try a museum store
on
Low Tech Toys?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If there is a children's museum or hands-on science museum near try that. I know they have some kaleidoscopes at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, for example.
well, I did notice the "you need to hire people like me aspect of it", but I would say that a more accurate statement would be "when the leaks show up, you need someone like me to fix it". That doesn't really imply that you need everyone to understand things all the way down. It means the demand for hard-core people is proportional to the leakiness of the abstraction. You might only need a coupld of really good guys in a crowd of a hundred passably competent VB'ers (or whatever--don't know much about VB or the people that program with it myself).
I agree that there could be a carrying capacity issue, but can you give evidence that the non-bozo ratio is going down? Recent irrational exuberance drew a lot of fully-abstraction-dependents into the market, but the more recent reality check probably pushed a huge number of them back out.
Anothing thing to note is that, if there really are a bunch of people out there that are heavily dependent on an abstraction that is leaky, that represents a large market for a better abstraction. So it's possible that forces will act to balance that problem anyway.
However, it does make for an interesting science fiction plot (I don't read much science fiction, so this should be easy pickings for you "Idiot--ths is exactly the plot of XXX"'ers out there:) where a few hyperintelligent folks keep the whole world working ("Marching Morons" did this, albeit with a bit of a racist/classist underpinning for the root of the problem).
(I didn't read the whole article, so my analysis may be leaky.)
It is true that every abstraction is but an imperfect representation of the concrete things it was abstracted from. It is true, and worth noting, that the degree to which the abstraction breaks down in certain situations can cause large problems.
I would like to nit-pick the Katzian "It's dragging us down" doomsday prediction at the end. Abstraction itself has lifted us, tremendously. The fact that abstraction is not perfect is a limitation to how much it can lift us, true. But it's like taxes to support military spending or highways--yes, they do "drag down" our paychecks, but they also make what we do to get that paycheck possible.
One other concept that doesn't seem to be considered is the fact that, even with the imperfections, there is a very powerful and important benefit to having done the abstraction in the first place. One people are using the abstraction instead of interfacing with the concrete target directly, then fixing a leak in the abstraction can be done at the abstraction, and everyone, potentially millions or billions, can benefit from it. Yes, there is a cost to rolling that out and ensuring compatibility, etc, but it's an advantage of abstraction that is a powerful tool to deal with inherent "leakiness" of abstracting anything.
Finally, I want to point out one thing that is implied but not stated, and that is how important it is to do your abstraction well. Once you have completed your abstraction, it's likely that thousands or millions will build things on top of it. Code that exists to be used by other code is more important than a one-off script. If you mess it up, you are messing it up for a lot of people. Just something to keep in mind, and something well illustrated by the article.
Gravity brushed off criticism that waiving the online course would hurt it.
"Look, I think it's safe to say that without me there would be no online courses. All Gore didn't invent everything."
Gravity went on to reassure everyone that the recent theft of the Principia did not affect it.
"Despite what you may have heard about things not existing until they are measured, etc, it is not the case that physical laws come into being only after they were described. I think that you will find through observation that I was alive and well before Mr. Newton's little revelatory experience."
Gravity also denied, again, that there was an assault and battery charge against him by Newton's heirs for the apple incident.
now that the very laws of physics are in the hands of evidoers, it's only a matter of time before stuff starts flying off the desk, soup unstirs itself. etc.
Someone I knew had a meeting with the guy that runs this company. They knew that Sun was violating the patent, and that they were doing it knowingly. They didn't go after Sun, they went after Microsoft. Why? Becaues they didn't like Microsoft. It's possible that they really truly won't take a cash settlement.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsof t. html
This is a great writeup from a guy who had a lot of access to the players with the understanding that he wouldn't publish until after the trial. I wish it would get turned into a book.
My favorite part about this is how it shows you the isolation that Gates and others live(d) in--he really seems to think he was innocent.
Another interesting revelation in this is that Gates micromanaged the law team.
