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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25606 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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My experience is that kids universally understand this simple concept, and that it takes a calculus teacher to beat such sensible reasoning out of them.

Normally I have a least a tiny bit of sympathy for educational "mainstreaming", but this really is the sort of thing that ought to be handled well before calculus by at least having some geeky books on hand for the faster kids to read while the kids who need review are covering fractions for the fourth time. Maybe most kids can't learn the standard stuff faster without getting stuck completely out of sync with the teachers' lessons, but asides like "infinity as a limit" vs "infinities in cardinal numbers" vs "infinities in ordinal numbers" ought to be written up in a child-friendly presentation somewhere, right?

I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me a month or two ago with the question "is infinity a number". I managed to avoid diving into set theory and losing them, but went through enough of the "things you call numbers today that weren't originally thought of as numbers" (zero, fractions, negatives, irrationals) and "things you'll call numbers later that you don't think of as numbers today" (imaginaries) to get across that names like "number" are a matter of definition.

I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me

Wow, I had no idea that was still even a Thing!

It seems to be a bigger thing than it was when I was a kid, even. Difficulty has increased by roughly one level (school->chapter, chapter->state, state->national, national->good-luck) over the past few decades, and that seems to be well-calibrated to account for how much more intense the competition is.

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