re: #657 otoc

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.

You argued that rote lessons increase the ability to concentrate for long periods of time. This is an unsupported and very dubious assertion.

What I’m saying, is what I repeated several times. Sesame Street was designed to take advantage of short attention spans.

Akward phrasing: It was designed to teach taking into account the short attention spans of the ages it was addressing.

But what do we have now? So many other venues have copied the concept and it’s not directed towards kids.

Copied the concept that you ought to teach age-appropriately?

But the kids that have grown with the concept that watching a rest pattern could be used for education.

This is not true.

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.

Those statistics aren’t talking about attention spans, it’s talking about internet usage.

What I grew up with required a bit more thought and attention to understand and appreciate. Movies, publications, news, the arts.

You’re just begging the question here; this is just raw assertion. This is what you should be trying to prove. It’s a little odd that you think that people don’t watch movies these days, too.

What’s your basis for claiming that reading newspaper articles of old required more thought and attention than reading stuff online does these days? It’s just text. Do you have the data for how much time people spent on newspaper articles back in the day?

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.

You haven’t done anything to substantiate your claims.