If you haven't signed up for a slashdot account in a while, try it. There is a step where you have to read a series of letters from an image to prove you aren't a bot. But it also shuts out the blind. (Not that I even thought of that until now.)
I think it's really funny that you brought them up as a counter-counterexample, because they also make a nice counterexample. They moved into various areas, voted together, got everything passed that they wanted passed, and made the locals so mad that they got themselves killed/burnt out/chased off/etc.
So one might argue that they prove that you _have_ to go somewhere remote and ignored, becaues if you move in on established territory and try to take control, the locals will rebel.
I expect that there will be serious local rebellion if this group tries to go to a place that doesn't already have a significant sympathetic population.
Of course, I also think these people won't do it. It's just more commitment than most people are willing to put forward.
I would use this as a rule of thumb--if you are already doing it, you will do it, and if you aren't, you aren't.
So in this case, is this a group of 20,000 people that are already pushing the political envelope, getting people out to vote their way, publicizing their views, taking risks to support their cause? If they are, then they might make a go of this. If they are merely a group that has strong opinions and whose biggest success to date is to get a website up, I don't think they will ever do much more than put up a website.
I'm not saying that people can't change, just that usually they don't. If there was already an advance party out there, for example, it would be more believable. If they are just talking about it, I would be surprised to see them suddenly change from "the kind of people that just talk about problems" to "the kind of people that do something about problems".
I want liberty but my political beliefs end at having to buy a winter coat.
Hey, mine too! I believe that we all have an unalienable right to a winter coat.
Re:20,000 good theory, but they forget plublicity
on
The Free State Project
·
· Score: 2
On another note, my choice for them is any state governed by a pro wrestler. That state has a proven history of voting a bit strangely.
Or maybe any state in a country that was run for 8 years by an actor...
Oh, wait...
"pro wrestler" == actor, but with the added capacity of doing his own stunts. Why don't you say "A state run by a former SEAL?". Ventura's politics make a lot of sense, in my opinion. If all you can see is "pro wrestler", you might want to check to see if you're looking at the issue through mass-media-provided glasses. I have a mild dislike for pro wrestling myself, but a very strong dislike for the practice of pandering to the prevailing, unexamined view rather than looking at the real issues.
"Kids these days, they don't grind their own components, just go to a hardware store and pick them up. X and Y and Z are readily available and you don't have to make your own any more. And when you don't make your own, you lose some of the beauty of the profession and some fundamental understanding of Q, R, and S."
If you look back, you can find examples of this, how peole depended on X technology instead of computing square roots by hand.
Here is a general purpose response:
"Don't worry. There will still be cool problems to solve, and people will still get into solving them. We solve problems because we are human, and we can't not do it, just like we write and make music because something inside us is screaming at us to be expressed."
It's not that I don't think he has a point--there is some intrinsic value in doing things the old way. People still bind books by hand, just because they want to. People quilt and can food and all sorts of things for the enjoyment of it. , or when prepackaged solutoins just don't meet their needs. It is possible that a way of life is fading, but there is cool stuff in the future.
What we should focus on is learning how to solve problems, learning how to show kids how fun solving interesting problems is, and how to show them how to do it. Then there will be a steady suppoly of people ready to tackle whatever comes next. But the good thing is, no matter how hard we try to do that wrong (school), we still end up with people who want to solve problems! Just like no amount of bad piano teachers will prvent te emergence of future garage bands.
We're still humans, and all in all that's a pretty cool thing to be.
I know plenty of people that went through a calculus class and remember nothing about it. _You_ may have been interested enough in calculus to have retained some. I think that the spirit of a lot of what you are saying is true, but I take exception to your defining what "educated" means in terms of a few random things that you happen to have liked. Basically, I agree with you wholeheartedly that learning a wide variety of subjects is healthy, life enriching, and desirable. The following rant is about the implied idea that there are particular subjects that a person must have in order to be considered educated (I realize that you might not have really meant that and that it probably wasn't your main point even if you did. But there are plenty of people who do think that and push it as an agenda, so we might as well engage the idea:).
