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Ball And Chain To Force Children To Study

You haven't tried everything to get your kids to study until you've tried the Study Ball. The Study Ball is a 21-pound prison-style device that locks onto your child's leg and only unlocks after a predetermined amount of study time has passed. The homework manacles can't be locked for more than four hours, and come with a safety key. The product website states, "Quite often, students who are having problems concentrating tend to get up every ten minutes to watch TV, talk on the phone, take something out of the fridge, and a long list of other distractions. Were they to dedicate all this wasted time to studying, they would optimise their performance and have more free time available. Study Ball helps you study more and more efficiently." Stop Teasing Your Brother Pepper Spray coming soon.

6 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. Price: 75 Pounds?? by Cornflake917 · · Score: 3, Informative

    TFA said it costs 75 pounds. Not only would you be a retarded parent for torturing your kid and making him associate studying with confinement, but you would be retarded because even if you wanted to such a stupid thing, you could do it for much, much cheaper.

  2. Re:What?! by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 3, Informative

    Surely making the subject fun, interesting would be a better way of encouraging students?

    Not really, no. I have a friend who used to teach at the middle school level. She was a good teacher, but there are just a lot of kids who don't care about education, are raised by parents who don't care about education, or come from subcultures that don't care about education. Generally, all three are in play, enforcing one another. There's nothing to be done from the outside about that, and the kids who do break out of the vicious cycle do so mainly through their own efforts, and a few who are just flat out intelligent enough to never get trapped by it. She helped the ones she could.

    The ball and chain won't help, and it's only use is in being totally and completely hilarious.

  3. Re:I could use this... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since the "editors" failed to include a linky to the actual product, here it is: http://www.curiosite.com/scripts/product/enproduct.php?idproducto=19126738

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  4. If I may... by denzacar · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let me try and describe this device as if it were a topic of an article at Telegraph.co.uk.

    Gun Camera to make people stop killing
    To end all gun violence once and for all, guns will be replaced with gun cameras.

    Your boss asks you to do the impossible, your mom tortures you to get you to clean up your room, your friends stand you up, your girlfriend cheats on you... instead of taking out your aggression on the first innocent victim you find, we suggest you get one of these 100% harmless guns.
    It'll take a picture each time you press the trigger.

    Aimat is a very basic, utterly unsophisticated photo camera. It was designed by Franziska Dierschke, a German student at the Bauhaus Academy in Weimar.
    Two years ago, she presented it at Desifnmai, a design conference held in Berlin, but it's only now started catching on over the Internet.

    It's a pinhole camera, the kind anyone can make at home because they don't require any sort of extensive understanding of photography.
    These cameras produce an image using light that passes through a tiny hole.
    Any sort of container can be used to make a pinhole camera; all you have to do is drill a hole in it.
    And what better way to "shoot" your photos than straight out of a gun?

    This camera has no focus, viewfinder, or lenses and makes very interesting photos, with a darkened frame around them like you get with the Lomo.
    A camera/toy that will help you reduce tension and also have fun running after your girlfriend, your mother, your boss, and your friends.

    Why am I mentioning this?
    Because they (Telegraph.co.uk) found the Study Ball at that same site.

    IT IS A JOKE ITEM!

    Not actually intended as a study device.
    You know... like the Periodic Table Shower Curtain.

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    Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
  5. Re:Laughably Medieval by sdpuppy · · Score: 3, Informative
    Too bad you posted AC... (Absolutely Correct)

    First you get " Bull S#!^"

    then you get "More of the Same"

    and finally it's "Piled higher & Deeper" !

    always wondered about double majors...

  6. Re:Laughably Medieval by martas · · Score: 3, Informative

    Are you kidding? When I think back to all the times that I felt like I was literally going to suffocate under the weight of my own guilt... Oh, memories.

    I was never punished physically. My parents didn't see the point in that, even when it's "mock beating", aka spanking, which doesn't really cause any significant physical pain. Guilt, disapproving and disgusted looks, cold attitude - these were their tools. And yes, for a kid these things can hurt more than any physical punishment. But there's another side to it - the feeling of relief you get once you finally do the "right" thing. As I said, they never spanked me as punishment (only for fun... I've said too much), so I don't have anything to compare to, but I'll never forget the relief and joy I felt when I made the choice to do what I knew was the right thing to do, and felt their approval and acceptance. The point I'm trying to make is that while spanking works simply through negative reinforcement, the "passive-aggressive" methods actually force the victim to acknowledge what the right course of action was, and what their mistake was, and what they needed to do to fix it.

    Ultimately, I don't know which is better. I guess the guilt stuff is riskier, because if you screw it up, you end up with a nervous, fucked up little loser. But that's kind of true in any case - they say one of the biggest factors in the development of an incredibly large range of psychological disorders is unpredictability and inconsistency of one's environment, and more specifically a feeling of unpredictability of the reactions of parents/other adults.