World’s Oldest Sport

To steal Uncyclopedia’s warning: “This article or section may be overly British. Americans may not understand humour, only humor. Canadians and Australians may not understand anything at all.“  Bon appetit!

There is a sport so ancient that it predates all other forms of entertainment. It came just a little bit after “fun with fire”, and only narrowly beat “wheel games” to the finish.

The sport in question was “let’s laugh at Johnny foreigner and his ineptitude with our (superior) language, and then base all our sitcoms around it”^[1]. It’s been going a loooong time, believe me:

Okay, not quite Stone Age, but you get the point. Hysterical, yes, but what we’re really saying is “your lack of ability/experience at our language is something to laugh at”.  Well, steady on, I say.  Do we laugh at cripples because of their lack of ability to propel themselves from A to B? Or at cancer victims whose bodies are ill-equipped to deal with tumors? Of course we don’t, even if it was their own fault – it would be thoroughly unsavoury, and social suicide to boot.

It is a strange thing therefore that the British have this peculiar tendancy to make fun of non-British accents.  “Ha ha, you’re different” – the sort of thing you might expect to see in a nursery, or school, or BNP conference.  (As it just so happens, Fawlty Towers was poorly received the Continent, because all those mainlanders were miffed at being the butt of John Cleese’s jokes – and perhaps rightly so.)

Nevertheless, the show eventually became a rip-roaring success, and was to make acceptable much other comedy that revolved around linguistic deficiencies – and not just on the television.  Take Engrish.com for example.  No, that’s not a typo – it’s a slightly cruel way of referring to English as stereotypicarry spoken by the Japanese, praying on their inabirity to make a “l” sound and applying it more generally to the imperfect English so many of them produce:

Simple mistakes, caused by an incorrect assumption that direct translations will produce readable results in the target language.

It’s all very well to chortle at these schoolboy errors, but you’ve got to give them credit for trying.  You have to start somewhere in one’s quest to conquer a second (or even third or fourth) language.  Small failures are always going to be a part of big successes, and that is life.  Not trying is at the root of all real failures, and it’s ironic that many people who laugh at these kind of mistakes can’t speak any other language, at any level. Who really gets the last laugh?

So the next time someone sniggers at your garble-age of their language, tell them two things – one, you’re learning a thing so monumetally large you’re bound to make a mistake here and there, so deal with it, and two – piss off.

^[1] Loose translation of the original text.

Teaching and Tutoring

Waaaaaaaay back, right when I started this blog, I mentioned that humans could only remember seven plus or minus two bits or information at any given time – and that this could be exploited for speedy learning of vocabulary.

I therefore question why we have an education system in which each class has 30 to 35 students.  How the hell can a teacher focus on each of these students at once, to make sure they’re always learning something they find interesting and stretches them?  Answer: they can’t.

I think the problem started in the Victorian era, with the introduction of free schooling.  Nothing wrong with that, but there was obviously an incentive from the government of the time to keep costs as low as possible.  After all, the schools weren’t there to (directly) make money.  This meant that the class to teacher ratio was kept as high as was reasonably possible, and this model has been passed down through public schools ever since.

Of course, the main problem with large classes is that every student has to sit through the same lessons and do the same activities.  It’s not reasonable to expect a teacher to be able to simultaneously have 30-odd pupils doing different things.  Sometimes, a student might be clearly progressing faster than his classmates, and the teacher will give them more difficult assignments – but this happens comparatively rarely.  Even then, the teacher is supervising only two (and at most three) different activities, and students progress at a lowest-common-denominator pace.

And this is silly.  It’s no wonder some of the end-users of our schools get bored and behave as delinquents.  Personally, I always found that if I worked hard at school for a week or so, I just ran out of things to do.  Then, it was a week of doing nothing while the rest of the class caught up, and I just sat there inattentive.  This inactivity might spill on for several weeks in a depressing cycle of binging and going cold turkey (in terms of schoolwork) – I’d be lax for several weeks and then struggle to catch up later in the term.

I have never had a tutor before (although I’ve been one), but I suspect they’re normally only called in when students are struggling with a subject (as opposed to when they’re doing really well with one).  I contend that they find certain subjects hard because they never got the basics, this being a consequence of their teachers being unable to given them sufficient personal attention.  It is depressing to sit through classes one doesn’t understand, and galling that the simple remedy of one-on-one learning could solve the problem easily.

What I’m therefore proposing are class sizes of seven plus or minus two, in accordance with Miller’s Law.  This would strike a perfect balance between teaching and tutoring – we wouldn’t have to hire one teacher for every student (unreasonable), but at the same time we wouldn’t have an education system that artificially slows the rate of student progress.  A teacher could then focus on all of his students simultaneously, making sure that they were neither finding their course too easy or too hard, too slow or too fast.  This in turn would mean that since students would reach higher levels of education faster – it’s not impossible to believe that students could learn all the material from primary and secondary school in half the time (since occasionally children labelled as “gifted” are allowed to do so).  They could then move on to higher study, in which they could work more independently.