Should _everybody_ take Shakespeare classes in school? In Shakespeare's time, wasn't there another way people learned about his stuff? If people go to the plays and like them, a good fraction of them might like to stay after for a short study session about some of the academic aspects of what they have just seen.
The _last_ thing we need is _another_ "list of things that ever student should know, dammit!". What we need is an easy way to get access to the content, people who are good at showing people what is interesting about the content, and an easy way for people to hook up with other people who can show them more stuff or resources that they can use to learn it on their own.
I have seen some Shakespeare plays done as movies, don't have any idea what "Hegel's Dialectic" is, know enough about current cognitive development theory to realize that Piaget's development stages are a horribly flawed set of ideas based on experiments that were laughably inadequate to show what he thought they were showing, and I have a pretty good idea about basic chemistry, physics, and calculus.
Shall we duel with abstract algebra at thirty paces? Is it important that I know what a group homomorphism is and you don't (if you don't, of course)? Part of my "education" (read "life":) involved learning the history of the mountain dulcimer and how to play it. Are you not "educated" because you didn't learn that? What do you know about accounting rules?
You took classes you were interested in. You didn't mention that you know the consistencies and techniques of different kinds of paints. What musical instruments do you play? Given the appropriate tools, do you know what you need to do to rebuild an engine?
Should that stuff be required? Should we call that what it means to be "educated"? I applaud your effort at becoming educated, and I hope that you have continued to become educated. But I don't think that we should say "an educated person will know X, Y, and Z". For one thing, that leads to "required classes", which leads to professors being forced to teach those classes to people who are forced to be in them. And very little education takes place in that sort of environment.
It concerns me that we take something that can be as utterly delightful as Shakespeare (or, in my opinion, mathematics), and decide "Everyone should know this" and therefore "if they don't wnat to learn it, we're going to shove it down their throats anyway, it's for their own good.".
There is more to learn now, granted. But there is more time to learn it than there was during the renaissance. The renaissance men were a famous few who didn't have to toil all day to eke out a living.
Today, people spend _lots_ of time watching sticoms and sports. They could easily be spending that time learning. The technology is there for the material to be presented clearly and in your own home. We _could_ do it, but we don't, becaues we don't value it.
(You'll have to do your own google searches to find them.)
ChemVix (chemistry visualization) was a project where you could submit datasets to a supercomputer (at the time I think they ran on the Crays at NCSA) and have it give you back a visualization of a molecule or energy levels therein or something.
Hands-On Universe was something that had kids taking real astronomical data and doing stuff like supernova searches (look at the data from now, put it on top of the data from then, see if there is anything new). (A couple of kids actually did find a supernova while doing this project.) There were other things that were done with real data as well.
Various projects at the Shodor Education Foundation are aimed at helping kids understand how scientists really do science, often with computational modeling, etc.
It's really not that hard to come up with ways for kids to participate in actual scientific research. What's hard is convincing people with an already-huge list of demands on them, a curriculum to "cover", and standardized tests to teach to that they should buck all that to do this stuff with their kids.
Scientists do the hard, drudgerous parts of their work. Whay? Not because they spent a lot of time doing hard, drudgerous work in school, and they're practiced at it. They do it because they want to know the answer.
Kids will do hard, tedious things, too, if they want to know the answer. Good "real science in real classrooms" projects almost always involve a lot of fairly tedious steps, but the kids are willing to do that because their minds are turned on, and they want to know.
Watch a baby developing fine motor skills. It's painful--you have to sit on your hands or turn away after a while to suppress the urge to "do it for them". But they do it. They do "pen drills"--taking the lid off a pen and putting the lid on again, taking it off, putting it on. They work and work and work to get that lid on. Who is standing over them, threatening them with bad grades or detention for not getting their work done?
No one. The human mind will do the hard stuff once it gets interested. It's a human trait. The idea that we actually need to force kids through various drills is unproven at best. There is a tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary.
(See similar rants at http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html ).
