“Fun disabled by administrator” (2015)
bugs.chromium.org
bugs.chromium.org
On the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is the mentality that would ban pencils because they can be used to scribble drawings instead of paying attention to class.
To butcher up a Montessori quote: it is an interesting piece of work that grabs a child's concentration. Not rules.
Too many schools just end up with this mindset that the kids HAVE to listen in class, and in order for them to, we just have to somehow force them by removing ANY alternative thing they could be doing, that way they will have no choice.
And those same people wonder why the kids say school feels like prison.
Trying to make successful educational media on the same playing field is hopeless. For one thing, the resources for doing that don't exist. For another, kids can instantly perceive that something "educational" is going to be slightly more boring than something purely entertaining and addictive. The playing field can't be leveled.
Third, we're really not helping them by reinforcing that the only way to learn is to be saturated in addictive media content.
Disclaimer: I'm not sure education was ever all that great, but there were people sincerely trying to make it better.
A generation back this would have been minesweeper and solitaire. These are all boring games.
Further back students would just be doodling in their notebooks. And they still do.
These are not highly entertaining activities with which you can't compete.
But at some point people need to learn how to put themselves through boring mindnumbing stuff as well, because this will sometimes be part of what you need to do if you wanna reach your goals (e.g. reading the datasheets, reading some specification, looking at some source text that hasn't been simplified to digestive bits by someone else, gather boring data that is needed, ...).
In my subjective observation students over the past 10 years have become less willing to put in mental footwork themselves if there is not an entertaining youtube video that lays it out for them. I work in art university, so most of the topics people will work on are entirely their own choice. But if e.g. a student wants to work with electronics, they would rather try to mimik what some guy in some youtube video did for a year (without understanding it at all), than grabbing a foundational book and work through it over the course of a month.
The latter is less instant reward and more boring work, but pays off for a long time and will allow them to judge what makes sense and what is bullshit. The former feels like the direct solution, but will leave you coming back for help whenever you deviate from that precise solution someone else made.
I have nothing against entertaining education at all, I just think that for many being able to go through the boring stuff (on their own terms) might be a valuable ability as well. And this is not about the media at all. The above example with the foundational electronics book would have worked as well if they have chosen to watch a foundational series of youtube videos as well. But these videos are not leading directly to the result.
I have seen single students who have fooled around for years with try and error in electronics without ever having the idea to learn the basics..
Do they have "boring week" at Montessori's?
In general, I would split the current volume of basic education into smaller subjects (with many optionals) and finer levels, and have students to make a choice how fast they want to complete them (as long as they would work towards one of these goals).
OK, really, do you want to be stuck with boring and bad textbooks and teachers to drive home the lesson, that some things are just not fun and have to be done anyways?
This can and will be done at home: brushing teeth, bathing, put on clothes, bring out the trash, wash dishes. I have a whole bag of not fun things for my kids to do, that are not fun but have to be done anyways. Turst me, they don't need it in school too. Let learning be fun.
Sorry to be lazy to not look it up, but I thought it was an interesting take on gamifying learning.
The only thing close in college was profs who would let you test out of classes, and work on a self study project for the class, I loved that.
Medication and therapy are expensive. It doesn't always work. If it works, it might not work well. If it works at all, there are often side effects. Getting into therapy is hard. Finding a therapist you click with once you get through all the hoops is even harder. Sticking with each step of the process when you have a disorder that makes sticking to things hard is hilarious once you think about it.
And so on.
People hearing the same thing over and over can be annoying to some, but for others it’s the only thing that’ll really get through a lot of our skulls and get us to try something different.
Doctors here are not aware of other medications and so I just smoke weed by the truckload :-)
Formulations with longer dose/release profiles exist - Concerta XR and Elvanse/Vyvanse are the same active stimulant (methylphenidate), but spread over the course of ~12 hours.
Personally I've found that Concerta has a ramping up and ramping down, with peak effects kicking in around 4 hours, whereas Elvanse kicked in relatively quickly at the same constant level.
Having to take ritalin (and adderall) multiple times a day with the risk of crashing in between sounds like a nightmare, and I'm glad at least here in the UK one of the first thing psychiatrists suggest trying is low dosages of the longer-acting methylphenidate derivatives.
It takes a lot of messing around with different meds and formulations to find one that works for you. It's like incredibly individual/personal; people seem to have wildly different responses to the different families of stimulants, different dosages, different delivery methods, different times of day etc etc. Takes a lot of educated effort.
It really sucks how it's so damn variable between countries or even within countries - national policies on ADHD meds and amount of knowledge your average doctor has in each country on those meds. Wildly and unhelpfully variable.
I've had Concerta, Medikinet and plain Methylphenidate and they all feel the same to me, it's the same chemical after all. Feels horribly nasty and I didn't find all the variables to make much of a difference unfortunately.
The substances that I feel have the most promise unfortunately have an uphill battle in terms of acceptance. Quite hard to find material about how psychedelics relate to ADHD.
It can take care of most of the mindnumbing work.
let’s file a bug to get the dinosaur back
It's very easy to construct examples where its summaries, while they look correct, either miss some crucial point or are outright incorrect.
(I've not done a systematic all-subject study; this is based on the comments I've seen from experts in a mere handful of domains, plus my own knowledge in my own domain).
"""Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”""" - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
It would be an ironically Greek tragedy, if the end of human civilisation were to be caused by a (written) language model, especially given how many Κασσάνδρα-analogs we have had from (given this hypothetical outcome) Socrates to Yudkowsky.
For example I read many, many scientific papers in college and they were all very boring. I feel like the big take away was how to deal with this type of communication medium which was dense, verbose and contextual. I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.
What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well crafted sources?
It would be great to raise the floor of educational material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work through some noise to find the signal.
Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it".
For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path.
Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space.
It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow.
I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff".
Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.
I work through boredom not because I like boredom and not because it's "foundational" to somebody else, but because that's the only way for me to accomplish a goal. So to the extent that somebody's particular work still requires it, I think we're going to have to find new ways to structure things to bring that experience forward in time for them.
I think the other option is to restructure things so that being bored is even less necessary. For example, the common way to think about "foundational" concepts is to structure education with a lot of boring and apparently pointless stuff up front, the promise being that it will pay off later. To me that looks like privileging the convenience and perspective of the instructor over that of the student. Can we instead swap it around so that "fundamentals" are taught in slices in close relation to purposeful activity?
As to the Montessori question, I think it depends on your understanding of boredom. My understanding is that as the student gets older, they take on larger and larger projects, so they learn how to deal with the sort of boring that comes from purposeful hard work, but not the sort of boredom that comes with blindly following authority. To me those feel pretty different, and I might more accurately call the first "tedious" rather than boring.
Framing is important, and there is a huge difference when approaching something with the attitude of "toleration" compared to "determination". The value in the skill of determination, is the realisation that with it, many things can become intrinsically more interesting and rewarding the more work you put in. When you find something that clicks and try hard at it you can end up in a feedback loop, and this is the sweet spot you want everyone to find in life.
Suggesting that hard work should only be tolerated is not a fruitful path to put people on - sure some things in society like filling out paper work are inherently boring, and unfortunately the realty of current systematised education is kind of similar, but ironically nether match the reality most real cognitive or skilful work.
Perhaps this sounds more like a romantic ideal than something practical - I get that in the reality of current school environments it seems like a hopelessly subtle idea to convey in the hurricane of the massive curriculum you are trying to get them to absorb - However, ideas and wisdom can have a much longer lasting effect on a student's life than what may as well be ephemeral knowledge at that age. I think the least a teacher can do is to encourage students whenever they see a spark of interest, it doesn't matter whether or not it looks "useful" or is even tangentially part of the curriculum, because you can learn the value in the skill of determination by learning to doing anything substantially difficult, and it's a surprisingly transferable mindset.
... But regardless of this framing, to be fair to the rest of your comment which I agree with, the real contender is the new reality of the short attention span, ruined by entertainment. Even as an adult who has long learned the rewards in this skill find it being eroded if I am not careful.
