Google excels at selling third-party ads. That's not the same as being able to create an interesting ad.
I am curious about your experience/opinion on this thing:
A computer can be a tool (editing or programming or learning), or a toy (playing games). I believe that it is better to learn using it as tool first, and as a toy later... and the social networks ideally as late as possible.
That's because if you don't know about the games, the editors are also lots of fun: a three years old child is excited about painting on the screen. But if you already know about the games, the editors are boring; it's like eating your cake first, and then being given broccoli.
Some people say that if your kids play Minecraft or Roblox, it will encourage them to start making their own levels. Sounds kinda plausible, but in my (very limited) experience, I didn't see such thing actually happen.
Once we organized a vacation together with some other families whose parents also work in IT. Each child had their own notebook there, so we made one big common computer room for kids. It was a lot of fun, the kids showed each other what they were doing. But my children were alternating between playing games, painting, and programming; children from the other families just kept playing Minecraft all the time.
So I recommend teaching your kids to use the computer as an editor before they join school (because afterwards they will take their lessons from their classmates). I'm curious if you agree or disagree.
Here are some computer programs that my kids used before they started school:
Tux Paint - a simple drawing program that a 3 years old child can handle (or 2 years old with touchscreen)
Sound Recorder - they enjoyed recording their songs and stories; later we burned the best ones on CD and distributed them to the family
Paint 3D - sadly, Microsoft killed it :(
Inkscape - vector graphics, okay this one was too difficult for them; they made a few pictures but didn't really enjoy it
Pocket platformer - create your own simple platform games
Stunts (in eXoDOS) - a car-driving game from previous millennium, but it allows you to edit your own levels
Sauerbraten - a first-person shooter, but more importantly a very simple 3D editor; my kids only use it to edit
...in hindsight, I wish I replaced Inkscape with Paint.NET and/or Pencil2D, but the general idea was to introduce the computer as a tool for creating your own projects; and when kids start playing games, to prioritize ones that come with level editors. I think I succeeded here. (But I couldn't find enough good games with level editors.)
These days my kids are programming in Scratch; and they find their own games online, so that part is no longer under my control.
We also played The Legend of Kyrandia (also in eXoDOS), but there was no educational goal behind it, only showing the kids the kind of games I used to play.
A story: School refuses to suspend a disruptive student who has no intention of passing any classes and often does not even attend. There’s pressure to ‘keep the suspension rate down,’ so the metric is what gets managed.
I probably already wrote this thousand times online, but I believe the root of the problem is conflict of interest: the same institution and the same people are supposed to both teach and examine the students. Guess what is the easiest way to improve the impression that you are teaching well?
The first step is grade inflation, because if I give everyone a free A that proves how wonderful teacher I am. The second step is a complete loss of discipline, because if I don't notice any problems, that proves they don't exist.
Re: phones in schools
Banning phone use during lessons should be common sense. Otherwise, what's the point of being there?
Banning phones in classrooms seems like a nicely defensible Schelling point.
I hope people won't go as far as banning phones in school (the entire building), because sometimes my kids need them for after-school activities, or I need to tell them what they are supposed to do after school.
Tangentially, I find it ironic that there are so many articles published by various psychologists on the dangers of computer use for children, but much fewer on dangers of phones. I guess the non-tech adults already treat phones as a normal part of their life, while computers are still the tools of Satan.
a school without smartphones probably cannot teach its students AI
LOL. Is that what his kids tell him when they get punished for using a phone during class? "Daddy, I was just doing research on how to build the new generation of artificial intelligence and solve the alignment problem, but the stupid teacher wanted me to focus on boring things such as multiplication!" 100% plausible.
I guess we all love to hate school. But most of us are not contrarian enough to believe that literally everything that violates the school rules must be a meaningful work of an oppressed genius.
Student suspended for three days for saying ‘illegal alien,’ in the context of asking for clarification on vocabulary
lists “Free Trade” as part of a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” in the same category as literally “Slavery”
How is this even possible? I mean, this is Trump era, if there is anything positive about it, I would expect that people are no longer afraid to push back at least against the most obvious woke nonsense.
We are now getting our kids’ grades sent directly to our phones after every assignment/test and woo boy am I happy that I grew up in the 90s with very limited internet.
We have a similar app in Slovakia, it keeps spamming me all day long (homeworks, new grades, lunch, new article on a school website), about ten messages every day. In theory there are settings where you can specify what notifications you want to achieve, in practice I have no idea which checkbox refers to what, so I keep it on to avoid accidentally missing one of the very few important messages. :(
If you are ‘better at explaining,’ but your explanations work less well? Skill Issue!
Yep. Perhaps instead of "explaining", give the kids some exercises that illustrate the topic.
