http://tinychat.com/lesswrong the password is lw
jkadlubo
Could you elaborate your interpretation to the extreme, i.e. a classical marriage, with one person earning money and the other caring for home and children?
This method of asking children to remember and describe their experiences has long traditions and was praised by Charlotte Mason in her Home education series (link to the whole text). Charlotte Mason considered this a great way to teach children perceptiveness and excercise their recall, as well as provide information about the environment (compare volume 1 pages 46-52).
Though her pedagogy is sometimes laughably wrong (blame the state of knowledge about human body and development in late 18th century) it is still generally relevant and, in consequence, popular among homeschoolers (a quick google search will confirm).
If you take into account that by asking questions you focus on some areas of development but not on others, then Feynman senior’s method might be a good complement to it.
My psychologist said today, that there is some information that should not be known. I replied that rationalists believe in reality. There might be information they don’t find interesting (e.g. not all of you would find children interesting), but refusing to accept some information would mean refusing to accept some part of reality, and that would be against the belief in reality.
Since I have been recently asking myself the question “why do I believe what I believe” and “what would happen if I believed otherwise than what I believe” (I’m still pondering if I should post my cogitations: they interesting, but somewhat private) I asked the question “what would happen if rationalists believed otherwise than what they believe”. The problem is that this is such a backwards description that I can’t imagine the answer. Is the answer simply “they would be normal people, like my psychologist”? Or is it a deeper question?
No, it was more of a general statement. AFAIR we were talking about me thinking too much about why other people do what they do and too little about how that affects me. Anyway—my own wording made me wonder more about what I said than what was the topic.
Remember that it may work for you or it might not. Try and see.
Beeminder didn’t work at all for me, I found it was all sticks and no carrot.
Gah. Now I think I shouldn’t have included the background for my question.
FYI, what I wrote in response to some other comment:
it was more of a general statement. AFAIR we were talking about me thinking too much about why other people do what they do (hence—I have too much information about them) and too little about how that affects me. Anyway—my own wording made me wonder more about what I said than what was the topic.
But reading you is still interesting.
And maybe, just maybe, this visibility and ensuing popularity will push forward the idea of changing tinychat to something else.
That is a good guess. Some of LWSH silliness includes plush toys and stuffed animals.
I was raised to have a job and a career. It was not a matter of religion or capitalism, it was just “all people work” and “you’ll go to the best high school, best university and then have a career”. My parents worked. My grandparents worked. I was raised more by nurseries, kindergartens and schools than by my family, so “everybody earns money at a job” is the default for me.
Yet, partly by chance, partly by laziness, partly through feeling of insecurity I never got a job. I studied, got married, had a kid, studied some more, had another kid. More or less then I decided to create a real family, one I never had as a child. I decided to consciously raise the children, and realized that this requires more time and effort than I could afford if I had any kind of steady job. So, even though I was getting “unemployable” by approaching 30 and never working a single day in my life, I ditched the one offer I had.
It’s relatively easy to be a homemaker with a husband who earns more money, but for me it’s difficult psychologically. After all, my childhood and adolescence were about learning enough to get a great job and not about housekeeping (when I moved out at 20 I couldn’t turn the washing machine on). I get that, in a way, I am doing the most stereotypical thing a woman can do, but for me it’s the other way round.
So maybe this is one more reason why people think they have to have a job—they were raised to think so.
On a general level me and tkadlubo are interested, but not this time. AFAWK there are just over a dozen Polish LWers, scattered around the country and that makes any meetup difficult.
We are going to the Berlin Meetup in 3 weeks, Maybe see you there?
Using idioms when talking to my advisor.
For example in my language there is an idiom “somebody broke the bank” which means that we’ve run out of something. So one day I told my advisor, that I can’t start a new culture (some eucaryotic cells), because somebody broke the bank, meaning that there are no samples left in the big freezer. And she understood that somebody managed to literally break the liquid nitrogen cell bank. That was a loooong day for me.