Now, I agree that it doesn't really do what we want to just have whizbang "hey that's cool" demonstrations and stuff. There's an article on that site about combustion--the "hey, that's cool" stuff is like lighting the leaves and dry grass, then you want to have something a little bigger for the fire to feed on, and eventually you get to being able to throw big logs on there. If all you do is show kids Bill Nye, it's like lighting a pile of dry leaves. Yes, the interest flares right up, but if that's all you have it will burn out pretty quickly and not really accomplish much. What you need is a good activity to go on to once their interest has been sparked by something Bill Nye'ish (Bill Nye's shows generally suggest a "try this yourself" activity, that would probably be a good place to start).
Of course, in my opinion the right way to do this is to show all the kids Bill Nye, then see who wants to try the "do it yourself" activity. Show kids the equivalent art or dance stuff and give them the opportunity to dig further into that. Let whoever wants to dig further into each thing so so, and whoever doesn't can do whatever it was that did spark their interest.
Some kids will want to work hard to learn to dance. Some will want to work hard to learn science or math. "But everyone needs to be able to do math!", you reply. Not really, and that isn't the point. If people need to know a topic, they will be interested in learning it, and they can learn it then. If you force them through it before they are ready, they will develop anxiety or general dislike for it, and you will have a hard time ever getting them to learn it when they finally do have something they want to do that would require it.
Attempting to teach a kid something they don't want to learn is, in many cases, _worse_ than a waste of time--it's a negative use of time. It convinces them that the topic is boring/hard/useless, and severely damages our chances of ever getting them to see what is interesting, fun, or useful about it.
in an interest-bearling account this could have one person working on this problem indefinitely. One person can do a lot with infinite time. (Of course the bad guys will still be working on it, and we'll be paying them to by buying DVDs of stuff we apparently can't live without, so maybe it won't be enough...)
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could put Wall's name on the LabrARRY
What makes you th9ink they didn't think of this sooner?
The posting of the domain name on slashdot is being challenged in court as a vigilate attempt to shut down the operation...
BzzzzzzzSLAP!
Damn! Tell them to send another one...
If there is a children's museum or hands-on science museum near try that. I know they have some kaleidoscopes at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, for example.
like we did in viet nam, you mean?
well, I did notice the "you need to hire people like me aspect of it", but I would say that a more accurate statement would be "when the leaks show up, you need someone like me to fix it". That doesn't really imply that you need everyone to understand things all the way down. It means the demand for hard-core people is proportional to the leakiness of the abstraction. You might only need a coupld of really good guys in a crowd of a hundred passably competent VB'ers (or whatever--don't know much about VB or the people that program with it myself).
I agree that there could be a carrying capacity issue, but can you give evidence that the non-bozo ratio is going down? Recent irrational exuberance drew a lot of fully-abstraction-dependents into the market, but the more recent reality check probably pushed a huge number of them back out.
Anothing thing to note is that, if there really are a bunch of people out there that are heavily dependent on an abstraction that is leaky, that represents a large market for a better abstraction. So it's possible that forces will act to balance that problem anyway.
However, it does make for an interesting science fiction plot (I don't read much science fiction, so this should be easy pickings for you "Idiot--ths is exactly the plot of XXX"'ers out there:) where a few hyperintelligent folks keep the whole world working ("Marching Morons" did this, albeit with a bit of a racist/classist underpinning for the root of the problem).
(I didn't read the whole article, so my analysis may be leaky.)
It is true that every abstraction is but an imperfect representation of the concrete things it was abstracted from. It is true, and worth noting, that the degree to which the abstraction breaks down in certain situations can cause large problems.
I would like to nit-pick the Katzian "It's dragging us down" doomsday prediction at the end. Abstraction itself has lifted us, tremendously. The fact that abstraction is not perfect is a limitation to how much it can lift us, true. But it's like taxes to support military spending or highways--yes, they do "drag down" our paychecks, but they also make what we do to get that paycheck possible.
One other concept that doesn't seem to be considered is the fact that, even with the imperfections, there is a very powerful and important benefit to having done the abstraction in the first place. One people are using the abstraction instead of interfacing with the concrete target directly, then fixing a leak in the abstraction can be done at the abstraction, and everyone, potentially millions or billions, can benefit from it. Yes, there is a cost to rolling that out and ensuring compatibility, etc, but it's an advantage of abstraction that is a powerful tool to deal with inherent "leakiness" of abstracting anything.
Finally, I want to point out one thing that is implied but not stated, and that is how important it is to do your abstraction well. Once you have completed your abstraction, it's likely that thousands or millions will build things on top of it. Code that exists to be used by other code is more important than a one-off script. If you mess it up, you are messing it up for a lot of people. Just something to keep in mind, and something well illustrated by the article.
Gravity brushed off criticism that waiving the online course would hurt it.
"Look, I think it's safe to say that without me there would be no online courses. All Gore didn't invent everything."
Gravity went on to reassure everyone that the recent theft of the Principia did not affect it.
"Despite what you may have heard about things not existing until they are measured, etc, it is not the case that physical laws come into being only after they were described. I think that you will find through observation that I was alive and well before Mr. Newton's little revelatory experience."
Gravity also denied, again, that there was an assault and battery charge against him by Newton's heirs for the apple incident.
now that the very laws of physics are in the hands of evidoers, it's only a matter of time before stuff starts flying off the desk, soup unstirs itself. etc.
Someone I knew had a meeting with the guy that runs this company. They knew that Sun was violating the patent, and that they were doing it knowingly. They didn't go after Sun, they went after Microsoft. Why? Becaues they didn't like Microsoft. It's possible that they really truly won't take a cash settlement.
Well, copyrights weren't perpetual. Whether they will be or not remains to be seen.
dude--joke. reference to bloom county? no? didn't think so. probably never read it...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microso
This is a great writeup from a guy who had a lot of access to the players with the understanding that he wouldn't publish until after the trial. I wish it would get turned into a book.
My favorite part about this is how it shows you the isolation that Gates and others live(d) in--he really seems to think he was innocent.
Another interesting revelation in this is that Gates micromanaged the law team.
...and they will come in little pulses, and when we decode the pulses we will realize that they say "Mars Needs Women".
If you haven't signed up for a slashdot account in a while, try it. There is a step where you have to read a series of letters from an image to prove you aren't a bot. But it also shuts out the blind. (Not that I even thought of that until now.)
I think it's really funny that you brought them up as a counter-counterexample, because they also make a nice counterexample. They moved into various areas, voted together, got everything passed that they wanted passed, and made the locals so mad that they got themselves killed/burnt out/chased off/etc.
So one might argue that they prove that you _have_ to go somewhere remote and ignored, becaues if you move in on established territory and try to take control, the locals will rebel.
I expect that there will be serious local rebellion if this group tries to go to a place that doesn't already have a significant sympathetic population.
Of course, I also think these people won't do it. It's just more commitment than most people are willing to put forward.
I would use this as a rule of thumb--if you are already doing it, you will do it, and if you aren't, you aren't.
So in this case, is this a group of 20,000 people that are already pushing the political envelope, getting people out to vote their way, publicizing their views, taking risks to support their cause? If they are, then they might make a go of this. If they are merely a group that has strong opinions and whose biggest success to date is to get a website up, I don't think they will ever do much more than put up a website.
I'm not saying that people can't change, just that usually they don't. If there was already an advance party out there, for example, it would be more believable. If they are just talking about it, I would be surprised to see them suddenly change from "the kind of people that just talk about problems" to "the kind of people that do something about problems".
Hey, mine too! I believe that we all have an unalienable right to a winter coat.
Or maybe any state in a country that was run for 8 years by an actor...
Oh, wait...
