In an ideal universe, one would subject every claim to searching and open-minded analysis to determine its truth. In the real world, life is short and there is only so much time to think about things. And so one develops certain heuristics or shortcuts to reduce wasted time. One such: anybody who uses the term “sage on a stage” as a pejorative is an idiot who can be safely ignored.
This is a fantastic post! Thank you for writing it. Of course, the point of Kung's article, in my opinion, is to try to make people feel like they're authoritarian dictators if they lecture or use explicit instruction. In other words, we're supposed to feel like we're bad people.
I want to mention one other thing from his article because the meta-analysis by Freeman et al. that he mentions has been sent to me several times, as some sort of evidence that direct instruction doesn't work. As you point out, Kung presents a bogeyman - lecturing in its most extreme form. And the Freeman et al. paper actually defines lecturing to be the most extreme one-way teaching possible.
Freeman et al. define traditional lecturing in this way: “continuous exposition by the teacher. Under this definition, student activity was assumed to be limited to taking notes and/or asking occasional and unprompted questions of the instructor.”
On the other hand, Freeman et al. define active learning in this way: “Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening. It emphasizes higher-order thinking and often involves groupwork”
The point of the meta-analysis was to examine articles in which traditional lecturing and active learning (according to their definitions above) were studied to try to determine which was more effective.
Their meta-analysis separated out papers in this way: “Note that criterion i) yielded papers representing a wide array of active learning activities, including vaguely defined “cooperative group activities in class,” in-class worksheets, clickers, problem-based learning (PBL), and studio classrooms, with intensities ranging from 10% to 100% of class time (SI Materials and Methods). Thus, this study’s intent was to evaluate the average effect of any active learning type and intensity contrasted with traditional lecturing.”
Therefore, the Freeman et al. paper does not actually present evidence against the effectiveness of direct instruction or explicit instruction (or lecturing at the university level), even though many people use it that way, because most good teachers who use explicit instruction would fall into the active learning category, by their definition. Even at the university level, the type of traditional lecturing Freeman et al. describe (which has NO interaction between students and prof) is rare.
You might think someone claiming people are just learning to accept ideas from authority would have a better logical argument. Yet we are presented with evidence that lectures don’t transfer information is evidence that lectures cause students to blindly accept incorrect information.
The level of stupidity combined with hubris here is staggering. This, I think more so than the Suzuki method which I too suffered as my mother taught beginner violinist for years is the root of the issue.
Organizations which are supposed to have standards for what they publish are publishing obvious crap.
It's definitely not Math lessons. I lay the blame for Trumpism squarely at the feet Suzuki method of music teaching. If rote repetition and blind imitation are to blame for authoritarianism, then the real culprits are the string section.
Having suffered through several recitals by Suzuki-method classes many years ago (15 exquisitely out-of-tune violins), I'd be happy to blame it for *anything*, let alone the election of Trump.
The argument Kung puts forward is ludicrous, as he might have learned if he tried to assess the math ability of the most devout attendees at the rallies. A large swathe of humanity has been taught to accept even demonstrably false statements as truth--and that a willingness to do is the highest virtue--through religion. The religious right has been a cornerstone of American conservatism for decades and has supported Trump more ardently every time he publicly violated a Commandment. Blaming math teachers who can't even get students to accept that algebra is useful for the inexplicable success of a corrupt politician is laughable.
No, math teachers are not responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. But one of the things that is responsible for his rise is our great cultural need for every person and group, including math teachers, to place themselves at the center of things and seek praise or blame.
Glad my piece has generated interest and conversation.
A few notes:
As luck would have it, I'm a Suzuki-trained violinist who started at age 4 and played seriously through high school. Not only am I well-versed in both mathematics and music, I did a Great Courses lecture series (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-music-and-mathematics-relate) on the connections between them (which are many).
The comparisons between learning math and learning violin on this thread are really telling. What I see in some of the comments here is an implicit goal of the teaching of math being to get students to mimic the teacher. That's certainly the goal of early Suzuki instruction. That's not my primary goal for math instruction - because the two subjects differ in a fundamental way: mathematics hangs together through logical reasoning, music doesn't.
Yes, I'm partially talking about passive lectures (exactly along the lines of those as defined by the Freeman report), but more than that I'm talking about how the students perceive whatever the instruction is. As I wrote, I've seen lots of classrooms (in the US & UK) and spoken to thousands of students. Too often what I hear from them is that they don't see the logical connections between the steps they are mimicking. They do those steps because they've been told to and because they need to in order to finish the assignment or do well on the quiz/test.
