Comments on: Xylophones and zebras

By: John Venier

John Venier — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:49:36 +0000

What’s an XBox? Is it like a PlayStation?

By: John Venier

John Venier — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:47:31 +0000

The person using your pottery may not care, but the collector probably will

Seriously, you bring up another point that keeps occuring to me — two of the most valuable things I got out of my education were how to think and how to solve problems. Related to this I recently purchased Polya’s classic , but haven’t read it yet.

By: Clift Norris

Clift Norris — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:52:45 +0000

I think we should have used XBox instead of Xylophones to teach the letter X. The word Xylophones is just too long and doesn’t emphasize the “X” sound. In 30 years when the XBox machine is no longer used, we can call this a history lesson also. Or maybe we should re-do the alphabet monikers every 20 years or so .

By: John

John — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:03:07 +0000

I agree that you have to be careful about having too narrow a view of what’s “practical.” I took some pure math classes that have been very “useful” because of how they changed my thinking, not because of the content per se. And I agree that it’s valuable to explore the boundaries. But there’s a danger of becoming obsessed with the arcane, or not even realizing that the arcane is arcane. I remember a quote from Sir Michael Atiyah to the effect that someone using your pottery doesn’t care that you were able to make it using only one hand.

By: John Venier

John Venier — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:45:48 +0000

Thinking of a stat class, it depends on what the goal is. Zebras are useful when used to point out the limitations of some formulation regardless of how common they really are. So including them may not be primarily about completeness, but as a way of helping students learn about non-zebras. Of course as you point out they may or may not actually help, but that can be said of any pedagogoical technique.

If a person structures a syllabus based primarily on what is common, that would have to be based on some problem domain. Also, one would run the risk of teaching only what is utilitarian. If one’s students are merely meeting some formal requirement by taking one’s class, and intend never to use statistics, then from their point of view everything beyond some vocabulary is likely to be a zebra.

On a related note, I personally see a trend in education of focussing only on job-relevant skills, or skills required to pass an arbitrary test. Why learn history? Will that make you a better programmer / engineer / technician? What about music, art, or even foreign languages other than Spanish (for us in Houston)? Virtually no job listings require any other languages. How are you going to realistically get a job based on learning anthropology? Or topology?

I think we are doing our students and by extension our future a disservice by focussing excessively on the “practical”. Even recess in elementary school is disappearing since it is not directly related to testing skills or job training.

I think the observant can already see the consequences of these priorities.

Then again, I am a zebra junkie.

A good friend of my family growing up was a chemistry professor at TCU. We knew his family well and his daughters used to babysit for us. I can still recall when his oldest child went off to college. Being a professor, he told her that college was a time to explore interests, learn the diversity of human knowledge, etc. She called him and told him she had signed up for billiards, and I believe anthropology, philosopy, medieval history, and ceramics. His immediate response was, “How the **** do you expect to get a job?” Of course he told the story gleefully.