Education: abolish in-class presentations?

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ec

climber
ca
Sep 19, 2018 - 10:04pm PT
That world has been here; couples at a nice restaurant, each engrossed in their separate phones.

There was a couple with a child in a place I used to go to for lunch. ‘Kid (5y/o) with a video game on a cellphone blaring. The other peeps and staff there were all visibly annoyed. The staff didn’t have the balls to do anything. When I asked nicely for the volume to be turned down, both parents looked at me and cussed me out (think of the parents at the end of ‘The Graduate’). The father actually wanted to square-off. I merely told them loudly and clearly, “YOU OUGHT TO TRY ACTUALLY PARENTING FOR ONCE, INSTEAD OF HAVING YOUR KID PLAYING GAMES.”

“I’ll take my order to go, please.”

Edit: they actually turned that sh!t off...

 ec
Lituya

Mountain climber
Sep 19, 2018 - 10:12pm PT
These are digital babies, born into a world of handhelds and smartphones.

I don't understand why teachers/schools don't have the power to completely ban these devices/distractions on campus.
Trump

climber
Sep 20, 2018 - 12:08pm PT
I blame their crap (in this regards) teachers

It’s not the teachers’ fault that they do a poor job giving presentations, it’s the teacher’s teacher’s fault? Who taught the teacher’s teachers to teach the teachers to teach? Was that the fault of the teacher’s teacher’s teacher?

I sure hope I’m not to blame.

I sure would like one of those newfangled topo cheat sheets to help me know what gear to bring though, and to pay for a space where I can muse about which other people are to blame for things not being the way I prefer them to be.

Go back far enough and maybe we’ll find some fault with amino acids.
August West

Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
Sep 20, 2018 - 01:24pm PT

Me, I’m really pretty disappointed with the parents’ parents.

Sure, and nothing happens in isolation and most parents mean for their children to do well.

But the parents' parents didn't helicopter their kids. That is fairly recent.

But I realize it is also hard to buck the trend and go against social expectations. A co-worker of mine left his two kids at the park (in a very low-crime suburban neighborhood) about 15 minutes before his wife got there. I wish I could remember the exact ages, but it was like 10 and 8.

Somebody called the cops on the unattended kids. The fact that the cops got there before the wife just shows that the cops had nothing better to do on a quiet afternoon in suburbia.

And the cops said if it happened again they would take the kids into custody.

I wonder if they post a notice somewhere saying how old you have to be before you can be left unattended in a super low-crime environment. 18?
rottingjohnny

Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
Sep 20, 2018 - 01:40pm PT
I tell you i don't get no respect...My mom left me at the park...Somebody called animal control...
Trump

climber
Sep 21, 2018 - 10:31am PT
But the parents' parents didn't helicopter their kids.

True enough.

What the parents’ parents did was they raised kids who grew up to be helicopter parents. The parents’ parents were crappy parents who did a sh#tty job raising their kids to be good parents, and the result is that now we have all these sh#tty parents out there raising this self-indulged crappy generation of kids.

And sh#tty citizens. Those crappy parents’ parents raised kids who grew up into adults who created a society in which you can’t leave your kids at the park for 15 minutes unattended.

Now our problem is that this batch of sh#tty parents are doing a sh#tty job raising kids who can give presentations, or who even feel like they should be made to do presentations at all.

We can go back as far as we want complaining about what a sh#tty job those other people did, if that’s what we want to do.

“I’m prettty disappointed with our young people.”
“these snowflakes”
“That’s the weakness of liberals”
“I’m really pretty disappointed with the parents”
“Teachers did a poor job”

The one thing that doesn’t seem to change is people complaining about what a sh#tty job other people do.

If we live in a reality where it takes a masters degree to get a job running a dorm, I’m gonna encourage my kids to do what it takes to thrive in the reality they actually live in, rather than in the hypothetical reality we create in our heads where it only takes a GED.

we still .. can live better than most even if we do sink ..

Yea. In retrospect we might say the same thing about humans sometime in the not too distant future.

But look, they’re doing what we want to do over there in their different environment. We can just do in our environment the thing that they’re doing in their different environment.

Reality seems to be arguing otherwise.

Fortunately for us though, we’ve got this awesome evolutionary advantage of not being constrained to believing reality! Well, awesome as long as youre not one of those sh#try other people who support me.
NutAgain!

Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
Topic Author's Reply - Sep 21, 2018 - 10:58am PT
Rather than focusing on what is wrong or complaining about others, I would prefer to spin this into a vision of where we should be heading:

1. Presentations (verbal communication to convey information to multiple people) should remain a fundamental part of education, a part of being an effective human being.
2. As a society we should strive for a consensus understanding and shared value that:
 struggling/effort/discomfort is a fundamental healthy part of growth and development
 being a nurturing and supportive parent does not mean pandering to the immediate gratification of kids seeking pleasure or avoiding discomfort

Reilly

Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
Sep 21, 2018 - 12:53pm PT
RJ, my dad took me to the zoo.

They thanked him for returning me.
Trump

climber
Sep 21, 2018 - 01:46pm PT
Rather than focusing on what is wrong or complaining about others ..

What would that look like, in other people?

