In my day, tests were on paper and collected at the end of class.
Now they’re online and kids exchange answers by taking the cell phone to the bathroom.
Or they will exploit the online nature and compare answers during the passing period AFTER the class a submit it before the next class starts. Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!
Instead of being 25-50% short response, tests are all multiple choice so they can be automatically graded.
To think my teachers recorded grades in a ledger and computed averages by hand for classes of 35+ students…
This feels like an uninformed opinion. Are you saying teachers aren’t fully occupied during the day? That would be news to me. If you admit to teaching being a full time job, what would you rather see teachers not do so they can spend a few extra hours grading? Just claiming that teachers need to give paper assignments and spend time grading by hand without considering the tradeoffs sounds like a step backward.
Cell phones haven’t magically made students cheat. Students were cheating plenty with paper tests too. Ands if the students are trading answers with cell phones, they will definitely have a way to trade answers to paper tests. Nearly every smartphone has a camera. Instead we should figure out how to regulate cell phone use at school if they are the enabler for cheating.
Teaching is undoubtedly different than it was a few decades ago. There is technology integrated into most schools and classrooms. The requirements of teachers has changed, but I wouldn’t say teachers have gotten lazy.
> Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!
What about students who need extra time, which can be part of an IEP, and other issues, I don't think that part is lazy. Also a decent amount of the usage of Canvas or similar LMS's is subject to school or district wide rules.
Edit: I taught highschool CS during the pandemic to try to help out with issues in my district.
Before I lodge my criticism: the kid's right. DNS blocking has always been a non-solution to the "kids screwing around on school computers" problem. When I was his age, we'd pull up breadfish.co.uk on all the computers in a single pod in the library, then un-mute all of them at once. They blocked breadfish, but then we just started pulling it up on youtube.
1:1 ed tech (e.g. chromebooks) probably exacerbates the problem because kids have a single machine that's their own. They can customize it as they please, for better and worse.
When I was his age, my school's thin clients would wipe most of your customizations every time you logged out. For the handful of standalone desktops, you'd still have to set stuff up on each machine individually. This limited the effectiveness of the various tricks we played to get past IT guardrails.
I think the title is a little misleading, though. The essay details why DNS-level blocking doesn't work in educational environments. The title suggests it'd talk about why ed-tech fails in a more general case. Remember, projectors, document cameras, VHS players, and Smart boards were all red-hot tech at some point. Even today, ed-tech is more than just computers assigned to kids.
I think laws/regulations are very similar. "Obvious" ones are good (e.g. violence, food safety), analogous to "of course they should block actually inappropriate content". But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations, and fine-grained laws and regulations don't work, because of loopholes.
To get a healthy society, you must teach people how to behave, then (again, still explicitly prevent serious crimes, but otherwise) trust them. Some will take advantage of the system, but they may still face natural and social consequences, and some abuse of the system is OK.
> But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations
I guess I’m not really following where this logic is going. Are you saying “therefore we should not have laws and regulations”? I highly doubt that’s what you actually mean, but I am unsure how to parse what you do mean if not that.
We should have laws and regulations for things that are important and (relatively) easy to define and enforce. But laws and regulations aren't enough, because people find loopholes, and trying to patch these loopholes with more laws and regulations doesn't work.
Examples of "obvious" laws and regulations: physical violence should be policed, companies should have to pay salaries and have basic restrictions on work hours, safety, sanitation, etc. Examples of things that can't really be regulated: "gambling" and "harmful social media". When does a game become "gambling"? When does a site become "social media" and "harmful"? Various countries have legal definitions for these, but they're very long, so companies find loopholes (e.g. sports betting, loot-boxes); or they straight-up break the laws, but the government doesn't bother to enforce them, because it's too difficult and the general population doesn't notice or care enough. Complex and ineffective laws and regulations also tend to have unintended consequences, like Balatro being considered "gambling" in Australia, and the UK's "Online Safety Act" affecting small forums.
Part of the reason is that the people writing and enforcing laws and regulations themselves are corrupt. But this goes back to the source: you can't police those people with more laws, because their enforcers are also corrupt, and so on. A society is controlled and its morality is defined by its people, so to some extent, a society must teach its people to be moral and give them the leeway to still behave immoral.
There are some poor word choices[1], but yes, all in all this 7th grader is definitely writing above grade level. Hopefully his English teachers give him feedback pertinent to his demonstrated ability.
[1] - E.g. "That’s not to say a school’s system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school had left unblocked the spammy-sounding Unblocked Games 66."
would be easier to understand if re-written as:
"That’s not to say a school’s system is completely ineffective. Last year, my school failed to block the spammy-sounding "Unblocked Games 66.""
I hate this trend because I use em dashes a lot in my writing. Someone tell the AIs to throttle back on them a bit — everyone thinks I'm using AI when I'm not.
Just have overworked teachers with minimal tech savvy compete for engagement with trillion dollar companies that employ armies of psychologists and programmers, and who have popular momentum on their side. Have them do this without turning into the industry they're competing with.
I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.
They already have tons interesting and gamified stuff in schools. Part of learning should also include how to tackle subjects you find boring. Discipline and perseverance are useful life skills that I think are increasingly disappearing.
The tough thing is probably trying to make it Type 2 fun, where hard work leads to rewards rather than Type 1 fun that’s basically just entertainment. Ultimately, learning something new is always kind of painful, and learning to push through that pain is in itself a key lesson you have to learn for adult life.
I don't think that's even real learning. But that's a slightly offensive thing to say to diligent swots, I guess. Well done swots, have a gold star anyway.
First of all, you are saying I think learning should not be fun at all, when I am actually saying that learning is type 2 fun, and people need to learn how to do that to be happy, fulfilled adults.
Second, in refuting me, it seems you are stating that learning should be Type 1 fun, which I totally disagree with. You are severely limiting your potential if you only do things that are entertaining. And not just in an accidental way: you are also setting yourself up for a life in which you follow the things that are made to be entertaining for you, by advertisers or whoever else thinks they can gain by leading you along.
I enjoy learning new things, I’ve learned new languages, musical instruments, and I’ve switched careers a couple of times which has led to all kinds of new things I had to learn to do. The fact is, that the real fun happens after mastery, and after a brief ”this is cool” bump where you bang a drum for a couple of minutes on the beach or whatever, there is a long period of practice where you pretty much have to put in the work before you can get to that fun flow state of mastery.
Well, I just ignored the whole thing about type 1 and type 2 fun. I guess type 2 is something about being patient. Thing is, though, if it's actually fun, it's not painful, and if it is painful, it's not necessary as part of learning, and isn't helping.
I suppose we often have to do painful things to maintain stability, or advance, and indirectly therefore they're necessary as part of a strategy to continue learning. Like, I don't know, work a terrible job to pay the rent. But that's indirect, not intrinsic to learning, so those things don't count.
No, but learning a new programming language can be more fun than watching a TV series.
This forum has plenty of past comments from people who have learned a programming language for fun when they could have spent that time watching a TV series.
"Learning is fun" for the right type of person is a far cry from an assertion of "fun is learning" that implies whenever someone is having fun, they're learning. The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower, which can easily be short circuited by things that are fun but not learning.
Yes, "learning is fun" does not imply "fun is learning". I agree the latter is not always true so I would strongly disagree with "all fun is learning".
