Very poor take. The author clearly has very limited experience with raising kids. Most kids won't do difficult things if you don't push them. Playing music, learning to spell correctly, doing mathematics, and so on. A very small minority of kids will do all of that easily and for the fun, but you can't rely on it. If you don't push your kid to do their 20 minutes of piano every day, they will half-ass it and will stop after 1 year and conclude they are not good at music. Same for sport. Same for reading books. Same for maths. And you know what? It's your fault. You chose to be lazy and complacent and didn't push them because it's hard to be a good parent. And now you expect me to validate your laziness? Nah.
The really important thing is to teach kids to find their joy.
At the end of my second year of piano lessons, my teacher took me into her living room, and we listened to Glen Miller records for most of the hour. And then we had a cup of tea, and she told me, "this is the music that I love. I play piano because I love that music, and I want to be able to play it myself. What kind of music do you like?" I didn't really have an answer. So she told me that we should stop doing lessons, but once I found music that I loved, she'd be happy to teach me how to play it.
In my early teens, I discovered Miles Davis. Once I had found my passion, all the hard work became play. I actually ended up learning to play jazz guitar, not piano. Even the heavy lifting was pure joy, because it had purpose and meaning.
I didn't become great at mathematics until I discovered the joy in mathematics (another brilliant teacher handed me a stack of old math contests, and said here, you might find these fun. I placed 4th among 20,000 students).
I didn't learn to write well until I discovered the joy in writings. (An absolutely brilliant English teacher who made us assign ourselves our own grades, but broke his promise in the end by upgrading all my papers to A+'s).
And I gave my kids the room to find their joy as well.
A counter argument is simply the observation that some stuff, it takes time (and effort) before you find the joy in it. Following your recepie, unless (as you say yourself) lucky teacher or wealthy parents, anything that doesn't incite immediate reward will be of low interest. A kid will probably pick up that general pattern too:
if joy can not be found in <T time, don't bother. And kids are not particularly known to be good at long horizon credit assignments, so that T is often hours, day, or maybe a week.
My brother (now an professional artist) told me at teenage years "some stuff you just won't understand the beauty and the joy until you've at least put 100 hours in it". And that's true in so many things in life.
I'm happy that one of my parent forced me to do some stuff (sports, music, language) even when I complained about it. Only 10 years later did I understand how valuable being able to speak another language fluently with minimal accent is, and how some of my fellow second generation migrants lost that ability, and regret it.
(having to go to school on Saturday sucked as a kid)
But kids are going to have setbacks, they will reach a plateau in their craft (music, painting, art, sport, ...). You need also as a good parent to help your kids go through, to not give up, because even joy to do is not always enough. This is the hard part.
From my modest experience of being a ski/snowboard instructor and trying to raise 3 boys (now 12, 16 and 18).
Yeah, but something vital happened: you learned the basics of music theory and how to sight read music - both prerequisites to jazz guitar (and something that most guitarists don’t know). Learning piano is a great way to step into other musical instruments.
Not forcing kids to learn mathematics and not becoming great at mathematics until you discovered the joy in them are not remotely the same thing.
Not learning to write and not learning to write well until... are not remotely the same thing.
Kids are inherently joyful, unless they are abused. One doesn't have to teach kids to find joy.
Whereas an admonishment to "teach kids to find joy", aka: "do what you feel like" according to the article, rings true as detached from reality self-talk meant to make adults feel good about themselves. Its almost a class signal, that is a privilege signal. With varying results across classes.
> The really important thing is to teach kids to find their joy.
As an adult, how can I find joy? I've been trying out various hobbies, but eventually, all of them became a chore. I really miss the feeling of fixating on something and getting lost in it, but it's not coming back. I'm so jealous of people who have a passion, because I just don't.
We fail at teaching a means with no end. Help them find an interesting end and they will achieve it by any means necessary.
Our job as parents is to expose our kids to a wide variety of disciplines so that they can find their interest.
I read that Elon Musk runs his private school this way. The kids narrow their focus quite early on. But of course there's tons of depth to study. So they actually get somewhere.
My parents pushed me hard to do piano when I was around 10-12. After a year that went pretty well I was starting to get lazy and put very little work and investment into preparing for the next lesson. They still had me play piano a full year until they eventually gave up and bitterly told me what a waste my resignation felt to them.
20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years. Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood.
Same for maths. I feel that a lot of people like the author of this blog post are being extremely misdirected thinking math can and should be taught in a fun or amusing manner every time.
Sure, a lot of topics in Maths can be made more digestible by "gameification" to help younglings develop an intuition.
But a very big part of Maths actually requires you to sit down and painstakingly crunch down the numbers/equations, memorize and learn when to apply the correct methods to solve some problems. And even though this part can feel fun and engaging after a while, you can't expect children to exhibit such interest right of the bat without having them first struggle with the classics.
Kids don't know better. Your role as a parent is to navigate along the fine line of forcing your kid to get good exposure to the (boring) activities we adults value and letting him enjoy what he enjoys.
Only in doing that will your kid open up to the world and grow up into a functional human being.
"20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years."
One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did.
My parents nagged me all the time about studying and even though I did my fair share of it I never fully appreciated how important it was until much later.
It's a strange phenomenon, one cognitively understands the reasons but one is isolated from the reality so one is somewhat distant from it. For example, one can get upset watching war footage on TV but being there is on another level altogether (soldiers often do not talk of their experiences because they know those at home will never fully understand).
In the same way, wisdom gained through experience is almost impossible to impart to a younger generation who has no actual experience.
My parents forced me to play piano, right up until I told them that I'll destroy our piano if they don't lay off, and any consequences they could think of would not stop me (I was normally an obedient child, but enough was enough).
That got their attention.
30 years later I picked up classical guitar and loved it! Do I thank my parents for forcing the piano on me? Hell no.
I’m happy that there was overlap between what your parents put in front of you and what you found passion in later in life.
I think that story happens to many but I cannot accept a premise that it is somehow universal.
The passions I found later in life were unrelated to what my parents put in front of me. I suspect that it’s because the activities I eventually found (distance running, volleyball, cooking) were not activities that my parents enjoyed or thought much about.
Moreover, I was unable to develop healthy models of internal motivation until mid life. I didn’t have to when the “why” was covered by my parents.
Childhood should be the lowest risk time in life for people to learn to fail and find the path back to success. This is what I worry about as a parent when I try to set my kids up for future success. I want them to fail now.
I see my role as a parent as coaching them to care about how they spend their time and how to recover from disappointment and failure. If they get that, then learning piano later in life is just work. They won’t be afraid of that.
> I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years.
Counter-example to anyone reading this and thinking about imposing this misery on their child - I absolutely hated piano lessons, and nowadays I absolutely hate that my parents forced me to do it. Total waste of time, even spending more time on Civilization or whatever instead would've been more valuable to me.
> "Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood."
I don't get it. you'll be a beginner in something that you weren't pushed to in your childhood. so what?
are you planning to only do things you were pushed to as a child? I learnt skiing in mid 30s , never even saw snow as a child. Its my fav thing to do all winter and spent like 40 days a season on snow. Not sure if i would've enjoyed it the same if i was "pushed" skiing as a child and hated it.
I’m not a parent myself, but something I’ve seen happen with an American family I know, is that they push their kids way too much to learn and do as many things as possible. They have their music lessons, their many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo. At some point you have to stop and wonder whether you’re taking their childhood away.
These kids barely have any free time. School during weekdays, activities during the weekend… worse than a full time job.
I think there’s a balance to be struck. Your kids don’t need to be good at everything.
Every parent is fighting an uphill battle against the technology now.
You either structure the day in such a way that there is literally no time for anything outside of activities, or you just observe the kid gets sucked into the screens with less and less will to do anything else.
> At some point you have to stop and wonder whether you’re taking their childhood away.
At some point you have to stop and wonder if a great childhood is doing - music lessons, many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo etc.
They are occupied, they are trying new things, learning new skills, running around outside, interacting with their peers.
