In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
I honestly blame the software we use. It’s made to be profitable, not to educate. Every fucking article is full of bullshit “click here!” for profit.
Where is the global and universal app to learn fucking everything? That teaches you, lets you read unlimited textbooks (oh piracy!) or science papers, quizzes you, scores you, lets you compete with others, gives you a diploma that is worth something?
Why do we expect an internet that has been captured by capitalism and is algorithmically tuned to maximize profit and brainwashing to be good for intelligence? That is what advertising is brainwashing, and it ru(i)ns everything.
PS: Of course, I have no idea how good online learning resources of schools actually are. I’m just going to assume they are abyssal. Because why wouldn’t they be terrible.
I learned a lot because there was friction in the tools. There’s a point where „accessible“ software (and I don’t mean accessible in the sense of making it usable with screen readers and other disability support) becomes detrimental. Like the complete abstraction that mobile devices have from a filesystem now - many younger people can’t use a hierarchical file explorer as a result.
Yeah that’s definitely true, IT systems becoming too easy to use. They should have given the students raspberry PIs and some wire and mechanical switches instead of McBooks, let them build their own laptops lol.
Nice one, Millennials.
Aren’t gen-z the kids of gen-x? I’m a millennial and my parents are boomers, 2 gens before
Nothing in USA rewards intelligence. Not education system, not employers, not government. Why develop a skill that isn’t in demand? Would you want to develop medieval brickmaking just because some researcher is measuring for it?
That poor child in the stock photo getting shown for an article on how children are getting dumber…
That being said, the reason why children are getting ‘dumber’ is probably because a) education is getting less money every year b) social media is destroying their attention span c) intelligence isn’t valued enough by society
At no point is getting a notebook part of the problem. Young people need to learn how to use technology.
Problem: we’re not spending enough on educators to teach kids
News Articles: we paid apple 10 billion dollars but the laptops made these kids dumber.
I feel bad for the girl in the picture. She turns up every time the “technology makes kids dumbfucks” argument surfaces. Feel like ive seen her about 20 times in the last year.
Imagine being the face of that.
I’m guessing from her vacant stare that she probably doesn’t think much of it mate. Jk
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It sounds like it’s false, but even if it were true, companies like Fortune are working hard to make it true. They want suckers who don’t think, who don’t remember, who can perform high level labor at almost no cost, so the rich can get richer.
yeah I’m skeptical, but at the same time I’m sure the people showing up for job interviews in the past few years are less capable of basic first year college shit than they used to be. Heck, these days if you ask a basic data structures question at an interview they’ll go home and meme about how bullshit it is that they even got asked that because algorithms got nothing to do with real programming
Kids these days
As a society, we chose to only teach ONE FUCKING GENERATION how to use technology and then went “well, young people ‘just understand’ technology, we don’t need to teach it anymore” and then somehow decided to just give all the kids a fucking tablet or laptop and assume they would LEARN THROUGH OSMOSIS I GUESS? Meanwhile we are defunding education across the country to absolutely shameful lows. (yes, I’m focused on the USA - I doubt “Cooney Horvath” is basing this broad generalization meant to scare people into buying his books on a study of ALL CHILDREN ALL OVER THE WORLD) AND THEN we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
BUT YES, JARED HORNY CORVATH, your astute observations PROVE it was the fault of the LAPTOP that the next generations are “INHERANTLY DUMBER” (feels like a dog whistle, I dunno for what - but it’s trying to justify something, I can feel it in my bones).
moreover, I’m convinced the entire reason my generation (millennials) turned out to be tech-savvy was because adults didn’t understand it, were trying to control and curtail our usage, and we were mostly focused on finding ways to circumvent boomer and gen-x meddling in our usage.
Nah that’s not it. People who used computers in the 50s, 60s and 70s were tech savvy. But that was just a small percentage of the population.
When mass adoption of computers started in the late eighties, through the nineties and early 00s computers needed a lot of tinkering and care in their usage.
People were forced to use their brains to use the computer and learn tech skills. Then computers started to become a lot more streamlined and people didn’t have to put as much thought into using them. It parallels cars and TVs, just in a more complex system.