What I would say that there are enough fun things that provide learning that kids (especially younger ones - its difference once exams and qualifications start looming) can learn primarily through fun. Provide the environment and guidance and encouragement. Think about how many fun things kids do is learning. Playing games, making things, drawing. The TV series might be a documentary or produced by a different culture or be based on a book that is worth reading, or may be of cultural value in its own right. It may create an opportunity to talk to children about related topics (I am very much a fan of "conversational learning").
> The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower
I am old enough that I learned because my parents bought me what was then called a "home computer" and it was fun to learn programming. I did not have much skill or will power at that point (I would have been about 10).
More generally, children can learn a lot without skill and will power. It needs opportunities and guidance and encouragement. I agree that sticking kids in front of a TV or giving them a tablet with a bunch of simplistic games will mean they do not learn.
Willpower - or not. Some of us learned languages unhesitatingly, with delight. So what? Do the other people have to take part too?
(Actually I remember hating C when I got to the part of K&R about pointers. I threw the book across the room. I hated it for about 12 hours. Then I woke up the next morning and was all like "pointers are brilliant", it was weird.)
I guess you can guide people into a subject, assuring them the whole way through that the subject is probably going to get enjoyable, and in the meantime making the experience enjoyable through social effects and entertainment - while allowing them freedom to back out if in fact you're boring them. But that doesn't demand their willpower. It hinges on their interest.
It's great that learning things was fun for you. I'm there with you myself. I had amazing lucid dreams the night after I learned Ocaml...
But this entire thread is about teaching children, many of whom need guidance, support, and unfortunately sometimes control to mitigate their attraction to easy-but-unhealthy activities.
Not everyone is going to be a programmer. But even if we're talking about structuring learning such that it's compelling on its own, then we're kind of assuming everyone is going to have a calling and also find it relatively young. That feels pretty naive.
Less drudgery and boring work? How about not drudgery and not boring. To accomplish this the thing has to be optional, and it has to be freely chosen. No amount of window dressing on a thing you're forced to do makes it truly fun. But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated, and so we get endless "make learning fun!" crap on top of compulsory drudgery.
> But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated
It's not not possible, but the problem is you'd end up with a majority uneducated populous who would decide that sacrificing goats and watering crops with Gatorade is the thing to do, and they would hang you if you disagreed
I don't know. I'd like Mike Judge's opinion on this point. Does trapping people in a building and forcing them to stack up academic KPIs really make them less stupid? I suppose it keeps them away from superstition and hoaxes and scams. Maybe. Does it even help with that? It's probably the socialization that matters.
Its not that hard to balance, but it takes individual attention. Learning is intrinsically fun and you need to avoid turning it into drudgery.
I home educated by kids from about eight up to sixteen when they had done GCSEs (exams school kids in the UK do at 16). I very rarely had to force them to do anything, but I did have to make an effort to find the right approach to make things interesting.
I think the solution is to let kids do what they choose but intervene if they are not learning at all. This takes judgement and knowing them as individuals.
You could do it in schools if you have a very low student-teacher ratio (I say below 10 to 1 - so in the UK you would need about double the number of teachers in the state system), trusted teachers' judgement over metrics, and had more flexibility about learning to individual needs rather the prescribing exactly what kids need to learn at a particular age.
But school is 13 years of mostly boring, stressful and irrelevant learning. What adult on earth would willingly take up that sort of work? None except the small percent of academically-oriented personalities.
Teacher: "today we're going to learn about the three types of rocks, and the quadratic equation."
Student: "what for? I've never seen an adult discuss or use that in real life."
Teacher: "you might need it some day, and its part of the curriculum."
I estimate more than 50% of people have an aversion to learning because of their school experience.
True learning, and curiosity-driven learning, boosts dopamine, hence most learning in modern society should be inherently "pleasurable". Of course this excludes hard lessons we have to learn through painful experiences.
Even really difficult learning, like at the Masters - phD level, the painful parts of learning should constitute a small percent of the person's overall learning.
Children are often accused of being unmotivated or lazy, but these are usually accusations from boring adults who can't see the magnitude of their error. A child will focus on a video game for hours, even a difficult one, and will still remember the information a week later. But give a child a boring and pointless video game, with no specific goal or accomplishment, and no one will play it. This is why the quadratic equation has become such a meme among "anti-schoolers". It's the epitome of pointlessness for the general population.
'Life" seems to be a codeword for other people being obstructive.'
If one chooses the modern life, then they're stuck within the constraints of society. You could be nearly self sufficient, but that would be even more difficult.
No but I think I can still think like one and I can remember what would have gotten my interest back then before dropping out because video games were so much more interesting :')
Before I realized this world is just as interesting, but school does everything to make you bored of it before you can explore it.
Even in the most interesting fields, 95% of everything is boring work. That even goes for the individual tasks. Found a good physics problem? Well, you might be excited about it but 95% of solving it is going to be thinking about assumptions and doing rote mathematical manipulations. You are likely to get sick of it before even getting to any answer, much less the right one. There are also many important/useful fields that are not very interesting.
In a sense, the most important thing school does is to build up within students a tolerance of boredom and an appreciation of the fact that most work is potentially boring.
Most people are not like that. Even playing video games will be boring, if it's your JOB. Much more so if you need to do hundreds of hours of cerebral work to get to the point where you can have a little fun lol...
Not that most people like games, but everyone has their own goal, even if they haven't discovered them yet, even if it's just to chill in a nice place and do nothing all day, they can still find better ways to be lazy! (build better furniture, explore the search for the ideal climate etc.)
What is with all this defeatist give-up-by-default attitude? There's NO fucking way that the current common system of human education, which has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, is perfect.
I'm just being real. If admitting that life is a hell of a lot of work makes me defeatist, so be it. The current system of human education is "only" several hundred years old, but that is long enough to see what works and what doesn't for the most part. What sure as hell doesn't work to reach success and provide for society is to loaf around aimlessly as if we don't know what skills are useful for modern life.
Again, it doesn't have to be an info dump, like how education is now and has forever been, just reciting rote explanations to questions nobody (at that age) asks.
Just enough to get you hooked into the "game" you've just spawned into.
does this ever work in tutorials in games? People skip the explanations and then complain later that they're confused or didn't know x and y feature existed.
We already have people say they wish they'd learned how to do their taxes or balance budgets - imagine what 12 year olds might think is uninteresting that comes up later, right?
In the last 20 years or so, how much of the knowledge that we know and use in life is from what we learned in school (and remember) versus looking it up on the internet or asking someone only during the moment we need that knowledge?
Of course, actually yes: Expose new humans to the latest technology right away, WHILE it's still awe-inspiring to them, before it become as routine as breathing, and explain how it's made, how we got there, and how life was before then.
That'd be a much better way of teaching multiple subjects that are boring and irrelevant on their own.
You're not supposed to have phones or computers in class but you're supposed to somehow be interested in the math and other sciences that make those things possible?
You go home and your life there is much more entertaining than in school, but you have no idea how what you're being taught in school ties into the things at home.
I don't think a way of teaching has been found, that doesn't require a willingness to be at least moderately bored, and that isn't to some extent disconnected from everyday life.
Even using computers in class, which I endorse, involves acceptance that many of the uses will seem boring.
Making everything as entertaining as commercial media is too much to ask.
One just needs an exciting goal to reach, something to look forward to.
For me for example, a lot of the work in developing the game is mundane boilerplate and looking up solutions to solved problems, but I can bear through it because I really want to play the game I'm trying to make.
