That is in fact a delusion many people seem to have. Reading books is seen as an inherent good, regardless of the book. School children are often told to get one book a week from the library. Any sort of book, it's often thought, will be good for the child. In my personal experience, most go straight for the "Where's Waldo" books. Fun books... but come on.
I'd pile on to this sentiment with noticing that many kids who do read these days are not progression past YA fiction in their discretionary reading options.
It isn't synonymous with 'worthwhile'. That's just true. For one thing, 'literature' is a form of media, 'worthwhile' is an subjective quality of experience.
You snark, but I think the enclosing conversation was about whether YA fiction is worthwhile (or, whether we should be concerned when people fail to progress past it), not whether it's literature.
Whether or not a literal entire genre of literature is worthwhile is itself a question of the worthwhileness, IMO. Historically, this has already been debated multiple times with multiple different genres- experimental fiction, fiction by female authors, fantasy, scifi, fiction by american authors. Must we repeat it for every new genre that becomes popular or even remotely prominent in the sphere of mainstream consumption?
I assert that some books have more value to children than others and that the distribution of worthwhile books is different in different genres. I further assert that YA fiction is proportionally less worthwhile than other genres generally accessible to the "young adult" demographic.
Can you convince me that any of those assertions is wrong? Pointing out that "YA fiction is literature" doesn't come anywhere close to refuting any of the above assertions.
Neither have you refuted that this has been a historical game of stack ranking literary genres and I’m asking when we will grow up and let people enjoy good books.
We live in very regressive times in that respect. As kids, we used to read and watch books and series and movies which mostly were originally intended for adults (I don't pretend that we didn't read any children literature or watch any youth program, but the former was seen as a step and the latter wasn't mass produced, so the natural way was to quickly evolve to adult literature and movies, just keeping a small regressive space for children/youth stuff). But now adults read and watch stuff that is specially designed for teenagers!
Even in a for-kids/for-youth book collection, where we used to have Jack London, Jules Vernes, James F. Cooper, Alexandre Dumas and so on mixed with more specific children's literature; I looked at the current catalogue the other day: such authors have been erased, and the whole offer is now made of novelisations of Star Wars, novelisations of cartoons and novelisations of comics... Oh you can still find them in other collections, but those are a bit more, how to put it, distinguished/smart collections (and aimed at a bit older age); so that was quite a shock to browse the catalogue of the 'standard' kids collection.
I do disagree. Books are not categorically better than television. It's pretty easy to think of examples where TV seems better than a book. For instance, a Nova documentary seems inherently better than Where's Waldo. I don't think that's a fringe viewpoint.
Perhaps a bit more fringe: I think a lot of light young adult fiction has the nutritional density of popcorn and any perceived inherent good in reading those books is likely a product of publishing industry propaganda campaigns. Scholastic Corporation, I am looking at you...
Well, I am glad that my kid is told to get a book a week from the library. I guess the main objection I have to my own statement is that for a child young enough that they are still learning how to read, reading any sort of book that is word-based (i.e. not Where's Waldo) will probably make them a better reader, in the same way that when you are first learning how to code, writing any sort of working 10-line program will probably make you a better programmer.
I think at some point it's good to read any book, as you're learning the process of reading.
But later on it definitely matters. I had this same struggle with my daughter when she was in middle school -- she got so many kudos for "reading so much" but the books were all filler. I tried many times to point out that books are just a medium and the content is key.
It's kind of funny that we can say this; it seems that modern computers have come so far in having a user-friendly UX that you're now learning nothing about computers by learning to use one.
Back in the 1980s, just giving kids a computer (without also giving them a bunch of game disks/tapes/carts) would certainly teach them something, in that the only thing you can really do with this "tech" is to fiddle around/tinker with it until you learn how to make it do something you came up with. Just sitting around "being bored on" these computers can—and did—gradually build up a skillset in many of us.
There are still computers that are like this, of course. The Arduino comes to mind. There are also environments you could lock a modern computer down into that do the same.
As well, there are apps and "games" that teach you a ton just by attempting to understand the model behind them, which bored children will stumble into and then learn from under the guise of "wasting time at recess." (The best thing you can preinstall on a computer that a middle-schooler is going to be using is an interactive kinematics sandbox program.)
It seems apparent to most classroom instructors that most tech is a distraction, not an enhancement. Obviously exceptions should be made for disabilities and there are some uses—spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes can use tech effectively. But in most classes it's detrimental rather than helpful.
Biggest disadvantage of books is that they are shareable, reusable, and DRM free. For business, anyway.
There's lots of cool things you can do to enhance learning with computers, like daily quizzes, discussion boards, etc. But replacing books is not one of them IMO
There are studies showing that e-texts are significantly less “assimilable” than paper texts. I think the consensus speculation is that the physicality of the paper gives the brain a better understanding of the text, where you are in the text, and so on. Text on a screen, on the other hand, has an effectively infinite “depth”, among other things.
I feel like I learn and retain more from printed books than e-books… but maybe that’s just because I’m an old man who learned to read decades before there was such a thing as an e-book?
Well, when I was a kid in the 80’s, almost all of my textbooks had been recycled from the year before, and all of them had been drawn in, scribbled over, ripped up, had jelly stains on them - the school district replaced them every maybe five years or so, so every once in a while, I’d get a clean one, but usually I’d get something that was useless in places.
On the other hand, my kids are learning from PDF’s now, and once the lesson is over, they delete the PDF’s, so they have nothing to reference - and even if they were saving them, it’d be a challenge to try to organize them in any meaningful way.
>There is a role for technology in school, she says, but it is a matter of how much and at what age.
Something about the school procurement process that knocks all the nuance or subtlety out of the goals.
This issue with technology goes way, way back decades. Always there are promising trials, it works here and there, under the right circumstances, and so some school wants to roll it out broadly and it doesn't work as well. Then there is a rollback.
[edit] And I could say the same about software development processes.
>Something about the school procurement process that knocks all the nuance or subtlety out of the goals.
The people authorizing the deals, administrators and school boards, aren't incentivized to improve outcomes, they're incentivized to make the people who put them there seem like they're doing something valuable.
If parents could choose the schools they were sending their children to, instead of being saddled with whomever the state has appointed to run a particular school, they'd pick schools for which evidence has proven better outcomes. Sure, they might be swayed by flashy tech, but as other comments have said the push for tech didn't largely come from parents.
There's been a big backlash against screens in my high privilege/high achieving community.
My dyslexic/ADHD daughter did a trial day at a private school with a "no screens in classrooms" policy. It was awful for her, because she's grown comfortable using text to speech, dictation, and other tools to do cope with the friction in her brain. My other kids benefit in different ways, they've all learned to do independent research way earlier than I ever did and know how to find answers to pretty much anything they think about.
None of our kids have access to Candy Crush or other gamble-games, though, so they tend to have healthier screen habits than their friends. All the quotes from parents in the article make it sound like they're helpless. I think that's an indication of just how bad tooling and education for _parents_ is.
I agree that there's many beneficial things technology can bring to the classroom in moderation.
But even when we didn't have chromebooks in every class, everybody in my grade used to go to great lengths to figure out how to play flash games, runescape, minecraft etc. on the school computers. I'm sure current students are even more sophisticated in distracting themselves now that chromebooks are assigned to each student.
I consider "getting around technical restrictions" to be a big part of learning about technology! Fortunately I'm better at restricting than my younger kids are at finding workarounds. My oldest got pretty good, though, but she's has to learn to learn to manage her own distractions anyway.
Almost all of these policies have exceptions for disabilities.
Most technology seems to be used to detract from learning: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... rather than enhancing it. Obviously there are exceptions, like spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes. But focus and concentration seem to be in short supply, relative to technology.
I don't think it does my daughter any favors if she's the only one using an iPad in a classroom, it just makes her obviously different in a way that'll create resentment. She also benefited long before she was diagnosed, I think a lot more kids _can_ make use of screens than are diagnosed with a disability.
My general belief is that gadgets are great for kids with the right boundaries, and what we're lacking is (a) parent / teacher experience managing those boundaries and (b) tooling.
This headline bothers me. What evidence is there that parents drove the use of technology in schools? From the beginning parents have been extremely skeptical about the use of technology and have always voiced concerns. There is every evidence that this was driven by administrators responding to incentives and mandates, and tech companies hoping to make money selling software and devices. There has never been any evidence that giving kids screens helps them learn, and as we see in the real world, the exact opposite is what is happening.
I cannot speak to motives behind the move but my experience has also been that administration has driven this.
My kids schools are 100% Chromebooks. This has been great for scheduling extracurricular activities and making their backpacks lighter. It really hasn't improved their ability to learn mathematics or English.
Wrong! We should make the backpacks heavier, cut gym/phys-ed altogether, and funnel the resulting surplus into purchasing more educational software[aaS] to confuse and frustrate our children and add to their already burdensome workload.
Gonna need you to flesh this one out for me. Why would a heavy backpack be healthier? They tend to promote bad posture and back/neck/shoulder problems. The extra weight resistance during walking probably isn't going to outweigh the potential negatives.
Chromebooks specifically? What's the difference, if the point is just to get kids to interact with an online worksheet/test web-app; or to write a research report (a common reason a class period was spent in a computer lab ten years ago); or to just have their textbooks loaded onto them? For all of those activities, all you need is a web browser; it doesn't matter what it's running on.
(Also, if you're clever, you can do things like finding a web-app that lets you use them as a substitute for those vote-clickers that some university lecturers use to gauge pre-lesson knowledgeability.)
These aren't the student's devices; they're enterprise-MDM workstations that the kids happen to carry around. Think of them as a computer lab that the kids don't have to go to; not as Personal Computers per se. They're probably logged into them with a school-issued GSuite email rather than their personal Google Account, too, and told to not use these computers for non-school activity. (I'm not intimately familiar with the Chromebook education initiative, but if it's anything like Apple's initiative with iPads, then that's how it's set up.)
And no, the school wouldn't ever be okay with not using Mobile Device Management; MDM is how they ensure that a classroom full of laptops all on a LAN together aren't spreading malware like the digital equivalent of a kindergarten in flu season; and how they ensure the devices don't get spyware installed onto them by someone else (some stranger; or someone's parents!) to steal kids' contact info and location details with the goal of kidnapping or worse.
I'd actually think that BYOD would be worse in such a case, as you'd have to contaminate your personal device with an enterprise MDM profile in order to get it on the network.
Better to just tell the kid that they can have a personal device, but they also have to have this school-managed device, and that they should think of them as separate things and not use one for the activities better suited to the other. (This also neatly solves the "school spy-ware" worry as well, because if the students are only doing school-work on their laptop and are just using their phones+ISP data plans to text/email/etc., then the school sees none of that.)
My district is using Google's edu initiative and it's pretty much precisely as you've described. They even filter email so kids can only mail inside the district's domain and can't accept outside email (although I've noticed I can share documents with my kids, which has come in handy).
I'm a little disappointed with chromebooks as well.
