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You can't tell people anything (2004)

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Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#101

Post by mrslave »

gowld wrote: post #95
jrussino wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you found any good counterexamples? We let our three-year-old watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and I love it because it is exactly this: short (~10 minute) stories about situations and conflicts that a young child will encounter in everyday life. I’d be really interested to hear of other good shows & books like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Daniel_Tiger%27s_Nei...

Stick with PBS Kids and Sesame Street and Mister Rogers reruns.

If I remember correctly, babies learn to distinguish vowels from consonants from near birth when adults speak to them in that annoying high pitched "coochy coochy coo" dialect. After 6-12 months of life this starts to hold them back as they need to transition to hearing normal sounds and seeing the people mouthing them. The puppets with hinge-flap mouths, exaggerated and insanely high pitched accents in Sesame Street are ridiculous. I would strongly discourage letting your little ones watch this show.

Also Sesame Street is very New York. The rest of the world doesn't live like this. I recommend local kids TV shows with real humons performing. Some short cartoons are fun, many of them are terrible, but the sum total of TV is dose dependent. Turning it off straight after their favorite show might result in a little argument but you'll be pleasantly surprised when 5 minutes later you catch them doing something (anything) else. Usually something creative, social, and developing fine motor skills, if not simply running around outside. And subsequently you'll find them turning it off themselves.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#102

Post by gregsadetsky »

acqq wrote: post #93
mopsi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" It's my main complaint with how maths and physics were taught in school. I didn't understand electricity, trigonometry, integrals etc until long after school when I started tinkering with microcontrollers and robots, and had to solve real-world problems. Then, suddenly all those concepts sprung into life and got real meaning with clear and observa…

Good story. Reminds me of a great story by Neil Stephenson about his experience of learning by doing the experiments: https://youtu.be/_J4QPz52Sfo&t=4511

That hyperlink did not work for me -- I think that you wanted to post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J4QPz52Sfo&t=4511 ?

(just listened -- great story) :-)

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#103

Post by victornomad »

mrslave wrote: post #101
gowld wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stick with PBS Kids and Sesame Street and Mister Rogers reruns.

If I remember correctly, babies learn to distinguish vowels from consonants from near birth when adults speak to them in that annoying high pitched "coochy coochy coo" dialect. After 6-12 months of life this starts to hold them back as they need to transition to hearing normal sounds and seeing the people mouthing them. The puppets with hinge-flap mouths, exaggerated and insanely high pitched accents in Sesame Street…

Many countries had local versions of Sesame Street. I watched the spanish one when I was a kid and felt totally identified with the people and scenarios there. Neither all the characters had high pitched voices (just rewatched a bit to confirm my memory :)

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#104

Post by madhadron »

war1025 wrote: post #87
jrussino wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you found any good counterexamples? We let our three-year-old watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and I love it because it is exactly this: short (~10 minute) stories about situations and conflicts that a young child will encounter in everyday life. I’d be really interested to hear of other good shows & books like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Daniel_Tiger%27s_Nei...

I don't know how "real life" it is, but Sarah and Duck [1] is about the best young kids show we've come across. It used to be on Netflix, but they took it off. We've bought all 9? seasons on Amazon by now though. It's a great show of just of just completely mundane things with a bit of imagination tossed in. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_%26_Duck

Agreed, and as a parent I can watch it with my kids over and over and I still enjoy it. Not quite as good, but close: Puffin Rock.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#105

Post by madhadron »

jrussino wrote: post #74
memco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire fo…

Have you found any good counterexamples? We let our three-year-old watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and I love it because it is exactly this: short (~10 minute) stories about situations and conflicts that a young child will encounter in everyday life. I’d be really interested to hear of other good shows & books like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Daniel_Tiger%27s_Nei...

I really, really prefer the original Mr. Rogers to Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. The latter feels like it abandoned the pacing that made Mr Rogers so calming and effective.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#106

Post by madhadron »

d23 wrote: post #61

I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial. The glue that keeps the illusion t…

This is why I insert multiple choice questions throughout my lectures to test understanding of the concepts. They're usually brutally simple, but once you've taught a course a few times and see how students get confused afterwards, you can put answers that diagnose that misunderstanding in pretty straightforwardly, and having to actually figure out a multiple choice question and then getting it wrong are enough to force people to integrate information.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#107

Post by jes5199 »

this is a lot like Wiio’s Laws “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws

also, I can’t remember the source but someone wrote that if a person says “I understand” then they probably don’t, but if they say “I don’t understand you but I just thought of something myself” then you probably had a successful transmission

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#108

Post by solstice »

victornomad wrote: post #103
mrslave wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, babies learn to distinguish vowels from consonants from near birth when adults speak to them in that annoying high pitched "coochy coochy coo" dialect. After 6-12 months of life this starts to hold them back as they need to transition to hearing normal sounds and seeing the people mouthing them. The puppets with hinge-flap mouths, exaggerated and insanely high pitched accents in Sesame Street…

Many countries had local versions of Sesame Street. I watched the spanish one when I was a kid and felt totally identified with the people and scenarios there. Neither all the characters had high pitched voices (just rewatched a bit to confirm my memory :)

I remember some Christmas special that (contrary to my country's version) had all these different characters, black and Asian kids, Big Bird and the story took place in this extremely urban setting of NY. This was in the late 80s or early 90s and I still remember how big of a difference this was for me.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#109

Post by quickthrower2 »

jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

Yeah definitely. Get the kids to plan a trip around south east asia. What do you pack, what languages do you need to learn learn, what customs should you be aware of? How much would you need to save to be able to afford the trip?

By the end of that they'll know where Laos is, you don't need to rote memorize that fact for an exam. It's a fake problem, but also a fun one, with learning being the side effect.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#110

Post by c22 »

memco wrote: post #66
jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

> I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire fo…

I really enjoyed watching episodes of The Busy World of Richard Scarry with my small children. The characters are all animals, but the kids in the show solve most of their own problems and defer to adults for appropriately serious matters. They still do whimsical things like going to outer space or back in time in one of Mr. Fix-it's contraptions, but the solutions to their problems are not magical. I found any programming I selected had to have some amount of whimsy in order to retain my kid's focus. The Magic Schoolbus was another good one. Both of these shows seem to have modern sequels now, but they don't appear to be as charming as the originals.
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