Is that a few of mathematics you are content with? I'm not.
Lastly, my piece includes this line: "Of course the list of reasons people are swayed by authoritarian leaders is long, and how we teach mathematics is not near the top." Given that, the headline of this response seems like a stretch at best.
Yes, I did notice you row back from your main thesis at that point, but I can hardly be held responsible for your inconsistency. You also wrote:
“However, it’s worth examining – both individually and collectively – how the interactions we have with students and the choices we make in the classroom every day can either support authoritarian tendencies or serve to protect us from them.”
What you have not done, and those who make similar arguments never do, is offer any evidence that your favoured approach actually does lead to students who are better able to reason, are more independent and so on. You just assume it will due to your prejudices.
Dave, I appreciate you joining this conversation. I think picking on this headline is unfair. You are the one who very explicitly brought US politics into a discussion on math teaching methods. You have to own that choice.
Your thesis fails on a few fronts. One, it is not obvious that trump supporters wouldn’t benefit from more respect for some authorities. Most of us would not win an argument with a flat earther or anti vax proponent. They know far more about the topic than most of us. Normal people don’t need to know all the whys of vaccines to pick the right answer.
Secondly, almost no one thinks understanding of the logical connections between steps is not a worthy goal. However, generalizing a deficit here to the extent you do seems a case of the curse of knowledge.
Arithmetic is usually introduced empirically rather than as a consequence of the axioms of number theory.
As with music an introduction that fills a mind with knowledge allows that mind to ponder and experiment. Greg has spent years arguing and studying the case that with math getting some facts into minds first is a more effective path to getting people curious about how those facts come about.
This relies on the idea that the teacher is a trusted authority and is teaching actual facts.
As to your survey of students understanding of the steps I don’t know if anyone can conclude anything from it. You don’t provide any context. Is this business students not understanding how to derive calculus theorems or graduate math students struggling with topology? Is it a bad thing if students have questions about what they learned- why does a shift to a minor key work, why do we even have minor and major keys? When is this a poor lesson and when is this a student asking too much from their own brain and when is it just great they now know what they don’t know and are curious?
Some of the people here are spending their lives trying to get better outcomes for math education. What does not help is bad arguments for avoiding teaching facts.
Both be bringing politics into it and by a caricature of teachers as experts imparting knowledge your article is not helping.
I am sorry you are unhappy. I’m kinda stuck with Substack’s method on this. When I’m back at my desk I’ll look into canceling your subscription and issuing a refund. Apologies.
I have had a look and there is only one John Hammond on my subscriber list and that person has a free account. Are you sure your paid subscription is not under a different name and/or email address? Maybe personal versus work? Feel free to email me by replying to one of my newsletters. We can sort this out and organise a refund.
Hi Greg, Kung is an idiot and is tied to an old idea of prog ed that somehow the "factory" model of ed is turning out authoritarians. Not really worth debating. As a civics teacher, the thing I'm appalled at is when I ask students where they get their news--very few over the past 10 years use major media outlets--instead, they get their news from social media or video outlets like TikTok or Youtube. If they see something by someone they trust (for whatever reason) they're far more likely to believe this. This paucity of information (despite how the internet was supposed to change everything by making information more widely accessible) undermines the critical thinking we hope they take with them into the voting booth.
As far as US politics go, I don't think your view hits the mark--there's a lot of underlying issues from voter turnout to the outdated electoral college process. We also have a strong racist and misogynistic element (call them George Wallace voters), as well as an anti-intellectual religious right which very much wants to dissolve the separation of church and state. Thus the politicization of issues like climate change which harms not only the US but the rest of the world. It's also why white union members voted for the anti-union candidate.
We're in for a wild ride the next four years--Trump has selected the former head of thee WWE as his next education secretary.
On the tiptop music education does anyone know why the likes of Kung don’t spend more time dissing poor Shinichi Suzuki. Is it because they think music education is completely unimportant or because they know the evidence is his method while painful or anyone close by produces amazing violinists.
In an ideal universe, one would subject every claim to searching and open-minded analysis to determine its truth. In the real world, life is short and there is only so much time to think about things. And so one develops certain heuristics or shortcuts to reduce wasted time. One such: anybody who uses the term “sage on a stage” as a pejorative is an idiot who can be safely ignored.
