What children lose when their brains develop too fast
wsj.com
wsj.com
I needed to worry about adult aspects of living when I was very young. I was focused on staying alive and didn't have the capacity to learn the way I could have.
My partner is a teacher and I can say, she is regularly working with kids, families and different support groups to try to help kids be in a place to actually learn.
More info in this can be found at:
https://developingchild.harvard.edu/media-coverage/take-the-...
There are other notable effects of a high ACES score and being on the older side myself, I can add my anecdotal comment that I fit comfortably into my score.
There is no pride to be had from dealing with stress
So a carefree life it is
Seems like a timeless tale for parents to try to make that environment for their children and then not be able to relate
I certainly don't think one should deliberately inflict stress on one's children, but I suspect experiencing brief mild adversity now and again helps to build resilience. I tend to veer on the side of trying to coach them through problems they encounter rather than using my powers as an adult to remove those problems.
When I’m around spiritual/hippie people, alot of them act like children, unadjusted for the demands of modern society, and I step back and think “why do I care?”. Mostly because they wont be able to adapt and execute well in other environments. But I can see a medium or balance that can be pursued as well.
One good reason to care is that adult children are an active liability in a functioning society:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwi... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-55957298 https://julesevans.medium.com/make-love-not-vaccines-why-are...
From the last link: "There is some evidence that people who have experienced childhood trauma are more likely to identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’. There’s also some evidence that people who have experienced trauma are likely to turn to spiritual practices and worldviews as a way of coping and recovering. That’s a good thing — but it makes some spiritual people prone to a spiky libertarianism if they feel judged, shamed or told what to do. In a triggered state, they divide people into Us versus Them, Light versus Darkness... Myths are useful sometimes, but if you always see the complexity of modern life through a Lord-of-the-Rings lens, you might not be much help to your culture."
Between noticing that and noticing that all the universe and energy talk is a proxy to shove Christianity down their throats, I find it strange and wonder if it is deliberate. Like many of the most obvious practioners will begin with being distinct from organized religion, offering a belief systems with no deity and the connectness of nature, but then get their followers with Christianity later. Clever, contrived.
Edit: from your third article
> “The other religious group that scores high in science-scepticism and anti-vaccine sentiment is white evangelicals.”
Okay there it is, thats because its the same people.
As far as research, I have yet to find anything that supports positive outcomes to significant adversity.
Evidence cited shows kids need diverse experience. That's very different.
Mistakes of the first kind should be celebrated, mistakes of the second should be harshly scorned.
Unfortunately, as I remember most of my classmates in school (lower, upper, and especially university) the vast majority of mistakes were made in #2.
I don't know what the school system can do about this. How can you differentiate between the two with the information available to instructors?
I think the bigger problem is that '100%' is often the goal, yet it is far from optimal; get students out of the 'all or nothing' mindset, so they don't become cynical.
The other nine points were for the steps, and, indeed, were a hint that there were probably ten distinct steps (although usually you could combine several steps and still get full marks so long as it was clear).
Among other things, this also allowed for error-carried-forward: if you made a stupid arithmetic error on step 3, and all your subsequent steps had the wrong values, you would only lose one point, though your final answer was completely wrong.
This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work."
get an answer right = +1 point
get an answer wrong = -2 point via subtracting the number of wrong answers from the right answers.
so the plan that was advised is if you are not 100% sure of the answer then dont answer, and you only lose 1 point for not answering
I know the answer is absurd, but I don't know where I went wrong.It's pretty important to be able to recognize if you fat-fingered a calculator and got something ridiculous or not.
Random point or two? As an American I think it was usually worth most of the points for the math I did...
But this is still aiming for 100%. Being challenged is dangerous to your grade.
Do you know of any basic theories about it or places I could read more?
My problem is that I remember seeing lots of different attempts to motivate students while I was in school (every teacher had a different approach), and I never saw one that worked at all beyond "If you don't do this I will punish you." (bad grades, principles office, some formal punishment system)
Motivation issues probably need to be worked out individually with each kid, which to be fair is not really possible for a teacher with 20 students in their class. But fear and punishments are at best just a band-aid for the problem. At worst, they can ruin a kid’s self-image and cause them to give up on school entirely.
I’m speaking from my own personal experience mainly, and what I saw happen to friends while growing up.
