{"id":83293,"date":"2023-07-03T03:00:08","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T07:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=83293"},"modified":"2023-07-02T18:28:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T22:28:43","slug":"schools-fail-their-students-when-they-try-to-teach-things-the-students-have-no-interest-in-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/07\/03\/schools-fail-their-students-when-they-try-to-teach-things-the-students-have-no-interest-in-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Schools fail their students when they try to teach things the students have no interest in learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/daviddfriedman.substack.com\/p\/reasons-to-learn\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">David Friedman<\/a> has several examples of success in learning when the learner suddenly <em>wants<\/em> to learn the material:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Dungeons-and-Dragons-rulebooks.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Dungeons-and-Dragons-rulebooks-480x318.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"318\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-25102\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Dungeons-and-Dragons-rulebooks-480x318.jpg 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Dungeons-and-Dragons-rulebooks-150x99.jpg 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Dungeons-and-Dragons-rulebooks.jpg 624w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One of the problems with our educational system is that it tries to teach people things that they have no interest in learning. There is a better way.<\/p>\n<p>What started me thinking about the issue and persuaded me to write this post was an <a href=\"https:\/\/apprenticebard.tumblr.com\/post\/654996323894984704\/transnikolaorsinov-betadunsparce-me-when-i\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">online essay<\/a>, by a woman I know, describing how she used D&#038;D to cure her math phobia.<\/p>\n<p>How to Cure Mathphobia<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>I was failed by the education system, fell behind, never caught up, and was left with a panic response to the thought of interacting with any expression that has numbers and letters where I couldn&#8217;t immediately see what all of the numbers and letters were doing. The first time I took algebra one, I developed such a strong panic response that it wrapped around to the immediate need to go to sleep, like my brain had come up with a brilliant defense mechanism that left me with something akin to situational narcolepsy. (I did, actually, fall asleep in class several times, which had never happened to me before.) I retook the class the next year. I spent a lot of that year in tears, with a teacher who specifically refused to answer questions that weren&#8217;t more specific than &#8220;I don&#8217;t get it&#8221; or &#8220;I have no idea what any of those symbols mean or what we&#8217;re doing with them&#8221;.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Until she had a use for it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The first time I played D&#038;D, I was a high school student. My party was, incidentally, all female, apart from one girl&#8217;s boyfriend and the GM, who was the father of three of the players. We actually started out playing first edition AD&#038;D, which I am almost tempted to recommend to beginners, just on the grounds that if you start there you will appreciate virtually every other edition of D&#038;D you end up playing by comparison. I might have given up myself before I started, except that one of the players in the first game I ever spectated was a seven-year-old girl, and I was not about to claim that I couldn&#8217;t do something that a seven-year-old was handling just fine.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>One of my most vivid memories of this group is the time we were on a massive zigzagging staircase &mdash; like one of those paths they have at the Grand Canyon, that zigzag back and forth down the cliff face so that anyone can reach the bottom without advanced rock-climbing. We saw a bunch of monsters coming for us from the ground below, and we weren&#8217;t sure whether they had climb speeds, but we didn&#8217;t super want to wait to find out. The ranger pulled out her bow to attack them before they could get to us.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Now, wait a moment,&#8221; says the GM. &#8220;Can your arrows actually reach that far?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Well, they&#8217;re only, like, sixty feet away.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;No, it&#8217;s more than that, because you have to think about height in addition to horizontal distance.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Yeah, but that&#8217;s, like, complicated?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Is it? Most of you are taking geometry right now, don&#8217;t you know how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>There were some groans. Math was hard. But we did know how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle. We got out some scrap paper and puzzled over it for a couple minutes, volunteering the height of the cliff and the distance of the monsters and deciding that we could ignore the slight slope caused by the zigzagging stairways. We got a number back and compared it to the bow&#8217;s range per the rules. We determined that we could hit the monsters without a range penalty.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>We killed the monsters. This wasn&#8217;t the real victory that day. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Friedman has several examples of success in learning when the learner suddenly wants to learn the material: One of the problems with our educational system is that it tries to teach people things that they have no interest in learning. There is a better way. What started me thinking about the issue and persuaded [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,14],"tags":[1351,755,778],"class_list":["post-83293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-gaming","tag-dungeonsanddragons","tag-incentives","tag-mathematics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-lFr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83293"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83295,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83293\/revisions\/83295"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}