[zibby8]

I experienced this a lot as a kid. Adults tend to leave out a lot of context in their answers to children. Often, it seems like they don’t even try to see the question from the child’s point of view. For instance, I didn’t do well in school. When I asked adults why doing well was necessary, they would give answer along the lines of “if you don’t do well, then the only job you’ll be able to get is as a janitor.” Perhaps that’s true, (or not?) but the answer was largely devoid of meaning to me as a child.

[mlyle]

I try to give kids honest answers, but there's a chasm of missing metacognition and unshared context that is hard to bridge.

I speak of spending a lot of time at work. And argue that developing intellectual interest and stamina that supports one feeling good during that time is one of the most viable / likely paths to live a happy, fulfilled life.

It's still a huge leap of imagination. How can you tell a kid what being in a dead-end job that you hate is like? It may not sound too unlike what you're asking them to do, burying themselves in their studies.

So we can talk about finding the interesting parts of studies--- interesting subjects. History as stories. Writing as imagination. Math as trying to figure things out. It's immediate and also hits the important part of the argument. As Csikszentmihaly said, “Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”

And now that I'm a teacher, I try to run classes that have a whole lot of the things that I liked best in other work, and to share them with kids.

[arkh]

> Math as trying to figure things out.

I think Maths (and physics) education is better when teachers also add some of its history. Most of maths was discovered for some need and lot of people working in the domain had really funny lives. Some anecdotes linked to some theorem or formula could make them easier to remember for certain students.

[mlyle]

:D I need to do this more.

I taught upper quartile 5th graders contest math. Talking about Gauss adding up the series 1, 2, 3,... 100 quickly and frustrating their teacher really resonates with them.

Also telling about Hippasus allegedly being drowned by the Pythagorean cult for showing irrationality of sqrt(2) is always exciting :D A lot of middle schoolers love the slightly gruesome.

[BLKNSLVR]

Adults tend to leave out a lot of context in their answers to anyone.

Even knowing this, I constantly have to step back, sometimes a number of times, to explain the background of the background before then getting into the actual details of the "thing" I'm supposed to be explaining.

Working on a project for X months and then having to compress and abstract that knowledge into a 30 minute introduction to a group of people staring from a clean slate is a gig that requires more preparation than expected or allowed for.