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When they filmed the movie ‘Van Helsing’ in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn’t have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.
My middle school in the us made us learn to waltz in gym class. I’m ass at it, but it was fun.
My elementary school PE did a couple weeks every year where we did square dancing and line dancing. I guess that’s the southeastern US coming in. Sometimes we did some other more traditional English dance where the boys and girls would be in rows facing each other where there were some set steps and then the couple at one end would dance down between the lines to the other end, there would be more steps and then the next couple would move, and so on. It was like something out of a Jane Austen movie.
Now circle together and do-si-do
What the fuck man I got told off for six years because I didn’t know how to jump rope
I mean I also got publicly humiliated by my inability to run far or fast so often it fucked with my head. But we had 6 months of learning to dance before returning to the shame gauntlet
Ah so, it’s not only Finland where the point of Physical Education is to humiliate all the joy of athletics out of the vast majority of generations of people.
Except the up and coming hockey players the washed up sportsman/woman who was hired to teach as a sort of social program gives all their attention to. Guess those have different sports abroad.
But really it seems so efficient that the state makes schools focus on competition, subsidize competitive team sports heavily, and hire subsidized people from professional sports to further the subsidized hobbies of the maybe future professionals.
The end result is billions in subsidies and that most people who can’t hack it professionally just quit sports alltogether in their teens or even earlier.
I just quite can’t see how are they actually trying to go public health first with which the tax expenses are excused.
Yeah I get what my schools were going for. And it was private school, so while taxes pay for actually a worse version by all accounts, my parents paid for mine.
Like, they tried to have a variety of things within budget. We did calisthenics, we did sports like basketball, flag gridiron football, and even occasionally some international football, we had American classics like dodgeball. In high school we even did pickleball and weight lifting.
But at the end of the day I got winded after a few meters of running and so running a mile (1069m) as is something most people were expected to be able to do was an exercise in me exhausting myself and slowly trudging along after everyone else finished. Fortunately I’ve always been really strong for my exercise level so for strength type stuff I regained some of the dignity I lost being lapped by fat smokers.
The thing is, nothing will ever make running something I’m willing to do if I can help it. I get the runners high and still hate running. And it would be an expensive disaster if schools did my preferred cardio of bikes or hikes. But also they didn’t even teach us proper running form. They just assumed “people know how to run, and the weird nerd won’t be athletic anyways”. Fortunately I’ve become fairly athletic in adulthood (though I fell out for a year and a half and am now hurting getting back into it)
We went to dance classes all throughout I think eight grade and learned a few of the classical dances. Waltz, Foxtrott, Cha-Cha, Tango. That’s Eastern Germany in the early 2000s.
Now I’m imagining Mel Brooks doing a black-and-white German Expressionist scene of nine year olds in tuxedos and gowns doing the tango.
“Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health”
(via)
“Julia” has a point, though. Not about the facts, but about the grading of the essays. A five-year-old can now produce a high-school level essay. The writing of essays has become pointless busywork better handed to a machine.
It used to be that penmanship was considered crucial to writing. It wasn’t good enough to have an idea and write it down; your audience had to be able to read what you wrote. Cursive was an essential skill for millenia. I spent 30+ minutes a day for 5 years practicing cursive.
Now, if it is taught at all, cursive has become a graphic art, not a language art. It is important to calligraphy, not communication.
Likewise, modern language arts can place less focus on spelling, grammar, structure, format, and other simple factors where machines have achieved competency, leaving in-depth study of these subjects to the poets. Communicative studies can focus on research, logic, rhetoric.
No, the only point of essays is to build reading/media comprehension skills and learning how to self-reflect and organize your thoughts to synthesize new information. It’s very important.
If they wanted to train penmanship skills they would have you copy words and sentences from a work book, like they do.
build reading/media comprehension skills and learning how to self-reflect and organize your thoughts to synthesize new information.
Yeah. That’s all “research, logic, and rhetoric”. None is “spelling grammar, structure, format”. You’re disagreeing with me, while repeating exactly my point.
Did you even read my comment?
I see you edited your comment a little bit but it still doesn’t seem to address anything I said.
You say: “the point of essays has become pointless busywork”
From what I can tell from your comment, ‘the point of essays’ is either to teach penmanship or to teach spelling, grammar, structure, and format. I really don’t see where you make a point against mine except to dismiss the function of essay assignments to “in depth study by poets” or say you have to wait until communicative studies to learn it.
