re: #596 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

My rebuttal is that rote learning tends to measurably diminish performance in other areas, and that ‘network’ learning actually expands attention far better than the frustrating and boring nature of rote learning.

Here’s a citation for that:

jstor.org

And here’s a citation that suggests rote learning is inferior to other forms of learning when it comes to ‘transfer’—that is, applying the learning to novel situations.

jstor.org

Do you have anything showing that rote learning, as you claimed, increases ability to focus for longer periods?

Sorry, all I could do was glean a couple of pages, but it seems you are rebutting something I never said. Unless you can provide additional quotes from these papers that require payment to read, I’m not saying that one form of learning is better than another. To be clear to you, I’m not saying that rote is the way to learn, I feel just the opposite having transitioned from the arts to the sciences many times. To take one of the published articles you gave, the one about students learning Ohms law, let’s face it, the first step is to learn the formulas. The next step is how to apply them into new environments.

A typical exercise with younger children is the use of flash cards and note taking. This to me is a form of rote learning. One is not exclusive of the other, and while rote plays a minimal role to me, it’s as if you are arguing against it entirely. Hard to say though. But obviously you are arguing against something I’m not saying.

If you wish to argue discipline can’t increase attention spans and rote learning doesn’t increase discipline, well, fine. All I can do is think about various exercises designed to increase attention. None of your links (as I can see) discounts what I stated. I said it in a qualified way, and never in a quantified way. Which to me is building relationships from what I’ve learned in the past to come to new conclusions in the present.

So how do you explain children growing up in the US who are part of a different culture having, for example, Chinese parents. They seem to do better in our schools, using our set of benchmarks. We both agreed comparing two countries wasn’t valid, but stats don’t lie. Is it they have a better propensity for drawing relationships or simply work harder to overcome the natural desire to not pay attention for more than short time periods?

Or how do you explain the fact that Sesame Street has changed their strategy over the years, away from the magazine soundbite approach and more towards the full hour show concept?

Again, please pay attention to this one, I’m not knocking what Sesame Street has done. But even they have learned and changed over the years. That was the basis on my half joke blaming them for the ills of the world. Come on now, If anyone should be blamed, it’s parents.

I still have no clue what you’re talking about with Sesame Street > Twitter. It makes as little sense to me as saying that the broadsheet style of newspaper led to twitter.

Really? Let’s look at this in a transfer way.

Your example, from broadsheet to Twitter. If we use the original meaning of a single sheet brought on by taxing the number of pages, it creates a transition of a reduced form of news to a further reduced form of news. While Twitter can be useful in passing links to further new or information, it also passes non-information of what someone ate that day or what someone put on for clothes. Who cares, I’d rather read the full news or article, the more pages the better, so I can get an understanding and make decisions on my own.

So no, what I’m saying is not what your analogy describes.

What I’m saying, is what I repeated several times. Sesame Street was designed to take advantage of short attention spans. For 20 years it really took advantage of them. We indulged our children with what they would take in easily. And it worked. Kids learned. And they did better in school than some kids without the experience. But what do we have now? So many other venues have copied the concept and it’s not directed towards kids. But the kids that have grown with the concept that watching a rest pattern could be used for education. I believe I noticed you made a statement that there is no indication that attention spans have gotten shorter over the years. I don’t agree. What I grew up with required a bit more thought and attention to understand and appreciate. Movies, publications, news, the arts.

Now, don’t blow this into a black or white extreme for I won’t respond. There’s good, with the bad. We aren’t living in a destitute world where people just grunt to each other moving on from one area of attention to another like extreme cases of ADD. Well, unless I read the average Twitter feed, lol.