TikTok is the bane of my existence working with middle schoolers
twitter.com
twitter.com
I've talked to some high schoolers that go to the same school recently and it's nothing like when I went. All of the exterior doors are now locked with passcodes, everyone is very closely surveilled, most of the exciting electives have been cut or are on the chopping block, and if you're late to class the teacher is supposed to lock you out and you have to report back to the office.
I can hardly blame kids for taking every spare second to look at their phones. What a nightmare. I'm expecting my first child soon and I'm definitely not sending them to full-time school.
At least in the recent past Americans had large families and civic organizations like churches to expose children to normal social structures. Today we are losing even those, and age-segregated schooling is the dominant mode of socialization for children.
Ah, right. The way they are designed.
Like you say though, there's no real alternative. I wish there was something else with widespread adoption.
Lots to think about here.
Also, speaking delicately, a lot of poorly-socialized homeschooled children have poorly-socialized parents, and were doomed from the start. I am gregarious and involved in many different social circles (athletics, music, engineering, etc.) and should be able to expose my kids pretty thoroughly to them.
Home schooling isn’t for everyone and not everyone has the means (lots of ferrying around kids between activities as well as the time needed to educate, basically it’s a unpaid full time job and many families require those hours spent generating an income to survive) but the image of home schooled kids being unsocialised is pretty much a myth.
I never really enjoyed school or authority after primary school, but I certainly wouldn't call it a nightmare. It was quite fine and I learnt things that I found interesting then, and others that I find useful now. I'm not sure having the exit doors open during class would have improved anything.
Anyway, I just wanted to give my experience because even though we have probably experienced high school in different countries, in my experience it has not gotten more boring than it used to be. And in the country where I live, it's also very different from how it was in mine when I was a kid.
These days that same school has a full-on photography studio, modern computers, an actual computing course, multiple extra language courses, bigger and significantly better equipped classrooms all around. Just better in every conceivable way.
And they're no more surveilled than we were.
In almost all cases, home-schooled kids are significantly worse-off. Both in terms of attainment and social development. You are not going to be an exception to that.
Let's leave aside his absurd assertion that this single fact is meaningful (it's probably not true, and it's probably not important either).
So what does this guy do, what does he aspire to? He's basically a thought leader. The middle aged equivalent of a teenage girl dancing on tiktok.
I was going to make a joke about how I wanted to be a ninja when I was a kid, and how clearly unlikely that is, but as an adult I do actually commonly see job openings for ninjas. (Okay, I guess it's actually a joke anyway, just not the one I thought of initially.)
The content being promoted, and the social "skills" and interactions originating from social media, are more prevalent and much, much less useful than someone wanting to play sax or act.
> 80% of my students want to be social media influencers when they grow up (despite having very poor social skills), and the other 20% have never given it any thought.
The numbers are made up, so I wouldn't expect that there's significance in the spread. My point is that the the teacher almost exclusively sees two groups: one who takes the option in vogue, and one who hasn't thought about it. To me, this suggests that something approaching 100% of their students have given this little to no thought, which jives with my experience at that age.
I think we'd agree that this is a minor point and doesn't really take away from the conclusion drawn in the tweet.
Sadly, the pay equivalence of all those actions (on median: minimal with the occasionally lottery ticket winner to keep the pipeline primed) suggests that society views them as equally non-useful.
Every new media in history has had harms and benefits. Saying things are harmless is just as dangerous as yelling it's the end of the world.
Give all ~15-year-olds a day-long standardized test. The test is mostly a bunch of boring "do lots of not-hard math", "read dull stuff & kinda understand it", etc. Kids are encouraged to bring their phones - but can't use them in any way that plausibly amounts to cheating on the test.
Kids with good scores on the test get admitted to high school. Ones with not-so-good scores (whether really dim, horribly prepared, or too addicted to their cell phones to pay attention) go to a menial labor training camp. Where they get to post pictures of the ditches they're learning to dig, potatoes they're learning to harvest, bathroom fixtures they're learning to clean, etc. all over their social media accounts.
[0] The internet tells me that most American kids have mobile phones by age 7.
I think it's worth thinking about ways in which new media formats are or are not different from old ones, and how that might offer new ways to ruin the youth. For example, comic books cost money, so you're naturally limited in how many you can buy. 1940s through 2000s - era TV/video games require you to be in front of a TV, vs having a handheld device which is accessible 24/7 regardless of where you are.
The thing preventing brain rot was the uncoordinated, decentralized nature of radio and TV stations. Once TV and radio became monopolies that could provide a unified message, the brain rot set in.
Why do you believe that the social media companies who are monopolies won't wind up the same?
Mom did not mince words about which one she thought was far better for the students - in spite of having a vastly lower per-student budget.
In my experience (as a student), what actually ends up happening is that students don't do the lectures, which leads to low engagement with the classwork. This also tends to punish people who fall behind, since class time is useless without doing the prerequisite material.
On the flip side, your ability to do homework with the teacher is limited by class size, which have to be large unless you can find a large supply of teachers and buildings to put them in. So what ends up happening is that you teach yourself, which is great if you're smart or talented enough to do that. But if you're not, it's very easy to fall behind and stay behind with this model.
Lots of students simply aren't mature enough or lack the disciple/interest to do a flipped classroom - and this will apply to any online education as well. Tech isn't going to magically change education, sadly, at least not the way we conceive of it now.
There are traditional ways of motivating student, a combination of carrot and stick.
But yeah its not been solved yet.
Edit: 30k tweets since joining in 2020 hmm...
My feeling is that all these cultural problems people complain about so often didn't really start with us. They started with our parents, or more likely with our grandparents. That's why they're so hard to fix, and so often the people calling out a problem are somewhat guilty of the problem themselves.
It's like a bunch of alcoholics admonishing the next one for drinking slightly more irresponsibly. When did people even start this? I don't think anyone can remember. We all know what needs to be done, but the vast majority of us can't do it ourselves.
Yeah this is some sort of subconscious cry for help, I'm pretty sure.
In August. Assuming it was August 1st that's 830 days or ~36 tweets a day (Using 29.6K tweet total). That's insane.
Impolite rhetoric detected: sarcasm
We have the data now. It’s better to structure entertainment in a socialized way. Too many people share stories tinged with survivorship bias.
Acronyms are kinda steamy nowadays too and kept in piles :p
<insert jeopardy theme here>
we can make a licensing regime and regulate content selection algorithms