It's an excellent point that you make in footnote 1. I especially like that you cited learning about taxes, because that's the rallying cry of the anti-education bore, but in every case (and there are many cases) where schools do try to teach their students about taxes, they hate that too. Also, what's more important? Teaching students about the particular tax laws that obtain at the time that they take a class, or teaching them the skills they need to read about and apply whatever tax laws might obtain in the future when they're actually filing a tax return?
Quite so, and students are quick to spot that this is a sore point among many of their teachers, which can be conveniently used to derail a lesson. However, students can be forgiven for not knowing ahead of time what in their education will turn out to be useful. What I find galling is the reiteration from those who should know better that "I never had to solve a quadratic equation in my life": one such being a former editor of *The Times*. Well, the education you need to become a newspaper editor is doubtless different from the education you need to become a cybersecurity designer, and if schools were able to determine that instantly and infallibly at age fourteen, then perhaps our school system could be streamlined. But since we don't, and can't know such things, and perhaps even if we could, the object of an education must surely be to give children the widest range of choices for their future careers. Refusing to learn quadratic equations cuts off choices as surely as refusing to learn anything about politics, philiosphy or economics.
I used to really dislike the "when will I use it in real life?" type question until I mentioned this in earshot of a very bright student I had. She said (slight paraphrase) "When we ask if something is useful, we're worried that the world is on fire, and there are terrible diseases in the world, and we want to know is this thing one of the tools we can use to help solve that?" I suspect she was being overly optimistic in terms of what others meant when they asked that sort of question, but it at least was a different perspective.
In my decades of teaching experience, I noticed that the complaint "does this have any applications, what is it good for?" often results when a student feels confused and overwhelmed by the material, and gets angry about it. Thus, it is rare that the question should be answered directly. The question is a plea for help rather than for information. Better is to empathize with the student and figure out a way to rebuild their confidence.
In the intro, where it is explained why one would need to share a secret at all, using rather trivial example, it might be explained why the proposed rather elaborate solution is better than the obvious trivial solutions. Like simply splitting large secret (binary key, password) into parts, generating random keys and XORing them together before using the result for encrypting, using multiple keys to simply encrypt a message repeatedly, one key after another, etc. One can read about these alternatives in the linked wikipedia articles though.
It's an excellent point that you make in footnote 1. I especially like that you cited learning about taxes, because that's the rallying cry of the anti-education bore, but in every case (and there are many cases) where schools do try to teach their students about taxes, they hate that too. Also, what's more important? Teaching students about the particular tax laws that obtain at the time that they take a class, or teaching them the skills they need to read about and apply whatever tax laws might obtain in the future when they're actually filing a tax return?
Quite so, and students are quick to spot that this is a sore point among many of their teachers, which can be conveniently used to derail a lesson. However, students can be forgiven for not knowing ahead of time what in their education will turn out to be useful. What I find galling is the reiteration from those who should know better that "I never had to solve a quadratic equation in my life": one such being a former editor of *The Times*. Well, the education you need to become a newspaper editor is doubtless different from the education you need to become a cybersecurity designer, and if schools were able to determine that instantly and infallibly at age fourteen, then perhaps our school system could be streamlined. But since we don't, and can't know such things, and perhaps even if we could, the object of an education must surely be to give children the widest range of choices for their future careers. Refusing to learn quadratic equations cuts off choices as surely as refusing to learn anything about politics, philiosphy or economics.
I used to really dislike the "when will I use it in real life?" type question until I mentioned this in earshot of a very bright student I had. She said (slight paraphrase) "When we ask if something is useful, we're worried that the world is on fire, and there are terrible diseases in the world, and we want to know is this thing one of the tools we can use to help solve that?" I suspect she was being overly optimistic in terms of what others meant when they asked that sort of question, but it at least was a different perspective.
In my decades of teaching experience, I noticed that the complaint "does this have any applications, what is it good for?" often results when a student feels confused and overwhelmed by the material, and gets angry about it. Thus, it is rare that the question should be answered directly. The question is a plea for help rather than for information. Better is to empathize with the student and figure out a way to rebuild their confidence.
100%! I don't doubt that there is *some* legitimate complaint hidden behind the expression---it just isn't the one that is being expressed!
Interesting read!
In the intro, where it is explained why one would need to share a secret at all, using rather trivial example, it might be explained why the proposed rather elaborate solution is better than the obvious trivial solutions. Like simply splitting large secret (binary key, password) into parts, generating random keys and XORing them together before using the result for encrypting, using multiple keys to simply encrypt a message repeatedly, one key after another, etc. One can read about these alternatives in the linked wikipedia articles though.