I had my septum deviated for doing similar to the above in Word 97 in the 2000s.
Must be nice to do things the way you describe, but unfortunately the process you go through in America to become a K12 teacher basically snags the sociopaths too intelligent to be cops and gives them a steady stream of narcissistic supply.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
Thing is, I suspect most people in general aren't like that. They just sort of exist, not knowing what they even want to learn or try to avoid learning if at all possible. You can see this very clearly in university students that pick prof given bachelor thesis titles by what seems easiest vs. those that come up with their own. Or just school project work in general.
There is a saying about this: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
So what if there are people like that? It is not like everyone must learn. If they don’t want to they don’t have to.
These two are very different contexts.
Which is a completely fair point.
The whole thread seems a lot like "concern trolling" to me. Every ChromeOS administrator knows kids can go to a website to play games, or type one into the Javascript console, but act outraged that there's a tiny easter egg in a web browser. "They're going to make us get rid of the Chromebooks if you don't turn this off!!!!11" Uh huh. I'm sure the taxpayers will want to throw away a couple million dollars worth of laptops because if you turn WiFi off you can play with a little dinosaur.
I found an RSS feed of proxy servers and their addresses. So I wrote a VB6 app that would pull it, set the registry key for a proxy server, open the embeddable browser in the background, and time how long it takes to load a bunch of popular sites. It would iterate through the list of servers, and finally settle on the server that had the fastest load times. When you closed the program, it would set the registry key back.
At the time, autorun.ini was still a thing. All of my friends had flash drives that would "turn off" the firewall when they plugged them in.
I was a young teenager. If you think you can stop a determined kid from bypassing your rules, you're fighting the wrong battle.
"If you think you can stop a determined kid" is trivializing the matter. Your average child will spend 24 hours a day melting their brain on TikTok. Not reading the ancient tomes of programmers gone by on how to better automate their bypasses. Your example actually demonstrates in a roundabout way that it's not there to stop determined adversaries who are likely self-driven enough to learn anyway. A certain, largely average, cohort of students do not have this ability, will never possess this ability, and will likely with much effort pass with middling grades. These people are highly susceptible to failing when distractions are introduced. Stopping them should be priority number 1 in any school district worth their salt.
I really regret the number of things we're allowed to casually refer to as "harm". That word used to be significant to me but now carries very little weight, manifesting instead as inconvenience, frustration, or, in this case, distraction.
One of the definitions of harm is: "actual or potential ill effect or danger"
This does have a potential ill effect: students playing games instead of following along with the lesson.
The teacher isn't being harmed, but the student's education is being harmed.
If teachers can be so boring that the t-rex game outcompetes them for the attention of students then the problem is teachers not the game.
I understand that not al teachers can be like Richard Feynman or Tatiana Erukhimova or Walter Lewin but surely we should expect them to be better than the t-rex game.
Many schools have wardens instead of teachers.
The only class that might be able to be made more interesting is English. The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are both snoozefests. But for other subjects the idea of "creating engagement" is more difficult. People seem to think children possess the foresight they do even though they are adults. In middle school, most of the time you can just say "this will get better in a few years if you do well here". Children lack a sense of delayed gratification. Hence the popularity of PE as a subject (aside from the health benefits) or music classes relative to other classes. Funny enough, the modern adult (still a child) also tends to lack this ability. There's nothing wrong with these classes intrinsically. They just provide an "instant" dopamine hit a developing brain is hardwired to understand.
Not everyone can afford to send their kids to a "montessori" school to have some avante garde teaching method keep them "engaged". For the rest of us, learning how to cope with something boring will be an extremely useful life skill the second you enter the real world.
School, as it currently exists, may be boring. I remember being bored out of my mind; that didn't necessarily need to be so though. Many teachers read out of our books and could explain little else beyond the content of the book. I hated maths and Spanish as a result. Many of the teachers attracted to these subjects aren't the kind of people who should be teaching kids. Meanwhile, when I learned Chemistry I learned more about maths than I could've ever dreamed and I was captivated.
