Imagine there is no math!

Was it in an episode of Star Trek, or was it The Twilight Zone, in which aliens were plants?  If only I were a science fiction junkie; I would then have retained this earth-shattering (get it?) detail!

Aliens don't have to be like us at all.  Their shapes and sizes could easily be beyond our wildest imaginations.  It is like that fourth-dimension that Carl Sagan sketched out a long time ago: As much as two-dimensional "people" would have no way of imagining the three-dimensions of ours, we might be incapable of understanding four dimensions, or sixteen for that matter!

Which is why there is nothing about the "natural" numbers that we are taught in math:

Counting “only exists where you have stones, trees, people—individual, countable things,” he says. “Why should that be any more fundamental than, say, the mathematics of fluids?” If intelligent creatures were found living within, say, the clouds of Jupiter’s atmosphere, they might have no intuition at all for counting, or for the natural numbers

That excerpt is from an essay that asks: What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered?

When they teach math, they don't make us think about these things, right?  They simply march us on through numbers, multiplication tables, fractions, angles, calculus, ... 

Instead, imagine if they asked kids in, say, the third grade whether aliens would do the same math that we do.  If aliens and their kids do not have fingers and toes, then will their counting and numbers be different?  Why don't they spark imagination and creativity in children, even as they teach numbers and multiplication tables?

The older I get, the more I value imagination and creativity.  We seem to systematically kill it.

Remember this from not too long ago?

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do. We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area.

I know I am ranting. I am getting old, I guess.  So, I will wrap up ;)

Drawing a few lessons about life and education

Way back in school in the old country, my friends Vijay and Srikumar were very good with pencil drawing.  Animals, nature, and even people, you name it and they easily could.  I, on the other hand, couldn't even draw a line!

How on earth do some people--even without any formal training--draw and sing and dance and write poems and more?

I have forever wondered about this, and have even blogged in plenty about creativity.  I get pissed off when education systematically marginalizes all these, and then write something like this, which I did a year ago:

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.
All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why when I read about one of the MacArthur "genius" Award winners, I was easily bowled over.

Lynda Barry, whose class at Wisconsin helps college students tap innate creativity, is one of the honorees.    Barry was tapped for the award for "Inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication."

I followed the link and listened to a 30-minute interview with her from six years ago.  Yep, there is no doubt about her genius.

Barry says there:

I find so interesting is there's that longing to make things stays with us our whole lives, and there is a lot of sadness about it, and a lot of, a lot of terror about drawing. I mean, that's the - that's the part, when I'm working with the people at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, I'm around geneticists and mathematicians and physicists, all these people who are also - and they do their big formulas on the board, you know, delta epsilon minus two and whatever they're doing. But if they have to draw like even a stick figure, they freak out. So that's interesting to me.

Count me as one those sad people!

Maybe some day we will think beyond how to prepare young children as coders and programmers and worker bees, and encourage them to explore their inner creativity.  Further, it is not as if creativity and imagination are "wastes" in the scientific and analytical thinking; remember this quote from a week ago?

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

On my part, later this evening I will go watch and support some creative people.  That's something "creative" that I could do.

Imagine!

Read the following:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Who do you think said that?

Even if you can't name the person, any guesses on what that person--a famous one--was known for?

The keyword there is "imagination," right?  And this imagination is linked to knowledge. And the quote begins with "artist."

We might be tempted to think that it was a famous person in the arts.  That's what I would have thought.

Think again.

It was Einstein!

Aha, you say, because we are immediately reminded of Einstein's famous thought-experiment approach to big questions.

It is not only Einstein.  Science itself requires imagination.

[It] doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to observe that, without the essential first step, without a creative reimagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all.

Now think about your own science classes.  Did you ever get a feel that science called for imagination?  To the contrary, chances are great that the classes came across as one boring thing to memorize after another boring thing, right?  I tell ya, every day I am amazed that we humans have progressed this much despite our best attempts to kill curiosity, learning, and imagination.  As Picasso--another imaginative mind, though a thoroughly flawed human--said, through schooling we make sure that students do not become artists!

Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science.

The older I get, the more I am frustrated by our screwed up approach to education.

I have blogged before on the role of imagination in science.  Like here, in which I quote Freeman Dyson:

Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. ... Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. 

Of course, the imagination is cross-checked by experiments and evidence, which is why string theory, for example, hasn't broken through--great imagination, but no proof. At least, not yet.

I have always known that I lack that kind of imagination.  But, as I noted here:

Education and learning are perhaps also about stretching one's imaginations.  It is easy to walk around with a limited view of the world, but is a challenge to expand that view.

