5 ms·

This is certainly harmful. Advertisers et al. have taken over the internet. There are easy dopamine hits everywhere. For example, one my relatives has a 10 year

This is certainly harmful. Advertisers et al. have taken over the internet. There are easy dopamine hits everywhere. For example, one my relatives has a 10 year old who is glued to their phone all day watching tiktok or youtube. In this particular case it's the parent's fault, but that is not my point. At school the kids are there to learn. If this is how many kids are at home if you give them unlimited access to the internet it will harm their education. Arguing the semantics is pointless.

kodah 4y ago
Right, but this is an assertion that the game harms education, which must be precipitated by unengaged students. Rather than ask, "why are students not engaged?" We instead gate their lack of engagement with boredom, which creates more problems.
- weakfortress 4y ago
  School is boring. The skill to learn is how to deal with that and still survive. At such a young age you're learning the rules which is why it's hard to engage students. A classic example, using algebra to balance a checkbook, would bore students more. They don't have the ability to do any interesting geometry, no knowledge of physics (that's usually high school), etc. Chemistry is typically not taught before the middle of high school, etc. Keeping high school students engaged, from what I understand, is a different art entirely. The only class that might be able to be made more interesting is English. The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are both snoozefests. But for other subjects the idea of "creating engagement" is more difficult. People seem to think children possess the foresight they do even though they are adults. In middle school, most of the time you can just say "this will get better in a few years if you do well here". Children lack a sense of delayed gratification. Hence the popularity of PE as a subject (aside from the health benefits) or music classes relative to other classes. Funny enough, the modern adult (still a child) also tends to lack this ability. There's nothing wrong with these classes intrinsically. They just provide an "instant" dopamine hit a developing brain is hardwired to understand. Not everyone can afford to send their kids to a "montessori" school to have some avante garde teaching method keep them "engaged". For the rest of us, learning how to cope with something boring will be an extremely useful life skill the second you enter the real world.
  - kodah 4y ago
    This seems like a gross amount of individual perspective being passed unlabeled. School, as it currently exists, may be boring. I remember being bored out of my mind; that didn't necessarily need to be so though. Many teachers read out of our books and could explain little else beyond the content of the book. I hated maths and Spanish as a result. Many of the teachers attracted to these subjects aren't the kind of people who should be teaching kids. Meanwhile, when I learned Chemistry I learned more about maths than I could've ever dreamed and I was captivated. As an adult I relearned a lot of that math to succeed as a programmer and it was fun. I think, largely, we fail to meet students where they are with respect to their education. We shove everything down their throats on our schedule rather than the pace in which they can build on these subjects. The result is boredom derivative of disenchantment. I'm not even sure what your point about Montessori education is. The teachers do not make it special. The method is what's special, which is that pace is dictated by the pupil.

kodah 4y ago

Right, but this is an assertion that the game harms education, which must be precipitated by unengaged students. Rather than ask, "why are students not engaged?" We instead gate their lack of engagement with boredom, which creates more problems.

weakfortress 4y ago
School is boring. The skill to learn is how to deal with that and still survive. At such a young age you're learning the rules which is why it's hard to engage students. A classic example, using algebra to balance a checkbook, would bore students more. They don't have the ability to do any interesting geometry, no knowledge of physics (that's usually high school), etc. Chemistry is typically not taught before the middle of high school, etc. Keeping high school students engaged, from what I understand, is a different art entirely. The only class that might be able to be made more interesting is English. The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are both snoozefests. But for other subjects the idea of "creating engagement" is more difficult. People seem to think children possess the foresight they do even though they are adults. In middle school, most of the time you can just say "this will get better in a few years if you do well here". Children lack a sense of delayed gratification. Hence the popularity of PE as a subject (aside from the health benefits) or music classes relative to other classes. Funny enough, the modern adult (still a child) also tends to lack this ability. There's nothing wrong with these classes intrinsically. They just provide an "instant" dopamine hit a developing brain is hardwired to understand. Not everyone can afford to send their kids to a "montessori" school to have some avante garde teaching method keep them "engaged". For the rest of us, learning how to cope with something boring will be an extremely useful life skill the second you enter the real world.
- kodah 4y ago
  This seems like a gross amount of individual perspective being passed unlabeled. School, as it currently exists, may be boring. I remember being bored out of my mind; that didn't necessarily need to be so though. Many teachers read out of our books and could explain little else beyond the content of the book. I hated maths and Spanish as a result. Many of the teachers attracted to these subjects aren't the kind of people who should be teaching kids. Meanwhile, when I learned Chemistry I learned more about maths than I could've ever dreamed and I was captivated. As an adult I relearned a lot of that math to succeed as a programmer and it was fun. I think, largely, we fail to meet students where they are with respect to their education. We shove everything down their throats on our schedule rather than the pace in which they can build on these subjects. The result is boredom derivative of disenchantment. I'm not even sure what your point about Montessori education is. The teachers do not make it special. The method is what's special, which is that pace is dictated by the pupil.