Sentenced To Learn
May 19th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Back when I was a kid, school wasn’t fun. And we didn’t expect it to be fun. It was school.
We were taught all day by one teacher who stood in front of the class and lectured to us while writing or drawing things on the blackboard. In between lectures, we read chapters in our textbooks and worked our ways through countless pages in our workbooks. Every once in awhile, they’d show us a boring educational film strip or 16mm movie. We were expected to pay attention and we were expected to learn. And we had an hour or more of homework every night, with more on weekends and during Christmas break.
But a few decades ago, breakthrough educational TV shows like Sesame Street changed the way that kids learn — and the way that they expect to be taught. Catchy songs, short, fast-paced, colorful cartoons, animated characters, puppets and celebrities do nearly all of the televised teaching — in 30-second bites of edutainment.
Of course, those shows have received a lot of praise.
But they’ve also received a lot of criticism. Some educators claim that such shows have trained children to have extremely short attention spans, and given them the expectation that their school teachers will entertain them in a similar fashion.
Could those short attention spans and inappropriate expectations be a major reason why so many teachers are willing to brand so many children as having attention deficit disorder these days?
What’s the solution? I’m not sure, but I seriously doubt that it’s going to involve anyone using The Study Ball.
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