Education should optimize for finding such "goals" for each individual person, instead of just finding a "use" for each person to be put to, as another poster put it.
Grammar and reading comprehension are important and can be enjoyable or at least unlock the enjoyment of understanding literature ...but I seriously doubt a 10 year old is going to think to take a class in it on their own.
>and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.
There isn't any educational technology. There are (and have been, for decades, accomplishing nothing) a bunch of companies trying to come up with ways to exploit educational institutions to create revolving income streams and failing. Letting kids access the internet at school is just an admission of complete failure, being bad at blocking bad sites doesn't make that failure any worse.
No phones, no internet at school. If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless. Leave the screens to their software and programming classes.
I'd say it will be a blessing when this debacle is replaced with AI, except the AI will also come from the revolving income stream guys, and will also have children's well-being as an afterthought. It will be the same failure, but with 4x the margin going to 1/100 the previous number of vendors, just like every "tech advance" in the past decade.
The answer isn’t some fancy security software or screening, it is much simpler: no software, period. The bulk of school should be learning in a classroom, computers are not required.
They can and should be allowed in limited doses early on, and can build over time, particularly as courses either obviously require it or the computers truly facilitate the learning.
We had her public school teachers trying to tell us the answer to our daughter’s reading issues was more screen time. We ended up sending her to a private religious school with very limited screen time, and she is now an A and B student.
This is a huge problem in public schools because state and federal governments are complicit in burying kids (and parents!) in unnecessary technology. During Covid, the feds flooded schools with literal billions of dollars that did not go to better teachers, it went to smart boards and MacBook pros and iPads and dozens of “School as a Service” providers who existed only to extract money from clueless superintendents who have a seemingly endless supply of tax money to draw from.
> If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless.
The numbers are smaller and smaller, but there will still be kids whose only access to the internet is their parents' smartphones. When I personally mentored a couple of pretty bright high school student interns, one of whom scored above 1500 SATs and a 36 ACT, they both found it really helpful to look at Khan Academy / YouTube clips to better understand what I was explaining.
If the poorer kids don't have access to these explanatory videos, except when their parents are done with their phones, they will fall further behind than they otherwise would have.
Perhaps a compromise would be to limit internet access to the school library?
I teach a 5th grade computer science class at my school. We just finished our "chatbot" project. I thought the kids some very simple Python syntax--assigning variables, concatenating strings, input, print, if, elif, else--and they made programs that could have a conversation with the user.
I suppose I could have done this without internet on air-gapped laptops. They do need laptops though, and the internet makes it much easier for them to submit their work for me to review after class.
I realize that a bounded computer science class probably isn't what you're talking about. However, my school has in fact really been trying to clamp down on technology use this year, and it has been challenging for the computer science department!
I teach a code club. I try to get the students excited and focused, and especially on projects where they work together, it generally works really well, even for students who obviously aren't quite 'into it'.
But at absolutely any opportunity where they are not focused (and there's always someone) they try to play roblox or other games. They try to have it running in the background and switch. And even installed a workspace switcher so it wasn't obvious they had game windows open.
It's really like highly addictive drugs. For kids, at least, the best solution is to make them unavailable while they are supposed to be learning.
This is now going on in college. I was just hearing from a professor the other day that it's impossible to keep students off of social media. They cannot sit for a 50 minute lecture without pulling out their phones (that's if they even physically come to class; if they're online, they are half-listening at best).
These are now the COVID lockdown and post-pandemic kids. They come in to college unprepared/lacking mastery of prerequisites, don't listen in class, they don't come to office hours, they don't do their homework (or try to have ChatGPT do it) and get upset when they fail.
This is because they like playing Roblox, and are getting something out of playing Roblox, and are not persuaded that your thing is more rewarding for them, and unless you can pull a miracle of engaging enthusiasm out of the bag they're right.
So if they take crack cocaine instead of literature class, they're right too?
Sorry, but learning is actually a slog. The best we can do is get them addicted to learning, instead of gaming, but let's help them on the way by removing the gaming temptation while they are in class.
Learning is not a slog. Cramming for exams, that's a slog, but only tenuously relates to learning.
OK, so sometimes a person may get all fired up about a project and slog through reams of - effort - in order to get some stage done, out of a deep desire to see what happens next. And from an external perspective that seems very worthy because it seems deeper than something that's just constantly rewarding. But is it necessary, proper, that any given person be doing such a deep and onerous thing all the time? Or even very often? Is it for the external observer, who knows nothing of the person's internal processes and feelings, to decide these things? Mind your own beeswax.
Crack doesn't count, IMO, because it games the system. Probably now you'll say something to compare Roblox unironically to crack "because dopamine". Did you know, we get dopamine released when doing anything we enjoy? But there's always a lot of people ready to claim that electronic devices are literally addictive, because it's a trendy thing to say, and the pressure of this opinion is like a physical force, a great gaseous mass of idiots. I shouldn't have got involved with this conversation, I have important video games to play.
Some learning is a slog. We have to go through it because it's required to understand the thing we really want to learn about. And we don't appreciate that until we're on the other side. The teacher/professor can say "you need to understand this, even though it's not obviously applicable yet, just trust me" and that is the part you have to slog through but you eventually see the point.
Other stuff we slog through just because we've decided it makes a student well-rounded. I like reading fiction, but I never liked reading "literature" and then trying to write an analysis of it. It was absolutely a slog, and even 40 years later I cannot see that my life is any worse off because I never loved reading Homer or Shakespeare or Chaucer or Tolstoy.
I recognize what you're talking about, from mathematics. But you're either being genuinely interested, in which case it's a delightful slog that you're keen on, or else (more commonly) you're being perversely stubborn for external reasons like prestige. In the latter case it's a sort of perverse-learning that isn't really worthy of the name, and although it's somewhat more sophisticated than rote memorization, the understanding is shallow and short-lived. I used to hate mathematics, so I did six years of pure mathematics, and now I really hate it.
I was reading parts of the Iliad for fun recently, on the other hand, because somebody had asked a question, and I enjoy slogging through dense texts to find obscure facts. It's horribly written because names are frequently oblique, like "the old one" or "son of ..." instead of an actual name, and everybody talks in flowery speeches. Shakespeare suffers from the flowery speeches thing too. Beowulf is also tedious to read because of all the kennings (talking in riddles). Chaucer on the other hand is sometimes dirty and amusing. Tolstoy, never tried. Gilgamesh, though, is well-written, fast-paced and highly entertaining, I reckon literature should probably have stopped there, all the authors after that were just derivative hacks.
I very much agree that learning is not a slog, and its sad that people are educated in ways that leaves them believing that learning has to be a slog.
Where I disagree with you is that I do think it is true that some things are addictive and are designed to be addictive (social media is), but its the things people do on devices that are addictive, not the devices themselves.
I agree "dopamine release" is not a bad thing per se, but when businesses hire psychologists to figure out how to get people to spend more time on their app people are being manipulated in a disturbing way.
One point about manipulative attempts to increase engagement is that they only have to apply statistically, that is, increase total engagement. Another point is that people just enjoy doing dumb things to relax. It's then offensive (to me, too!) that businesses exploit this to promote things. But it's not disturbing if somebody is really into, say, jigsaw puzzles. We don't claim Ravensburger is hacking people's brains with their carefully designed colorful and complex pictures that draw you in and keep you playing. That's because Ravensburger are not a bunch of sinister jerks, which is the real issue. But the brain-hacking capacity of infinite phone videos isn't any more real than that of the jigsaws.
