I know a lot of teachers, who’ve been teaching for quite a while.
“Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
I can’t either. That dates back to me being a kid before the dawn of the smartphone. It doesn’t need to be a phone — I’ll play guitar while watching TV or work on a hobby coding project. I just need something to do with my hands.
I learned as an adult I have ADHD. I’m high functioning so I never got tested as a kid, but it’s 100% a condition I always had. It made a lot of aspects of my life since childhood make sense.
I think you're thinking of a different thing, which is specifically in the context of that technology reaching a simple "it just works" state. People no longer need to fiddle with it, and from that, never learn how it works. First time I heard of it was 2013 [0], and have been experiencing it with some of our recent hires over the past few years.
I don't think students care about group achievement tests. These aren't college entrance exams. I went to a top 1% school system and literally the only people who cared about those tests were the teachers and administrators, but we still scored very high on them.
Sometimes, while using chatting apps like WhatsApp, I get annoyed by people that despite knowing perfectly how to read and write, seem incapable of doing so over the cellphone. They just keep using annoying audio messages. This gets me pondering if cellphones + AI tools like converting text in pictures to audio will eventually cause illiteracy to be fashionable again. Perhaps people will just stop bothering learn how to read and write, if their gadgets can act as the equivalent to personal scribes in antiquity.
I've had this same thought and even direct comment to friends. The answer I've gotten basically every time has been that they send audios because they're driving while they're responding.
And most phones, even after 12+ years of this feature, badly mangle spoken text when transcribing and require editing, while the audio stays intact when sent.
Why do you compare speed to "sucking"? I don't care about the speed or efficiency, it just feels terrible.
On the other hand (on both hands ;) ) it feels wonderful to type on my thinkpad. I never compared speed or accuracy, it's just undeniably much more comfortable.
I don't think I will convince you, but that is training as well.
Yes, in the beginning, it feels terrible, because you hit the glass too hard, but after some time you adjust your tapping and hit the screen with the minimal force necessary to register a touch.
Yea, it will probably never feel as comfortable as your thinkpad, but once you get the hang of it, it isn't the difference between "wonderful" and "sucking".
What do you mean "in the beginning"? For how long do you think I've been using a phone lol?
There's no convincing, it's like comparing old, low quality shoes that don't even fit you to my perfect pair of shoes.
I can use all 10 fingers with minimal movement, I get immediate feedback, I don't have to hold anything. There's no training that can replace that. Typing on a touch screen will never not such.
My wife’s an editor and writer and uses voice to text all the time when messaging on her phone.
I think OP means sending actual voice memos. Yeah, I’d just never listen to most of those. I’m not the sort who has AirPods in my ears all day, so stuff with audio in messaging apps usually gets skipped.
I can swipe with Google gboard faster than I can type on a real keyboard (and I'm a programmer and can type), but I tried that google keyboard ("Gboard") on my iPhone and it was awful - slow to respond, lots of mistakes. (Until fairly recently, Apple didn't allow third-party keyboards at all, and iPhone still doesn't allow third-party keyboards access to all the API's, so they're a bit hamstrung). (Note: on GrapheneOS, I block Gboard from all network access, so it doesn't learn from my mistakes or new words, but it's still light years beyond running it on iPhone.)
So it might be a platform-specific thing. I definitely find typing on an iPhone to be rather painful, but swiping on Android is very, very fast.
I've been using swipe on Android for almost a decade and it still features me. Sometimes it works well. Other times it mangles almost every word in a sentence. I've sent thousands of embarrassing messages over the years, but I can't imagine doing regular typing all the time.
Yeah, no, you're just annoyed people aren't texting, it has nothing to do with literacy. Audible user interfaces are great but they don't remove the need for text.
We're back to Plato and his dislike of writing. "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written"
There was this thing I read years ago about how teenagers in Japan don't know how to write a lot of kanji by hand, but they'll recognize and be able to use it when typing it in their phone (since the input is phonetic and it autocompletes to possible kanji).
I know a few older adults who effectively cannot compose text. They can read just fine, they can talk, they just can't express themselves in written words. If they learned to, it was fifty years ago and they've spent their working lives doing things that didn't require it. In the little things where you need to write (a thank you card), they had a spouse cover for them.
I think it's probably relatively common, at least for some generations. Voice memo gets them past a very big source of anxiety.
Is this a regional/socioeconomic thing? I very rarely see people record and/or listen to voice recordings in public, and my friends certainly don't do it.
It seems to be younger people where I am. What's funny is they don't hold the phone to their ear like I would, they hold the phone with the screen facing them right in front of their faces. I assume that's because their generation don't really do phone calls anymore.
I've never used voice messages like the ones being talked about in this thread so I don't know if there's a particular reason they hold the phone that way
On the rare occasion I record an audio message, I hold it in front of my face. To me it feels like talking on a speaker phone in my brain and I hold my phone accordingly.
So, are there any schools measured who already did ban smartphones? Did they fare better? Where's the control group?
I can accept the assertions about smartphones, being massive attention grabbing devices. I know before I neuter all the "engagements", it chimes every minute.
However, we're also seeing massive inflation for quite some time. Food costs are up, stability of living has been down for some time. How much of other variables are also contributing or overriding smartphone usage?
(And blocking cell signals is a quick meeting with the FCC, if using active methods.)
Thanks for that 'fact', but that is nearly a generation old.
I guess it could be used as a longitudinal study... But the speed of technology is speeding up (technology is accelerating technology). I can't see this being that useful.
Again, where's the current schools that ban smartphones? That would be much more useful than something 11 years ago. (Yeah, 11 years...)
I'm not sure if the 2013 comment is true or not but I think it's in relation to this (from the article):
>For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement.
But of course it was already dropping quite consistently at that point. Perhaps smartphones made it worse, but clearly, concluding that they caused it seems very far fetched.