As an adult I relearned a lot of that math to succeed as a programmer and it was fun. I think, largely, we fail to meet students where they are with respect to their education. We shove everything down their throats on our schedule rather than the pace in which they can build on these subjects. The result is boredom derivative of disenchantment.
I'm not even sure what your point about Montessori education is. The teachers do not make it special. The method is what's special, which is that pace is dictated by the pupil.
> No, you can't leave the table until you eat your vegetables.
> No, you can't go play until your chores are done.
It's interesting how strongly people feel about a basic little game.
(full disclosure, I work at Google but I've never had to deal with upset teachers and upset children arguing in bugs assigned to me)
There are ways to get companies to actually pay attention to you; a good place to start is sending registered mail to an executive in a way that looks like you might be a lawyer. patio11 has more advice on this.
The ticket is literally about distraction - the kid intends to do work, the game is literally placed in the middle and the kid forgets what was original goal. 100% normal for kids and I would not blamed neither them nor teachers.
Basically, portraying rules (that are to your disadvantage) as some kind of laws of nature. So for instance:
"To continue, you need to install the app".
Instead of
"We're not letting you read more of this since we think you're webbrowsing this on mobile and want you to install our app"
Quite often we're indeed being lied to as if we're little children.
But in this exceptional case, the "Fun disabled by administrator", it's frank! That must be because its this third party, the "administrator", which is to blame for the restriction. Were it google themselves setting the rules of the game, they would probably not frame it in the same way.
> We've actively worked on making the website a worse experience than the app
e.g. by constantly nagging you do download the app
https://codereview.chromium.org/977323003
is bad - because it gives an error message stating the owner has disabled the dinosaur game, but gates the game just based on whether the device is enrolled. The owner has not explicitly disabled the game, nor has any way to reenable it, as the message suggests; google has.
Nothing is better for education than pupils thinking they are gaming when they are really learning useful stuff.
Later, when we got home, I asked him what he'd done and he let me know that he learned that if he turned-off WiFi via the physical button on the tablet, dino game would appear in the browser. Naturally, he showed his friends, and they all made the great decision to play the game in class.
The next morning, I dropped him off a little early so he could show the teacher how to access the game and how to turn WiFi back on.
I was struggling with this as well the first time I wanted to look inside an Electron app.
(Also that the change stopped the fun for Googlers that had enrolled devices as well. Is that still true?)
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=471738
[2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221...
so this is what working at google is like huh
I doubt the effectiveness of turning off this game, kids will be distracted either way. Does it really matter if they play the dinosaur game or stare out of the window?
Which should be illegal. If the parents have to pay for a Chromebook, then the parents should have final control over it, not the school district.
Come to think of it, though, he did write a primitive choose-your-own-adventure on the calculator.
To me, this seems like trying to making the entire environment more boring than the already-boring lesson/teacher in the vain hope that this will lead to magical goodness.
Anecdata: I had almost exclusively schools with huge walls of windows, and the 'distraction' of the outside world was all that made some of my lessons bearable. Mind-numbing boredom is not a paved road to teaching me and getting me to retain much. I definitely observed and received correction for excessive distraction sometimes. This also happened in classrooms that had no interesting views. For me, the more dull and utilitarian the classroom, the more likely I'll spend the class time reading ahead in the literature book, writing about other topics in my notebook, or drawing. Trying to "remove distractions" instead of livening up the course material may be…pessimal.
If teachers are so boring such that the majority of students are turning to a dinosaur game, then the lesson is already not going to be learned. Might as well just give them a pamphlet and tell them to study for the test, as that is what is basically happening anyways but with more timing flexibility.
If it is only a minority of students doing the dinosaur game, then they will turn to something else anyways. Thus the blanket policy it implements according to other commenters just ruins it for others.
But anyway I thought it was going to be some hitherto-unknown Linux command line tool called `fun` that was sudo only.
Seems like a fun thing to teach, at least for a few years, teaching kids skills via projects.