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Comment by plughs | Hacker News Reader

Our elementary school uses chromebooks from 1st grade on, and I do see a lot of downsides.

The most outrageous problem, IMO, is that there are 'modules' that must be completed, and kids with computer access at home can work on them at home. Kids from low income families are screwed over - again.

Other problems

- spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you?

- The de-emphasis on handwriting is mentioned in the article. In-class assignments are still handwritten, but take-home projects can be typed.

- A lot of 'educational' games are regular games with a minimal pretense of education value. Frogger is still Frogger, even if there's some notion of jumping to the lily pad with the right sum.

- Same for 'educational' youtube videos. youtube is blocked on my kid's devices, despite insistence that there are channels where they do scientific experiments. The videos are more about funny jokes than the different phases of matter.

( youtube is a funny one. Non-tech parents always tell me how great kid's youtube is. Tech parents are always like "f yea, of course you block youtube" )

Plus the last thing my kid needs is more screentime. I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.

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Why do you think students will better learn to spell without spellcheck?

As far as I can tell spending class time on spelling per se and/or grading students on spelling mistakes is a complete waste of time and focus.

The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

It’s plausible that showing that a mistake was made but then forcing the student to retype or rewrite the word correctly (without letting them just click once on the word to fix the mistake) would be more effective.

But I have seen no evidence that spellcheck reduces people’s ability to learn spelling. I’d like to see some kind of formal study.

Disclaimer: I think giving every 1st grade student a chromebook is a terrible mistake.

>The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

I'm not sure I agree with this. This doesn't teach the fundamentals and rules of how words are put together. Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together so, even if you don't know how a word's spelled, you should be able to at least be able to make a good guess based on your knowledge of English. The spell checker doesn't teach you any of this.

People don’t learn the “rules of English” through explicit instruction. They learn them through years (decades) of exposure.

Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.

I did. They taught us this in school. My spelling is good. I rarely rely on a spell checker and have autocorrect turned off on my keyboard because I find it annoying rather than helpful. Knowing how to spell and sound out words helped me be a better reader and kept reading interesting for me.

Anecdotally, I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.

> I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.

None of the people I know who grew up in highly literate families with parents who read with them several hours per week up through age 7+ ever had either of these problems in adulthood. Including the dyslexic ones.

I am highly skeptical that your acquaintances dislike reading because the spelling of long words is too complicated. More realistically they find long words hard because they never did enough reading to become fluent. Nearly everyone can get at least 90% of the way to reading arbitrary English text with about a year of appropriate reading instruction at age 6 plus a few years of regular practice.

As someone who never spent any effort on spelling in school, big words are fine to read and spelling is no trouble. I also dislike and disable autocorrect. I’d happily put my pronunciation of arbitrary English words up against anyone who isn’t a professional linguist.

Heavy readers with terrible spelling seems odd... spelling isn't something that is hard, it's kind of automatic once you use a language past a certain age, at least for me.

>Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.

Agreed, but it doesn't just have to be books. My personal example: in my native language, I read tons of books as a child, which was what gave me a strong edge when it comes to spelling/grammar. I got into learning english in my late teens, and, by that time, I wasn't as much into reading long-form books as I was into reading random things on the internet. I would say my grammar/spelling is on about the same level in english as it is in my native language, at the moment. In both cases, however, I can easily attribute it to consuming a lot of reading material that gave me some kind of intuition for the correct spelling/grammar. I don't remember explicit grammar rules for either language. In case of my native one, I never really learned the rules in the first place, as I had trouble memorizing those, and the rules felt forced and arbitrary with tons of exceptions to each of them. I just know that something feels "right" or "wrong", simply because of tons of reading that settled down in my head.

Yeah, and I prefer the (good, "adult") Russian translation of the Lord of the Rings to the original too! :P

Wait, there was something special about the Russian translation of LotR? I totally missed it then, because that's how I read LotR as a kid (translated Russian version), and I have never re-visited the book since then, as I was not a big fan of the movies (which, I know, is almost a sacrilegious thing to admit, given the reactions I've received for saying it irl).

Haha, I knew it ! Let me guess, you read the "big single dark brown book" version too ? It might be just the children nostalgia though... (Had the same reaction to the movies initially !) I've also seen much later a translation that seemed to be designed "for kids" and that seemed godawful to me !

Unfortunately, I think I might have read the newer translation. I don't have it anymore, but iirc I got the book around 2005-2006, and it might have been brown underneath, but it had that glossy art cover over it that I took off only once to check out how it looked without it.

Hah, completely forgot about that, it got lost pretty quickly...

In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writing with pen and paper.

Is that a bad thing? You can still write in Chinese with an IME, and most uses are on some sort of phone or computer anyways. 27 year old me learned how to text in Chinese but skipped learning the muscle memory to write characters, first I'm left handed so stroke order was bizarrely awkward anyways, but also...it just didn't feel important anymore.

If you live in a Chinese-speaking country then, yes, it's a bad thing.

There are plenty of situations in which you still have to write; at the post office, applying for things, hospitals, places like that. Maybe not every day, I'll grant you that, but you are going to hit barriers when required to write your address or apply for a driving license or similar.

You don't want to be the guy painstakingly copying characters stroke by stroke off his phone while a line grows behind you.

I live in Japan and often regret that my writing is so far behind my reading comprehension. Like, it doesn't need to be AS good, but it would be better if it were close.

I lived in Beijing for 9 years and it didn't seem to be a problem. Yes, I occasionally had to really write something in Chinese (e.g. at the bank when making an account changed), but my hand was basically held while writing it. The post office and hospital never required me to write in Chinese.

My 69 year old father lived in Beijing for a few years recently and I'm pretty sure the company he worked for must have taken care of things like that for them because I can't imagine that man ever attempting to write Chinese.

I guess there's probably a pretty strong market for translators in the big Asian cities with American/European presence.

The company didn’t even have to provide anybody. There was always at least one English speaker at the bank, even though I could get by in Chinese verbally, it’s just one weird rule that requires me to write anything by my own hand at all (other than my signature). A lot of places are like that: they’ll easily take care of the paperwork for you if they know you can’t. Even for foreigners that don’t speak Chinese, they get by, especially in a first tier.

If you have a Caucasian appearance, might not part of it be that the Chinese simply excused you from having to write Chinese more than they would someone who appeared Chinese?

Of course it's a bad thing! Imagine not being able to write your own language.

I think some countries should just bite the bullet and start replacing their archaic writing systems with something more modern

Phonetical alphabet, standardized spelling, etc

Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders. Not to mention the whole "every character has several unrelated pronunciations, but hey, context, right?!" of Japanese.

> archaic writing systems with something more modern

The Latin alphabet is an archaic system that barely worked for Latin and doesn't work at all for English. There's a reason English dictionaries have to include IPA.

> Phonetical alphabet

You say so while typing in an alphabet that doesn't have enough characters to describe all the phonemes of the language you're using, and which is used phonetically in name only.

> standardized spelling, etc

I don't know what gives you the impression that "some countries" don't have standardized spelling.

> Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders.

You're literally talking about the writing system of the word's most widely used language. Obviously a plurality of people do have the patience to do so. In practice it requires roughly the same amount of memorization as English. The only difference is being that most of HN probably learned English early in life and have internalized things like "Peak Vs. Pique Vs. Peek".

Honestly it took me a few seconds to remember what pique even means.

Chinese characters (hanzi) are not an 'archaic writing system'. While hanzi allows for the expression of meaning in addition to pronunciation, which is unique amongst the other writing systems of the world, they are also more phonetic than is commonly perceived.

The majority of Chinese characters (more than 80%) are 'phono-semantic compounds' where 1 part of the character indicates the meaning and the other indicates the pronunciation. And the majority of these compounds follow a surprisingly regular pattern: for instance, the character '召' is pronounced 'zhao' in Mandarin Chinese, and forms the right side of the characters '招' and '昭' - both of which are also pronounced 'zhao'.

Here's another example - the character '包' is pronounced 'bao', and is frequently found as a component in characters pronounced 'bao': '饱' ('full stomach', with the food radical ⻠ on the left) and '抱' ('hug', with the hand radical ⺘). '包' also forms the phonetic component of some characters pronounced as 'pao', which sounds similar to 'bao': '跑' ('run', with the foot radical ⻊), '炮' ('cannon', with the fire radical 火), and '泡' ('bubble', with the water radical ⺡). I had been studying Chinese recently, and understanding the phonetic aspects of the characters has helped me to read them more easily than before.

Having said that, a lot of these phonetic relations date back many years and some of them have been obscured due to language change. But to blindly assume that Chinese characters are 'archaic' is false - as others have commented, you can say the same for English spelling, which also has spellings that date back many years but do not make sense today, like the 'gh' in 'tough', 'dough' and 'caught'. Also, it would be possible to reform Chinese characters such that every character with the same pronunciation would use the same phonetic component, while allowing for additional components to indicate the meaning. And that was what Simplified Chinese did to a certain extent.

Thanks for the detailed response, 'archaic' is not necessarily the best word to describe the problems with it, and hanzi seems to be more straightforward than Kanji

But dealing with a huge alphabet is more complicated than one with (much) fewer characters as the Latin, Arabic and Korean ones.

The English spelling problem is annoying, but most languages don't have such a disparity in writing (which, for the most part, is not that big).

Chinese writing is adapted to write the Chinese language. The only place where this is an issue is languages where there was no standardization (namely every other Chinese languages except Standard mandarin) because even natives don't know which character to use. More interestingly, once someone has knowledge of Chinese character, he can guess the meaning of text in other languages; for instance Korean written in mixed script is incredibly readable to some one with Japanese reading ability.

The Voyager Golden Record has a record of Minnan language which transcription in Chinese character is: 太空朋友，恁好。恁食飽未？有閒著來阮遮坐哦! Anyone in this thread reading some Chinese can guess accurately what the first sentence means. Probably the second too. The third is more difficult but looks like an invitation. Now compare with the romanization: Thài-khong pêng-iú, lín-hó. Lín chia̍h-pá--bē? Ū-êng, to̍h lâi gún chia chē--ô·! Besides pêng-iú looking like Mandarin pengyou is this totally foreign.

They did, but it stopped and then went back as far as I know. E.g. nowadays there are two Chinese writing systems, simplified and traditional. Similar Japanese efforts to ban some rare kanji (e.g. some were only ever used in certain last names) fizzled with the advent of computers that make it easy to type any kanji.

People do not always want things simplified. They also want richness and this may conflict with simplicity. Look at fonts, for example. They gained a lot of complexity recently, there's lots of contextual variations and even two different systems to express it (Apple has its own). The monospace fonts that were invented for typewriters are much simpler than other fonts, but nowadays they are only used in certain specific contexts, like programming, and even there they started to get quite a bit of richness + complexity with PragmataPro being the absolute champion of it.

I'd say the general trend is toward perceived simplicity, but internal richness. Automation, not simplification.

> look at fonts, for example. They gained a lot of complexity recently, there's lots of contextual variations and even two different systems to express it

Yes, but see how many fonts there are for Latin alphabets vs. Kanji/Chinese. (something about dozens of characters vs thousands)

What you describe includes English, however, due to its heritage of being a conglomerate of several different languages. That's why English spellings bees are a thing -- the spelling and pronunciations don't always match up. We'd need to switch to something like Korean, where deviations between spelling and pronunciation can be counted on one, maybe two hands.

> What you describe includes English

Yes, but to a much, much lesser degree

If someone says to you their name is "John" you know how to write it. Foreign names might be weird sometimes (hi Ireland) but usually they're simple.

In Japan you have to ask everyone how to write their name because there's no standard way of spelling. And every character has (completely) different pronunciations depending on context https://www.thejapanesepage.com/tag/kanji-pronunciation/

I was more referring to the phonetic alphabet and standardized spelling part of your post, and not to the Japanese part. That's why I proposed Korean as the language to satisfy your requirements, as English does not, as exemplified by the name John, which is pronounced [jon].

I actually count English spelling as a strength and not a weakness, otherwise we'd have the situation of multiple semantically distinct and unrelated words being spelled the same[0] while at the same time having to maintain distinct orthographies for every minor dialect[1].

[0] https://ko.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%88%98%EB%8F%84_(%EB%8F%9...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_differen...

English is also unable to avoid the issue of having multiple semantically distinct and unrelated words being spelled the same, for example "stock" or "light" or "scale". I don't know enough about languages to say which ones have avoided this issue. Regarding your second point about not having to maintain distinct orthographies, could you explain in more detail how English avoids that?

> English is also unable to avoid the issue of having multiple semantically distinct and unrelated words being spelled the same, for example "stock" or "light" or "scale".

Fair point.

> Regarding your second point about not having to maintain distinct orthographies, could you explain in more detail how English avoids that?

I'm not an expert on phonics but from what I've seen from attempts at writing any language phonetically regular is that in order to achieve phonetic regularity for everyone you either have to force everyone to pronounce words identically (impossible for a language as widely used as English) or you have to maintain entirely seperate spelling systems for each dialect. This number goes up the more phonetically regular your writing system is. See this example in the wikipedia entry on the Shavian script, a phonetically regular alphabet for English[0]:

> Spelling in Androcles follows the phonemic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectical variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to produce the canonical spellings spontaneously. For instance, most North American dialects merge 𐑭 /ɑː/ and 𐑪 /ɒ/ (the father–bother merger). Canadian English, as well as many American dialects (particularly in the west and near the Canada–US border), also merge these phonemes with 𐑷 /ɔː/, which is known as the cot–caught merger. In addition, some American dialects merge 𐑧 /ɛ/ and 𐑦 /ɪ/ before nasal stops (the pin–pen merger).

With exceptions, the mapping of letters to language in English mostly seems to occur at the level of morphemes and not phonemes. Look at this wiktionary entry for "schedule" for example[0]. All dialects spell it the same but there are multiple distinct pronounciations listed in the IPA section that would all lead to different spellings in a completely phonetically regular system.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/schedule

>(UK) IPA(key): /ˈʃɛ.djuːl/, /ˈʃɛ.dʒuːl/, /ˈskɛ.djuːl/, /ˈskɛ.dʒuːl/

>(US) IPA(key): /ˈskɛ.dʒʊl/, /ˈskɛ.dʒəl/, /ˈskɛ.dʒu.əl/, /ˈskɛ.dʒul/

>(India) IPA(key): /ʃɛ.djuːl/

>(Canada) IPA(key): /ˈskɛ.dʒu.əl/, /ˈskɛ.dʒuːl/, /ˈʃɛ.dʒu.əl/, /ˈʃɛ.dʒuːl/

Actually kanji only don't make sense in the context of only reading them. First learn how to speak and listen. Then as soon as you write a bunch of kanji you will realize how consistent the stroke order is and that there are a lot of repeating elements (loads and loads of boxes...). There are still some annoying exceptions but those are the minority. Learning the meaning of each kanji will make it very easy to connect the kanji with the intended word.

In other words, exposure to professional, high quality writing that rigorously follows the rules of English.

Unlike most speakers.

I'd say that nothing is learned through instructions. There always is an element of use that turns instructions into understanding.

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words

Funny you should say that in defense of classical methods of teaching literacy, which for me consisted of eight years of memorizing lists of words and regurgitating them on weekly spelling quizzes.

Weekly spelling quizzes. Memorized lists of ten to fifteen words at a time.

All the way into high school.

I had the same methods. Ironically I’ve learned more about the English language in attempting to learn (or re-learn) other languages (Spanish, German, French, Latin). So idk, I inclined to buy the argument that teaching the parts of all the systems is a better start than teaching one system at a time, and doing it through brute force memorization.

Those lists aren't picked at random. They're designed to expose learners to words with letter groups, structures, silent letters, etc they might not encounter otherwise. You learned about spelling by seeing them.

During primary school I switched to a place that did a weekly dictation. So like every Monday, first thing in the morning was a half-hour of the professor reading a page of text and you handed off your copy of it, you lose one point per mistake basically (out of 20 points, the standard in France).

That helped tremendously with my spelling.

Ours were thematically grouped, usually by phoneme. For example, I remember that one week in elementary was /hw/ ("what","when","whichever").

I never had to study for spelling, probably because reading was my favorite thing to do. Well, until I had one teacher who tested that we'd memorized the list of words...

Explicitly studying spelling ended after 5th grade (rural elementary school in Texas, late 80s/early 90s)

Spellcheck is a wonderful tool, but relying on it can lead to embarrassing results. I would not want the kids in my life using it until they have their own grasp of spelling.

Like English spelling has any rules. There are a lot of irregularities with English spelling that students need to learn by heart how the word is spelled compared to how it is pronounced.

English spelling absolutely has rules. The famous 'ghoti' example (where supposedly it should be able to be pronounced 'fish' because of 'gh' in rough, 'ti' in 'nation', etc.) is nonsense because there's only one way that word can be pronounced in English and that's 'goatee'.

Irregularities don't mean it doesn't have rules. The most common 1-2k words are much less regular than the rest of the language, but learning how they're spelt is not remotely difficult for children (no adult that doesn't have a learning disability struggles to remember how to spell 'much' or 'about'). The rest of the language is pretty much regular.

Funny, I always pronounced "ghoti" like "Gotti".

Slight difference in vowel, otherwise the same, that's valid enough. English isn't great at telling you the exact vowel, probably because people keep making them shift.

English is spoken with such a wide variety of accents that you can just about get away with using random vowels sounds and still be understood.

Obligatory "What if English were phonetically consistent":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU

English spelling has plenty of rules. It's just inconsistent and full of exceptions because English has its roots in many different languages and unfortunately inherits rules from all of them as well as having a bunch of its own.

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together

Learning those rules involve learning the orthographies of French, Latin, and Greek, etc. as well as their associated transliteration schemes(usually multiple per language), and memorizing which one was used for which specific word(Hamburg[0] vs. burgher[1] vs. bourgeoisie[2] vs. Berger[3]), as well as words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor[4]). I don't think most people actually learn this.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher

[2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger

[4] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor

Edit: See comment below for better source.

> words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor)

Seems the better link is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors

Apparently “chisel” comes from the same source.

That's what the reading is for

> The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

Speaking as a dyslexic person this is garbage. Learning to spell required weekly word lists, spelling tests and hours of study. The memory skills this built have seriously helped me in my life.

That worked for you, good. But my personal anecdote agrees with jacobolus, and one anecdote is as good as another. I completed all the spelling books through HS by 4th grade because I read so much. The downside was, of course, that I would regularly mispronounce words.

This comes down to the fact that schools don't let students learn in their optimal manners.

This hints at the biggest problem with our education system. Different children learn in different ways. Word lists and spelling tests may have been effective for you, but they weren't for me (reading hundreds of books otoh did improve my spelling). Unfortunately, I don't really have a practical solution.

ISTR there is no scientific basis for “children learn in different ways”. If a child has dyslexia or something like that, sure, that can affect things, but good teaching strategies should work for the vast majority of children.

I'm not referencing the different learning styles ("auditory", "visual", "kinesthetic", etc.). I'm saying different people have different strengths and weaknesses and that effects how you learn.

> good teaching strategies should work for the vast majority of children

In my experience, good teaching strategies usually includes teaching the same thing in a variety of different ways, so that hopefully at least one of the ways is effective for each student.

It's kind of obvious: teach different children differently? Classes with large numbers of children should probably be rare.

well, yes. that's why I had the qualifier "practical". smaller classes are more expensive, and at least where I live, the trend has been the opposite where class sizes are increasing.

Is it "practical" if you end up getting worse results with bigger classes ? I'm willing to bet that "undereducated" children (and then adults !) are going to end up costing much more than ones with a better education !

That short feedback loop is the only thing that worked for me. Spelling/vocab lists all through school. I Could slog through that and get an A, but forget spelling next week. Typing in chat or essays would give the red squiggly line. Instead of right-clicking and getting the spelling, I would backspace and try again. That is how my spelling improved.

> I have seen no evidence that spellcheck reduces people’s ability to learn spelling.

Spellcheck has shown me that I've been misspelling certain words forever :-)

To play devils advocate here, I have always been a terrible speller and it doesn't affect me because all surfaces I use have spell check. Occassionally I will butcher something so bad I confuse the spell checker and Google it, but those are so few and far between I don't feel like I missed out memorizing list after list of arbitrary word roots and remembering if this is loaned from greek, a romance language like french, or old german.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-18158665

N=1: I feel like - and I am 99% certain - that my grammatical and spelling skills have decreased since I started using the internet heavily.

I think it heavily depends on the kind of content you are consuming. I know it is anecdata, but my personal grammar and spelling skills went all the way up since I started using internet heavily (which was very noticeable to me, since english isn't my native language). And while I use a lot of incorrect grammar and spelling when talking to friends, I usually do it out of convenience (to shorten words, etc.), not because I don't know the proper grammar/spelling.

I would like to make the argument that reading/writing HN have made my English a bit better in recent years.

English isn't my first language. Yet, I believe my english grammar is getting worse even if I read a lot of English everyday. I blame this on globish though and the fact that it's relatively rare to get corrected on grammar mistakes around here.

On the other hand, the internet pretty much taught me English. Sure, we had English classes in school, but the internet gave me an immense amount of practical experience. Most of my peers, particularly those who didn't use the internet, finished school with significantly worse English than I did. Spell-checking has been pretty useful, but probably not vital.

I generally think that the sort of knowledge best learned with flash cards is probably knowledge not memorizing in the first place, with the truth of this being proportional to the size of the dataset being learned. For sets in the neighborhood of 200 or less, I don't think it's a big problem. Chemistry classes asking you to memorize the mapping of element names ⟷ element symbols seems okay. But memorizing the spelling of several hundred to thousands of words? That seems like a job for a machine.

I don't have studies, but the idea is they never have to learn it because the computer just does it for them. So why bother?

It's anecdotal, but growing up the students who relied on their calculators never really learned to do mental math the same. The difference was palpable.

But I'm not a formal teacher or expert when it comes to the psychology of learning, so I also welcome studies on this subject.

Spellcheck is not like a handheld electronic calculator. It doesn’t write for you.

It’s more like a system that would let you practice doing arithmetic with pen and paper but then immediately show errors.

Look at how people practice board games nowadays: they try making their own moves but get a precise computer analysis to reveal when they have made a blunder on the spot, for real-time feedback. This is not the same as just watching the computer play against itself.

You're thinking of it as a pedagological tool. I'm thinking of it as a crutch. The truth is in-between and will vary from person to person, but I'd bet money most people lean on it more than they learn from it.

But does developing your spelling actually matter?

Maybe being able to spell perfectly is about as useful a skill as putting shoes on a horse or chipping a piece of stone into an arrowhead.

What if 100% of the time that s devoted to spelling was devoted to something else, like just reading?

> But does developing your spelling actually matter?

I don't think it does. I think it's similar to how people used to lament the loss of the bard who'd memorize songs/stories as reading became increasingly popular. I was just responding on how it changes how we think.

I do think mental math matters, but most people disagree so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also think mental math matters, but I think that people who end up using simple math a lot will simply pick up the ability to do mental math as necessary.

> It doesn’t write for you.

Modern ones kind of do - for example, gmail's spell checker now comes with predictive input.

“Plus the last thing my kid needs is more screentime. I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.”

That was my German mother-in-law's rationale for not having a TV in the house while my husband and sister-in-law were kids. “I didn’t have enough time to watch and make sure everything they saw was appropriate.” To her, just because the program claimed to be for children meant that every minute of it (and commercials) was appropriate for her children.

I’m going to say it worked out well overall, because that family is way better at sitting down for calm, well-planned meals and just lounging in a quiet living room, talking to each other than my family is. Slight downside for my husband: he is absolutely incapable of tuning out the constantly-running TV my relatives use for background noise.

I can't even comprehend how anyone could tune out constantly-running TV. Just turn it off!

I think it is practice. I don't have a TV at home, so my family is unable to tune them out at all when we go out. When I catch myself and turn away I notice most people seem to be ignoring it - it is obvious by looking my family is not.

I know people who sleep to TV, and it genuinely sounds like torture to me.

I do this. I have a really difficult time turning my mind off in silence. If it’s dark and quiet, my mind is working.

Listening to old TV shows like TNG helps distract me enough to fall asleep.

Just gonna throw this out there (as a longtime insomniac): perhaps that’s your brains way of telling you that it needs to mull over whatever’s going on in your life. I’ve found that my insomnia is worst when I have so much going on that I’m not getting enough quiet time to process it all.

How many hours of mulling might be necessary? I don't really care if some part of me wants to spend 20 hours a week in generic reflection, it's going to be mostly wasted effort after the first hour or two. Whatever I would replace is probably more important.

Hmm, I'm talking more about projects I'm working on, or things I want to work on the next day. I'm at a point in my life where I look at this as a good thing, not something that needs correcting.

This sounds to me like someone saying "I have a pebble in my shoe so I hop everywhere on one foot" when they should probably just take the pebble out of their shoe.

Have you tried avoiding screens for a couple of hours before bed, and reading books instead? I had the same problem - found it difficult to get to sleep - and I have experienced MUCH better sleep since moving my last hour or two before sleep to some light reading.

>Have you tried avoiding screens for a couple of hours before bed, and reading books instead?

Yes of course I've "tried" that, although I think this sortof incorrectly frames what I'm talking about as a problem. I don't find listening to star trek while I fall asleep as a problem. If I read before going to bed I will just stay up all night long reading. Activating my mind by reading a book seems like the opposite of what I'm looking to accomplish here.

>Our elementary school uses chromebooks from 1st grade on, and I do see a lot of downsides.

When my family moved last year, we moved to a school system where Chromebooks are in use. (You can bring your own or the school will provide one for you for free). I was very worried about many of the downsides as well, but after 1.5 years, I think it's actually a pretty big positive.

In my case, my son has ADHD, so getting paperwork organized is a huge challenge for him. Being able to access everything is a life saver for him. About 50% of his homework and projects are completed and submitted online. Getting him to complete a creative project on paper is pulling teeth, but making a slide deck for the same thing with lots of clip art, etc. is easy and he'll do countless revisions.

I think some of the keys to success are that we only use the Chromebook for school stuff. Anything other than schoolwork happens elsewhere. The school system also does a good job balancing things and the "games" we've seen skew far more towards educational rather than game-like. As parents, we make it easy to find the recreational stuff on a different device, but that's a luxury we have that many don't. The result is that the school computer gets used for school.

So, it's possible to make it work well, but I agree that there are many places it can go wrong.

I think Chromebooks are awesome, but not at grade 1.

Kids are too developmentally different at that age. They range from the kids whose parents delay kindergarten a year to make them better at sports to the kids put into school early to save money on daycare. Using a trackpad and keyboard is too abstract.

My kids' school uses iPads as limited enrichment devices until grade 3. As a reward, they get to independently use an iPad to do some things. Grade 3 and up Chrome is there in a similar way, and they start requiring them at grade 5. They are a little conservative, but I think they are getting better outcomes, especially with younger kids.

>I think Chromebooks are awesome, but not at grade 1.

Great point. Our life w/Chromebooks didn't start until Grade 5.

> kids whose parents delay kindergarten a year to make them better at sports

Unrelated, but could you explain this?

Some people are focused on sports and want their kid to be bigger than their classmates. So you either opt out of school if the birthdays work, delay kindergarten if it isn’t mandatory, or send the kid to a private kindergarten and have them repeat.

It’s a big advantage, especially around 11 or 12, and get kids on more competitive teams earlier.

I coach little league, and we see it all of the time. It’s a compliance issue as kids get a little older and start playing tournaments.

Are teams not based on age in the United States? In New Zealand they're all categorised as 'under 9s', 'under 8s', 'under 7s' etc. They've also introduced weight classes to a lot of teen sports too to prevent them from being dominated by gigantic Samoan kids.

School teams are classed by grade level. Non-school teams are by age. Non-school teams are generally seen as a fun thing to do on weekends, while school teams can become very serious. Hold your kid back early and they will be the star of the team 12 years latter. Some of this is because at some critical points their body is physically better than their peers and thus they get to play a little more and get that much more practice. Some of it is the parents who think doing well in sports is important are teaching their kids young to play sports and so those kids are getting practice at home that other kids do not get.

Yeah, it's a common thing for all sportsmen and women. https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/why-many-olym...

The positive feedback loop they're in pushes them more and more towards the things they're better at than their peers.

On a similar note, I've read about parents in China scheduling the conception and birth of their child so that the child can be the oldest at school. Although it's only a few months' difference, but in kindergarten and elementary school, that head start could mean quite a difference in academic performance.

I wonder about this also. In most districts you don't have a choice, and it is those kids with October-December birthdays that are delayed a year because of the cut off date. Maybe they are using fake birth certificates?

My little girl had a recent projects. She had to choose from one of six entrepreneurs and answer some questions about one of them in complete sentences. How was she to acquire the information about this person? A URL to a biography.com bio.

Fine. I have a computer and she was able to read the article. She then answered the questions. To my surprise, she hadn't capitalized a single word. I told her that she needed to capitalize her sentences and proper pronouns, and she was annoyed because "my teacher doesn't make us do that."

WTF?

First I was annoyed because they sent a link, which means that kids without internet access might not be able to complete the assignment. THEN I was upset because her 3rd grade English teacher didn't care that students were paying attention to basic capitalization. And this is in a REALLY good school district.

English is not my native language, but the medium of education in my school was English.

My grandmother used to make me read three articles from the newspaper. One from the front page, one from the weather pages and one from the sports pages. Puzzles on weekends and it was our job to scan and read out obituaries everyday.

She was born in 1921 and never went to school after 8th grade. She learnt how to spell and write in English because she figured newspaper articles were already spell checked and edited for correct grammar etc. I had to chuckle as I imagined re what she would have said if she were alive in our buzzfeed and dailymail times.

Go back and look at archives of old newspapers. Seems like any time I read an old newspaper article, say from the 60s, I spot more grammatical mistakes than say a given Buzzfeed or Daily Mail article.

Not in India, it wasn’t..the English was impeccable. Newspapers was how so many people who didn’t go to school brushed up and learnt English grammar and spelling.

When you are 45 and have 3 kids..and as a housewife have never learnt English..a newspaper lying around was great reading material in the afternoons between cooking and cleaning. And it was cheap..almost free. Self paced language lessons!

Tech-parent here (if you can call me that!) I have a 9 and 4yo. My 9yo watches youtube since she was 2 (on normal restricted mode) I have been teaching my kids (especially the older one) to identify by herself what is quality content that you can learn from Vs what is just dopamine inducing click bait. I think it is delusional to think you are achieving anything by blocking youtube. The earlier you teach your kids to create their own filters the better. They will be exposed to it at some point anyway. My kid learned a lot of stuff by herself already on you-tube. How to draw, how to braid her hair, its really an empowering thing for kids. I wish i had youtube when I was a kid. It just enables them to learn by seeing and imitating, except they are not limited to what they see at school or at home. She already has a great sense of what is a shit video full of non-sense or what might be violent or inappropriate for her and polices herself to stop watching straight away. (obviously there is some supervision involved. She is not allowed to watch yt on the infrequent occasions she is home alone).

The other day we were researching something on wikipedia together for one of her homework assignments and i closed a browser tab by accident, she immediately turned and pressed Ctrl+Shift+T. I asked her how did she learn that. You guessed it, on youtube. One day she was drawing on a online drawing app and she closed the tab by accident and was really upset about loosing the drawing she had made, so she went on youtube and searched how to recover lost tabs.

> kids with computer access at home can work on them at home

More than once, my kids have been required to print something out, often in color. I have a crappy inkjet printer, but the quality is so bad that I've taken their assignments and printed them out at Staples a few times.

Taking a moment to proselytize on the value of color laser printers. They're well worth the investment. Inkjet printers are one of the greatest sources of human misery.

Except for the toxic toner-dust laser printers emit.

My kids school allows them to take the Chromebook home. But until now class assignments have always been written assignments. They have "modules" which they do at school, not at home. There were a couple of days where it just got to be too much screen time. I've banned opening the Chromebook at home. It doesn't go up to their room. Allowing them to take the Chromebook home isn't a healthy idea. Too many downsides, I haven't seen a single upside.

To me, de-emphasizing handwriting seems like going with the times, where handwriting is getting more and more rare. Likewise, if spellcheck is always on in the real world, is correct spelling without it still as important as it was 50 years ago?

Society changes. Remember how we were taught that we need to know how to do math on paper because we won't always be carrying a calculator? Nowadays, it may be useful to learn it just to understand the principles behind the math, but it's a lot more useful to learn how to effectively use the calculators (and potential CAS) that we are all carrying in our pockets than to learn how to perform long division on paper.

(Long division in particular seems like one of those skills that contribute little to understanding the principles behind it and are unnecessary nowadays).

In school, I was taught how to write with various implements - had to write some things with a fountain pen, which is a 100% useless skill. A complete waste of time. What I wasn't taught is how to effectively use a keyboard, because school was too obsessed teaching us how to write with ancient instruments just because they were seen as morally superior to the easier to use modern pens.

But handwriting is important not only for the exact skill, but because it is one of the most demanding fine-movement we will ever do - missing out/not properly learning that in an age where we are truly plastic to it both mentally AND physically - I really do believe - will cause at least a big generational difference , at most rendering certain currently mundane tasks impossible for younger people.

In Japan they don't use any computers etc until a much older age in school; interestingly much of that stems from a worry of hindering a student's ability to write kanji.

Having dabbled in kanji, my initial assumption is that such a worry is justified. With English you have 60 or so characters you need to know how to write, many near duplicates (X vs x, U vs u). Kanji is far more numerous and also seems to have a more artistic emphasis.

Yeah, the worry's pretty unambiguously justified; even today, native speakers sometimes just forget how to write words they know. It's just a question of how much it matters.

Hi there! Unfortunately (or fortunately), they DO use computers in schools in Japan now. Albeit not like handing out Chromebooks, but there is computer classes and computer time. In Middle school, I believe there is a small push to use iPads and the like on occasion.

So, there is SOME use, but not like a Chromebook for everyone (Thank heavens!)

-- JD in JP

- spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you?

I wonder if over time you absorb the information anyways. Also, spell-check telling you there's an error isn't the same as automatically fixing the errors and hiding that there was ever an issue... so I think the right click/see list of likely words / pick one is still a learning process.

- The de-emphasis on handwriting is mentioned in the article. In-class assignments are still handwritten, but take-home projects can be typed.

I'm 30 and my handwriting is getting much worse unless I deliberately try to write perfectly. It's wild. Sometimes I don't write anything by hand for months at a time.

> Also, spell-check telling you there's an error isn't the same as automatically fixing the errors and hiding that there was ever an issue... so I think the right click/see list of likely words / pick one is still a learning process.

Here in Quebec we got a spellcheck that I sadly only learned about after high school (though it still helped me so much) called Antidote. They not only tell you what's wrong, but also why it's wrong and trick to avoid that mistake. It's in French though, they do have an English version, but I'm not sure if it's as good. It's spell checking is also much better than the one from Word (though again, French may be the issue here)

spellcheck can't fix things like "their" and "there", many people autocorrect/spellcheck the wrong word in.

It certainly can, either by detecting the sentence structure, or even more simply, by tagging them all as warning. You then go over them one by one and it can remind you of the difference and ask you whether you used the right one.

> - spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you?

Why is this a problem? Augmented spelling isn't bad, and you still have to know the differences between similar correctly spelt words. Learning Chinese, I de-empahsized writing them by hand and being able to write them on computer instead, you still need to know about them, what they look like and how they sound, but the muscle memory isn't necessary.

> - The de-emphasis on handwriting is mentioned in the article. In-class assignments are still handwritten, but take-home projects can be typed.

As a lefty I would have loved this. Our handwriting is already worse because our hand is occluding what we are writing. I got plenty of flack for it in elementary school (to the point that some teachers thought I should I should use my "right" hand instead). The computer was a great equalizer to me, which is one of the reasons I got into them in the first place.

As for the screen time issue, I'm more worried about their eye health, but ya, it is an issue all of us parents are facing these days.

> The computer was a great equalizer to me

It was an even greater equalizer to me, as a legally blind person. I can see enough to handwrite, but it's laborious. When I was in the third grade, my mother convinced my teachers to let me do as much of my homework as possible on my family's home computer. And sometimes I could do in-class assignments on a computer as well, either in the regular classroom or in the special room for the blind students. I wish we had had ubiquitous laptops back then (late 80s and into the 90s).

As another lefty, I don't see the issue, unless you write with a "hook hand." I hold the pen (pencil, etc.) as a right-handed person would, just mirrored. I've even done both European and Chinese calligraphy left handed (much to the amusement of the Chinese calligraphy teacher, but for European calligraphy, I have to turn the paper 90° to the right).

I don't see how your hand occludes what you're writing. It occludes what you've already written. But you've already written that bit, and you can move your hand if you really need to see it.

Maybe we should go back to what the Ancient Egyptians did and allow people to write in whatever direction they like!

It includes what you have written and much of what you are writing, you are basically writing your character blind. Writing in straight lines is especially problematic on whiteboards (which these days is an interviewing handicap).

> Plus the last thing my kid needs is more screentime. I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.

I don't think that is necessarily the best approach - it get's the job done with regard to YouTube, but there is some derrived effect they're missing. I don't think problem is that children watch funny, but ultimately meaningless videos. That give them basis for a social life with their peers. The way I see it, the problem is when they do it too much. What I've done is limit the the available screen time for them. They can do what they want with that time they're allotted, but beyond that it's for homework or hobbies (drawing, guitar, programming, ect.). They learn to prioritize with they available screen time.

> - spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you?

I don't have an answer to that question. At least, not a better one than than some vague "it will build character." Do you have another answer in mind?

Something I've been wondering about is the effect of typewriters and word processors on the development of penmanship. Has the average penmanship of a highschool graduate improved or declined with the proliferation of these technologies in schools? Has anybody researched this matter? I have my suspicions, but they're only suspicions.

Supposing it got worse though, would that matter? Maybe the dexterity/coordination skills are transferable. But if that's the case, has that manifested in any apparent way? And if not, does it really matter?

I think penmanship as an art is basically dead.

Yes, kids still work on improving their handwriting, but only insofar as it's legible.

I actually think this started out with the death of fountain pens, although computers likely contributed. We might be witnessing the death of connected writing.

> Plus the last thing my kid needs is more screentime. I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.

And you don't have to, there's youtube-dl, finding the right level material is another story though.

I can't agree about poor families being at a special disadvantage here. It's true that a computer costs more than paper and pencils, but families being too poor to afford a cheap chromebook is not a problem inherent in education. It's more of an indicator of a bad state of society. Of course, educators have to work within existing limits, but I wouldn't use it as a criticism of the idea.

Besides, kids from poor families are probably already disadvantaged in more significant ways, like not having too much time with their parents, since they have to work longer.

> The videos are more about funny jokes than the different phases of matter.

I learn so much better when I'm interested in what I learn, making it funny can be a good way to learn it.

> I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.

Can you explain that one a bit more? Do you expect your kid to always do productive work? Is being productive is all you think matters in life?

There's no reasonable correlation between spelling and higher intelligence. It can be a proxy for minimum intelligence, absent other information, but that's about all.