You can't force people to learn, you must interest them, and FLOSS desktops would help much, if well presented. Otherwise you only create dysfunctional dictatorship who only exalt conformism and mediocrity.
The word your looking for is Discipline. The way to control babies and animals it to simply take it away from them. This is not the way to control twelve year olds.
12 year old kids are still developing the brain structures to be able to handle discipline. Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.
When you look around and everyone is suddenly overweight and addicted to their phones humans didn’t suddenly lose willpower, their environment changed.
> Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.
Is it not because they failed to learn it in there teenage years?
My mother is a teacher and she noticed that kids that regularly do some kind of competitive sports tend to be much more hardworking in school, and it does extend to their university studies as well. Meanwhile "former gifted children" often experience the first year of university as a giant slap on the face, because they never learnt how to study, how to work hard for something, and being smart is often not enough at this level. Many can't even stand up from that hit.
So this is absolutely a huge disservice to not teach children some sort of self-discipline, motivation is never enough, there will always be days when you don't have enough of the latter, and only the former could push you forward then.
I agree learning should happen, but you don’t learn to drive a car by someone handing you the keys on day 1.
Learning just about anything looks very different than handling the full responsibility of doing the thing correctly in your own. ‘How to teach someone to use a cellphone’ is a much better question than ‘is 12 years old enough to be given one.’
> in less than 6 years your 12 year old is a complete adult
They really aren't. Brains are not close to being fully developed until the age of 25.
The gift of "adult discipline" is quite a flawed idea. Depending on how far you take it, that's exactly the kind of thing that can create trauma, depression, low self esteem and perhaps worst can affect creativity self expression and just wanting to play.
Play, undiscipline, rebelliousness, is exactly where the Apple Macintosh came from and so many other amazing technologies and ideas came from in the world.
I'd say exactly the opposite, we need to find ways of removing discipline and conformity and extending play and self-expression into adult life for as long as possible as it is the foundation of so much goodness.
That said, if your idea of "Adult discipline" is chock-o-block full of play and self-expression then I'm all ears.
> Brains are not close to being fully developed until the age of 25.
Brains continue developing throughout our lifetimes.
The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
It would be convenient to have a specific age we can point to where we can say "now you're fully adult!" based on biological factors, but I'm afraid we'll just have to use our flawed human judgement and draw imperfect lines.
That said, it is fairly well-understood when various of the structures and functions in the brain responsible for certain basic capacities (like discipline) first develop, on average.
> The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
Its not one study, its a multitude of studies of a different functions, and the popular conception about “brain development” not being full until the mid 20s is specifically about where multiple studies show the average peak in executive function occurs (with a slow decline after the peak, which obviously wouldn't be seen if it was only based on studies of younger people.)
Other functions peak anywhere from a little earlier, to much later, to, in a few cases, continuing to develop without a discernible age-related peak.
The drinking age is 21 in the US 18 is not quite full adulthood, so 12 is still quite young. Even just 1 year is a big deal for kids, 6 years is a huge jump look at 0 vs 6 vs 12 vs 18 and these are very different people.
You see my last sentence when you don’t change how our parents were raised. A 12 year old isn’t ready to handle the full responsibility of a smartphone or grocery shopping etc, but that doesn’t mean you can’t introduce aspects of a smartphone.
I would argue that 18 is not a complete adult just one defined legally as an adult by our legal system. I would argue that the definition of complete adult is relatively arbitrary and mostly cultural.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I agree that an 18 year old is not fully developed, but they have to be able to make sensible decisions by the time they are legally an adult, because you have no means of stopping them any more. At the very least enough sense to know when they need to ask for advice.
Heinlein is right in principle but its a big ask. can do quite a bit of that list, but I have never butchered a hog or conned a ship or planned an invasion. I am pretty sure I could pitch manure but finding out whether you can die gallantly is likely to be the last thing you find out.
No human has the capability to learn to do all the things necessary to sustain a modern technological lifestyle solo, with the limited time we have on this planet. At best, someone who's wealthy enough not to have to do all the boring, time-consuming parts might be able to learn a decent subset.
Heinlein's purported philosophy fits very well with the all-too-American "rugged individualist" perspective that every person should be completely self-sufficient, but it doesn't actually hold up if you study psychology, sociology, or history.
It is, perhaps, also relevant that this quote is from the book "Time Enough for Love", whose main character, Lazarus Long, has been alive for many centuries.
I'm may be a little off-topic here (but I don't think so).
In my opinion, elementary school (grades K-5) should really focus a good deal on rote memorization, but only if this focuses on teaching every kind of game and technique to facilitate that kind of learning. By that I mean making flash cards, learning to create and use mnemonic devices, etc.
I just asked ChatGPT, and got something like 15 different techniques, some of which can be used with kindergarteners, all of which can be used by grade 5.
There are always going to be "boring" things to learn. These things are often no longer boring once you know them by heart. In fact, they're often extremely valuable to know. I think by grade 5, if kids are going to be taught anything, they need to be taught the techniques that they can use—on their own—to make learning fun.
In my opinion too many people have opinions where they shouldn't. Just import a working system, like Estonia successfully imported from Finland. You don't have the skills to roll your own.
Teaching has gotten lazy.
In my day, tests were on paper and collected at the end of class.
Now they’re online and kids exchange answers by taking the cell phone to the bathroom.
Or they will exploit the online nature and compare answers during the passing period AFTER the class a submit it before the next class starts. Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!
Instead of being 25-50% short response, tests are all multiple choice so they can be automatically graded.
To think my teachers recorded grades in a ledger and computed averages by hand for classes of 35+ students…
This feels like an uninformed opinion. Are you saying teachers aren’t fully occupied during the day? That would be news to me. If you admit to teaching being a full time job, what would you rather see teachers not do so they can spend a few extra hours grading? Just claiming that teachers need to give paper assignments and spend time grading by hand without considering the tradeoffs sounds like a step backward.
Cell phones haven’t magically made students cheat. Students were cheating plenty with paper tests too. Ands if the students are trading answers with cell phones, they will definitely have a way to trade answers to paper tests. Nearly every smartphone has a camera. Instead we should figure out how to regulate cell phone use at school if they are the enabler for cheating.
Teaching is undoubtedly different than it was a few decades ago. There is technology integrated into most schools and classrooms. The requirements of teachers has changed, but I wouldn’t say teachers have gotten lazy.
> Back in my day there was nothing wrong with how testing happened, I know because I succeeded in that system.
The above is maybe not an entirely fair summary, but I think it captures the spirit of Bobby's comment in vivid detail.
> Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!
What about students who need extra time, which can be part of an IEP, and other issues, I don't think that part is lazy. Also a decent amount of the usage of Canvas or similar LMS's is subject to school or district wide rules.
Edit: I taught highschool CS during the pandemic to try to help out with issues in my district.
Project-based learning / assessment is much more common now.
Students have to explain their process when they present their projects, and answer questions, which ensures they did the work.
These projects make up most of their grades.
Before I lodge my criticism: the kid's right. DNS blocking has always been a non-solution to the "kids screwing around on school computers" problem. When I was his age, we'd pull up breadfish.co.uk on all the computers in a single pod in the library, then un-mute all of them at once. They blocked breadfish, but then we just started pulling it up on youtube.