Many kids will do difficult stuff, just not the stuff you'd have in mind. Sometimes parents are right in what the kids should be focusing on, but I'd guess more than not they are wrong. For example, all the parents who discouraged heavy computer use or video games, when this is how most millennials came into programming and IT. Then there's the thing where a kid who is interested, obsessed even, learns SO much faster. I recall a story of a parent who wanted their child checked for learning disabilities and the psychologist exclaimed "Your son has memorized 350 Pokemon! It's not a question of learning ability, it's a question of motivation".
In my view, if we let our children do what interests them, to some degree (of course anything taken to the extreme will likely fail, and it depends on the child), they are likely to cover way more territory, and probably more useful territory, than a child that is being forced and coerced. One of the many things my 7 year old has learned from Minecraft is an entire language (English), to a level which in the past (my generation) we didn't reach before perhaps 18 (and that was due to watching TV, not school). The other day I caught him taking notes on a piece of paper that said single = 1, double = 2, triple = 3, quadruple = 4, quintuple = 5, sextuple = 6. This is a child who should not be speaking English, but now he can write and spell it better than his native language, because we let him follow his passion. He's also learned a ton of engineering concepts and vocabulary, and has the ability to install mods, debug when they don't work, has a basic understanding of networking, IP addresses and on and on.
He has no interest in playing an instrument right now, why should we force him? If the time comes and he wants to, he will learn it so much faster because he wants to get better.
If the kid isn't enjoying the piano lessons, will forcing them to do it for 20 minutes every day really be beneficial? Sure, they will now be able to do something - something that they absolutely hate... (also, why is it always piano that parents try to force on children?)
"something they absolutely hate" is learning to read sheet music, training for skill, practicing for muscle memory.
The fruits are reaped when they (me!) get older.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I can play along to a song I like, play a song that is a certain memory, jam with friends at a whim.
Those are not things I necessarily wanted to do when I was a kid.
But the "forced" practice was required as a foundation to do what I want to today.
Different point of view: do you consider hunting in the wilderness to be difficult?
I do, it requires being still in miserable conditions for a long time, being cold, wet, mosquitos, and then usually still no success, but frustration.
But to my knowledge, no savage kid is in need of being forced to learn it.
"children sense your true passions and naturally want to join in"
And that is my experience as well. But if you stop childrens curiosity out of limited time and patience "Be quite now!" - stop them from helping, because they are not a help in the beginning and you are faster on your own - then of course they won't just start enthusiastically some years later doing with motivation whatever it is, you define as their arbitary target now.
> But to my knowledge, no savage kid is in need of being forced to learn it
Uhh then your knowledge is very limited because that is rather well documented. Also, why are you saying "savage" like an 18th century racist? Is that in fashion again?
This kind of forced practice can create the appearance of a certain level of competence, but it rarely produces a deep understanding or innate appreciation of any of those subjects.
Take music, for example. Many high schoolers play an instrument as part of the college admissions game. Almost none of those kids can play music with their friends and just enjoy it. To them music is this structured activity where they get paper with dots on it, and they have to play the right notes at the right time to pass the class. These kids never develop a true understanding or appreciation for music. They don't keep their instruments or practice as adults.
There's so many things to learn to be good at, why not find something that you actually like?
This is one of the reasons I'm really happy that my daughter found show choir. Choir sucks. My kids hated it. I hated going to watch it. Bunch of terrible old songs that no one knows. Now she's singing and dancing to pop songs and show tunes on the stage and it's far more engaging for her. I do think it also helps that show choir is a tryout based program so the floor for interest and talent is far higher than with the regular choir.
The really important part of this is that kids mimic what they see adults they like and respect doing. If their role models spend 6+ hours in front of the television every night, that’s what they’ll do. If their role models are playing music or sport, that’s what they’ll want to do.
Yes, but one of the problems with our civilization is that we typically do the important stuff out of our children's sight, and then come home tired and try to relax. So they do not naturally get a correct idea of what we do.
Oh yeah let's turn otherwise fun hobbies into a forced chore, that will surely be great for the kid. Forcing kids to learn to spell when they have learning difficulties (eg dyslexia) doesn't usually go well either it's just causing suffering for the kid.
The problem in this discussion is that people here seem to miss that both an excessively authoritarian parenting style is bad but also going full liberal and just letting them run wild is not the solution. Sometimes children need guidance an a gentle push.
Even as a adult I sometimes need to get pushed. I sometimes take guided courses so I don't skip over the hard but important parts of learning a new thing.
Just don't push your children too hard or you do more harm than good. Accept that they are not you and have different interests and needs. Like make them practice an instrument but give them a choice which one. And if after a few years they still hate it, well you tried. Maybe it is not for them.
Doesn’t seem to be an issue for Asian families or ones coming the from former Soviet block as well as Jewish ones. These groups as adults tend to outperform others. There’s a reason for that: early childhood discipline and consistency being built into their cultures.
> Forcing kids to learn to spell when they have learning difficulties (eg dyslexia) doesn't usually go well either it's just causing suffering for the kid.
I greatly valued the tutoring that I received for that (personally wish it had not been cut short). I was somewhat fortunate and received one-on-one tutoring in a secluded room.
They provided me with clearer definition of rules (instead of sayings like "i before e...", proper phonetics, and a history of where English came from.
That said, there's research into trying to determine which children with Dyslexia should receive specialized treatment as a segment just cannot learn to read at all.
Double-edged sword IMO. I was mandated to a half hour of piano practice early on, and I came to dread it. But in my experience that was less having to do with being pushed to practice, and more I loathed my parents overhearing my piano playing and thinking they'd come down and criticize me for not trying hard enough. This was an uncommon occurrence, but it occurred enough to plant the seeds of anxiety in my mind.
The nature of pushing needs to be considered in the sense of the overall parent-child relationship, and not just being handed a Mikrokosmos and an egg timer. If my parents were more proud of my ability to push forward and took interest in the piano and my playing beyond just performing good at recitals, I probably would have grown up to truly enjoy performing music. Today I'm left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that would require conceited effort to overcome. So I guess my parents weren't "lazy" in your terms but a bit too strict for me to conclude I would be "good at music" that early.
> A very small minority of kids will do all of that easily and for the fun, but you can't rely on it
This may be true, but explain to me what are the returns you get on forcing math (or anything) on kids? They won't like it, they won't learn it intimately, the won't internalize it, it'll be unusable knowledge and mostly a waste of time with lots of bad vibes and probably even a little trauma...
I spent a lot of time with math in high school and college but that was because I had a couple teachers who really elucidated why *I* might find math to be interesting (in my case, it was physics and computing). Forcing people to do anything generally leads to nothing worthwhile.
I think there's also a significant cultural dimension to this discussion.
For example, in many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures (pardon my generalization here), there's an ingrained expectation that children should be pushed, often quite hard, especially in areas like mathematics, science, engineering, and law. Hence the old cliche: "You have three career options: doctor, lawyer, or engineer.".
I've seen this firsthand as a Middle Easterner (I was born in IRAN). My father is an engineer, and both my parents were relentless when it came to academic discipline. I ended up in computer science, and my brother became a pharmaceutical researcher after obtaining his PHD.. There's no question that this kind of structure and pressure produced tangible results. But I'd be lying if I said it was an easy or joyful process. It ended up costing me plenty of social anxieties and now I struggle with social dynamics.
That said, I have mixed feelings about it. While the rigor pays off in terms of career and technical competence, it often comes at the cost of creativity, intrinsic motivation, and the space to explore things like literature, music, and the arts. I sometimes wonder what paths we might have followed if exploration had been valued as highly as performance.
So I _partially_ agree with you that some degree of external motivation is necessary, especially with children who haven't yet developed discipline. But I also think we should be careful not to frame this solely as a matter of "lazy" vs. "good" parenting. Upon reflection, I think that there's a balance between encouragement, discipline, and allowing for the development of intrinsic interest. Different families, cultures, and even individual children may need to strike this in different ways.
But should the parent decide if the kid will become a musician?
