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American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

1843magazine.com

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Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#101

Post by analog31 »

NTDF9 wrote: post #22

What I've noticed common among a lot of Americans is a fear/inhibition of speaking the truth, mostly to not have a confrontation. I witnessed an example of this in a music performance of a teen rock band. In this performance, the band sucked overall. The guitarist didn't know what he was doing. But everybody (guardians, parents, teachers, friends) just keep saying, "Great performance brah, awesome shit, good going gu…

My kids are in music lessons, the youth orchestra, etc., as I was at the same age. I also played in a rock band as a kid. I don't think that things have changed at all. Maybe the whole "self esteem" thing is an urban legend.

Everybody's enthusiastic at the performance, like you say.

At the next lesson, they review the recording. But then, they've been receiving that kind of critique at every lesson. You should hear the conductor let 'em have it at orchestra rehearsal. Because of this kind of dialog and close analysis, they also know exactly how well they're playing, immediately and intimately. Part of the goal is to teach kids how to engage in the critical dialog, and to be self-critiquing.

With the typical teen rock band, there is no adult involvement at all, other than fiscal.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#102

Post by gluggymug »

rimantas wrote: post #77
gluggymug wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't teach kids I assume. I do. I am a judo coach of kids. I think the point is : It is not really up to the parents to be so critical of their kids. They should be supportive and positive. It is really up to the coach to provide the technical feedback and it is more beneficial to assess performance at the next practice when the kids are back in a learning mode. At that point they are mentally ready to practice…

Yeah, it's really not up to the parents to raise their kids. It's scarry how we get to this point where people write this kind of shit with a straight face.

Parents can raise them but the coach is the coach.

I don't allow parents to do the "tiger mode" criticism on the sidelines because it is not objective. The parents have emotional investment in winning.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#103

Post by cwyers »

The grading scale at my daughter's elementary school keeps moving more and more towards not having any sort of discernable outcomes. The possible grade as of her most recent report card are:

Basic skill Progressing towards goal Meets goal Exceeds goal

And in several subjects (it grows every semester), Es are not awarded at all. I am not sure I understand the point of this system.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#104

Post by tajen »

charlesdm wrote: post #59
mgalka wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country are you from? In my experience Americas fall somewhere in the middle in terms of directness, compared to European countries. I lived in the UK for a few years and found Brits very hard to read / resistant to confrontation. On the other hand, I'm married to a Spaniard, and when I'm over there, it's sometimes a bit uncomfortable how direct and open people are.

Belgium. It's not necessarily the directness that I mind, it's the fact that often people are (excuse my language) full of shit. They say A, but actually mean B. Which is a trait, for example, the British have as well, but one I seem to understand a lot better than when I'm dealing with Americans.

Among "opportunity for improvement" and "a challenge", my preferred wording came from an American war movie: "Boss, we have a situation" was translated in French with "Boss, we have a problem". As if the original movie's character meant there was an interesting "new situation" about natural water cooling the nuclear reactor, while the French translation acknowledged that it could be a problem to have water pouring in a nuclear submarine at -3000 feet...

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#105

Post by zhemao »

cwyers wrote: post #103

The grading scale at my daughter's elementary school keeps moving more and more towards not having any sort of discernable outcomes. The possible grade as of her most recent report card are: Basic skill Progressing towards goal Meets goal Exceeds goal And in several subjects (it grows every semester), Es are not awarded at all. I am not sure I understand the point of this system.

Because it's not meant to rank children against each other. It's meant to tell the parents and students how they are doing compared to the standard. If they have not met the goal, then something needs to change. If they have met the goal or exceeded it, there's not much to worry about.

It's not like kids really learn much in elementary school anyways. Which is itself a problem, but a different one.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#106

Post by gaur »

dwaltrip wrote: post #88
gaur wrote: post #78

> SORRY, YOU NEED TO ENABLE JAVASCRIPT TO VISIT THIS WEBSITE. I need Javascript to read a magazine article? Nope. Bye.

If the underlying issue is that you don't like ads or tracking, you could try installing uBlock origin instead of disabling javascript. There are some other useful extensions in this area but uBlock origin is the only one I have experience with. It's been great for me. Usage of javascript as a tool for building web properties is only going to keep increasing, and grumbling about it doesn't solve anything.

> building web properties

This phrase gave me pause (why not just say "making wesbites"?), but I think I have a handle on what it implies.

"Making websites" is what you do when your main deliverable is content. Maybe you throw in some javascript for a little aesthetic kick or some nice features, but if a user comes to your website with javascript disabled, your goal is to still get the content to them.

"Building web properties" is what you do when your main deliverable is non-content: ad clicks, tracking, etc. Whatever content you offer on the site is just a honeypot. If a user comes to your website with javascript disabled, your goal is to intentionally turn them away because they've refused the delivery of your non-content.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#107

Post by greendragon »

rimantas wrote: post #84
Animats wrote: post #31

The article mentions that too much effort is going into teaching arithmetic by different means. Is that really necessary? Once kids get addition, subtraction, and multiplication as useful operations, and know what division is for, that kind of covers it. (Long division by hand is such a clunky operation, and done so much better by calculators, it may not be worth teaching any more.) "I like having low self-esteem. It…

Long division was probably the first algorithm I've learned. If you don't think that learning how to manipulate abstractions by applying algorithms is a usefull thing… well why not just skip arithmetics too, calculators are good with this one.

I bet you learned the 'new math' of addition and multiplication algorithms before long division. (e.g. for multiplication you construct a new set of numbers to add to get the final result.) But we probably should skip much of the arithmetic curriculum. We can move on to more interesting problems more quickly, or study different algorithms if that is the goal.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#109

Post by sheepmullet »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #67
charlesdm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right: 10yo - agree. But once you're past a certain age, e.g. 14-15, probably not? Then again, I don't think people should be rewarded either for showing up or putting in an effort. But for younger kids (e.g. Maybe I have different view on things, but if I look back at how much focus was put on putting in effort (and not actually achieving anything) during my high school years, then I think we have things wrong to so…

If your friend was learning to code, and wrote a tetris clone, would you congratulate them on their first major project, or would you critique their sloppy code? They had to develop and live with that codebase, maybe for several days or more. They're probably aware of some things that suck about it, but had to stick with it (otherwise you never finish). Having someone criticize your code, variable names, lack of patt…

In reality it depends so much on the context. People are primed for learning right after finishing a task.

Is my friend just giving coding a go or are they trying to get a dev job?

Is my friend trying to show me what they have built or asking for help improving the quality of their code?

Etc etc.

Likewise is this a 14 year old athlete trying to compete at the state level? Or a 14 year old trying out football because his friends play?

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#110

Post by zhemao »

It doesn't seem like this is a problem with self-esteem. The problem is that American schools don't have good educational standards or trained teachers. In the countries that rank ahead of us in the international assessments, even elementary school teachers need to have education degrees. That is not the case in most American school districts (just need a teaching certificate). Teaching is also a more highly respected profession in other countries.

It's pretty much expected in the US that kids don't really learn much of anything in school until they get to 8th grade. I certainly think we could introduce more advanced math concepts at earlier grades instead of taking five years to cover basic arithmetic.

That's not to say that I would like us to adopt a system like that of China or South Korea, in which students are drilled from morning to night on mostly rote tasks and then pitted against each other in a gladiatorial competition called the National College Entrance Examination. If there was a better way of squashing children's natural curiosity and love of learning, I can't really envision it.

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