I try my best to get that view across to students and colleagues alike, even though I know fully well that I am not winning.

Be dragonflies, not flatfish

When you read a line "The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of conformity," and with the author imploring you to rebel, chances are that you will be tempted to conclude that it is some uber-left intellectual who has gone off the rails, again.

The essay titled "Let your workers rebel" is in the Harvard Business Review.

I will give you a minute for that to sink in ;)

Now, my experience with the private sector was for a grand total of nine months, and that too in the old country.  And, it was in an era when India was still relatively a closed economy and with the Berlin Wall seemingly impenetrable.

But, one of the many reasons why I knew I would never fit into the private sector was this: I knew I could not conform.  Heck, I have that problem even in my chosen profession!

So, when the author--Francesca Gino--who teaches at Harvard Business School, writes and talks about the importance of non-conformity, I feel like I don't have to read the essay in order to agree with her.  But, read I did.

Few leaders actively encourage deviant behavior in their employees; most go to great lengths to get rid of it. Yet nonconformity promotes innovation, improves performance, and can enhance a person’s standing more than conformity can.

It is like with students and children too.  The downside is that the more successful we get at promoting constructive nonconformity, the less we enjoy the relationship when they begin to question and rebel ;)

My research also shows that going against the crowd gives us confidence in our actions, which makes us feel unique and engaged and translates to higher performance and greater creativity.

Seriously, they need to do research to find this out?

Of the different real world examples that Gino provides in her essay, the one that I liked the best was this:

Look for disconfirming evidence. Leaders shouldn’t ask, “Who agrees with this course of action?” or “What information supports this view?” Instead they should ask, “What information suggests this might not be the right path to take?” Mellody Hobson, the president of Ariel Investments and the chair of the board of directors of DreamWorks Animation, regularly opens team meetings by reminding attendees that they don’t need to be right; they need to bring up information that can help the team make the right decisions, which happens when members voice their concerns and disagree. At the Chicago Board of Trade, in-house investigators scrutinize trades that may violate exchange rules. To avoid bias in collecting information, they have been trained to ask open-ended interview questions, not ones that can be answered with a simple yes or no. Leaders can use a similar approach when discussing decisions. They should also take care not to depend on opinions but to assess whether the data supports or undermines the prevailing point of view.

I am mighty glad that the private sector is realizing the importance of non-conformity.  The old country is about all conformity.  I assume this HBR essay won't go far there!

Why "Be dragonflies, not flatfish" in the title?  Read the damn essay; I can't do all the work for you! ;)

Stayin' Alive in The Wall

I have forever blogged about creativity in the time of advanced computing.  Routine tasks can be translated into algorithms--even facial recognition, yes.  But, creativity?

There is no formula for creativity.  After all, if there is one, then that can be written up as an algorithm, right?

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.

All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why I fully resonate with the following:

Machines are already superintelligent on many axes, including memory and processing speed. Unfortunately, those are the attributes our education system currently rewards, with an emphasis on learning by rote.
It doesn’t make sense to me. Part of my job as an investor is to attempt to predict the future – I need to make bets on the way we’ll be behaving in the next two, five, ten and 20 years. Computers already store facts faster and better than we do, but struggle to perfect things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking.
We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.
We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area.

The system in K-12 and in higher ed increasingly make no sense to me.

As an example, think about how music comes about.  And then think about such remixing:




Of course, there is a lot more to creativity than to music alone.

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.
We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area. Science and maths, which are often considered uncreative, have shaped human history with huge creative leaps. It was creativity that allowed Newton to discover gravity while observing a falling apple as he was thinking about the forces of nature.

Tell me something that I have not been yelling about!

Oh well ... nobody cares :(

Here is Sir Ken Robinson, whom I have quoted a lot when it comes to creativity:

If only students would listen to me!

The older I get, the more I am temped to respond with a "doh!" when I read stuff that I have been saying/writing forever.  But then other than the few losers, er, readers here, who cares about what I have to say, right? ;)

In this essay on the importance of innovation, I read the following sentence:

GPA was associated with innovation, but maybe not in the direction you’d think.

Why the "doh!" you wonder, eh ... let me tell you that first before I report on the innovation essay.

For starters, I have this post from December 2012, with the title "Education does not equal pursuing the GPA" in which I quoted a better known person:

The pursuit of the perfect GPA is a distraction that leads too many students away from the challenges they should be facing in their undergraduate years.