People who used computers in the 60s were more tech savvy than people who used computers in the 70s who were more savvy than those in the 80s who were better at computers than those in the 90s and so on. Because they had to learn more to use them and take care of them.
New tech (like the web) meant you had to get used to new stuff, which younger people do better than older people.
But if you speak to a boomer who has kept up with the technology you can bet that they are more capable and have more knowledge about tech than us millennials.
With cars, I don’t get it we’ve even collectively given up standard maintenance. When I tell people I did my own oil change or change my brake pads, they look at me like I’m some sort of magician or Tim Taylor. It’s like, dudes, you’re supposed to be doing it yourself – it’s not hard. And it costs me $40 to diy an oil change compared to $100 for a Quick Lube. Brake pads are a little more difficult, but also are standard maintenance and totally possible. Cost savings of diy vs shop there is hundreds of dollars.
I’ve not met boomers that have kept up on tech. In fact, all of the boomers I know now use tech like the Gen Z kids.
I was once in a room with a boomer, I’m a Millennial, and a Gen Zer. I said, “your generation invented the tech, my generation perfected it, and your generation takes it all for granted.”
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ive seen parents give phones to toddlers watching on the phones, ipads just to shut them up. defunding is mostly done by republicans, underfunding is pretty everywhere else, even in pretty decent blue areas. the money goes to admin/bureaucracy and redtaping teachers. the books, i recently saw students at my former hs, from 10+years ago sitll using the same kind of book( the blue book for chemistry edition), but they need to use newer books with updated info.
THIS. PREACH. I couldn’t say it better myself. Abso-friggin-lutely.
“Technology” is SUCH an abused word by these absolute simpletons. “Technology” didn’t cause this. They did what they always do: They thoughtlessly expect their false god, The Market, to somehow organically solve the problem of education and human betterment, if only we sacrifice enough money to it.
Giving kids laptops? MAYBE, right? Huge MAYBE. Ask any generation if elementary schoolers on unsupervised internet connections was a good friggin idea.
But tablets and Chromebooks?! GTFO. Right out. Those things are barely “technology.” They’re consumption devices optimized primarily to make ongoing profit from their users.
In 95% of cases, I’ll wager, nobody’s getting hands-on learning from a friggin iPad or Chromebook. Trying to “replace” standard desktops with those things collectively killed a huge chunk of our cognitive abilities as a society.
we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.
So many usability decisions and standards were coming from public univerisities and publicly transparent nonprofits. (Why we have an Internet that’s open source at its core, for instance. But I have a lot to research…) Even privately, standards were about the benefit of the users, rather than
“Let’s copy every decision Apple makes because look at their stonk price and slavishly drooling fanbase.”
My mom used to be awesome with our Windows 95 Packard Bell. She used internet forums, she figured out eBay when it was brand new, she ran DXDiag when games weren’t working. She knew how to freaking DEFRAG the thing.
Now she struggles and panics to do the most basic thing if it’s not 1-step on her iPhone. It’s tragic. Heartbreaking. And I hate them for it.
We let the filthy marketers from packaged goods and casino industries run amok in tech, and that’s how we got here : Tech is largely not the incredible new tools we dreamed of to live better lives, instead its often closer smoking and gambling .
If you let marketers take over anything , unregulated, it inevitably takes the form of toxic vice, because our poorest choices make them the richest.
Mainstream technology doesn’t connect us, it isolates us. It doesn’t educate us, it actively endeavors to make us stupid . Every freaking bit of bandwidth reaching our eyeballs on the mainstream net is dedicated to reducing “friction” to rob our wallets and personal data.
I’m INFURIATED that most people can’t even handle organizing a file system anymore. Only private schools seem to teach actual computer education, and they all bought into this stupid lie that the “future” is cloud subscriptions served on brainrot e-waste.
I feel like we need to start “desktop computer clubs” or something. Seeing this crap like they’re trying to extinguish the personal computer is basically a declaration of war in my book…
Nailed it. This is equally true for many countries beyond the US.
