This is likely a hot take but, I don’t think this was the fault of the in-class laptops. They thought removing phones were going to solve the issue, it didn’t, they thought computers were going to solve the issue, they didn’t.
The core issue is: School is fucking boring. As a kid/teen you spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk listening to a teacher yap about shit that at the time you don’t believe is even important so you can regurgitate said useless information in tests that you then proceed to forget 2 weeks after taking. Hell even now I think I learned more actual life and useful skills in college. I have more engagement and entertainment working a full time job, than I did in a classroom, and at least I was making money with the job.
The school districts are shocked that upon providing a tool that could be used to lessen the tedium and lifelessness that school shoves down kids throats they then misused said tool. I don’t understand it.
Make learning fun and engaging, add actual life skills to classrooms like how to read an analog clock, or how to write a check. Talk about how to survive in the real world, how interest works, how your credit score is really important, maybe how the government works cause I know I never had a civics class. Stuff that kids in middle/high school would actually care about, instead of how to solve 3 unknowns in an equation, or how to find an angle of a triangle when you know the 2 angles, or learning about colonization for the 8th time. Make it so it isn’t just “read this board, repeat on the test”.
If you solve the underlying issues at play, instead of trying to remove the tools that kids are misusing in order to fix the issue that the school system as a whole created, I think it would be found that computers would be a net positive. I know having a computer in class significantly improved my scores and learning capability, as I could use it for legible note taking, and I could record sessions if I needed to. Yes I definitely accessed coolmathgames at times but, I can tell you right now, the ability to do that helped remove the monotony of the classroom, and if I didn’t have that tool at my disposal, I would have simply zoned out and gained nothing out of the day, instead of what I did. My scores definitely wouldn’t have gone up like the article seems to be alluding to.
I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s worth noting that to some extent learning is inherently boring, like, making it more interesting makes it less effective. Reiterating the same thing to the point of boredom and beyond had been shown to be effective if I remember correctly. It’s why things like Duolingo take so much longer to teach you a language, because they’re trying so hard to be somewhat fun they actually compromise the effectiveness of the teaching.
So I do think schools need to remove distractions, especially ones engineered to be distracting like Facebook.
But your point is valid too, just because some boredom is necessary doesn’t mean they can’t do better, a lot better.
To some extent yes, I do agree with you, but if your student at least understands why they are needing to, or shows reasonable expectation that it will actually improve their life later on, you stop fighting the kid the entire way and learning becomes a whole lot easier.
I do agree that teachers shouldn’t enable it, but I don’t believe the proper response is to throw the blame strictly on the kids and remove a resource to them. Removing said resource isn’t going to make them want to be there, or make them learn anything. You need to address that issue first, otherwise it’s just going to move to the next distraction (like talking to your peers or just skipping class altogether)
Everyone wants a cheatcode at life. But there is no cheatcode for learning things. You have to do the hard work, which is hours and hours of boring repetitive stuff. That’s how your brain works and improves and retains information, from repetitive exposure. That’s why living in a foreign country massively accelerates your language skill, because you’re constantly exposed to the language intead of working in an isolated way for like 30m each day.
It’s hilarious that people agree with the 10,000 hour rule for learning guitar or something, but magically think that rule shouldn’t apply to school work. You know what it also applies to, physical fitness. Nobody can cheat at getting faster or stronger without doing hours and hours of hard training, and nobody thinks it’s problem for kids to spend 20 hours a week at football practice…
Like we know what works. Americans, teachers and students both, are just pathologically lazy and want to shortcut and cheatcode everything. Meanwhile the students who are learning and successful put in the time and the effort. And of course everyone else resents those kids and mocks them as losers.
Even my own nephew spent a good chuck of his graduation mocking and deriding the top performing kids as losers with no lives, meanwhile he’s a B+ student who spends 30 hours week paying video games and whining how he isn’t a better student and life isn’t fair… and if you try to point out to him that being a A student would require less video games and more studying, he gets angry and tells you he wants to have ‘have fun’. OK buddy, you made your choice then, and you got your results. He is under the delusion he’s B+ average should have gotten him into MIT or something because he is ‘cooler’ than the kids who studied way harder.
Typical American entitled attitude. I’m sure he will make a great CEO someday.
Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn’t particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.
In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn’t keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.
The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn’t positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.
I am not going to pretend that boredom can’t factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?
I think you’re probably right actually. I suspect I read about the importance of repetition in learning which seems to be a real thing, and then either over interpreted it or read it from a source with an agenda. It’s true that repetition is critical to learning, but the idea that it’s fundamentally opposed to “fun” might have been layered on top without justification. Though I do maintain that the require practice is tough to keep fun, and is important, so I think there’s some practical truth to it even if it’s not a requirement as such.
You’re definitely correct that boredom isn’t a goal in itself, plenty of ways to be boring and teach nothing, I’ve definitely suffered through that!
I do agree that passion is a huge thing. I also think that explaining why something is important and how it will effect life is equally important. If the student has no reason to care, why would they want to be there, why would they be entertained and why would they actually gain something.
I was hoping AI would take us there. All the kids have computers. A guided LLM walks them through videos and concepts. tests them, lets them advance at their own pace.
I wanted to zoom through the lessons, learn everything, but I didn’t want the awful college-prep bullshit or the high scrutiny of my essays. Did I understand the work? Yes, and that’s enough. I showed up to every class, knew what they asked, and aced tests.
How cool would it be for every kid to be able to ask unlimited questions and be given different ways to understand a problem and its corresponding answer until they understood them properly?
Set the text books and workbooks, guardrail the conversations. Double-check for incorrect assertions.
Let them go and seek out on their own whatever subject they wanted at whatever time they wanted.
Personally, if AI wasn’t so destructive, or blatantly stolen as it was, and they changed basically everything about it to make it more reliable and stuff, I agree. I do think eventually something that is called AI will do that, but it won’t be the LLM tech we have today that’s for sure, it will be some other form of tech.
I would love if they had something like you see in the futuristic movies where theres a hologram teacher, could have every kid have their own. I just don’t forsee it happening reliably with our current tech.
You just brought a good point up but I’m not sure if you meant to.
“… If they want to learn” - Most kids don’t, or at least don’t want to for topics they don’t get are important. At least in this country anyway. They are forced to go to school with claims it’s going to help them, to sit and stare at a teacher writing on a board for 8-10 hours a day, of mostly stuff that isn’t clear how it’s supposed to help them, then are supposed to regurgitate what was seen on the board. Usually with little to no interest and little socialization with others outside lunch period or the brief intermission period where you switch classes.
That’s the job of the teachers, to make the kids learn the topics, and the best way to do so is keeping it entertaining. You don’t learn subject matter if you are not interested in the subject, instead you start doing anything but retaining the information. If the school system is stating they are unable to keep their kids attentive of classes, they have failed as a school system. No amount of blaming other resources is going to change that.
The sad thing is, distractions in class isn’t a new concept. My parents have told stories of how kids would play hookie, or go out to hunt over lunch break and not come back till the next day, or how they would pass notes in class, and if the teacher caught them they would have to read the note aloud for better or for worse. Hell people set firecrackers/fireworks off in the bathroom during exam periods to set the fire-alarms off. The issue of it being boring and as such not lucrative to the general student is not a new concept caused by phones or computers, it’s just said concept is now easily blamed on them or the kids instead of the system which is causing it in the first place.
Ammendum: Like I said in the original comment, I have to disagree with your that’s how adult life is. I personally found working a full time job to be way more entertaining and engaging than any of my school experiences. Which is sad concidering you do the same thing every day, but at least you have the freedom of choosing how you do it, and you have a clear outcome of why you are doing it… which is way more than I can say about the highschool/middleschool experience.
This is likely a hot take but, I don’t think this was the fault of the in-class laptops. They thought removing phones were going to solve the issue, it didn’t, they thought computers were going to solve the issue, they didn’t.
