Comment by version_five
1 year ago
My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback.
Also, ed-tech built by the lowest bidder is always going to be crap. Imagine "learning" as a kid in the same way that corporate training is done.
I think this is the right move, even if it's technically solvable to provide good tech-heavy education, I don't see it as practically possible.
Yes. From the article:
> “We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy,” said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research.
Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
> it's not technology per se that's the problem
That said, handwriting practice is correlated to developing fine motor skills, which are documented to be in decline in children in a number of countries. Excessive time with (touch)screens is terrible on that front.
My son could print perfectly legibly about age 7, then the schools tarted forcing letter shapes that were far harder to read with loops and smears etc.
His handwriting then devolved into a spidery mess which was impossible to read, which meant that marks started slipping.
Joined up handwriting is a disgusting unrequired curse on society. If you want to do "beautiful calligraphy" (unreadable scrawl) that's fine, have an optional class.
I had perfectly joined up handwriting by that same age. They should've let your son continue to use his perfectly legibly print but that doesn't mean that calligraphy is necessarily unreadable, just that your son was bad at it.
2 replies →
I had this issue growing up, except it was cyrillic. Reading cursive cyrillic is its own beast of an undertaking, but writing it is hell on earth and I wouldn't wish it upon by greatest enemy. They'd even refuse to grade anything handed in in non-cursive, which never made sense to me because doesn't it fucking suck to attempt to grade those papers when it's all just very long squiggles? Seriously the letters šćčti and Dž all look identical in cursive, and many words have a lot of words have these letters one after the other so you just end up with loop after loop, it's ridiculous
Fast forward a decade and I can barely read cursive cyrillic anymore and I definitely can't write in cursive, thank god.
1 reply →
Yeah, I honestly don't see the point of learning one set style as long as the letters are sufficiently legible. I would rather see children try out a few types of handwriting/multiple letter forms per letter and let them pick what they find appealing and can reproduce legibly and quickly letter by letter.
Is he left handed? I had a similar experience, being left handed writing cursive at 2nd grade at 7-8 caused me to almost fail by 3rd grade (my parents switched me to a private learning disability school…which was super easy).
Possibly because things such as:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
didn't get grandfathered in, but more likely because teachers just search for:
https://www.google.com/search?q=handwriting+worksheets
and grab the first free result.
That said, I would recommend:
https://www.handwritingrepair.info/
and
https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books
> Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
Eh, who knows what 'vetted for accuracy' means to this guy?
I mean, is Wikipedia allowed? What about Khan Academy, this Sal Khan guy doesn't hold even the lowest swedish teacher's qualification.
And that's without getting into the vetting of history textbooks.
I can well believe the rush to online learning during the pandemic lead to the use of material some people would consider unvetted.
> And that's without getting into the vetting of history textbooks.
Do you mind clarifying this part?
1 reply →
I think what they might be implying is that electronics make it very easy for teachers to rely on potentially inaccurate sources on the internet. Rather than that there aren't vetted sources that are acceptable to use (there probably are).
I somewhat tend to agree, assuming that the quality of teachers in Sweden is comparable to my own experience. In hindsight many teachers I had (especially for earlier grades) weren't likely to be better than the average rando taken off the street when it comes to vetting the material they use.
Only upon getting to university did it finally seem like the free/open source materials some professors liked to use were vetted.
> Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
Maybe to train the kids in vetting materials themselves? Seems like an important skill. It's incredible that in school you're never confronted two contradictory sources of information and have to decide which is right.
The main point of my history lessons at school was looking at different sources (primary, secondary etc) and assessing them for bias.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z6gv6v4/articles/zxqss... (for age 11-14, not sure exactly which year this page is aimed at).
Yes, that's it. They talk a lot about how to find reliable sources, because they know students are going to look on the internet either way.
> "...knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy...”
Wikipedia?
All of school is structured around the fact that there is about one teacher per 30 students. Of course teachers will use tech as a way to reduce their own burnout. We know how to make a much better school: more competent teachers and more of them, ideally so that each student has a ton of one-on-one time with teachers daily. Whether books are paper or writing is by hand is really insignificant consideration compared to all the other shortcomings of school.
Thankfully every student will soon have a very knowledgeable, perfectly patient and available teacher: ChatGPT. At first I was skeptical schools will use them, since they don't tend to understand technology very well, but I think some schools will see the potential to relieve the pressure on their teachers and others will follow when they see the positive outcomes for students.
If allowed, ChatGPT will also allow teachers to spend less time on administrative tasks, which is one of the reasons why they're so burned out in the first place.
> My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback
I think this is highly likely given what they are cutting back on is “independent online research.”
[dead]