I was one of the kids who was a little disappointed when the first MacOS came out. Where was the command line? Where did I wrote code? The commodore64 did a lot more for kids who wanted to learn about computers, an affordable and highly hackable and programmable computer. I felt like the first Mac was a big step forward in terms of ease of use for the general consumer, but a step back from the AppleII in getting in there and really enjoying computing.
Chromebooks put more, not less distance, between a kid and what I consider to be the interesting things about a computer.
Think of it this way - google talks a lot about a critical skills shortage. Ok, so, would a kid who grows up using a Chromebook be more likely to develop these skills than a kid who uses a linux system, or Mac OS X? Or hell, even a windows system, at least it's relatively easy to get a bash shell working there.
Nah, let's face it, the future of google's workforce is not going to be found among the the kids using google's educational products. Bet you google execs and high up engineers most definitely have their kids learning on something else, and they probably avoid too much exposure to any kind of electronics for a longer period of childhood than google pushes out there in the classroom.
Indeed. And all of those frustrations people have using Windows computers end up teaching problem solving skills in a far more effective manner than anything you could put in a textbook.
The thing is, it is a backwards way to look at things. Regular students shouldn't need to deal with frustrations of windows machines and learn all the skills needed to solve issues with OS just to perform their school-related tasks.
I, personally, see the value in those skills, but for students who are not interested in it, it is just an unnecessary hassle and a source of frustration. It's like saying that having an easily repairable, but not that reliable or user-friendly, car is a good opportunity to learn problem-solving and basic vehicle maintenance skills. As someone not interested in that, I just want a reliable device that will drive me in comfort and convenience from point A to point B without making me worry about having to fix anything.
We're programmers, and I am aware that I need to keep that in mind. But I think reliability vs. hackability is a false dilemma.
Personally, I worry about having to fix something when I'm incapable of fixing it. That's why it stresses me out when my car or washing machine breaks. But true, that breaks all the time just because I can fix it with a trip to the hardware store.
The thing is... well, sure, easily repairable but not reliable isn't necessarily a trade off that needs to happen.
Google could have done what apple did with OsX, but at a realistic price point. An easy to use, affordable and reliable UI with astonishing power right beneath the surface, all based on Unix, in the hands of millions of school aged kids. This could have been the Commodore 64 or apple II times a thousand.
Instead, we have the Chromebook.
Note I deleted the last line which on reflection was excessive and not useful to the discussion.
What you describe is not a chromebook in 2019. I have android apps, and linux apps. I can run different versions of linux, run gui tools and many people are using atom, and all the other editors. This is precisely what a chromebook allows in 2019 with crostini.
I think it was meant to be a joke. But in all seriousness, one of the main reasons I continue to use linux, despite the technical problems, is precisely the technical problems. I like figuring things out and solving them. The old advice, if you want to get good at computers, use unix, still holds true today, precisely because it won't hold your hand.
Now that you mentioned it, i can see how it can be interpreted as a joke. However, looking at all the other replies, a lot of people seem to actually seriously hold that belief.
I agree with you on the rest, however. I, personally, enjoy learning about computing by fixing stuff, hacking, etc. However, this won't hold true for everyone, and they shouldn't be subjected to this weird form of hazing with "we got through it, you gotta do it too, otherwise you won't learn all those computer skills (that you don't care about at all)!"
Reminds me a bit of some people in the US being almost religious about driving a car with a manual transmission. I get it, it is fun sometimes, and a pretty cool skill to have, but I am glad that most people in the US don't have to deal with that unless they want to. I had to learn it (because 99% of motorcycles still come in manual transmission only), but I do not think that manual is some life changing skill that needs to be learned by everyone. Those who need it will learn, those who don't will not, and it is a good thing we have this option. No need to force this on everyone.
Wasn't meant as a joke. Honest truth is people who aren't getting the opportunity to problem solve early are going to end up having much more difficulty later in life, and end up paying a significant portion of their income to Geek Squad-type support as more of their life is computerized and less of what they use they have even a passing understanding of.
That being said, no, I don't think we should give kids a terminal window and tell them to figure it out from there, but we should definitely be giving them computers that give them the opportunity to peel back the layers, and then we should encourage them to do so.
>I don't think we should give kids a terminal window and tell them to figure it out from there, but we should definitely be giving them computers that give them the opportunity to peel back the layers, and then we should encourage them to do so.
I agree with you on this one, but with one important caveat: it shouldn't be their primary driver/school work machine, it should be something provided by parents. I am all about letting kids figure stuff out and play around with the OS, but doing that on the machine that you use to submit homework, do your class scheduling, gradebook management, etc. is a recipe for disaster. Have you ever had cases where your machine became useless until you fixed it, because of some non-trivial symlinking or config screw up? Now imagine being a middle schooler who is already overstressed due to all the homework and other school stuff, but without enough technical and coping skills to deal with it.
In a similar vein, if I had a kid, and they were interested in learning things about cars, I would be absolutely glad to get them a shitty old beater car, appropriate tools, and look into working on that car with them. However, for their daily driver, I would heavily insist on getting them a less than 10 years old japanese economy car they can use on the daily basis or in case where something on their "learning car mechanics" beater went wrong. You make mistakes when you learn, and I wouldn't want their daily life to be handicapped due to making a mistake or two.
Chromebooks in education were not supposed to get students interested in computing or teach them about it. They were supposed to be used as an alternative for heavy backpacks with books and make scheduling and other organizational things to be done easier (considering that all of those things are slowly moving to online space, like class registration, gradebooks, etc.).
I.e., it isn't a programming-friendly OS vs. chromebooks, it is heavy backpacks filled with textbooks and notebooks vs. chromebooks. Don't mistake chromebooks for a computing tool, it is an everyday student things kind of tool that just happens to be served by a computing device.
And yet, google has induced millions of families to spend their limited computing budget on a "non-programmable" OS. Was it really beyond google's capabilities to make this a more open, perhaps linux based environment?
>And yet, google has induced millions of families to spend their limited computing budget on a "non-programmable" OS.
As far as I am aware, chromebooks in education are provided by school districts, families aren't paying for it directly. You can always resort to "they are paying for it with taxes", but that would be the same for any non-chromebooks as well, except it would end up being more expensive (they won't be sold at as high of a loss as google can afford with chromebooks; count all that extra IT administration needed for non-chromebooks, adding a lot of costs as well).
>Was it really beyond google's capabilities to make this a more open, perhaps linux based environment?
It wasn't beyond their capabilities, it just wasn't a good idea for the purposes chromebooks were supposed to serve.
I dunno, I got a C202SA Chromebook specifically for software development. It was designed for schools, so it has a spillproof keyboard, shock-resistant case, 1.5-2 days of battery life with my usage, it only costs like $250, and it's smaller than 12".
I installed GalliumOS, and I love it. It is a complete Linux environment (Ubuntu), and it easily meets my needs even if Firefox sometimes slows down a bit with Javascript-heavy web apps (I haven't installed Chrome.) My only complaint is the limited storage space.
Google may not ship Chromebooks with a customizable OS, but they and the OEMs don't interfere with end users' ability to install one (yet), and I really appreciate that the education market has created so much demand for machines with this sort of form factor.
Sandboxing this stuff away is in general a good idea for protecting "normal" users. People often want to install pirated games or whatever and that's abused as a vector to get malware onto those devices.
If that's not enough you can install entirely different operating systems and even bootloaders (if you want to).
That's not an accurate description of chromebooks - they are not non-programmable os. In chromebooks out the last 1.x years, you can run android apps, dev tools, and linux too. Yet they are all safely sandboxed from the os, giving the benefit of no virii.
Just wanted to point out that Chromebooks run Linux under the hood and as of late 2018/early 2019 you can access it on all new Chromebooks and a good number of older ones by clicking on the settings icon and turning on "Linux (Beta)".
Can’t edit and leave a note on my original post(too much time elapsed), but I want to acknowledge I have read the replies informing me that chromebooks have changed since i got one several years ago, and that they now do some of these things and have a beta command line. That’s a game changer, as big a deal as the terminal in osx vs earlier macs
I haven’t looked into it yet but it appears that my criticisms no longer apply to the current product. In blunter words, I had it wrong about chromebooks in 2019. It sounds like many of the tools I care about are still a little clunky, but now a possibility, and will likely get better over time.
My kids were in elementary school when the district transitioned from iPads to gApps for class projects.
It was a definite plus. Kids could hop onto any machine that had a browser (even the older Win7 PCs) and continue to work. Does iOS even allow multiple logins or was that whole educational push a few years ago just FUD against Google? Doesn't matter, everyone has moved on anyway.
The whole "OMG Chromebooks!" cry was drowned out when the cost savings was figured out, because the alternatives are $500 keyboardless iPads that can't be shared and monitorless $500 Dell PCs that can't be transported.
The kids are now in secondary ed and use Docs/Slides/Classroom for their classwork. Remote collaboration is dead simple (again, more iCloud FUD from Apple), and nobody EVER forgets their classwork at school since it's always a login away.
I think the chromebooks are excellent if they are going to use computers, and they basically do everywhere. They don't have to worry about os upgrades, or virus, they are very safe for browsing. They work great with minimal resources. If the district wants to allow it, they can allow linux apps in a controlled safe way, supporting bash command line or whatever else they want to support.
> It really hasn't improved their ability to learn mathematics or English.
Lightening backpack load and improved scheduling are pretty good outcomes, as long as learning hasn't gotten worse. Why would learning ability (for basics like the 3Rs) be significantly improved using tech? The students are still the same after all.
I used to work at an ed-tech company. When we talked with teachers, one of the things we learned that students were doing was opening up shared Google Docs during lectures and taking notes collaboratively. Even more interesting is that if one of the students didn't understand something the teacher said, they could use the comment function to make a note and other students would then explain the concept to them.
I think you are correct that the concepts these students are learning probably aren't improved too much by technology, but there are tons of ways in which students can learn and collaborate in real time which wouldn't be possible without devices like chromebooks.
My mother, a school teacher, describes herself and her coworkers as being enthusiastic about more ipads and laptops in the classroom. But the reasons she gives seem suspect to me. I believe that many teachers are supportive of this deployment of tech because of the sedative properties. Give the hyper kids an ipad and suddenly they sit still and stop running circles around their 65 year old teachers.
She says that I'm not wrong per se but that it's still a good thing overall for the kids. I think they should just let the kids run around outside instead (7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district, and PE is only one or two days a week...)
Wait what? Is there some difference in notation since recess (in Finland it's 15 minutes between each class and usually 30min after lunch) is like absolute must for kids of any age. There's even recess in upper secondary school but the lessons are 75 minutes usually instead of 45 minutes as in comprehensive school.
Are you really saying that it's directly from class to another class? That's crazy!
Nope, you get it. It is crazy. The educational system is REALLY MESSED UP in the U.S. Recess doesn't help you do better on standardized tests, so it goes.
