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[Egan_BW]

Coffee is probably a good idea. If it's light out go for a walk and look at things. Hopefully you can go somewhere with birds and trees and things, but if not at least you can step out and confirm that the real world does indeed exist, and contains air and sunlight.

[Yoink]

Don't think going for a walk around here would be a terribly pleasant experience... but, all going well I'll be home later this week, so I shall have to make time for a decent walk or two in some nice surroundings.

I probably won't, though. I probably won't do most things I intend to.

[TD1]

That is a symptom of the human condition which we all must reconcile ourselves too, unfortunately.

[CABL]

YouTube is loading extremely slowly both in Chrome and Firefox. Is it just on my end?

[Egan_BW]

Does not appear to be the case, on chrome. I don't think I live anywhere near you though so it might be on youtube's end, just a different server.

[CABL]

Does not appear to be the case, on chrome. I don't think I live anywhere near you though so it might be on youtube's end, just a different server.

Then I guess Russian YouTube servers are struggling with something right now. I hope the servers will get better tomorrow.

[Kagus]

Does not appear to be the case, on chrome. I don't think I live anywhere near you though so it might be on youtube's end, just a different server.

Then I guess Russian YouTube servers are struggling with something right now. I hope the servers will get better tomorrow.

Possibly a symptom of the war on Telegram? I remember YouTube basically being the odd one out of the sites and IPs blacklisted by the government.

[CABL]

Possibly a symptom of the war on Telegram? I remember YouTube basically being the odd one out of the sites and IPs blacklisted by the government.

Nah, that's not Roskomnadzor. Apparently, some serious Youtube servers crash happened in Russia yesterday, in April 24.

You want to know what's extremely funny and embarrassing at the same time? Apparently, Wayback Machine was blocked in Russia because it contained some ISIS propaganda video, so they banned it under "propaganda of terrorism/hatred" moniker.

[Trekkin]

I went to go give a presentation on genetics to a local high school class today for DNA Day, as I apparently qualify as a "local scientist." Nobody asked or answered any questions or even looked up from their phones, let alone looked interested. They didn't even change facial expression or anything. Might as well have been teaching to forty coma patients.

It's just a little sad that all the effort required to set all this up was so thoroughly wasted.

[Kagus]

It's times like that when you incorporate really outlandish topics like which genes were rectally implanted into our DNA by space aliens, as well as sudden loud noises into your presentation. Works a charm.

[Trekkin]

Well, their regular teacher did tell me in passing that "they don't do anything. No questions, no work, nothing." during the experimental portion, so I guess I'm not uniquely terrible at this. Then, too, the librarian (in whose library I was teaching, apparently in order to fit everyone) was surprised that so many of them turned up, as out of two classes of twenty they got a combined twenty-four and only two were called to the principal's office during the lecture.

[JoshuaFH]

I went to go give a presentation on genetics to a local high school class today for DNA Day, as I apparently qualify as a "local scientist." Nobody asked or answered any questions or even looked up from their phones, let alone looked interested. They didn't even change facial expression or anything. Might as well have been teaching to forty coma patients.

It's just a little sad that all the effort required to set all this up was so thoroughly wasted.

I'm afraid this is very common. Perhaps one might want to blame the children, or the phones, but I've been reading a book (How Children Learn -John Holt) recently that I think identifies the very poor method of schooling and teaching that disinterests children and turns them off from being personally inquisitive. Curiosity is something naturally present in the very young, but modern schools prematurely snuff it out with their good intentions of trying to stuff information into them and set them toward a planned, predestined academic future.

It's a topic that's actually occupied a good deal of my thinking recently, and I wonder both how valid my own thinking is, how valid the traditional system is, and how one would even go about changing system if it's obvious that this one is both obsolete and actively harmful to today's young minds.

[Trekkin]

Just to be clear, I'm not blaming the kids or the phones; I'm certainly not angry at them for not paying attention to something they realistically have no need to know. I'm just sad that this is the state of things: they're very well trained to come in and warm a seat for ninety minutes without doing anything disruptive or indeed anything at all, and I don't see how any of them are ever going to learn to do anything different.

[JoshuaFH]

Just to be clear, I'm not blaming the kids or the phones; I'm certainly not angry at them for not paying attention to something they realistically have no need to know. I'm just sad that this is the state of things: they're very well trained to come in and warm a seat for ninety minutes without doing anything disruptive or indeed anything at all, and I don't see how any of them are ever going to learn to do anything different.

That's a goddamn good question. I obviously don't want to say that they're lost causes, but any solution I can think of would require a drastic cultural shift that obviously can't happen overnight and not without a powerful impetus to force it into motion.

[wierd]

Part of the issue (How to keep children interested/engaged, while also assuring a more or less uniform practice of availability and standardized educational CV) is that what interests students is a very "per student" thing, and what society wants from schools is "homogeneous CV acquisition."

EG, the society is less concerned that billy and jane like English class, or develop a love for literature. The society wants billy and jane to be able to read instructions competently.

Then there is the whole, "billy is from an inner city with a high crime rate (and is also black), while jane is from an affluent suburban area with a low crime rate (and is also white)-- how do we assure that billy has the same CV as jane (or even has the same opportunities to gain a robust CV as jane)?"

Even with our "Cookie cutter, all kids are cardboard cutouts" approach to education, we *STILL* are not achieving this latter goal.

If we adopted, say-- the German methodology, where interests are identified early, nurtured, and students guided down preset pathways to assure high quality but very disparate outcomes-- we would have the "equality" people up in arms, because it would (by necessity of its design) segregate outcomes, and have strong statistical biases in those outcomes based on population and geographical demographic profiles. (What is interesting to impoverished inner city kids is going to be different than what is interesting to privileged affluent suburban kids, and so, the interest scores for various academic paths will be different, so on a track-based system, you will have wild differences in rates between the two.)

This is getting into the "I want my cake and eat it too." territory.  Not every child is a budding physicist, or a writer of masterful fiction, or an aspiring engineer.  Some kids really are "Future janitor."  Society does not want to acknowledge this, is in love with the idea that everyone should be cookie-cutter equal as children, even when in practice, all this does is disinterest 99% of the student body, and ensure a homogeneous but terrible outcome.