Abstraction use in education, transition sentences

I wonder what place abstraction has in learning/teaching.

I wonder what place abstraction has in learning/teaching. I am a big fan of the process of abstraction, as I feel like it gives you a road map. I used the process a lot in math, because sometimes it felt like I was tunneling underground with no way to orient myself. With abstractions from the area I was studying, or even category theory, it gave me a map with GPS coordinates of where I was at.

Yet there is a balance between the use of abstraction, and being overwhelmed with details. I suppose what you could do is identify use cases, treat the usage of abstractions as if they were details on a map. So whatever you are teaching, you can reference back to that map for continuity and orientation. Something else you could do is interpret the locations a little bit for users, and then have a consistent interpretations within an area.

For example ,”In the bad lands, there is a bad town, that has a bad street, which has a bad house, that is housing bad people.” The consistency of ‘bad’ is acting like the abstraction here across the things I mentioned. The bad thing is that it could create false expectations if the abstraction is not well founded. What would happen if we contradicted it? This might tie into storytelling, and that might be interesting to look into.

I was reading a book on education [1], and in it they were talking about the memory types. I wonder if there isn't a memory type, and all the rest are components of it. As we use less of the main memory type, the less effective it is.

Sometimes I feed my blogs to a local LLM, and get feedback on it. One thing that it tells me, and I've been told in the past, is the need for transition sentences. I could understand that thought process, maybe 20 years ago, but now? One of the most popular platforms in the world is TikTok, and you don't have direct control of the content that you see (only that you don't have to watch what is currently being played). It's one disjointed thing composed with the next, and as a result I question the idea that you need to have transitions between ideas within content. In the context of someone watching something on TikTok, I would argue that the thing that creates cohesion is not the content or the platform but the user. Kind of like a 'suspension of disbelief' for social media. Only your experience is universal to you, kind of thing.

If you can't tell, I've been traumatized by the advice to have transition sentences between paragraphs.

For future reference, I am going to try and fill out references with a full bibliography style. For books try to fill in as much as you can [2]:

  • Author
  • Title (including subtitle)
  • Editors(s) and translator(s) (if any)
  • edition (if not the first)
  • volume number (if any)
  • publisher
  • year published
  • page numbers of chapters consulted
  • library call number (if any)
  • ISBN
  • URL (if any)
  • name of database (if any)
  • date of access (if consulted online)
  • electronic format of the book

For journal articles [2]:

  • author(s)
  • title
  • title of journal
  • volume and issue number
  • date
  • page number of article
  • library call number (if any)
  • URL/DOI (if any)
  • name of database (if any)
  • owner or sponsor of the site
  • date of access

[1] Julie Dirksen. Design For How People Learn. Nikki Echler McDonald, Maureen Forys, Margaret S. Anderson, Scout Festa. Second edition. New Rider. Published 2020. Consulted chapter 4 page 108. ISBN-13: 978-0-134-21128-2.

[2] Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, William T. Fitzgerald. The Craft of Research. Fifth edition. The University of Chicago Press. Published 2024. Consulted chapter 4 pages 75-76. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82667-7.