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

#241

Post by benhurmarcel » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

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.

During primary school I switched to a place that did a weekly dictation. So like every Monday, first thing in the morning was a half-hour of the professor reading a page of text and you handed off your copy of it, you lose one point per mistake basically (out of 20 points, the standard in France).

That helped tremendously with my spelling.

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

#242

Post by SteveGoob » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 8:53 AM UTC

TheOperator wrote: post #173

>Among the jobs most likely to be automated out of existence are those whose functions are the most similar to computers, including jobs like computer systems administrators, network architects, and computer support specialists, 60–70 percent of whose functions could be automated using current technology. >Even the brainiest are not safe. In the finance industry, in recent years, we have seen the development of machi…

^^ These parts of the article also bothered me, and tainted many of his other possibly/probably valid points.

> ...we have seen the development of machine learning tools that can perform in minutes the same analysis for which a human computer science major required hours or even days.

Statements like this just demonstrate an obvious lack of understanding of how the field of computer science works. Guess who developed those machine learning tools? A machine learning engineer _who more than likely studied CS._

It's just hard to trust the author on other topics where I'm less familiar, seeing the data clearly driven toward a predetermined narrative.

It reeks of cherrypicking to me, regardless of how well justified it is or isn't.

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

#243

Post by raverbashing » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:04 AM UTC

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #202

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.

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 simpl…

> 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

Yes, but see how many fonts there are for Latin alphabets vs. Kanji/Chinese. (something about dozens of characters vs thousands)

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

#244

Post by raverbashing » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:08 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.

> What you describe includes English

Yes, but to a much, much lesser degree

If someone says to you their name is "John" you know how to write it. Foreign names might be weird sometimes (hi Ireland) but usually they're simple.

In Japan you have to ask everyone how to write their name because there's no standard way of spelling. And every character has (completely) different pronunciations depending on context https://www.thejapanesepage.com/tag/kanji-pronunciation/

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

#245

Post by MandieD » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

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.

Ours were thematically grouped, usually by phoneme. For example, I remember that one week in elementary was /hw/ ("what","when","whichever").

I never had to study for spelling, probably because reading was my favorite thing to do. Well, until I had one teacher who tested that we'd memorized the list of words...

Explicitly studying spelling ended after 5th grade (rural elementary school in Texas, late 80s/early 90s)

Spellcheck is a wonderful tool, but relying on it can lead to embarrassing results. I would not want the kids in my life using it until they have their own grasp of spelling.

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

#246

Post by pcdandy » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:24 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.

Chinese characters (hanzi) are not an 'archaic writing system'. While hanzi allows for the expression of meaning in addition to pronunciation, which is unique amongst the other writing systems of the world, they are also more phonetic than is commonly perceived.

The majority of Chinese characters (more than 80%) are 'phono-semantic compounds' where 1 part of the character indicates the meaning and the other indicates the pronunciation. And the majority of these compounds follow a surprisingly regular pattern: for instance, the character '召' is pronounced 'zhao' in Mandarin Chinese, and forms the right side of the characters '招' and '昭' - both of which are also pronounced 'zhao'.

Here's another example - the character '包' is pronounced 'bao', and is frequently found as a component in characters pronounced 'bao': '饱' ('full stomach', with the food radical ⻠ on the left) and '抱' ('hug', with the hand radical ⺘). '包' also forms the phonetic component of some characters pronounced as 'pao', which sounds similar to 'bao': '跑' ('run', with the foot radical ⻊), '炮' ('cannon', with the fire radical 火), and '泡' ('bubble', with the water radical ⺡). I had been studying Chinese recently, and understanding the phonetic aspects of the characters has helped me to read them more easily than before.

Having said that, a lot of these phonetic relations date back many years and some of them have been obscured due to language change. But to blindly assume that Chinese characters are 'archaic' is false - as others have commented, you can say the same for English spelling, which also has spellings that date back many years but do not make sense today, like the 'gh' in 'tough', 'dough' and 'caught'. Also, it would be possible to reform Chinese characters such that every character with the same pronunciation would use the same phonetic component, while allowing for additional components to indicate the meaning. And that was what Simplified Chinese did to a certain extent.

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

#247

Post by raverbashing » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

pcdandy wrote: post #246

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.

Chinese characters (hanzi) are not an 'archaic writing system'. While hanzi allows for the expression of meaning in addition to pronunciation, which is unique amongst the other writing systems of the world, they are also more phonetic than is commonly perceived. The majority of Chinese characters (more than 80%) are 'phono-semantic compounds' where 1 part of the character indicates the meaning and the other indicates…

Thanks for the detailed response, 'archaic' is not necessarily the best word to describe the problems with it, and hanzi seems to be more straightforward than Kanji

But dealing with a huge alphabet is more complicated than one with (much) fewer characters as the Latin, Arabic and Korean ones.

The English spelling problem is annoying, but most languages don't have such a disparity in writing (which, for the most part, is not that big).

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

#248

Post by shard » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #244

shard wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What you describe includes English Yes, but to a much, much lesser degree If someone says to you their name is "John" you know how to write it. Foreign names might be weird sometimes (hi Ireland) but usually they're simple. In Japan you have to ask everyone how to write their name because there's no standard way of spelling. And every character has (completely) different pronunciations depending on context https://…

I was more referring to the phonetic alphabet and standardized spelling part of your post, and not to the Japanese part. That's why I proposed Korean as the language to satisfy your requirements, as English does not, as exemplified by the name John, which is pronounced [jon].

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

#249

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 11:25 AM UTC

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #218

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. 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.

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by foobarian » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 11:32 AM UTC

eikenberry wrote: post #115

pier25 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about handwriting per se but about using fine motor skills. For a healthy development of the brain, young kids need to develop motor skills which neurologically will allow cognitive skills to develop properly later on. Sorry I don't have any link to back this claim but I worked for a couple of years in EdTech with pedagogy experts.

Fine motor skills can be developed in many ways, including many ways that use more modern technology than a pen. If it is the motor skills that are important, then they should focus on those and not one particular means of practicing them.

Yes for example let kids use a real mouse, and then they can practice hitting the "x" on all the ads that pop up. /s