I don't know what's wrong with Americans either, and I am one.
When do kids socialize then? Breaks between lessons is how students can get to know each other, grab some snacks, go to the toilet, talk about the game last night, flirt etc etc.
Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.
They talking in the halls, during class, or during lunch. Study hall or detention. And all the while looking for teachers out of the corner of their eye. Many teacher are eager to scold any socializing, sometimes even during lunch, and students are willing to risk a scolding to have social contact. The teachers interpret this as unruly behavior and in an act of circular logic use the perceived unruliness of the children as a justification for scolding students who socialize.
'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.
I am in shock if that's not exaggeration... But then again this might be one of those things - which do happen a number of times - where an American whom I actually meet in real life tells me not to believe what I read about the US online.
I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad.
But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game).
But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.
Everything does vary a substantial amount between districts and even individual schools since at the national level there are only a few guidelines(although standardized tests have crept in since No Child Left Behind), so even with the public system the schools vary between feeding the "school-to-prison" pipeline where students walk through metal detectors and have little breathing room, and "magnet" schools that soak up all the academic achievers and give them back-breaking workloads.
In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.
So when I was in primary school in the US in the 1980s, we had recesses. That is the golden age of those "highschool movies" -- and they were to some extent of course "fantasy" portrayals of high school even then, although not about the time between classes and recesses necessarily.
We also biked to school ourselves unattended. And we had maybe two half-days a year spent on standardized tests, one test each. The insanity of American schools is a more recent phenomenon.
It can vary between school districts though. Generally the wealthier and whiter the neighborhood/city/school, the better the kids will be treated. Although it's pretty shitty even at most of the "good" ones.
What you are reading isn't much of an exagerration though. It is a good reminder of how insane it sounds to you, because IT IS INSANE.
And you say we seem to be "fine" in the US? Have you even been paying attention to what's going on in the US? I don't know how much of it can be blamed on the eductional system... but you know, probably a chunk of it. The schoolchildren and former schoolchildren of the US are decidedly not "fine" though. This place is fucked up.
What's up with the pressure to perform so well on standardized tests though? Are they pushed because the school wants to look good to attract rich families? Or do parents push it so their kid can get to college?
In Hungary we only have standardized tests for school admissions, both high school an university. (so you write one test and can apply to many places with the score). Otherwise every two years there's the PISA international test, but that's only for statistics, it isn't graded. All our other tests are just prepared by the teacher. Of course this means different schools have different standards, mostly depending on the percentage of Roma students. Where they are the majority there is not much learning happening and then non Roma families rather make their kids take a 1-2 hour bus ride to the next town.
I think whole books could be written on "what's with the standardized tests". (and probably have been) As a subset of "What's with wanting to measure _everything_ quantitatively and make evaluations based only on quantitative measures, in our society in general?" For various reasons people wanted an "objective" and numeric way to measure student learning and compare it nationally, so they had to create more things to measure...
But it's not generally the parents that are pushing them. Except maybe to the extent that parents want to know "How do I know if a school is good or terrible?" and someone can give them a "score" built in part on standardized tests...
I think (and this may not be a popular theory), it is in large part a disfunctional reaction to the extreme social inequality in the U.S.. Going back to the days of legal segregation, some people had _terrible_ schools others had good schools. Even once we have legal equality, somehow some schools are still pretty terrible. If only we had an 'objective' way to determine which schools are effectively teaching, and reward those doing well and punish those doing poorly...
In fact, though, it's still the poor and not white who bear the brunt of all this terribleness. I know someone who is a teacher who was at a meeting where the principal was explaining why it was "only fair" to the poor students to have every minute of the day regimented and disciplined, because they too deserved the best education... while knowing the principal sent her OWN kids to a "sudbury school"!
Ten minutes, maybe five minutes if the school is small enough physically to get between rooms in that time. The break is definitely not meant to be long enough for more than "get to your next class" - and that's from someone from a relatively well-off suburban school district.
Elementary school gets recess, don't remember how long. Middle school I don't remember very well; high school you just get lunch (but are perhaps not restricted to one room to have it, at least).
Here's my district's high school schedule for an example, schedules vary slightly from district to district and state to state but this is reasonably representative:
The breaks in my district are 6 minutes long, with five 71-minute class periods. You can't socialize much in 6 minutes, you have to get from one class to the next, which might be a 400m walk if you want to stop at your locker - walking through a dense crowd of people, with a 15 lbs backpack. Or 200m if you bring a backpack of 40+ lbs of books and binders for all your morning or afternoon classes, stopping by your locker just at lunch. Lunch is 24 minutes long somewhere before/in the middle of/after 4th period. "Zero hour" at the top of the linked schedule is if you want to take an extra class, eg. to accomodate state requirements like civics and communications while also taking year-long AP classes, performing arts classes, or doubling up on science/math electives beyond the minimum.
If you have an average morning bus arrival at 6:50, and add a sport that goes until 5:30PM, and are quick enough to have get your homework done in just an hour each night, it ends up being about the equivalent of a 60-hour work week...pretty rough on a 14-year-old child. But we're a Blue Ribbon Exemplary School! Top 250 in the nation! In spite of the flaws obvious in the schedule above, if my family is going to be in an American school system, and especially if we want them near extended family, friends, and my job, we're not going to do too much better than this: I bought a house in this district so my kid could get the same great education I did.
School districts are pressured by parents with jobs to make the school day start early, so that parents and kids can leave the house at the same time in the morning.
Of course, because kids are so dependent on parents. Everything is interrelated. This just wouldn't be a problem in most places in Europe, because kids can take public transportation or walk.
Typically in America, school districts operate buses that are available for any student not in walking distance. Children could (and sometimes do) catch those buses after their parents have already left for work, but many parents don't trust their children with that degree of autonomy.
> but many parents don't trust their children with that degree of autonomy
But I guess it would appear in the school records if they didn't go to school. At least in Hungary the state takes away certain benefits if the kid regularly doesn't go to school and it can also have other consequences as well, like having to repeat the year.
But to some degree it should also be part of growing up. When we were 15-16 and all of us commuted by public transportation, a few times we skipped the first class and went to a pub instead. And I didn't become some lowlife gangster, I completed a CS degree with good results.
When I was in elementary school I was regularly getting on the school bus by myself long after my parents left for work (at that time my mother wasn't a teacher). It worked fine for me and for plenty of other families.
Parental attitudes changed more than anything else. Coddle kids longer, trust them less. That seems to be the current trend.
That's an extra class slot available at the parent's election. I took zero hour classes for civics and communication state requirements in the winter of my junior and senior years so I could take AP Physics and AP Chemistry, which were year-long classes that exceeded the science requirements and got me some college credit. In winter, it didn't interfere with sports, and you were going to be up 2 hours before the sun anyways, so why not 3?
And no, there's no bussing for zero hour. You have to drive yourself to school, ride with a parent, or find a carpool setup for either of those.
Thanks for the info. We never had anything such as a zero hour, but various extra-curriculars would take place in the hour or two before school started.
And then when kids cannot conform to this it's labeled ADD and ADHD (I know that these are also real diseases, but I do wonder how much of it is perhaps caused by schedules described in your comment).
Do you (parents in general) think this is normal and good for a child? I had thought homeschooling was lunatic, but if this is the alternative, I can see why people would choose it.
In Hungary in high school we had 45 min classes and 15 min breaks for the first 3 breaks, and then 10 min breaks. We had usually 7 classes per day, so school went from 8:00 to 14:30, usually. Then lunch if you want.
In primary school we had a break where it was mandatory to go down to the schoolyard to be outside in the fresh air (but then do whatever you want).
In most of the US from what I've seen, recess is seriously degraded for 5th and 6th grades, then eliminated entirely for 7th and beyond. They really expect teenagers to be sedentary until the end of the school day.
I vividly remember recess going away after 6th grade and it bummed me out hard. It's usually replaced by PE or some organized sport, which felt strictly worse in overall enjoyment.
My wife (a former PS teacher) just literally created a microschool focused on project based collaborative learning and lots of outdoor activity so that we wouldn’t have to send our daughter to that system. We thought we might get 10 kids enrolled the first year and got 34 and are waitlisted. There is a huge demand for alternatives, and we don’t live in a progressive area of the country.
My nephew's school in upstate NY eliminated recess periods starting in grade 7. He's in 9th grade and gets 25m study hall 4 days a week. He has 3 minutes to get between classes. They essentially added time for test prep.
When I was in the same school district in the early 90's, we had a 42m recess period at least 3 days a week and either a 42m or 20-25m study hall every day.
For my kids, we bit the bullet for private school. There are some things I don't like about private school, but I'm unwilling to make my son a subject of whatever bullshit social experiment is being conducted. You're only young once, and we live in a world where you need to be top of your game.
Not sure if it's the same, but in France school was from 8AM to 4:45PM. Which makes sense if you have one or both parents working typical business hours. In my case I paid the school to supervise our son for an extra hour and made sure to conclude my business by 5:30P.
In the US school is typically 8AM to 2PM. There is very little time between classes and the kids have to scramble for the next class. I also found out our son has been missing lunch because the cafeteria line queue is too long to accommodate all the students.
In the US schools attempt to do more with less they have stripped any joy out of the educational experience. No recess, fieldtrips, or extracurriculars. And arts and sciences are a pale comparison of what they used to be. Labs and lab equipment has been replaced by online videos and virtual learning.
I experienced secondary school in Ireland, France and Germany around 20 years ago and never saw this "15 minutes between class". In all three, as far as I remember, we had 3-5 minutes to get from classroom to classroom, a lunch break of 40-90 minutes, and one or two other breaks of 15-20 minutes. I think this is completely normal in Western Europe.
Damn, I bet the success in education in Finland can be hugely attributed to just having actual recess between classes for all the classes and through the whole basic education (comprehensive school and upper secondary / vocational school).
Teachers try to sedate students because they have nothing valuable to teach. Only a small percentage of teachers have had a profession other than teaching. Some teachers have hobbies that make them interesting, many others do not. New Math/Discovery Math is a failure, because grade school teachers themselves have no idea what purpose it serves.
Students with wealthy parents will do well; tutoring, travel, summer camps, all help with education and growth.
I take offense to the implication here that just because you’ve only taught means you have nothing to teach.
The finest English teacher I know has taught for the vast majority of her career and her methods have a thoroughly proven record of improving writing and reading in students from every walk of life. She has a doctorate in education now, with a dissertation on improving learning methods and and numerous students over her 25 year career have contacted her and thanked her for specifically her methods and pressure that got those students to succeed, not just in her class, but in college and the future.
There are many, horrible teachers who would do better in a career where they are kept far from influencing the next generation, but this woman, with her majority-teaching-career, is not one of them, full stop.
When discussing a group, we need to stay at a group level. Moving between individuals and a group as a whole is not constructive.
Grade school teachers tend to graduate with degrees in English/History, and haven't had experiences in work outside of teaching grade school.