1:1 ed tech (e.g. chromebooks) probably exacerbates the problem because kids have a single machine that's their own. They can customize it as they please, for better and worse.
When I was his age, my school's thin clients would wipe most of your customizations every time you logged out. For the handful of standalone desktops, you'd still have to set stuff up on each machine individually. This limited the effectiveness of the various tricks we played to get past IT guardrails.
I think the title is a little misleading, though. The essay details why DNS-level blocking doesn't work in educational environments. The title suggests it'd talk about why ed-tech fails in a more general case. Remember, projectors, document cameras, VHS players, and Smart boards were all red-hot tech at some point. Even today, ed-tech is more than just computers assigned to kids.
I think laws/regulations are very similar. "Obvious" ones are good (e.g. violence, food safety), analogous to "of course they should block actually inappropriate content". But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations, and fine-grained laws and regulations don't work, because of loopholes.
To get a healthy society, you must teach people how to behave, then (again, still explicitly prevent serious crimes, but otherwise) trust them. Some will take advantage of the system, but they may still face natural and social consequences, and some abuse of the system is OK.
> But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations
I guess I’m not really following where this logic is going. Are you saying “therefore we should not have laws and regulations”? I highly doubt that’s what you actually mean, but I am unsure how to parse what you do mean if not that.
We should have laws and regulations for things that are important and (relatively) easy to define and enforce. But laws and regulations aren't enough, because people find loopholes, and trying to patch these loopholes with more laws and regulations doesn't work.
Examples of "obvious" laws and regulations: physical violence should be policed, companies should have to pay salaries and have basic restrictions on work hours, safety, sanitation, etc. Examples of things that can't really be regulated: "gambling" and "harmful social media". When does a game become "gambling"? When does a site become "social media" and "harmful"? Various countries have legal definitions for these, but they're very long, so companies find loopholes (e.g. sports betting, loot-boxes); or they straight-up break the laws, but the government doesn't bother to enforce them, because it's too difficult and the general population doesn't notice or care enough. Complex and ineffective laws and regulations also tend to have unintended consequences, like Balatro being considered "gambling" in Australia, and the UK's "Online Safety Act" affecting small forums.
Part of the reason is that the people writing and enforcing laws and regulations themselves are corrupt. But this goes back to the source: you can't police those people with more laws, because their enforcers are also corrupt, and so on. A society is controlled and its morality is defined by its people, so to some extent, a society must teach its people to be moral and give them the leeway to still behave immoral.
This reminds me of the times playing snake on our TI 84 calculators.
It's depressing that anyone would call internet censorship "educational technology"
That was exceptionally well written for a 7th grader.
I plugged it into a couple of free readability analyzers and got 10th - 12th grade reading levels.
https://charactercalculator.com/readability-checker/
- Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade
- Reading Score: 59.00
- Reading Note: Fairly difficult to read
https://hemingwayapp.com/readability-checker
- Readability checker: Grade 10; OK. Aim for 9.
- 5 of 19 sentences are very hard to read.
- 6 of 19 sentences are hard to read.
There are some poor word choices[1], but yes, all in all this 7th grader is definitely writing above grade level. Hopefully his English teachers give him feedback pertinent to his demonstrated ability.
[1] - E.g. "That’s not to say a school’s system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school had left unblocked the spammy-sounding Unblocked Games 66."
would be easier to understand if re-written as:
"That’s not to say a school’s system is completely ineffective. Last year, my school failed to block the spammy-sounding "Unblocked Games 66.""
There are multiple em dashes present. I strongly suspect AI help.
I hate this trend because I use em dashes a lot in my writing. Someone tell the AIs to throttle back on them a bit — everyone thinks I'm using AI when I'm not.
Where has educational technology not been failing?
Maybe work should be put into make the curriculum more engaging so that it's less drudgery and boring work and more rewarding.
A practical example of this from fitness is turning exercise into a sport.
Just have overworked teachers with minimal tech savvy compete for engagement with trillion dollar companies that employ armies of psychologists and programmers, and who have popular momentum on their side. Have them do this without turning into the industry they're competing with.
I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.
> I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.
Even without knowing anything about your music, I'm 98 % certain that I would prefer to go to your concert than to a Taylor Swift concert. :-)
The key part that wasn't mentioned is "...more engaging to a mass audience."
They already have tons interesting and gamified stuff in schools. Part of learning should also include how to tackle subjects you find boring. Discipline and perseverance are useful life skills that I think are increasingly disappearing.
The tough thing is probably trying to make it Type 2 fun, where hard work leads to rewards rather than Type 1 fun that’s basically just entertainment. Ultimately, learning something new is always kind of painful, and learning to push through that pain is in itself a key lesson you have to learn for adult life.
No. Fun is learning. You've just internalized an ugly perspective.
I agree, Learning is fun. It becomes something you need to push through because a bad educational system destroyed the fun.
Its sometimes necessary to learn some thing that are not fun, buts is exceptional, especially for children.
I don't think that's even real learning. But that's a slightly offensive thing to say to diligent swots, I guess. Well done swots, have a gold star anyway.
I think it can be real learning, but it often is not.
You made me laugh anyway.
First of all, you are saying I think learning should not be fun at all, when I am actually saying that learning is type 2 fun, and people need to learn how to do that to be happy, fulfilled adults.
Second, in refuting me, it seems you are stating that learning should be Type 1 fun, which I totally disagree with. You are severely limiting your potential if you only do things that are entertaining. And not just in an accidental way: you are also setting yourself up for a life in which you follow the things that are made to be entertaining for you, by advertisers or whoever else thinks they can gain by leading you along.
I enjoy learning new things, I’ve learned new languages, musical instruments, and I’ve switched careers a couple of times which has led to all kinds of new things I had to learn to do. The fact is, that the real fun happens after mastery, and after a brief ”this is cool” bump where you bang a drum for a couple of minutes on the beach or whatever, there is a long period of practice where you pretty much have to put in the work before you can get to that fun flow state of mastery.
Well, I just ignored the whole thing about type 1 and type 2 fun. I guess type 2 is something about being patient. Thing is, though, if it's actually fun, it's not painful, and if it is painful, it's not necessary as part of learning, and isn't helping.
I suppose we often have to do painful things to maintain stability, or advance, and indirectly therefore they're necessary as part of a strategy to continue learning. Like, I don't know, work a terrible job to pay the rent. But that's indirect, not intrinsic to learning, so those things don't count.
So are you saying that binge watching a TV series is just as educational as learning a new programming language?
No, but learning a new programming language can be more fun than watching a TV series.
This forum has plenty of past comments from people who have learned a programming language for fun when they could have spent that time watching a TV series.
Exactly! Also, depending on the person, in fact yes.
"Learning is fun" for the right type of person is a far cry from an assertion of "fun is learning" that implies whenever someone is having fun, they're learning. The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower, which can easily be short circuited by things that are fun but not learning.
Yes, "learning is fun" does not imply "fun is learning". I agree the latter is not always true so I would strongly disagree with "all fun is learning".
What I would say that there are enough fun things that provide learning that kids (especially younger ones - its difference once exams and qualifications start looming) can learn primarily through fun. Provide the environment and guidance and encouragement. Think about how many fun things kids do is learning. Playing games, making things, drawing. The TV series might be a documentary or produced by a different culture or be based on a book that is worth reading, or may be of cultural value in its own right. It may create an opportunity to talk to children about related topics (I am very much a fan of "conversational learning").
