[77pt77]

> Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.

Feynman's son was his biological offspring, while the daughter was adopted.

I think this is relevant information that was left out.

Edit: Also, Feynman's son chose to pursuit philosophy, much to Feynman's dismay.

[arkades]

In an article discussing the dispensation of advice to the parenting community as a whole - which includes the whole variety of genetic heterogeneity - her being adopted isn't relevant.

[VLM]

A lot depends on ones beliefs (and possibly facts) about being self taught and if a difference exists in outcomes when various teaching styles and techniques are applied.

Its highly likely that the "best" or "right" way Dad X learned topic Y will work pretty well when helping teach a little clone of himself and not so well when teaching random kids. I'd theorize that parents are generally better at teaching their own kids than public school teachers for this reason, even if on average a public school teacher would be better on long term average at teaching a very large pool of kids.

As a very specific example I remember reading one of Feynman's books where he explained he had very high spacial reasoning performance, much like a mechanical engineer would have. Its much more likely his child would have that ability than a randomly selected kid. So his teaching style for something like calculus volume of a solid of revolution disk vs cylinder seems self explanatory to someone like Feynman, probably his son, or me, because of high spatial reasoning performance but someone without it probably needs to memorize very hard or just guess -n- check, I mean 50:50 odds getting it correct? That's actually an interesting question, how does someone (like his adopted daughter perhaps) without unusually high spatial awareness decide on a disk or cylinder strategy for that class of calculus problem?

[dragonwriter]

> Its highly likely that the "best" or "right" way Dad X learned topic Y will work pretty well when helping teach a little clone of himself

Perhaps, but children aren't clones of either of their biological parents, generally.

[throwmeaway1]

Care to explain how? I understand the original comment didn't really add any other information but surely the differences in nature and nurture account for something, when considering Adoption Studies are a thing. [1] Perusing the results of a quick search bring up loads and loads of differences between adopted and non-adopted children, across many different metrics. I'm sure the "parenting community as a whole" doesn't exclude adoptive parents. Almost all of these studies show differences, such as with social skills or behavioral problems [2], and with these differences might the parent have to adapt? There are many things that come into an adopted child's mind about their own adoption too, and challenges specific to adoption [3]. Is this particular information relevant?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_study

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/the-adopt...

[3] https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/f_adimpact.pdf

[Nimitz14]

> Also, Feynman's son chose to pursuit philosophy, much to Feynman's dismay.

Wow really. Poor Feynman.