Critical thinking is taught in schools. When I think back far enough to my daughter's elementary school education, teachers were trying to develop it by at least 4th grade (9-10yo). Starting the next year, she had classes in civics that continued through to high school (14-18yo) where she is now. As I write this comment, her world history class is discussing yesterday's events in DC in a point/counter-point fashion.
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.
sort of a tangent, but I wonder if the emphasis on proper scholarly citations gets in the way of the actual critical thinking part. when I was in middle/high school, most of the teachers seemed to care more about us following the APA/MLA format perfectly and using proper "authoritative" sources than whether our arguments actually made sense. I was never very efficient at making bibliographies or sifting through academic papers, so I felt a perverse incentive to cite as few sources as possible.
the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...
Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.
I quite several times over the years, one time as long as 6 months. I go back, ultimately, because I love the flavor.
That said, I would never work as early as 9am if I didn't have to. Caffeine allows me to jumpstart my brain for programming. I need coffee in particular: tea sustains but doesn't jumpstart.
Exercise first thing in the morning can act as a substitute for coffee in getting my brain jumpstarted. While I find it easy to exercise at 6:30-7am in the Summer and Fall, Winter and Spring in southern New England suck. At 6:30am, it's often dark, 10-20F, windy, and damp. It's an area made for depressions. I can't see ever giving up coffee while I live here.
It's important to point out that about every decade you're going to have to adapt your diet and exercise to meet changes in your body. I'm 53 now. When I don't exercise at least 5x/week I start to have sleeping issues. Alcohol affects me more, especially my sleep. Carb bombing happens with a portion of half the amount I could eat 10 years ago. Back to coffee, I have 2 espressos in the morning and, occasionally, one after lunch but never after 2pm. Breaking any of those coffee "rules" causes me hypertension, sleep loss, and/or a sour stomach.
Sorry for the tome. Hopefully some of it is useful.
IIRC academic studies have shown that people don’t ”love the flavor”; rather, they misattribute to flavor the craving they have for the neuropsychological effects of their preferred substances.
I tried black coffee for short durations and hated it. So, I'm willing to say my experience follows the conclusion of the study.
However, people have wide variations in what they taste (and smell) as pleasurable. Without reading the study, I have a hard time being as binary as "nobody likes the taste of coffee".
The author seems burned out given his age. (I'm going to assume a male author given how few women were in the field 20 years ago.) I went through the same stage after working for a mid-sized financial institution. I had a plan to retrain as a physical therapist. I left the job and lived on savings and my wife's salary. Six months into it I started to write software again: I missed it. So I contracted for 1.5 years and wound up working in-house for a university as a developer. Here I stayed for 14 years now.
Early in my time at the university I started to feel again the way the author describes. When I started to attend local tech meetups and started to take university CS classes out of interest, I started to feel rejuvenated. About 3 years ago, I changed to a team of much younger developers. They used modern tools, had less bureaucracy, and developed distributed applications, which I had little experience with. That was the step I needed to get excited about development again. Now I'm working extra time on my own because I enjoy the work. I'm also taking up niche areas, like language design, in my personal time.
To anyone reading this who might feel the way the author does, I give the advice to focus on finding your cultural fit and figure out the priority of your values. When I worked for startup companies I loved the absence of bureaucracy and the rapid adoption of new technology. But I hated having to wear a lot of hats: I really despise desktop configuration and system administration. My current team has some bureaucracy but we have teams to handle the things I dislike. So it's a compromise that I feel works in my favor.
I didn't notice if "participation" meant meals available or actually picked up by kids. Kids, particularly younger ones, who are in unstable households may not get to school in time to pick up what's available. Some districts have adapted by doing grab-and-go available anytime or serving meals in the classroom.
My biggest problems as a math major at the undergraduate level were proofs. I could muddle my way through abstract algebra proofs but real analysis just didn't click.
The oddity is that I could read proofs for both subjects: the reasoning made sense. But I couldn't develop a proof.
I had a similar experience doing my math minor. All the way through Caluclus classes and Diff EQ and up until the first half of Linear Algebra, everything is plug and chug. After the first half of Linear Algebra when proofs started making an appearance, I came to the realization that proofs are another type of mental activity entirely. Survey of Algebra, Basic Real Analysis, and even the dedicated proof writing course I took were all exponentially harder to pass.
What was yours like? The one I took didn't cover much on the actual writing of proofs. The professor accepted reasonable essays with high-school level notation. Instead, he gave us a toolbox for proving things: pairing terms in a series to find the sum, rewriting recursive equations, etc. It was mostly to show that clever tricks are how mathematicians prove new things. But that might've been because the professor was a guy who reveled in clever solutions.
It has been over a decade so I don't exactly remember - I looked it up and the class was Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning.