This is a fantastic post! Thank you for writing it. Of course, the point of Kung's article, in my opinion, is to try to make people feel like they're authoritarian dictators if they lecture or use explicit instruction. In other words, we're supposed to feel like we're bad people.
I want to mention one other thing from his article because the meta-analysis by Freeman et al. that he mentions has been sent to me several times, as some sort of evidence that direct instruction doesn't work. As you point out, Kung presents a bogeyman - lecturing in its most extreme form. And the Freeman et al. paper actually defines lecturing to be the most extreme one-way teaching possible.
Freeman et al. define traditional lecturing in this way: “continuous exposition by the teacher. Under this definition, student activity was assumed to be limited to taking notes and/or asking occasional and unprompted questions of the instructor.”
On the other hand, Freeman et al. define active learning in this way: “Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening. It emphasizes higher-order thinking and often involves groupwork”
The point of the meta-analysis was to examine articles in which traditional lecturing and active learning (according to their definitions above) were studied to try to determine which was more effective.
Their meta-analysis separated out papers in this way: “Note that criterion i) yielded papers representing a wide array of active learning activities, including vaguely defined “cooperative group activities in class,” in-class worksheets, clickers, problem-based learning (PBL), and studio classrooms, with intensities ranging from 10% to 100% of class time (SI Materials and Methods). Thus, this study’s intent was to evaluate the average effect of any active learning type and intensity contrasted with traditional lecturing.”
Therefore, the Freeman et al. paper does not actually present evidence against the effectiveness of direct instruction or explicit instruction (or lecturing at the university level), even though many people use it that way, because most good teachers who use explicit instruction would fall into the active learning category, by their definition. Even at the university level, the type of traditional lecturing Freeman et al. describe (which has NO interaction between students and prof) is rare.
You might think someone claiming people are just learning to accept ideas from authority would have a better logical argument. Yet we are presented with evidence that lectures don’t transfer information is evidence that lectures cause students to blindly accept incorrect information.
The level of stupidity combined with hubris here is staggering. This, I think more so than the Suzuki method which I too suffered as my mother taught beginner violinist for years is the root of the issue.
Organizations which are supposed to have standards for what they publish are publishing obvious crap.
It's definitely not Math lessons. I lay the blame for Trumpism squarely at the feet Suzuki method of music teaching. If rote repetition and blind imitation are to blame for authoritarianism, then the real culprits are the string section.
Fair. Blame where blame is due.
Having suffered through several recitals by Suzuki-method classes many years ago (15 exquisitely out-of-tune violins), I'd be happy to blame it for *anything*, let alone the election of Trump.
The argument Kung puts forward is ludicrous, as he might have learned if he tried to assess the math ability of the most devout attendees at the rallies. A large swathe of humanity has been taught to accept even demonstrably false statements as truth--and that a willingness to do is the highest virtue--through religion. The religious right has been a cornerstone of American conservatism for decades and has supported Trump more ardently every time he publicly violated a Commandment. Blaming math teachers who can't even get students to accept that algebra is useful for the inexplicable success of a corrupt politician is laughable.
“Why do I need to learn this?” Etc
No, math teachers are not responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. But one of the things that is responsible for his rise is our great cultural need for every person and group, including math teachers, to place themselves at the center of things and seek praise or blame.
Glad my piece has generated interest and conversation.
A few notes:
As luck would have it, I'm a Suzuki-trained violinist who started at age 4 and played seriously through high school. Not only am I well-versed in both mathematics and music, I did a Great Courses lecture series (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-music-and-mathematics-relate) on the connections between them (which are many).
The comparisons between learning math and learning violin on this thread are really telling. What I see in some of the comments here is an implicit goal of the teaching of math being to get students to mimic the teacher. That's certainly the goal of early Suzuki instruction. That's not my primary goal for math instruction - because the two subjects differ in a fundamental way: mathematics hangs together through logical reasoning, music doesn't.
Yes, I'm partially talking about passive lectures (exactly along the lines of those as defined by the Freeman report), but more than that I'm talking about how the students perceive whatever the instruction is. As I wrote, I've seen lots of classrooms (in the US & UK) and spoken to thousands of students. Too often what I hear from them is that they don't see the logical connections between the steps they are mimicking. They do those steps because they've been told to and because they need to in order to finish the assignment or do well on the quiz/test.