My solution for this problem is better professional development. Make a 4 day work week, with one day of training in a new career (something completely not related to teaching/pedagogical development).
I have a strong suspicion that there are so many exceptions to your assumptions here that your model is wrong.
My finest computer science teachers never did anything but teach, either. At the high school and collegiate levels. Same with my favorite college English teacher.
I think a more effective route is to regularly fire the bad teachers, so they can’t harm students with their poor guidance.
>>Teachers try to sedate students because they have nothing valuable to teach.
Let's try and break this extreme opinion down into some components.
What is "valuable" to you? Why would working outside of teaching help someone be better at teaching their subject matter? Is this statement for teachers across all levels, or just grade school? How is it that gross generalization opinions are constructive, but empirical personal experiences providing evidence that contradict that generalization aren't?
""What is "valuable" to you?"" I think that these ideas of relativism are dying. I respect people that are good in their field. I value science and disparage things like alternative medicines.
"empirical personal experiences" - this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical.
Was my statement a gross generalization, sure. But;
-most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees,
-there has been a steady devaluation of degrees,
-many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college,
-wealthy families pay for extra tutoring, and camps, (wealth has always been the best factor in determining academic success),
-in order to teach about something you need to know about something.
If eduction was supposed to be a meritocracy, its failed. It's a systemic failure, no one person is responsible, no one person can save the educational system. Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years. Realists and pessimists have long concluded that the purpose of the educational system is to work as a babysitter, it's cost effective.
Okay Mr. "I value Science", let's keep this going. First, all my basis is on the U.S. education system. If you're basing your idea on some other country, I'll tap out because I have no basis.
>> this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical.
All personal experience is, by definition, empirical. The definition of "empirical" is here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empirical. You're literally wrong.
>>most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees
Citation Needed. Is "Elementary Education" a "very liberal art"? Who is more qualified to teach 6-10 year olds if not someone with a Masters in Elementary Education (generally the minimum requirement) in your opinion?
>>many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college
Your proposed solution doesn't address this. The 4/1 just means that teachers will now face an additional difficulty, finding a 2nd job to have "real world experience", in order to teach 7 year olds how to read and write.
>>in order to teach about something you need to know about something.
Of course. But there's millions of students spread across tens of thousands of school districts. IDK where we're suddenly going to find all of these domain experts willing to take lower pay and miss out on career advancement in exchange for educating children.
>>Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years.
I'm sorry, are you only 30 years old and therefor unaware that this is the lesson of the course of human history? Social and economic factors are your majority factors for everything, but that feeds directly into education by allowing for school choice (either by sending to private schools or moving into well funded, higher performing public schools). The fact that you're lumping the "realists and pessimists" together on who has decided what school actually is, shows your contempt for the system. I get that, you feel it's broken (so do I actually, but not at all for the reasons you do). I just find your idea that "all elementary school teachers are bad at their job" to be founded on poor/lacking data and a complete misunderstanding of the specifics of primary education.
Empiricism is about quantifying natural phenomena. Empiricist discussed 'personal experiences' that were physical, as they wanted to exclude the occult and supernatural guff. They didn't mean it is o.k. to count personal anecdotes as evidence.
Admitting that economy and class determine educational attainment, negates any argument that any specific pedagogical techniques are helpful.
You generalize in a useless and offensive way. One could also say programmers have mostly only had one job, programmer, and they don't understand how society works and the needs of different jobs. Your solution for that could be better professional development too. Maybe all those tech bros need to get into the real world, see the problems that say teachers face so they can figure out what to focus on.
Yup. My mother entered school teaching after decades in the private sector. She had held several secretarial positions for CEOS, vice presidents, and other executives at large pharma, travel, etc companies. In other words, she understood corporate america. She entered teaching because that was her dream job, but one she was unable to enter as an immigrant to this country. She loved the idea of teaching and she had done a pretty good job on my brother and I. She wanted to be able to be home with us during the summer.
It took her a few years after getting her credential to see the dysfunction in the system. Old teachers were unable to cope with the young children who need young, able bodied teachers able to deal with their very normal behaviors. Principals would get upset that my mother would allow the kids to go outside, even when recess wasn't scheduled. She had the highest marks in the school when it came to testing, but was denied tenure, because her methods of getting the job done were at odds with her principal. There was a large parental showing at the board meeting, and she ended up being put on administrative leave. Some of her students -- who no longer had to take ritalin to deal with his 'excessive' movement while she was their teacher -- ended up back on the drug. This was all in a lower-income district with a history of terrible results.
From that point on, my entire family has shunned public schools. My brother and I were sent to private schools, and my mother always votes against every issue the teachers union supports. They enable the behavior. They encourage, ineffective, anti-competitive practices which harm students, and enable lazy teachers.
that isn't fair or accurate about teachers. It's just inflammatory. Teachers want to educate and work within the structures that districts allow. They don't pick laptops, the school district mandate textbooks. You've got an unrealistic idea of education.
Does it matter who drove adoption? Surely at some point schools would have explored using tablets in education anyway? They weren't going to forever ignore the possibilities, and it didn't enhance education and now we know. That's just a valid outcome to a question we had to ask.
And who drives the PTA, typically parents out to please the administrators at least in what I have seen. The PTA at one local school raised funds for a Gator (1) for the landscaper to use, totally pushed by the principal.
Can you point to some of this evidence, for the uninformed? Especially on "giving kids screens helps them learn, and as we see in the real world, the exact opposite is what is happening."
Who are these "administrators" that always come up in the context of education in the US? The word makes it sound like some bureaucrat or secretary, but it seems like they have a lot of decision making power. Are they school employees, do school directors count as administrators? Or are they part of the local government or state government? Elected officials responsible for education in some area? Who are they and how come there are so many of them?
No, 'administrators' usually means non-teaching educational staff of a school and district- principals, vice-principals, deans, directors, superintendents and similar. They're employees.
Local elected officials form a school board, which may then have various committees composed of board members, administrators, teachers, and parents.
The Congress gives away money with high-level strings attached. States set curriculum guidelines (or micro-manage the curriculum), set rules and standards, and provide lots of money. School boards make local budget and taxation decisions and exercise other management functions that vary by state and district.
The "administrators" are appointed management who are employees of the school. The superintendent (aka the CEO/commissioner) of the district usually has an individual contract with the board. The rest of management is usually civil service or appointed management/confidential employees. In some states they may be unionized to some degree.
In the rural school I went to in the 90s, there was a superintendent, CFO, elementary/middle/high school principals and assistants, and about a dozen clerks/secretaries. Today, the district has fewer students, but has added a compliance officer, CIO, special education deputy superintendent, and a bus superintendent.
> Who are these "administrators" that always come up in the context of education in the US?
"Administrators" is generally a generic term used to refer to non-teaching individuals involved in the running of the education.
Who those individuals are is highly varied though. Education is controlled at the state level in the United States, not the federal level[1]. So what you end up with are completely different ways of running/managing things. So state-level bureaucracy has it's say in things. Then there's a state-level department of education with a secretary or commissioner (possibly elected, possible appointed), which manages high level details like enforcing compliance with legislation and certification and whatnot. But they generally further cede control to a local entity which is in charge of the school system for that locality (could be as small as a special district inside of a single city or as large as multiple counties). This is the level that manages local infrastructure, school zoning, shared services like IT, etc. This can also be led by either an elected or appointed figure, depending on both local and state laws. As long as they're acting within the bounds of what the state level legislation and department of education has dictated, the local district can run things how they see fit.
All of these layers are purely administrative, and performs no actual teaching (but likely and hopefully is staffed with people that come from teaching or education backgrounds). Then you get to the actual school level, where you'll have a few administrators that handle the management of that individual school, but is predominantly staffed by actual teachers. Administrators at this level are generally always hired, rather than elected individuals.
[1] While the federal government has no direct control of education, it indirectly wields influence by dangling money in front of states[2]. Which is what it does with practically everything else it doesn't technically have any jurisdiction of. States are free to manage education however they want, but the federal government provides states with subsidies for education that are tied to particular regulations or policies. States that implement and meet the regulations get free federal money, states that don't implement or meet them give up the associated subsidy and have to make up the funding shortfall with more state or local taxes. This has a trickle down effect where teachers ultimately have very little say in what or how they teach, since they have so many different masters they have to please to ensure their school stays funded.
So at my mother's school there was the principal and vice principal, obviously. Each one of them was typically getting their masters or EdD and thus running experiments on the students to write about in their theses. Of course, given that this is teaching and teachers are one of the most unethical professions in existence, there was no IRB approval for these studies (Sowell addresses this concern in his book 'Education in America').
After the principal there is a 'district'. The district is made up of completely ineffective administrative staff who are unable to manage even the most basic office tasks. My mother once was offered a contract to teach in our local district, and the secretary sent a piece of blank paper for her to sign -- twice.
And then, there is the superintendent, which is an employee (unelected in most places). The superintendent is like the principal of principals. Of course, like the principals, he or she too is conducting unapproved research on the children, without any kind of oversight. Above that is an elected school board made up of people pushing their own agenda.
Oh, and then there's the teacher's union, a quasi-governmental body, which demands a premium of the teacher's salary (thus inflating the cost of hiring a teacher). Rather than advocating on behalf of teachers (which is their nominal job), they spend most of the money lobbying for leftist causes meant to enrich the union representatives. Of course the union has no accountability to voters and has a shadow structure to the school district, all of which has to be paid for out of your tax dollars, because why not?
That's just at the local level. There are then even more layers at the regional, state, and national level.
> From the beginning parents have been extremely skeptical
> There is every evidence that this was driven by administrators and tech companies hoping to make money selling software and devices.
> There has never been any evidence that giving kids screens helps them learn
No offense, but you made three fairly bold claims there with little sources to back them up. It's not that I disbelief any of your assertions, but refuting someone else's claim because it has no evidence and providing counterpoints without evidence isn't really helpful...
All these issues were at the forefront of the "discussions". The strategy to upsell technological improvements to struggling schools, was a simple way to by pass skepticism. Might as well try something new?
I don't remember specific "Powerful Educators" looking to boost student scores, via a massive monetary investment, but someone had to sign off. There were a few newsworthy failures and no demonstrable good...although it's a little early to tell. I found that my early exposure to computers when I was six, led in to my current career. So there may not be any conclusions for decades.
Other proponents included vendors like Apple (iPads for everyone in a Los Angeles school, lol) and politicians, who were either bribed or philosophically sold (if there's a difference). Again, this wasn't a scientific decision and one-off school trials are VERY difficult to get past entrenched interests like regulators and unions via equivalence challenges (ie if it's good enough for 1 school it's good enough for all, right? Oh so you're experimenting on these kids but not these?).
> What evidence is there that parents drove the use of technology in schools? From the beginning parents have been extremely skeptical about the use of technology and have always voiced concerns.
What are you basing those claims on? In particular, the claim that all parents share a single viewpoint and especially how you know that the administrators aren't responding to interest from a subset of parents who are enthusiastic.
