I appreciate she's asking questions about the topic. I don't understand math at all, never did, and I counted myself lucky to pass math with a C-. I hated it all with the burning intensity of a thousand white-hot suns
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Replying to @suburbanbeatnik @arthur_affect
to me, it was all... blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blahpic.twitter.com/Ig2iwKz9BL
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Replying to @suburbanbeatnik
Yeah and I dunno on some level that's fine You're a grownup now and you're living your life and you know all the things you need to know to live it, more or less
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
Lockhart's Lament is partly him just getting mad and asking what the point of math class is at all Like the traditionalists say the really important thing isn't all this highfalutin philosophical bullshit, it's whether you can work out the square root of 7 with a pencil if asked
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
And Lockhart is just like "Well they can't Most people don't remember how to do any of that shit after they're out of school for like two years It's a total fucking waste of time and money already so why yell at me that my version of math education is 'impractical'"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
"The kids are right, most of them are just going to become English majors and rely on a calculator"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
It's a lot like bad piano lessons Like a lot of bad music teachers actually don't really teach you to love music or understand it on any real level They just kind of torture you through playing Für Elise badly and by rote until you get through it with "no mistakes"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
And they'll say "Don't give me that shit about how Mozart played games with music and how Duke Ellington etc built a whole tradition around improvising etc Most kids aren't geniuses For most of them sight reading their way through Für Elise is the best they'll ever do"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
And it's like okay Well why do that then If a creaky, mechanical interpretation of Für Elise is the best they can do why make them do it at all What the fuck is the point of having 10,000 kids play a horrible butchered version of the same great piece of music every year
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
They could go do something they like doing instead Watch a movie, play baseball, go out on dates It would have the same beneficial impact on their future career and earning prospects as the torturous dreary piano lessons (zero)
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The argument is that this kind of thing is the only way to *discover* great musicians, to *build* a talent and love for music that wasn't there, that maybe 9,999 of those kids are wasting their time but one of them will come to really love music and do something great
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Replying to @arthur_affect @suburbanbeatnik
I am, to put it politely, skeptical this is the right way to do it
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Replying to @arthur_affect
that seems like an Unlikely Prospect. It just seems to me like some modern iteration of 19th century "accomplishments"
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End of conversation
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