In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
As the great Douglas Adams once wrote: “This has generally been considered a bad idea.”
2002 though. I sympathize. The internet was different and more human. He must’ve thought they were giving kids freedom to access NatGeo and Wikipedia.
…We were more optimistic about the internet then.
…But they failed to take into account that they were releasing children into an unregulated world of predatory marketer barons making millions hand-over-fist by hijacking attention.
not useful for k-12, but very useful for college students.
Students aren’t being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They’re being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?
I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it’s just not sticking.
Exactly.
As if, what, are kids gonna be making their own websites with HTML by just handing them some content-consumption appliance? Yeah, right!
I know some kids who are actually using technology well, and learning valuable skills, building their own gaming machines and stuff.
They’re usually in private school or educated households though. As usual, everybody else “fell through.”
We need to bring proper computing education back, but Techbro Valley hijacked our schools to train future dependent idiot consumers. Kids have been getting robbed.
It breaks my heart. I had to work in a public library for a long time as a computer lab assistant, and it was soul-sucking how many people of ANY generation were just absolutely clueless. Functionally illiterate. Zero problem solving neural pathways.
It didn’t have to be like this. I’m very passionate about this subject, apparently lol, but I have no idea what to actually do about it…
YES. The only piece of technology ever thaught by schools are a fixed set of google & microsoft products.
It would’ve been so great if for at least once say “We don’t have microsoft word tasks today, we don’t have google docs tasks today, follow the pdf guide in kstars to chart these heavenly bodies and learn some astronomy instead.”
Unrelated but I am pretty annoyed articles can refer to age groups as “gen z” or “millenial.”
It’s not some universally agreed number. They could just say “kids aged 12-24.” It’s more empirical.
And these generation cutoffs are basically meaningless. The next one starts just because it would be weird for a parent and child to be in the same “generation” not because the specific birth cutoff indicates anything special. Young X’ers and old millennials have way more in common with each other than those on the other side of their generations.
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
I’m 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.
I get the writhing because of muscle memory but reading is reading…
Books are tactile and involve more of your perception.
That tracks, although I’d compare them with ereaders instead of screens.
We are more distractible when reading on digitsl devices though. Perhaps with the exception of dedicated ebook readers.
In addition to fhat I wonder if eInk and actual paper are more conducive to prolonged reading as well, less eye strain
Agreed! I also have CS degrees and got them before having computers in the classroom was the norm. We had all our exams on pen and paper, you would have to write out a lot of lines of code and make sure it was proper C in the flavor we learnt in that class. Most of our classes were all books, paper and overhead projectors. We did have classes with computers, but they were awful. Our class would be two hours and at about the one hour mark you needed to be sure you were compiling. The compilation could easily take more than 30 mins and if you fucked up or it simply crashed you’d be at the end of the class easily.
I have a masters in Embedded Systems design, so a lot of my studies focused on both the hardware and software. We needed to juggle bits and extract the absolute max out of our very limited hardware. We needed to know about how software could even work on the hardware and why it worked the way it worked. Why hardware shaped the software and vice versa. I feel with the billion abstraction layers these days people are missing a lot of fundamentals about software design.
I also remember half of our classes were various forms of maths. All of those the first year first class started with a variation of: “Forget everything you’ve learned about maths so far, this is something completely different”. And each and every time it was true as well, blew my mind. A lot of those maths I still use very often and I feel like modern programming classes don’t focus enough on those.
On the other hand, I’m an old fart and it feels very “Everything was better when I was young”. So don’t take my opinion too seriously, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.
A core moment of my life was when, late at night, doing homework for assembly class, I finally GOT that “The instruction is the data is the number”. I would be surprised if students today have an opportunity to get to that realization.
I’m just gonna toss this out there…
You old fucks1 are siding with someone non-ironically named “Cooney Horvath” who, btw, is trying to sell books on how best to teach. Hoodwinked I say. Absolutely hoodwinked. “Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!” “They expect to be able to learn spelling and writing without a chalk board tablet? Preposterous!”
1 - Used as a term of endearment.
“Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!”
I know this is an exaggeration for emphasis… but people who learn the abacus method are faster and more accurate at basic addition.
That’s just not true. People don’t learn with pencil or computer better - a single tool does not shape the learning experience. Sure pencil has positive effects stimulating muscles while learning but it has a billion of negative effects too.
[citation needed]
It’s actual on people to cite that pencil is somehow better but somehow all research never yields any results. Hmm I wonder why. Maybe because learning efficiency doesn’t revolve around a single tool that is being used, weird I know.
[citation needed]
also: you made a claim that “People don’t learn with pencil or computer better”, and that claim needs backing up with facts.
no it’s the other way around dummy. The default state is neutrality and if you have a claim that something veers of it then you have to substantiate it.
there’s no such thing as a default assumption of “neutrality”. straight up not a thing that exists.
what does exist, and what you’re mosst likely mixing up here, is the mediocrity principle. that’s en entirely different concept and has nothing to do with “neutrality”, because no such concept exists in scientific contexts.
“neutral” is not a concept in nature, so it’s not a concept in research either.
there was for a long time a similar concept for U.S. broadcasters, where they were obligated to try and provide balanced reporting, but that also has nothing to do with research.
if you can provide a source for that “neutrality” claim, I’d be thrilled to learn something new! but for now that’s yet another [citation needed]
What are you even talking about. So you by default assume position that pencil learning is good and ask someone to disapprove it? Don’t you see flaw here? Smh
Mostly posting this because holy shit what a jump to blame schools distributing laptops being the cause and not psychologically addictive social media algorithms having a total domination of their attention
Definitely nothing to do with the fact that schools giving out laptops disproportionately benefits less wealthier families
THANK YOU. As a teacher, this guy made me rage hard. And even harder when older teachers who already hate technology latched on to it as an excuse. Show me evidence for fucks sake when middle school teachers are ALSO now teaching multiple subject areas, have way less prep time, the school has less money, are also responsible for live online grading and access to assignments.
Also, I love fediverse. Rational mind heaven
Giving kids laptops was a great idea. Letting corporations use those laptops to brainwash our children was probably not.
“Educational” software is terrible.
Someone clearly hasn’t played Typing of the Dead.
It educates kids to use MS Office and ChatGPT.
Many got chromebooks and just had google everything.
You shut your whore mouth about Oregon Trail
The issue was not being willing or able to curate their online experiences when given computers.
Correct, and an actual study can isolate variables and when you do that, tech is usually a boon. It’s especially easy to do with tech, but long term studies are still difficult because of history effects and imperfect control groups.
I can believe Gen Z is doing worse, but almost every study I’ve been around in education has found Socioeconomic Status to be the strongest factor (by far) and given Gen Z and Alpha are raised by the first generations to have economic decline, it stands to reason that’s probably the main factor here.
School interventions do help to some degree to mitigate SES, it’s just hard when it’s this bad for this long. We’re talking decades of decline.
It would have been a longer and more complex article requiring a lot of research if they tried to go through all the issues that could be contributing. Hell, it’d be a book.
multiple books, each discussing a different issue.
Give the kids a blank laptop that they must erase weekly, and a thumb drive with the basic Gentoo installer.
I know you’re joking, but what would result if this actually happened would be after 1 week 99% of the laptops would never be powered on again and simply be handed back in at the end of the term.
I’d be more worried about the 1% that are still being used. You’ve created a group of kids that know more about the computers than most IT departments.
Those aren’t kids to worry about. Those are kids to put into advanced classes because they’ve got some great understanding of complex topics and problem solving skills.
Well that’ll definitely make them resilient in the face of adversity, at the very least.
That is brought up near the end of the article.
While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be.
“Unfortunately, ease has never been a defining characteristic of learning,” he said. “Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it’s the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future.”
Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn’t just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it’s counterproductive.
“Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive,” Twenge told Fortune. “Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible.”
Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable.
It doesn’t have to be. Rote memorization always is for me, but that’s not really learning. And you can focus on just about anything when the alternative is a shitty textbook poorly explaining something that just won’t click with you. Look out the window, doodle, count the ceiling tiles, daydream about not being stuck in school, …
Be careful not to conflate effortful with boring. Learning can be fun but fun doesn’t mean easy or lacking in effort. Fun just makes it easier to remain motivated.
