7 ms·

Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 yea

Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 years. Across the board they report declines in math and reading and just about everything else. Curiously some of them teach foreigners, so this is not just a U.S. phenomena. When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
newsbinator 5y ago
> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones Teachers universally believe all sorts of things that turn out (or long ago turned out) to be false or detrimental. They may be right about phones or they may be wrong, but I'd guess their professional intuition on stuff like this is no better than random chance.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Don't assume they haven't performed experiments. If performance improves after removing devices from class, in multiple classes in various situations, teachers won't be relying on "intuition" to know what's going on.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    If they have performed experiments, I'd like to read them: I'm easy to convince by a good experiment.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      We call them "professionals" so we don't have to pay them overtime, but teachers are working people. Their mission is not to advance scientific understanding. Their mission is to impart knowledge to children. It's not as though the idea that modern smartphones are distracting is a novel result. No one who has observed distracted drivers on the highway would be surprised.
- rscho 5y ago
  "Don't listen to the professionals on the front lines. They know nothing" Really?
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    Being negative about teachers is, in this case, a hill I'm choosing to get downvoted on. Professionals keep up with developments in their field, insist on scientifically valid studies to inform their methodology, and so on. In this case we are not talking about professionals, we are talking about teachers. They pick a theory that sounds good then ignore any evidence that it isn't valid. https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-state-teacher-license-prep-materials-debunked-theory/ https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-... For this reason, when they say X is caused by Y, it may well be, but not because I put any stock in their pedagogical expertise.
    - specialist 5y ago
      > Professionals keep up with developments in their field... Teachers are required to do a ridiculous amount of ongoing education, inservice stuff, credentialing. Typically on their own time with their own money. Whatever your obvious grievance is with teaching, it's not for lack of professionalism or training.
    - rscho 5y ago
      When you need your car fixed, do you ask the repairman which scientifically valid studies he bases his methods on? Scientists study things and advise on new methods (that often turn out to be worthless). Front line workers do the work they are paid for. But when the repairman says "I think that's your gear box", it often turns out to be true. And yes, a teacher is a professional. Teaching is a profession, and probably one the topmost important in Our society. If one day you end up trying to teach something to a bunch of angry teenagers, you'll quickly realize why. It's really fucking sad that so many people don't realize that.
      - iammisc 5y ago
        There's a difference between a repairman and a teacher. The repairman's techniques are immediately assessable. If you pick up your car and it doesn't work, his technique failed. A teacher's results are not obvious until many years after the fact. It is for this reason that when purchasing a car, we expect manufacturers to use engineering processes informed by scientific study that lead to longer-lasting cars. When mistakes in their quality are discovered, their cars develop particular reputations and sometimes have to be recalled.
- Confiks 5y ago
  Agreed. It's a good hunch, but no evidence. "One such factor [of increasing ADHD prevalence] may be audiovisual media exposure during early childhood. Observational studies in humans have linked exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life with subsequent attentional deficits in later childhood." [1] but also "The diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among children and adolescents has increased considerably over the past decades. Scholars and health professionals alike have expressed concern about the role of screen media in the rise in ADHD diagnosis. However, the extent to which screen media use and ADHD are linked remains a point of debate. (...) The available evidence suggests a statistically small relationship between media and ADHD-related behaviors. " [2] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9851 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9851 [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9875 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9875
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Modern cartoons and movies are now really fast paced. We've adapted to them that it makes watching the older stuff painful. YouTube and game videos take this to an extreme. So that is probably evidence of an attentional feedback loop.
corpdronejuly 5y ago
The role of attention in our ability to test well shouldn't be underestimated. I bet the same children could produce great results with a complete gamified test that used various tricks to pull their attention back to it.
- rscho 5y ago
  I strongly disagree. Math and other stuff such as reading or writing requires focus. That's what is degrading. Kids can't focus anymore, not by choice but because they're simply unable to do it (even for stuff they like).
  - corpdronejuly 5y ago
    I think we agree, but I expressed it poorly. Focus/Attention and patience are the skill that is degrading and proficiency in it is probably the pre-requisite for any successful growth in most other academic skills. I'd be curious to see if those skills are being explicitly taught in preK and Kindergarten.
    - rscho 5y ago
      IMO, those are qualities that are hard to teach to a class and should be a responsibility of the parents to teach their kids.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Kids can play games with complicated puzzles for hours. You can make games that teach math in this way and I am sure they'd be a big hit. My kids play some gamified educational games and loved them.
