What's included and what is eliminated will vary between people and so who has the final word on what should be taught?

See the OP in the "Fucking Education..." thread.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
The worst part is that there are probably tons of little landmines like that out there that I'm oblivious to.
Wait what? If you're oblivious to it, then is it really important for you in your life? As I said there will be gaps, that cannot be avoided, but luckily if you find a gap, you can fill it.
Only if I know I am missing some information, though. Like I said, I literally did not know what orders of operation were called, and I spent way too long figuring it out myself through trial and error and checking my results against keys and things like that just to sort out a simple piece of information that I could have looked up had I known what the term for that even was. Yeah, I figured it out, but my time figuring shit out could probably have been better spent.

And that's just grade school.

I also did not go to high school pretty much at all. I dropped out in ninth grade, later got my GED, then went to college and proceeded to get CLEP credits for a huge chunk of my core classes. Moreover, out of my three siblings, only one of us did go to and complete normal high school. So even in my family, the collective knowledge of "what you do in high school" isn't there.

However, during college, my brothers and I would all, every now and again, find out that we were either missing some vital piece of information or doing something inefficiently or even downright wrong. It could be as simple as not knowing the right term for something, or having learned some weird old-timey terminology. But sometimes, it'd be some basic methodological or factual error.

And it was a very common thing for all three of us. We've talked about it, how something would come up in passing, where it was assumed we'd be familiar with some part of the canon that we'd never heard of before. Sometimes, it'd be like a straight up epiphany, like all of a sudden, shit we kind of knew made sense in a way that we hadn't noticed before. Other times, it'd be like SHIT GOTTA FIGURE OUT TENTH GRADE REAL FAST because nothing makes sense.

This is not a real example because we had current maps and globes in the house and my dad was annoying prone to singing novelty songs all day every day constantly, much to everyone else's chagrin, but it'd be like positing at some really classy smart people party that Constantinople was the most peaceful land because there hasn't been unrest there for, like, forever. Or not hearing about Pluto, or reading studies that had been discredited or taken out of historical context, and not having a grasp of the history and fallibility of even seemingly objective scientific research or understanding how it fits in accurately with the existing body of work.

And like I said, that's just things I've actually noticed or had pointed out to me. I know I am wrong about lots of things I don't know I'm wrong about, because maybe my Constantinople theories just haven't come up in conversation, and based on previous patterns, I am positive that there are lots of other things that I'm seemingly blissfully unaware of that have impeded my progress in other areas socially, personally, and professionally. I can't tell you what they are, but I can't kid myself that I have actually located all the deficits that affect my understandings either, because there is no way in hell I caught them all.

Everyone has those, I'm sure, but there actually really is a basic canon of Shit You Should Know About at various stages in your education, and not having those can interfere with your ability to continue your education, and even to function optimally in society.
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  #21  
Old 04-08-2013, 09:16 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

AW DANG, I just thought of the best example to illustrate the issue, and I love this one especially hard because it's not me being the dumbass in this one.

I knew a lady who thought that the word animal meant mammal. She wasn't stupid or unobservant. In fact, she had some very complicated understanding of the taxonomy of living things that had, at its foundation, the mistaken belief that the word animal meant mammal. She had no doubt seen things that contradicted that understanding, but she must have somehow glossed over or discounted them or something. Because I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but I do remember that it was a pretty grown up and relevant discussion and we weren't just standing around trying to remember the taxonomy we learned in grade school or something.

She was obviously kind of embarrassed (as was I, because I thought she was telling a joke or something at first), but moreso, she was sort of knocked over by just how much shit she thought she understood but didn't. Like you could tell she was facing the prospect of having to confront the fact that a HUGE part of her understanding of the world and things she'd read and observed was based on a faulty fundamental premise that somehow took foothold at a very early age.

That's a really clear and glaring example, but that's exactly what it's like and that's the sort of thing that's at stake when you don't get the basics down right before you move on.
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  #22  
Old 04-08-2013, 09:24 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Or like how my friend thought that caramelized onions were onions with caramel sauce.

That's a similarly world-shattering mistake.
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Old 04-08-2013, 10:12 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Quote:
but there actually really is a basic canon of Shit You Should Know About at various stages in your education
And what are those things everyone should know? I am fighting with you because you are being all vague.

I know there's a shitton of stuff I never learned until I decided to learn it. And I agree that I don't know what I don't know. But I also don't know what it is I should know, and I don't know who should have or would have decided what it is I should know. And I don't know if what I learned is what I should have learned.

Do you think the public schools systems have it right? I know some of them don't, because I am filling gaps as fast as I can with Kiddo.
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Old 04-08-2013, 10:20 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

When I was referring to shortcuts, they were the kind sadie was talking about. When I was referring to the rise of more self learning I was referring to the kind of self learning experience one might have at Khan Academy or coursera. Still a structured environment but without the discipline of a rigid class setting and schedule. And not at this time providing a degree program but still providing useful classes. Given by university faculty often with advice from the instructor on where to go next and providing job placement services. A very interesting experiment.

Last edited by naturalist.atheist; 04-08-2013 at 10:49 PM.
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Old 04-08-2013, 10:22 PM
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Default Re: How is This Possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea View Post
AW DANG, I just thought of the best example to illustrate the issue, and I love this one especially hard because it's not me being the dumbass in this one.

I knew a lady who thought that the word animal meant mammal. She wasn't stupid or unobservant. In fact, she had some very complicated understanding of the taxonomy of living things that had, at its foundation, the mistaken belief that the word animal meant mammal. She had no doubt seen things that contradicted that understanding, but she must have somehow glossed over or discounted them or something. Because I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but I do remember that it was a pretty grown up and relevant discussion and we weren't just standing around trying to remember the taxonomy we learned in grade school or something.

She was obviously kind of embarrassed (as was I, because I thought she was telling a joke or something at first), but moreso, she was sort of knocked over by just how much shit she thought she understood but didn't. Like you could tell she was facing the prospect of having to confront the fact that a HUGE part of her understanding of the world and things she'd read and observed was based on a faulty fundamental premise that somehow took foothold at a very early age.

That's a really clear and glaring example, but that's exactly what it's like and that's the sort of thing that's at stake when you don't get the basics down right before you move on.
Okay, well that goes back to my statement that "learning is an internal and personal experience no matter whether you are doing it in a traditional setting or on your own". You can be taught something all day, but that doesn't mean you will learn it.

As you pointed out, she had to have read or seen a definition of mammal just in passing (like on TV or in a dictionary or something), and she was almost certainly actively taught it in the school system. For some reason she didn't learn it. So what is that an example of, exactly?
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