The burden of proof is on you for your claim.
Why does learning not need to be effortful or not difficult or not oftentimes uncomfortable?
Yeah, I have literally never gotten better at anything without effort, difficulty, and sometimes being uncomfortable. These things are ingrained to mastering any skill.
I think if it as no difference than lifting weights.
Do hard things till they get easy, then do harder things.
I also think schools are not evolving to the reality. There’s little incentive to memorize facts in a world where they are so easily acceptable. So we shouldn’t teach the memorization of facts.
We should teach people how to use information, how to criticize it, how to synthesize it, how to apply it. If these pursuits are taken seriously students will retain the information.
This issue is that’s much more difficult to test for than the memorization of facts.
I couldn’t disagree more. We should not be teaching kids to rely their phones. This is literally the same attitude the article talks about.
Rote memorization sucks but it’s 100% a necessary skill if you’re going to learn literally anything. Do you really want an electrician who lives on his phone because he didn’t memorize important aspects of his job? How about a surgeon or a lawyer?
There’s no getting around the fact that you need to memorize things if you’re doing to develop a deep level of skill in any given field. Your phone or laptop is not always going to be there.
I was homeschooled. My mom was always avidly against what she called “read and regurgitate.” Instead she supported “teach how to learn.”
It was a different world back then, but the lessons still serve me well.
I teach immigrants the local language, and students are never grateful to be taught a language. Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it’s not. There are thousands of words that people use in common conversation, tens of thousands that you can find in standard newspapers and normal literature, and even more if you want to read academic or specialized literature. When I teach the meaning of one word, that’s giving the students a fish. When I teach them how to break down prefixes or give them advice for increasing their exposure to language input, that’s teaching them how to fish.
The problem is that it only works for students who care. That’s fine by me, because I teach adults and they can decide whether they want to learn or not.
I don’t know how k-12 teachers navigate that, because it’s not exactly the student’s choice- we’ve decided as a society that kids need to learn certain things, whether they want to or not (basically), and that means that schoolteachers need to be able to teach students who don’t care or actively want not to learn (at least about a given subject). Just teaching them to teach themselves doesn’t work there, so you have to teach them some facts, because otherwise they won’t learn any.
It sucks, but I don’t know if it can be fixed. It’s reasonable that students don’t care about every subject, and it’s reasonable that there are things we’ve decided they need to learn, regardless of their interest. Teachers can’t always make a subject interesting to everyone, so sometimes you have to teach the base facts.
Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
I relate to this immensely. I’m taking german classes currently and the professor is driving me insane.
She uses an immersion only method where she speaks German at us and we do exercises from a book.
I am slowly getting an understanding of the past imperfect and various grammatical rules but only barely. There has been no real instruction on how these rules work so when I encounter a new verb or noun it’s a total guess everytime.
From my understanding speaking with some Germans, this is the preffered method for teaching English to school children. Which I must admit does seem to work well the English proficiency of the average person is quite high, even amongst those too afraid to speak it their comprehension is high.
The issue is I do not want to be learning German for the next 8 years as a German student would learn English in school. Also my brain is fundamentally different than a child’s. If they were to explain the rules and grammatical concepts it would be much much easier to understand.
A blended approach where the rules for new grammatical concepts are first explained followed with the immersion based exercises we’ve been doing would be ideal.
Just relying on classes is slow no matter what method they use. You need to study at home as well and something different from what you learn in class so don’t use the textbook from class. I think the best way to learn a language is to focus on vocabulary first. Like learn the 2000 most frequently used words first through rote memorization. Then grammer comes more naturally since you can get a lot of things from context. Also native speakers don’t know the grammar rules by heart, to them forming a correct sentence just comes naturally. Sure it’s good to know the grammar rules and concepts, but to make it come naturally requires a ton of reading and listening and eventually speaking and writing and that requires a large vocabulary.
The most used method for vocabulary is flash cards. Many people use a program called Anki and a German flash card deck has already been made by the community.
Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I actually teach German, and especially for students who have a good language sense for English (so if “I singed a song” immediately sticks out to you), tenses are mostly (with some obvious exceptions, like present progressive and preterite/perfect) pretty similar.
She’s probably trying to get your brain to recognize an irregular verb so you don’t have to learn each verb anew, but that’s a problem you’re less likely to have as an English speaker (for example, you’d say “Morgen singe ich, gestern sang ich, heute habe ich noch nicht gesungen,” which is pretty intuitive after English).
Fwiw, you do retain it longer if she sets it up so you can draw your own conclusions, but you also learn more slowly. And if you’re highly motivated, you’ll probably remember it well enough either way.
The whole class speaks English at a B2 level since that’s what is required for International students at the university. I do feel like that could be capitalized on given the similarities.
Honestly I truly feel like I paid someone to read the Kurs DaF A1 book to me. Rarely there are other exercises or explanations.
Comparing other language course I’ve had I liked my high school French teacher’s approach. She primed us with explanations of the new concepts and grammatical rules. Then she followed up with immersion and exercises.
My Spanish courses in college and high school were just memorization based. I technically reached a higher level of course in Spanish, but remember next to nothing. My comprehension of French is much better.
Truthfully I need to dedicate more time to my German, but my other studies being all English take up my time. I’m here for a master’s degree. The language is an additional skill I would like.
And if you care for learner’s perspectives, give quizzes. I don’t know how to explain it, but when we took our first test I felt a lot of concepts click into place because I had to perform if that makes sense. It’s like my brain felt the pressure and acted. It made me wish we had regular quizzes on the content in between tests.
Honestly I truly feel like I paid someone to read the Kurs DaF A1 book to me. Rarely there are other exercises or explanations.
That’s rough. I’m currently teaching at a school where they basically hired me to do that, but they’re not upset that I’m not. The teachers at the school are mainly university students in language related fields, but they mostly don’t have any experience or training in didactics (my autocorrect twigged on that-is it still pedagogy when you’re teaching adults?), so that’s an okay way to get people doing an alright job.
I’m almost done with my masters thesis in German instruction, so I’m not an expert teacher or anything, but I know how to construct an assignment and what didactic principles should guide a lesson plan. And just teaching to the book makes me feel pointless/like I’m cheating.
If you want a pretty good guide to grammar based on comparison with English, then try English Grammar for Students of German
And if you care for learner’s perspectives, give quizzes. I don’t know how to explain it, but when we took our first test I felt a lot of concepts click into place because I had to perform if that makes sense. It’s like my brain felt the pressure and acted. It made me wish we had regular quizzes on the content in between tests.
That’s very good advice, thank you. One of my students currently is in his mid 50s and he’s got a lot of experience learning things (not just his age, he’s had a lot of huge life changes that required him to do totally new things), and it’s so incredibly helpful. I gave them a quiz when I started teaching them (their last teacher went on leave partway through) and everyone (good naturedly) groaned a little, but he was 100% down for it and got the class to settle.
It helped show me their gaps, and I was able to anonymize them and have them peer correct, which was even more helpful
My seventh grade English teacher got permission from admin (she told us this) to spend her whole semester with us teaching vocabulary. Word roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. That was helpful, and interesting, and the first time I enjoyed learning English. I still struggled in English, but I did better after that.
it’s like blaming the obesity epidemic on plates…
You actually can influence how full a person feels after a set amount of food based on how big or small the plate is on which the food was served.
The addictive qualities of ultra processed foods at the same time as the diminishing nutrition of processed and unprocessed foods alike is obviously so much more of a contributing factor, but isn’t it nuts that plates can also have a measurable effect?
when it’s microplastics!
Then it’ll make the wealthy stupider.
the wealthy know this, they are shielding them from it, placing them in montiserri type schools, aka rich people tutoring, learning grind+ make sure they are in sports, get all extracarricular. with a poorer family its an IPAD/TV/computer doomscrolling , or watching youtube, streamers.
I would be willing to bet that is the case, but good luck doing a study to test the hypothesis.