Is that a few of mathematics you are content with? I'm not.
Lastly, my piece includes this line: "Of course the list of reasons people are swayed by authoritarian leaders is long, and how we teach mathematics is not near the top." Given that, the headline of this response seems like a stretch at best.
Yes, I did notice you row back from your main thesis at that point, but I can hardly be held responsible for your inconsistency. You also wrote:
“However, it’s worth examining – both individually and collectively – how the interactions we have with students and the choices we make in the classroom every day can either support authoritarian tendencies or serve to protect us from them.”
What you have not done, and those who make similar arguments never do, is offer any evidence that your favoured approach actually does lead to students who are better able to reason, are more independent and so on. You just assume it will due to your prejudices.
Dave, I appreciate you joining this conversation. I think picking on this headline is unfair. You are the one who very explicitly brought US politics into a discussion on math teaching methods. You have to own that choice.
Your thesis fails on a few fronts. One, it is not obvious that trump supporters wouldn’t benefit from more respect for some authorities. Most of us would not win an argument with a flat earther or anti vax proponent. They know far more about the topic than most of us. Normal people don’t need to know all the whys of vaccines to pick the right answer.
Secondly, almost no one thinks understanding of the logical connections between steps is not a worthy goal. However, generalizing a deficit here to the extent you do seems a case of the curse of knowledge.
Arithmetic is usually introduced empirically rather than as a consequence of the axioms of number theory.
As with music an introduction that fills a mind with knowledge allows that mind to ponder and experiment. Greg has spent years arguing and studying the case that with math getting some facts into minds first is a more effective path to getting people curious about how those facts come about.
This relies on the idea that the teacher is a trusted authority and is teaching actual facts.
As to your survey of students understanding of the steps I don’t know if anyone can conclude anything from it. You don’t provide any context. Is this business students not understanding how to derive calculus theorems or graduate math students struggling with topology? Is it a bad thing if students have questions about what they learned- why does a shift to a minor key work, why do we even have minor and major keys? When is this a poor lesson and when is this a student asking too much from their own brain and when is it just great they now know what they don’t know and are curious?
Some of the people here are spending their lives trying to get better outcomes for math education. What does not help is bad arguments for avoiding teaching facts.
Both be bringing politics into it and by a caricature of teachers as experts imparting knowledge your article is not helping.
Greg.
I have had $50 taken out of my account.
I have not had access to your upgrade for at least 2 years.
Previously l had trouble with subtract doing the same with a writer called Taubo
I contacted them and they just avoided the
While l enjoy your articles the business practices of not informing of the renewing is not ethical.
I am sorry you are unhappy. I’m kinda stuck with Substack’s method on this. When I’m back at my desk I’ll look into canceling your subscription and issuing a refund. Apologies.
I have had a look and there is only one John Hammond on my subscriber list and that person has a free account. Are you sure your paid subscription is not under a different name and/or email address? Maybe personal versus work? Feel free to email me by replying to one of my newsletters. We can sort this out and organise a refund.
Hi Greg, Kung is an idiot and is tied to an old idea of prog ed that somehow the "factory" model of ed is turning out authoritarians. Not really worth debating. As a civics teacher, the thing I'm appalled at is when I ask students where they get their news--very few over the past 10 years use major media outlets--instead, they get their news from social media or video outlets like TikTok or Youtube. If they see something by someone they trust (for whatever reason) they're far more likely to believe this. This paucity of information (despite how the internet was supposed to change everything by making information more widely accessible) undermines the critical thinking we hope they take with them into the voting booth.
As far as US politics go, I don't think your view hits the mark--there's a lot of underlying issues from voter turnout to the outdated electoral college process. We also have a strong racist and misogynistic element (call them George Wallace voters), as well as an anti-intellectual religious right which very much wants to dissolve the separation of church and state. Thus the politicization of issues like climate change which harms not only the US but the rest of the world. It's also why white union members voted for the anti-union candidate.
We're in for a wild ride the next four years--Trump has selected the former head of thee WWE as his next education secretary.
On the tiptop music education does anyone know why the likes of Kung don’t spend more time dissing poor Shinichi Suzuki. Is it because they think music education is completely unimportant or because they know the evidence is his method while painful or anyone close by produces amazing violinists.
Damn auto correct- topic of