I went to school in South Korea, it's basically illegal to ban smartphones in schools, but even now, top high schools ban smartphones. parents prefer it, and students get good grades. But I'm not sure about the causality
It's weird that people point to this recent episode of inflation like it's been relatively severe. Historically speaking, it wasn't very high, and it didn't last very long. It would make more sense to blame COVID or the great recession--both of which were much more disruptive to day-to-day life.
I wonder if it's mainly younger people who believe this inflation is traumatic, because they haven't experienced a real economic crisis.
For what it's worth, my father is a civil engineering professor and has been complaining that students have been getting dumber for 30ish years at this point. That predates smartphones and laptops weren't a common occurrence in lecture halls yet.
The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.
And it has probably been true for 30 years. I’ve been increasingly dismayed at the stark loss of competence from what I already considered the low baseline of my peer group.
In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
I think there is a multi-generational trend. 150 years ago graduating highschool used to really mean something, now it's almost impossible not to. And that's not because everybody got smarter. Even the abject idiots with awful attendance get handed diplomas. There are now school districts in America where none of the students are proficient with basic math and writing, but they're still graduating most if not all of their students.
I’m on the edge of concluding that the iPhone was actually a bad thing and that the mobile revolution is on balance bad for humanity.
* There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform.
* They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process.
* It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos.
* They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way.
* They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention.
* They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation.
* They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model.
* The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing.
* Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy.
The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit.
All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system.
If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.
They are being made into consumers, for profit. Big companies don't want you producing mspaint artwork, writing little games yourself. They want you consuming generically bland content that they can place advertising beside to make you go buy stuff. There's a slightly similar story with food and why many kids eat sugar. Oh sure you have a choice but when everone has a phone, everyone has a TV, every store has a chocolate aisle at the counter and you've seen 1000 adverts by age 2. Is it really a choice.
I think you expressed my frustration with today's smartphones significantly more clearly than I could. Thank you!
I've been using smartphones since 2003. Smartphones prior to the iPhone were tools through and through. They were designed to be communicators, or maps, or, sometimes, actual phones. Texting with T9 with feature phones was definitely popular, but they were still very limited in capability.
I don't think the iPhone was borne to become an addictive consumption machine. I think it was created to make smartphones more accessible. It succeeded at doing that. Great things exist today because of the iPhone. Unfortunately, there will always be people who are out to make money no matter the cost, and I don't think anyone knew or foresaw the consequences of long-term phone use that exist today.
Oh I agree that it wasn't planned this way. I think they were just trying to make a great touch screen interface and we accidentally discovered that this format lends itself very effectively to addictive content consumption. I don't think it was a conspiracy.
Sure, let’s blame the phones rather than decades worth of misappropriation of school funds, budget cuts, and teachers caught in a myriad of politics. I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. It’s insane.
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple
lolwut? What's the context on this?
But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education.
That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
>Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended.
I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
Yet never addressed is why Daddy Pig's professional colleagues also call him "Daddy Pig"... I don't know why but this got into my brain and won't leave.
I'm sorry your school is so weird. Could or be true, though, that your lived experience is one factor and phones are another factor?
For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
Yes, let's. PISA scores have been dropping here in Finland too, and we don't have close to the magnitude of the problems I personally saw as a US high school student last decade. I'd be willing to bet a lot of countries have seen a decline since 2010 or so.
While that sounds admittedly ridiculous, there is international data that suggests the problem is widespread and its rise coincides with smartphones.
As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008.
Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.)
The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
There is another factor nobody will mention, countries in EU that accepted statistically significant number of immigrants from outside of EU are doing way worse on PISA scores. While countries like poland are not really that affected it seems.
Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
Finland also leaned heavily into purely constructivist/inquiry-based teaching methods over the last 20 years. There is significant evidence going back to Project Follow-Through that these are not the best way to teach average and below-average students. The Finnish government announced earlier this year that they are doing a major revamp of the curriculum to reduce the emphasis on these instructional techniques.
For this to be evidence, it requires that there are countries in the dataset where phones did not become widespread? Are the Asian countries better at controlling phone access?
But this phenomenon is happening across the developed world:
> Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average
Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
> It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended.
Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
Some people in America are just culture-war Don Quixotes; tilting at windmills 24x7. For every person that's rolling their eyes at a pointed "Merry Christmas" in response to their "Happy Holidays", there's someone feeling they scored a point for the authentic American way of life.
You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. Everyone wants a scapegoat for this problem, whether it be funding, teachers, or administration, but unfortunately the problem is societal.
Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
Based on my own tiny "clinical trials" how much and how quickly children learn is proportional to the time spent working through problems together with their parents.
Yeah. My dad literally sits with me for extra Math and English materials (He is a Math prof and my mom is an English prof). I hated it but TBH that's probably I'm going to do to my son :P Of course to a lesser extend as I need to take care of my career at the same time. Back then once you are prof you are safe for eternity.
> My dad literally sits with me for extra Math and English materials…that's probably I'm going to do to my son
Yep, that’s the way to do it, and it can be fun, especially since it’s just helping rather than full on home schooling.
Most school curricula have different and concrete objectives (basically meeting aggregated KPIs) rather than “is the student actually learning?” Also teachers have a lot to deal with, and always have, tangential to actual teaching, like disruptive students.
I think the best part of the supplement is that most school work has no context (“will this be on the test?”). Especially in math, where you spend 12 years “learning the alphabet” and only after high school do you get to the fun parts, if ever. So at home you can actually see how the stuff you’re getting in school actually relates to the realm world, and can pursue interesting paths.
Yeah I agree. I'm probably going to do it differently as I hated that experience and TBH it doesn't benefit my study as he so wished.
I found the biggest problem of his approach is that he didn't care about figuring out my interest (TBF I didn't know either). The extra-curriculum study is mostly aimed for getting into a better school later so he first taught me Math in advance and then some extra for competitions. And even for programming he extremely hates gaming (to this day he thinks game developers are bad people, like people who do narcotics) and ONLY wants me to do competitive programming. Anyway I did not have any interest for anything he taught so it has been a painful drag for both of us until he kinda gave up when I reached grade 10.
