11 ms·

My mother, a school teacher, describes herself and her coworkers as being enthusiastic about more ipads and laptops in the classroom. But the reasons she gives

My mother, a school teacher, describes herself and her coworkers as being enthusiastic about more ipads and laptops in the classroom. But the reasons she gives seem suspect to me. I believe that many teachers are supportive of this deployment of tech because of the sedative properties. Give the hyper kids an ipad and suddenly they sit still and stop running circles around their 65 year old teachers. She says that I'm not wrong per se but that it's still a good thing overall for the kids. I think they should just let the kids run around outside instead (7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district, and PE is only one or two days a week...)

emilfihlman 7y ago
>7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district Wait what? Is there some difference in notation since recess (in Finland it's 15 minutes between each class and usually 30min after lunch) is like absolute must for kids of any age. There's even recess in upper secondary school but the lessons are 75 minutes usually instead of 45 minutes as in comprehensive school. Are you really saying that it's directly from class to another class? That's crazy!
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Nope, you get it. It is crazy. The educational system is REALLY MESSED UP in the U.S. Recess doesn't help you do better on standardized tests, so it goes. I don't know what's wrong with Americans either, and I am one.
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    When do kids socialize then? Breaks between lessons is how students can get to know each other, grab some snacks, go to the toilet, talk about the game last night, flirt etc etc. Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.
    - kn0where 7y ago
      At my school it was 5 minutes to get to your next class. Socializing was during lunch (we got an hour).
    - liability 7y ago
      They talking in the halls, during class, or during lunch. Study hall or detention. And all the while looking for teachers out of the corner of their eye. Many teacher are eager to scold any socializing, sometimes even during lunch, and students are willing to risk a scolding to have social contact. The teachers interpret this as unruly behavior and in an act of circular logic use the perceived unruliness of the children as a justification for scolding students who socialize. 'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.
      - bonoboTP 7y ago
        I am in shock if that's not exaggeration... But then again this might be one of those things - which do happen a number of times - where an American whom I actually meet in real life tells me not to believe what I read about the US online. I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad. But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game). But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        mntmoss 7y ago
        Everything does vary a substantial amount between districts and even individual schools since at the national level there are only a few guidelines(although standardized tests have crept in since No Child Left Behind), so even with the public system the schools vary between feeding the "school-to-prison" pipeline where students walk through metal detectors and have little breathing room, and "magnet" schools that soak up all the academic achievers and give them back-breaking workloads. In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- liability 7y ago
  In most of the US from what I've seen, recess is seriously degraded for 5th and 6th grades, then eliminated entirely for 7th and beyond. They really expect teenagers to be sedentary until the end of the school day.
  - cliffy 7y ago
    I vividly remember recess going away after 6th grade and it bummed me out hard. It's usually replaced by PE or some organized sport, which felt strictly worse in overall enjoyment.
- nlavezzo 7y ago
  My wife (a former PS teacher) just literally created a microschool focused on project based collaborative learning and lots of outdoor activity so that we wouldn’t have to send our daughter to that system. We thought we might get 10 kids enrolled the first year and got 34 and are waitlisted. There is a huge demand for alternatives, and we don’t live in a progressive area of the country.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    My wife and I are very interested in something like this, does your wife have a website?
- Spooky23 7y ago
