
Disrupting Class and Playing Games - babyshake
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/disrupting-clas.html
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gruseom
_Infecting our kids with passion for learning is key and we must do a better
job of it._

I think this is backwards. Children have abundant passion for learning. What
we ought to do is stop stifling it.

Edit: what they don't have a passion for is (to paraphrase basically
everybody) blah blah competitiveness blah blah global marketplace blah.

~~~
jackowayed
As a high school student, I can tell you that what kids (or at least I) REALLY
don't have passion for is tedious, boring work and classes that are boring.

Some teachers give far more homework than is necessary to learn the material.
I understand that not all learn as fast as I, but it really can get ridiculous
and become a waste of time, which makes kids not just hate the homework but
school in general. I like my calc class so much more this year because it's
like many college classes--the homework is optional. I get A's on the tests
w/o doing the homework, so why should I do homework?

Teachers need to make the material more interesting by applying it to the real
world more. So many times in my calc class I've heard "Why do I care about
whether this series converges?" and the like. Teachers need to come up with
interesting ways to teach and show how it's actually used so that the students
will care.

I like learning infinitely more when I'm building apps at home than at school,
and it's not just because I like coding more than other stuff. I see it's use.
The use of learning about lamdas is so that I can make x work so that this app
will do what I want it to do.

~~~
aneesh
> _"so why should I do homework?"_

Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't
enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have. It's not just
about the tests.

> _"Why do I care about whether this series converges?"_

You can abstract anything to the point of irrelevance. Don't. Try to learn
something from it. You're developing problem-solving skills, not merely
finding the sum of a series.

~~~
DaniFong
The ability to avoid pointless work in favor of things that matter is probably
my most helpful learned trait.

~~~
aneesh
Agreed, that is a very important skill. But it's not always possible to avoid
the grunt work ... even running your own business, someone still has to take
out the trash (metaphorically), and the buck stops with you.

I've run into this a lot doing data analysis. Sometimes it takes 20-30 minutes
to manually clean up the data (or more often, if it's structured enough, write
a script to do it), but other people often overestimate the amount of work
required, and decide that the grunt work isn't worth it. But it lets me make
better conclusions from the data, so it's usually worth the effort.

~~~
jamesbritt
" But it's not always possible to avoid the grunt work ... even running your
own business, someone still has to take out the trash (metaphorically), and
the buck stops with you."

An enviable skill is to be able to see past the grunt work to the value down
the road.

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aneesh
> _"But what doesn't make sense to me is that parts of our country are in
> serious economic decline and I am not aware of an uptick in engineering and
> science students in those regions."_

There's a logical flaw in that line of reasoning.

The authors claim the following: "If a student has tackled a difficult
subject, it is because s/he was motivated by economic hardship [or a passion
for the subject]."

However, Fred seems to interpret this as the converse: "If a student is
motivated by economic hardship , s/he will tackle a difficult subject" (This
is NOT implied by the original statement), and base his argument on that.
There are probably millions of people who are living proof that economic
hardship & an opportunity to study doesn't automatically make you prefer
difficult subjects.

His argument about passion, though, is spot-on. We do need to do more to
encourage kids to develop healthy passions. I don't think you can make a kid
love math overnight, but you certainly can kill a kid's passion for math by
not supporting it. Supporting this passion for learning though, is easier said
than done. It is much more of a family responsibility, than something that can
be legislated by the government in a top-down fashion.

~~~
babyshake
"It is much more of a family responsibility."

"In my house we give glory to achievement, self-respect and hard work. It's up
to us to set these high expectations. And that means meeting those
expectations ourselves.That means setting examples of excellence in our own
lives."

That's a quote from earlier in the year, from our soon to be inaugurated
President.

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jleyank
If you want people to study engineering/science, then there has to be jobs
awaiting the graduates. Unless, of course, you merely want erudite cabbies and
burger flippers. These fields have never been the route to serious coin, and
now they've decamped for cheaper countries.

Unless there's strong economic or national security issues I'm unaware of,
leave them to those interested in engineering/science. Hopefully, such people
will actually know the subject matter and thus be able to actually deliver on
their promise.

~~~
gaius
Yes supply massively outstrips demand for engineering graduates. Of my Mech
Eng class most ended up in IT or banking. I estimate my salary now is at least
2x what I could be making as an engineer, and despite the economy being down
at the moment I feel a lot more secure with my IT skillset than I would if my
entire industry was in systemic decline.

I do wonder tho' if one day someone, a government or large corporation, will
initiate grand engineering projects ("let's colonize Mars! Right now!") and
I'll be left out for having abandoned the "true path". Nah, never happen.

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lsemel
Once a society gets too prosperous, the highest-paying jobs end up in fields
like finance and law, far outpacing science and engineering. That's one reason
for the decline in science -- the return on learning hard material is higher
in other fields.

Also, you have a greater number of kids growing up in already-prosperous
families, who don't perceive the need to become prosperous themselves, and so
don't pursue higher-paying fields like finance, law, science or engineering.

~~~
Radix
I'm reminded of an article which referenced Japanese fan-mangas. They're
technically illegal in Japan, but the industry does very little to cut them
down. When the author asked a lawyer in Japan why this was he was told there
just weren't enough lawyers.

To that end, we should coerce the government into changing laws that structure
insurance and tax systems to be simple enough to reduce the demand for finance
and law...

...I just can't decide how one would go about changing the insurance system,
or what would be done if the new system required fewer jobs.

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pavelludiq
The problem with the prevailing method of education around the world is that
its really inefficient in many ways. You have to be in class for a specific
time of the day, you get interrupted every 40 minutes by recess, you have to
change the subject very often and different subjects require different types
of concentration. The working environment is not good for learning, its too
noisy, and its not optimized for the individual paces of learning, that the
different types of students have. You are also tormented socially in so may
ways, you don't even need to be physically abused to feel miserable in school.
All this even without mentioning that most teachers just plain suck, and even
if they don't, very often they have to teach boring and tedious material, only
because the system requires it. I spent the last 12 years in this hell, I'm
literally suffocating intellectually!

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joel_liu
"That's what I am talking about. We could use a similar dynamic in
bioengineering, energy technology, and other important new technologies."

How about developing some simple hacking video courses for kids？ Children can
learn the knowledge ,more importantly how to use the knowledge in this way.
However, many teachers and parents don't have such skills. Maybe hackers here
can work together for kids.

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simonista
Did anyone else think this was going to be about playing games in class? I
certainly played all the classic calculator games in high school.

Interesting ideas though. I've been meaning to pick up a Clayton Christensen
book.

