[ExI] common core educations standards, was: RE: far future

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2014, Mike Dougherty wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 5:42 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> >
> >> "Tyler made 36 total snowflakes which is a multiple of how triangular
> >> snowflakes he made. How many triangular snowflakes could he have made?"
> >>
> >> Did ya get it?   {8-]  They have a funny backhanded way of asking
> >> questions.
> >>
> >
> > I see the missing word.  ;)
> >
> > As to the math part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, or 36.  It's a factoring
> > question.

Adrian: how did you answer this so quickly? Have you pacted with Satan, 
perhaps? :-P

> >
> I'm interested in the backstory where Tyler has the nano-fabber capable of
> making snowflakes of arbitrary sidedness.

Yeah. Does he pour some substance into a form? Does he construct them atom 
by atom? Could there be structural improvements as to the atom layout, 
producing equivalent snowflake with less atoms? Or maybe he grows them 
a'la natural way?

BTW, what material? Water? Could he have used something else?

> this is also another example of why non-math people 'dislike math' - the
> question should be:  what are the factors of 36.  The introduction of
> "Tyler" and "snowflakes" and "triangular" and all the nonsense is just
> confusing distraction.  Once the math principles are understood, the
> application of those principles really would be better understood in an
> interactive data analysis.  I feel like we're assuming children are too
> stupid to do so-called "big data" analysis in 4th grade.  I also feel like
> the right teacher would make that fun.  Instead we hire data scientists
> (applied-math geeks?) to do it for us.
> 
> I'm not really sure what are the goals of "common core"

My own hypothesis is, it's good to have dumb masses. Especially nowadays - 
conscription times is over, workers in the fabs are on their way out. 

In Poland, we used to have exams but no tests. Now we have tests. One 
doesn't have to pass a university-specific exam to enter it. Only unified 
tests matter. So nowadays, I hear, first year of studying is spent 
teaching students what they should know if they were to pass the now 
non-existant exams. Stupid academics, they think students are to know 
anything. ;-/

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **