“Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”--- Sherlock Holmes
Without the memorization of enough facts, there is nothing to synthesize. Sherlock Holmes needed facts/data before he could work his deductive magic, yet we feel as if our children are somehow exempt from this basic requirement? We now, as a comedian once noted, have smart phones and dumb people. Where, pray tell, are the children supposed to get these basic, foundational facts? Well, to paraphrase the Great Detective mentioned above, "Elementary (school), dear Watson!"
Unfortunately, they're clearly NOT getting them in elementary school. All I can see now is that I'm really only interested in helping parents who care enough to look to see what is obviously NOT happening in schools. Everybody else? Good luck.
i remember when the first iPhone came out, it was so cool to me to think I could look up anything I wanted to look up right in the palm of my hand. I no longer had to lug around my huge and heavy brick of a laptop in order to respond to emails or watch YouTube videos or even send photos and post stuff to social media.
I also remember thinking, "so then why do we need to learn anything if all we need to do is ask Google?" And I got chills. I didn't know why that idea scared me until I had my kids.
Your explanation of new information being added block by block as a new pyramid of base knowledge is exactly how I was taught in school and by my parents. It is how I homeschool my own kids and I can SEE the difference between what my own kids have learned and what their public school counterparts learned.
Even the private Catholic school kids are no better. They have gaps in their knowledge and even they use those damn Chromebooks too.
Worse still are the toddlers I see in my church. Especially the boys, NONE of the toddler boys other than my own can be quiet during the Liturgy. So what do the parents do? They plop a phone in their face and give up. I strongly resisted handing my kids a phone when they were little, people thought I was being ridiculous, but now I have all the older generation coming to me to say thank you for not using a phone on my babies.
This is sad, so terribly sad how the world has just given up on itself. Why do we have to fight so hard to do the right thing? What the hell happened to people in the last 20 years??? It is like some sort of switch was flipped, I don't know when, and now people can no longer resist temptation for the slick and easy thing.
All I can tell you is not necessarily hopeful, but it's true.
There's always and only ever a remnant. The Bible points to it. Literature points to it, especially dystopian literature, often written by guys who saw this happen and the deadly and soul-crushing consequences of the fact that "men most often go mad in crowds and only come to their senses slowly and one by one."
Individual parents have to decide whether or not they will be part of the remnant and do the work that even the most poorly-served see should be done with their children, or they will not. My focus is on them, and wherever they might still be in the fringes out in the Twitterverse, which is the only digital wildland where I foray other than here.
At this point, my focus (which by necessity has to be limited) is in trying to inspire and support all of my followers in growing that remnant. Even were I in a position of authority in a public school system, I don't think there's much I could do in the face of the leviathan before it saw me and crushed me as an example to others who might try to change things. I recognize that as a possible outcome, but I can't stop. Hopefully, I'll get enough down and enough little pieces of support out there that people can pick up an ember and carefully cultivate it in their families and, maybe, their wider community over time.
How do you get someone to willing do something they don't want to do?
I do not know how to answer it. All I know is about the same as you've said: To keep plugging along and to keep being that beacon, that example of how things could be.
I know no other way other than to be true to what I know works well.
We had an AI training last week and it was awful. An extremely large majority of my colleagues thought it would be the best thing ever, especially the younger ones. The idea that learning should never have its tedious and difficult moments and that AI would help keep things “engaging and fun” is what really drove me nuts. It was like listening to school of education professors.
Keeping things "engaging and fun" seems to be common nowadays for practically anything involving kids. God forbid they get bored! Always with the entertainment!
I had to push back on the "engaging and fun" as a Sunday School teacher!!!! I couldn't believe that a parent was pushing for religion, a serious topic if you are religious, to be superficially fun. These are precious souls we were teaching, I would expect the temperament of those around me would have been serious. No wonder many are even choosing to leave religion behind too.
We get almost weekly AI "teaching tools" emails from our district. The latest (OK, fine, the only one of several I actually opened), was a program (that we likely purchased use of) that turns your essay or slides (Or MORE! Check it out!) into an AI podcast. I only mention this because on the same day, our weekly admin newsletter introduced - guess what - a PODCAST of their newsletter! Their newsletter, known for the past two years to be generated shoddily by ChatGPT, is now also available in an AI podcast. I'm in SoCal, so also waiting for it to be AI-translated into Spanish as well. (The Chinese and Vietnamese and Filipino families, SOL baby.)
If admin is this lazy (this story is just the tip of the iceberg, team), it's no surprise that they champion the same laziness with academics and what constitutes student success (hint: grad numbers).
“Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”--- Sherlock Holmes
Without the memorization of enough facts, there is nothing to synthesize. Sherlock Holmes needed facts/data before he could work his deductive magic, yet we feel as if our children are somehow exempt from this basic requirement? We now, as a comedian once noted, have smart phones and dumb people. Where, pray tell, are the children supposed to get these basic, foundational facts? Well, to paraphrase the Great Detective mentioned above, "Elementary (school), dear Watson!"
Unfortunately, they're clearly NOT getting them in elementary school. All I can see now is that I'm really only interested in helping parents who care enough to look to see what is obviously NOT happening in schools. Everybody else? Good luck.
i remember when the first iPhone came out, it was so cool to me to think I could look up anything I wanted to look up right in the palm of my hand. I no longer had to lug around my huge and heavy brick of a laptop in order to respond to emails or watch YouTube videos or even send photos and post stuff to social media.
I also remember thinking, "so then why do we need to learn anything if all we need to do is ask Google?" And I got chills. I didn't know why that idea scared me until I had my kids.
Your explanation of new information being added block by block as a new pyramid of base knowledge is exactly how I was taught in school and by my parents. It is how I homeschool my own kids and I can SEE the difference between what my own kids have learned and what their public school counterparts learned.
Even the private Catholic school kids are no better. They have gaps in their knowledge and even they use those damn Chromebooks too.
Worse still are the toddlers I see in my church. Especially the boys, NONE of the toddler boys other than my own can be quiet during the Liturgy. So what do the parents do? They plop a phone in their face and give up. I strongly resisted handing my kids a phone when they were little, people thought I was being ridiculous, but now I have all the older generation coming to me to say thank you for not using a phone on my babies.
This is sad, so terribly sad how the world has just given up on itself. Why do we have to fight so hard to do the right thing? What the hell happened to people in the last 20 years??? It is like some sort of switch was flipped, I don't know when, and now people can no longer resist temptation for the slick and easy thing.
All I can tell you is not necessarily hopeful, but it's true.
There's always and only ever a remnant. The Bible points to it. Literature points to it, especially dystopian literature, often written by guys who saw this happen and the deadly and soul-crushing consequences of the fact that "men most often go mad in crowds and only come to their senses slowly and one by one."
Individual parents have to decide whether or not they will be part of the remnant and do the work that even the most poorly-served see should be done with their children, or they will not. My focus is on them, and wherever they might still be in the fringes out in the Twitterverse, which is the only digital wildland where I foray other than here.
At this point, my focus (which by necessity has to be limited) is in trying to inspire and support all of my followers in growing that remnant. Even were I in a position of authority in a public school system, I don't think there's much I could do in the face of the leviathan before it saw me and crushed me as an example to others who might try to change things. I recognize that as a possible outcome, but I can't stop. Hopefully, I'll get enough down and enough little pieces of support out there that people can pick up an ember and carefully cultivate it in their families and, maybe, their wider community over time.
It seems to me to be an age old question:
How do you get someone to willing do something they don't want to do?
I do not know how to answer it. All I know is about the same as you've said: To keep plugging along and to keep being that beacon, that example of how things could be.
I know no other way other than to be true to what I know works well.
We had an AI training last week and it was awful. An extremely large majority of my colleagues thought it would be the best thing ever, especially the younger ones. The idea that learning should never have its tedious and difficult moments and that AI would help keep things “engaging and fun” is what really drove me nuts. It was like listening to school of education professors.
Keeping things "engaging and fun" seems to be common nowadays for practically anything involving kids. God forbid they get bored! Always with the entertainment!
I had to push back on the "engaging and fun" as a Sunday School teacher!!!! I couldn't believe that a parent was pushing for religion, a serious topic if you are religious, to be superficially fun. These are precious souls we were teaching, I would expect the temperament of those around me would have been serious. No wonder many are even choosing to leave religion behind too.
We get almost weekly AI "teaching tools" emails from our district. The latest (OK, fine, the only one of several I actually opened), was a program (that we likely purchased use of) that turns your essay or slides (Or MORE! Check it out!) into an AI podcast. I only mention this because on the same day, our weekly admin newsletter introduced - guess what - a PODCAST of their newsletter! Their newsletter, known for the past two years to be generated shoddily by ChatGPT, is now also available in an AI podcast. I'm in SoCal, so also waiting for it to be AI-translated into Spanish as well. (The Chinese and Vietnamese and Filipino families, SOL baby.)
If admin is this lazy (this story is just the tip of the iceberg, team), it's no surprise that they champion the same laziness with academics and what constitutes student success (hint: grad numbers).