The way I've generally heard this characterized is that things like smartboards or tablets are popular with donors & a subset of affluent parents who like visible cool things but not the basic support / dealing with poverty which actually matter for a lot of students. Want to guess which group is disproportionately represented in communications with school administrators and local politicians?
There is a panic regarding having children 'ready' for the future-- and having kids be proficient in 'future' technologies/ needs. We in tech drive this, actually, as salaries in the area outpace other salaries. That pushes technology into the classroom, which is not the same as thoughtful uses of well-tooled technology that aids students.
i feel like CS is lightyears ahead of where it was when I was in school. My son learned Python and Java in HS, something I would only have dreamed of when I was his age. Instead I got to learn MS Office.
A) On the other hand, in middle school in the 80s, I learned Commodore 64 BASIC. (and my DAD learned BASIC because when you bought an Apple IIe, the manual suggested that learning BASIC was how you learned how to use the Apple IIe, and included a tutorial, so my Dad just followed it. I think programming has become a lot less common as a 'basic computer skill', not more).
B) I think you are confusing CS with programming/software engineering. They are related, but the "CS" class the post you are responding to suggested with nothing but a chalkboard would not have it's students ready for a job getting paid programming. (I don't mean this as an insult to you). On the other hand, the class in which you were learning MS Office probably wasn't CS at all. A class involving Python and Java might get someone more ready for a job getting paid programming, but may or may not be a CS class, depending on... if it includes any CS.
I think there are a few viewpoints in this article all mixed together:
1. General anti-screen / anti-tech crowd (not uncommon, e.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...)
2. Anti-authoritarian crowd (privacy concerns, complaints about quality of teaching, etc.)
3. Pro-authoritarian crowd (playing games, not learning anything, low scores on standardized tests)
I wonder if these just correlate with political party or there's a more interesting pattern.
I'm aware that funds aren't necessarily discretionary, but could the money spent on all this technology be redirected to teacher salaries (or other basic supplies) if the technology is dumped? I'd be curious to see the breakdown of funds that gets used for iPads/Chromebooks/etc.
As someone who thinks that children should absolutely be learning programming as soon as possible, I don't really think that means they need brand new whatever every year (not implying that's what is currently happening). When I was growing up, we had incredibly old machines (in a computer lab, or sometimes a couple shared computers pre classroom), and I think this actually worked fine (perhaps better in some respects now -- since a "benefit" of an old Apple II is that its pretty focused on the one task at hand, and can't load up other things).
One of my problems with the way technology is used in the classroom (at least in my kid's school) is that they're being trained how to operate applications -- not how to use a computer.
This seems like it would be related to a broader shift (among tech parents, at least [0]) from digital to analog.
From my perspective, it seems like a pendulum. On the whole, baby boomers didn't adapt to the advent of computers very well. However, they generally recognized their value, and provided access to the devices in a mostly unstructured way. Thus, their Gen X/millennial children are overall more technically savvy than they.
Now, those children are becoming parents themselves, and reflecting on the potential negative aspects of unlimited screen access, social media, widespread gamification, etc. on their own children. Providing the same unrestricted access to their own children may seem unlikely to produce the same results that they themselves experienced. Thus, alternatives like reducing or restricting access at home/school become more common/popular.
Perhaps the next generation will resent their parents' restrictions, or feel left behind technically, and swing back the other way?
> An interactive program delivered an image of a token on the screen when she completed an assignment. She could then trade in those tokens to play games.
> To Dr. Boyd, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, it looks more like a video game than a math class. She isn’t sure if the lessons are sticking with Jane and worries about the hyper-stimulating screen time.
I think gamifying school is probably a good idea. How many kids don't know the parts of speech, but have memorized the Pokedex?
Even in the late 90s/early 2000s they had a program set up in my district which gamified reading books.
For the books in the program you could choose to take a quiz that would effectively test whether you read and comprehended the content. If you passed the quiz, you'd get points based on how well you did on the quiz and how long the book was. Those points would add up and you could use them for prizes at the end of the semester.
I have to agree. I've accepted that the Pokedex part of my brain is never going to be reclaimed. What worries me though is that it will end up being even worse than standardized testing. I fear that these "games" will be nothing more than smaller, more frequent tests that will be used to generate metrics which will be used to "fund" individual students.
That brings to mind a classic issue - it isn't the tech but how it is used. The same standardized test approach which combines the worst features of feudalism and bueracracy with the virtues of neither was there before. The games or lack of them won't change that.
I vividly remember how in Elementary School they had workbooks after workbooks of multiple choice analogies with words used within occasionally unexplained. They insisted it was all very important when we asked why so overboard. The real answer became obvious when the SAT was changed to have a writing section instead of an analogies one and they promptly vanishes into the void only to appear on standardized tests four questions a year at very most.
They didn't even have the honesty to say "It is used a lot for in important test."
I work in the EdTech realm writing software to keep students on track. Technology in the classroom is a means and not and ends, it all depends on usage.
We have two "model" teachers.
The old guard teacher who started their career before computers were in classrooms, those teachers utilize our technology to accomplish a task (block websites, etc)
The other model teacher is someone who welcomes technology into the classroom, they utilize the deeper functionality of our program, and normally have more than one technology of some kind running in the classroom.
Both are great teachers, they just use our product differently.
I've reflected a lot on this, as a parent. I can't quite get behind the "no computer screen" thing, because a bit part of me wants to get my kids into unix, python, and interesting electronics projects from an early age. Another part of me sees this as a potentially endless loop of gummy bear videos (and, to paraphrase "war of the roses", "by the time this is all over, an argument about gummy bear videos will seem like one of your lighter moments").
I've come to a general, porous, leaky set of guidelines. The closer you are to black text on a white background (or white text on a black background), you're more likely it is you're doing something interesting. That could mean reading a novel or analyzing data with python or R or unix on the command line or in a relatively lightweight IDE. If lots of distractingly flashy colors and sounds are going on around you, then odds are you're getting sucked into the screen vortex, even if you aren't actually looking at a screen.
And like I said, porous. There are, indisputably, phenomenal comic books (ok, graphic novels) with great depth. Videos and movies can have tremendous artistic value. Those flashy images on a screen could be watching Citizen Kane. That black and white text could be 101 fart jokes. What the hell do I know.
But overall, I feel like the equation holds, sort of. If you're looking at symbols on a background, odds are this isn't the wrong kind of screen time, and it could be very intellectually enriching.
We also have porous guidelines for our kids. The ones that worked the best for us are:
* Only creative / educational games (including minecraft), and those for less than 2 hours per day. They don't get games that are heavily optimized for addiction.
* No screens in their bedrooms ever. As my oldest got more of a social life, we noticed the drama of friends kept following her around and she never naturally escaped from it. Once we stopped letting her have her phone in her room her ability to deal with drama bombs improved drastically.
* No video apps at all for the younger kids.
Screentime makes it reasonably easy to enforce this stuff on iPads, and the original Screen Time (https://screentimelabs.com/) is even better on Android.
"An interactive program delivered an image of a token on the screen when she completed an assignment. She could then trade in those tokens to play games. To Dr. Boyd, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, it looks more like a video game than a math class."
I think this is a core part of the problem. Gamification, perceived usefulness, and enjoyment are being used in lieu of actual learning gains. I believe, however there is too much focus on "enjoyment" rather than learning.
As an example, my research is on rote practice of writing code. Literally retyping syntax, because I believe the technical literacy is the foundation to conceptual understanding. This is no different than a cook, musician, athlete, even doctors. However, retyping syntax is not "fun". It's not "interactive". It's not meta-cognitive. It's drilling. But the responses I get are near bimodal. Some people fully understand the logic and others outright argue against it.
However, rote practice is (in my opinion) the first step to high-level learning. Meta-cognitive skills like self-explanation are great but only if you have the prior knowledges to utilize them. They should not be given to a pure novice; however, no one wants to admit to being a novice. Somehow, that's for children, but I'm an adult / young-adult / "big boy"! True novices should be given the chance to learn these lower level skills without feeling like its beneath them or treated as "lesser" than higher level skills.
My wife and I raised three daughters, all of whom are in their 20's now. Their generation went from no home Internet in the mid-90's to smart phones in their pockets today. As parents we struggled like everyone simply because we didn't know what was right. I would describe the phases we went through as something like: uncertainty combined with attempts at control, followed by a loss of any illusion of control as the channels proliferated. I specifically came to feel that we were experiencing a grand and fundamental change in human society and that anything I tried to do to stand as a filter between the girls and the rest of the world that was now pouring in would do more harm than good.
In the end, they all came through it fine. I won't rattle off metrics of their normality, but they are doing fine, along with all the others of their generation that we came to know over the years. Being human they proved impressively adaptable in the face of change, even high-velocity vertigo-inducing change. As for my wife and I, we still don't know how much technology and information is the right amount, at home or in schools. In fact the only thing I think we learned on that score is how much we didn't know, how much we still don't know, and how terribly weak our ability to predict how any of this will work out is. Probably parents felt similarly 30 or 40 years after the invention of printed material, or radio, or phones. Regardless, the genie is well out of the bottle.
My in-laws are very anti-public schools. My wife was home schooled for a few years and otherwise went to a private religious school.
Before we had kids, I thought that was the most ridiculous opinion I'd ever heard. The closer our kids get to school age, the more reluctant I am to entrust them to the school system.
Probably just paranoia, I guess. But it seems like the majority of what I hear about schools anymore is how they have the same issue as the corporate world: being too focused on showing short-term gains instead of actually doing what is best over the long-term.
The biggest predictor by far of a child's success at school is and always remains their parent.
Adding technology cannot make up for a parent who doesn't teach their child study skills, good learning habits and places an importance on the value of education.
Parents should look at themselves if their child is not performing rather than put the blame on some tool like technology.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadCan you convince me that any of those assertions is wrong? Pointing out that "YA fiction is literature" doesn't come anywhere close to refuting any of the above assertions.
Even in a for-kids/for-youth book collection, where we used to have Jack London, Jules Vernes, James F. Cooper, Alexandre Dumas and so on mixed with more specific children's literature; I looked at the current catalogue the other day: such authors have been erased, and the whole offer is now made of novelisations of Star Wars, novelisations of cartoons and novelisations of comics... Oh you can still find them in other collections, but those are a bit more, how to put it, distinguished/smart collections (and aimed at a bit older age); so that was quite a shock to browse the catalogue of the 'standard' kids collection.
Well, as opposed to, say, watching TV (or the somehow even more mindless content that’s on YouTube), do you really disagree?
Perhaps a bit more fringe: I think a lot of light young adult fiction has the nutritional density of popcorn and any perceived inherent good in reading those books is likely a product of publishing industry propaganda campaigns. Scholastic Corporation, I am looking at you...
But later on it definitely matters. I had this same struggle with my daughter when she was in middle school -- she got so many kudos for "reading so much" but the books were all filler. I tried many times to point out that books are just a medium and the content is key.
