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

#211

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:04 AM UTC

knolax wrote: post #204

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, 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]),…

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by Hermel » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

In case you understand German, it is worth reading the books (or watching the talks) of psychologist Manfred Spitzer. He makes compelling arguments on why in particular our children suffer from “digital dementia”. Among other things, he argues that our brain learns much better when writing with pen and paper than when writing on a keyboard. This resonates with my own experience at university: I remembered stuff much better when I took notes on paper than when I did so using a computer.

Links: https://www.amazon.de/Digitale-Demenz-unsere-Verstand-bringe... https://youtu.be/MRrPbNLhEuQ

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

#213

Post by jacobolus » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

knolax wrote: post #204

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, 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]),…

> words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor)

Seems the better link is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors

Apparently “chisel” comes from the same source.

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

#214

Post by knolax » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

shard wrote: post #208

raverbashing wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually count English spelling as a strength and not a weakness, otherwise we'd have the situation of multiple semantically distinct and unrelated words being spelled the same[0] while at the same time having to maintain distinct orthographies for every minor dialect[1].

[0] https://ko.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%88%98%EB%8F%84_(%EB%8F%9...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_differen...

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

#215

Post by shaded-enmity » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

mrr54 wrote: post #163

dnqthao wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like English spelling has any rules. There are a lot of irregularities with English spelling that students need to learn by heart how the word is spelled compared to how it is pronounced.

English spelling absolutely has rules. The famous 'ghoti' example (where supposedly it should be able to be pronounced 'fish' because of 'gh' in rough, 'ti' in 'nation', etc.) is nonsense because there's only one way that word can be pronounced in English and that's 'goatee'. Irregularities don't mean it doesn't have rules. The most common 1-2k words are much less regular than the rest of the language, but learning h…

Obligatory "What if English were phonetically consistent":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU

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

#216

Post by jacobolus » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #162

jacobolus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did. They taught us this in school. My spelling is good. I rarely rely on a spell checker and have autocorrect turned off on my keyboard because I find it annoying rather than helpful. Knowing how to spell and sound out words helped me be a better reader and kept reading interesting for me. Anecdotally, I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling…

> I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.

None of the people I know who grew up in highly literate families with parents who read with them several hours per week up through age 7+ ever had either of these problems in adulthood. Including the dyslexic ones.

I am highly skeptical that your acquaintances dislike reading because the spelling of long words is too complicated. More realistically they find long words hard because they never did enough reading to become fluent. Nearly everyone can get at least 90% of the way to reading arbitrary English text with about a year of appropriate reading instruction at age 6 plus a few years of regular practice.

As someone who never spent any effort on spelling in school, big words are fine to read and spelling is no trouble. I also dislike and disable autocorrect. I’d happily put my pronunciation of arbitrary English words up against anyone who isn’t a professional linguist.

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

#217

Post by watwut » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #119

watwut wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, engineers and computer programmers routinelly introduce their kids to scratch, hour of code, code combat, general programming, hacking things and what not. At the high school level, kids of my collegues (especially boys) have significant advantage compared to kids of other people.

indeed, but I wouldn't say "then again": I'd say that teaching kids Word isn't giving them any kind of computational thinking. Teaching them to write a small piece of code (and that exquisite feeling when you finally get it working) is very powerful. It's similar to how mathematics is typically taught to kids in the systems I'm familiar with (US, DE, AU): mostly as syntactic transformations unattached to anything use…

Yes. But "computer should wait till high school" and "this is bad curriculum" are not the same complaints.

And also, basic knowledge of word will not harm them. They are not taught word in deep details, they basically learn few basics - that files exists and can be opened with it. For many kids it is first encounter with anything remotely like that.

Again, it is stuff that programmers kids just know by osmosis living with parents, that is why it looks pointless to teach. But many kids simply dont.

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

#218

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:37 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Speaking as a dyslexic person this is garbage. Learning to spell required weekly word lists, spelling tests and hours of study. The memory skills this built have seriously helped me in my life.

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

#219

Post by lechemin » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

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 would you even mention this as a problem when the real problem is that kids are sitting in front of computer screens instead of running around and playing and learning how things work the real way instead of a completely false game version?

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

#220

Post by lechemin » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:43 AM UTC

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…

But I guess, now that I think about it, that with a shortage of teachers we must get education out to the kids somehow..