Now that my kid is 3.25, I want to try something different. But I do find myself lacking the time or knowledge to prepare material for such activities. I want to expose him to a variety of activities after he reaches 4, say arithmetic and simple reading (so he can then spend more time reading books by himself), but I do not know how to approach teaching the topics. He is as impatient as a child can be and of course he is not interested in learning stuffs, which is definitely less interesting than, say, watching tanks crashing cars.
All in all, I know nothing about pediatrics education and need to know more before damaging our relationship as my father did back in the day. Neither do I have the mental energy reserve to burn candles to research on such topics. But I'll try.
Quick way to get started: find numbers and letters in anything they are interested in. Kids love helping their parents and cooking with them using recipes and measuring stuff uses letters and numbers.
Thanks! We do do this like counting cars or clothes. He is good at counting from 1-20 so I think we are going to move to the concept of adding/subtractions. Probably going to use fruits.
I personally think focusing on discrete math is a mistake, though everybody does it. Kids know the world is continuous* — just consider Piagetian experimentation in the bath — so opportunities to think that way are just as important, and I suspect more intuitive. The downside is my kid wanted to major in pure math.
Read the text books, or when little the handouts, to see what they are being taught. When they are big enough for textbooks it will probably shock you, especially history and the like. Anyway, just play with stuff related to what they are learning, and play is the key word.
Most math education is syntactic transforms, not understanding. There are lots of skill-appropriate puzzles in books and online you can do together so your kid can see that math can be fun. Same applies to other subjects — learning about US history? Make a trip to some local historical thing and when kiddo is bored just run around or whatever.
Does it make sense calculating teacher salaries by year when they don’t work the full year, it’s actually significantly less when we take working hours into account maybe as low as 70% so it’s more like they’re paid a 70k rate with low hours and two months off.
Go ask a teacher about how many hours they work -- it's more than the 40 hours a week we in tech work, generally. And their summers are often full of required continuing education courses which they pay for out of pocket, much like many other professions which are desperately understaffed (see: counselors).
How many hours a week do they spend drilling leetcode or being on call. On maintaining their homelab because they need to keep up with the latest fashionable tech nonsense?
If you ask anyone, they'll tell you they're busy because that's the socially acceptable thing to say. If I'm honest, I don't do that much work (I tend to believe that's actually why we create and maintain all of these machines - so we don't have to work very much, but I'm apparently a disagreeable sort), but I still say that I'm keeping busy because if I said that I'm basically lazy and just want to meditate or watch TV most of the day away, people (particularly my employer) might take issue with that.
The extra hours a week teachers spend have to do with lesson planning, grading, etc. which is directly related to their job unlike leetcode or your homelab or whatever, those aren't equivalent at all.
They say that, but how many times do they need to lesson plan if they teach the same subject year after year? And doesn't the curriculum rather decide the plans anyway? We had scantrons and other grading tech way back when I was in school or even just having the kids grade each others work; there are strategies for that as well.
My cousin is a teacher and manages that job plus a couple side businesses plus 3 kids. Somehow he finds the time.
scantrons and grading each other's work only makes sense if your assignments are multiple choice, which is probably the least effective way of teaching in my opinion. As soon as the assignment requires any essay portion where you can get partial credit that breaks down. Curricula change every year, and relying on whatever standardized test your students are required to pass to develop your plans is a good part of why US education is lambasted elsewhere in the developed world, I'm glad your cousin can run 2 side businesses while teaching but I'd rather pay teachers more so they could put the effort into the kids, because there's a staggering difference between the ones that phone it in and the ones that don't.
I think it's entirely possible that the belief in education is one of the many beliefs that I've lost as I get older. Or perhaps like people say they believe in god, but not organized religion, I don't believe in organized education. That reflects my own experience I suppose; I wasn't much of a student, but once I actually got put into a position where I needed to learn things (a computer infrastructure/software engineering type job), I learned them well enough I suppose.
One takeaway from the covid lockdowns I took is it seems that to a first approximation, school is where children go for babysitting and perhaps learning happens there somehow. That would reflect my memories (plus it was a good place to score drugs).
I didn't think much of the system at the time, and even less upon reflection some years later, and it's not a system I'd want to put kids through, but I seem to say that about an increasing number of aspects of the modern world, so it's likely I'm just some sort of antisocial malcontent.
Leetcode so you can get big bucks working as a programmer? Teachers put in extra hours because they see a kid in their class who will suffer through life if they don’t intervene. Compare your motivations to those of teachers, and leave the comparison at that.
I'm not a programmer and I said I don't actually work that hard. I do think that teachers work harder than I do on any given day, but I don't believe that they're as busy as they might have you believe, and they do still get summers off which I do not.
Have you like, talked to an actual teacher? Or is this just "common sense" posturing about something you haven't actually looked into at all?
I'm regularly confused by people whose entire knowledge of classrooms comes from being a student, who nevertheless feel like they are experts and have all of the right answers.
I know several teachers, a few of them in my family and a few of them in the group of friends I kept in touch with after highschool. Some of them work very hard during the school year, and some of them reuse the same lesson plans for years and say the others are working too hard. All of them don't work for most of the summer break, but they all do some work particularly in the first and last weeks.
Do you know why teachers get paid so little? Because there's a surplus of people who want to be teachers; actually getting a teaching job, let alone one at a good school, is a serious accomplishment. The schools that have a hard time keeping teachers are the ones with shitty students (due to shitty parents) which burn out teachers fast. The ones who can hack it at those schools use their experience to seek employment at better schools (positions at good schools are so competitive that having experience before applying is almost essential.)
So, because 'some' of them don't work very hard, it's your 'belief' that all teachers aren't as busy as they say they are? Or are you now back-tracking your earlier comments? Does re-using lesson plans mean that those teachers aren't grading course work, or doing other activities, or are you assuming that "lesson plans" is the sum total of any extra work they may be doing?