> The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower
I am old enough that I learned because my parents bought me what was then called a "home computer" and it was fun to learn programming. I did not have much skill or will power at that point (I would have been about 10).
More generally, children can learn a lot without skill and will power. It needs opportunities and guidance and encouragement. I agree that sticking kids in front of a TV or giving them a tablet with a bunch of simplistic games will mean they do not learn.
Willpower - or not. Some of us learned languages unhesitatingly, with delight. So what? Do the other people have to take part too?
(Actually I remember hating C when I got to the part of K&R about pointers. I threw the book across the room. I hated it for about 12 hours. Then I woke up the next morning and was all like "pointers are brilliant", it was weird.)
I guess you can guide people into a subject, assuring them the whole way through that the subject is probably going to get enjoyable, and in the meantime making the experience enjoyable through social effects and entertainment - while allowing them freedom to back out if in fact you're boring them. But that doesn't demand their willpower. It hinges on their interest.
> Do the other people have to take part too?
Yes?
It's great that learning things was fun for you. I'm there with you myself. I had amazing lucid dreams the night after I learned Ocaml...
But this entire thread is about teaching children, many of whom need guidance, support, and unfortunately sometimes control to mitigate their attraction to easy-but-unhealthy activities.
Not everyone is going to be a programmer. But even if we're talking about structuring learning such that it's compelling on its own, then we're kind of assuming everyone is going to have a calling and also find it relatively young. That feels pretty naive.
Less drudgery and boring work? How about not drudgery and not boring. To accomplish this the thing has to be optional, and it has to be freely chosen. No amount of window dressing on a thing you're forced to do makes it truly fun. But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated, and so we get endless "make learning fun!" crap on top of compulsory drudgery.
> But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated
It's not not possible, but the problem is you'd end up with a majority uneducated populous who would decide that sacrificing goats and watering crops with Gatorade is the thing to do, and they would hang you if you disagreed
I don't know. I'd like Mike Judge's opinion on this point. Does trapping people in a building and forcing them to stack up academic KPIs really make them less stupid? I suppose it keeps them away from superstition and hoaxes and scams. Maybe. Does it even help with that? It's probably the socialization that matters.
Its not that hard to balance, but it takes individual attention. Learning is intrinsically fun and you need to avoid turning it into drudgery.
I home educated by kids from about eight up to sixteen when they had done GCSEs (exams school kids in the UK do at 16). I very rarely had to force them to do anything, but I did have to make an effort to find the right approach to make things interesting.
I think the solution is to let kids do what they choose but intervene if they are not learning at all. This takes judgement and knowing them as individuals.
You could do it in schools if you have a very low student-teacher ratio (I say below 10 to 1 - so in the UK you would need about double the number of teachers in the state system), trusted teachers' judgement over metrics, and had more flexibility about learning to individual needs rather the prescribing exactly what kids need to learn at a particular age.
Life is not all fun. You need to learn how to buckle up and just get it done.
But school is 13 years of mostly boring, stressful and irrelevant learning. What adult on earth would willingly take up that sort of work? None except the small percent of academically-oriented personalities.
Teacher: "today we're going to learn about the three types of rocks, and the quadratic equation."
Student: "what for? I've never seen an adult discuss or use that in real life."
Teacher: "you might need it some day, and its part of the curriculum."
Well, (some?) humans have inherent curiosity about how to world operates, see all the litany of questions small children have.
Education should attempt to somehow tap into that as a core motivation, though that will surely not be enough or good for everyone.
But learning is work, and there is no way around that.
I estimate more than 50% of people have an aversion to learning because of their school experience.
True learning, and curiosity-driven learning, boosts dopamine, hence most learning in modern society should be inherently "pleasurable". Of course this excludes hard lessons we have to learn through painful experiences.
Even really difficult learning, like at the Masters - phD level, the painful parts of learning should constitute a small percent of the person's overall learning.
Children are often accused of being unmotivated or lazy, but these are usually accusations from boring adults who can't see the magnitude of their error. A child will focus on a video game for hours, even a difficult one, and will still remember the information a week later. But give a child a boring and pointless video game, with no specific goal or accomplishment, and no one will play it. This is why the quadratic equation has become such a meme among "anti-schoolers". It's the epitome of pointlessness for the general population.
Is work fun?
Can be. Working hard for something and achieving it can be a great source of fun, and many people chase it.
"What adult on earth would willingly take up that sort of work?"
Probably most people. 6 hour days, lunch provided, recess with your friends, no real responsibilities. Sounds better than most jobs.
Rocks are easy to turn into fun since they're physical things and you can go over knapping flint, etc.
"Life" seems to be a codeword for other people being obstructive. It's sadly true, you end up learning to be pragmatic and defeated.
'Life" seems to be a codeword for other people being obstructive.'
If one chooses the modern life, then they're stuck within the constraints of society. You could be nearly self sufficient, but that would be even more difficult.
Early school should be like a game onboarding tutorial for this world:
"You are a human."
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
"You are a human."
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
That's basically what school is. Many of these topics can't be explained in reasonable detail and complexity until after 10 years old.
Do you have kids? You’re going straight to planets huh.
No but I think I can still think like one and I can remember what would have gotten my interest back then before dropping out because video games were so much more interesting :')
Before I realized this world is just as interesting, but school does everything to make you bored of it before you can explore it.
Even in the most interesting fields, 95% of everything is boring work. That even goes for the individual tasks. Found a good physics problem? Well, you might be excited about it but 95% of solving it is going to be thinking about assumptions and doing rote mathematical manipulations. You are likely to get sick of it before even getting to any answer, much less the right one. There are also many important/useful fields that are not very interesting.
In a sense, the most important thing school does is to build up within students a tolerance of boredom and an appreciation of the fact that most work is potentially boring.
> Even in the most interesting fields, 95% of everything is boring work.
You can plow through boring work if the end goal is exciting. For example, when developing a game that you yourself want to play :)
Most people are not like that. Even playing video games will be boring, if it's your JOB. Much more so if you need to do hundreds of hours of cerebral work to get to the point where you can have a little fun lol...
> Most people are not like that.
Not that most people like games, but everyone has their own goal, even if they haven't discovered them yet, even if it's just to chill in a nice place and do nothing all day, they can still find better ways to be lazy! (build better furniture, explore the search for the ideal climate etc.)
What is with all this defeatist give-up-by-default attitude? There's NO fucking way that the current common system of human education, which has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, is perfect.
I'm just being real. If admitting that life is a hell of a lot of work makes me defeatist, so be it. The current system of human education is "only" several hundred years old, but that is long enough to see what works and what doesn't for the most part. What sure as hell doesn't work to reach success and provide for society is to loaf around aimlessly as if we don't know what skills are useful for modern life.
“This is what the world is like” is a full education in itself.
Again, it doesn't have to be an info dump, like how education is now and has forever been, just reciting rote explanations to questions nobody (at that age) asks.
Just enough to get you hooked into the "game" you've just spawned into.
does this ever work in tutorials in games? People skip the explanations and then complain later that they're confused or didn't know x and y feature existed.
We already have people say they wish they'd learned how to do their taxes or balance budgets - imagine what 12 year olds might think is uninteresting that comes up later, right?
In the last 20 years or so, how much of the knowledge that we know and use in life is from what we learned in school (and remember) versus looking it up on the internet or asking someone only during the moment we need that knowledge?
"You are a human."