Here’s the maths: if we reduce class sizes by a factor of ~4, and speed children through their education twice as quickly, we only need twice as many teachers as we do today.  We’ve just made a load of tutors redundant, so they can take up some of that slack.  Even better, teachers have fewer assignments to grade and report cards to fill out, so the number of extra staff needed is even smaller.  And don’t forget, we’re not wasting any time on exams – each teacher will know exactly what each student knows, and so formal examinations (with the lengthy marking and re-marking processes) are no longer needed.

In other words, by simply re-structuring our education system, we can make far better use of time of its end users – children – without markedly increasing the amount of money spent on teachers.  Since pupils would rarely be at a loose end, we might find other societal problems caused by education-for-the-masses would slowly die out.

The bottom line is that one size never, ever fits all – and to try to make a system that caters to everyone is one that is ultimately bound to failure.

What Do You Really Know?

As you may already have guessed, I think that the education system as it stands is rubbish. Terrible. And it is for a lack of neither good teachers nor inherent student enthusiasm. I contend that it is stilted by the eternal desire from governments (and individuals, for that matter) at all levels to measure progress.

Now, I have nothing against measuring things.  In fact, part of this blog is about measuring my own progress – but it’s in a very qualitative way.  I don’t know how many words or tunes or facts I know – I don’t care, and it’s not important.  The knowledge itself is what’s important.

As a physicist, it’s always been pretty obvious to me that there are some things that you just can’t do – there are a whole host of physical systems too difficult to describe in a way that is both accurate and simple. Vastly complicated computer programs need to be devised to describe, for example, the flow of real water in a real river. This should come as no surprise, since we live in an inherently complicated world, and the reason students only study simple systems at school is because – well – they’re simple, and therefore easy to understand.

Something that is vastly more complicated and less well understood than the ultimately describable physical world however is the human brain. Psychologists are, to all intents and purposes, clueless about what goes on in the human mind – how is information encoded in the brain? We may have an idea of where information is stored, but as for anything more complicated, we know nothing.

I think that it’s therefore not unreasonable to suggest that it’s not really possible to accurately and simply grade what any given person really knows through the medium of a one-off written exam – and there are all kinds of problems that arise from written papers:

1. The results of a paper can be drastically changed by practising how to pass exams.  Studies have shown that going through past-papers increases exam performance significantly.
2. The one-off nature of exams encourages one-off study bingeing, followed by study cold-turkey.  Finished an exam? Great. Now you can forget whatever you just learnt.  Sure, all teachers will tell you to pace out your learning, but very few people I’ve come into contact with actually have.  This problem can be compounded by universities explicitly encouraging students to waste time partying as much as possible (in the UK anyway – don’t know about other countries).
3. If you fall behind with studying, for whatever reason (anyone got a student job?), it’s that much harder to catch up again in time for the final exams. Exam papers are designed to be taken at specific times each year – fail (for example, because of illness or running out of money), and you might, might just be able to retake it half a year later. Demotivating, to say the least.
4. Things that are easy to measure are not necessarily interesting.  I learnt how a fridge works whilst studying Thermodynamics recently – that was interesting.  How solar panels work?  Interesting.  These things have never been examined at my university though, whereas endless abstract mathematical calculations and elegant physical theories have.
5. Governments have an incentive to show their voters what a great job they’re doing with their country’s education system – which means they have an incentive to make exams easier each year as a quick way of showing apparent improvement.

The favoured antidote is coursework – which is little better, since it’s far too easy to cheat on. Last time I checked, there were companies offering paid-for degree essays (complete with a guarantee that the misdeed would go unnoticed). It seemed to be typical at my school for parents to chip-in or do outright GCSE and A-level coursework of their offsring – to the detriment of the more honest students. Another method of measuring progress that’s inherently flawed.

I propose therefore a radically different system, taking a degree-level course as an example. Rather than having exams at set times, you can take them whenever you want – when you feel you really, really understand the laws of thermodynamics and their implications and applications, then you can go show the relevant professor what you know, in an oral examination.  In fact, scrap the term “exam” – you’re just going to go and discuss some physics with him, once a week if you like.  The line between progress measurement and tutorial would be blurred – assessment becomes a learning tool, and vice versa.  The important thing, of course, is that your professor would know how much you know, without the need for an exam – and as such, he’ll also have a good idea of how to keep you personally interested over the course of time.

