this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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They would probably be more likely to stare at their phones instead of learning if they did.
I do think that having students sit at desks for hours at a time is not an effective way of teaching. Giving students different ways of learning is beneficial and more likely to motivate them. But that usually is more work and more expensive to do.
In an ideal world, every student would have an individualized, self paced learning program with a dedicated teacher. Unfortunately, that's not the case for nearly any student.
I would be interested to see how a self paced learning program with a dedicated teacher would end up if it was focused on embracing getting sidetracked. I know I've sat through history classes in the past and had semi-unrelated questions I wanted to research or ask about but didn't want to waste people's time. In situations like that I would prefer to have a computer to get a quick answer versus pondering it in the back of my head.
There must be some truth to an idea that you don't learn as much from an answer from a question you didn't ask.
I had a history teacher in school that liked me even though I barely paid attention in class. I was bored in the class itself, but loved history and would spend the entire period just reading the textbook because I found it interesting. So even though I didn't pay attention I would still ace assignments like nobody else in there.
I was usually a couple chapters past the class at any given time.
Man, I remember a couple teachers that encouraged randomly asking questions like that, and the whole class was really engaged. It was very rare but an amazing environment to learn in. I feel bad that there's so many people that never got to have those sort of teachers.
It's like the educational equivalent of a gateway drug. Some of the electives I took like programming really encouraged it and that's what kept me interested even afterwards with subpar instructors.
I think at a certain point, you should be able to drop math as a subject and take programming instead. There's no shortage of math concepts in programming that still require understanding of underlying concepts, but I can easily say if I had that option in school, I'd have learned way more in a programming class than I ever did in math.
I mean programming is a way to get someone engaged and to some degree there can be creativity. It would almost be like a more topical and realistic version of a word problem