"pro wrestler" == actor, but with the added capacity of doing his own stunts. Why don't you say "A state run by a former SEAL?". Ventura's politics make a lot of sense, in my opinion. If all you can see is "pro wrestler", you might want to check to see if you're looking at the issue through mass-media-provided glasses. I have a mild dislike for pro wrestling myself, but a very strong dislike for the practice of pandering to the prevailing, unexamined view rather than looking at the real issues.
...about his generation?
"Kids these days, they don't grind their own components, just go to a hardware store and pick them up. X and Y and Z are readily available and you don't have to make your own any more. And when you don't make your own, you lose some of the beauty of the profession and some fundamental understanding of Q, R, and S."
If you look back, you can find examples of this, how peole depended on X technology instead of computing square roots by hand.
Here is a general purpose response:
"Don't worry. There will still be cool problems to solve, and people will still get into solving them. We solve problems because we are human, and we can't not do it, just like we write and make music because something inside us is screaming at us to be expressed."
It's not that I don't think he has a point--there is some intrinsic value in doing things the old way. People still bind books by hand, just because they want to. People quilt and can food and all sorts of things for the enjoyment of it. , or when prepackaged solutoins just don't meet their needs. It is possible that a way of life is fading, but there is cool stuff in the future.
What we should focus on is learning how to solve problems, learning how to show kids how fun solving interesting problems is, and how to show them how to do it. Then there will be a steady suppoly of people ready to tackle whatever comes next. But the good thing is, no matter how hard we try to do that wrong (school), we still end up with people who want to solve problems! Just like no amount of bad piano teachers will prvent te emergence of future garage bands.
We're still humans, and all in all that's a pretty cool thing to be.
I know plenty of people that went through a calculus class and remember nothing about it. _You_ may have been interested enough in calculus to have retained some. I think that the spirit of a lot of what you are saying is true, but I take exception to your defining what "educated" means in terms of a few random things that you happen to have liked. Basically, I agree with you wholeheartedly that learning a wide variety of subjects is healthy, life enriching, and desirable. The following rant is about the implied idea that there are particular subjects that a person must have in order to be considered educated (I realize that you might not have really meant that and that it probably wasn't your main point even if you did. But there are plenty of people who do think that and push it as an agenda, so we might as well engage the idea :).
:) involved learning the history of the mountain dulcimer and how to play it. Are you not "educated" because you didn't learn that? What do you know about accounting rules?
Should _everybody_ take Shakespeare classes in school? In Shakespeare's time, wasn't there another way people learned about his stuff? If people go to the plays and like them, a good fraction of them might like to stay after for a short study session about some of the academic aspects of what they have just seen.
The _last_ thing we need is _another_ "list of things that ever student should know, dammit!". What we need is an easy way to get access to the content, people who are good at showing people what is interesting about the content, and an easy way for people to hook up with other people who can show them more stuff or resources that they can use to learn it on their own.
I have seen some Shakespeare plays done as movies, don't have any idea what "Hegel's Dialectic" is, know enough about current cognitive development theory to realize that Piaget's development stages are a horribly flawed set of ideas based on experiments that were laughably inadequate to show what he thought they were showing, and I have a pretty good idea about basic chemistry, physics, and calculus.
Shall we duel with abstract algebra at thirty paces? Is it important that I know what a group homomorphism is and you don't (if you don't, of course)? Part of my "education" (read "life"
You took classes you were interested in. You didn't mention that you know the consistencies and techniques of different kinds of paints. What musical instruments do you play? Given the appropriate tools, do you know what you need to do to rebuild an engine?
Should that stuff be required? Should we call that what it means to be "educated"? I applaud your effort at becoming educated, and I hope that you have continued to become educated. But I don't think that we should say "an educated person will know X, Y, and Z". For one thing, that leads to "required classes", which leads to professors being forced to teach those classes to people who are forced to be in them. And very little education takes place in that sort of environment.
It concerns me that we take something that can be as utterly delightful as Shakespeare (or, in my opinion, mathematics), and decide "Everyone should know this" and therefore "if they don't wnat to learn it, we're going to shove it down their throats anyway, it's for their own good.".
