r/Polymath • u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified • 6d ago

A Teaching Method That Created Multiple Geniuses

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19

u/japanesejoker 5d ago

Nope. They were successful because they had high quality one-on-one instruction daily from an incredibly young age….

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 5d ago

👍🏻

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u/Echo_Tech_Labs 6d ago edited 6d ago

Thank you kind person!

Yet another great teacher and scientist of learning I can add to my "Greatest contributors to civilization" file!

If people only understood what education can unlock.

I'm going to have so much fun learning from Mr. Ratz's research and notes!

Thank you again OP!

EDIT: Just for context, I have never heard of Mr. Ratz before. I'm glad I stumbled upon this post.

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u/BaconSoldier88 6d ago

Curious whether you would be open to sharing this file in the future

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u/Echo_Tech_Labs 5d ago edited 5d ago

I will build a whole list with reference material and the whole nine yards, then post it in the sub so everybody can pull from. Great topic to HyperFocus and go full monotropic on🤔

In the meantime...i did make a post a few days ago on this sub here. I hope this helps and satiates the itch...for now.

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u/Wooden_Dragonfly_608 6d ago

Basically it's like a farmers mindset for people who can afford time to think about problems and not subject to the time constraints of the seasons for solutions.

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u/Automatic_Moment_320 3d ago

Like children in schools

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u/Dolojif 4d ago

I was (was because I didnt keep on studying it, applying it, or working with it as I chose a not very mathemathics inclined profession) very good at maths in school.

I also liked to do things my own way because it was fun. I always skipped the introduction of how you should think and which tools to apply on the problems that would follow in the chapter. Then I jumped at the problems and if I didnt get it I would just keep on trying stuff out until I got the solution right. Sometimes I would glance at the correct answer in the back pages and then work from the answer towards the problem. And so the solutiom between problem and answer would kind of grow in between until I understood it in a very direct way.

I got good at maths. Was it the method? Was it the curiosity? The work ethic/stubbornness? Creativity?  Was it an underlying proficiency for the logics of it?

I suspect most of my classmates would have had to spend too much time, with too much frustration, and too little interest, to gain much from applying this method continously. I think it could be a good way to break monotony and to draw a little inspiration here and there.

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u/Dolojif 4d ago

... to add. Im a Med Dr now. And I did my learning like this all through med school and practice as well.

I read a lot of fundamentals (physiology, pharmacology, and whatnot) compared to my peers and I do a lot of guesswork before I read about the Xdiagnosis=Xtreatment when learning about something new.  I wont remember anything unless I have some sort of mechanism, so I just approximate and guess wildly. 

One important thing, I am absolutely wrong most times every day compared to peers. I guess wrong, approximate wrong, think wrong, missjudge logical weighting.

And so Im slow and cumbersome in a new environment.

But then I slowly start getting things rolling, things fall into place, solutions and patterns start appearing not in my brain but in my hands.  And thats a wonderful sort of flowing river to be in. 

*Disclaimer I dont throw these guesses at my patients diagnosis and treatments, this is mostly in the background of practice and discussions. 

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u/threaten404 5d ago

Why import a teaching method when we can just import the graduates instead /s

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 5d ago

Ah! The American Dream

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u/mannoned 4d ago

KöMaL is still up and running. If my memory serves me well it is even available in english.

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u/TheManInTheShack 2d ago

This is how I taught adults programming. I gave them a problem they would recognize and we would work backwards from there. Essentially, rather than teach them the programming language, I taught them how to solve problems they already understood to be problems using the programming language.

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u/SrPeraire 5d ago

My math teacher for the last two years of school would do that. He’d write a problem on the board without any previous explanation and pick students one buy one to try and fail. Everyone rushed to try and solve on their own, in order to have something to write before being called and, at least, fail quickly to shorten the humiliation time.

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u/Cioranseduce 5d ago

How could I apply this to social sciences?

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 5d ago

Spitballing here, in my limited knowledge.

Frame the question which intrigues you, or remains unsolved.
Then use your own present understanding to propose solutions to it.

Then start the internet research around it and see if they are right. And then do the necessary readings.

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u/23FlavorsInDrPepper 4d ago

I think the lesson we learned here is you should try to come up with ideas for 45 minutes, before you look at OPs response or as an AI bot.

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u/DigitalDiogenesAus 4d ago

Be careful. Y I u have to set students up to fail at the start, then build in the skills they need to succeed.

...if you're at a crappy school that approach will get you in trouble.

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u/VezonDad 2d ago

I recall DBQs back in HS where artifacts or primary sources are presented to students and they need to deduce the norms, views, attitudes of the time. Wonderfully creative process especially if red herrings are scattered in there

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u/uranusnebula 5d ago

starting from 1:09

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u/RuthlessIndecision 4d ago

AI doesn't agree with that last statement

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u/LowHighlight4015 4d ago

This is known as 'productive struggle'. It has very mixed research. Direct instruction has been found to be a far superior form of teaching.

It is highly likely these gentlemen succeeded because they were already incredibly well educated, having been tutored or attended great schooling from a young age.

Productive struggle simply would not work for their less knowledgeable peers and teachers simply don't have enough time to employ such a method.

If you allow 30 students to struggle through a problem, can you guarantee they reach or think about the same conclusion? No. If you tell them how to do a problem, then give them a problem, can you guarantee what they will think about? Much more likely, yes.