I feel like this is just a cop out comment (particularly with the mealy 'I totally know some people' as evidence), moreso given the clear lack of understanding of the acute teacher shortages in this country, particularly in rural areas and particularly exacerbated over the last 4 years that you nevertheless think not only doesn't exist but is actually a surplus, in complete contradiction of literally all available evidence.
There are no teacher shortages at good schools, getting one of those jobs is extremely competitive. Shitty schools constantly lose teachers and need new ones.
And to reiterated, the difference between a good school and a bad school is the quality of the student body, who reflect the quality of their parents. It's not funding. Often the worst schools have the most funding because people think that will make the school better, but over-funding schools won't fix kids who are fucked up by their parents.
Anyway, you asked for comments from people who know teachers. I know teachers, but I'm not here to back up your preconceptions. Deal with it.
> There are no teacher shortages at good schools, getting one of those jobs is extremely competitive. Shitty schools constantly lose teachers and need new ones.
This is not supported by any evidence, unless you assume that all rural schools, for instance, are "shitty schools". But hey, let me throw yet another link you'll not look at while repeating things that are patently untrue:
I've no idea why you're talking about funding, as if that has anything to do with anything I've said, but article after article suggests the absurdly low teacher pay is a major issue - talking about ephemeral 'funding' in that context is dishonest.
But sure, you "know" teachers. You're not answering the questions because... you don't want to back up my preconceptions that are based on direct experience, er, I mean, "preconceptions"? Um, ok.
> but I'm not here to back up your preconceptions.
Says the guy who just keeps repeating himself when faced with linked evidence his preconceptions are incorrect.
During the school year, teachers put in significantly more than the 8 hours they're physically at school. Marking, course planning, etc take up quite a bit of time that teachers must put in outside of work.
At least in my state of the US and I’d venture to guess the rest of the US, a disproportionate amount of that taxpayer money goes to special education and other services.
So while the statistics may break it down to a half million per classroom, that classroom doesn’t actually see that money. It’s chewed up with special education and the bureaucracy.
It's both. School systems are often heavily funded (but not always and not consistently, it varies by literal district). School employees are often drastically underpaid (but not always, and not consistently, it varies by district).
My local school district (generic midwest USA), there's a 17:1 teacher ratio, each student represents $13,011/yr in funding (so a single classroom gets $221,187 in government funding each year). Of that, the teacher in that room collects a salary of $40k to $60k W2 salary each year (plus benefits). Or, a teacher's salary is basically ~20% to 25% of the budget for that classroom, and the rest goes elsewhere.
And yeah, our teachers get literally nothing for their rooms, so they have to beg parents to donate crayons and tissue paper and pencils and basically anything else in their classroom, every year. (generally, each parent is expected to pitch in about $100 per student per year, in donate-ables to cover the stuff the district won't provide for teachers)
Often the per student funding number is skewed because of all the services a school provides, but not every student gets. Extra services may be specialized staff like speech therapists, occupational therapists, nurses, aides, bussing, or lunch programs. As an example, a special education class may have several aids, more specialized equipment and a need for more accommodating rooms. So it may not be a good method to take number of students x average cost = classroom budget.
It's pretty simple actually. US schools are run at the local level, not the national level. So different school districts (a district is usually the size of a town or county) get different amounts of funding.
Salary varies a lot by location. I think median salary for teacher in California is ~90k. But teacher salary is not the only cost of running a school district. Multiple buildings to manage, maybe busses, various staff, etc…
What do you think this means? Is having a picture of me and my wife on my desk "pushing my heterosexual orientation" on my co-workers?
I'm really confused by what you think is upsetting in a cartoon with multiple Mom/Dad characters, also including a lesbian couple. Why is it ok to "push" one sexual orientation, but "worrying" to "push" another?
It's not confusing if you just remove the premise you're trying to assume. One of those displays has been a given in our culture for as far back as recorded history, the other is something new that is being imposed from above with unknown, potentially detrimental effects. So suspicion is warranted.
> One of those displays has been a given in our culture for as far back as recorded history, the other is something new that is being imposed from above with unknown, potentially detrimental effects.
This is patently and demonstrably false. Numerous cultures and societies have happily tolerated homosexuality.
Again, what is being "pushed" on kids? What are you suspicious of? I don't understand why you don't want to answer a very basic question.
I thought I did answer the question. But to be clear, what is being pushed on children is that homosexuality is normal and healthy with the subtext that they should experiment with it. I am suspicious of the claim that it is those things and that the claimants are doing nothing more than promoting tolerance.
> with the subtext that they should experiment with it.
This is purely something you've invented, whole cloth, out of nothing. No one is suggesting kids experiment with any sexual behavior in elementary school, and the belief that telling your child that "Jane has two mommies" is encouraging your kid to hook up with their same sex friend is absolutely as patently absurd as the notion that telling your child "Jane has a mommy and a daddy" is encouraging them to hook up with an opposite-sex friend.
Telling young people that it's normal and healthy is by it's nature an encouragement to experiment with it. The people pushing this do not want to talk about that. Saying that I've invented that is just an attempt to mask it.
The idea that a parent's ideological worries are something that a school should do something about is inherently problematic. Children are always going to have families with ideological differences from their peers. However, this isn't a reason to turn the school itself into the arbiters of those ideological differences.
The school didn't come up with the cartoon, others in society did. Children are going to talk about cartoons that they watch. My parents didn't always like the cartoons some of my classmates watched. Their solution was to not let me watch them, and instill their own set of values in me. They didn't ask the school to shelter me from the existence of other's ideologies.
I would agree with you but it's not that simple. In Toronto there was a "controversy" when the schools allowed parents to exempt their children from drag queen story hour.
I am not familiar with that situation, but I think my previous statement could apply in any situation. I'm not picking sides here.
There are ways to discuss sensitive and ideologically divisive topics in an academic and neutral way. The way religion and politics are covered in social studies courses is often a good example of this.
