I think this is typical-minding. For a child who isn’t a weird geek of the type who will grow up to post on LW, the adult knows more than the child and is a lot closer to correct than the child is about most of your points (maybe not the third one, although I don’t think that quite describes what’s going on). When a non-geek child disagrees with the teacher about whether the math skills are useful later in life or whether they are for the child’s own good, my bet would be on the teacher. The child probably doesn’t care much about either of those things and certainly didn’t conclude that math is useless based on good reasoning, and the teacher is probably a lot more knowledgeable than the child on pretty much any subject. And a non-geek child who’s disruptive or inattentive probably is at fault; he’s supposed to be learning the math whether it’s interesting or not and non-geeks really do need to be learning at this point.
If the child is an A+ student who understands the math after a week and finds it useless to go through of months of lessons teaching the same thing repeatedly, sure, the teacher is wrong. Maybe you were one of those. Most kids are not.
(Responding to old post here.)
I think this is typical-minding. For a child who isn’t a weird geek of the type who will grow up to post on LW, the adult knows more than the child and is a lot closer to correct than the child is about most of your points (maybe not the third one, although I don’t think that quite describes what’s going on). When a non-geek child disagrees with the teacher about whether the math skills are useful later in life or whether they are for the child’s own good, my bet would be on the teacher. The child probably doesn’t care much about either of those things and certainly didn’t conclude that math is useless based on good reasoning, and the teacher is probably a lot more knowledgeable than the child on pretty much any subject. And a non-geek child who’s disruptive or inattentive probably is at fault; he’s supposed to be learning the math whether it’s interesting or not and non-geeks really do need to be learning at this point.
If the child is an A+ student who understands the math after a week and finds it useless to go through of months of lessons teaching the same thing repeatedly, sure, the teacher is wrong. Maybe you were one of those. Most kids are not.