Month: July 2018

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The Eating Machine

There is a scene from the 1936 Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times, called The Eating Machine.

In this 4-minute scene, Chaplin, who plays a factory worker, is chosen to demonstrate a contraption designed to automate eating. He is made to stand before the machine, then is strapped so that he can’t move his hands, and before him is a turntable with food.

At first, the machine works well. A small platform underneath the bowl of soup moves it up to his mouth level, then tilts automatically for him to sip the soup. Then the turntable moves around and a plate with bits of food is again raised to his mouth. Then a lever pushes the food into his mouth. Next comes a machine with corn on the cob that automatically moves from left to right, and turns the corn as he eats it.

Chaplin seems to be enjoying this very much as he pretty much doesn’t have to do anything except open his mouth to receive and chew the food. Then things begin to go wrong with the machine. The corn feeder doesn’t stop moving and turning and keeps rolling over his mouth even when he is done eating. The mechanics scramble to fix and reset the machine. They try again and this time, the soup gets spilled down Chaplin’s chest or gets thrown in his face. Another plate smacks pie on his face and another device bangs onto his lips.

Those who enjoy slapstick will probably laugh at this short clip, but I was actually sad as I watched it because it shows a lot that is wrong with our educational system. Kids sit helpless as adults decide what subjects they ought to learn. They force feed the material and keep heaping it on them even if they can no longer take it. The system itself is broken as there are many teachers who are incompetent, who abuse their authority, or pass arbitrary judgements on their students.

I just had a conversation with a friend, John, who talked about an incident he had with his chemistry teacher. He got into a heated argument with the teacher about a statement that she had made until the teacher finally told him to shut up because he was wrong. Later in the term, the teacher corrected that statement. One of John’s classmates then blurted out, “So ma’am, John was right after all.” As a result of that, John got the lowest grade possible for that class.

Talk about throwing a bowl of soup in one’s face…

Children have boundless energy, persistence and creativity. But we force them through the Eating Machine we call the educational system. That system tells them what is “important” for them to learn and tells them to “prioritize” those things first over other things that might interest them more, like maybe drawing, or fishing, or playing computer games. After around 20 years of their lives in this system, only the toughest ones will emerge with that energy and creativity still intact, but most will have been eaten by the Eating Machine.

Is it any wonder then, why we have so many “graduates” today who lack initiative, creativity and direction? You only have to look at the system that produces them and wonder no more.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Math (Part 4)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Later on, I would teach math in high school (I would also teach English, but that is another story).

I guess my love-hate relationship with math helped me in relating with my students’ difficulties. I spent a lot of time on the basics, often reviewing lessons supposedly mastered in elementary, which was often not the case, except for a handful of students. I remembered my own difficulties in high school and I knew that were it not for a lucky circumstance that unlocked my understanding, I would probably be in the same boat with them.

So my goal was always to make my students understand, never mind if I was behind the prescribed curriculum. I thought a lot of it was trash anyway, unnecessary and inapplicable for high school students. I mean, seriously, let’s be honest and realistic. Who uses logarithms or proves trigonometric identities in real life?

What use was it trying to teach them how to factor the difference of two squares when they could barely add or subtract fractions? How could I discuss the Pythagorean theorem and its applications when they did not even know the difference between a square root and a cube root?

After one of my exams, a student reported to me that their elementary teacher was the proctor and he looked at my exam and exclaimed, “Why is your exam like this? I already taught you these things before!” If he had said that to my face I would have replied, “Well, had you done a better job, I wouldn’t have had to reteach all this, would I?”

I also hated memorizing stuff. I just didn’t see the point. You don’t go around in real life with everything memorized. There’s no rule against looking up references. So I had a policy that all my quizzes and exams were open-notes and books. I didn’t think it was valid for students to fail just because they forgot some part of a formula. I wanted them to analyze and think for themselves, not spend precious time memorizing. Besides, even the great Albert Einstein was once said to have looked up his own phone number in the directory, saying, “I don’t unnecessarily fill my head with things that I can always look up.”

Of course, if you waited until the exam before you opened your notes and tried to figure things out, you weren’t likely to pass either because you wouldn’t have enough time, and I always reminded them of that.

I would skip lessons that (in my view) were too esoteric, saying, “Ah most of you won’t even get to touch this in college and more so in real life. Let’s just focus on mastering the basics.”

And yes, I get that question a lot. “Why do I need to study this? Will I really use all this algebra in my life?”

To which I reply, “Well, yes, I actually use algebra in my life.”

“For what?” they’ll ask.

“Well, to teach algebra,” I would reply with a wink.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Math (Part 3)

Image from GeniusQuotes

Part 1 | Part 2

From that moment on, I came to love Math and everything about it seemed easy. I wondered why I was having such a hard time before when it all seemed so simple now.

Then came Junior year and Geometry which was a whole different animal. We had a teacher who wasn’t connecting with a lot of us. Fortunately, one of my best friends from my elementary years, Anthony, came back from a high school in Manila, and had already taken Geometry in his sophomore year.

So after he had explained the basic concepts of proving to me (which at first I found as puzzling as problem-solving), everything became easy. We would solve problems at the end of the chapter and compare notes with each other, while the teacher was still explaining the lesson. If both of us got it right, we could relax and do some other stuff like read a pocketbook or doodle. If one of us was wrong, we would exchange solutions and each would try to see who was wrong.

This tag team with Anthony would later be joined by Eric, my other best friend from elementary, and the trio was complete once more. We would go on to our senior year doing this with physics and trigonometry, and it didn’t really matter who our teacher was though some of my classmates found it difficult to connect with them, but our informal peer tutoring and competition made us zoom ahead of the lesson by leaps and bounds.