You don't have to pick sides to cover a topic in a neutral manner.
Well my point with that example was that in your case your parents wouldn't have had the option to not let you watch the cartoon, the school would have decided for them. It's not just about kids discussing what they've been exposed to at home.
Blaming phones isn't arbitrary. The attention grabbing [/destroying] nuisance UIs that dangle dopamine hits in reach at all times are having an effect on people, adults that grew up w/ no smartphones included.
Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.
I’d like to hammer on this point. The problem isn’t phones, but how they are used.
Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free.
People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
You make a good point. To clarify mine, though: The treacherous thing about phones is not so much the phones capabilities, it's that the software deeply (but often subtly) disrespects end users. It's a normalized part of the industry. There's constant pressure from app-makers looking to shove content on you or to exfiltrate data about you, even if it's just recording a simple interaction. There's some of this on mouse-and-keyboard computers too, and increasingly so, but not to the same degree.
For one example, the push notification system is absurdly abused, and it's difficult to get the right balance of awareness versus distraction. Trying to get the notifications settings how I want tends to fail in one of two directions:
1. I miss an important/urgent email or message (terrible), or fail to respond to a dating app message in time. (Not responding quickly to messages is offensive to some...)
2. I'm just constantly annoyed by irrelevant updates or even blatant SPAM.
Ultimately, I disagree that the problem with phones lies with how users choose to use them. It's that the environment provided is overrun with software that's hostile, geared towards unhealthy usage. With new OS updates and new apps come new pitfalls and additional effort needed to get everything behaving how a reasonable, tech literate, self-respecting person would want. Some will jump through the hurdles to get things under control, but most just default to being abused, and I strongly believe it's asking too much of people, especially younger people, to understand what's at stake and to make all the right moves. When I point to phones as a source of problems, that's really what I'm talking about.
We don't really have the problems you mentioned in Alberta and we have maintained our standing relative to everybody else in that academic world wide test or slightly improved (pisa??? I forget the name), however our performance over time is terrible. The percentage of people not sufficient in math has slipped from the low teens to low 20% comparing now to 20 years ago, if I recall the numbers correctly. Not to say it's phones, but something is certainly going on over time that is making at least a subset of the kids dumber.
You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).
definitely you got a point. teachers are not valued across the continents - teaching job is not stable not high paying...etc...people who would love to teach are quitting because of the economics. if you can't sustain yourself why get into that job market? obviously this is going to have an effect and this is it.
This sort of stuff can be A-B tested, I'm not sure if I can buy into the idea that increased discussion of Peppa Pig would result in increased student intelligence, or the lack of has resulted in lower student intelligence. There was a time where Peppa Pig / Teletubbies / Barney was considered brain rotting TV and ideally avoided for its own sake. Shoehorning it in as a protected human right seems feels like it may be going in the wrong direction.
I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?
> I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig
I was born in the 70s.
We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school.
No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons.
A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect.
Technology for sure made me dumber. I used to always know the date, could perform mental mathematics quite nicely, and remember things pretty easily. Ask me what day of the month it is and I'll have to check my phone.
Turns out there are a lot of things we don't need to know the data but it is enough to know how to get it. Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always avaliable when you needed it
Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
Sometimes it's nice knowing how to do something simply for its own sake. I know lots of random little facts and calculation tricks which don't really help me in any major way but I enjoy and take pride in knowing them.
> Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always available when you needed it
I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard.
How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway.
The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving.
So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video.
But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.
Personally, I am extremely bad at resisting distraction. Remote working is tough for me because if I'm in a meeting with some interesting and some boring parts, the moment a boring part starts I'll just quickly check my e-mails, and then I won't notice when the meeting gets interesting again.
I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account.
I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
On the issue with getting distracted on calls while working from home. I do the same, not because I am easily distracted but because I have a lot of work to do, and you are sitting there in front of your work, so you get back to it. On some calls, I think this is ok.
For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.
The way I see it, for the past decade, the internet-connected world has been running a global experiment on our minds—and, in particular, on the minds of young people. Teens are easily distracted and exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment.
I call bullshit. The kids are alright.
You know who can’t handle the epistemic crisis of this global many-to-many information system? Anyone over the age of 50.
Teenagers might have a new way to distract themselves from schooling but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does.
One practical example when I was interviewing a candidate a few years back - I don't need to recall or remember anything, I can just google it up at the moment and learn it.
Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect?
Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.
I don't have hard scientific evidence, but memory absolutely plays a role as far as I can tell. Even for simple deductions we rely constantly on toy examples or similar scenarios to that we're currently thinking, which can then guide our thinking further.
For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks.
Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
> This is interesting. Does that make you smarter?
I'd rather not think in terms of "smarter" or "intelligent", since then you open the discussion to nitpicking what we mean by those anyway. I'm more interested in how to think reasonably fast and accurately, i.e., how schools typically measure smarts. There these shortcuts absolutely help.
> Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
Not necessarily, since by having to do more calculations exposes you to the risk of errors, and being overall slower. The user AlanYx had a very nice response to my previous comment on this.
> And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
Well.. Depends. If every time you see a multiplication, your immediate reaction is to go to your pocket and start typing numbers, you have a lot less feeling for the numbers themselves, and your flow of thinking is interrupted by thinking about the phone.
> Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
Ideally, sure. However, in practice what tends to happen is that you do the calculation with your phone, get your answer, look at the phone in your hand and see all the social media notifications. The attention then goes to checking the messages, reacting to a funny meme and scrolling the latest social media outrages. You can't really think of the phone as a microchip in your brain that instantly provides you with the correct answer, it comes with its usual drawbacks too.
There is a lot of cognitive science research confirming the point you're making. Cognitive scientists draw a major distinction between working memory and long-term memory (there's also a third "sensory memory" that appears in the literature but isn't all that germane to learning math). In cognitive load theory, managing working memory is important to getting things into long-term memory, so if you have to do 6+6+...+6, that's going to eat up your working memory and you're less likely to be able to commit the more important thing you're trying to learn to long-term memory. There's a lot of published research on this.
