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American among tourists reported missing in Greece amid deadly heat
A local rescuer in Greece says "it defies logic" that people are risking walks alone in such extreme...
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I do not think that lack of exercise is the main issue here: in most schools kids get a lot of breaks during which they can run around, plus many go outside after school. The issue is streamlining of the process, with students treated as ants in a hive following the same rails as everyone else. There is little respect for individuality, for unique strengths and weaknesses, for different learning strategies, et cetera.
I have spent pretty much 25 years in the education system in various capacities, from a student to a lecturer to a course designer to a performance assessor, plus I have learned a ton on my own. I believe I have gained a pretty good understanding of how one truly learns something quickly and efficiently. Spoiler alert: it is not by sitting in a classroom with a bunch of random students, listening to an underpaid and dispassionate professor.
The primary ingredient in learning is interest: the more excited you are about the material, the better you learn. There are many ways to induce that excitement, and the best one is to gamify the process. You can turn virtually anything into a game that you will have a blast playing, and a masterful teacher will know exactly how to make such a game. For instance, how does one encourage a 2nd grader to learn the multiplication table? "Hey, here is the table: memorize it over the next week, then pass the test. If you fail, you will have to keep retaking the test weekly until you pass". *yawn* Awful.
Let us switch the assignment up a little bit. "Let's split into 8 groups of 4. Each group will present the part of the multiplication table with the first number from 2 to 9, for instance: 3*1, 3*2, ..., 3*9. For each of the pairs of numbers, you will develop a short story involving them. For 3*4, it could be this: 'Me and 3 friends went to that awesome ice cream place. They had 12 varieties of ice-cream, and we wanted to try them all. So we ordered 3 different flavors each. I had mint chocolate, vanilla and... tofu flavors. The tofu one was interesting, it actually goes back to the Meiji restoration era in Japan...' Feel free to use tools such as ChatGPT to help you get all these facts."
I can guarantee that by the end of this assignment every single kid in the class will know the multiplication table by heart. Furthermore, many kids who previously were not interested in math at all now might start looking for other fun math games and puzzles...
But you have to have a flexible mind in order to come up with effective learning strategies. If you are an educator, especially one produced by the soulless system, then you will likely just follow the script, monotonically read the material in class and give students generic assignments - after all, it takes much less effort, and it is all you have been taught.
I sometimes joke nowadays that ChatGPT 4 could take over all the teaching at public schools and do a better job than 99% teachers out there - and that is a joke that has a huge bucket of truth. Here is a simple prompt a kid wanting to learn the multiplication table can use:
"Hey ChatGPT, I want to learn the multiplication table. Please play the role of the teacher and create a fun game for me so I can learn it." I literally just fed it to ChatGPT 4, and here is what it came up with. Neat!
Then just ask it to start with Round 1 and go from there. Dang, I am almost tearing up: I wish tools like this were available back when I was at elementary school...
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