The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by xmprt » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #95

jacobolus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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…

That's what the reading is for

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

#202

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #188

shard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writ…

I think some countries should just bite the bullet and start replacing their archaic writing systems with something more modern Phonetical alphabet, standardized spelling, etc Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders. Not to mention the whole "every character has several unrelated pronunciations, but hey, context, right?!" of Japanese.

They did, but it stopped and then went back as far as I know. E.g. nowadays there are two Chinese writing systems, simplified and traditional. Similar Japanese efforts to ban some rare kanji (e.g. some were only ever used in certain last names) fizzled with the advent of computers that make it easy to type any kanji.

People do not always want things simplified. They also want richness and this may conflict with simplicity. Look at fonts, for example. They gained a lot of complexity recently, there's lots of contextual variations and even two different systems to express it (Apple has its own). The monospace fonts that were invented for typewriters are much simpler than other fonts, but nowadays they are only used in certain specific contexts, like programming, and even there they started to get quite a bit of richness + complexity with PragmataPro being the absolute champion of it.

I'd say the general trend is toward perceived simplicity, but internal richness. Automation, not simplification.

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

#203

Post by ericd » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

_audakel wrote: post #79

watwut wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education has many goals and one of them is to teach them spelling. The fact that fourth grade homework is spelled correctly does not matter at all - the goal is not to produce correctly spelled homework.

Of they don't have to memorize random spellings it could free up mental resources for other things. Regardless, why be stuck in the past with things like handwriting or spelling or cursive?

If you're a programmer, does your editor perform spellcheck for you? Mine certainly doesn't.

It's utterly bizarre to me that people in this thread are seriously suggesting that spelling is an obsolete skill.

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

#204

Post by knolax » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #95

jacobolus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together

Learning those rules involve learning the orthographies of French, Latin, and Greek, etc. as well as their associated transliteration schemes(usually multiple per language), and memorizing which one was used for which specific word(Hamburg[0] vs. burgher[1] vs. bourgeoisie[2] vs. Berger[3]), as well as words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor[4]). I don't think most people actually learn this.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher

[2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger

[4] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor

Edit: See comment below for better source.

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

#205

Post by floren » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #197

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…

Go back and look at archives of old newspapers. Seems like any time I read an old newspaper article, say from the 60s, I spot more grammatical mistakes than say a given Buzzfeed or Daily Mail article.

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

#206

Post by IggleSniggle » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:45 AM UTC

daxfohl wrote: post #169

mrr54 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these 'common core math' techniques? I went to primary school in New Zealand. In around 2005 they introduced a new way of teaching mathematics that we referred to as the 'numeracy programme'. It wasn't very popular with students and parents obviously all thought it was crap because parents are naturally scared of change in education negatively affecting their kids. But when we actually did it, it was basical…

> if I'm adding 47 to 54, I can simplify that by instead adding 50 (47 + 3) to 57 (54 + 3), which is 107 47+53=107??? Haha, okay I get it, it was a slip. But it's kind of the point from my perspective. All these different techniques of moving stuff around seems fraught with ways to misunderstand it or muck it up. At best they should be supplementary skills, and shouldn't be taught as the primary techniques. Per Commo…

I dunno. Having an intuition for why 12x6=72, etc all the way on up through integrals, Taylor series, and the rest of K-12 math just seems a lot more intellectually stimulating, and therefore useful to the development of the mind to me.

I never understood the kids who "just wanted to know how to get the answer." Like, any monkey can follow a protocol. Why does it work? That's the brain muscle worth growing.

Mathematics is a foundation for systematic logical thinking. Rote memorization comes in so that you don't need to work through the why once you have mastered the why of that problem; to enable thinking about more complex relationships. But if you didn't really get the simpler relationship, maybe it's not time to move on...

Disclaimer: I have zero personal experience with Common Core outside the kind of anecdotes I come across like in this thread

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

#207

Post by knolax » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:48 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #188

shard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writ…

I think some countries should just bite the bullet and start replacing their archaic writing systems with something more modern Phonetical alphabet, standardized spelling, etc Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders. Not to mention the whole "every character has several unrelated pronunciations, but hey, context, right?!" of Japanese.

> archaic writing systems with something more modern

The Latin alphabet is an archaic system that barely worked for Latin and doesn't work at all for English. There's a reason English dictionaries have to include IPA.

> Phonetical alphabet

You say so while typing in an alphabet that doesn't have enough characters to describe all the phonemes of the language you're using, and which is used phonetically in name only.

> standardized spelling, etc

I don't know what gives you the impression that "some countries" don't have standardized spelling.

> Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders.

You're literally talking about the writing system of the word's most widely used language. Obviously a plurality of people do have the patience to do so. In practice it requires roughly the same amount of memorization as English. The only difference is being that most of HN probably learned English early in life and have internalized things like "Peak Vs. Pique Vs. Peek".

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

#208

Post by shard » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #188

shard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writ…

I think some countries should just bite the bullet and start replacing their archaic writing systems with something more modern Phonetical alphabet, standardized spelling, etc Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders. Not to mention the whole "every character has several unrelated pronunciations, but hey, context, right?!" of Japanese.

What you describe includes English, however, due to its heritage of being a conglomerate of several different languages. That's why English spellings bees are a thing -- the spelling and pronunciations don't always match up. We'd need to switch to something like Korean, where deviations between spelling and pronunciation can be counted on one, maybe two hands.

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

#209

Post by temporallobe » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

I am gravely concerned about using too much tech in early education, as this will assuredly hinder the development of critical fine motor skills such as handwriting, drawing, painting, sculpting, among many other skills, all of which I learned as a child. Not to mention all of the physical play we had. As a child I remember having to invent games, stories, and adventures. In other words, we were forced to use our imagination, for everything. Perhaps I’m just a cynical and aging critic, but I feel like the overuse of technology in general will make future generations of children lazier, and therefore less creative. I already feel that my own life has been impacted in this way.

Case in point: The widespread use of Grammarly is dumbing down everyone. Why actually learn proper grammar, spelling, common idioms, and syntax, if AI can basically do it for you? What as a society do we gain from such things? I can’t help but imagine that at some point our understanding of language will become so simplified that we’ll need a proxy language to express “real” phrases so that all we have to do is bang out basic ideas on some kind of modified keyboard which will translate it to real language.

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

#210

Post by tmaly » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

I agree with parts of the article such as the issue with common core requirements that make it easier for computers to grade.

I do not see STEM being taught as an issue as I think science helps move us forward as a species.

Connecticut passed a statue last year requiring inclusion of computer science in curriculum. The one issue I have with this is they want to retrain the teachers and make them subject matter experts in computer science.

Public Act 19-128 (“An Act Concerning The Inclusion Of Computer Science Instruction In The Public School Curriculum, Programs Of Teacher Preparation And In-Service Training Programs For Teachers”)