  My nephew's school in upstate NY eliminated recess periods starting in grade 7. He's in 9th grade and gets 25m study hall 4 days a week. He has 3 minutes to get between classes. They essentially added time for test prep. When I was in the same school district in the early 90's, we had a 42m recess period at least 3 days a week and either a 42m or 20-25m study hall every day. For my kids, we bit the bullet for private school. There are some things I don't like about private school, but I'm unwilling to make my son a subject of whatever bullshit social experiment is being conducted. You're only young once, and we live in a world where you need to be top of your game.
- yardie 7y ago
  Not sure if it's the same, but in France school was from 8AM to 4:45PM. Which makes sense if you have one or both parents working typical business hours. In my case I paid the school to supervise our son for an extra hour and made sure to conclude my business by 5:30P. In the US school is typically 8AM to 2PM. There is very little time between classes and the kids have to scramble for the next class. I also found out our son has been missing lunch because the cafeteria line queue is too long to accommodate all the students. In the US schools attempt to do more with less they have stripped any joy out of the educational experience. No recess, fieldtrips, or extracurriculars. And arts and sciences are a pale comparison of what they used to be. Labs and lab equipment has been replaced by online videos and virtual learning.
- dmurray 7y ago
  I experienced secondary school in Ireland, France and Germany around 20 years ago and never saw this "15 minutes between class". In all three, as far as I remember, we had 3-5 minutes to get from classroom to classroom, a lunch break of 40-90 minutes, and one or two other breaks of 15-20 minutes. I think this is completely normal in Western Europe.
  - emilfihlman 7y ago
    Damn, I bet the success in education in Finland can be hugely attributed to just having actual recess between classes for all the classes and through the whole basic education (comprehensive school and upper secondary / vocational school). Here's actually a somewhat recent news on the matter (in Finnish https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit-voivat-selittaa-suomalaislasten-koulumenestysta/767720/ https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit...) and here's https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g21swi4HFLLhEdhLeODWPmNA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g... a somewhat normal (though day length variation seems to not happen much in this schedule, it does happen all the time in that you can have shorter days by either going to school later or leaving earlier, too) timetable for an 8th grader.
- emilfihlman 7y ago
  Here's some Finnish 8th grade timetable I found and translated for you: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g21swi4HFLLhEdhLeODWPmNA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g...
mymythisisthis 7y ago
Teachers try to sedate students because they have nothing valuable to teach. Only a small percentage of teachers have had a profession other than teaching. Some teachers have hobbies that make them interesting, many others do not. New Math/Discovery Math is a failure, because grade school teachers themselves have no idea what purpose it serves. Students with wealthy parents will do well; tutoring, travel, summer camps, all help with education and growth.
- t-writescode 7y ago
  I take offense to the implication here that just because you’ve only taught means you have nothing to teach. The finest English teacher I know has taught for the vast majority of her career and her methods have a thoroughly proven record of improving writing and reading in students from every walk of life. She has a doctorate in education now, with a dissertation on improving learning methods and and numerous students over her 25 year career have contacted her and thanked her for specifically her methods and pressure that got those students to succeed, not just in her class, but in college and the future. There are many, horrible teachers who would do better in a career where they are kept far from influencing the next generation, but this woman, with her majority-teaching-career, is not one of them, full stop.
  - mymythisisthis 7y ago
    When discussing a group, we need to stay at a group level. Moving between individuals and a group as a whole is not constructive. Grade school teachers tend to graduate with degrees in English/History, and haven't had experiences in work outside of teaching grade school. My solution for this problem is better professional development. Make a 4 day work week, with one day of training in a new career (something completely not related to teaching/pedagogical development).
    - t-writescode 7y ago
      I have a strong suspicion that there are so many exceptions to your assumptions here that your model is wrong. My finest computer science teachers never did anything but teach, either. At the high school and collegiate levels. Same with my favorite college English teacher. I think a more effective route is to regularly fire the bad teachers, so they can’t harm students with their poor guidance.

emilfihlman 7y ago

>7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district Wait what? Is there some difference in notation since recess (in Finland it's 15 minutes between each class and usually 30min after lunch) is like absolute must for kids of any age. There's even recess in upper secondary school but the lessons are 75 minutes usually instead of 45 minutes as in comprehensive school. Are you really saying that it's directly from class to another class? That's crazy!

jrochkind1 7y ago
Nope, you get it. It is crazy. The educational system is REALLY MESSED UP in the U.S. Recess doesn't help you do better on standardized tests, so it goes. I don't know what's wrong with Americans either, and I am one.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  When do kids socialize then? Breaks between lessons is how students can get to know each other, grab some snacks, go to the toilet, talk about the game last night, flirt etc etc. Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.
  - kn0where 7y ago
    At my school it was 5 minutes to get to your next class. Socializing was during lunch (we got an hour).
  - liability 7y ago
    They talking in the halls, during class, or during lunch. Study hall or detention. And all the while looking for teachers out of the corner of their eye. Many teacher are eager to scold any socializing, sometimes even during lunch, and students are willing to risk a scolding to have social contact. The teachers interpret this as unruly behavior and in an act of circular logic use the perceived unruliness of the children as a justification for scolding students who socialize. 'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.
    - bonoboTP 7y ago
      I am in shock if that's not exaggeration... But then again this might be one of those things - which do happen a number of times - where an American whom I actually meet in real life tells me not to believe what I read about the US online. I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad. But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game). But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - mntmoss 7y ago
        Everything does vary a substantial amount between districts and even individual schools since at the national level there are only a few guidelines(although standardized tests have crept in since No Child Left Behind), so even with the public system the schools vary between feeding the "school-to-prison" pipeline where students walk through metal detectors and have little breathing room, and "magnet" schools that soak up all the academic achievers and give them back-breaking workloads. In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
liability 7y ago
In most of the US from what I've seen, recess is seriously degraded for 5th and 6th grades, then eliminated entirely for 7th and beyond. They really expect teenagers to be sedentary until the end of the school day.
- cliffy 7y ago
  I vividly remember recess going away after 6th grade and it bummed me out hard. It's usually replaced by PE or some organized sport, which felt strictly worse in overall enjoyment.
nlavezzo 7y ago
My wife (a former PS teacher) just literally created a microschool focused on project based collaborative learning and lots of outdoor activity so that we wouldn’t have to send our daughter to that system. We thought we might get 10 kids enrolled the first year and got 34 and are waitlisted. There is a huge demand for alternatives, and we don’t live in a progressive area of the country.
- ksdale 7y ago
  My wife and I are very interested in something like this, does your wife have a website?
Spooky23 7y ago
My nephew's school in upstate NY eliminated recess periods starting in grade 7. He's in 9th grade and gets 25m study hall 4 days a week. He has 3 minutes to get between classes. They essentially added time for test prep. When I was in the same school district in the early 90's, we had a 42m recess period at least 3 days a week and either a 42m or 20-25m study hall every day. For my kids, we bit the bullet for private school. There are some things I don't like about private school, but I'm unwilling to make my son a subject of whatever bullshit social experiment is being conducted. You're only young once, and we live in a world where you need to be top of your game.
yardie 7y ago
Not sure if it's the same, but in France school was from 8AM to 4:45PM. Which makes sense if you have one or both parents working typical business hours. In my case I paid the school to supervise our son for an extra hour and made sure to conclude my business by 5:30P. In the US school is typically 8AM to 2PM. There is very little time between classes and the kids have to scramble for the next class. I also found out our son has been missing lunch because the cafeteria line queue is too long to accommodate all the students. In the US schools attempt to do more with less they have stripped any joy out of the educational experience. No recess, fieldtrips, or extracurriculars. And arts and sciences are a pale comparison of what they used to be. Labs and lab equipment has been replaced by online videos and virtual learning.
dmurray 7y ago
I experienced secondary school in Ireland, France and Germany around 20 years ago and never saw this "15 minutes between class". In all three, as far as I remember, we had 3-5 minutes to get from classroom to classroom, a lunch break of 40-90 minutes, and one or two other breaks of 15-20 minutes. I think this is completely normal in Western Europe.
- emilfihlman 7y ago
  Damn, I bet the success in education in Finland can be hugely attributed to just having actual recess between classes for all the classes and through the whole basic education (comprehensive school and upper secondary / vocational school). Here's actually a somewhat recent news on the matter (in Finnish https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit-voivat-selittaa-suomalaislasten-koulumenestysta/767720/ https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit...) and here's https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g21swi4HFLLhEdhLeODWPmNA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g... a somewhat normal (though day length variation seems to not happen much in this schedule, it does happen all the time in that you can have shorter days by either going to school later or leaving earlier, too) timetable for an 8th grader.
emilfihlman 7y ago
Here's some Finnish 8th grade timetable I found and translated for you: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g21swi4HFLLhEdhLeODWPmNA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g...

mymythisisthis 7y ago

Teachers try to sedate students because they have nothing valuable to teach. Only a small percentage of teachers have had a profession other than teaching. Some teachers have hobbies that make them interesting, many others do not. New Math/Discovery Math is a failure, because grade school teachers themselves have no idea what purpose it serves. Students with wealthy parents will do well; tutoring, travel, summer camps, all help with education and growth.

t-writescode 7y ago
I take offense to the implication here that just because you’ve only taught means you have nothing to teach. The finest English teacher I know has taught for the vast majority of her career and her methods have a thoroughly proven record of improving writing and reading in students from every walk of life. She has a doctorate in education now, with a dissertation on improving learning methods and and numerous students over her 25 year career have contacted her and thanked her for specifically her methods and pressure that got those students to succeed, not just in her class, but in college and the future. There are many, horrible teachers who would do better in a career where they are kept far from influencing the next generation, but this woman, with her majority-teaching-career, is not one of them, full stop.
- mymythisisthis 7y ago
  When discussing a group, we need to stay at a group level. Moving between individuals and a group as a whole is not constructive. Grade school teachers tend to graduate with degrees in English/History, and haven't had experiences in work outside of teaching grade school. My solution for this problem is better professional development. Make a 4 day work week, with one day of training in a new career (something completely not related to teaching/pedagogical development).
  - t-writescode 7y ago
    I have a strong suspicion that there are so many exceptions to your assumptions here that your model is wrong. My finest computer science teachers never did anything but teach, either. At the high school and collegiate levels. Same with my favorite college English teacher. I think a more effective route is to regularly fire the bad teachers, so they can’t harm students with their poor guidance.