Oh, and when your supervisor tell you to do something the fast way, by omitting some safety—don’t do that. A friend of mine got poisoned with benzoic acid this way.
Actually, the Old Testament has three versions of the commandments, each one of different length (Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, and the third one I forgot. Fun fact: I learned that at literature lessons in high school, not at any kind of religious lessons). The shorter commandments are the same, but the longer ones differ—maybe it was too difficult even for ancient izraelites to remember them exactly?
Let’s try to make some other points shorter.
Number 10. Thou shalt meekly accept battles lost in pursuit of wars won
Number 7. Thou shalt not cease falsificating thine beliefs
Some photos. The album is available only through this link and I will of course remove any photos that you feel are not showing your faces in good (enough) light.
It’s a pity so few people took any photos at all.
As for my thoughts. I was surprised by myself. I have a huge personal space, so I feel invaded pretty much all the time (only my kids have unlimited hugs with me, even tkadlubo doesn’t). And here, maybe partly because of the tags system, I almost never felt invaded. I did feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people around me, but I could cope surprisingly well (by my own standards).
I think next time we could expand the 5-10min speeches part. For me it was the best part of all of the workshops, because all the people who did talk, talked briefly and engagingly about what recently is interesting to them. I also think we should make all the workshops more explicitly voluntary. Everybody attended (which is great), but the few people who chose to omit one or two were left without anybody to talk to. This is one of my insights from comparing this meeting with Polish Mensa Annual Gathering (I told Christian about the others, but if required, I will write them down here, too). PMAG is much larger and has an ample schedule of lectures, workshops and contest, but at all times many people are just hanging around talking to others.
There were slots for 10 five minutes speeches planned but not enough people volunteering fro speeches.
I thought that there would be so many people, that I didn’t volunteer (by the time Gunnar’s speech was over I had outlines for 3 interesting speeches, though one of them would likely be too inside of the topic for our public).
The formal legal default in Germany is that it’s not allowed to make photos of people without their consent.
I asked some people, others were delighted when I took those photos (so I assumed consent), others still also thought it pity to have so few photos. But I didn’t consider the legal side. Do you think I should take those photos down? I don’t think I asked everyone I photographed.
And BTW, they are low resolution, so if someone wishes a higher quality pic of their own face, PM me please.
I am not on that list and I got the impression that people generally thought there were too few photographers. Hence my opinion.
My experience was two parents as high income providers and state facilities as children carers. The same plan was my default. This made me easily realize the lack of parents-related memories and how I did not want the same for my kids. If I was faced with a default “both parents are healf-heartedly working and raising children”, full time homemaking would have been a much more difficult choice.
From a more philosophical point of view, I blame second wave of feminism for this situation and hope the third one will help women sort carrier and family balance out. FYI: grossly simplyfying things, the second wave of feminism, in the ’60s and ‘70s, promoted the image of women being able to do (and work) the same things as men did, depreciating in fact stereotypical (natural?) female roles. The third wave (since the ’90s) is supposed to bring the message that women can do whatever they choose—be it manly work or womanly homemaking and caring for their appearance—unlike tomboyish stereotypical feminists.
This quota idea is a really interesting one. I like how it uses side effects (more men lured by higher pay) to get to the real goal (higher status of job). This should be done more often!
Right now know only 2 men working as kindergarten teachers (or, more specifially, one of them is working and I lost contact with the other one when he entered the job market), and it makes even me uneasy to see the first one at my son’s kindergarten. On one hand I feel “yay for equality” but on the other hand I can’t stop thinking “what’s wrong with this guy?”
I think there were too few people wearing no-touching tags to make them work (well enough). At some point I freaked out and everyone who saw me in distress and wanted to help just hugged, patted and generally invaded me—ignoring the tag and the semi-obvious reason for freaking out.
What I do not agree is what you call the ironic status of those tags. I talked to some people about it and aside from straight “I want a lot of hugs” and “don’t touch me at all” there was also the opinion “I don’t feel comfortable being hugged (or touched), but I can hug some of the other people”—a middle ground, which didn’t have a separate tag and did not truly fit neither of the present tags. Given the generally cuddly atmosphere picking a “don’t hug me” tag was the sensible action (because not picking a tag would simply put you in the majority—“hug me” group).