The core issue is: School is fucking boring. As a kid/teen you spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk listening to a teacher yap about shit that at the time you don’t believe is even important so you can regurgitate said useless information in tests that you then proceed to forget 2 weeks after taking. Hell even now I think I learned more actual life and useful skills in college. I have more engagement and entertainment working a full time job, than I did in a classroom, and at least I was making money with the job.
The school districts are shocked that upon providing a tool that could be used to lessen the tedium and lifelessness that school shoves down kids throats they then misused said tool. I don’t understand it.
Make learning fun and engaging, add actual life skills to classrooms like how to read an analog clock, or how to write a check. Talk about how to survive in the real world, how interest works, how your credit score is really important, maybe how the government works cause I know I never had a civics class. Stuff that kids in middle/high school would actually care about, instead of how to solve 3 unknowns in an equation, or how to find an angle of a triangle when you know the 2 angles, or learning about colonization for the 8th time. Make it so it isn’t just “read this board, repeat on the test”.
If you solve the underlying issues at play, instead of trying to remove the tools that kids are misusing in order to fix the issue that the school system as a whole created, I think it would be found that computers would be a net positive. I know having a computer in class significantly improved my scores and learning capability, as I could use it for legible note taking, and I could record sessions if I needed to. Yes I definitely accessed coolmathgames at times but, I can tell you right now, the ability to do that helped remove the monotony of the classroom, and if I didn’t have that tool at my disposal, I would have simply zoned out and gained nothing out of the day, instead of what I did. My scores definitely wouldn’t have gone up like the article seems to be alluding to.
I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s worth noting that to some extent learning is inherently boring, like, making it more interesting makes it less effective. Reiterating the same thing to the point of boredom and beyond had been shown to be effective if I remember correctly. It’s why things like Duolingo take so much longer to teach you a language, because they’re trying so hard to be somewhat fun they actually compromise the effectiveness of the teaching.
So I do think schools need to remove distractions, especially ones engineered to be distracting like Facebook.
But your point is valid too, just because some boredom is necessary doesn’t mean they can’t do better, a lot better.
To some extent yes, I do agree with you, but if your student at least understands why they are needing to, or shows reasonable expectation that it will actually improve their life later on, you stop fighting the kid the entire way and learning becomes a whole lot easier.
I do agree that teachers shouldn’t enable it, but I don’t believe the proper response is to throw the blame strictly on the kids and remove a resource to them. Removing said resource isn’t going to make them want to be there, or make them learn anything. You need to address that issue first, otherwise it’s just going to move to the next distraction (like talking to your peers or just skipping class altogether)
Bingo.
Everyone wants a cheatcode at life. But there is no cheatcode for learning things. You have to do the hard work, which is hours and hours of boring repetitive stuff. That’s how your brain works and improves and retains information, from repetitive exposure. That’s why living in a foreign country massively accelerates your language skill, because you’re constantly exposed to the language intead of working in an isolated way for like 30m each day.
It’s hilarious that people agree with the 10,000 hour rule for learning guitar or something, but magically think that rule shouldn’t apply to school work. You know what it also applies to, physical fitness. Nobody can cheat at getting faster or stronger without doing hours and hours of hard training, and nobody thinks it’s problem for kids to spend 20 hours a week at football practice…
Like we know what works. Americans, teachers and students both, are just pathologically lazy and want to shortcut and cheatcode everything. Meanwhile the students who are learning and successful put in the time and the effort. And of course everyone else resents those kids and mocks them as losers.
Even my own nephew spent a good chuck of his graduation mocking and deriding the top performing kids as losers with no lives, meanwhile he’s a B+ student who spends 30 hours week paying video games and whining how he isn’t a better student and life isn’t fair… and if you try to point out to him that being a A student would require less video games and more studying, he gets angry and tells you he wants to have ‘have fun’. OK buddy, you made your choice then, and you got your results. He is under the delusion he’s B+ average should have gotten him into MIT or something because he is ‘cooler’ than the kids who studied way harder.
Typical American entitled attitude. I’m sure he will make a great CEO someday.
Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn’t particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.
In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn’t keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.
The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn’t positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.
I am not going to pretend that boredom can’t factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?
I think you’re probably right actually. I suspect I read about the importance of repetition in learning which seems to be a real thing, and then either over interpreted it or read it from a source with an agenda. It’s true that repetition is critical to learning, but the idea that it’s fundamentally opposed to “fun” might have been layered on top without justification. Though I do maintain that the require practice is tough to keep fun, and is important, so I think there’s some practical truth to it even if it’s not a requirement as such.
You’re definitely correct that boredom isn’t a goal in itself, plenty of ways to be boring and teach nothing, I’ve definitely suffered through that!
The trick is to let teachers teach what they are passionate about
I do agree that passion is a huge thing. I also think that explaining why something is important and how it will effect life is equally important. If the student has no reason to care, why would they want to be there, why would they be entertained and why would they actually gain something.
seeing my teachers get excited about stuff? those are the lessons i remember now, 30, 40 years later.
I was hoping AI would take us there. All the kids have computers. A guided LLM walks them through videos and concepts. tests them, lets them advance at their own pace.
I wanted to zoom through the lessons, learn everything, but I didn’t want the awful college-prep bullshit or the high scrutiny of my essays. Did I understand the work? Yes, and that’s enough. I showed up to every class, knew what they asked, and aced tests.
How cool would it be for every kid to be able to ask unlimited questions and be given different ways to understand a problem and its corresponding answer until they understood them properly?
Set the text books and workbooks, guardrail the conversations. Double-check for incorrect assertions.
Let them go and seek out on their own whatever subject they wanted at whatever time they wanted.
Personally, if AI wasn’t so destructive, or blatantly stolen as it was, and they changed basically everything about it to make it more reliable and stuff, I agree. I do think eventually something that is called AI will do that, but it won’t be the LLM tech we have today that’s for sure, it will be some other form of tech.
I would love if they had something like you see in the futuristic movies where theres a hologram teacher, could have every kid have their own. I just don’t forsee it happening reliably with our current tech.
or kids need to stop expecting learning to be easy and entertaining…
and do the work required if they want to learn.
because that’s what adult life is like, learning and working doing difficult shit all day. not being entertained.
You just brought a good point up but I’m not sure if you meant to.
“… If they want to learn” - Most kids don’t, or at least don’t want to for topics they don’t get are important. At least in this country anyway. They are forced to go to school with claims it’s going to help them, to sit and stare at a teacher writing on a board for 8-10 hours a day, of mostly stuff that isn’t clear how it’s supposed to help them, then are supposed to regurgitate what was seen on the board. Usually with little to no interest and little socialization with others outside lunch period or the brief intermission period where you switch classes.
That’s the job of the teachers, to make the kids learn the topics, and the best way to do so is keeping it entertaining. You don’t learn subject matter if you are not interested in the subject, instead you start doing anything but retaining the information. If the school system is stating they are unable to keep their kids attentive of classes, they have failed as a school system. No amount of blaming other resources is going to change that.
The sad thing is, distractions in class isn’t a new concept. My parents have told stories of how kids would play hookie, or go out to hunt over lunch break and not come back till the next day, or how they would pass notes in class, and if the teacher caught them they would have to read the note aloud for better or for worse. Hell people set firecrackers/fireworks off in the bathroom during exam periods to set the fire-alarms off. The issue of it being boring and as such not lucrative to the general student is not a new concept caused by phones or computers, it’s just said concept is now easily blamed on them or the kids instead of the system which is causing it in the first place.
Ammendum: Like I said in the original comment, I have to disagree with your that’s how adult life is. I personally found working a full time job to be way more entertaining and engaging than any of my school experiences. Which is sad concidering you do the same thing every day, but at least you have the freedom of choosing how you do it, and you have a clear outcome of why you are doing it… which is way more than I can say about the highschool/middleschool experience.