Would it look like them portraying other people and their ideas and perspectives and beliefs and behaviors in positive uplifting terms like

“watering down standard”
“parental failure”
“disability”
“cave in”
“ridiculous positions”
“monsters”
“disorder”
“excuse”
“instead of digging deep”
“short-cuts”
“superficial”
“imitate happiness”

And humbly portraying ourselves and our positions and our beliefs with negative disparaging terms like:

“healthy discomfort”
“reasonable values”
“positive instruction”
“real and sustainable things that lead to happiness”
“better outcome”
“raising a child in a healthy way”

How would you do that, if you wanted to have a shared solution where we value everyone’s positions? How would you say and think things in a way that wasn’t “yea me and what I think boo you and what you think”?

What is the process that is going to create our future reality? Is it the same process that has created our current reality? That process seems to have involved everyone saying and thinking “me me me me I’m great what I think is right other people are wrong.” Are we going to try to change that process, or are we just going to continue with our same ole yea me and my reasonable healthy thinking processes? Are we even going to notice that in ourselves?

I wonder what the current state-of-the-art parenting books say

Reality as it currently exists is the definitive state of the art. If we want to believe that our awesome hypothetical beliefs about how reality SHOULD be are righter than how reality actually IS, we can join all the other humans who believe that they’re not saying “yea me boo you” and are just trying to objectively understand reality.

The collective wisdom of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men is what has created the reality that we currently live in. We’d probably be well served to consider that when predicting the future effects of our collective wisdom, and congratulating ourselves in advance for how wise our current hypothetical thoughts turned out to be in the future.

Maybe those parents’ parents’ strategy of requiring students to make in class presentations didn’t work out as well in producing the current crop of ridiculous superficial failure parents as we’d like to believe that their strategy will in the future, now that we’re adopting it as our own healthy reasonable better sustainable positive dig-deep strategy of requiring students to make in class presentations.

But don’t be too eager to jettison your me me me mindset, or you might discover, too late, that it was one of the things keeping you alive.

Best to all you misguided sh#tty parents, and the rest!
Bad Climber

Trad climber
The Lawless Border Regions
Sep 21, 2018 - 04:57pm PT
I'm all for presentations. I'm VERY lukewarm about group work. Way too often I saw one or two students carrying all the weight. The shy ones, the dullards, the lazy would just sit there and let the go-getters git 'er done.

Overall, students, hell, all of us, need to be pushed more. I knew going through school that I was rarely pushed to what I was capable of doing. As a result, when I became a teacher, I changed that for my student. As a result, I had lots and lots of dropped students, D's and F's. Ah, good times.

BAd
Reilly

Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
Sep 21, 2018 - 06:16pm PT
Jeezus, Jim, I’d lay large money that Bad was an excellent teacher.

My all time fave teach announced to the class one day:

“Reilly, when you breathe you make too much noise!”

He was so right! Of course he was commenting on my propensity for a continuous
stream of consciousness presentation all period.
NutAgain!

Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
Topic Author's Reply - Sep 21, 2018 - 07:35pm PT
Hi Trump, I think you have firmly made the case that my manner of exposition and the care with which I select my words varies. Sometimes I'm in the mood to try to make the world a better place, and sometimes I'm just burning a few minutes between other things and spitting out a stream of consciousness. But the point you draw into focus is my implicit bias, the greater respect and deference I confer to my own perspective. Of course, because from my perspective, it's the best one! ;) AS for my logical inconsistency or pivoting from apparent attacker to peace-maker, well you got me there.

I try to forgive myself for not rising up to my ideals, and I do like to become aware of the filters that color my perceptions. Now that we have established that, what is your perspective on the issue rather than your perspective on my perspective?
Bad Climber

Trad climber
The Lawless Border Regions
Sep 22, 2018 - 06:42am PT
Yeah, Jeez, Jim. Chill out! I worked at the community college level in a pretty hardscrabble area. I did my damned best to get my charges to where they needed to be, but I found that a huge percentage were not up to the task. To give you an idea of why I throw around sarcasm, in my remedial level course one step below transfer comp, I'd typically assign a one page editorial as a prompt for an essay, usually something provocative like 1st or 4th Amendment stuff. It was COMMON to have one third to one half of the students not bother to read and annotate the work. A quick read would take a few minutes. A very careful read with annotations might take thirty minutes. I had similar problems with other weekly exercises. I tell you, man, that kind of apathy starts to deaden your soul. Yeah, there are usually the few who get what you're doing, and a good day in the classroom was awesome! But after nearly thirty years beating my head against the wall, I started to lose my enthusiasm for the slog. However, I never let my standards slip. I wanted passing my class to mean something. Oh, here's another fun fact: California, after a few years of so many students failing, has quietly dropped it's "high school" 8th grade level English proficiency exit exam! We dropped the math one, too, but I'm unsure as to what actual level of mathematics was tested there.

As a good friend and colleague once said: If you want a career where you're faced more often with failure than success, try teaching!

BAd
Bad Climber

Trad climber
The Lawless Border Regions
Sep 22, 2018 - 07:31am PT
Thanks, Jim. Class dismissed!

BAd
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