Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

americanaffairsjournal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 295 posts

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

#281

Post by johnchristopher »

filoleg wrote: post #116
johnchristopher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-18158665 N=1: I feel like - and I am 99% certain - that my grammatical and spelling skills have decreased since I started using the internet heavily.

I think it heavily depends on the kind of content you are consuming. I know it is anecdata, but my personal grammar and spelling skills went all the way up since I started using internet heavily (which was very noticeable to me, since english isn't my native language). And while I use a lot of incorrect grammar and spelling when talking to friends, I usually do it out of convenience (to shorten words, etc.), not beca…

English isn't my first language. Yet, I believe my english grammar is getting worse even if I read a lot of English everyday. I blame this on globish though and the fact that it's relatively rare to get corrected on grammar mistakes around here.

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

#282

Post by thayne »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #268
thayne wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hints at the biggest problem with our education system. Different children learn in different ways. Word lists and spelling tests may have been effective for you, but they weren't for me (reading hundreds of books otoh did improve my spelling). Unfortunately, I don't really have a practical solution.

It's kind of obvious: teach different children differently? Classes with large numbers of children should probably be rare.

well, yes. that's why I had the qualifier "practical". smaller classes are more expensive, and at least where I live, the trend has been the opposite where class sizes are increasing.

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

#283

Post by thayne »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #251
thayne wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hints at the biggest problem with our education system. Different children learn in different ways. Word lists and spelling tests may have been effective for you, but they weren't for me (reading hundreds of books otoh did improve my spelling). Unfortunately, I don't really have a practical solution.

ISTR there is no scientific basis for “children learn in different ways”. If a child has dyslexia or something like that, sure, that can affect things, but good teaching strategies should work for the vast majority of children.

I'm not referencing the different learning styles ("auditory", "visual", "kinesthetic", etc.). I'm saying different people have different strengths and weaknesses and that effects how you learn.

> good teaching strategies should work for the vast majority of children

In my experience, good teaching strategies usually includes teaching the same thing in a variety of different ways, so that hopefully at least one of the ways is effective for each student.

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

#284

Post by BlueTemplar »

filoleg wrote: post #280
BlueTemplar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and I prefer the (good, "adult") Russian translation of the Lord of the Rings to the original too! :P

Wait, there was something special about the Russian translation of LotR? I totally missed it then, because that's how I read LotR as a kid (translated Russian version), and I have never re-visited the book since then, as I was not a big fan of the movies (which, I know, is almost a sacrilegious thing to admit, given the reactions I've received for saying it irl).

Haha, I knew it ! Let me guess, you read the "big single dark brown book" version too ? It might be just the children nostalgia though... (Had the same reaction to the movies initially !) I've also seen much later a translation that seemed to be designed "for kids" and that seemed godawful to me !

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

#285

Post by BlueTemplar »

thayne wrote: post #282
BlueTemplar wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of obvious: teach different children differently? Classes with large numbers of children should probably be rare.

well, yes. that's why I had the qualifier "practical". smaller classes are more expensive, and at least where I live, the trend has been the opposite where class sizes are increasing.

Is it "practical" if you end up getting worse results with bigger classes ? I'm willing to bet that "undereducated" children (and then adults !) are going to end up costing much more than ones with a better education !

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

#286

Post by jelliclesfarm »

floren wrote: post #205
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in India, it wasn’t..the English was impeccable. Newspapers was how so many people who didn’t go to school brushed up and learnt English grammar and spelling.

When you are 45 and have 3 kids..and as a housewife have never learnt English..a newspaper lying around was great reading material in the afternoons between cooking and cleaning. And it was cheap..almost free. Self paced language lessons!

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

#287

Post by BlueTemplar »

vkou wrote: post #74
sansnomme wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that most schools do not provide a good education on how to be creators instead of passive consumers of technology. Learning to use tools such as Excel should be coupled with a tutorial on Visual Basic, beyond shallow here's-a-formula-here's-a-grid. Millennials and Gen Zs don't need the an entire class dedicated to how to use Khan Academy. They just need to know that Moocs and other free resources exis…

> Learning to use tools such as Excel should be coupled with a tutorial on Visual Basic, beyond shallow here's-a-formula-here's-a-grid. Excel is the tool of a creator. Just because it's not a traditional programming language does not mean that it is not an incredibly powerful computational tool, even without VBScript.

Yeah, I used to "program" in Excel : I loved how I could immediately see the changes in each "memory cell" when modifying an input or a formula...

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

#288

Post by SolarNet »

daxfohl wrote: post #148
SolarNet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, could someone enlighten the non-US readers about what common core is? A new set of standards for education that are meant to cut across state lines (e.g. California and Texas previously set education standards merely through market volume and being the biggest purchasers). It's mostly fine. A lot of people are upset that they "changed how math works" but what they really did was introduce a bunch of d…

My eldest is in first grade and so far I'm not a fan of the Common Core math. I could make a cynical conspiracy argument that much of it is designed around promotion of the type of technology presented in the article. "Carry the one" is the simplest thing to explain with a pencil and a blank piece of paper. All the additional Common Core techniques seem to require some kind of visual representation, either via the ga…

> All the additional Common Core techniques seem to require some kind of visual representation,

Yes, because humans are not very logical or abstract thinkers. We are used to visualizing things. It's a lot easier to help students build the abstract and logical thinking required for mathematical literacy if they can fall back on visual representations when they need to.

> Whether it ends up helping students is moot; it helps put money into a lot of lobbyists' pocketbooks.

I mean I value helping students higher. And as you pointed out it can be drawn out.

> IMO the better teaching method is give them one way to get the answer. Once they've mastered that, then start looking at additional ways to reason about it.

Except that that doesn't work well. The point of giving them many different ways to reason about it is so that they can get the core concept and actually learn the concept, rather than just memorizing "the one way".

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

#289

Post by floriol »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #225
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…

To me, de-emphasizing handwriting seems like going with the times, where handwriting is getting more and more rare. Likewise, if spellcheck is always on in the real world, is correct spelling without it still as important as it was 50 years ago? Society changes. Remember how we were taught that we need to know how to do math on paper because we won't always be carrying a calculator? Nowadays, it may be useful to lear…

But handwriting is important not only for the exact skill, but because it is one of the most demanding fine-movement we will ever do - missing out/not properly learning that in an age where we are truly plastic to it both mentally AND physically - I really do believe - will cause at least a big generational difference , at most rendering certain currently mundane tasks impossible for younger people.

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

#290

Post by Quiark »

nl wrote: post #181

Can anyone find a source for that "Give Students a Laptop to Knock off Half a Letter Grade" graph? It is credited to PISA, but isn't mentioned in the references section and isn't obvious in the PISA publications list: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa_19963777?page=1 I wonder if technology here is actually a proxy variable for country?

Also can't find it, even if I google the label. All I can get is another study which finds the same but attributes it to distraction
Post reply on HN