Posts Tagged ‘“Outliers”’
“You have the right to make errors and not to understand in school”, and you are intelligent too
Posted May 9, 2012
on:“You have the right to make errors and not to understand in school”, and you are intelligent too
You have this math teacher who addresses his class: “I adore students who can’t comprehend math. This is great: I will be of service. Together, we’ll do some progress…” This teacher never gives up and keeps repeating and trying different approaches until the topic is understood and the students feel “good in math”
An experiment was conducted and the only variation between the experimental and the control groups of students was this priming warning: “Learning is not easy. It is very normal that you’ll make mistakes. With practice, you’ll invariably succeed...” The experimental group outperformed the control group.
This type of experiment was done in many different kinds of mental tasks and learning fields, and the results are very consistent: Let the student know that it is normal to make mistakes and not understand…
Apparently, in most countries, the school systems do not prompt students that failure to understand is part of the learning process.
Students are not initiated to manage difficulties in learning. When a student does an error, he feels paralyzed by a sense of incompetence.
The traditional message in school systems, transmitted by teachers, is that “Generating mistakes and errors is a bad tendency. Only result counts…”
Experiments are demonstrating that failure to succeed in school has little to do with intelligence deficiency or lack of good will to learn. It is the competitive climate that is doing most of the ravages in students’ failure to doing well in school.
What are these competitive gimmicks that tie students in knots?
1. Teacher asks students to raise hands when solving a problem or answering a question. You could have an answer, but you need extra time to think it out. The consequence is that you feel totally incompetent relative to other students, and you feel bogged down for the “slowness of your mind”
2. Students are ranked every month for performance. Even those students in the 10th percentile feel not suited enough for learning or going to graduate schools.
Can you tell me the kinds of competitions you had to be submitted to in your school?
Do you feel that having to constantly compare your performance with the other students is pretty depressing and not conducive to good learning habits?
In Finland’s school system, student of less than 13-year do not submit to exams, rating, ranking, or any kinds of competitive gimmicks. And Finland ranks the highest among the western school systems in student performance. Still, Asian students do better in math and sciences (China, South Korea…). Why?
First, Asians are good at math because their language allows them to count faster. For western language the numbers “four” and “seven” takes way longer to pronounce than “si” and “qi” in Chinese. Particularly when we deal with longer numbers like 389, or 10,932…
Chinese number system is very logical for adding and subtracting and for easy memorization and mental calculations. Chinese can associate numbers better and have more time to think in solving a math problem instead of spending four years (as with western languages) to learn how to count and spell correctly numbers.
Not all Chinese will have this advantage if they were brought to America at a very young age and learned English in kindergarten. The Chinese that are born in America are taught English when they start school and so have hard time learning to count numbers in English. At home, the Chinese kids learn to count in the simple Chinese number system.
Second: Growing rice is an extremely hard and complex work, waking up at 5 am and caring for the rice paddy all year round. And this habit comes with a reward. Rice is life to a Chinese farmer and rice is needed to run a family business as well as food throughout the year. Their thought is that if a farmer does not work hard, they will starve to death and the land becomes lazy.
Chinese have acquired a reputation for being hard workers and handed down from their ancestors. Asian kids are most probably raised at home to become hard workers and those are the Asian students who get higher scores in math and sciences tests in comparison to other ethnicity.
The Asians kids gain a “built in advantage” of several years over the western kids. It is not just a matter of acquiring mental agility as it is practicing doing real math, instead of practicing how to count and spell numbers for years. Read link in note 2.
Note 1: Post inspired from a piece by Jacqueline de Linares in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur
Note 2: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/a-few-cultures-find-math-easy-many-cultures-have-difficulties/Malcolm Gladwell’s chapter in “Outliers” on Rice Paddies and Math Tests
A few cultures find math easy: many cultures have difficulties
Do you think math abilities is genetic? Not quite, apparently. Do you think that math is just a matter of manipulating numbers? Not quite, apparently. There are at least four main factors that promote math thinking and abilities:
First factor: There are indications that math aptitude is generated from customs of persistent habit in resolving problems. It appears that doing well in Math is related to engaged attitudes for working hard: The more persistent and resolved to solve a problem, the longer your attitude to be engaged in what you do, the better you are in math.
For example, people in culture working in rice fields that require constant and hard effort all year round do better in math than other people who just saw, forget the field for a season, and just reap in the proper season. A rice paddy, the size of a room, is built from the ground up, irrigated frequently at the proper level, and constantly maintained and worked 360 days a years, rain or shine…A rice paddy is literally “blood” and sweat and waking up everyday at 5 am to tend to the paddies: The rice peasant and his family have to tend to the adequate amount of water, varieties of proper rice shoots, cleaning each plant from parasites…If you need good quality and two harvest, you have got to sacrifice blood, sweat, persistence, endurance…The survival in rice planting culture is very delicate, and working hard with resolve is a way of life.
Second factor: Cultures with vocal numbers that are reduced to single syllables do better than culture complicating the utterance of simple numbers with long string of syllables. Why? Kids of 5 year-old, instead of focusing on manipulating numbers, spend many precious years just memorizing how to say and comprehend verbal numbers. Our short-term memory of a couple of seconds can handle ten syllables, and if the numbers are of single syllable, kids are better at memorizing and recalling strings of 10 numbers in any order they are presented: Digits are fun and no longer a complicated manipulation of transformations from the verbal to the numeric dimensions…
Third factors: Cultures with logical correspondence between the vocalized numbers and the digits do better than other cultures in math. For example, what eleven (11) has to do with one and ten? Or the French number 93 (quatre vingt threize) has to do with nine tens and three? Instead of first transforming a complicated vocalized number before figuring out its corresponding digital number, the Cantonese Chinese culture has arranged to say the numbers the way they are written logically.
For example, how would you keep in your short-term memory two numbers such as two hundred and forty-five (245) and seven hundred and twenty-one (721)? Suppose these two numbers are vocalized as (two hundred four ten and five), and ( seven hundred two ten and one), which would constitute 10 syllables since each number is of a single syllable, the kids in which culture would have a qualitative edge in manipulating numbers and math?
Adding and subtracting the two numbers are straightforward in Cantonese: The digits are plainly arranged for computation, and you don’t need several mental transformations before you get to the task of adding…
Kids of 3 year-old in a particular culture have more facility with math than kids of over 5 year-old in other cultures, simply because they don’t need to undergo several mental manipulations and having to retrieve from the various working memory data and information stored in verbal forms and complicated shapes…
Culture relying mainly on trading variety of goods end up devising a coded language for transactions, mainly by truncating the verbal numbers and shortening the sentences in transactions: I guess, lengthy verbal numbers originally adopted in the language are truncated when transacting goods…
Four, kids who are trained to solve all the math problems and exercises after each math chapters, from the easiest to the hardest, in neat and legible handwriting, do better than kids who have no patience of solving but what they consider to be harder than the other problems, and don’t care to sit down and put down on paper how they solved the problem…
This practice of solving all the math problems and exercises has this huge benefit of spending 10,000 hours in math practice-sessions, a requirement to getting top among math professionals…
Curiously, kids and students who excel in math have acquired the habit of focusing entirely on the lesson in class.
Maybe the second and third factors don’t translate well into the abstract domain of mathematics in the long-term, simply because the kids get used to relying very much on their short-term memory and fail to train adequately their working memory for other kinds of intelligence and abilities. But the first and fourth factors are essential for doing great in math.
Note: This post was inspired from a chapter in “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell