4 ms·

As someone working in an educational context on the university level, I certainly agree for young kids. But at some point people need to learn how to put thems

• js8 4y ago
  I think we should gamify education. Give the students a challenge who will complete the difficult electronics theory exam the quickest and you will see them making an effort. In general, I would split the current volume of basic education into smaller subjects (with many optionals) and finer levels, and have students to make a choice how fast they want to complete them (as long as they would work towards one of these goals).
  • number6 4y ago
    Not necessarily gamify but make it fun. I recommend 'Code' by Petzold. This book explains how computers work and has some methoids how to add numbers or build an adder yourself and it is super fun to read.
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      How then will these kids have any sort of ability to do things that are not fun? That's a fairly essential life skill.
      • number6 4y ago
        There is still PE for this. /s OK, really, do you want to be stuck with boring and bad textbooks and teachers to drive home the lesson, that some things are just not fun and have to be done anyways? This can and will be done at home: brushing teeth, bathing, put on clothes, bring out the trash, wash dishes. I have a whole bag of not fun things for my kids to do, that are not fun but have to be done anyways. Turst me, they don't need it in school too. Let learning be fun.
  • lewdev 4y ago
    I recall a teacher creating an RPG-like learning system that tracks numbers that help them "level up" by "gaining xp" through activities that help in their weak areas. Sorry to be lazy to not look it up, but I thought it was an interesting take on gamifying learning.
    • jdesmond 4y ago
      My HS CS class in 2014 was like this. It was wonderful because it took away the incarceration feeling of normal public school. If I did the work faster than everyone else correctly, I could go and do what I wanted in the school, which motivated other students to finish and motivated me to finish first. I wish other classes were like that. The only thing close in college was profs who would let you test out of classes, and work on a self study project for the class, I loved that.
• LocalH 4y ago
  Some people are physically incapable of focusing on things that bore them. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't. What for them?
  • rnd0 4y ago
    Ritalin? Therapy?
    • Kye 4y ago
      Any inquiry in the genre of "Why not try [obvious thing]?" is generally going to lead nowhere. You don't know what you don't know, and it can be exhausting to explain to the nth person asking too-obvious questions that their obvious question is missing experiential data or any effort at research, and then filling in those gaps. Medication and therapy are expensive. It doesn't always work. If it works, it might not work well. If it works at all, there are often side effects. Getting into therapy is hard. Finding a therapist you click with once you get through all the hoops is even harder. Sticking with each step of the process when you have a disorder that makes sticking to things hard is hilarious once you think about it. And so on.
      • wincy 4y ago
        I dunno, I’m 36 and Adderall is the difference between “low performance dev about to get put on PIP because he doesn’t do his work” and “software engineering team lead being congratulated by higher ups on your teams performance”. Which is literally the last few years of my life’s ups and downs. People hearing the same thing over and over can be annoying to some, but for others it’s the only thing that’ll really get through a lot of our skulls and get us to try something different.
        • Kye 4y ago
          Okay. The experiences (mine and others shared with me) that informed my post are still real.
• hatenberg 4y ago
  Most of your reasoning was just murdered by chatgpt. It can take care of most of the mindnumbing work. let’s file a bug to get the dinosaur back
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Eh, chatgpt also kinda murders the content it processes. It's very easy to construct examples where its summaries, while they look correct, either miss some crucial point or are outright incorrect.
    • ben_w 4y ago
      Sure. But, IMO, it (chatGPT) is about the quality of a first or second year uni student right now (albeit in every subject at the same time), including being confidently incorrect. (I've not done a systematic all-subject study; this is based on the comments I've seen from experts in a mere handful of domains, plus my own knowledge in my own domain).
      • marginalia_nu 4y ago
        That's sort of the worst archetype you for summarizing anything for you. Make a bot that's like Socrates instead. That would be genuinely educational.
        • ben_w 4y ago
          Well, Socrates would definitely hate ChatGPT: """Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”""" - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-... It would be an ironically Greek tragedy, if the end of human civilisation were to be caused by a (written) language model, especially given how many Κασσάνδρα-analogs we have had from (given this hypothetical outcome) Socrates to Yudkowsky.
• ascotan 4y ago
  I feel like boring to some extent means that poor communication is happening. What you're learning when dealing with a boring subject is how to deal with something/someone that is unengaging, dense or confusing. Although this is a skill, I feel like learning the material isn't really taking place. For example I read many, many scientific papers in college and they were all very boring. I feel like the big take away was how to deal with this type of communication medium which was dense, verbose and contextual. I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way. What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well crafted sources? It would be great to raise the floor of educational material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work through some noise to find the signal.
  • atoav 4y ago
    I think it is a good skill to have, to know that sometimes the information you truly need might exist in a shape that you cannot appreciate (yet). Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it". For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path. Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space. It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow. I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff". Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.
• wpietri 4y ago
  I agree that learning to work through boredom is an important skill. But I also think the internet has made it substantially less important because so much more knowledge has been made available in non-boring ways. I work through boredom not because I like boredom and not because it's "foundational" to somebody else, but because that's the only way for me to accomplish a goal. So to the extent that somebody's particular work still requires it, I think we're going to have to find new ways to structure things to bring that experience forward in time for them. I think the other option is to restructure things so that being bored is even less necessary. For example, the common way to think about "foundational" concepts is to structure education with a lot of boring and apparently pointless stuff up front, the promise being that it will pay off later. To me that looks like privileging the convenience and perspective of the instructor over that of the student. Can we instead swap it around so that "fundamentals" are taught in slices in close relation to purposeful activity? As to the Montessori question, I think it depends on your understanding of boredom. My understanding is that as the student gets older, they take on larger and larger projects, so they learn how to deal with the sort of boring that comes from purposeful hard work, but not the sort of boredom that comes with blindly following authority. To me those feel pretty different, and I might more accurately call the first "tedious" rather than boring.
• tomxor 4y ago
  > at some point people need to learn how to put themselves through boring mindnumbing stuff as well, because this will sometimes be part of what you need to do if you wanna reach your goals Framing is important, and there is a huge difference when approaching something with the attitude of "toleration" compared to "determination". The value in the skill of determination, is the realisation that with it, many things can become intrinsically more interesting and rewarding the more work you put in. When you find something that clicks and try hard at it you can end up in a feedback loop, and this is the sweet spot you want everyone to find in life. Suggesting that hard work should only be tolerated is not a fruitful path to put people on - sure some things in society like filling out paper work are inherently boring, and unfortunately the realty of current systematised education is kind of similar, but ironically nether match the reality most real cognitive or skilful work. Perhaps this sounds more like a romantic ideal than something practical - I get that in the reality of current school environments it seems like a hopelessly subtle idea to convey in the hurricane of the massive curriculum you are trying to get them to absorb - However, ideas and wisdom can have a much longer lasting effect on a student's life than what may as well be ephemeral knowledge at that age. I think the least a teacher can do is to encourage students whenever they see a spark of interest, it doesn't matter whether or not it looks "useful" or is even tangentially part of the curriculum, because you can learn the value in the skill of determination by learning to doing anything substantially difficult, and it's a surprisingly transferable mindset. ... But regardless of this framing, to be fair to the rest of your comment which I agree with, the real contender is the new reality of the short attention span, ruined by entertainment. Even as an adult who has long learned the rewards in this skill find it being eroded if I am not careful.