There would be no grade classification (as in modern medicine courses) – you either know your stuff, or you don’t.  This would discourage study-bingeing, and let students work at their own pace (such that they could also learn things outside of their subject properly – language anyone?); it would also eliminate problems like pre-exam stress and illness, and would even let students earn enough to support themselves financially without damaging their degree.

In the case of a maths based subject, your professor might ask you to go through a proof, calculation or derivation on the board, variants of which the student would have meticulously practiced beforehand.  Arts subjects (e.g. English) could continue to be essay-based – but under frequent consultation with a professor (thereby reducing plagiarism opportunities, since the evolution of the essay could be seen). Explaining the content of an original essay verbally would be much easier than expatiating on one that had been fraudulently produced.

Note that this alternative system is not significantly more time-intensive than the current system; someone still has to mark and double-mark an exam script, then add up the marks, then collate them… not a good use of time, methinks, especially since it’s at the expense of personal tuition.  Note also that it doesn’t require dispensing with targets and milestones; it merely makes more of them that are smaller.  We get an education/examination system built around bitesize, manageable chunks - and anyone who uses an SRS will know that that’s exactly the best way of approaching learning.

Now, there are some obvious problems here, mostly to do with how much time academic staff can reasonably spend on individual tuition sessions as described above.  And I’m also aware I’m overgeneralising too – I don’t hate easy-to-measure things completely, I just think they’re usually less interesting than more practical applications.  But this is an entire education system we’re overhauling, a cornerstone of modern society!  I think there are ways of making it workable – to be covered soon…

P.S. I’m also aware that it is possible to succeed and do really well and learn under the current exam system, but only if you work hard at the right times.  Even then, it’s tempting to slack off once the pressure’s off, with the result of forgetting what you’ve learned.  Waste.  Of.  Time.

i am a barber!

I used to love Sesame Street when I was a kid. There are loads of reasons why – it was one of the few children’s shows that assumed its audience didn’t have brains made of cotton wool; a lot of the sketches are also genuinely funny no matter what age you are, meaning that parents can sit through the show with children (giving them feedback that a TV can’t). Anyway, I was nostalgically watching clips on Youtube when I came across this Ernie and Bert sketch:

The most important line, I think, is this one:

“What do you mean I’m no barber?! I’ve got myself a barber pole, a pair of barber scissors and a barber comb, and I got barber mirror – and so I am a barber!”

This is, of course, analagous to a trap that a lot of people seem to fall into. “I’ve got my gym clothes; I’ve got my gym membership; ergo, I’m getting fitter!” being one of my favourites^[1]. Or, “I’ve got all the textbooks on the course; I’ve arranged them nicely on the shelf; I’m learning!”.

It’s not happening.

The “trick” is to do more than just be an owner of these items – to accept that they are merely vehicles to success, that without extensive work on the part of the owner that they are worthless. Just as having a barber’s tools does not automatically make Ernie a competent barber, having a load of study materials/gym clothes/whatever does not mean that you’re going to be automatically successful. I cringe at the number of unused Japanese textbooks cluttering up my room; I thought at the time that it was a useful way to spend money. Daft as this sounds, I was a collector (but importantly, not a user) of Japanese textbooks.

I remember in my first Japanese class (run by the local council), there were several businessmen; only one stayed on until the end. The ones who dropped out really, really wanted to succeed – they’d paid for the class, and the textbooks, and audio tapes – and they started enthusiastically. They dropped out because they couldn’t make time to do any work; they assumed that simply turning up a class each week would magically make them speak Japanese.

Knowledge is interesting, because it’s intangible. You can’t go down to a store and pay for instantly knowing kung fu^[2]; for starters, kung fu isn’t just about knowledge, since it requires physical strength and dexterity. If you spent much of your life studying, even if you were completely bankrupted, you’d still retain what you learned; it’s not like a physical possession that can be collected by a repo man. (Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is even more interesting – a lot of people won’t get why you might want to learn things even when you’re not taking an exam or don’t have some other specific goal.^[3])

I guess this is just a longwinded way of saying that learning tools are just catalysts for being able to learn – without the reactant of hard work, they’re not useful. It may take a lot of work (and hence time) to succeed, but it’s the only way; if time is a problem, maybe it’s worth looking at how to make the most of what’s available, or even how to make space from other activities.

^[1] These are also usually the people who drive half a mile down the road to the gym and back again afterwards, rather than, I dunno, WALKING, RUNNING OR CYCLING?!

^[2] And no, it doesn’t matter how many times you watch the Matrix, that kinda knowledge loading just ain’t gonna happen. Not in your lifetime anyway.