Back in the 1980s, just giving kids a computer (without also giving them a bunch of game disks/tapes/carts) would certainly teach them something, in that the only thing you can really do with this "tech" is to fiddle around/tinker with it until you learn how to make it do something you came up with. Just sitting around "being bored on" these computers can—and did—gradually build up a skillset in many of us.
There are still computers that are like this, of course. The Arduino comes to mind. There are also environments you could lock a modern computer down into that do the same.
As well, there are apps and "games" that teach you a ton just by attempting to understand the model behind them, which bored children will stumble into and then learn from under the guise of "wasting time at recess." (The best thing you can preinstall on a computer that a middle-schooler is going to be using is an interactive kinematics sandbox program.)
It seems apparent to most classroom instructors that most tech is a distraction, not an enhancement. Obviously exceptions should be made for disabilities and there are some uses—spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes can use tech effectively. But in most classes it's detrimental rather than helpful.
They are heavy, expensive, take up space, you can't search them etc.
However, I find it almost impossible to learn hard subjects from a PDF. Printed book is so much better. I wonder why.
I see no reason why school books cannot be made cheaply...
There's lots of cool things you can do to enhance learning with computers, like daily quizzes, discussion boards, etc. But replacing books is not one of them IMO
On the other hand, my kids are learning from PDF’s now, and once the lesson is over, they delete the PDF’s, so they have nothing to reference - and even if they were saving them, it’d be a challenge to try to organize them in any meaningful way.
Something about the school procurement process that knocks all the nuance or subtlety out of the goals.
This issue with technology goes way, way back decades. Always there are promising trials, it works here and there, under the right circumstances, and so some school wants to roll it out broadly and it doesn't work as well. Then there is a rollback.
[edit] And I could say the same about software development processes.
The people authorizing the deals, administrators and school boards, aren't incentivized to improve outcomes, they're incentivized to make the people who put them there seem like they're doing something valuable.
If parents could choose the schools they were sending their children to, instead of being saddled with whomever the state has appointed to run a particular school, they'd pick schools for which evidence has proven better outcomes. Sure, they might be swayed by flashy tech, but as other comments have said the push for tech didn't largely come from parents.
My dyslexic/ADHD daughter did a trial day at a private school with a "no screens in classrooms" policy. It was awful for her, because she's grown comfortable using text to speech, dictation, and other tools to do cope with the friction in her brain. My other kids benefit in different ways, they've all learned to do independent research way earlier than I ever did and know how to find answers to pretty much anything they think about.
None of our kids have access to Candy Crush or other gamble-games, though, so they tend to have healthier screen habits than their friends. All the quotes from parents in the article make it sound like they're helpless. I think that's an indication of just how bad tooling and education for _parents_ is.
But even when we didn't have chromebooks in every class, everybody in my grade used to go to great lengths to figure out how to play flash games, runescape, minecraft etc. on the school computers. I'm sure current students are even more sophisticated in distracting themselves now that chromebooks are assigned to each student.
Most technology seems to be used to detract from learning: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... rather than enhancing it. Obviously there are exceptions, like spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes. But focus and concentration seem to be in short supply, relative to technology.
My general belief is that gadgets are great for kids with the right boundaries, and what we're lacking is (a) parent / teacher experience managing those boundaries and (b) tooling.
My kids schools are 100% Chromebooks. This has been great for scheduling extracurricular activities and making their backpacks lighter. It really hasn't improved their ability to learn mathematics or English.
https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/why-bags-are-wrecking-...
(Also, if you're clever, you can do things like finding a web-app that lets you use them as a substitute for those vote-clickers that some university lecturers use to gauge pre-lesson knowledgeability.)
Unfortunately a lot of parents won't care, and the school system won't give them a choice either. However, it leads to shit like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
The ideal is BYOD. If all you really need is a web browser, then let parents and kids decide what to use together.
If you really give a shit about cheating use analog quizzes/tests. It's not perfect, but the old ways are easier to police.
These aren't the student's devices; they're enterprise-MDM workstations that the kids happen to carry around. Think of them as a computer lab that the kids don't have to go to; not as Personal Computers per se. They're probably logged into them with a school-issued GSuite email rather than their personal Google Account, too, and told to not use these computers for non-school activity. (I'm not intimately familiar with the Chromebook education initiative, but if it's anything like Apple's initiative with iPads, then that's how it's set up.)
And no, the school wouldn't ever be okay with not using Mobile Device Management; MDM is how they ensure that a classroom full of laptops all on a LAN together aren't spreading malware like the digital equivalent of a kindergarten in flu season; and how they ensure the devices don't get spyware installed onto them by someone else (some stranger; or someone's parents!) to steal kids' contact info and location details with the goal of kidnapping or worse.
I'd actually think that BYOD would be worse in such a case, as you'd have to contaminate your personal device with an enterprise MDM profile in order to get it on the network.
Better to just tell the kid that they can have a personal device, but they also have to have this school-managed device, and that they should think of them as separate things and not use one for the activities better suited to the other. (This also neatly solves the "school spy-ware" worry as well, because if the students are only doing school-work on their laptop and are just using their phones+ISP data plans to text/email/etc., then the school sees none of that.)
I was one of the kids who was a little disappointed when the first MacOS came out. Where was the command line? Where did I wrote code? The commodore64 did a lot more for kids who wanted to learn about computers, an affordable and highly hackable and programmable computer. I felt like the first Mac was a big step forward in terms of ease of use for the general consumer, but a step back from the AppleII in getting in there and really enjoying computing.
Chromebooks put more, not less distance, between a kid and what I consider to be the interesting things about a computer.
Think of it this way - google talks a lot about a critical skills shortage. Ok, so, would a kid who grows up using a Chromebook be more likely to develop these skills than a kid who uses a linux system, or Mac OS X? Or hell, even a windows system, at least it's relatively easy to get a bash shell working there.
Nah, let's face it, the future of google's workforce is not going to be found among the the kids using google's educational products. Bet you google execs and high up engineers most definitely have their kids learning on something else, and they probably avoid too much exposure to any kind of electronics for a longer period of childhood than google pushes out there in the classroom.
I, personally, see the value in those skills, but for students who are not interested in it, it is just an unnecessary hassle and a source of frustration. It's like saying that having an easily repairable, but not that reliable or user-friendly, car is a good opportunity to learn problem-solving and basic vehicle maintenance skills. As someone not interested in that, I just want a reliable device that will drive me in comfort and convenience from point A to point B without making me worry about having to fix anything.
Personally, I worry about having to fix something when I'm incapable of fixing it. That's why it stresses me out when my car or washing machine breaks. But true, that breaks all the time just because I can fix it with a trip to the hardware store.
The thing is... well, sure, easily repairable but not reliable isn't necessarily a trade off that needs to happen.
Google could have done what apple did with OsX, but at a realistic price point. An easy to use, affordable and reliable UI with astonishing power right beneath the surface, all based on Unix, in the hands of millions of school aged kids. This could have been the Commodore 64 or apple II times a thousand.
Instead, we have the Chromebook.
Note I deleted the last line which on reflection was excessive and not useful to the discussion.
I agree with you on the rest, however. I, personally, enjoy learning about computing by fixing stuff, hacking, etc. However, this won't hold true for everyone, and they shouldn't be subjected to this weird form of hazing with "we got through it, you gotta do it too, otherwise you won't learn all those computer skills (that you don't care about at all)!"
Reminds me a bit of some people in the US being almost religious about driving a car with a manual transmission. I get it, it is fun sometimes, and a pretty cool skill to have, but I am glad that most people in the US don't have to deal with that unless they want to. I had to learn it (because 99% of motorcycles still come in manual transmission only), but I do not think that manual is some life changing skill that needs to be learned by everyone. Those who need it will learn, those who don't will not, and it is a good thing we have this option. No need to force this on everyone.
That being said, no, I don't think we should give kids a terminal window and tell them to figure it out from there, but we should definitely be giving them computers that give them the opportunity to peel back the layers, and then we should encourage them to do so.
I agree with you on this one, but with one important caveat: it shouldn't be their primary driver/school work machine, it should be something provided by parents. I am all about letting kids figure stuff out and play around with the OS, but doing that on the machine that you use to submit homework, do your class scheduling, gradebook management, etc. is a recipe for disaster. Have you ever had cases where your machine became useless until you fixed it, because of some non-trivial symlinking or config screw up? Now imagine being a middle schooler who is already overstressed due to all the homework and other school stuff, but without enough technical and coping skills to deal with it.
In a similar vein, if I had a kid, and they were interested in learning things about cars, I would be absolutely glad to get them a shitty old beater car, appropriate tools, and look into working on that car with them. However, for their daily driver, I would heavily insist on getting them a less than 10 years old japanese economy car they can use on the daily basis or in case where something on their "learning car mechanics" beater went wrong. You make mistakes when you learn, and I wouldn't want their daily life to be handicapped due to making a mistake or two.
I.e., it isn't a programming-friendly OS vs. chromebooks, it is heavy backpacks filled with textbooks and notebooks vs. chromebooks. Don't mistake chromebooks for a computing tool, it is an everyday student things kind of tool that just happens to be served by a computing device.
As far as I am aware, chromebooks in education are provided by school districts, families aren't paying for it directly. You can always resort to "they are paying for it with taxes", but that would be the same for any non-chromebooks as well, except it would end up being more expensive (they won't be sold at as high of a loss as google can afford with chromebooks; count all that extra IT administration needed for non-chromebooks, adding a lot of costs as well).
>Was it really beyond google's capabilities to make this a more open, perhaps linux based environment?
It wasn't beyond their capabilities, it just wasn't a good idea for the purposes chromebooks were supposed to serve.
I installed GalliumOS, and I love it. It is a complete Linux environment (Ubuntu), and it easily meets my needs even if Firefox sometimes slows down a bit with Javascript-heavy web apps (I haven't installed Chrome.) My only complaint is the limited storage space.
Google may not ship Chromebooks with a customizable OS, but they and the OEMs don't interfere with end users' ability to install one (yet), and I really appreciate that the education market has created so much demand for machines with this sort of form factor.
Sandboxing this stuff away is in general a good idea for protecting "normal" users. People often want to install pirated games or whatever and that's abused as a vector to get malware onto those devices.
If that's not enough you can install entirely different operating systems and even bootloaders (if you want to).
Now for families that are voluntarily buying chromebooks for personal use, I don’t see them getting any value out of programmability regardless.
Or are you one of those people who think everyone should be forced to learn coding?
Perhaps beyond their better judgment. More open implies more ways to break.
I haven’t looked into it yet but it appears that my criticisms no longer apply to the current product. In blunter words, I had it wrong about chromebooks in 2019. It sounds like many of the tools I care about are still a little clunky, but now a possibility, and will likely get better over time.
https://alex.miller.im/posts/data-science-chromebook-pixelbo...
