

Kids urged to study less, sleep more  - bootload
http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/kids-urged-to-study-less-sleep-more-20110310-1borm.html

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Splatchar
This incessant competition for grades between children, deliberately
inculcated by adults, is tragic. Done in the name of education, it has nothing
to do with a love of knowledge. It is part of the schooling tradition: a set
of memes surviving purely for its own sake, with a huge amount of suffering
and worry generated as byproducts.

In a life worth living, success doesn't comes from doing the same old thing a
shade more quickly than the next guy. It comes from _cooperation_ and from
building a niche in which one can thrive.

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Lost_BiomedE
I really wish that education looked more like Conrad's vision in:

Conrad Wolfram’s TED Talk: “Stop Teaching Calculating, Start Teaching Math”

From very early on, at least in my education, concepts and the reason 'why do
this at all' was stripped from the curriculum. The other thing that I feel is
lacking is confidence building, which to me is directly connected.

When solving a real life problem, the problem does not care about your GPA,
rank, etc.

I have had well respected professors tell me about a hard problem they are
working on, that I later solved with a google search...

Bringing together tools and concepts is very powerful. Solving real problems
with them builds confidence and passion. Learning not to reinvent the wheel,
even though you understand the concepts that would enable you to, is what
allows us to cooperate and build to new heights.

Empowerment.

~~~
yarian
I saw Conrad's talk a few months ago and I couldn't agree more. In fact I am
attempting to put his theory in general by teaching math through programming
at the moment.

I wanted to add a caveat to your confidence point though. We need to engender
the _right_ kind of confidence. A lot of kids are already confident, even
arrogant. Yet it's completely unfounded since they are not actually acquiring
human capital.

We need to promote the kind of confidence that comes from taking a hard
problem, banging your head against it for a week, solving it, and repeating.
The kind of confidence that comes from previous hard work.

~~~
Lost_BiomedE
Agreed. The current confidence you speak of is smoke and mirrors, the
arrogance hits a brick wall and turns to depression.

In regards to math through programming, I always wondered how well it would
work to have a supervised lab that students could use to write up a program
verified as their own. Then, allow the student to use this in coursework. The
geeks currently do it behind the scenes with their TI calculators anyway. Of
course, increasing complexity of coursework would require them to revisit or
rewrite their programs.

~~~
yarian
I don't teach math the way you are thinking about it though. What I mean by
math is more like the way of thinking and not specific math concepts.

I mean they learn boolean logic but really it is more of gaining comfort with
defining and working with functions, domain, range, and variables.

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yarian
While I agree that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, I disagree with
the spirit of the article. Yes, children should not be adults. But let's face
it, America's percentage of overbooked, stressed, kids is nothing compared to
the overwhelming masses which are under-challenged and not interested in
school or learning. The U.S. is so far behind in education--having school
years much shorter than the top countries like Finland and Japan--that
overworking our kids should be the last thing we are worrying about.

Malcolm Gladwell makes a point about
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation>] Concerted Cultivation
in his book Outliers that I think is very appropriate to the topic at hand.

One more thought: If a child from China read this article, he would probably
laugh. I say, work our kids harder! Damn punks...

~~~
dmm
| The U.S. is so far behind in education

How did you develop this hypothesis? What does it mean to be ahead or behind
in education? _Anticipating some of your answers._ Is it really meaningful to
compare the test results of the US to those of Finland? What are the reasons
for the differences between the test results of Finland and the US? Is a few
more weeks in school really the best reason you can think of? Are you aware of
the fact that if you only consider white people the US compares much more
favorably to European countries, in fact score better than 30 of them in one
particular test? Why do you think that would be?

Those are some of the questions that come to my mind when considering the
issue. This is something I think about a lot, especially since I starting
dating a elementary special ed teacher who has shared a lot of her
experiences.

You can't consider these international test-score comparisons without also
addressing the diversity of the US. In particular blacks in the US still score
significantly lower than everybody else. Why is this and what are we going to
do about it? Just declaring it to be "racism" isn't enough. If it's racism,
what kind is it? What does this racism actually look like? If racism is still
present in schools it is probably unconscious to those perpetrating it. I
sincerely doubt it's just racism.

I don't know.

~~~
natnat
I think poverty may have a bigger effect on test scores than race. If you
break down the PISA scores by state, the three lowest performing states are
Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia. While Mississippi has a huge black
population, New Mexico is only 2% black and West Virginia is only 3%. While
New Mexico is 44% hispanic, West Virginia is almost entirely white non-
hispanic. One thing these three states have in common, though, is that they
are all very poor.

There is definitely a correlation between a higher population of blacks and
lower test scores. But there is also a strong correlation between higher rates
of poverty and lower test scores, and a very large number of hispanics and
blacks are poor.

Black students in Massachusetts perform much better than black students in
Mississippi. Virginia, which is nearly 20% black, is one of the top-performing
states, while West Virginia, which is 96% white, is near the bottom.

While the US is richer than most of Europe, our income inequality means that
we have a much higher poverty rate. When you control for poverty, the U.S.
outperforms every other country tested.

~~~
yarian
But "controlling for poverty" is the same as saying "if you assume that the US
was something else without some of its key flaws _then_ "... Do you see that
this line of thought goes nowhere?

~~~
cema
It may be a flaw, but it appears not to be a flaw in ''education'' but
elsewhere.

------
gnemeth
According to a poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 53% of teens take naps
to cope with insufficient sleep. This is symptomatic of the problem and it
does not just stop at teens. 44% of adult take naps to cope with insufficient
sleep. For more info about sleep checkout <http://blog.wakemate.com/>