What if its not talented and pushing it with force to mechanically play Mozart?
I later became interested in playing bass guitar, nobody forced me.
I did it for leisure.
Children are and will not be experts in all fields.
Sure you are right that some discipline is needed to move forward and to keep up with something.
Do you remember and use everything you ever learned in school, if its not needed for your current job?
Kids nowadays spent half to 3/4 of the day in school or outside their own home.
When should they be kids?
I understand the pressure of parents to make sure they have good grades, some is necessary, but not really all of it.
I never learned touch type in school. I did that on my own after work within half a year. I did it because i was interested in. Worked 20 years in IT.
Now i am currently trying to get my amateur radio license, i use my knowledge that i collected so far, allthough i was bad at math in school.
Life is a journey, i got three professions so far.
> Most kids won't do difficult things if you don't push them.
I guess it's true for adult humans, and other creatures as well. Instead of pushing, however, you should consider using other motivational methods (a simple prize for accomplishing something that you want from your kids works very well). Pushing can cause alienation and hate, which could affect their entire adult life.
I think many adults don't push themselves because they were always pushed by others their entire lives. It's a form of learned helplessness. You never have a say in what to do, so you just do what you're told, nothing more.
Sample size 3 here and they are all adults and all STEM grads.
You have to push them, but push them right. That's a combination of coercion and encouragement and helping them avoid procrastination. There are hills to climb and they need helping over them to where the good stuff is.
I remember my eldest crying over ratios at the dining table. Then algebra at the kitchen table. Then crying again at real analysis in the pub with me. She graduated with a first in the end.
> My kid will do everything as long as it is interesting
Difficult things aren't interesting locally, you have to practice boring things in order to do interesting things in difficult subjects. Some kids do practice boring things if you just ask them, but most do not.
I agree. I got frustrated a lot being forced to practice the piano as a child. Not a long practice, just like you mentioned, about 20 minutes a few days a week and an hour lesson every other week or so with someone in the neighborhood.
I look back at the memories very fondly now. As a pre-teen I got invited to play at my cousin's wedding and everyone still talks about it. It gave me a good foundation and I performed well in highschool band and small ensembles. I now play my instruments for my kids and it brings us all a lot of joy.
Both of my parents weren't especially musical. I'm not amazing or anything, but I've got enough skill to hear a tune from a show or someplace and play it at home for my kids reasonably enough. But I wouldn't be able to if my mom didn't make me practice.
Every kid that I know who was forced to do their 20 minutes of piano a day now doesn't play piano and can only play with sheet music in front of them. They can't improvise, they seem to take no joy in the music.
I was the kid who wanted a keyboard and guitar but didn't get one until I could afford one in my twenties, then I learned just enough to be able to be creative. People say I'm good at piano but technically I suck, I'm just creative and expressive with limited tools.
It's an interesting phenomenon, the adults who are technically great at piano, but can't play anything without it being written in sheet music.
As an adult, you develop the agency to force yourself to do things you don't like doing
I can tell you as someone who was never forced into any extracurricular activities and was forced to go to church-schools that you probably should force your kids to learn something well (and not send them to religious schools)
I spend at least 40 hr a week doing something I have no motivation for. Most people do. Even if you don't hate your job, would you actually do it if you weren't getting paid?
> Most kids won't do difficult things if you don't push them.
I roughly classify parents in two groups: (1) like the author of the article, (2) like you. Based on my limited observation, neither can be claimed to give optimal results, and it more boils down to "see what actually works for your kid in the long term" which unfortunately far too often can only be definitely said in hindsight.
The world needs less Asian kids being forced to play piano since a very early age and it needs more kids (Asian and not only) that are left to explore the world.
Without that exploration the kids won't make the world their world, at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.
I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much.
Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, otherwise we’ll all become fat americans.
Except they are now, wealthy Chinese are one of the most rapidly growing segment of tourists. Wanna guess what the wealthy successful ones learned as kids? That’s right: piano and math.
Just on this, do you factor in that maybe they don't practice the piano because they aren't interested in it, and that's fine because it has no practical utility? I.e. in contrast with things like spelling, which do.
Also in your opinion at what age should pushing start, and how much pushing per age group?
How do you know that the conclusion you’re drawing from your experience raising kids is correct? There are alternative conclusions that sound like they match your experience, such as “most kids won’t do difficult things that don’t interest them if you don’t push them.”
At first I am reluctant to agree. But I decided to take math and English every year. I sucked at math, and had to figure out how to get good on my own. Now I have a degree. Math and music go hand in hand. I hated the music I was learning, so I quit lessons, and got the music I wanted to learn and struggled to learn it and I got muh better. I am an avid reader.
I reluctantly admit that you are right, and I am the better for it because I overcame my lazyness and found joy, in math, English, reading, and music. I sing, play piano, guitar, and listen with appreciation.
Its not a good take because no alternative is provided, but the author does notice something important that 99% of other people don't notice today. They don't realize it explicitly, but the actions do recognize it implicitly.
The school system today uses elements, structures, and clusters, the same techniques used in real torture. Its embedded into the structure of by-rote pedagogy starting in the late 1970s, and it also goes by another name starting in the 90s, where Administrators, NEA representatives, and Teachers, call this "Lying to Children".
Most parents today seem to be simply too busy, treating school like daycare, or maybe they just don't love their children enough to put the time in to protect them and figure out what is actually happening to their kids.
Classic curricula followed the western philosophy of the greeks, you develop tools that let you reduce a working system to first principles (in guided manner), which are proven true, and then you use those principles to model the system accurate, and then predict the future parts of that system.
"Lying to Children" does the exact opposite in time. It starts with a flawed model that is useless teaching abstract concepts and includes other unrelated concepts that arise naturally from that flawed model. The student is then as mastery progresses forced to struggle to unlearn material that isn't correct, and then relearn the finer details with each new flawed model given in a progressive fashion, over, and over, and over, becoming more useful yes, but torturing themselves, and in a way destroying themselves in the process.
When questions or true insights occur, the flawed model breaks those insights requiring you to do things differently in earlier classes before you can use those, but not even this information is given so you can't leap frog the torture.
There are additional strategic structures that orchestrate failures to gatekeep technical fields like math. There is an Algebra->Geometry->Trigonometry sequence which uses a gimmick in undisclosed pass criteria between class 1 and class 3, so the student passes initially but then fails and has to go back to Algebra, but can't because its sequential.
Its called burning the bridge.
Regardless, the student is blamed, no help is given (because there is no cure for torture). They are told, "maybe you're just not a math person, you should choose a career that doesn't use this if your having trouble.
This gatekeeper is orchestrated to induce PTSD towards math in general, and as all technical fields require math this prevents them from entering those fields. Some are able to pass and enter these professions, but never the best and brightest, only the most compliant with blinders.
The exception to this is if you bypassed the entire process through private boarding school, and Ivy league college straightaway. If your an elite, you get a decent education.
These structures follow a false ideology based in gnosis/gnosticism which is long refuted, but that hasn't stopped these things from being used for purpose, or allowed others to remove these.
There is an all out war that has been happening for years, a war on our children. Compare low attention spans and other things with the documented characteristics of torture from PoWs and you'll see there are parallels everywhere.
The thousand yard stare. Hollowed out feelings. Lashing out. These are often referenced in the material on torture.
The problem is unlike adults, once broken and distorted by torture children carry that forward their entire lives, unable to change because its not learning, its torture, and there are very few who ever recover.
Failing to see the reality of what is happening and calling it lazy and complacent without understanding is problematic and most definitely not the sign of a good parent if that means you let your children's minds be destroyed under a false belief that its just laziness.
For those parents that are unaware of what I mean by torture. You can read books on the subject matter by Joost Meerloo, or Robert Lifton. From the case studies you can derive the requirements and you would be shocked to find and recognize these things being used everywhere today without you knowing. Robert Cialdini touches on the psychological blindspots used which bypass your and your children's perception to the issue.
The elements are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove oneself from the situation. Some would argue this also includes time and exposure.