We were already supposed to learn this lesson from the failure of the online courses a few years ago. It does not matter how well you explain, if the kids remain passive, they will remember nothing. For an online course to be effective, it needs to interrupted every few minutes and give the student a problem to solve, which will verify that the student understood that part of lesson. I guess the same applies to human teachers.
The "Knowing Better" guy sounds like a troll. I mean, even the name is already like that. But I agree that many people believe similar things. (I actually wrote a post on a similar topic recently.) I know schools that teach negative numbers in the second grade, and there is nothing complicated about that, if you do it the right way. The right way is to visualize it: to draw a line or a sequence of squares or circles with positive numbers on one side, zero in the middle, and negative numbers on the other side. (Instead of e.g. counting on fingers.) There you trivially see how adding is moving the the right, and subtracting is moving to the left.
Patrick McKenzie: I could get behind a compromise: a) Mandatory annual testing for homeschool students and anyone below 10th percentile ordered to attend public school. b) Any public school teachers whose class below 10th percentile identified as Would Have Been Fired If They Were Homeschoolers:
This proposal sounds nice, but it ignores the fact than not all students are the same. It would be unfair for both teachers and homeschooling parents of retarded children.
I was tempted to suggest a prediction market (something like: the school predicts how well they are going to teach your child, and it is okay to homeschool if you do a comparable or better job), but the obvious problem is that the child could "prove" the school wrong by simply giving wrong answers at school tests on purpose.
But I like the concept that homeschooling parents don't have to be perfect; only comparable to school.
As for ‘learning to work with others’ this is such a scam way of trying to enslave my kid to do your work for you, I can’t even.
Yep. If I wanted my child to spend a lot of time teaching others, it would be more efficient to have them tutor younger children (not classmates) for some pocket money, or maybe try making a YouTube channel.
2
1Zvi has many articles on children and education:
- Childhood Roundup #1
- The Kids are Not Okay
- Childhood Roundup #2
- Childhood Roundup #3
- Childhood and Education Roundup #4
- Childhood and Education Roundup #5
- Childhood and Education Roundup #6: College Edition
- Childhood and Education Roundup #7
- Childhood and Education #8: Dealing with the Internet
- Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
- Letting Kids Be Kids
- Childhood and Education #10: Behaviors
- Childhood and Education #11: The Art of Learning
- On Alpha School
- Childhood and Education: College Admissions
- Childhood and Education #13: College
- Childhood and Education #14: The War On Education
- Childhood and Education #15: Got To Get Out
Steven Byrnes recommended a few resources on X:
MATH: @DragonBox - A+, whole series of games running from basic numeracy thru geometry & algebra. Excellent gameplay, well-crafted, kid loves it.
.@numberblocks (Netflix) - A+, basic numeracy, addition, multiplication. Kid must have watched each episode 10 times, and enthused about it endlessly.
Counting Kingdom @LittleWorldsInt - A+, mastering mental addition. Excellent gameplay (even fun for adults). Note: not currently available on ipad; I got it on PC Steam.
.@SliceFractions & Slice Fractions 2 - A+, great gameplay, great pedagogy, kid now understands fractions thanks in significant part to this game, 'nuff said.
An old-fashioned pocket calculator - A+, an underrated toy
READING: Explode the Code book series - A, been around since at least the 1980s, still good.
.@MonstersCanRead - B+, gameplay is a bit repetitive & difficulty progressed too quickly, but got a few hours of great learning in there before he lost interest
.@Poio_Official - A-, Good gameplay, kid really liked it. Limited scope but great for what it is.
(General note: For reading, no individual thing seemed to make a huge difference and none of them kept his interest too long. But it all added up, bit by bit, and now he's over the hump, reading unprompted. Yay!)
PROGRAMMING - @ScratchJr - A+, duh
Many people don't think for themselves, they just repeat what seems popular. Making a racist shut up not only converts one open-racist to one silent-racist, but also removes a few copy-racists.
Do we have some page containing resources for rationalist parents, or generally for parents of smart children? Such as recommended books, toys, learning apps, etc.
I found tag https://www.lesswrong.com/w/parenting but I was hoping for some kind of best textbooks / recommendations / reference works but for parents/children.
I don't know much about Emily Oster, but it seems like she is a contrarian, most famous for her opinion that it is safe to drink [EDIT: small amounts of] alcohol during pregnancy. She claims that it is evidence-based, but has anyone actually verified that independently? (Seems like a task for Scott Alexander.)
To me it seems that some skepticism is deserved, considering that fetal alcohol syndrome exists. Also, research on adults suggests that even small amounts of alcohol are harmful, and it also seems weird that the small amounts of alcohol would be harmful for adults but harmless for fetuses.