> Since I'm reading HN of course I'm good at math.
I read HN, I assure I am not good at math. :P
Note that a) your sons are linked to you genetically; b) your sons' genetics likely differ. You can't actually derive any useful information from this anecdote alone.
I think it's a mixed issue. There most likely are differences in effectiveness of picking up math in people, and they may be significant, but the environment is making them too significant and creating unnecessary thresholds (i.e., if you can't do X math by age Y, there's a problem).
From what I've seen, most institutions want the most easily teachable students, which automatically selects for all ducks to be in the row, regardless of whether these factors are fatally influential. So if someone just has an easier time with math, for whatever reason, they'll have an easier time in general, because they require less work from institutions.
I think we have very little data of what good teaching can do because it largely doesn't exist, so mostly we're just looking at flat ability.
> You can't actually derive any useful information from this anecdote alone.
Understood. I think the information I feel I can derive is this : with sufficient effort you can turn a "can't do math" person into one that can, modulo your theory that there are some "untransformable" people.
>I think we have very little data of what good teaching can do because it largely doesn't exist
True, although in the case of my kids' teachers I can immediately tell which of them has any real appreciation for Mathematics and it seems to correlate strongly with outcome. For example our schools like to hire English teachers to teach math in middle school. That doesn't seem to work out so well.
I read HN, I assure I am not good at math. :P
Note that a) your sons are linked to you genetically; b) your sons' genetics likely differ. You can't actually derive any useful information from this anecdote alone.
I think it's a mixed issue. There most likely are differences in effectiveness of picking up math in people, and they may be significant, but the environment is making them too significant and creating unnecessary thresholds (i.e., if you can't do X math by age Y, there's a problem).
From what I've seen, most institutions want the most easily teachable students, which automatically selects for all ducks to be in the row, regardless of whether these factors are fatally influential. So if someone just has an easier time with math, for whatever reason, they'll have an easier time in general, because they require less work from institutions.
I think we have very little data of what good teaching can do because it largely doesn't exist, so mostly we're just looking at flat ability.