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Would you agree that using electronic devices to "download Shakespeare" is highly unusual in primary school, and that most kids just use their phones to play ga

Would you agree that using electronic devices to "download Shakespeare" is highly unusual in primary school, and that most kids just use their phones to play games/watch YouTube and other distractions?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
The deeper question is - how do we make it not unusual, but a normal things that kids just do?
- eesmith 9y ago
  It looks like your response is focused on the "download"/"wrote my own script" aspect of peterburkimsher's account, and that you want to make that more common. I believe that Majestic121 is trying to point out that this ban is for the younger grades. Elementary school students rarely read Shakespeare. Or am I wrong, and your intent is that reading Shakespeare in grade 6 should be "a normal thing that kids just do"? FWIW, carrying too many heavy books is a known problem. In the US, from http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117633&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117633&page=1 : > Shelly Goodgold found that 55 percent of fifth- through eighth-grade students she surveyed carry backpack loads weighing more than 15 percent of their body weight. One-third of those students said they've suffered back pain. In Hong Kong, from http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/1310896/children-are-still-damaging-their-spines-carrying-school http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/13108... : > Despite government reminders to parents and students, children are still carrying school bags that are too heavy for them, leading to serious spinal damage > "Studies indicate that 96 per cent of students carry school bags which are heavier than 15 per cent of their weight," says Dr Grace Szeto Pui-yuk, an associate professor at the Polytechnic University's department of rehabilitation sciences. That last one, from 2013, ends: > The adoption of electronic textbooks (e-books), which is encouraged by the Education Bureau as part of e-learning programmes, might help reduce the weight on young shoulders, but that's not always feasible. > Secondary school teacher Mo Kin-ping says her school considered using e-books. "But we found out they were more expensive than the actual hardcopies, and students may not be able to afford them."
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Nah, you've guessed right - I would like it to be more common for kids to use their electronic devices for learning, creating, and generally solving their own problems (instead of creating them). Computing is a complex, but a very powerful tool; quite a lot about it is mindset, not skills. I completely agree that carrying too many books is a problem. We have that in Poland, too - the amount of books kids need to bring to school is only ever increasing, and publishers are doing their best to kill off solutions like ability to share books or keep them at school (through structuring the material to be single-kid-use, throwaway, and changing every year to make people buy new copies). That's a long topic, but school publishing is one of the industries I'd love to see completely destroyed - not disrupted, but literally all major publishers going bankrupt - and rebuilt anew, with products and practices more akin to what my country saw in the 60-80s - good books with lots of content, little fluff, reusable, resellable, and quite often usable for learning without supervision.
    - eesmith 9y ago
      "school publishing is one of the industries I'd love to see completely destroyed" Agreed. (I can hear the cry out of "not all publishers" already.)
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  There was a Mac Plus in the classroom at school. We were given some classes in LogoWriter, and I excelled at it. My dad found an abandoned Mac Plus next to the church one evening, but it was broken. He gave it to me and told me that if I fix it, it's mine. Of course it was much slower than the family computer, but I wanted my own! So I learned how to replace the motherboard, and kept writing more programs on it for fun. I then sort of stopped programming for a few years, until I wanted to download eBooks and copy music, and I wrote an HTML parser and iTunes tagging script using AppleScript. Since then I've been coding continuously. There are many ridiculous rules that are applied to "children", because they're "too young". I'm sure that Seymour Papert and the Raspberry Pi Foundation would disagree. In fact, I'd like to ask some younger friends from church if they could do a coding project with me and we can post it on HN and see if they get the equal recognition they deserve. There should be some balance between interrupting class work and giving people the freedom to explore independently. But if the class is really that boring, I can hardly blame the kids for playing games instead. Instead of punishing people, why not make the class more interesting?
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    And if they're going to play games, is it more disruptive to throw virtual fruit against virtual knives, or real paper balls at real classmates?

TeMPOraL 9y ago

The deeper question is - how do we make it not unusual, but a normal things that kids just do?

eesmith 9y ago
It looks like your response is focused on the "download"/"wrote my own script" aspect of peterburkimsher's account, and that you want to make that more common. I believe that Majestic121 is trying to point out that this ban is for the younger grades. Elementary school students rarely read Shakespeare. Or am I wrong, and your intent is that reading Shakespeare in grade 6 should be "a normal thing that kids just do"? FWIW, carrying too many heavy books is a known problem. In the US, from http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117633&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117633&page=1 : > Shelly Goodgold found that 55 percent of fifth- through eighth-grade students she surveyed carry backpack loads weighing more than 15 percent of their body weight. One-third of those students said they've suffered back pain. In Hong Kong, from http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/1310896/children-are-still-damaging-their-spines-carrying-school http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/13108... : > Despite government reminders to parents and students, children are still carrying school bags that are too heavy for them, leading to serious spinal damage > "Studies indicate that 96 per cent of students carry school bags which are heavier than 15 per cent of their weight," says Dr Grace Szeto Pui-yuk, an associate professor at the Polytechnic University's department of rehabilitation sciences. That last one, from 2013, ends: > The adoption of electronic textbooks (e-books), which is encouraged by the Education Bureau as part of e-learning programmes, might help reduce the weight on young shoulders, but that's not always feasible. > Secondary school teacher Mo Kin-ping says her school considered using e-books. "But we found out they were more expensive than the actual hardcopies, and students may not be able to afford them."
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Nah, you've guessed right - I would like it to be more common for kids to use their electronic devices for learning, creating, and generally solving their own problems (instead of creating them). Computing is a complex, but a very powerful tool; quite a lot about it is mindset, not skills. I completely agree that carrying too many books is a problem. We have that in Poland, too - the amount of books kids need to bring to school is only ever increasing, and publishers are doing their best to kill off solutions like ability to share books or keep them at school (through structuring the material to be single-kid-use, throwaway, and changing every year to make people buy new copies). That's a long topic, but school publishing is one of the industries I'd love to see completely destroyed - not disrupted, but literally all major publishers going bankrupt - and rebuilt anew, with products and practices more akin to what my country saw in the 60-80s - good books with lots of content, little fluff, reusable, resellable, and quite often usable for learning without supervision.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    "school publishing is one of the industries I'd love to see completely destroyed" Agreed. (I can hear the cry out of "not all publishers" already.)
peterburkimsher 9y ago
There was a Mac Plus in the classroom at school. We were given some classes in LogoWriter, and I excelled at it. My dad found an abandoned Mac Plus next to the church one evening, but it was broken. He gave it to me and told me that if I fix it, it's mine. Of course it was much slower than the family computer, but I wanted my own! So I learned how to replace the motherboard, and kept writing more programs on it for fun. I then sort of stopped programming for a few years, until I wanted to download eBooks and copy music, and I wrote an HTML parser and iTunes tagging script using AppleScript. Since then I've been coding continuously. There are many ridiculous rules that are applied to "children", because they're "too young". I'm sure that Seymour Papert and the Raspberry Pi Foundation would disagree. In fact, I'd like to ask some younger friends from church if they could do a coding project with me and we can post it on HN and see if they get the equal recognition they deserve. There should be some balance between interrupting class work and giving people the freedom to explore independently. But if the class is really that boring, I can hardly blame the kids for playing games instead. Instead of punishing people, why not make the class more interesting?
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  And if they're going to play games, is it more disruptive to throw virtual fruit against virtual knives, or real paper balls at real classmates?