It also helps if the teacher is genuinely passionate about the subject taught. And knows way more than is in the curriculum so he can go on weird tangents and answer curveball questions.
Oh and keeping difficulty just right. Not so easy that it is boring, but not so hard that it makes students despair.
Learning is a need to for both. The body needs to learn how to breathe, digest, poop, etc. Joy is a need for thriving. It also boosts learning.
There's an issue that arises here with common issues around "motivating kids to learn," which is this implies people need to be given some form of incentive to learn, when the truth is the brain is always learning. It may not be learning the content being taught, but it's at least definitely learning from the way the content's being taught. The issue here is that autonomy is a need and modern schooling seems to be focused on dictating to people what to learn. This is a systemic denial of autonomy. As a result, the learning environment is already suboptimal. And if someone already suffers from a chronic denial of autonomy (like, say, in a society that doesn't value empowering children to do what they want and/or in a family that also doesn't, or supports empowerment within a very limited set of constraints, all of which are common situations for most young people in the US), then the system is ensuring learning the curriculum will be severely hindered for those people.
People learn faster when they choose their options. Choosing from an arbitrarily constrained list of subjects isn't the same thing. And chronic need denial harms the learning process, so if you want people to learn what they need to survive and thrive, ask them what they want to learn next and help them learn about that thing and tie the exploration back to needs.
And if you don't know what the mathematically proven universal human needs are, welcome to the dystopia. We currently don't have such a list and I'm hoping category theorists or constructor theorists develop it soon. In the meantime, there are many different lists online promoting different needs. One that's seemingly been forgotten from many of them is the need for memory, so remember to figure out a process for uncovering hidden needs. I choose to follow suffering to see what the underlying needs are there and seeing if the suffering goes away after meeting those needs. If not, there may be a hidden need at play.
Please don't be a parent.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29617722 also.
I kinda agree with you on this one, but I don't agree with you on the thread re: diabetes. Some sentiments are harming people, right now, and not being allowed to call them out seems wrong to do. If this was also about the name of the person, I just picked the name that they had on their HN profile.
Either way. Apologies to you for creating more mod-work-load. I'll keep this in mind and I'd like not to get banned either.
If you slip into the flamewar style and/or the online callout-shaming culture, you won't reduce harm. You'll only provoke and reinforce the people who disagree, and the resulting conflagration won't help undecided people decide. Worse, you run the risk of discrediting your own position, and if your position happens to be a correct one, that actually causes harm in its own right, because it somehow ends up discrediting the truth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
So happily, I would say, the cause of not having flamewars, of sticking to the site guidelines, and of giving the truth the best possible advocacy, more or less coincide. That doesn't make it easy. It's far from easy, but that's because it's hard to handle the emotional torque it places on you when someone else is saying something that is (or that you feel is) totally wrong on a topic. Where by "you" I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us.
You might not mean it but to me this implies that things were better in the past. You don’t have to go back very far at all to find completely alarming and abusive methods used in schooling. It might have a way to go but it’s also come quite a long way in quite a short time.
My grandfather tells my daughter about going to school and being beaten by the teacher for making mistakes.
I'm sure it's possible to get a grade lower than an A, but you have to try really hard. My daughter didn't turn in a single assignment on time in 7th grade, and what she did turn in was honestly pretty crappy for every subject except math. Lowest grade was an A-.
As soon as she is old enough we plan on making sure she gets a job; weird to say this, but I hope she gets fired for showing up late.
This is of course is a bit different for retail or blue collar work. It's kind of ironic that as you get payed more, the more you can get a way with.
My first exposure to this was during my first serious internship. On my first day, I was in a meeting of a dozen large banks and everyone was supposed to have completed a task so that we could move on. My bank had not completed the task, so I was expecting a lecture from the others in the group.
Maybe two companies had done it. The rest were split between halfway done and "oh, that was for today?"
In my life as a dev, work that runs over just gets shipped in the next sprint. That feature you have needs a tad more work? Move it from sprint 7 to 8.
Something can be delayed with prior notice, but that’s a lesson in and of itself.
Saying "if you get this wrong now, in the future when you do X you'll have trouble" is completely unmotivating.
My first W2 job was grunt landscaping work. It was pretty motivating to get an education.