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The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#191

Post by bluGill »

mrr54 wrote: post #164
Spooky23 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are focused on sports and want their kid to be bigger than their classmates. So you either opt out of school if the birthdays work, delay kindergarten if it isn’t mandatory, or send the kid to a private kindergarten and have them repeat. It’s a big advantage, especially around 11 or 12, and get kids on more competitive teams earlier. I coach little league, and we see it all of the time. It’s a compliance…

Are teams not based on age in the United States? In New Zealand they're all categorised as 'under 9s', 'under 8s', 'under 7s' etc. They've also introduced weight classes to a lot of teen sports too to prevent them from being dominated by gigantic Samoan kids.

School teams are classed by grade level. Non-school teams are by age. Non-school teams are generally seen as a fun thing to do on weekends, while school teams can become very serious. Hold your kid back early and they will be the star of the team 12 years latter. Some of this is because at some critical points their body is physically better than their peers and thus they get to play a little more and get that much more practice. Some of it is the parents who think doing well in sports is important are teaching their kids young to play sports and so those kids are getting practice at home that other kids do not get.

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#192

Post by nitwit005 »

triceratops wrote: post #99
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #83

I only ever write on a computer. I own a single pen which I have not needed to replace since I moved into my apartment in 2016. I'm pretty sure I last used it in November, when I had to fill out a form for jury duty. The article cite studies that handwriting is linked to brain development, and reading on paper improves memory, and so on... I'm certainly not in a position to refute those studies, but I have to wonder…

> we should be teaching the skills that people need in today's world, and that overwhelmingly means typing. You don't need a ton of practice to get good at typing. Anyone can reach 80 WPM within a year. That's more than enough. Handwriting is much more difficult and needs more practice. Even software engineers who type all the time need to write on whiteboards to get jobs. /s

Most everyone is bad at writing on chalkboard or whiteboards unless they practice it as a separate skill. Teachers sometimes get training.

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#193

Post by macNchz »

gumby wrote: post #60

about six years ago my son let a campaign to turn back the attempt to introduce iPads to the school (they'd been piloted in grade 9 and were to be introduced high school wide the following year). A surprising number of the 9th graders said it was a waste and many kids didn't want them (they already had phone to get whatever distraction they wanted). The principal finally took him aside and said "I'm not going to disc…

> But time was taken from something else and all the 2-6 grade kids learned to use Powerpoint and Word which essentially none of them (now all college age) have used in years.

My computer classes in ~6th grade (1999) involved at some point learning Excel by building stock portfolio spreadsheets, researching companies on the internet, making “investments” and tracking our profits over time. We learned Word and Powerpoint as well, but getting into the formulas in Excel was super fun for me, and came at a time when I was starting to play with Basic and Perl outside of school.

After that I was also way ahead of future friends in high school and college at building out spreadsheet calculators for science projects, research papers, club budgets, whatever.

I was back home a few years ago and ran into the teacher who taught that class and actually thanked him specifically for his Excel classes, as they’d caught my interest enough to still be thinking about them 20 years later!

Way better than all the time we spent learning cursive...

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#194

Post by remarkEon »

saulrh wrote: post #189
grawprog wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment. I'm not sure I agree with this. This doesn't teach the fundamentals and rules of how words are put together. Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put t…

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words Funny you should say that in defense of classical methods of teaching literacy, which for me consisted of eight years of memorizing lists of words and regurgitating them on weekly spelling quizzes. Weekly spelling quizzes. Memorized lists of ten to fifteen words at a time. All the way into high school.

I had the same methods. Ironically I’ve learned more about the English language in attempting to learn (or re-learn) other languages (Spanish, German, French, Latin). So idk, I inclined to buy the argument that teaching the parts of all the systems is a better start than teaching one system at a time, and doing it through brute force memorization.

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#195

Post by jacobolus »

mrr54 wrote: post #180
mcqueenjordan wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A video recording of the MIT OCW courses is absolutely educational. Many science/technology focused YouTube channels absolutely produce educational content. You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education. I'm deeply sorry that you've struggled with bad things you saw on the internet. That can be a compelling reason to limit access. But that doesn't redefine education.