It was a definite plus. Kids could hop onto any machine that had a browser (even the older Win7 PCs) and continue to work. Does iOS even allow multiple logins or was that whole educational push a few years ago just FUD against Google? Doesn't matter, everyone has moved on anyway.
The whole "OMG Chromebooks!" cry was drowned out when the cost savings was figured out, because the alternatives are $500 keyboardless iPads that can't be shared and monitorless $500 Dell PCs that can't be transported.
The kids are now in secondary ed and use Docs/Slides/Classroom for their classwork. Remote collaboration is dead simple (again, more iCloud FUD from Apple), and nobody EVER forgets their classwork at school since it's always a login away.
Lightening backpack load and improved scheduling are pretty good outcomes, as long as learning hasn't gotten worse. Why would learning ability (for basics like the 3Rs) be significantly improved using tech? The students are still the same after all.
I think you are correct that the concepts these students are learning probably aren't improved too much by technology, but there are tons of ways in which students can learn and collaborate in real time which wouldn't be possible without devices like chromebooks.
She says that I'm not wrong per se but that it's still a good thing overall for the kids. I think they should just let the kids run around outside instead (7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district, and PE is only one or two days a week...)
Wait what? Is there some difference in notation since recess (in Finland it's 15 minutes between each class and usually 30min after lunch) is like absolute must for kids of any age. There's even recess in upper secondary school but the lessons are 75 minutes usually instead of 45 minutes as in comprehensive school.
Are you really saying that it's directly from class to another class? That's crazy!
I don't know what's wrong with Americans either, and I am one.
Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.
'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.
I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad.
But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game).
But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.
In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.
We also biked to school ourselves unattended. And we had maybe two half-days a year spent on standardized tests, one test each. The insanity of American schools is a more recent phenomenon.
It can vary between school districts though. Generally the wealthier and whiter the neighborhood/city/school, the better the kids will be treated. Although it's pretty shitty even at most of the "good" ones.
What you are reading isn't much of an exagerration though. It is a good reminder of how insane it sounds to you, because IT IS INSANE.
And you say we seem to be "fine" in the US? Have you even been paying attention to what's going on in the US? I don't know how much of it can be blamed on the eductional system... but you know, probably a chunk of it. The schoolchildren and former schoolchildren of the US are decidedly not "fine" though. This place is fucked up.
In Hungary we only have standardized tests for school admissions, both high school an university. (so you write one test and can apply to many places with the score). Otherwise every two years there's the PISA international test, but that's only for statistics, it isn't graded. All our other tests are just prepared by the teacher. Of course this means different schools have different standards, mostly depending on the percentage of Roma students. Where they are the majority there is not much learning happening and then non Roma families rather make their kids take a 1-2 hour bus ride to the next town.
But it's not generally the parents that are pushing them. Except maybe to the extent that parents want to know "How do I know if a school is good or terrible?" and someone can give them a "score" built in part on standardized tests...
I think (and this may not be a popular theory), it is in large part a disfunctional reaction to the extreme social inequality in the U.S.. Going back to the days of legal segregation, some people had _terrible_ schools others had good schools. Even once we have legal equality, somehow some schools are still pretty terrible. If only we had an 'objective' way to determine which schools are effectively teaching, and reward those doing well and punish those doing poorly...
In fact, though, it's still the poor and not white who bear the brunt of all this terribleness. I know someone who is a teacher who was at a meeting where the principal was explaining why it was "only fair" to the poor students to have every minute of the day regimented and disciplined, because they too deserved the best education... while knowing the principal sent her OWN kids to a "sudbury school"!
Elementary school gets recess, don't remember how long. Middle school I don't remember very well; high school you just get lunch (but are perhaps not restricted to one room to have it, at least).
http://www.rockfordschools.org/high-schools/rockford-high/da...
The breaks in my district are 6 minutes long, with five 71-minute class periods. You can't socialize much in 6 minutes, you have to get from one class to the next, which might be a 400m walk if you want to stop at your locker - walking through a dense crowd of people, with a 15 lbs backpack. Or 200m if you bring a backpack of 40+ lbs of books and binders for all your morning or afternoon classes, stopping by your locker just at lunch. Lunch is 24 minutes long somewhere before/in the middle of/after 4th period. "Zero hour" at the top of the linked schedule is if you want to take an extra class, eg. to accomodate state requirements like civics and communications while also taking year-long AP classes, performing arts classes, or doubling up on science/math electives beyond the minimum.
If you have an average morning bus arrival at 6:50, and add a sport that goes until 5:30PM, and are quick enough to have get your homework done in just an hour each night, it ends up being about the equivalent of a 60-hour work week...pretty rough on a 14-year-old child. But we're a Blue Ribbon Exemplary School! Top 250 in the nation! In spite of the flaws obvious in the schedule above, if my family is going to be in an American school system, and especially if we want them near extended family, friends, and my job, we're not going to do too much better than this: I bought a house in this district so my kid could get the same great education I did.
But I guess it would appear in the school records if they didn't go to school. At least in Hungary the state takes away certain benefits if the kid regularly doesn't go to school and it can also have other consequences as well, like having to repeat the year.
But to some degree it should also be part of growing up. When we were 15-16 and all of us commuted by public transportation, a few times we skipped the first class and went to a pub instead. And I didn't become some lowlife gangster, I completed a CS degree with good results.
Parental attitudes changed more than anything else. Coddle kids longer, trust them less. That seems to be the current trend.
And no, there's no bussing for zero hour. You have to drive yourself to school, ride with a parent, or find a carpool setup for either of those.
Do you (parents in general) think this is normal and good for a child? I had thought homeschooling was lunatic, but if this is the alternative, I can see why people would choose it.
In Hungary in high school we had 45 min classes and 15 min breaks for the first 3 breaks, and then 10 min breaks. We had usually 7 classes per day, so school went from 8:00 to 14:30, usually. Then lunch if you want.
In primary school we had a break where it was mandatory to go down to the schoolyard to be outside in the fresh air (but then do whatever you want).
When I was in the same school district in the early 90's, we had a 42m recess period at least 3 days a week and either a 42m or 20-25m study hall every day.
For my kids, we bit the bullet for private school. There are some things I don't like about private school, but I'm unwilling to make my son a subject of whatever bullshit social experiment is being conducted. You're only young once, and we live in a world where you need to be top of your game.
In the US school is typically 8AM to 2PM. There is very little time between classes and the kids have to scramble for the next class. I also found out our son has been missing lunch because the cafeteria line queue is too long to accommodate all the students.
In the US schools attempt to do more with less they have stripped any joy out of the educational experience. No recess, fieldtrips, or extracurriculars. And arts and sciences are a pale comparison of what they used to be. Labs and lab equipment has been replaced by online videos and virtual learning.
Here's actually a somewhat recent news on the matter (in Finnish https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit...) and here's https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g... a somewhat normal (though day length variation seems to not happen much in this schedule, it does happen all the time in that you can have shorter days by either going to school later or leaving earlier, too) timetable for an 8th grader.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g...
Students with wealthy parents will do well; tutoring, travel, summer camps, all help with education and growth.
The finest English teacher I know has taught for the vast majority of her career and her methods have a thoroughly proven record of improving writing and reading in students from every walk of life. She has a doctorate in education now, with a dissertation on improving learning methods and and numerous students over her 25 year career have contacted her and thanked her for specifically her methods and pressure that got those students to succeed, not just in her class, but in college and the future.
There are many, horrible teachers who would do better in a career where they are kept far from influencing the next generation, but this woman, with her majority-teaching-career, is not one of them, full stop.
My finest computer science teachers never did anything but teach, either. At the high school and collegiate levels. Same with my favorite college English teacher.
I think a more effective route is to regularly fire the bad teachers, so they can’t harm students with their poor guidance.
Let's try and break this extreme opinion down into some components.
What is "valuable" to you? Why would working outside of teaching help someone be better at teaching their subject matter? Is this statement for teachers across all levels, or just grade school? How is it that gross generalization opinions are constructive, but empirical personal experiences providing evidence that contradict that generalization aren't?
"empirical personal experiences" - this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical.
Was my statement a gross generalization, sure. But;
-most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees,
-there has been a steady devaluation of degrees,
-many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college,
-wealthy families pay for extra tutoring, and camps, (wealth has always been the best factor in determining academic success),
-in order to teach about something you need to know about something.
If eduction was supposed to be a meritocracy, its failed. It's a systemic failure, no one person is responsible, no one person can save the educational system. Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years. Realists and pessimists have long concluded that the purpose of the educational system is to work as a babysitter, it's cost effective.
>> this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical. All personal experience is, by definition, empirical. The definition of "empirical" is here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empirical. You're literally wrong.
>>most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees Citation Needed. Is "Elementary Education" a "very liberal art"? Who is more qualified to teach 6-10 year olds if not someone with a Masters in Elementary Education (generally the minimum requirement) in your opinion?
>>many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college Your proposed solution doesn't address this. The 4/1 just means that teachers will now face an additional difficulty, finding a 2nd job to have "real world experience", in order to teach 7 year olds how to read and write.
>>in order to teach about something you need to know about something. Of course. But there's millions of students spread across tens of thousands of school districts. IDK where we're suddenly going to find all of these domain experts willing to take lower pay and miss out on career advancement in exchange for educating children.
>>Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years.
I'm sorry, are you only 30 years old and therefor unaware that this is the lesson of the course of human history? Social and economic factors are your majority factors for everything, but that feeds directly into education by allowing for school choice (either by sending to private schools or moving into well funded, higher performing public schools). The fact that you're lumping the "realists and pessimists" together on who has decided what school actually is, shows your contempt for the system. I get that, you feel it's broken (so do I actually, but not at all for the reasons you do). I just find your idea that "all elementary school teachers are bad at their job" to be founded on poor/lacking data and a complete misunderstanding of the specifics of primary education.
Admitting that economy and class determine educational attainment, negates any argument that any specific pedagogical techniques are helpful.
It took her a few years after getting her credential to see the dysfunction in the system. Old teachers were unable to cope with the young children who need young, able bodied teachers able to deal with their very normal behaviors. Principals would get upset that my mother would allow the kids to go outside, even when recess wasn't scheduled. She had the highest marks in the school when it came to testing, but was denied tenure, because her methods of getting the job done were at odds with her principal. There was a large parental showing at the board meeting, and she ended up being put on administrative leave. Some of her students -- who no longer had to take ritalin to deal with his 'excessive' movement while she was their teacher -- ended up back on the drug. This was all in a lower-income district with a history of terrible results.
From that point on, my entire family has shunned public schools. My brother and I were sent to private schools, and my mother always votes against every issue the teachers union supports. They enable the behavior. They encourage, ineffective, anti-competitive practices which harm students, and enable lazy teachers.
(1) - https://www.deere.com/en/gator-utility-vehicles/full-size-cr...
Local elected officials form a school board, which may then have various committees composed of board members, administrators, teachers, and parents.