You can already see the connection, right?  In the American system (with which I am most familiar) students can follow a number of strategies in order to pursue the GPA.  They can, for instance, avoid the sciences if they think they are not quite strong in that field--even if they are genuinely interested in science.  They can bypass learning a foreign language if that is not their best suit.  Or, even within these, they can avoid mean old professors like sriram who have may earned a reputation for being intense.  Very rational, if the goal is the GPA.  But, the un-challenged mind is not good at creativity and innovation!

As I wrote in this post from March 2013:

Thus, we end up graduating students with high GPAs, making sure that all students being above-average is not merely the case in a fictional Lake Wobegon!  Commencement ceremonies now routinely have magna- and summa-cum-laudes by the dozens--of course, very, very few of them from math and science, and nobody seems to even acknowledge that!  Once, when I participated in the university's deliberations on choosing the outstanding graduates, I made a mistake of commenting that it would not be fair to compare GPAs of students who were in different majors; I was surprised that there was no discussion on that point. Keep ignoring and eventually people like me will go away, I suppose!  It worked--it has been years since I participated in those discussions.

 Have I established by now that I have always been railing against the GPA?  If only students understand that.  No, correct that.  If only faculty understood that and passed along to students that an easy A or an easy C or easy whatever is not going to help them at all.  It is no longer a world in which every college graduate can immediately transition to that successful middle class life.

Back to the innovation essay then:

From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.
Time spent in these areas might really benefit innovation, but not necessarily GPA.
Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.
We see this work as confirmation of our findings – grades, by their very nature, tend to reflect the abilities of individuals motivated by receiving external validation for the quality of their efforts.
Perhaps, for these reasons, the head of people operations at Google has noted:

GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring.

If only students understood that! :(

And, the essay presents everything that I tell every one of my classes.  Like this:

Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments.

Any student who has been in any of my classes, even if that student slept through, knows well that my courses are structured exactly along those lines.  I emphasize over and over the importance of the ability "to create and answer their own questions."  Of course, I have posted about that too:

Higher education is then about understanding concepts enough to be able to ask questions.  In the format that most of higher education is, students rarely are taught how to ask questions.  And if they never figure this out after four years of university education, then all the access that Google provides will be of zero value.

Despite the "doh!" it does feel good to know that I am not alone in this cosmos ;)

If only students would listen to me though--for their own good!

Ditch the testing mania if we really want students to learn

It is time for midterms.

No, not that one in which the two parties will once again come together in order to choke the lives out of us regular people.

I am referring to midterm exams in the academic quarter system in which I work.  The students in my classes know all too well that I hate "tests."  Instead, what I provide them are structured opportunities for them to demonstrate their understanding of the materials.  This is no semantics here.  After all, the whole point of education is for students to learn and show us how much and how well they have learnt?

But, we focus on testing.  And that too via standardized tests.  Why?  Because that is easy.  Way easier than to systematically find out what every individual student has understood, and why they have not understood something.

Any half-brained politician--ok, there are very few fully-brained ones!--loves talking about more testing as if that is the panacea.  And then the idiotic demagogues look across the seas at a Japan or a China or a Russia and then jingoistically beat their chests and yell out that more testing is what we need in order to beat the crap out of the countries that threaten our number one status in the world.

Seriously, is that what we really want from education?

As Diane Ravitch puts it in this NYRB essay:

There was no educational problem, it seemed, that could not be cured by more testing.

Yep. Every few years, the Geriatrics Only Party and the Democrooks take turns arguing in favor of more testing.  First it was the patriotic alarm over the Soviets. Then the economic alarm against the Japanese.  And now the economic and patriotic alarms that the Chinese are taking over the world.

There is only one word that is appropriate to describe these: chickenshit!

Back to Ravitch:

It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other eleven nations by every measure, whether economic productivity, military might, technological innovation, or democratic institutions. This raises the question of whether the scores of fifteen-year-old students on international tests predict anything of importance or whether they reflect that our students lack motivation to do their best when taking a test that doesn’t count toward their grade or graduation.

The typical fifteen year old is immensely smarter than the chickenshit demagogues!

Tell us more, Ravitch:

Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation’s governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism.

Yes, indeed.  A victory for authoritarianism.

So, how were things in China?  Yes, "were":

A system called keju lasted for thirteen hundred years, until 1905, when it was abolished by the emperor of the Qing dynasty. This system maintained Chinese civilization by requiring knowledge of the Confucian classics, based on memorization and writing about current affairs. There were local, provincial, and national examinations, each conferring privileges on the lucky or brilliant few who passed. Exam scores determined one’s rank in society. The keju was a means of social mobility, but for the ruling elite, it produced the most capable individuals for governing the country.