Structuring and Clustering, forces active engagement through specially designed circular trauma loops, forcing the psyche back on itself to destroy itself, and narco-synthesis and narco-analysis which in the 50s used barbituates to trigger dopamine are used today through associative priming through many ways including your phone (gamification uses many of these things learned from research on torture).
It is established that those who are drugged have less resistance to torture, and those with faith-based beliefs tend to resist torture better. One of the first things to go under torture is rational thought.
The important part is to start as early as possible and absolutely not trust the school/teacher or kindergarden staff. They are badly programmed to reinforce kids in what comes easy to them and stop encouraging them after less than a handful of attempts.
If you have to restart later, no matter at which point, even up into 'the kids' 20s ( ultra late bloomers, slackers, kids disgusted by most people for reason Z, drug- or "condition X"-induced deadbeats, repressed kids with and without ADHD, failed or successful attempts by psycho-social environments ) understand three things:
1) you are not pushing, even if you are, you are demanding sth for the sake of your child AND yourself. YOU WANT THIS first and foremost. It's not a bad thing, fuck what the little fucker wants.
It's imperative for the kid to know that YOU WANT THIS no matter the obstacles. You want to see the process and result. It's a form of accountability, I guess. Kids pushing back is some dumb implicit way to check how important THEY and THE THING really are to you _or someone else_ (that counts for the ugly stuff, too). It's part of our evolutionary, hard-coded OODA loop.
2) just start at the very beginning, so that it's easy, almost effortless. The kid will be annoyed on most of the difficulty increases, it always depends on the sub-topic so don't back down. Even 20 year olds will catch up with their successful piers within some time. Neuro-genesis is awesome. Most 'grown up' stuff is child's play and a matter of baseline-human character anyway.
3) your stress level is what matters. Stay cool, be equanimous, serene, check your posture, voice, tone, the discussion won't last 5 min and will be worth it.
A friend of mine taught remedial math at UW to incoming freshmen. She would write:
x + 2 = 5
on the blackboard and ask a student "what is the value of x?" The student would see the x, and immediately respond with x means algebra, algebra is hard, I cannot do algebra.
So she started writing:
_ + 2 = 5
and ask the student to fill in the blank. "Oh, it's 3!"
The semantic meaning of a blank is much better understood to everyone than an arbitrary letter like 'x'.
People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value. They might even think how can 24 + 2 = 5? They just want something to grab onto and nobody is really teaching the concept of a symbol in a math class.
I will die on the hill that most of math would benefit from better naming, less short names and longer format.
Yes, the crack math guys have no problems with terse symbols. But most people do.
Good example is Greek letters for geometry. They are not really taught in school so an easy formula gets 'weird squiggly thing times another squiggly thing....' and that does not help understanding at all
I don’t recall the exact age, but when I was doing math in primary school (somewhere around age 9/10) we were absolutely using symbols - “Paul has two apples, and the basket can hold 10 apples. How many more apples can Paul put in the basket” is the same as 2 + x = 10
We did these sorts of problems for a long time, with addition/multiplication/fractions, and even when we started doing actual algebra the problems were introduced the same way “let’s look at a problem we’ve solved already, and write it in a different way”.
This becomes even more true in higher level maths where programming language style functions would make everything vastly more clear, and easily typeable, than the traditional Greek symbols. sum(x+3, 1, 4) is just so much more clear (and consistent when generalized across other operations) and practically as concise as the mathematical way of expressing that which I cannot even type. Multiple variables would be a bit dirtier, but still much cleaner than the formal expression.
Interestingly mathematical symbols in the past also regularly evolved. Then at some point we just stopped doing that and get stuck in a time which is arguably no longer especially appropriate. So we're left with rather inconsistent symbols, oft reused in different contexts, and optimized for written communication.
> People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value.
The way I was taught it and the way that worked now for my now 3 year old is just to say pirates buried a number under the X, and that we need to guess what they buried. If the concept of a number being hidden is a barrier to understanding for anyone they have seriously bad teachers.
I’ve always found that an indictment of math education — and spent many, many hours discussing it.
When teaching addition, workbooks commonly use a box, eg, “[ ] + 2 = 5” — and first graders have no conceptual problem with this. Somehow, we lose people by the time we’re trying to formalize the same concept in algebra. There’s been many times I’ve written a box around letters in a problem and asked students “what’s in the box labeled x?”
There is a game called dragonbox algebra which I'm currently working through with my son and is an absolutely fantastic approach to this problem. Sadly its now part of a horrendous subscription service and is hard to access. I find it really sad that we've had computers for decades and there are so few good maths games like this.
As a senior in high school, I devoured this game in elementary school and got way better at math than my peers. Now taking differential equations and multivariable calculus through our college in the high school (CHS) program. When I looked for it out of curiosity I was sad to see it transformed into a subscription service.
One of my school math teacher had the same approach in another way: We were expected to use greek letters, not latin ones.
Same reasoning: It showed us kiddos that the letter was insignificant compared to the concept expressed by the letter.
So my take would be: Your friend taught the students for the first time what they were actually doing while handling equations with "a letter in it". That is no problem of algebra in itself. It just means their previous teachers sucked.
She loves it. It uses a ‘?’ for basic algebra style problems and after a few days of playing (if/when she wants to, we don’t make her play it), she was already much better and faster at those problems. It made me think that schools should be giving kids games like these.
There are two sides to this. The system or method might be bad but also a determined person can go all the way and perform at a decent level if they put in enough time.
Even if the system was better the person still has to be able to motivate themselves and put in the time.
I tell my kid that math is a language. You learn to speak it, just like you learn to speak any other language, slowly, by listening, understanding, speaking, intuitively recognizing patterns, rules and exceptions. When you start to become fluent you translate problems into math and solve them. At school they keep trying to make them memorize useful phrases, like a tourist that goes to Paris and learns how to say "where's the bathroom", "hello", "would you like to sleep with me", "thank you", "goodbye", etc.
If you are a physicist or an economist, you may be using mathematics as a language in the sense that you are using a mathematical description to convey an understanding of the natural world or the economy to your colleagues. But if you are a mathematician, you are interested in the mathematical objects for their own sake.
There is also a difference between the purpose of learning language and learning math. The goal of learning language is (often) to be fluent in it. In other words, the goal is to reach a level of proficiency which would allow you to not have to think about language and focus on the content of the conversation instead. On the other hand, the goal of learning mathematics is usually to be able to solve mathematical problems. Being able to do math without "thinking about it" is not usually a requirement.
"At school they keep trying to make them memorize useful phrases, like a tourist that goes to Paris…."
Like learning dozens of trig identities without any explanation about why one would need them. As I've mentioned elsewhere learning math for the sake of it isn't enough. For most of us math has to have relevance, and for that we have to link it to things in the real world.
I'm damed sure I'd be much worse at math if I'd not been pushed in a formal environment such as a school classroom.
I liked math—especially calculus as it made sense to me—but parts became a drudgery when I could see no reason for studying them.
Right, there's always the kid in class who excels at math like a mini Euler and gets bored because the rest can't keep up but the majority of us aren't like that—doing Bessel functions and Fourier stuff as abstract mathematics without any seeming purpose can seem pointless and our only interest in them was to pass exams. (Teaching may be better these days but my textbooks never discussed the value of learning these aspects of mathematics.)
Later whilst studying elec eng/electronics it became very obvious to me how important these aspects of mathematics were. If I'd been given some practical examples of why this math was useful then I'd have been much more enthusiastic.
Same goes for the history of mathematics, I'm old enough to have had a small textbook full of log and trig tables yet if someone had asked me at highschool who John Napier was I wouldn't have had a clue. In hindsight, that was terrible.
Mathematics is often taught as if the student was going to become a mathematician à la Hardy or Ramanujan and I'm firmly of the belief this is not the best approach for the average student let alone those with few math skills.
Mathematics ought to be taught with the real world in mind for ease of understanding. For example, it's dead easy to represent AC power as a sine wave and from there use that mathematical fact to solve power problems. (Perhaps maths and physics texts should be written in tandem and synced to show relevance.)