"Here's the refrigerator."
"Here's a cell phone."
Of course, actually yes: Expose new humans to the latest technology right away, WHILE it's still awe-inspiring to them, before it become as routine as breathing, and explain how it's made, how we got there, and how life was before then.
That'd be a much better way of teaching multiple subjects that are boring and irrelevant on their own.
You're not supposed to have phones or computers in class but you're supposed to somehow be interested in the math and other sciences that make those things possible?
You go home and your life there is much more entertaining than in school, but you have no idea how what you're being taught in school ties into the things at home.
I don't think a way of teaching has been found, that doesn't require a willingness to be at least moderately bored, and that isn't to some extent disconnected from everyday life.
Even using computers in class, which I endorse, involves acceptance that many of the uses will seem boring.
Making everything as entertaining as commercial media is too much to ask.
One just needs an exciting goal to reach, something to look forward to.
For me for example, a lot of the work in developing the game is mundane boilerplate and looking up solutions to solved problems, but I can bear through it because I really want to play the game I'm trying to make.
Education should optimize for finding such "goals" for each individual person, instead of just finding a "use" for each person to be put to, as another poster put it.
Grammar and reading comprehension are important and can be enjoyable or at least unlock the enjoyment of understanding literature ...but I seriously doubt a 10 year old is going to think to take a class in it on their own.
>and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.
There isn't any educational technology. There are (and have been, for decades, accomplishing nothing) a bunch of companies trying to come up with ways to exploit educational institutions to create revolving income streams and failing. Letting kids access the internet at school is just an admission of complete failure, being bad at blocking bad sites doesn't make that failure any worse.
No phones, no internet at school. If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless. Leave the screens to their software and programming classes.
I'd say it will be a blessing when this debacle is replaced with AI, except the AI will also come from the revolving income stream guys, and will also have children's well-being as an afterthought. It will be the same failure, but with 4x the margin going to 1/100 the previous number of vendors, just like every "tech advance" in the past decade.
This. Exactly this.
The answer isn’t some fancy security software or screening, it is much simpler: no software, period. The bulk of school should be learning in a classroom, computers are not required.
They can and should be allowed in limited doses early on, and can build over time, particularly as courses either obviously require it or the computers truly facilitate the learning.
We had her public school teachers trying to tell us the answer to our daughter’s reading issues was more screen time. We ended up sending her to a private religious school with very limited screen time, and she is now an A and B student.
This is a huge problem in public schools because state and federal governments are complicit in burying kids (and parents!) in unnecessary technology. During Covid, the feds flooded schools with literal billions of dollars that did not go to better teachers, it went to smart boards and MacBook pros and iPads and dozens of “School as a Service” providers who existed only to extract money from clueless superintendents who have a seemingly endless supply of tax money to draw from.
> If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless.
The numbers are smaller and smaller, but there will still be kids whose only access to the internet is their parents' smartphones. When I personally mentored a couple of pretty bright high school student interns, one of whom scored above 1500 SATs and a 36 ACT, they both found it really helpful to look at Khan Academy / YouTube clips to better understand what I was explaining.
If the poorer kids don't have access to these explanatory videos, except when their parents are done with their phones, they will fall further behind than they otherwise would have.
Perhaps a compromise would be to limit internet access to the school library?
I teach a 5th grade computer science class at my school. We just finished our "chatbot" project. I thought the kids some very simple Python syntax--assigning variables, concatenating strings, input, print, if, elif, else--and they made programs that could have a conversation with the user.
I suppose I could have done this without internet on air-gapped laptops. They do need laptops though, and the internet makes it much easier for them to submit their work for me to review after class.
I realize that a bounded computer science class probably isn't what you're talking about. However, my school has in fact really been trying to clamp down on technology use this year, and it has been challenging for the computer science department!
Parent of two teenagers. Came here to say exactly this.
"teach kids how to use technology responsibly"
OK
I teach a code club. I try to get the students excited and focused, and especially on projects where they work together, it generally works really well, even for students who obviously aren't quite 'into it'.
But at absolutely any opportunity where they are not focused (and there's always someone) they try to play roblox or other games. They try to have it running in the background and switch. And even installed a workspace switcher so it wasn't obvious they had game windows open.
It's really like highly addictive drugs. For kids, at least, the best solution is to make them unavailable while they are supposed to be learning.
This is now going on in college. I was just hearing from a professor the other day that it's impossible to keep students off of social media. They cannot sit for a 50 minute lecture without pulling out their phones (that's if they even physically come to class; if they're online, they are half-listening at best).
These are now the COVID lockdown and post-pandemic kids. They come in to college unprepared/lacking mastery of prerequisites, don't listen in class, they don't come to office hours, they don't do their homework (or try to have ChatGPT do it) and get upset when they fail.
Offline-first teaching! Let them only be able to read docs available to them
This is because they like playing Roblox, and are getting something out of playing Roblox, and are not persuaded that your thing is more rewarding for them, and unless you can pull a miracle of engaging enthusiasm out of the bag they're right.
So if they take crack cocaine instead of literature class, they're right too?
Sorry, but learning is actually a slog. The best we can do is get them addicted to learning, instead of gaming, but let's help them on the way by removing the gaming temptation while they are in class.
Learning is not a slog. Cramming for exams, that's a slog, but only tenuously relates to learning.
OK, so sometimes a person may get all fired up about a project and slog through reams of - effort - in order to get some stage done, out of a deep desire to see what happens next. And from an external perspective that seems very worthy because it seems deeper than something that's just constantly rewarding. But is it necessary, proper, that any given person be doing such a deep and onerous thing all the time? Or even very often? Is it for the external observer, who knows nothing of the person's internal processes and feelings, to decide these things? Mind your own beeswax.
Crack doesn't count, IMO, because it games the system. Probably now you'll say something to compare Roblox unironically to crack "because dopamine". Did you know, we get dopamine released when doing anything we enjoy? But there's always a lot of people ready to claim that electronic devices are literally addictive, because it's a trendy thing to say, and the pressure of this opinion is like a physical force, a great gaseous mass of idiots. I shouldn't have got involved with this conversation, I have important video games to play.
Some learning is a slog. We have to go through it because it's required to understand the thing we really want to learn about. And we don't appreciate that until we're on the other side. The teacher/professor can say "you need to understand this, even though it's not obviously applicable yet, just trust me" and that is the part you have to slog through but you eventually see the point.
Other stuff we slog through just because we've decided it makes a student well-rounded. I like reading fiction, but I never liked reading "literature" and then trying to write an analysis of it. It was absolutely a slog, and even 40 years later I cannot see that my life is any worse off because I never loved reading Homer or Shakespeare or Chaucer or Tolstoy.
I recognize what you're talking about, from mathematics. But you're either being genuinely interested, in which case it's a delightful slog that you're keen on, or else (more commonly) you're being perversely stubborn for external reasons like prestige. In the latter case it's a sort of perverse-learning that isn't really worthy of the name, and although it's somewhat more sophisticated than rote memorization, the understanding is shallow and short-lived. I used to hate mathematics, so I did six years of pure mathematics, and now I really hate it.
I was reading parts of the Iliad for fun recently, on the other hand, because somebody had asked a question, and I enjoy slogging through dense texts to find obscure facts. It's horribly written because names are frequently oblique, like "the old one" or "son of ..." instead of an actual name, and everybody talks in flowery speeches. Shakespeare suffers from the flowery speeches thing too. Beowulf is also tedious to read because of all the kennings (talking in riddles). Chaucer on the other hand is sometimes dirty and amusing. Tolstoy, never tried. Gilgamesh, though, is well-written, fast-paced and highly entertaining, I reckon literature should probably have stopped there, all the authors after that were just derivative hacks.