In fact, we weren’t paying attention one time and chatting with each other a little too loudly so our math teacher got really mad at us, called us a bunch of “smart alecks” and walked out of the class. We were silent for a few a seconds as he stormed out of the room. Someone at the back who probably also wasn’t paying too much attention asked in a bewildered voice, “Who’s Alex?” and the class erupted in laughter.

I spent most of my high school in sheer enjoyment of math, but college was another matter. I walked into my freshman pre-calculus class oozing with confidence. I listened to the first lecture and found out that pre-calculus was just a review of algebra so I relaxed and sat back and didn’t take any notes. I could follow the lectures and examples in my mind.

Then came our first exam and I stared at the paper and wondered where the problems came from because they looked alien. I struggled to solve them but they seemed ten times as difficult as the lectures and examples. I barely passed that exam with a grade of D which in my mind stood for “deflated” as in it deflated my ego and I went back to diligently taking notes every class.

I guess it’s different when you have Ph.D. level professors. I went through calculus, linear algebra, graph theory and so on. But I couldn’t find my old groove. I didn’t have classmates or peers that I could have that sort of friendly competition and  camaraderie I had with Anthony and Eric in high school.

So I went back to being an average math student.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Math (Part 2)

Image from 52DazheW

Click here for Part 1.

So now I had a page full of word problems which I really hadn’t figured out how to solve in a coherent manner, and now I had to solve it using x and equations, which I barely understood at this point.

I was pretty desperate. This was before the internet so you couldn’t just go online and Google up a tutorial. I remembered my childhood friend, Arthur, 2 years my senior and studying in another school. Arthur was always winning math contests here and there so I thought he could really help me.

I called him up, explained my situation and he asked me right then to read him one of the problems, which I did. Then he told me to write some stuff down, never mind if I didn’t understand it at that point. Then he explained to me what I had just written down, and how it related to the problem. And as I was listening to him, and looking at the problems, and looking at the solution, understanding slowly dawned on me.

To this day, I cannot explain how it happened. One minute, I was a confused mess staring at a bunch of number problems, coin problems, speed problems, work problems and so on. The next minute, I was seeing them in a new light, suddenly understanding how to translate the sentences into equations, then solving for the ever elusive x.

It was like magic.

Arthur walked me through some more problems but this time, I was writing things ahead of him and checking with him if what I had done was correct. He made some minor corrections here and there but at that moment, I understood what it was all about, and the difference was like night and day.

When we had our next class, I was surprised to find out that I was the only one who had answered all word problems correctly. I always thought there were people in class who were miles ahead of me. I mean, I would frequently be in the top 10 list since my elementary days but I was never at the top 5 or thereabouts, so I always felt I wasn’t as smart as some other people who would frequently be in those spots.

My teacher noticed the difference that day and it seemed she looked at me in a new way. I was eager to prove to myself that I had really understood this. I attacked the next problem set with glee, mostly solving it on my own now. I still called Arthur for pointers, especially on new types of problems, but I had things mostly figured out now.

It was amazing how my understanding word problems led to my understanding of almost all the other aspects of algebra that I found difficult before. I made sense of simplifying expressions, factoring, and so on, and I think it was even at this point when I stopped counting on my fingers when multiplying 7×8. I started getting high scores in quizzes and exams.

A few short months later, my teacher selected me and a bunch of others to join the city wide Math Olympiad, competing with other schools. To my great surprise, I finished second place over all.

I felt good. I felt confident. I felt like a rock star.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Math (Part 1)

I wasn’t a bad math student. I had a pretty good understanding of it in my elementary years, but I wasn’t that fast in operations. I had trouble memorizing the multiplication table at the higher digits. If you asked me to do 8×7 for example, I would still have to tick off the multiples of 8 on my fingers: 8, 16, 24…and so on until I got to my seventh finger, then write down the answer — I would do that all the way till high school.

I remember that at the start of every year since around grade 4 or 5, I would have trouble remembering how to perform certain operations like adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions and decimals, or how to get the least common denominator (LCD) and how that was different from getting the greatest common factor (GCF).

Despite that, I was chosen to be one of a handful of “math-gifted” students in sixth grade though I didn’t really feel all that gifted. Looking back now, they must have been pretty desperate. We were asked to cut short our lunch break and come in 30 minutes earlier for special lectures on advanced topics. Again, looking back, was that really a reward or punishment for being “gifted”?

I don’t remember much from those classes except that I struggled to keep up and that it highlighted what I hated most about math — word problems. In all my elementary years, I never understood how to solve a word problem. There was no step 1, 2, 3 to it. At least when multiplying fractions, as long as you memorize the steps, you had a pretty good chance of getting the right answer.

But word problems frustrated me.

Oh I would occasionally get them right but I never felt confident with them and I dreaded seeing them in quizzes or exams. No matter how I studied, I couldn’t prepare for a word problem. Thankfully, teachers didn’t make exams full of word problems, and so I survived elementary mathematics.

Then came high school and the start of algebra. Oh my, here I was trying to remember how to properly multiply decimals and subtract fractions, and now I have to deal with x, y and z, and sometimes a, b and c as well? But given some time, I was able to make some sense of the algebraic rules although factoring left me confused for a good long while, especially quadratic square trinomials.

Somehow, I survived freshman algebra. Now on to my sophomore year.

We began with a review of the basics, how to perform operations with variables, the laws of exponents, and so on. Shortly after that, we were introduced to equations, and then our teacher handed us a page of homework to do over the weekend.

When I got the page, I was terrified. It was full of word problems.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.