^[3] Case in point – my boss at work (fluent in French and German, and a language teacher for several years) dismissed my learning Cantonese as a “waste of time” on the grounds that it wouldn’t be useful economically – that I should be spending time on Mandarin or German instead. Except, of course, that my friends don’t speak Mandarin, and neither do my girlfriend’s family. Not to mention Cantonese is a fun language to speak. Gee, I’m really wasting my time, aren’t I?

critical thinking

In case you hadn’t already guessed, I have a bad habit of procrastinating.  In fact, I’ve devised probably hundreds of ways of avoiding doing what needs to be done.

Case in point: every time I open a physics text, rather than diving right in to the meat of what I should be studying, instead I go for the preface and/or introduction every time.  (I attribute this to the lack of maths – plain prose is always easier to understand than scientific jargon interlaid with equations aplenty.)

I did come across something interesting the other day in doing so though, which reminded me of one of fundamentals in good studying that I’d kinda lost sight of.  It went something like this:

“Be critical of everything you read – every concept, every explanation, every theory.  Approach everything skeptically, and spend some time satisfying yourself that what you read is plausible.”

The last part is clearly most applicable to hard sciences and maths, where it’s reasonable to assume that no matter how skeptical you might be, there’s a good chance what you read is correct.  I think the rest of the idea though can and should be applied to all the information we come into contact with, especially given the vast array of information that is output from sources with varying agendas.^[1]

Blindingly obvious as this all is, I thought it was nice to be reminded that there’s ultimately no reason to listen to anyone or read anything without ever asking “why?” or “what’s in it for you?” – or even “so what?”.  Occasionally I forget to be critical of other people’s ideas, for whatever reason (newspapers, blogs, politics – you name it) – and it’s to nobody’s advantage if they were wrong and their words went unquestioned.  (An obvious “truth” I accepted without really thinking was the idea that language learners shouldn’t to speak until they were “ready” – but I think I got a lot out of considering other approaches.)

Anyway, all of this is pretty vague (and did I mention obvious?), so I apologise in advance – although there may be more to say on the subject some other time.  The bottom line is that it’s really important to always be questioning what comes our way – after all, the ability to ask questions is something uniquely human.  A monkey doesn’t really care why bananas grow on trees – he just knows that he likes eating them!

^[1] Something that struck me most recently was that of the Mexican Gulf oil catastrophe – there’s a sizeable amount of media coverage debating whether BP or Transocean is at fault.  Clearly some blame does lie with the drillers, both for not doing enough to prevent disasters and for not making preparations for such an eventuality – but it seems obvious that at least some of the rap should be taken by end-consumers who insist on burning petrol in their cars every day.^[2]

^[2] And yes, I’m well aware that oil is used for other things too (plastics, pharmaceuticals etc.), but that doesn’t change the fact that something like 2/3 of American oil consumption goes into private transport.

run!

I remember reading Dr Piotr Wozniak (Supermemo creator) suggesting that doing some exercise was a really good way of improving absorption of new information and recall of old. It wasn’t the first time I saw the idea, and it seemed pretty plausible – there have been waaaay too many times where I’ve found myself sat at my desk all day, managing no more than watching Gorillaz videos on Youtube whilst browsing the news/hilarious blogs. Other days, when I needed to go to work though (a ten-mile round trip by bike), I tended to get a lot more work done when I got back.

Now, I tend to be a lazy cyclist – it’s far too easy to get up a decent speed and then coast for a while, rinsing and repeating as required. Whilst this makes for an awesome way to get around, it’s harder to turn into proper exercise without going too fast.^[1] So, I figured I’d go running instead.

I say running – right now, that’s an unduly charitable description. It’s more like jogging, really. Fast walking? Unfortunately, my body has taken an aversion to the latest turn on events that have beset it. It’s started off like this: “Hey, I thought we had an agreement? You [brain] didn’t want to do exercise, and I got to do sweet sod all! What gives?!” A couple of weeks down the line and it’s changed its tune a little: “Man, we live in a society of free trade. Can’t we just, like, pay someone else to exercise for us? That’ll work, right?”. There may be more stages yet to come.

Anyway, it’s been fine from a Cantonese/saxophone point of view – it’s a good opportunity to really listen to music. So far (over the first four or five times of getting out) I’ve been able to buckle down to a lot more work on getting back home. A tentative success methinks – but it’s probably too early to tell… I think the main thing is that despite the continual and unignorable protest from my body, I don’t completely hate it (yet)

Update: I think the article with Dr. Wozniak was this one – not sure though, doesn’t seem quite as I remember it…

^[1] Funny story – I was whizzing down a hill at 30mph the once, and decided it would be a good time to let hands and handlebars part company.  Then, I went one better and took my feet off the pedals.  Then, I slipped off the front of the saddle and had an unfortunate and altogether unwelcome meeting with tarmac; now I have a permanent aversion to high speeds…^[2]

^[2] But that still doesn’t make me wear a helmet. Yes, I’m a complete dingbat.