The Congress gives away money with high-level strings attached. States set curriculum guidelines (or micro-manage the curriculum), set rules and standards, and provide lots of money. School boards make local budget and taxation decisions and exercise other management functions that vary by state and district.
The "administrators" are appointed management who are employees of the school. The superintendent (aka the CEO/commissioner) of the district usually has an individual contract with the board. The rest of management is usually civil service or appointed management/confidential employees. In some states they may be unionized to some degree.
In the rural school I went to in the 90s, there was a superintendent, CFO, elementary/middle/high school principals and assistants, and about a dozen clerks/secretaries. Today, the district has fewer students, but has added a compliance officer, CIO, special education deputy superintendent, and a bus superintendent.
"Administrators" is generally a generic term used to refer to non-teaching individuals involved in the running of the education.
Who those individuals are is highly varied though. Education is controlled at the state level in the United States, not the federal level[1]. So what you end up with are completely different ways of running/managing things. So state-level bureaucracy has it's say in things. Then there's a state-level department of education with a secretary or commissioner (possibly elected, possible appointed), which manages high level details like enforcing compliance with legislation and certification and whatnot. But they generally further cede control to a local entity which is in charge of the school system for that locality (could be as small as a special district inside of a single city or as large as multiple counties). This is the level that manages local infrastructure, school zoning, shared services like IT, etc. This can also be led by either an elected or appointed figure, depending on both local and state laws. As long as they're acting within the bounds of what the state level legislation and department of education has dictated, the local district can run things how they see fit.
All of these layers are purely administrative, and performs no actual teaching (but likely and hopefully is staffed with people that come from teaching or education backgrounds). Then you get to the actual school level, where you'll have a few administrators that handle the management of that individual school, but is predominantly staffed by actual teachers. Administrators at this level are generally always hired, rather than elected individuals.
[1] While the federal government has no direct control of education, it indirectly wields influence by dangling money in front of states[2]. Which is what it does with practically everything else it doesn't technically have any jurisdiction of. States are free to manage education however they want, but the federal government provides states with subsidies for education that are tied to particular regulations or policies. States that implement and meet the regulations get free federal money, states that don't implement or meet them give up the associated subsidy and have to make up the funding shortfall with more state or local taxes. This has a trickle down effect where teachers ultimately have very little say in what or how they teach, since they have so many different masters they have to please to ensure their school stays funded.
[2] https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/education/k-12-educatio...
After the principal there is a 'district'. The district is made up of completely ineffective administrative staff who are unable to manage even the most basic office tasks. My mother once was offered a contract to teach in our local district, and the secretary sent a piece of blank paper for her to sign -- twice.
And then, there is the superintendent, which is an employee (unelected in most places). The superintendent is like the principal of principals. Of course, like the principals, he or she too is conducting unapproved research on the children, without any kind of oversight. Above that is an elected school board made up of people pushing their own agenda.
Oh, and then there's the teacher's union, a quasi-governmental body, which demands a premium of the teacher's salary (thus inflating the cost of hiring a teacher). Rather than advocating on behalf of teachers (which is their nominal job), they spend most of the money lobbying for leftist causes meant to enrich the union representatives. Of course the union has no accountability to voters and has a shadow structure to the school district, all of which has to be paid for out of your tax dollars, because why not?
That's just at the local level. There are then even more layers at the regional, state, and national level.
> There is every evidence that this was driven by administrators and tech companies hoping to make money selling software and devices.
> There has never been any evidence that giving kids screens helps them learn
No offense, but you made three fairly bold claims there with little sources to back them up. It's not that I disbelief any of your assertions, but refuting someone else's claim because it has no evidence and providing counterpoints without evidence isn't really helpful...
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-...
All these issues were at the forefront of the "discussions". The strategy to upsell technological improvements to struggling schools, was a simple way to by pass skepticism. Might as well try something new?
I don't remember specific "Powerful Educators" looking to boost student scores, via a massive monetary investment, but someone had to sign off. There were a few newsworthy failures and no demonstrable good...although it's a little early to tell. I found that my early exposure to computers when I was six, led in to my current career. So there may not be any conclusions for decades.
Other proponents included vendors like Apple (iPads for everyone in a Los Angeles school, lol) and politicians, who were either bribed or philosophically sold (if there's a difference). Again, this wasn't a scientific decision and one-off school trials are VERY difficult to get past entrenched interests like regulators and unions via equivalence challenges (ie if it's good enough for 1 school it's good enough for all, right? Oh so you're experimenting on these kids but not these?).
What are you basing those claims on? In particular, the claim that all parents share a single viewpoint and especially how you know that the administrators aren't responding to interest from a subset of parents who are enthusiastic.
The way I've generally heard this characterized is that things like smartboards or tablets are popular with donors & a subset of affluent parents who like visible cool things but not the basic support / dealing with poverty which actually matter for a lot of students. Want to guess which group is disproportionately represented in communications with school administrators and local politicians?
B) I think you are confusing CS with programming/software engineering. They are related, but the "CS" class the post you are responding to suggested with nothing but a chalkboard would not have it's students ready for a job getting paid programming. (I don't mean this as an insult to you). On the other hand, the class in which you were learning MS Office probably wasn't CS at all. A class involving Python and Java might get someone more ready for a job getting paid programming, but may or may not be a CS class, depending on... if it includes any CS.
I wonder if these just correlate with political party or there's a more interesting pattern.
As someone who thinks that children should absolutely be learning programming as soon as possible, I don't really think that means they need brand new whatever every year (not implying that's what is currently happening). When I was growing up, we had incredibly old machines (in a computer lab, or sometimes a couple shared computers pre classroom), and I think this actually worked fine (perhaps better in some respects now -- since a "benefit" of an old Apple II is that its pretty focused on the one task at hand, and can't load up other things).
From my perspective, it seems like a pendulum. On the whole, baby boomers didn't adapt to the advent of computers very well. However, they generally recognized their value, and provided access to the devices in a mostly unstructured way. Thus, their Gen X/millennial children are overall more technically savvy than they.
Now, those children are becoming parents themselves, and reflecting on the potential negative aspects of unlimited screen access, social media, widespread gamification, etc. on their own children. Providing the same unrestricted access to their own children may seem unlikely to produce the same results that they themselves experienced. Thus, alternatives like reducing or restricting access at home/school become more common/popular.
Perhaps the next generation will resent their parents' restrictions, or feel left behind technically, and swing back the other way?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309305
1. Replaces teachers / supervision.
2. Distracts students.
It seems like administrators are particularly interested in 1 for cost savings reasons, and are unable to solve 2.
> To Dr. Boyd, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, it looks more like a video game than a math class. She isn’t sure if the lessons are sticking with Jane and worries about the hyper-stimulating screen time.
I think gamifying school is probably a good idea. How many kids don't know the parts of speech, but have memorized the Pokedex?
For the books in the program you could choose to take a quiz that would effectively test whether you read and comprehended the content. If you passed the quiz, you'd get points based on how well you did on the quiz and how long the book was. Those points would add up and you could use them for prizes at the end of the semester.
I vividly remember how in Elementary School they had workbooks after workbooks of multiple choice analogies with words used within occasionally unexplained. They insisted it was all very important when we asked why so overboard. The real answer became obvious when the SAT was changed to have a writing section instead of an analogies one and they promptly vanishes into the void only to appear on standardized tests four questions a year at very most.
They didn't even have the honesty to say "It is used a lot for in important test."
We have two "model" teachers.
The old guard teacher who started their career before computers were in classrooms, those teachers utilize our technology to accomplish a task (block websites, etc)
The other model teacher is someone who welcomes technology into the classroom, they utilize the deeper functionality of our program, and normally have more than one technology of some kind running in the classroom.
Both are great teachers, they just use our product differently.
I've come to a general, porous, leaky set of guidelines. The closer you are to black text on a white background (or white text on a black background), you're more likely it is you're doing something interesting. That could mean reading a novel or analyzing data with python or R or unix on the command line or in a relatively lightweight IDE. If lots of distractingly flashy colors and sounds are going on around you, then odds are you're getting sucked into the screen vortex, even if you aren't actually looking at a screen.
And like I said, porous. There are, indisputably, phenomenal comic books (ok, graphic novels) with great depth. Videos and movies can have tremendous artistic value. Those flashy images on a screen could be watching Citizen Kane. That black and white text could be 101 fart jokes. What the hell do I know.
But overall, I feel like the equation holds, sort of. If you're looking at symbols on a background, odds are this isn't the wrong kind of screen time, and it could be very intellectually enriching.
* Only creative / educational games (including minecraft), and those for less than 2 hours per day. They don't get games that are heavily optimized for addiction.
* No screens in their bedrooms ever. As my oldest got more of a social life, we noticed the drama of friends kept following her around and she never naturally escaped from it. Once we stopped letting her have her phone in her room her ability to deal with drama bombs improved drastically.
* No video apps at all for the younger kids.
Screentime makes it reasonably easy to enforce this stuff on iPads, and the original Screen Time (https://screentimelabs.com/) is even better on Android.
I think this is a core part of the problem. Gamification, perceived usefulness, and enjoyment are being used in lieu of actual learning gains. I believe, however there is too much focus on "enjoyment" rather than learning.
As an example, my research is on rote practice of writing code. Literally retyping syntax, because I believe the technical literacy is the foundation to conceptual understanding. This is no different than a cook, musician, athlete, even doctors. However, retyping syntax is not "fun". It's not "interactive". It's not meta-cognitive. It's drilling. But the responses I get are near bimodal. Some people fully understand the logic and others outright argue against it.
However, rote practice is (in my opinion) the first step to high-level learning. Meta-cognitive skills like self-explanation are great but only if you have the prior knowledges to utilize them. They should not be given to a pure novice; however, no one wants to admit to being a novice. Somehow, that's for children, but I'm an adult / young-adult / "big boy"! True novices should be given the chance to learn these lower level skills without feeling like its beneath them or treated as "lesser" than higher level skills.
In the end, they all came through it fine. I won't rattle off metrics of their normality, but they are doing fine, along with all the others of their generation that we came to know over the years. Being human they proved impressively adaptable in the face of change, even high-velocity vertigo-inducing change. As for my wife and I, we still don't know how much technology and information is the right amount, at home or in schools. In fact the only thing I think we learned on that score is how much we didn't know, how much we still don't know, and how terribly weak our ability to predict how any of this will work out is. Probably parents felt similarly 30 or 40 years after the invention of printed material, or radio, or phones. Regardless, the genie is well out of the bottle.
Before we had kids, I thought that was the most ridiculous opinion I'd ever heard. The closer our kids get to school age, the more reluctant I am to entrust them to the school system.
Probably just paranoia, I guess. But it seems like the majority of what I hear about schools anymore is how they have the same issue as the corporate world: being too focused on showing short-term gains instead of actually doing what is best over the long-term.
Adding technology cannot make up for a parent who doesn't teach their child study skills, good learning habits and places an importance on the value of education.
Parents should look at themselves if their child is not performing rather than put the blame on some tool like technology.