And what did it achieve for the culture that was ever so dominant?

keju diverted scholars, geniuses, and thinkers away from the study or exploration of modern science. The examination system, Zhao holds, was designed to reward obedience, conformity, compliance, respect for order, and homogeneous thinking; for this reason, it purposefully supported Confucian orthodoxy and imperial order. It was an efficient means of authoritarian social control. Everyone wanted to succeed on the highly competitive exams, but few did. Success on the keju enforced orthodoxy, not innovation or dissent. As Zhao writes, emperors came and went, but China had “no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.”

And, for the most part, this system continues in China, South Korea, Japan, India, ... On top of that, the focus on testing means that students, teachers, parents, and everybody else tries to then figure out ways in which they can game the system. Cheating and fraud follows.

Is it any surprise then to read something like this?

The announcement by administrators of the SAT college entrance test that scores are being withheld for students from China and South Korea who took the exam earlier this month has infuriated many and raised anxiety about what for a number of them is a high-stakes college application process.
The Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test worldwide, said Wednesday that it was withholding the scores of those who took the test on Oct. 11, at least temporarily, because of suspicions of cheating “based on specific, reliable information.” The company referred in a statement to “organizations that seek to illegally obtain test materials for their own profit, to the ultimate detriment of all students.

Ahem, isn't SAT one heck of a standardized test?  ;)

In 2007, administrators voided 900 SAT scores from South Korea. Last year, administrators canceled an exam in South Korea scheduled for May 2013 after accusations of attempts at widespread cheating were reported in the domestic news media. That forced some of the 1,500 South Korean students who had signed up for the exam to scramble to apply to take the exam elsewhere.
In November 2013, South Korean prosecutors said they had indicted eight “SAT brokers” who had hired students to memorize questions of exams taken abroad or posed as test-takers themselves, using secret cameras to take pictures of questions. Prosecutors also indicted 22 managers and teachers at test preparation companies in South Korea for buying the illegally acquired SAT data.
In both South Korea and China, academic cheating has been a long-running problem. Professors, officials and celebrities have been exposed for having plagiarized dissertations or even faked degrees.

I am worried that the Baptists and the Bootleggers will end up with a lot more of the standardized tests.  I suppose I should simply give up, shrug my shoulders, collect my paycheck, and participate in the enterprise called education whose mission is to screw the students.

Creativity and original thinking. If only I could!

So, when I blogged about Narendra Modi's methodical quest to lead the country, I titled the post "India turns to Narendra Modi for gung-ho capitalism and national pride?"

The Economist, while commenting about Modi's ambitions, titles its report in a way that makes me so jealous: Finding NaMo.

What a wonderful play on Finding Nemo!  Now, why didn't I think of that!  Darn :(

So, how the heck can one become creative?  As John Cleese remarked:

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

Yes, creativity is so inexplicable.

Stayin' Alive in The Wall

One of the best remixes I have seen/heard recently.  If we can create such things, then I am all the more in favor of Lawrence Lessig's proposal to teach remixing.

ht

Internet and creativity

I am not sold on the idea that somehow the growth of the internet impedes creativity.  Often I think it is the other way around .... and here is an example of how creative people can get and, more importantly, how easily that product can be shared with the entire world:

Source

Schooling, creativity, and .... plagiarism?

I was absolutely intrigued by the caption of a column in The Hindu--Creativity and Education: Contradictory Impulses? So, I started reading it, given my own interests in this topic.

Well, the overall tone there seemed to be less original, and more of a convenient paraphrasing of Sir Ken Robinson's much viewed and discussed 20-minute Ted.com talk. (I have embedded it at the end of this post.)

The only "new" idea in Rajivan's column is right at the beginning about cows and amoebae.

When I reached the end, I was simply taken aback that Rajivan would outrightly use Sir Ken's anecdote about a child drawing a picture of god, without attributing the source!

I wonder if the author thought this was kosher; not in the definitions of plagiarism that I tell my students.

The author fails outrightly in trying to convey the argument about creativity and education, and instead comes across as having no original idea--perhaps an example of a lack of creativity on the author's part, on top of the plagiarism ....

Creativity: What does Karl Marx pour on his pasta?

Watched/heard this one on the Colbert Report:

What does Karl Marx pour on his pasta?
The Communist Mani pesto :-)

How creative these comedians are! Creativity is something that has always intrigued me--being far from creative myself, I suppose it is a natural fascination for me. I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.

Here is Sir Ken Robinson on this subject: