In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Robert Frick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I happened to have a vehement and probably radical opinion on this.
>One of my sayings: "Ironically, our educational system is ideally suited
>to teaching computers and ill-suited to teaching human beings." If you
>are going to program a computer to do statistics, tell the computer
>rules to follow.
I must echo just about everything in this posting!
At least at this time, this is all the super-fast sub-imbeciles
can do. A computer will do exactly what it is told, no matter
how stupid it is. If you ask it to add zero to a number until
the number increases by 1, it will keep doing this until
some higher level rule, like not giving you too much time, or
an interrupt, intervenes, or until the machine fails.
> If you give students rules to memorize, they will surely forget them.
>If you had a student who learned and applied the rules, people would say
>that the student was mindlessly following rules and couldn't think for
>him/herself. But your best student will just remember half the rules --
>and by that, I mean half of each rule.
I would not rate the power to memorize as that low. But they
remember only the rules, and will apply them to anything, even
if they are not appropriate, and they will apply what they
have remembered partially. Most of us who have taught calculus
level statistics classes have seen student apply the wrong rule
to integrate the normal density, and in lower level courses,
after calculating the probabilities of numerical outcomes, they
still compute the expected value using equal weights.
> I know it is hard to make statistics fun, but FOLLOWING RULES IS NEVER
>FUN. Not in math, not in games, nowhere.
> There are advantages to teaching rules. Most students like it. They
>certainly understand that method of teaching. They just won't learn
>anything.
They have been so brainwashed in this that they resent being
expected to do otherwise. Understand a few principles, and
the rules make sense, which makes them easier to remember,
and in addition can make them easy to derive, which makes
it unnecessary to remember them.
>Bob F.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
