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> "According to psychologists and educational professionals, learning can occur only in the Stretch zone." Checking the general state of education and mental h

> "According to psychologists and educational professionals, learning can occur only in the Stretch zone." Checking the general state of education and mental health in our society, I'm not sure that the current crop of psychologists and educational professionals are really all that worth listening to. A fair comparison might be that of listening to the advice of doctors in the mid-19th century on the treatment of infectious diseases - I think they're missing something fundamental, at least as judged by outcomes. As far as learning, I think there's been a degradation of the average person's attention span, brought on by technological effects related to social and other media trends. How long does it take to absorb the meaning in a tweet? How about in a TikTok video (shorter on average than a Youtube video, apparently)? Anything longer and there's a tendency for the eyes to glaze over, the mind to start wandering, as boredom sets in... A traditional approach to learning might involve 15 minutes of constant full concentration on a single subject, followed by several minutes of coming up for air, and then repeat that three more times, that's say 75 minutes of effort. Brutal work for the attention-span-challenged, certainly, but that's the most efficient way to learn new material. However, if you've trained yourself to have a longer attention span, this can be done in a state of mind rather like 'a Comfort Zone'.

resonious 4y ago
I remember hearing about a study showing some insight into the stereotype about Asian countries being good at math compared to western ones. The study was just your usual aptitude test for kids with math questions among other things. At the end there was also a survey. Sure enough, western kids tended to have lower math scores than Asian kids. Apparently the survey was very long and not every kid finished it. Here's the kicker: high math scores were very highly correlated with completing the survey. It's hard to draw any concrete conclusions from that, but it seems that the "Asians are good at math" trope might really just be "Asians can sit down and focus". So it definitely seems that it's possible to have a culture either nurture or hinder its inhabitants ability to focus for long periods of time. (this is where I heard about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk very interesting talk)

resonious 4y ago

I remember hearing about a study showing some insight into the stereotype about Asian countries being good at math compared to western ones. The study was just your usual aptitude test for kids with math questions among other things. At the end there was also a survey. Sure enough, western kids tended to have lower math scores than Asian kids. Apparently the survey was very long and not every kid finished it. Here's the kicker: high math scores were very highly correlated with completing the survey. It's hard to draw any concrete conclusions from that, but it seems that the "Asians are good at math" trope might really just be "Asians can sit down and focus". So it definitely seems that it's possible to have a culture either nurture or hinder its inhabitants ability to focus for long periods of time. (this is where I heard about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk very interesting talk)