Teachers need to take time to explain that math isn't just abstract concepts but that it's very relevant to everyday life and that tying up mathematical functions to things in the real world is actually interesting and enjoyable.
> (Perhaps maths and physics texts should be written in tandem and synced to show relevance.)
I agree with most of what you wrote, but this part is tricky. Yes, it would be nice to have math and physics textbooks synced. Maybe other subjects, too.
But writing a textbook is a lot of work; it can take years. How do we get two textbooks synced, if they are written by different people? One writes their book first, then the other has to match it? What if the other disagrees with how the first book was organized? They both write together? Now there is a risk that one does a good job, another does a bad job, and the good textbook is connected to the bad one.
Or maybe write the common outline first, and then each author is trying to follow it independently? Plus, there could be multiple versions of each book, following the same outline, so each math textbook can be connected with each physics textbook based on the same outline. Here the problem is that people often disagree on the outline.
Also, not sure how important is this part, having things in sync could slow down the improvement in the future. For example, imagine that we figure out a better way to teach something in physics. But now everyone is used to having math and physics textbooks synced, so the new physics books would be rejected, until someone rewrites the math books too.
Compare learning math to learning to bicycle. There is some some sweat and struggle that needs to be put in, before one "gets it". After this it can become enjoyable. I encouraged my daughter with practice exercises from a young age, but tried to avoid making it a drudge. She built up confidence and did well with it. She is also very hands on creative. She decided to study engineering and is working towards her PhD.
Those aren't nearly comparable. Riding a bike is one simple skill and as long as you're not racing that's enough for most people. Meanwhile learning maths is a years-long effort at best. I learned how to ride a bike within an hour by myself when I finally had a good reason to learn it. I can't say the same about maths.
Bike is fabulous self-correcting vehicle in most operation conditions. The trick really is just to learn to trust it when it is moving. And then what to do when it stops.
Math is layers upon layers upon layers. And then it also branches. Never really had willpower to learn it myself alone.
20" competition trials bike, mulleted DH racing machine, full-squish slope-style dirtjumps, Japanese keirin, multi-week bikepacking, ITT, freeride.... Obviously there is some overlap.
Math, for most people, is the same a bicycles, for most people. With a handful of simple concepts, you can get by daily life.
The key element here is nurturing curiosity.
Since then i and my 10yr old have been sitting through a virtual math circle led by Aylean McDonald on parallel.org.uk an organization run by Simon Singh
Forcing is kind of hopeless. So is logic, and reasoning.
How children learn (they can't rely on a fully formed prefrontal cortex like adults) is very different than how adults learn (no fully developed prefrontal cortex until 25-26), learning about this can help a lot.
Learning more about the Reggio Emelia approach might help parents curious about this, it has been quite surprising how much is possible naturally. One of the best things to do is to relentlessly read to and with your kids.
Showing kids the math in every day things, especially things they already love is a helpful way of making it approachable, or at least aware.
Also, linking a topic to their interest's radar, encouraging curiosity, play in general, and letting them potentially discover it can go a long away.
When they've got something they want, teaching math and savings is a great thing. Understanding life is a lot harder without knowing a basic bit of math, and can be made a bit easier when doing it younger.
I had a math teacher that once made it clear, some stuff can just click, others is just about doing a lot of examples to learn the patterns. Doing math is very different than being creative with being comfortable to find it.
Today, I'd probably setup a good prompt to find a way for the child to share their mine to discover how they like to learn, and how they might like to learn faster and easier by taking some shortcuts through math directly or on navigating an ontology/taxonomy perspective.
> One of the best things to do is to relentlessly read to and with your kids.
My mom would bring us into the clubhouse in the backyard and read to us, which I found really boring. Ended up not liking books because of it, and I'm pretty sure the same happened to both of my brothers. For years I'd only read the bare minimum required for school.
Years later I happened to see an neat book cover in the impulse-buy section of a store and begged for the book. That one book was what actually got me set on reading, and from then on I'd always have something with me.
She never realized this and still thinks I like reading because she read to us. I can't help but wonder how many of the anecdotes here are also parents not realizing what's actually going through their kids' minds.
When I was 8, I went to the library in our town a lot. My parents went there sometime to return their books. At some point I just stayed there when they would go home. First I was in the children/teenager section and soon in the general library, where I would read about programming and computers. I learned C by age of nine.
The "undeveloped PFC" argument is shallow, unspecific and usually just used to infantilize younger people. It may be useful if the child is under 6 years old, but at the time someone is 17 or older, it becomes essentially useless.
My learning process was always, and still is fueled by curiosity.
As a counterpoint, look at how the Polgar sisters were raised.
Yes, Lazlo and his wife were both education professionals, and spent an inordinate amount of time dedicated to developing the girls. But look how it turned out.
On a different note, I used to hate sport when my parents forced me to play it. I liked screwing around on the computer or playing video games. However, when I found tennis naturally around 12 or 13, I couldn't get enough of it, and vastly improved on my own because I had a lot more fun playing than most of my peers did, who were forced into it by their parents. Most of them don't even play for fun anymore with friends, and I'm in my mid 30s and still play frequently.
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At the end of my second year of piano lessons, my teacher took me into her living room, and we listened to Glen Miller records for most of the hour. And then we had a cup of tea, and she told me, "this is the music that I love. I play piano because I love that music, and I want to be able to play it myself. What kind of music do you like?" I didn't really have an answer. So she told me that we should stop doing lessons, but once I found music that I loved, she'd be happy to teach me how to play it.
In my early teens, I discovered Miles Davis. Once I had found my passion, all the hard work became play. I actually ended up learning to play jazz guitar, not piano. Even the heavy lifting was pure joy, because it had purpose and meaning.
I didn't become great at mathematics until I discovered the joy in mathematics (another brilliant teacher handed me a stack of old math contests, and said here, you might find these fun. I placed 4th among 20,000 students).
I didn't learn to write well until I discovered the joy in writings. (An absolutely brilliant English teacher who made us assign ourselves our own grades, but broke his promise in the end by upgrading all my papers to A+'s).
And I gave my kids the room to find their joy as well.
if joy can not be found in <T time, don't bother. And kids are not particularly known to be good at long horizon credit assignments, so that T is often hours, day, or maybe a week.
My brother (now an professional artist) told me at teenage years "some stuff you just won't understand the beauty and the joy until you've at least put 100 hours in it". And that's true in so many things in life.
I'm happy that one of my parent forced me to do some stuff (sports, music, language) even when I complained about it. Only 10 years later did I understand how valuable being able to speak another language fluently with minimal accent is, and how some of my fellow second generation migrants lost that ability, and regret it. (having to go to school on Saturday sucked as a kid)
It takes a long time to get good at some things and those days suck.
From my modest experience of being a ski/snowboard instructor and trying to raise 3 boys (now 12, 16 and 18).
Not learning to write and not learning to write well until... are not remotely the same thing.
Kids are inherently joyful, unless they are abused. One doesn't have to teach kids to find joy.
Whereas an admonishment to "teach kids to find joy", aka: "do what you feel like" according to the article, rings true as detached from reality self-talk meant to make adults feel good about themselves. Its almost a class signal, that is a privilege signal. With varying results across classes.
As an adult, how can I find joy? I've been trying out various hobbies, but eventually, all of them became a chore. I really miss the feeling of fixating on something and getting lost in it, but it's not coming back. I'm so jealous of people who have a passion, because I just don't.
We fail at teaching a means with no end. Help them find an interesting end and they will achieve it by any means necessary.
Our job as parents is to expose our kids to a wide variety of disciplines so that they can find their interest.
I read that Elon Musk runs his private school this way. The kids narrow their focus quite early on. But of course there's tons of depth to study. So they actually get somewhere.
My parents pushed me hard to do piano when I was around 10-12. After a year that went pretty well I was starting to get lazy and put very little work and investment into preparing for the next lesson. They still had me play piano a full year until they eventually gave up and bitterly told me what a waste my resignation felt to them.
20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years. Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood.