It is appealing to some educators to lean on 6+6+...+6 because it shows conceptual understanding, but counterintuitively students who don't make the jump to memorizing 6x7 or something close like 6*6+6 (cognitive scientists call this "fluency") end up having difficulty learning higher-order concepts because of the working memory bottleneck.
Maybe it's not the phones per se, but the fact that most of the software on them is written by people whose business model is primarily about distracting people from whatever they set out to do and getting them to do something else instead.
Learning requires a modicum of dopamine hygiene, and dopamine hygiene is bad for business.
This article commits the ever present sin of not showing the absolute values in a graph thus presenting an image that is biased in support of its supposition. I will mention, to not completely throw the author under the bus, that I suspect they chose this format because OECD does this themselves! See Page 9.
So if you just glance at it you can see science scores have dropped by 12 points between 2006 and 2022! That's terrible! Oh wait, but they dropped from 503 to 491... or less than 3%. For math scores the decline is 22 points! But it is from 502 to 480... or less than 5%.
I should also point out that part of the article discussed survey results that showed more screen time was correlated to having lower scores but on Page 13 of the above OECD doc they have a graph showing higher math scores were correlated with school buildings being closed... How were those students learning if not remotely, on screens, all day?
That being said, I think it's hard not to look at the statistic of 45% of students feeling anxious if they don't have their phone on them and not be worried about the mental health of the younger folks among us.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] thread“Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
I learned as an adult I have ADHD. I’m high functioning so I never got tested as a kid, but it’s 100% a condition I always had. It made a lot of aspects of my life since childhood make sense.
[0] http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
Does low test score means students became dumber or they care less about tests?
In many important aspects of life, failure to produce results takes precedence over such a distinction.
So I think there's something more going on. I think maybe it's that text was the "default" communication medium, and speech is becoming the default.
I am faster on a touchscreen than most people are on a keyboard. I have seen teens who are ~50% faster than me.
It's just training.
On the other hand (on both hands ;) ) it feels wonderful to type on my thinkpad. I never compared speed or accuracy, it's just undeniably much more comfortable.
Yes, in the beginning, it feels terrible, because you hit the glass too hard, but after some time you adjust your tapping and hit the screen with the minimal force necessary to register a touch.
Yea, it will probably never feel as comfortable as your thinkpad, but once you get the hang of it, it isn't the difference between "wonderful" and "sucking".
There's no convincing, it's like comparing old, low quality shoes that don't even fit you to my perfect pair of shoes.
I can use all 10 fingers with minimal movement, I get immediate feedback, I don't have to hold anything. There's no training that can replace that. Typing on a touch screen will never not such.
I think OP means sending actual voice memos. Yeah, I’d just never listen to most of those. I’m not the sort who has AirPods in my ears all day, so stuff with audio in messaging apps usually gets skipped.
So it might be a platform-specific thing. I definitely find typing on an iPhone to be rather painful, but swiping on Android is very, very fast.
Things that are much less common over my (long) lifetime:
-memorization of classic poetry and lines from literature
-memorization of tables for simple math operations (+ - * / )
-memorization of telephone numbers
-memorization of how to travel to different locations, even in a city
Is memorization of the alphabet next?
It's a difference of degree.
There was this thing I read years ago about how teenagers in Japan don't know how to write a lot of kanji by hand, but they'll recognize and be able to use it when typing it in their phone (since the input is phonetic and it autocompletes to possible kanji).
I think it's probably relatively common, at least for some generations. Voice memo gets them past a very big source of anxiety.
Is this a regional/socioeconomic thing? I very rarely see people record and/or listen to voice recordings in public, and my friends certainly don't do it.
I've never used voice messages like the ones being talked about in this thread so I don't know if there's a particular reason they hold the phone that way
I know I do (with certain friends, depending on context).
I can accept the assertions about smartphones, being massive attention grabbing devices. I know before I neuter all the "engagements", it chimes every minute.
However, we're also seeing massive inflation for quite some time. Food costs are up, stability of living has been down for some time. How much of other variables are also contributing or overriding smartphone usage?
(And blocking cell signals is a quick meeting with the FCC, if using active methods.)
I guess it could be used as a longitudinal study... But the speed of technology is speeding up (technology is accelerating technology). I can't see this being that useful.
Again, where's the current schools that ban smartphones? That would be much more useful than something 11 years ago. (Yeah, 11 years...)
>For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement.
I wonder if it's mainly younger people who believe this inflation is traumatic, because they haven't experienced a real economic crisis.
The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.
In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
* There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform.
* They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process.
* It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos.
* They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way.
* They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention.
* They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation.
* They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model.
* The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing.
* Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy.
The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit.
All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system.
If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.
I've been using smartphones since 2003. Smartphones prior to the iPhone were tools through and through. They were designed to be communicators, or maps, or, sometimes, actual phones. Texting with T9 with feature phones was definitely popular, but they were still very limited in capability.
I don't think the iPhone was borne to become an addictive consumption machine. I think it was created to make smartphones more accessible. It succeeded at doing that. Great things exist today because of the iPhone. Unfortunately, there will always be people who are out to make money no matter the cost, and I don't think anyone knew or foresaw the consequences of long-term phone use that exist today.
lolwut? What's the context on this?
But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education.
That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008.
Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.)
The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
> Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average
Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.
Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
Yep, that’s the way to do it, and it can be fun, especially since it’s just helping rather than full on home schooling.
Most school curricula have different and concrete objectives (basically meeting aggregated KPIs) rather than “is the student actually learning?” Also teachers have a lot to deal with, and always have, tangential to actual teaching, like disruptive students.