I don’t know if having a new middle-ground tag would fix this problem. Maybe it would be ignored the same way that the “don’t touch me” tag was. Maybe it simply would work better if the group was more balanced. I caught myself several times looking at somebody’s tag to check if they will accept a hug and preparing my body for a hug before my brain processed the meaning of the pictogram—since almost everyone wanted hugs, this person must want them too, right?
I read the first 1⁄3 of the post and then skimmed the rest, because I think that you yourself are “glossing over important bottlenecks”.
As I see it, for you the main problem with education is that students don’t learn effectively in schools and you try to treat this problem. However, you should be asking: how did this problem appear? What could be done to solve the real problems? And those are in fact more difficult questions and require much deeper changes than creating a dependency tree and applying it to the students.
Creating and following a dependency tree with pupils implies that you consider 5-, 6- or 7-year-old children who enter the school system tabula rasas, which is not true. What is more, during my pedagogy studies one of the lecturers mentioned that 7-year-old children may be 2 years ahead or behind in development in any area (gross motor, fine motor, memorization, social skills, knowledge, you name it) and these differences are normal. This in turn means that the primary school teacher has to manage and teach not a uniform group of tabula rasa children, but a highly differentiated collective of individuals ranging in mental age from 5 to 9 years.
If you are not starting with a uniform group, you cannot follow a dependency tree, because each child is in a different place of this tree. First you would have to sort the children, so that each group is at some level of your tree. But how would you do that? As I said, sorting by age is one of the worst ideas, it has only one advantage: it’s cheap. You don’t even have to see the kid, you just find one number about her and decide about her life. So, maybe do some tests? (now let’s just not talk about how much it would cost and how much time it would take). Sure, but now you can clearly see that some of those kids can read but not count and some can count but not read, so you should either put them in separate classes or order them to go to different classes for different subjects (the former unrealistic and the latter being very frowned upon in elementary schooling; my country even tries to forbid separation of lessons with bells for 7-9-year-olds).
Suppose that you in fact solved that problem and have a group of children on a very similar level in the area that you are going to teach them. Soon you notice one more phenomenon. The same differences that made some of your pupils start education a year earlier and some a year later cause the kids to learn at a different pace. You could be working with some of the pupils on harder problems, advance your tree faster than the average set by bureaucrats, but other kids need more explanation, more time practicing before they advance. If you comply with the needs of the faster kids, the slower ones will completely stop learning, because they will stop understanding what is going on. If you accomodate the slower kids, the faster ones will get bored and unmotivated to learn anything. How do you solve this problem? My lecturers said that teachers should teach the lesson at such a pace that 3⁄4 of the class can understand it, effectively stiffling half of the class. Maybe you would divide the class further?
But then, how many times can you divide the class without forcing half of the adult population to work as teachers?
This comment is already longish, but let me point to another problem. When learning anything, a dependency tree is an oversimplification.
From Glossary of language teaching terms and ideas
Active vocabulary: Vocabulary that students actually use in speaking and writing.
Passive vocabulary: Vocabulary that students have heard and can understand, but do not necessarily use when they speak or write.
When learning a language, students commonly have much larger passive vocabularies than active. Some textbooks are designed in a way that is supposed to minimize this difference, but at the same time they offer an extremely slow pace of learning. I observe that this concept of active and passive knowledge applies to any field of study. It’s quite intuitive: you first have to learn about something before you can use your knowledge. Following a dependency tree means that you cannot expand your passive vocabulary in a given field of study before you master active vocabulary of the lower level, and this in turn slows down you learning. You can learn about multiplication and division when you have not yet mastered calculating addition and subtraction; you only need to understand the concepts of addition and subtraction, have them in your passive vocabulary.
These are just two sample problem with education, but as a newbie, I only wanted to point that you’re missing your own point, not solve the whole mess of institutionalized education.