Who said anything about intelligence? Spelling is a critical component of effective written communication.

That also means students using spellcheck is not necessarily a problem, so long as they can communicate effectively in writing.

Spellchecking isn’t always available.

I used to work in a job that involved access to severely restricted information.

We weren’t allowed to use conventional computer. No access to spellcheckers.

And we were rigorously assesses for spelling, because our reports had a very wide audience.

Knowing how to write well without software support is still a skill required on our world.

Education has many goals and one of them is to teach them spelling. The fact that fourth grade homework is spelled correctly does not matter at all - the goal is not to produce correctly spelled homework.

Of they don't have to memorize random spellings it could free up mental resources for other things.

Regardless, why be stuck in the past with things like handwriting or spelling or cursive?

If you're a programmer, does your editor perform spellcheck for you? Mine certainly doesn't.

It's utterly bizarre to me that people in this thread are seriously suggesting that spelling is an obsolete skill.

You don't think it would be embarrassing to be standing at a whiteboard at work and be unable to spell basic words?

It won't be embarrassing if no one else in the room can spell better than you. (I once had a Chinese professor forget how to write a certain character while writing on the blackboard. He just laughed it off.)

It's also not clear to me that spellcheck will lead to people forgetting how to spell, since it's all about notifying you of spelling mistakes.

So we should study things so we don't get embarrassed? Moving on are you embarrassed because you don't know how to swordfight or any other outdated skills?

That's begging the question. It's not an outdated skill if there are situations you need it! If I couldn't spell the things I were writing on the board in tutorials, it would quite reasonably look like I have no idea what I'm doing. Not a great look.

I think in the entirety of my 16 years as a student, I probably wrote less than 100 words total on blackboards or whiteboards. There weren't computers or ipads in those classrooms either.

Whiteboards are something I use more often at work these days, but not really when I was in school.

Are you sure there’s no correlation between spelling and intelligence? Can you provide a source?

It’s counterintuitive that people with extremely low IQs aren’t more likely to make spelling mistakes.

> Kids from low income families are screwed over - again.

No matter what, there will be disadvantages, but it's not the end of the world. At least they have less screentime at home right?

> Tech parents are always like "f yea, of course you block youtube"

"Always"? I highly doubt that. Actually, I bet most tech parents guide their kids on which youtube channels to watch because most tech parents watch youtube.

> I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.

They are kids. Why are you concerned about 'productive' work. Sounds like you are dealing with a company and employees rather than a family and kids.

Calm down. Everything will be okay. People really do turn into their parents.

> spellcheck is always on, why learn real spelling when the computer fixes it for you?

The computer immediately shows spelling errors and corrections, TEACHING correct spelling.

> The videos are more about funny jokes than the different phases of matter.

( youtube is a funny one. Non-there are many great youtube channels packed with scientific content, like Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Mark Rober, CGP Grey, VSauce, engineerguy, Physics Girl, Captain Disillusion, Mathologer, Numberphile, ...

> I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.

That's a parenting issue not a computer issue. Teach your kids what's allowed and what's not, and check their browser history until they learn how to manipulate it, then check your router logs

The main problem with ed tech is the extremely low quality of the apps the schools buy and make the kids use, not the computers and youtube themselves.

Most of those channels you mention aren't really teaching anything beyond general knowledge and trivia.

You could watch every video on every one of those channels and you might know a lot of random facts but it won't make you a physicist or a mathematician or a biologist.

>That's a parenting issue not a computer issue. Teach your kids what's allowed and what's not, and check their browser history until they learn how to manipulate it, then check your router logs

Ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. There are things I saw on the internet as a child that I still cannot unsee. My parents having seen that I saw them afterwards would not have changed that.

There is a lot of excellent inspiring youtube content (including well presented secondary and undergraduate level math and physics lectures) buried in mountains of dreck.

People can learn all sorts of useful things from youtube, but they can also easily waste huge amounts of time, become radicalized by extremists, ....

I'm not saying it can't be inspiring. I'm sure youtube videos about mathematics have inspired quite a few young people to pursue mathematics! They can foster an interest, inspire people to learn, etc. But that doesn't make them educational.

A video recording of the MIT OCW courses is absolutely educational.

Many science/technology focused YouTube channels absolutely produce educational content.

You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education.

I'm deeply sorry that you've struggled with bad things you saw on the internet. That can be a compelling reason to limit access. But that doesn't redefine education.

>there are many great youtube channels packed with scientific content, like Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Mark Rober, CGP Grey, VSauce, engineerguy, Physics Girl, Captain Disillusion, Mathologer, Numberphile, ...

That's what I was replying to. And those videos are not educational. They're 'interesting facts' or 'wow science is so coooooool!!!!!111 yeah science!!!11' channels.

>You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education.

Fun interesting facts are great for getting people interested in science, but they are not science! People coming away from a Mathloger video interested in maths? Brilliant. People coming away from a Mathloger video thinking they know maths? Not brilliant.

There are lots of university lectures, worked example problems, videos of people demonstrating and teaching every type of manual skill, .... on youtube

> those videos are not educational

This kind of thing is absolutely “educational” under any reasonable definition of the word https://youtu.be/0KjG8Pg6LGk https://youtu.be/8KmVDxkia_w https://youtu.be/Ku8BOBwD4hc https://youtu.be/k8Rxep2Mkp8 https://youtu.be/1VPfZ_XzisU https://youtu.be/IcrBqCFLHIY

Of course it’s not (and not supposed to be) a substitute for students working problems for themselves, running experiments, conducting interviews, doing research in the stacks, writing papers, writing code, putting each-others’ art through critique, or the like.

Nobody “comes away from a Mathologer video thinking they «know math»” (whatever that is supposed to mean).

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