Same for maths. I feel that a lot of people like the author of this blog post are being extremely misdirected thinking math can and should be taught in a fun or amusing manner every time.
Sure, a lot of topics in Maths can be made more digestible by "gameification" to help younglings develop an intuition. But a very big part of Maths actually requires you to sit down and painstakingly crunch down the numbers/equations, memorize and learn when to apply the correct methods to solve some problems. And even though this part can feel fun and engaging after a while, you can't expect children to exhibit such interest right of the bat without having them first struggle with the classics.
Kids don't know better. Your role as a parent is to navigate along the fine line of forcing your kid to get good exposure to the (boring) activities we adults value and letting him enjoy what he enjoys. Only in doing that will your kid open up to the world and grow up into a functional human being.
One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did.
My parents nagged me all the time about studying and even though I did my fair share of it I never fully appreciated how important it was until much later.
It's a strange phenomenon, one cognitively understands the reasons but one is isolated from the reality so one is somewhat distant from it. For example, one can get upset watching war footage on TV but being there is on another level altogether (soldiers often do not talk of their experiences because they know those at home will never fully understand).
In the same way, wisdom gained through experience is almost impossible to impart to a younger generation who has no actual experience.
That got their attention.
30 years later I picked up classical guitar and loved it! Do I thank my parents for forcing the piano on me? Hell no.
I think that story happens to many but I cannot accept a premise that it is somehow universal.
The passions I found later in life were unrelated to what my parents put in front of me. I suspect that it’s because the activities I eventually found (distance running, volleyball, cooking) were not activities that my parents enjoyed or thought much about.
Moreover, I was unable to develop healthy models of internal motivation until mid life. I didn’t have to when the “why” was covered by my parents.
Childhood should be the lowest risk time in life for people to learn to fail and find the path back to success. This is what I worry about as a parent when I try to set my kids up for future success. I want them to fail now.
I see my role as a parent as coaching them to care about how they spend their time and how to recover from disappointment and failure. If they get that, then learning piano later in life is just work. They won’t be afraid of that.
Counter-example to anyone reading this and thinking about imposing this misery on their child - I absolutely hated piano lessons, and nowadays I absolutely hate that my parents forced me to do it. Total waste of time, even spending more time on Civilization or whatever instead would've been more valuable to me.
I don't get it. you'll be a beginner in something that you weren't pushed to in your childhood. so what?
are you planning to only do things you were pushed to as a child? I learnt skiing in mid 30s , never even saw snow as a child. Its my fav thing to do all winter and spent like 40 days a season on snow. Not sure if i would've enjoyed it the same if i was "pushed" skiing as a child and hated it.
These kids barely have any free time. School during weekdays, activities during the weekend… worse than a full time job.
I think there’s a balance to be struck. Your kids don’t need to be good at everything.
You either structure the day in such a way that there is literally no time for anything outside of activities, or you just observe the kid gets sucked into the screens with less and less will to do anything else.
At some point you have to stop and wonder if a great childhood is doing - music lessons, many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo etc.
They are occupied, they are trying new things, learning new skills, running around outside, interacting with their peers.
In my view, if we let our children do what interests them, to some degree (of course anything taken to the extreme will likely fail, and it depends on the child), they are likely to cover way more territory, and probably more useful territory, than a child that is being forced and coerced. One of the many things my 7 year old has learned from Minecraft is an entire language (English), to a level which in the past (my generation) we didn't reach before perhaps 18 (and that was due to watching TV, not school). The other day I caught him taking notes on a piece of paper that said single = 1, double = 2, triple = 3, quadruple = 4, quintuple = 5, sextuple = 6. This is a child who should not be speaking English, but now he can write and spell it better than his native language, because we let him follow his passion. He's also learned a ton of engineering concepts and vocabulary, and has the ability to install mods, debug when they don't work, has a basic understanding of networking, IP addresses and on and on.
He has no interest in playing an instrument right now, why should we force him? If the time comes and he wants to, he will learn it so much faster because he wants to get better.
The fruits are reaped when they (me!) get older. Like I mentioned in another comment, I can play along to a song I like, play a song that is a certain memory, jam with friends at a whim.
Those are not things I necessarily wanted to do when I was a kid. But the "forced" practice was required as a foundation to do what I want to today.
A valuable life skill if you want to ever have a job or get paid.
Sure, once I was playing it, I was fine, but I cannot explain to you the sheer dread I felt opening up the case.
Have not played in decades, despite all those lessons and concerts and orchestra sessions.
And yes practicing will result in them getting better.
I do, it requires being still in miserable conditions for a long time, being cold, wet, mosquitos, and then usually still no success, but frustration.
But to my knowledge, no savage kid is in need of being forced to learn it.
"children sense your true passions and naturally want to join in"
And that is my experience as well. But if you stop childrens curiosity out of limited time and patience "Be quite now!" - stop them from helping, because they are not a help in the beginning and you are faster on your own - then of course they won't just start enthusiastically some years later doing with motivation whatever it is, you define as their arbitary target now.
Hunting in wilderness is a good example; so are sports, cooking, crafts, etc.
But unfortunately not all important activities that kids need to learn to become well adjusted adults in our modern societies fit those 2 criteria.
Point 2) can be hacked to an extent by modeling the behavior yourself - eg kids who see adults read books are more likely to want to read themselves.
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Uhh then your knowledge is very limited because that is rather well documented. Also, why are you saying "savage" like an 18th century racist? Is that in fashion again?
Take music, for example. Many high schoolers play an instrument as part of the college admissions game. Almost none of those kids can play music with their friends and just enjoy it. To them music is this structured activity where they get paper with dots on it, and they have to play the right notes at the right time to pass the class. These kids never develop a true understanding or appreciation for music. They don't keep their instruments or practice as adults.
There's so many things to learn to be good at, why not find something that you actually like?
The really important part of this is that kids mimic what they see adults they like and respect doing. If their role models spend 6+ hours in front of the television every night, that’s what they’ll do. If their role models are playing music or sport, that’s what they’ll want to do.
Even as a adult I sometimes need to get pushed. I sometimes take guided courses so I don't skip over the hard but important parts of learning a new thing.
Just don't push your children too hard or you do more harm than good. Accept that they are not you and have different interests and needs. Like make them practice an instrument but give them a choice which one. And if after a few years they still hate it, well you tried. Maybe it is not for them.
I greatly valued the tutoring that I received for that (personally wish it had not been cut short). I was somewhat fortunate and received one-on-one tutoring in a secluded room.
They provided me with clearer definition of rules (instead of sayings like "i before e...", proper phonetics, and a history of where English came from.
That said, there's research into trying to determine which children with Dyslexia should receive specialized treatment as a segment just cannot learn to read at all.
The nature of pushing needs to be considered in the sense of the overall parent-child relationship, and not just being handed a Mikrokosmos and an egg timer. If my parents were more proud of my ability to push forward and took interest in the piano and my playing beyond just performing good at recitals, I probably would have grown up to truly enjoy performing music. Today I'm left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that would require conceited effort to overcome. So I guess my parents weren't "lazy" in your terms but a bit too strict for me to conclude I would be "good at music" that early.
This may be true, but explain to me what are the returns you get on forcing math (or anything) on kids? They won't like it, they won't learn it intimately, the won't internalize it, it'll be unusable knowledge and mostly a waste of time with lots of bad vibes and probably even a little trauma...
I spent a lot of time with math in high school and college but that was because I had a couple teachers who really elucidated why *I* might find math to be interesting (in my case, it was physics and computing). Forcing people to do anything generally leads to nothing worthwhile.
For example, in many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures (pardon my generalization here), there's an ingrained expectation that children should be pushed, often quite hard, especially in areas like mathematics, science, engineering, and law. Hence the old cliche: "You have three career options: doctor, lawyer, or engineer.".