    - rscho 5y ago
      Do the same with a whole class of students, and then we'll talk...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Gibbon1 5y ago
Friend of mine teaches college English. She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other. As a result her students can't string two sentences together coherently.
- jseliger 5y ago
  I teach college English and while some students fit this stereotype, most don't.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other. Ah yes, the old days before the mobile phone was invented, when teenagers everywhere were writing novels in their spare time. Teenagers who didn't want to be writers weren't writing back then. Same as now. Although the average teen is almost certainly "writing" more than ever because the primary mode of communication now is typing, not talking.
- burkaman 5y ago
  Before phones, were teenagers writing full-length letters to each other in order to communicate? Were most of them writing at all, even just sentence fragments, outside of school? I wasn't alive so I can't say for sure, but I have a pretty good guess.
  - circlefavshape 5y ago
    > Before phones, were teenagers writing full-length letters to each other in order to communicate? I was, and my friends were. Still have a big box of old letters up in the attic someplace
    - dwater 5y ago
      I was never a big writer, but in middle school in the mid 90's I certainly exchanged notes with my girlfriend that were over a page in length daily.
  - 5y ago
bawolff 5y ago
My intuition, is that a phone is both a visual and written media, and extended exposure to writing via phones should improve reading skills. (I have nothing to back this up)
- ungamedplayer 5y ago
  r u sure of that m8 ?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Yes. The skills to read txtspeak are the same as to read normal english. The grammar and vocab rules are slightly different but its still fundamentally reading.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      My kids taught themselves to read using Siri voice to text chat in Roblox. It was amazing. I mean, yes we read to them too and have them read books and they had some reading lessons in school but this all happened when the pandemic hit so I am pretty convinced it was Siri and Roblox. My kids are in 2nd grade and reading at the 4th-5th grade level.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
They didn’t think the pandemic and distance learning were a factor?
andruby 5y ago
My wife is a teacher. She (and some of her colleagues) do blame phones somewhat, but they blame parents even more. Not necessarily the individuals themselves, but rather "parenting" and how society has changed that concept. Society has changed a lot. Compared to a few decades ago, in more households both parents are working. Moreover, I would assume that we (parents) spend more time working or thinking about work when we are at home. Which leads to less time focussing on family. My wife sees several symptoms of this: parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children (iso them). Parents now come with excuses for their children not doing their homework. Plenty more examples like this.. This could be the typical trope of "things were better when we were young". I do feel like parents these days spend less time raising their children. (which perhaps is partly due to.. phones, but I think is due to a much broader societal shift)
- PeterisP 5y ago
  IIRC all the stats show that nowadays parents spend significantly more time raising their children than they did a generation ago. E.g. here's one random analysis - https://qz.com/1143092/study-modern-parents-spend-more-time-with-their-kids-than-their-parents-spent-with-them/ https://qz.com/1143092/study-modern-parents-spend-more-time-...
  - andruby 5y ago
    Thank you for that link. I guess I need to adjust my assumptions. I guess my assumption was based on the fact that women are increasingly more active in the workforce in the past few decades: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-labor-force-participation-oecd https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-labor-force-partic... (roughly from 40% to 60%)
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Glad you are reconsidering your assumptions. Being a parent is hard. It is not like kids come with an instruction book especially for very difficult behaviors and other things like adhd, autism, anxiety and depression. "Parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children" Of course we do. The kids spend 7 hours a day in class and their behaviors directly impact what and how they learn. Regulating behavior is a life long skill that you learn. We send our kids off to school at age 5 typically. I am tired of the blame the parents trope. We know and have therapies and interventions to reinforce positive behaviors and the schools should be working with parents to help them learn how to apply these in both the home as well as school.
mkotowski 5y ago
> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. A smartphone is an easy scapegoat, but I think its role is greatly exaggerated. People simply like to complain about things they are not used to. It does not mean it is not the root cause, only that a “gut feeling” reasoning can easily be wrong. Not so long ago teachers were still trying to “correct” left-handedness. That said there are certainly many issues surrounding modern use of smartphones (starting with microtransactions), but I doubt that it is the main issue there. By the way: While I can’t find the website where I read it, there was supposedly a period before widespread TV, when reading too many books was considered a developmental issue for a child.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

newsbinator 5y ago

> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones Teachers universally believe all sorts of things that turn out (or long ago turned out) to be false or detrimental. They may be right about phones or they may be wrong, but I'd guess their professional intuition on stuff like this is no better than random chance.

jessaustin 5y ago
Don't assume they haven't performed experiments. If performance improves after removing devices from class, in multiple classes in various situations, teachers won't be relying on "intuition" to know what's going on.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  If they have performed experiments, I'd like to read them: I'm easy to convince by a good experiment.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    We call them "professionals" so we don't have to pay them overtime, but teachers are working people. Their mission is not to advance scientific understanding. Their mission is to impart knowledge to children. It's not as though the idea that modern smartphones are distracting is a novel result. No one who has observed distracted drivers on the highway would be surprised.
rscho 5y ago
"Don't listen to the professionals on the front lines. They know nothing" Really?
- newsbinator 5y ago
  Being negative about teachers is, in this case, a hill I'm choosing to get downvoted on. Professionals keep up with developments in their field, insist on scientifically valid studies to inform their methodology, and so on. In this case we are not talking about professionals, we are talking about teachers. They pick a theory that sounds good then ignore any evidence that it isn't valid. https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-state-teacher-license-prep-materials-debunked-theory/ https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-... For this reason, when they say X is caused by Y, it may well be, but not because I put any stock in their pedagogical expertise.
  - specialist 5y ago
    > Professionals keep up with developments in their field... Teachers are required to do a ridiculous amount of ongoing education, inservice stuff, credentialing. Typically on their own time with their own money. Whatever your obvious grievance is with teaching, it's not for lack of professionalism or training.
  - rscho 5y ago
    When you need your car fixed, do you ask the repairman which scientifically valid studies he bases his methods on? Scientists study things and advise on new methods (that often turn out to be worthless). Front line workers do the work they are paid for. But when the repairman says "I think that's your gear box", it often turns out to be true. And yes, a teacher is a professional. Teaching is a profession, and probably one the topmost important in Our society. If one day you end up trying to teach something to a bunch of angry teenagers, you'll quickly realize why. It's really fucking sad that so many people don't realize that.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      There's a difference between a repairman and a teacher. The repairman's techniques are immediately assessable. If you pick up your car and it doesn't work, his technique failed. A teacher's results are not obvious until many years after the fact. It is for this reason that when purchasing a car, we expect manufacturers to use engineering processes informed by scientific study that lead to longer-lasting cars. When mistakes in their quality are discovered, their cars develop particular reputations and sometimes have to be recalled.
Confiks 5y ago
Agreed. It's a good hunch, but no evidence. "One such factor [of increasing ADHD prevalence] may be audiovisual media exposure during early childhood. Observational studies in humans have linked exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life with subsequent attentional deficits in later childhood." [1] but also "The diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among children and adolescents has increased considerably over the past decades. Scholars and health professionals alike have expressed concern about the role of screen media in the rise in ADHD diagnosis. However, the extent to which screen media use and ADHD are linked remains a point of debate. (...) The available evidence suggests a statistically small relationship between media and ADHD-related behaviors. " [2] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9851 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9851 [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9875 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9875
- sjg007 5y ago
  Modern cartoons and movies are now really fast paced. We've adapted to them that it makes watching the older stuff painful. YouTube and game videos take this to an extreme. So that is probably evidence of an attentional feedback loop.

corpdronejuly 5y ago

The role of attention in our ability to test well shouldn't be underestimated. I bet the same children could produce great results with a complete gamified test that used various tricks to pull their attention back to it.

rscho 5y ago
I strongly disagree. Math and other stuff such as reading or writing requires focus. That's what is degrading. Kids can't focus anymore, not by choice but because they're simply unable to do it (even for stuff they like).
- corpdronejuly 5y ago
  I think we agree, but I expressed it poorly. Focus/Attention and patience are the skill that is degrading and proficiency in it is probably the pre-requisite for any successful growth in most other academic skills. I'd be curious to see if those skills are being explicitly taught in preK and Kindergarten.
  - rscho 5y ago
    IMO, those are qualities that are hard to teach to a class and should be a responsibility of the parents to teach their kids.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Kids can play games with complicated puzzles for hours. You can make games that teach math in this way and I am sure they'd be a big hit. My kids play some gamified educational games and loved them.
  - rscho 5y ago
    Do the same with a whole class of students, and then we'll talk...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Gibbon1 5y ago

Friend of mine teaches college English. She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other. As a result her students can't string two sentences together coherently.

jseliger 5y ago
I teach college English and while some students fit this stereotype, most don't.
brandonmenc 5y ago
> She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other. Ah yes, the old days before the mobile phone was invented, when teenagers everywhere were writing novels in their spare time. Teenagers who didn't want to be writers weren't writing back then. Same as now. Although the average teen is almost certainly "writing" more than ever because the primary mode of communication now is typing, not talking.
burkaman 5y ago
Before phones, were teenagers writing full-length letters to each other in order to communicate? Were most of them writing at all, even just sentence fragments, outside of school? I wasn't alive so I can't say for sure, but I have a pretty good guess.
- circlefavshape 5y ago
  > Before phones, were teenagers writing full-length letters to each other in order to communicate? I was, and my friends were. Still have a big box of old letters up in the attic someplace
  - dwater 5y ago
    I was never a big writer, but in middle school in the mid 90's I certainly exchanged notes with my girlfriend that were over a page in length daily.
- 5y ago

bawolff 5y ago

My intuition, is that a phone is both a visual and written media, and extended exposure to writing via phones should improve reading skills. (I have nothing to back this up)

ungamedplayer 5y ago
r u sure of that m8 ?
- bawolff 5y ago
  Yes. The skills to read txtspeak are the same as to read normal english. The grammar and vocab rules are slightly different but its still fundamentally reading.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    My kids taught themselves to read using Siri voice to text chat in Roblox. It was amazing. I mean, yes we read to them too and have them read books and they had some reading lessons in school but this all happened when the pandemic hit so I am pretty convinced it was Siri and Roblox. My kids are in 2nd grade and reading at the 4th-5th grade level.

bingohbangoh 5y ago

They didn’t think the pandemic and distance learning were a factor?

andruby 5y ago

My wife is a teacher. She (and some of her colleagues) do blame phones somewhat, but they blame parents even more. Not necessarily the individuals themselves, but rather "parenting" and how society has changed that concept. Society has changed a lot. Compared to a few decades ago, in more households both parents are working. Moreover, I would assume that we (parents) spend more time working or thinking about work when we are at home. Which leads to less time focussing on family. My wife sees several symptoms of this: parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children (iso them). Parents now come with excuses for their children not doing their homework. Plenty more examples like this.. This could be the typical trope of "things were better when we were young". I do feel like parents these days spend less time raising their children. (which perhaps is partly due to.. phones, but I think is due to a much broader societal shift)

PeterisP 5y ago
IIRC all the stats show that nowadays parents spend significantly more time raising their children than they did a generation ago. E.g. here's one random analysis - https://qz.com/1143092/study-modern-parents-spend-more-time-with-their-kids-than-their-parents-spent-with-them/ https://qz.com/1143092/study-modern-parents-spend-more-time-...
- andruby 5y ago
  Thank you for that link. I guess I need to adjust my assumptions. I guess my assumption was based on the fact that women are increasingly more active in the workforce in the past few decades: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-labor-force-participation-oecd https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-labor-force-partic... (roughly from 40% to 60%)
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Glad you are reconsidering your assumptions. Being a parent is hard. It is not like kids come with an instruction book especially for very difficult behaviors and other things like adhd, autism, anxiety and depression. "Parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children" Of course we do. The kids spend 7 hours a day in class and their behaviors directly impact what and how they learn. Regulating behavior is a life long skill that you learn. We send our kids off to school at age 5 typically. I am tired of the blame the parents trope. We know and have therapies and interventions to reinforce positive behaviors and the schools should be working with parents to help them learn how to apply these in both the home as well as school.

mkotowski 5y ago

> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. A smartphone is an easy scapegoat, but I think its role is greatly exaggerated. People simply like to complain about things they are not used to. It does not mean it is not the root cause, only that a “gut feeling” reasoning can easily be wrong. Not so long ago teachers were still trying to “correct” left-handedness. That said there are certainly many issues surrounding modern use of smartphones (starting with microtransactions), but I doubt that it is the main issue there. By the way: While I can’t find the website where I read it, there was supposedly a period before widespread TV, when reading too many books was considered a developmental issue for a child.