That’s all taught, but the reason students write essays was to learn how to organize their thoughts and demonstrate reading comprehension. Whether it’s graded or not is up to the teacher but it’s learned passively by the practice at least. And I was taught principals of reading comprehension along with them. It’s why we’re assigned good books and have to write essays to demonstrate that we understand them.
Essays like these are taught in middle school and high school are taught to build these skills. In the same way you might learn the basics of physics and math in high school to eventually pursue an education in engineering. The purpose of argumentative essays in grade school and high school is to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later.
The purpose of argumentative essays in grade school and high school
iswas to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later.FTFY.
The purpose of cursive in grade school was to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later. Then we realized that cursive wasn’t actually needed for this purpose. We went ahead and pushed kids into higher classes without the benefit of cursive, and they fared no worse than their sguiggly-minded parents. A student handicapped with poor dexterity is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much more advanced work now. Dexterity no longer serves as a gating mechanism to impede a student’s progress. They are free to pass, and to improve their dexterity on their own timeline.
Spelling and grammar no longer requires mastery in grade school. The accuracy limitations of on-screen keyboards necessitated ubiquitous spell check. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough that spelling stopped being a gatekeeping function. Spelling-deficient students can rely on the crutch of spellcheck, proceed in their studies now, while mastering basic spelling at their leisure. A student handicapped with undiagnosed lexical agraphia is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much higher level studies immediately, and master spelling and grammar at their leisure.
AI is excellent at forming the structure of essays. It is terrible at reasoning. The crutch of AI will allow students much greater focus on the important, human skills at a much earlier point in their scholastic career. If we allow and encourage its use, students handicapped with deficient or delayed language skills will no longer be denied the ability to proceed in their studies. They can progress with much more advanced work at a much younger age. Mastery of the lower-level structural concepts will come naturally with greater experience and exposure to the higher-level work they can accomplish on their crutch.
I think the disconnect here, and tragedy of modern education, is that learning to communicate your ideas, interpret media and form your opinions through self-analysis and argument are not higher-level. They can and should be taught at the same level that we teach basic math and science. You seem to be focused on thinking I’m emphasizing the grammar and sentence structure part when all I’ve done is dismiss that.
Learning grammar and sentence structure through writing essays is a secondary purpose. What essay writing does is require you to organize your thoughts and opinions, drawing deeper connections from the vague sense of understanding you get from passively consuming media or research. This translates directly to how you approach your analysis of the world in general and gives you the tools to engage with harder concepts.
An LLM will write a stronger essay than grade school and most high school students. But students are supposed to write weak essays. It’s a necessary step to how you learn to form stronger arguments and strengthen your own patterns of thought.
But students are supposed to write weak essays.
That is the concept I am rejecting.
It’s a necessary step to how you learn to form stronger arguments and strengthen your own patterns of thought.
I reject that such mediocrity is a necessary step.
The essential skill is critical thought. The analysis and validation of the claims made in the essay. This argument is weak, that argument is bullshit, this conclusion is unsupported, that one stretches the truth. Those are the skills the student needs to write a good essay, and they aren’t getting them by writing what they know to be mediocre crap. They are getting them by analyzing other works. Learning to identify legitimate arguments from bald-faced lies. Learning to research claims. These are the heart of critical thinking, and these skills are wasted when “mediocre” is the expectation. AI can provide a mountain of shit papers full of hallucinated claims, ready and waiting for a student to rip apart. That’s exactly what this generation of students is going to need to be able to do now that the world is completely buried in AI slop.
English teachers grade grammar, spelling, punctuation. Most pay little attention to the actual content. Weak papers with excellent grammar receive high marks, while strong, well-sourced, well supported papers are are heavily docked over spelling and punctuation. The purpose of language “arts” classes is not the function of language, but the form. “Language arts” are the arts of pedantry, and the antithesis of critical thought. And all of that pedantry has become obsolete in the past few years, just like cursive ~25 years ago. AI-era students will recover thousands of hours of time wasted on pointless machine work, and be able to turn it toward vastly more useful human studies.
English teachers grade grammar, spelling, punctuation. Most pay little attention to the actual content. Weak papers with excellent grammar receive high marks, while strong, well-sourced, well supported papers are are heavily docked over spelling and punctuation. The purpose of language “arts” classes is not the function of language, but the form.
This isn’t true at all. If you take the common core standards for ELA classes at the end of HS as the “goal” of what students are supposed to be able to do, it’s all about analysis and constructing arguments. There’s not a single mention of spelling or punctuation in there.
Students that embrace AI will outperforms tradition students.