</rant>
There is more to learn now, granted. But there is more time to learn it than there was during the renaissance. The renaissance men were a famous few who didn't have to toil all day to eke out a living.
Today, people spend _lots_ of time watching sticoms and sports. They could easily be spending that time learning. The technology is there for the material to be presented clearly and in your own home. We _could_ do it, but we don't, becaues we don't value it.
(You'll have to do your own google searches to find them.)
ChemVix (chemistry visualization) was a project where you could submit datasets to a supercomputer (at the time I think they ran on the Crays at NCSA) and have it give you back a visualization of a molecule or energy levels therein or something.
Hands-On Universe was something that had kids taking real astronomical data and doing stuff like supernova searches (look at the data from now, put it on top of the data from then, see if there is anything new). (A couple of kids actually did find a supernova while doing this project.) There were other things that were done with real data as well.
Various projects at the Shodor Education Foundation are aimed at helping kids understand how scientists really do science, often with computational modeling, etc.
It's really not that hard to come up with ways for kids to participate in actual scientific research. What's hard is convincing people with an already-huge list of demands on them, a curriculum to "cover", and standardized tests to teach to that they should buck all that to do this stuff with their kids.
Let's phrase the question a different way:
"Should learning be engaging?"
Scientists do the hard, drudgerous parts of their work. Whay? Not because they spent a lot of time doing hard, drudgerous work in school, and they're practiced at it. They do it because they want to know the answer.
Kids will do hard, tedious things, too, if they want to know the answer. Good "real science in real classrooms" projects almost always involve a lot of fairly tedious steps, but the kids are willing to do that because their minds are turned on, and they want to know.
Watch a baby developing fine motor skills. It's painful--you have to sit on your hands or turn away after a while to suppress the urge to "do it for them". But they do it. They do "pen drills"--taking the lid off a pen and putting the lid on again, taking it off, putting it on. They work and work and work to get that lid on. Who is standing over them, threatening them with bad grades or detention for not getting their work done?
No one. The human mind will do the hard stuff once it gets interested. It's a human trait. The idea that we actually need to force kids through various drills is unproven at best. There is a tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary.
(See similar rants at
http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html
).
Now, I agree that it doesn't really do what we want to just have whizbang "hey that's cool" demonstrations and stuff. There's an article on that site about combustion--the "hey, that's cool" stuff is like lighting the leaves and dry grass, then you want to have something a little bigger for the fire to feed on, and eventually you get to being able to throw big logs on there. If all you do is show kids Bill Nye, it's like lighting a pile of dry leaves. Yes, the interest flares right up, but if that's all you have it will burn out pretty quickly and not really accomplish much. What you need is a good activity to go on to once their interest has been sparked by something Bill Nye'ish (Bill Nye's shows generally suggest a "try this yourself" activity, that would probably be a good place to start).
Of course, in my opinion the right way to do this is to show all the kids Bill Nye, then see who wants to try the "do it yourself" activity. Show kids the equivalent art or dance stuff and give them the opportunity to dig further into that. Let whoever wants to dig further into each thing so so, and whoever doesn't can do whatever it was that did spark their interest.
Some kids will want to work hard to learn to dance. Some will want to work hard to learn science or math. "But everyone needs to be able to do math!", you reply. Not really, and that isn't the point. If people need to know a topic, they will be interested in learning it, and they can learn it then. If you force them through it before they are ready, they will develop anxiety or general dislike for it, and you will have a hard time ever getting them to learn it when they finally do have something they want to do that would require it.
Attempting to teach a kid something they don't want to learn is, in many cases, _worse_ than a waste of time--it's a negative use of time. It convinces them that the topic is boring/hard/useless, and severely damages our chances of ever getting them to see what is interesting, fun, or useful about it.
Or, at least, that's what I think.
in an interest-bearling account this could have one person working on this problem indefinitely. One person can do a lot with infinite time. (Of course the bad guys will still be working on it, and we'll be paying them to by buying DVDs of stuff we apparently can't live without, so maybe it won't be enough...)