What I personally recall was following along in class while the professor walked through classic proofs emphasizing what each new notation meant as well as the difference between Direct, indirect, and induction proofs. Tests and assignments were essentially recreating proofs cherry picked to be similar to ones we walked through in class.
I realize that's kind of how all my higher level math classes were run. It's just that once the cherry picking becomes looser, intuition doesn't necessarily catch up :(.
My university realized the need for a proof writing course a little too late to help me. Students who did well in the more abstract math classes, aside from the outlier "gifted" mathematicians, formed study groups. I wasn't mature enough at the time to realize how valuable those groups were so I went it alone and my grades reflected it.
I had a very similar experience during undergrad. I loved most of my classes through Linear Algebra but developing proofs felt like trying to learn a new language. Unfortunately, it never really clicked for me.
I'd love to know how to develop an intuition for writing proofs from scratch.
I also strugged with analysis. I always felt like epsilon-delta proofs involved pulling some absolutely strange value for delta out of your ass that happens to work out in the end, and I never developed an intuition for that. Same with integrating by parts, oh it just works out so nicely if you rewrite u in this totally obtuse way.
The tricky thing with analysis that I don't think many professors are good at conveying is that the ordering of statements in the proof isn't the same as the ordering of steps the proof writer performs to come up with the proof.
Basically you sort of write the broad strokes of the proof up front, leaving the right hand sides of statements like "Choose epsilon such that epsilon = __" blank. Then you do a bunch of scratch work to figure out what epsilon needs to be so that your proof works out in the end.
Another challenge with analysis is that inequalities are central, so fluency in their manipulation is absolutely critical. And naturally most students aren't fluent with them by the time they take analysis, so they get bulldozed by Baby Rudin and learn to hate a pretty cool (and useful) branch of math
Python is an excellent teaching language. It's simple to install. You follow a tutorial by typing something at the REPL and it gives you results. Learning stuff like importing modules, etc. happens as your coding ambitions increase.
Something else to consider is the Python shell at python.org/shell. Students often have Chromebooks. I'm about to mentor second year high school students who are interested in CS. Several of them have Chromebooks only. I can recommend Python and point them to the shell.
I would think Python got a good bump through Hour of Code and other programs to introduce people to coding.
Interesting tidbit. I'm take an online course in Mexican cooking. The first unit is making tortillas. The chef covered the traditional way. You take dried corn, cut from the cob, and soak it in lime (pickling lime) water overnight. Then you grind it. I wondered how Mexicans use corn as a staple when it doesn't digest well. Question answered.
The lime helps the corn loosen its 'husk' as well... Nixtamalization also involves washing and husking the corn before grinding. The husk is the part that isn't digestible.
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
I think we need to be careful about the free speech debate in this case. Free speech applies to civic life, not your relationship with a business. Near me we have a bar that doesn't tolerate swearing. On your first offense, the bartender gives a warning. On the second offense, you have to leave. The bar owner has the right to make a rule that makes his business a more pleasant environment. As a result, the bar does quite well. Google has the right to do the same in order to make the experience of YT better.
It's amazingly difficult to get away from. For those of us who had Yahoo email accounts, trying to get people to stop emailing them is a slow drawn out process. My wife and I switched to Gmail accounts at least 5 years ago. We still get friends and relatives sending to our Yahoo accounts. This, despite multiple requests to stop.
People seem to either reply all on old messages whenever they want to contact us or copy/paste email addresses from old messages, like invitations for Christmas parties, when they contact us. Either way we can't get away from Yahoo.
The other issue is companies using email addresses as user names. Just a few days ago, I went through Yelp to order a food delivery fulfilled by Grubhub. The order confirmation listed an old Yahoo account as the contact email. This was courtesy of Yelp using the Yahoo account as my login. Yelp provides a way to add an email address and make it the primary. Not all businesses do.
If I could snap my fingers and be done with Yahoo, I'd do it. I started to move us from it when Marissa Meyer was still CEO.
I shed my Yahoo mail 15 years ago. It was easier back then, especially since I was moving to Gmail, which was miles ahead of Yahoo's interface at the time. I don't even remember when I stopped checking my Yahoo account, nor when it was automatically disabled because I didn't log in for too long.
About two years ago I started moving away from Gmail, and that was a lot harder. I kept checking but eventually had to just set up a vacation responder. I still check it about once every couple months, but to truly move away from an email address, you have to really stop using it.
I maintain a Yahoo.com email account but I'm not sure why. I have Gmail pick up the mail using POP and that's where at least 90% of the emails in my spam folder come from.
I guess I worry about there being something out there that I used long ago and want to retrieve. And they started recycling email addresses: https://celeretech.com/blog/yahoo-begins-recycling-e-mail-ac... So there was the fear that somebody else would take over your old address.
That was a long time ago (2010) and they reversed direction but there's nothing going on with Yahoo that makes you think they won't do it again.
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.