I think the best part of the supplement is that most school work has no context (“will this be on the test?”). Especially in math, where you spend 12 years “learning the alphabet” and only after high school do you get to the fun parts, if ever. So at home you can actually see how the stuff you’re getting in school actually relates to the realm world, and can pursue interesting paths.
I found the biggest problem of his approach is that he didn't care about figuring out my interest (TBF I didn't know either). The extra-curriculum study is mostly aimed for getting into a better school later so he first taught me Math in advance and then some extra for competitions. And even for programming he extremely hates gaming (to this day he thinks game developers are bad people, like people who do narcotics) and ONLY wants me to do competitive programming. Anyway I did not have any interest for anything he taught so it has been a painful drag for both of us until he kinda gave up when I reached grade 10.
Now that my kid is 3.25, I want to try something different. But I do find myself lacking the time or knowledge to prepare material for such activities. I want to expose him to a variety of activities after he reaches 4, say arithmetic and simple reading (so he can then spend more time reading books by himself), but I do not know how to approach teaching the topics. He is as impatient as a child can be and of course he is not interested in learning stuffs, which is definitely less interesting than, say, watching tanks crashing cars.
All in all, I know nothing about pediatrics education and need to know more before damaging our relationship as my father did back in the day. Neither do I have the mental energy reserve to burn candles to research on such topics. But I'll try.
* well, down to the Planck length I suppose :-)
Most math education is syntactic transforms, not understanding. There are lots of skill-appropriate puzzles in books and online you can do together so your kid can see that math can be fun. Same applies to other subjects — learning about US history? Make a trip to some local historical thing and when kiddo is bored just run around or whatever.
While not scientific, it is a sentiment described in _Diamond Age_.
On one hand, I've heard that a class of 30 kids gets almost half a million dollars of taxpayer money per year.
On the other hand, I've heard that teachers get a salary of about $50k, and have to beg on gofundme to equip their classrooms with basic stationary.
I really have no idea how to get these two facts to line up.
If you ask anyone, they'll tell you they're busy because that's the socially acceptable thing to say. If I'm honest, I don't do that much work (I tend to believe that's actually why we create and maintain all of these machines - so we don't have to work very much, but I'm apparently a disagreeable sort), but I still say that I'm keeping busy because if I said that I'm basically lazy and just want to meditate or watch TV most of the day away, people (particularly my employer) might take issue with that.
My cousin is a teacher and manages that job plus a couple side businesses plus 3 kids. Somehow he finds the time.
One takeaway from the covid lockdowns I took is it seems that to a first approximation, school is where children go for babysitting and perhaps learning happens there somehow. That would reflect my memories (plus it was a good place to score drugs).
I didn't think much of the system at the time, and even less upon reflection some years later, and it's not a system I'd want to put kids through, but I seem to say that about an increasing number of aspects of the modern world, so it's likely I'm just some sort of antisocial malcontent.
I'm regularly confused by people whose entire knowledge of classrooms comes from being a student, who nevertheless feel like they are experts and have all of the right answers.
Do you know why teachers get paid so little? Because there's a surplus of people who want to be teachers; actually getting a teaching job, let alone one at a good school, is a serious accomplishment. The schools that have a hard time keeping teachers are the ones with shitty students (due to shitty parents) which burn out teachers fast. The ones who can hack it at those schools use their experience to seek employment at better schools (positions at good schools are so competitive that having experience before applying is almost essential.)
What on earth?
- https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-... - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/10/17/tea...
> I know several teachers
So, because 'some' of them don't work very hard, it's your 'belief' that all teachers aren't as busy as they say they are? Or are you now back-tracking your earlier comments? Does re-using lesson plans mean that those teachers aren't grading course work, or doing other activities, or are you assuming that "lesson plans" is the sum total of any extra work they may be doing?
I feel like this is just a cop out comment (particularly with the mealy 'I totally know some people' as evidence), moreso given the clear lack of understanding of the acute teacher shortages in this country, particularly in rural areas and particularly exacerbated over the last 4 years that you nevertheless think not only doesn't exist but is actually a surplus, in complete contradiction of literally all available evidence.
And to reiterated, the difference between a good school and a bad school is the quality of the student body, who reflect the quality of their parents. It's not funding. Often the worst schools have the most funding because people think that will make the school better, but over-funding schools won't fix kids who are fucked up by their parents.
Anyway, you asked for comments from people who know teachers. I know teachers, but I'm not here to back up your preconceptions. Deal with it.
This is not supported by any evidence, unless you assume that all rural schools, for instance, are "shitty schools". But hey, let me throw yet another link you'll not look at while repeating things that are patently untrue:
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/25/texas-teacher-shorta...
I've no idea why you're talking about funding, as if that has anything to do with anything I've said, but article after article suggests the absurdly low teacher pay is a major issue - talking about ephemeral 'funding' in that context is dishonest.
But sure, you "know" teachers. You're not answering the questions because... you don't want to back up my preconceptions that are based on direct experience, er, I mean, "preconceptions"? Um, ok.
> but I'm not here to back up your preconceptions.
Says the guy who just keeps repeating himself when faced with linked evidence his preconceptions are incorrect.
So while the statistics may break it down to a half million per classroom, that classroom doesn’t actually see that money. It’s chewed up with special education and the bureaucracy.
My local school district (generic midwest USA), there's a 17:1 teacher ratio, each student represents $13,011/yr in funding (so a single classroom gets $221,187 in government funding each year). Of that, the teacher in that room collects a salary of $40k to $60k W2 salary each year (plus benefits). Or, a teacher's salary is basically ~20% to 25% of the budget for that classroom, and the rest goes elsewhere.
And yeah, our teachers get literally nothing for their rooms, so they have to beg parents to donate crayons and tissue paper and pencils and basically anything else in their classroom, every year. (generally, each parent is expected to pitch in about $100 per student per year, in donate-ables to cover the stuff the district won't provide for teachers)
The proportion that goes to the management levels above the teachers keeps going up, instead of to the teachers or teaching materials.