But in summary it depends what you're into.
I very much agree that learning is not a slog, and its sad that people are educated in ways that leaves them believing that learning has to be a slog.
Where I disagree with you is that I do think it is true that some things are addictive and are designed to be addictive (social media is), but its the things people do on devices that are addictive, not the devices themselves.
I agree "dopamine release" is not a bad thing per se, but when businesses hire psychologists to figure out how to get people to spend more time on their app people are being manipulated in a disturbing way.
Edit - inserted missing "not"
> is a bad thing
I'll take that as "is not a bad thing."
One point about manipulative attempts to increase engagement is that they only have to apply statistically, that is, increase total engagement. Another point is that people just enjoy doing dumb things to relax. It's then offensive (to me, too!) that businesses exploit this to promote things. But it's not disturbing if somebody is really into, say, jigsaw puzzles. We don't claim Ravensburger is hacking people's brains with their carefully designed colorful and complex pictures that draw you in and keep you playing. That's because Ravensburger are not a bunch of sinister jerks, which is the real issue. But the brain-hacking capacity of infinite phone videos isn't any more real than that of the jigsaws.
I'll take that as "is not a bad thing."
Yes, and I have now edited it. Thank you.
> not a bunch of sinister jerks, which is the real issue.
I agree with this.
> But the brain-hacking capacity of infinite phone videos isn't any more real than that of the jigsaws.
I am not sure about this, and I am convinced that some things (e.g. social media) do have greater brain-hacking capacity.
You can't force people to learn, you must interest them, and FLOSS desktops would help much, if well presented. Otherwise you only create dysfunctional dictatorship who only exalt conformism and mediocrity.
The word your looking for is Discipline. The way to control babies and animals it to simply take it away from them. This is not the way to control twelve year olds.
That’s a strategy doomed to failure.
12 year old kids are still developing the brain structures to be able to handle discipline. Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.
When you look around and everyone is suddenly overweight and addicted to their phones humans didn’t suddenly lose willpower, their environment changed.
> Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.
Is it not because they failed to learn it in there teenage years?
My mother is a teacher and she noticed that kids that regularly do some kind of competitive sports tend to be much more hardworking in school, and it does extend to their university studies as well. Meanwhile "former gifted children" often experience the first year of university as a giant slap on the face, because they never learnt how to study, how to work hard for something, and being smart is often not enough at this level. Many can't even stand up from that hit.
So this is absolutely a huge disservice to not teach children some sort of self-discipline, motivation is never enough, there will always be days when you don't have enough of the latter, and only the former could push you forward then.
I agree learning should happen, but you don’t learn to drive a car by someone handing you the keys on day 1.
Learning just about anything looks very different than handling the full responsibility of doing the thing correctly in your own. ‘How to teach someone to use a cellphone’ is a much better question than ‘is 12 years old enough to be given one.’
Sure but in less than 6 years your 12 year old is a complete adult. You must give them the gift of Adult discipline in that short period of time.
Without that you will get the result in your final sentence.
> in less than 6 years your 12 year old is a complete adult
They really aren't. Brains are not close to being fully developed until the age of 25.
The gift of "adult discipline" is quite a flawed idea. Depending on how far you take it, that's exactly the kind of thing that can create trauma, depression, low self esteem and perhaps worst can affect creativity self expression and just wanting to play.
Play, undiscipline, rebelliousness, is exactly where the Apple Macintosh came from and so many other amazing technologies and ideas came from in the world.
I'd say exactly the opposite, we need to find ways of removing discipline and conformity and extending play and self-expression into adult life for as long as possible as it is the foundation of so much goodness.
That said, if your idea of "Adult discipline" is chock-o-block full of play and self-expression then I'm all ears.
> Brains are not close to being fully developed until the age of 25.
Brains continue developing throughout our lifetimes.
The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
It would be convenient to have a specific age we can point to where we can say "now you're fully adult!" based on biological factors, but I'm afraid we'll just have to use our flawed human judgement and draw imperfect lines.
That said, it is fairly well-understood when various of the structures and functions in the brain responsible for certain basic capacities (like discipline) first develop, on average.
> The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
Its not one study, its a multitude of studies of a different functions, and the popular conception about “brain development” not being full until the mid 20s is specifically about where multiple studies show the average peak in executive function occurs (with a slow decline after the peak, which obviously wouldn't be seen if it was only based on studies of younger people.)
Other functions peak anywhere from a little earlier, to much later, to, in a few cases, continuing to develop without a discernible age-related peak.
The drinking age is 21 in the US 18 is not quite full adulthood, so 12 is still quite young. Even just 1 year is a big deal for kids, 6 years is a huge jump look at 0 vs 6 vs 12 vs 18 and these are very different people.
You see my last sentence when you don’t change how our parents were raised. A 12 year old isn’t ready to handle the full responsibility of a smartphone or grocery shopping etc, but that doesn’t mean you can’t introduce aspects of a smartphone.
I would argue that 18 is not a complete adult just one defined legally as an adult by our legal system. I would argue that the definition of complete adult is relatively arbitrary and mostly cultural.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
I agree that an 18 year old is not fully developed, but they have to be able to make sensible decisions by the time they are legally an adult, because you have no means of stopping them any more. At the very least enough sense to know when they need to ask for advice.
Heinlein is right in principle but its a big ask. can do quite a bit of that list, but I have never butchered a hog or conned a ship or planned an invasion. I am pretty sure I could pitch manure but finding out whether you can die gallantly is likely to be the last thing you find out.
I knew as soon as I read this that you are a parent.
I am, and one of my daughters is 22 and the other 17 so I have seen a lot of the process of growing up.
Specialization is for societies.
No human has the capability to learn to do all the things necessary to sustain a modern technological lifestyle solo, with the limited time we have on this planet. At best, someone who's wealthy enough not to have to do all the boring, time-consuming parts might be able to learn a decent subset.
Heinlein's purported philosophy fits very well with the all-too-American "rugged individualist" perspective that every person should be completely self-sufficient, but it doesn't actually hold up if you study psychology, sociology, or history.
It is, perhaps, also relevant that this quote is from the book "Time Enough for Love", whose main character, Lazarus Long, has been alive for many centuries.
I'm may be a little off-topic here (but I don't think so).
In my opinion, elementary school (grades K-5) should really focus a good deal on rote memorization, but only if this focuses on teaching every kind of game and technique to facilitate that kind of learning. By that I mean making flash cards, learning to create and use mnemonic devices, etc.
I just asked ChatGPT, and got something like 15 different techniques, some of which can be used with kindergarteners, all of which can be used by grade 5.
There are always going to be "boring" things to learn. These things are often no longer boring once you know them by heart. In fact, they're often extremely valuable to know. I think by grade 5, if kids are going to be taught anything, they need to be taught the techniques that they can use—on their own—to make learning fun.
In my opinion too many people have opinions where they shouldn't. Just import a working system, like Estonia successfully imported from Finland. You don't have the skills to roll your own.
This is the classical approach where early education ("grammar") is focused on learning facts.
Yes. But I'm adding that learning methods should be explicitly taught, to where they become second nature to the student.