>there are many great youtube channels packed with scientific content, like Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Mark Rober, CGP Grey, VSauce, engineerguy, Physics Girl, Captain Disillusion, Mathologer, Numberphile, ... That's what I was replying to. And those videos are not educational. They're 'interesting facts' or 'wow science is so coooooool!!!!!111 yeah science!!!11' channels. >You don't need to receive a title or a…

There are lots of university lectures, worked example problems, videos of people demonstrating and teaching every type of manual skill, .... on youtube

> those videos are not educational

This kind of thing is absolutely “educational” under any reasonable definition of the word https://youtu.be/0KjG8Pg6LGk https://youtu.be/8KmVDxkia_w https://youtu.be/Ku8BOBwD4hc https://youtu.be/k8Rxep2Mkp8 https://youtu.be/1VPfZ_XzisU https://youtu.be/IcrBqCFLHIY

Of course it’s not (and not supposed to be) a substitute for students working problems for themselves, running experiments, conducting interviews, doing research in the stacks, writing papers, writing code, putting each-others’ art through critique, or the like.

Nobody “comes away from a Mathologer video thinking they «know math»” (whatever that is supposed to mean).

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#196

Post by mattnewton »

jacobolus wrote: post #81
plughs wrote: post #8

Our elementary school uses chromebooks from 1st grade on, and I do see a lot of downsides. The most outrageous problem, IMO, is that there are 'modules' that must be completed, and kids with computer access at home can work on them at home. Kids from low income families are screwed over - again. Other problems - spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you? - The de-emphasis on…

Why do you think students will better learn to spell without spellcheck? As far as I can tell spending class time on spelling per se and/or grading students on spelling mistakes is a complete waste of time and focus. The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment. It’s plausi…

To play devils advocate here, I have always been a terrible speller and it doesn't affect me because all surfaces I use have spell check. Occassionally I will butcher something so bad I confuse the spell checker and Google it, but those are so few and far between I don't feel like I missed out memorizing list after list of arbitrary word roots and remembering if this is loaned from greek, a romance language like french, or old german.

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#197

Post by jelliclesfarm »

plughs wrote: post #8

Our elementary school uses chromebooks from 1st grade on, and I do see a lot of downsides. The most outrageous problem, IMO, is that there are 'modules' that must be completed, and kids with computer access at home can work on them at home. Kids from low income families are screwed over - again. Other problems - spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you? - The de-emphasis on…

English is not my native language, but the medium of education in my school was English.

My grandmother used to make me read three articles from the newspaper. One from the front page, one from the weather pages and one from the sports pages. Puzzles on weekends and it was our job to scan and read out obituaries everyday.

She was born in 1921 and never went to school after 8th grade. She learnt how to spell and write in English because she figured newspaper articles were already spell checked and edited for correct grammar etc. I had to chuckle as I imagined re what she would have said if she were alive in our buzzfeed and dailymail times.

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#198

Post by WalterBright »

jacobolus wrote: post #81
plughs wrote: post #8

Our elementary school uses chromebooks from 1st grade on, and I do see a lot of downsides. The most outrageous problem, IMO, is that there are 'modules' that must be completed, and kids with computer access at home can work on them at home. Kids from low income families are screwed over - again. Other problems - spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you? - The de-emphasis on…

Why do you think students will better learn to spell without spellcheck? As far as I can tell spending class time on spelling per se and/or grading students on spelling mistakes is a complete waste of time and focus. The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment. It’s plausi…

> I have seen no evidence that spellcheck reduces people’s ability to learn spelling.

Spellcheck has shown me that I've been misspelling certain words forever :-)

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#199

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

jacobolus wrote: post #100
grawprog wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment. I'm not sure I agree with this. This doesn't teach the fundamentals and rules of how words are put together. Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put t…

People don’t learn the “rules of English” through explicit instruction. They learn them through years (decades) of exposure. Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.

I'd say that nothing is learned through instructions. There always is an element of use that turns instructions into understanding.

Re: The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

#200

Post by chime »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #83

I only ever write on a computer. I own a single pen which I have not needed to replace since I moved into my apartment in 2016. I'm pretty sure I last used it in November, when I had to fill out a form for jury duty. The article cite studies that handwriting is linked to brain development, and reading on paper improves memory, and so on... I'm certainly not in a position to refute those studies, but I have to wonder…

> we do in fact have worse memories than scholars during the Middle Ages.

I wouldn't be so sure. People can regurgitate from memory dialogs for entire movie series, TV shows, and countless songs. We also remember deeply nested folder structure on numerous computer systems, variety of software interfaces (e.g. click Menu > Tools > Options...), and innumerable memes/facts/lists. Sure we forget a ton (is it needle/haystack or haystack/needle?) but we know and remember a lot more than medieval epic poems.

Navigating the modern world requires an insane amount of memorization but since we no longer need to remember road signs or phone numbers, we feel we remember less today than decades or centuries ago.

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