Programming the Brain I

In addition to being a teacher I am also a computer engineer. In fact, I've been creating software products and companies for over 25 years and I'm here to let you in on a little secret, its not all that difficult. In fact, teaching a computer to do advanced mathematics is trivial compared to teaching a person.

So, after all these years of education you would think we would have a complete set of proven methods fully in place to get everyone fully up to speed on what they need to know. I propose that almost every graduate from High School should be able to do advanced calculus. They have certainly spend enought time in school to have mastered advanced calculus by the time they graduate. The reason most don't know calculus has nothing to do with their intelligence, it has everything to do with their education.

You see you don't program a human brain the same way you do a computer. With a computer you set down step by step instructions and the computer simply follows those instructions perfectly (yes I mean perfectly, those bugs are almost always an error in the instructions not an error in the computer).

A human is different. Human intelligence is based not on following step by step instructions, rather it is based on pattern matching. Do you want to make the human smarter, expose the human brain to more information and let the brain do what it does naturally.

Do you want to make the human brain better at mathematics, expose the brain to more and more math patterns before trying to explain all of the steps. The brain uses the patterns to understand the steps, not the other way around.

Now, here is the amazing thing. If you wanted everyone who graduated from High School to be very good at math, how many minutes a day do you think they should drill starting in first grade. Have you guessed it? Did you guess 5 minutes?

Recently I posted the following, 10 reinforcements a minute x 5 minutes a day x 200 days per year x 12 years = 120,000 reinforcements

Over a 12 year school period I can reinforce 120,000 pieces of information in five minutes a day. I can teach even the most stubborn brain 600 key concepts in that time. We can teach that brain calculus, and make it really good at it!

Of course, currently our educational system does not do this. But it can.