Life In 19x19

Hi skydyr, Bill, thanks for the updates.

Bill Spight wrote:I first heard that it takes around 9,000 hours to become an expert in the late 1960s.

Inflation is infectious...?

John Fairbairn wrote:In any case, the burden of expectations placed on western go teaching
is far too high because too many people want go in cartons now.

This is good stuff; this is good understanding.

Hi EdLee,

EdLee wrote:

schawipp wrote:A dan-level teacher may find it pretty obvious that these groups are weak
and can not imagine that a beginner still struggles in recognizing that obvious fact.

Hi schawipp,

Remember understanding is a continuum.
[...]

Yep, I agree. However when sitting on the lower orders of magnitude on a logarithmic scale, the higher orders become somehow indistinguishable (and maybe also vice versa). When I speak of "Dan-level players" it means that I will always get a decent crushing when playing them without handicap. Maybe the crushing from a 7d would be even more subtle than from a 1d but the overall result would be pretty much the same - at least for me from my current point of view .

schawipp wrote:when sitting on the lower orders of magnitude on a logarithmic scale,

Your understanding is not bad here.

schawipp wrote:I will always get a decent crushing when playing them without handicap.

Indeed. But taking 6H from a 1d (you have a chance) versus a pro (no chance),
you can feel the difference, I suspect.

It has been 40 years since Robert Pirsig discussed the Greek concept of areté in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). What he understood then may still resonate with some of you youngsters.

See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig

IMHO, this book is a classic, but de gustibus non est disputandum.

Hi Aidoneus,

Thanks for the reminder. I've wanted to read that book for years now... some day I'll get to it.

EdLee wrote:Hi Aidoneus,

Thanks for the reminder. I've wanted to read that book for years now... some day I'll get to it.

Ed, I really think that you would enjoy taking the ride with Pirsig. (Perhaps not so much his follow-up book, Lila. The difference between pointing at the moon and giving a chemical analysis, if you follow my meaning.) As I came from a mathematical background, Pirsig's discussion of the philosophical ideas of Henri Poincaré (a hero of mine) in relation to the concept of quality inspired in me a much deeper appreciation of Eastern ideas and led me to take a long random walk through translations of Chinese literature. Of course, like most everything, I am a mere dilettante.

Aidoneus wrote:Henri Poincaré (a hero of mine)

Hi Aidoneus, I'm sure you can appreciate Poincaré, Perelman,
and Wiles' math infinitely more than I can.
That's very nice. One of mine is Feynman.


YouTube has a lot of nice stuff: Poincaré Conjecture -- Numberphile

Culture and Etiquette, 2

Disclaimer: yes, over-generalization is bad,
and we have to be careful of anecdotal evidence.

(a)(b)

EdLee wrote:Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms

That is one of the best videos I've seen in years Ed, thank you very much for sharing...

Hi topazg,

You're very welcome. I like it a lot, too,
and every now and then re-watch it and/or forward it
to friends.

EdLee wrote:Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms

Robinson's ideas are in the humanistic tradition of John Dewey, A. S. Neill, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow. They run counter to the thrust of most education reforms of the current day (in the US, anyway). New recruits for Teach for America, for instance, are taught to run their classrooms more like prisons than factories. As in my day, children are trained to be still, be quiet, be on time, know their place, and conform. But now, under the banner of "No Excuses", they are put in more rigorous straitjackets, especially if they are minorities. Sometimes the teacher in my classes would tell a student to stop looking out the window. Now students get demerits if their eyes are not glued to the teacher at all times.

There is a kind of war going on in public education, with the humanistic side in retreat. Take Weather Woman, for instance (a meteorologist featured in another video). She would like fifth graders to do arithmetic computations almost as well as calculators, if not as fast. But what happens when divergent thinking meets third grade arithmetic? In our schools, divergent thinking loses, as a rule. Weather Woman wants kids to learn not just the right answers, but also the right ways to get those answers. She poo-poos textbooks that ask kids for different ways they can find the answer (an attempt to foster divergent thinking). That does not make them good little calculators. Real mathematicians are creative, akin to poets. When John Conway visits third grade classrooms, kids have fun. Unfortunately, we cannot have a Conway in every elementary classroom.

I came to humanistic education by way of teaching English conversation in Tokyo to adults. My training was in the behaviorist tradition. My students had learned to be quiet. But conversation requires talking. Well, I knew how to get them talking. Reward any speech. And that means to reward mistakes. Within a few weeks they were talking. So far so good. Now was the time to shape their behavior by differential reinforcement. So I began correcting errors. Wrong! They clammed up. OK. Back to rewarding everything. When their errors were such that I did not understand them (to keep to our theme) I asked questions so that I could understand. After a few more weeks I noticed something strange. They were making fewer errors. That was not supposed to happen. So I gaily continued to make my classes rewarding for my students, without trying to shape their behavior. That is how I started to come around to student centered education.

I've never been quite sure what to think of Dewey. Often he wrote about educating the whole person for a life as a citizen in a democracy rather than just training children to become workers, yet he was a strong supporter of William Wirt's Gary Plan (Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow https://archive.org/details/schoolsoftomorro005826mbp). Applauded by Carnegie for producing malleable industrial workers, the Gary Plan involved the implementation of rigid subject rooms and school bells, as well as a strong emphasis on "shop" classes (wood working, metal working), drafting, and other skills useful for industry.

A disclaimer. I graduated from William A. Wirt H.S. in Gary, though by the early 1960s it had fully implemented a tracking system. Some of us took lots of math (geometry using Euclid (!), algebra, trigonometry, calculus), science (biology, chemistry, physics), U.S. and world history (context, not just dates), English (yes, reading classics), foreign languages (Latin, in my case), etc. While the non-college track students were forced into shop classes, home education, consumer math, minimal non-rigorous science, little-to-no reading assignments, history as indoctrination, no extra languages, etc.

So, I just cannot reconcile Dewey's support for Wirt with his vast writings on educational theory.

A couple further references:

Noam Chomsky, Education is Ignorance, http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm

John Taylor Gatto, Chap.9, The Underground History of American Public Education, http://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john ... anagement/