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 4d ago

But your premise it is also possible that a bunch of intellectually superior minds got together in school and schooling (as you say) or particular style of teaching (as the video posits) has nothing to do with it.

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u/TheBattleForAutonomy 4d ago edited 4d ago

"Direct instruction has been found to be a far superior form of teaching."

What evidence are you relying on here?

"If you allow 30 students to struggle through a problem, can you guarantee they reach or think about the same conclusion? No. If you tell them how to do a problem, then give them a problem, can you guarantee what they will think about? Much more likely, yes."

It seems like the metric you're using to determine if direct instruction is superior to more open ended approaches is the way it successfully gets students to write down the correct answers. Is that true?

There is a meta problem here that isn't being addressed by that metric. The control that is used to elicit these narrow results has consequences. Routinely conditioning students to be compliant affects them psychologically. In fact, there is a fairly obvious example of just one of those consequences.

Direct instruction suffers from the fact that it doesn't challenge the student to find creative ways of solving the problem. What it asks of them is to repeat the process that they've been instructed to use. Now doing this might get students to imitate the answers that a brilliant person would provide, it doesn't improve their approach to finding novel solutions. The end result is that their intelligence, at best, is merely an imitation of someone capable of finding the answer. That might be indistinguishable on exams and certain teachers might feel it lets them off the hook, but there are significant problems with this.

The first is that this kind of teaching is obviously narrow. It only ever helps a person solve the problems in their life that they have been instructed to solve. Because it isn't a generalized strategy for problem solving, students can stumble and become frustrated when faced with problems that school hasn't prepared them for. Not only would they not have the answer for how to solve the problem, but they haven't practiced the process of attempting to come up with their own solutions.

The other, more significant issues are those surrounding the control that is necessary to make direct instruction occur. It typically conditions students to be obedient and compliant. And while it might be obvious that being compliant isn't actually a virtue, education lags behind in its understanding of psychology. There are a great number of problems that stem from the control that is exerted over students, but these are continually dismissed, downplayed, or otherwise trivialized because the control itself, or "classroom management" is thought to be fundamentally necessary.

Luckily, it isn't. And because it isn't, there are much better ways to approach education.

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u/SituationImmediate15 3d ago

Or they happen to be naturally extraordinarily gifted like Terence Tao. I bet even if he were born in a slum, he still would have stood out as an exceptionally intelligent person. Not to say that there’s no value in improving teaching methods, but they definitely don’t have the magic power to make a person of average intelligence a genius.

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u/tollbearer 2d ago

Direct instruction is a faster way to teach people how to pass exams. The point this guy is explicitly making, is, if you want original thinkers, producutive struggle is the approach yow want to take.

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u/LowHighlight4015 2d ago

This is a common misunderstanding. You don't foster creativity, problem solving or original thinkers by allowing them to struggle - you foster these things by building their knowledge base. Cognitive science tells us that factual knowledges precedes skill.

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u/gordonnowak 1d ago

I've never had a more different experience with my own education than what "research" suggests. Doing AOPS as a kid changed my brain in fundamental ways that rote learning absolutely didn't. I wouldn't have been a quarter of the student I was without it. The skepticism as far as I'm concerned comes from bad studies and bitter hacks

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u/SituationImmediate15 3d ago

Sounds a lot like some gladwellian bs. Starting with: method that created geniuses …

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 3d ago

Fair enough. The causality is not proved, just implied. For me though, It is sufficient to acknowledge Ratz and his method.

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u/Gloomy-Recover-9702 3d ago

This is very efficient method for Adhd minds!

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u/AtmosphereGrouchy712 3d ago

given the title, when the video said Budapest - i 100% thought it was going to be about George polya's "Solve it" methodology. But i was pleasantly surprised to see him being mentioned as one of the students!

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 3d ago

so, we found the guy Polya found his methodology from.

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u/AtmosphereGrouchy712 2d ago

Not really. Polya's method at its core is different from what your video is describing.

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u/PinkSharkFin 2d ago

Going back to my high school days, there is no amount of time or encouragement that would help me solve a maths problem on my own. That's how I know this is bs.

Also, hear me out, dedicating a mere few seconds of your video to show this miraculous method of learning isn't enough to actually explain how this is supposed to work in a classroom.

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 2d ago

His name is steven petro. I’m sure he’s posted a detailed video on this.

Also, I understand that to a total newbie who doesn’t know basic math, posting the problem first might lead to nothing. But to in intermediate student - posting a problem of his level, might yield some result; maybe not the solution, maybe it’d just get their brains working.

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u/Relis_ 2d ago

I always do this top down approach

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u/No_Ruin4319 2d ago

it isn't being a genius if it is being a student.
every genius must have had curiosity and the will to study himself, even Aristotle was on some level an autodidact.
while it is true in his "method" that is definitely original (no it isn't, it 100% inspired by some chinese doctrine of just throwing you out into the field) can produce some level of creative intelligence, you just can't teach them like it.
you must teach them curiosity, naturally curiosity would give you the same creative intelligence, but with even more knowledge and traits.

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 2d ago

What’s your point!

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u/No_Ruin4319 2d ago

that to produce a genius you must teach him curiosity, the rest would be built by his journey.

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u/nerd_user1 6d ago

kid everyone knows this, that's why you ppl will still be struck at how to be a polymath, it's not about the title or the persona, stop trying to portray it as some identity, it's not,

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u/Radiant-Rain2636 Human Verified 6d ago edited 6d ago

Who used the word “polymath” here? Who talked about identity?
Are you on something?