If you're not too demading of my intellectual adaquacy, then I blame my
inadaquacy on my teachers.
Lets face it, there is nothing new about your lady friend's complaint.
Logic, especially in the symbolic form,
is not easy to learn, otherwise, illiterate programmers like me would have a
tough time making a living.
However, hard to learn doesn't mean typical people don't have a sense of
logic or basic skills in
logical deduction. Your lady friend has only herself to blame for failing to
perform her duties.
On a recent day, I was interviewing CS senior from a top tier school who
claimed to be studying "Theory of Languages"
this semester. So I casually asked him to explain the "Pumping Lemma" to me.
He wisely said his class was about to
cover it the following week so he didn't know it yet. Now that's what I call
a big disappointment.
-----Original Message-----
From: John Hall [mailto:johnhall@evergo.net]
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 12:07 PM
To: Pang, Hokkun; FoRK
Subject: RE: How do you teach fundamental logic to someone that doesn't grok
it?
I think you lack the courtesy expected of polite discourse. You were
offered an opportunity to make a productive comment and declined.
Furthermore, you can't read very well. I didn't say how she handled it, I
was silent on the issue. I said I couldn't imagine how it could be handled.
Don't project your own intellectual inadequacies on others.
-----Original Message-----
From: Pang, Hokkun [mailto:HPang@Yesmail.com]
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 7:39 AM
To: 'John Hall'; FoRK
Subject: RE: How do you teach fundamental logic to someone that doesn't grok
it?
I think your lady is a lousy teacher who lacks the heart and the creativity
to teach.
-----Original Message-----
From: John Hall [mailto:johnhall@evergo.net]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 6:32 PM
To: FoRK
Subject: How do you teach fundamental logic to someone that doesn't grok it?
I was presented with this problem from a lady that taught logic at the
college level.
About the simplest thing in logic is:
Given: A => B
Given: A
Conclude: ?
What do you do with a student that can't answer that question?
My reactions boiled down to:
a) dumbfounded that someone over the age of 12 who can dress themselves
considers that a hard problem.
b) anyone who can't get that will never get that and can't be taught logic.
Hand them a shovel.
On the other hand, I have seen people that had trouble with:
Given: A => B
Given: B
Conclude: ?
That seemed to be harder to understand, and for someone that misses such
questions I can think of ways to teach them, provided they could get the
first problem right.
Any thoughts?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 06 2001 - 08:04:38 PDT