What do you think this means? Is having a picture of me and my wife on my desk "pushing my heterosexual orientation" on my co-workers?
I'm really confused by what you think is upsetting in a cartoon with multiple Mom/Dad characters, also including a lesbian couple. Why is it ok to "push" one sexual orientation, but "worrying" to "push" another?
This is patently and demonstrably false. Numerous cultures and societies have happily tolerated homosexuality.
Again, what is being "pushed" on kids? What are you suspicious of? I don't understand why you don't want to answer a very basic question.
It is.
> with the subtext that they should experiment with it.
This is purely something you've invented, whole cloth, out of nothing. No one is suggesting kids experiment with any sexual behavior in elementary school, and the belief that telling your child that "Jane has two mommies" is encouraging your kid to hook up with their same sex friend is absolutely as patently absurd as the notion that telling your child "Jane has a mommy and a daddy" is encouraging them to hook up with an opposite-sex friend.
I've never seen an abstinence curriculum that avoids mentioning the existence of heterosexual couples.
The fact of the matter is that homosexuality isn't learned, it is something that people inherently feel.
The school didn't come up with the cartoon, others in society did. Children are going to talk about cartoons that they watch. My parents didn't always like the cartoons some of my classmates watched. Their solution was to not let me watch them, and instill their own set of values in me. They didn't ask the school to shelter me from the existence of other's ideologies.
There are ways to discuss sensitive and ideologically divisive topics in an academic and neutral way. The way religion and politics are covered in social studies courses is often a good example of this.
You don't have to pick sides to cover a topic in a neutral manner.
Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.
Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free.
People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
For one example, the push notification system is absurdly abused, and it's difficult to get the right balance of awareness versus distraction. Trying to get the notifications settings how I want tends to fail in one of two directions:
1. I miss an important/urgent email or message (terrible), or fail to respond to a dating app message in time. (Not responding quickly to messages is offensive to some...)
2. I'm just constantly annoyed by irrelevant updates or even blatant SPAM.
Ultimately, I disagree that the problem with phones lies with how users choose to use them. It's that the environment provided is overrun with software that's hostile, geared towards unhealthy usage. With new OS updates and new apps come new pitfalls and additional effort needed to get everything behaving how a reasonable, tech literate, self-respecting person would want. Some will jump through the hurdles to get things under control, but most just default to being abused, and I strongly believe it's asking too much of people, especially younger people, to understand what's at stake and to make all the right moves. When I point to phones as a source of problems, that's really what I'm talking about.
You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).
I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?
I was born in the 70s.
We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school.
No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons.
A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect.
It's insane? /s
The apps kids are using on phones have the mechanics of slot machines. There is no way that this is good for them.
Unfortunately, they are not using their time online to research 9th century Persian literature.
I hate that about myself - I'm too reliant.
Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
Maps themselves are a shortcut tool!
> what if there's an emergency?!
This excuse didn't fly in the era of flip phones. Classrooms and the front office have phones which can be used in cases of genuine emergencies.
How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway.
The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving.
So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
If people live in a world of ubiquitous phones and internet access, maybe we should teach them how to live in such a world.
Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video.
But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.
I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account.
I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.
I call bullshit. The kids are alright.
You know who can’t handle the epistemic crisis of this global many-to-many information system? Anyone over the age of 50.
Teenagers might have a new way to distract themselves from schooling but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does.
Do you have teenage kids? Mine is falling for a new health/beauty/wellness 'spin' on a near weekly basis.
Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect?
Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.
For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks.
Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
I'd rather not think in terms of "smarter" or "intelligent", since then you open the discussion to nitpicking what we mean by those anyway. I'm more interested in how to think reasonably fast and accurately, i.e., how schools typically measure smarts. There these shortcuts absolutely help.
> Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
Not necessarily, since by having to do more calculations exposes you to the risk of errors, and being overall slower. The user AlanYx had a very nice response to my previous comment on this.
> And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
Well.. Depends. If every time you see a multiplication, your immediate reaction is to go to your pocket and start typing numbers, you have a lot less feeling for the numbers themselves, and your flow of thinking is interrupted by thinking about the phone.
> Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
Ideally, sure. However, in practice what tends to happen is that you do the calculation with your phone, get your answer, look at the phone in your hand and see all the social media notifications. The attention then goes to checking the messages, reacting to a funny meme and scrolling the latest social media outrages. You can't really think of the phone as a microchip in your brain that instantly provides you with the correct answer, it comes with its usual drawbacks too.
It is appealing to some educators to lean on 6+6+...+6 because it shows conceptual understanding, but counterintuitively students who don't make the jump to memorizing 6x7 or something close like 6*6+6 (cognitive scientists call this "fluency") end up having difficulty learning higher-order concepts because of the working memory bottleneck.
Do we have evidence that the set of questions asked on exams revolve around the same theme of questions?
I remember doing my high school chemistry exams and one of the teachers intentionally set very obscure questions on topics we didn’t cover.
We all did poorly and she used to say “students are getting dumber”. That was a decade ago.
Turns out when the teacher got replaced and the new one asked questions from material we studied, “students are getting smarter”.
ChatGPT and future models are training on entire corpus of available human knowledge including the various high school and college level exam set.
So much of exams is pattern matching on existing questions asked from previous exams.
Learning requires a modicum of dopamine hygiene, and dopamine hygiene is bad for business.
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Int...
So if you just glance at it you can see science scores have dropped by 12 points between 2006 and 2022! That's terrible! Oh wait, but they dropped from 503 to 491... or less than 3%. For math scores the decline is 22 points! But it is from 502 to 480... or less than 5%.
I should also point out that part of the article discussed survey results that showed more screen time was correlated to having lower scores but on Page 13 of the above OECD doc they have a graph showing higher math scores were correlated with school buildings being closed... How were those students learning if not remotely, on screens, all day?
That being said, I think it's hard not to look at the statistic of 45% of students feeling anxious if they don't have their phone on them and not be worried about the mental health of the younger folks among us.