I've seen this firsthand as a Middle Easterner (I was born in IRAN). My father is an engineer, and both my parents were relentless when it came to academic discipline. I ended up in computer science, and my brother became a pharmaceutical researcher after obtaining his PHD.. There's no question that this kind of structure and pressure produced tangible results. But I'd be lying if I said it was an easy or joyful process. It ended up costing me plenty of social anxieties and now I struggle with social dynamics.
That said, I have mixed feelings about it. While the rigor pays off in terms of career and technical competence, it often comes at the cost of creativity, intrinsic motivation, and the space to explore things like literature, music, and the arts. I sometimes wonder what paths we might have followed if exploration had been valued as highly as performance.
So I _partially_ agree with you that some degree of external motivation is necessary, especially with children who haven't yet developed discipline. But I also think we should be careful not to frame this solely as a matter of "lazy" vs. "good" parenting. Upon reflection, I think that there's a balance between encouragement, discipline, and allowing for the development of intrinsic interest. Different families, cultures, and even individual children may need to strike this in different ways.
I guess it's true for adult humans, and other creatures as well. Instead of pushing, however, you should consider using other motivational methods (a simple prize for accomplishing something that you want from your kids works very well). Pushing can cause alienation and hate, which could affect their entire adult life.
Such a bold claim coming from some who does not share their credentials on the matter.
My kid will do everything as long as it is interesting. My sample of 1 contradicts your claim, but neither of us are experts on the matter.
You have to push them, but push them right. That's a combination of coercion and encouragement and helping them avoid procrastination. There are hills to climb and they need helping over them to where the good stuff is.
I remember my eldest crying over ratios at the dining table. Then algebra at the kitchen table. Then crying again at real analysis in the pub with me. She graduated with a first in the end.
Difficult things aren't interesting locally, you have to practice boring things in order to do interesting things in difficult subjects. Some kids do practice boring things if you just ask them, but most do not.
I look back at the memories very fondly now. As a pre-teen I got invited to play at my cousin's wedding and everyone still talks about it. It gave me a good foundation and I performed well in highschool band and small ensembles. I now play my instruments for my kids and it brings us all a lot of joy.
Both of my parents weren't especially musical. I'm not amazing or anything, but I've got enough skill to hear a tune from a show or someplace and play it at home for my kids reasonably enough. But I wouldn't be able to if my mom didn't make me practice.
I was the kid who wanted a keyboard and guitar but didn't get one until I could afford one in my twenties, then I learned just enough to be able to be creative. People say I'm good at piano but technically I suck, I'm just creative and expressive with limited tools.
It's an interesting phenomenon, the adults who are technically great at piano, but can't play anything without it being written in sheet music.
I can tell you as someone who was never forced into any extracurricular activities and was forced to go to church-schools that you probably should force your kids to learn something well (and not send them to religious schools)
I roughly classify parents in two groups: (1) like the author of the article, (2) like you. Based on my limited observation, neither can be claimed to give optimal results, and it more boils down to "see what actually works for your kid in the long term" which unfortunately far too often can only be definitely said in hindsight.
Without that exploration the kids won't make the world their world, at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.
I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much.
Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, otherwise we’ll all become fat americans.
Also in your opinion at what age should pushing start, and how much pushing per age group?
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they used to beat the living shit out of us india when were growing up. is that what you mean?
I reluctantly admit that you are right, and I am the better for it because I overcame my lazyness and found joy, in math, English, reading, and music. I sing, play piano, guitar, and listen with appreciation.
The school system today uses elements, structures, and clusters, the same techniques used in real torture. Its embedded into the structure of by-rote pedagogy starting in the late 1970s, and it also goes by another name starting in the 90s, where Administrators, NEA representatives, and Teachers, call this "Lying to Children".
Most parents today seem to be simply too busy, treating school like daycare, or maybe they just don't love their children enough to put the time in to protect them and figure out what is actually happening to their kids.
Classic curricula followed the western philosophy of the greeks, you develop tools that let you reduce a working system to first principles (in guided manner), which are proven true, and then you use those principles to model the system accurate, and then predict the future parts of that system.
"Lying to Children" does the exact opposite in time. It starts with a flawed model that is useless teaching abstract concepts and includes other unrelated concepts that arise naturally from that flawed model. The student is then as mastery progresses forced to struggle to unlearn material that isn't correct, and then relearn the finer details with each new flawed model given in a progressive fashion, over, and over, and over, becoming more useful yes, but torturing themselves, and in a way destroying themselves in the process.
When questions or true insights occur, the flawed model breaks those insights requiring you to do things differently in earlier classes before you can use those, but not even this information is given so you can't leap frog the torture.
There are additional strategic structures that orchestrate failures to gatekeep technical fields like math. There is an Algebra->Geometry->Trigonometry sequence which uses a gimmick in undisclosed pass criteria between class 1 and class 3, so the student passes initially but then fails and has to go back to Algebra, but can't because its sequential. Its called burning the bridge.
Regardless, the student is blamed, no help is given (because there is no cure for torture). They are told, "maybe you're just not a math person, you should choose a career that doesn't use this if your having trouble.
This gatekeeper is orchestrated to induce PTSD towards math in general, and as all technical fields require math this prevents them from entering those fields. Some are able to pass and enter these professions, but never the best and brightest, only the most compliant with blinders.
The exception to this is if you bypassed the entire process through private boarding school, and Ivy league college straightaway. If your an elite, you get a decent education.
These structures follow a false ideology based in gnosis/gnosticism which is long refuted, but that hasn't stopped these things from being used for purpose, or allowed others to remove these.
There is an all out war that has been happening for years, a war on our children. Compare low attention spans and other things with the documented characteristics of torture from PoWs and you'll see there are parallels everywhere.
The thousand yard stare. Hollowed out feelings. Lashing out. These are often referenced in the material on torture.
The problem is unlike adults, once broken and distorted by torture children carry that forward their entire lives, unable to change because its not learning, its torture, and there are very few who ever recover.
Failing to see the reality of what is happening and calling it lazy and complacent without understanding is problematic and most definitely not the sign of a good parent if that means you let your children's minds be destroyed under a false belief that its just laziness.
For those parents that are unaware of what I mean by torture. You can read books on the subject matter by Joost Meerloo, or Robert Lifton. From the case studies you can derive the requirements and you would be shocked to find and recognize these things being used everywhere today without you knowing. Robert Cialdini touches on the psychological blindspots used which bypass your and your children's perception to the issue.
The elements are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove oneself from the situation. Some would argue this also includes time and exposure.
Structuring and Clustering, forces active engagement through specially designed circular trauma loops, forcing the psyche back on itself to destroy itself, and narco-synthesis and narco-analysis which in the 50s used barbituates to trigger dopamine are used today through associative priming through many ways including your phone (gamification uses many of these things learned from research on torture).
It is established that those who are drugged have less resistance to torture, and those with faith-based beliefs tend to resist torture better. One of the first things to go under torture is rational thought.
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If you have to restart later, no matter at which point, even up into 'the kids' 20s ( ultra late bloomers, slackers, kids disgusted by most people for reason Z, drug- or "condition X"-induced deadbeats, repressed kids with and without ADHD, failed or successful attempts by psycho-social environments ) understand three things:
1) you are not pushing, even if you are, you are demanding sth for the sake of your child AND yourself. YOU WANT THIS first and foremost. It's not a bad thing, fuck what the little fucker wants.
It's imperative for the kid to know that YOU WANT THIS no matter the obstacles. You want to see the process and result. It's a form of accountability, I guess. Kids pushing back is some dumb implicit way to check how important THEY and THE THING really are to you _or someone else_ (that counts for the ugly stuff, too). It's part of our evolutionary, hard-coded OODA loop.
2) just start at the very beginning, so that it's easy, almost effortless. The kid will be annoyed on most of the difficulty increases, it always depends on the sub-topic so don't back down. Even 20 year olds will catch up with their successful piers within some time. Neuro-genesis is awesome. Most 'grown up' stuff is child's play and a matter of baseline-human character anyway.
3) your stress level is what matters. Stay cool, be equanimous, serene, check your posture, voice, tone, the discussion won't last 5 min and will be worth it.
Absolutely force your kids to do math.
A friend of mine taught remedial math at UW to incoming freshmen. She would write:
on the blackboard and ask a student "what is the value of x?" The student would see the x, and immediately respond with x means algebra, algebra is hard, I cannot do algebra.So she started writing:
and ask the student to fill in the blank. "Oh, it's 3!"People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value. They might even think how can 24 + 2 = 5? They just want something to grab onto and nobody is really teaching the concept of a symbol in a math class.
We did these sorts of problems for a long time, with addition/multiplication/fractions, and even when we started doing actual algebra the problems were introduced the same way “let’s look at a problem we’ve solved already, and write it in a different way”.
Interestingly mathematical symbols in the past also regularly evolved. Then at some point we just stopped doing that and get stuck in a time which is arguably no longer especially appropriate. So we're left with rather inconsistent symbols, oft reused in different contexts, and optimized for written communication.
The way I was taught it and the way that worked now for my now 3 year old is just to say pirates buried a number under the X, and that we need to guess what they buried. If the concept of a number being hidden is a barrier to understanding for anyone they have seriously bad teachers.
This was what? 5th grade?
What kind of crap teachers never taught that
When teaching addition, workbooks commonly use a box, eg, “[ ] + 2 = 5” — and first graders have no conceptual problem with this. Somehow, we lose people by the time we’re trying to formalize the same concept in algebra. There’s been many times I’ve written a box around letters in a problem and asked students “what’s in the box labeled x?”
Pedagogy is hard.
X = X + 1
once we got it, it was a like new world!
One of my school math teacher had the same approach in another way: We were expected to use greek letters, not latin ones.
Same reasoning: It showed us kiddos that the letter was insignificant compared to the concept expressed by the letter.
So my take would be: Your friend taught the students for the first time what they were actually doing while handling equations with "a letter in it". That is no problem of algebra in itself. It just means their previous teachers sucked.
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She loves it. It uses a ‘?’ for basic algebra style problems and after a few days of playing (if/when she wants to, we don’t make her play it), she was already much better and faster at those problems. It made me think that schools should be giving kids games like these.
https://www.amazon.com/Educational-Insights-Math-Electronic-...
Even if the system was better the person still has to be able to motivate themselves and put in the time.
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Quite a story condensed into those five phrases.
I think there are some differences
If you are a physicist or an economist, you may be using mathematics as a language in the sense that you are using a mathematical description to convey an understanding of the natural world or the economy to your colleagues. But if you are a mathematician, you are interested in the mathematical objects for their own sake.
There is also a difference between the purpose of learning language and learning math. The goal of learning language is (often) to be fluent in it. In other words, the goal is to reach a level of proficiency which would allow you to not have to think about language and focus on the content of the conversation instead. On the other hand, the goal of learning mathematics is usually to be able to solve mathematical problems. Being able to do math without "thinking about it" is not usually a requirement.
Like learning dozens of trig identities without any explanation about why one would need them. As I've mentioned elsewhere learning math for the sake of it isn't enough. For most of us math has to have relevance, and for that we have to link it to things in the real world.
Instead we will just continue to slog along with the same poor system. Math wise, completely at the expense of the top down learners.
I liked math—especially calculus as it made sense to me—but parts became a drudgery when I could see no reason for studying them.
Right, there's always the kid in class who excels at math like a mini Euler and gets bored because the rest can't keep up but the majority of us aren't like that—doing Bessel functions and Fourier stuff as abstract mathematics without any seeming purpose can seem pointless and our only interest in them was to pass exams. (Teaching may be better these days but my textbooks never discussed the value of learning these aspects of mathematics.)
Later whilst studying elec eng/electronics it became very obvious to me how important these aspects of mathematics were. If I'd been given some practical examples of why this math was useful then I'd have been much more enthusiastic.
Same goes for the history of mathematics, I'm old enough to have had a small textbook full of log and trig tables yet if someone had asked me at highschool who John Napier was I wouldn't have had a clue. In hindsight, that was terrible.
Mathematics is often taught as if the student was going to become a mathematician à la Hardy or Ramanujan and I'm firmly of the belief this is not the best approach for the average student let alone those with few math skills.
Mathematics ought to be taught with the real world in mind for ease of understanding. For example, it's dead easy to represent AC power as a sine wave and from there use that mathematical fact to solve power problems. (Perhaps maths and physics texts should be written in tandem and synced to show relevance.)
Teachers need to take time to explain that math isn't just abstract concepts but that it's very relevant to everyday life and that tying up mathematical functions to things in the real world is actually interesting and enjoyable.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but this part is tricky. Yes, it would be nice to have math and physics textbooks synced. Maybe other subjects, too.
But writing a textbook is a lot of work; it can take years. How do we get two textbooks synced, if they are written by different people? One writes their book first, then the other has to match it? What if the other disagrees with how the first book was organized? They both write together? Now there is a risk that one does a good job, another does a bad job, and the good textbook is connected to the bad one.
Or maybe write the common outline first, and then each author is trying to follow it independently? Plus, there could be multiple versions of each book, following the same outline, so each math textbook can be connected with each physics textbook based on the same outline. Here the problem is that people often disagree on the outline.
Also, not sure how important is this part, having things in sync could slow down the improvement in the future. For example, imagine that we figure out a better way to teach something in physics. But now everyone is used to having math and physics textbooks synced, so the new physics books would be rejected, until someone rewrites the math books too.
Math is layers upon layers upon layers. And then it also branches. Never really had willpower to learn it myself alone.
Math, for most people, is the same a bicycles, for most people. With a handful of simple concepts, you can get by daily life.
The key element here is nurturing curiosity. Since then i and my 10yr old have been sitting through a virtual math circle led by Aylean McDonald on parallel.org.uk an organization run by Simon Singh
How children learn (they can't rely on a fully formed prefrontal cortex like adults) is very different than how adults learn (no fully developed prefrontal cortex until 25-26), learning about this can help a lot.
Learning more about the Reggio Emelia approach might help parents curious about this, it has been quite surprising how much is possible naturally. One of the best things to do is to relentlessly read to and with your kids.
Showing kids the math in every day things, especially things they already love is a helpful way of making it approachable, or at least aware.
Also, linking a topic to their interest's radar, encouraging curiosity, play in general, and letting them potentially discover it can go a long away.
When they've got something they want, teaching math and savings is a great thing. Understanding life is a lot harder without knowing a basic bit of math, and can be made a bit easier when doing it younger.
I had a math teacher that once made it clear, some stuff can just click, others is just about doing a lot of examples to learn the patterns. Doing math is very different than being creative with being comfortable to find it.
Today, I'd probably setup a good prompt to find a way for the child to share their mine to discover how they like to learn, and how they might like to learn faster and easier by taking some shortcuts through math directly or on navigating an ontology/taxonomy perspective.
My mom would bring us into the clubhouse in the backyard and read to us, which I found really boring. Ended up not liking books because of it, and I'm pretty sure the same happened to both of my brothers. For years I'd only read the bare minimum required for school.
Years later I happened to see an neat book cover in the impulse-buy section of a store and begged for the book. That one book was what actually got me set on reading, and from then on I'd always have something with me.
She never realized this and still thinks I like reading because she read to us. I can't help but wonder how many of the anecdotes here are also parents not realizing what's actually going through their kids' minds.
The "undeveloped PFC" argument is shallow, unspecific and usually just used to infantilize younger people. It may be useful if the child is under 6 years old, but at the time someone is 17 or older, it becomes essentially useless.
My learning process was always, and still is fueled by curiosity.
Yes, Lazlo and his wife were both education professionals, and spent an inordinate amount of time dedicated to developing the girls. But look how it turned out.
On a different note, I used to hate sport when my parents forced me to play it. I liked screwing around on the computer or playing video games. However, when I found tennis naturally around 12 or 13, I couldn't get enough of it, and vastly improved on my own because I had a lot more fun playing than most of my peers did, who were forced into it by their parents. Most of them don't even play for fun anymore with friends, and I'm in my mid 30s and still play frequently.