[HN Gopher] Why are kids being forced to eat lunch in silence?
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Why are kids being forced to eat lunch in silence?
Author : Stratoscope
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-04-06 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| badgersnake wrote:
| Most state labor laws would require a 30 minute lunch break, this
| isn't for no reason.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Man if this happened to me as a kid, I'd fucking learn sign
| language or start blinking in morse code. What jerks! They are
| asking for a class of rebels.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You'd have to know those existed. These children are quite
| young, and might not have heard of Morse code (and hand signing
| slows eating down nearly as much as speaking).
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Accidental hunger strike.
| graemep wrote:
| I do not believe that it even achieves the aim of improving
| academic achievement, except maybe in the very short term.
|
| Happy, healthy, motivated kids do better academically - as well
| as in everyone other way.
|
| I thought this would be about somewhere like Britain's strictest
| school, but even there kids are encouraged to talk.:
| https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/
|
| Silence is just horrific. It is like some form of punishment made
| daily normality.
| ohmyiv wrote:
| I feel old reading that article. I guess it was all the "when I
| was a kid..." thoughts that popped into my head. I believe social
| skills are pretty important to learn in elementary school. "When
| I was a kid", recess and lunch were one of the best times where
| we could get to know and learn from each other. And it applied to
| classwork and playing games and hobbies.
|
| It seems to me that taking kids away from socialization in school
| is just going to lead them to even more social media where
| they'll probably not learn the best social skills. But it could
| just be my weariness of social media make feel this way.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Haha, this seems like something out of a parody. School ranking
| are kinda nessesary, but are also the biggest victim of
| Goodheart's law.
|
| If you want to teach more stuff, then how about you just make the
| day longer? This decision seems less like something that was done
| for the children, and more for having another checkbox filled
| while keeping the kids easy to process.
|
| I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching
| at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if
| effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be
| worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and
| French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything.
| Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like
| this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the
| children.
| bigthymer wrote:
| > I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth
| teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if
| effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will
| be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and
| French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything.
| Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like
| this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the
| children.
|
| Myself and I believe all of my cousins took Spanish classes in
| school. I've hardly used it since then and my Spanish is
| terrible. However, theirs is much better. I think it largely
| depends on what type of career you are involved in and whether
| frequent interaction with regular people is involved. Most of
| us in the software world only interact with others in
| professional environments who speak English well.
| treyd wrote:
| Also, while I essentially never had a use for the 2 years of
| spanish I took in high school, it really made my english
| writing better. Learning spanish made me learn more about the
| structure of sentences (how to talk about direct/indirect
| objects, etc.) and learn more latin roots that I never would
| have consciously been exposed to, which is very useful to me
| now in the context of figuring out what people are saying
| when hearing/reading other european languages. It made my
| grades in english classes go up since my writing was more
| formally correct and comprehensible. The knowledge transfer
| felt the same as it does when applying skills learned in the
| context of one programming language to another programming
| language.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| That's more of an argument for Latin.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| Man, taking Spanish in high school blew my mind. I'm a
| native English speaker with excellent grammar (I missed one
| question on the reading and writing section of the SAT),
| but it's all subconscious. I just go with what sounds right
| when I read aloud in my head, and it's almost always
| correct. When we started learning about conjugating verbs
| in Spanish class I was like, we do this in English? I had
| never thought about it before. I still haven't thought
| about it, I have no idea what tenses we have in English.
| But I can speak and write it just fine! Brains are pretty
| crazy.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Yeah, usage is important. Most people don't need Spanish. It
| makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs. You
| should spend your time on extracurriculars, or anything else.
|
| Of course, if you're interested in a foreign language, for
| any reason, I wouldn't discourage you from learning it. I
| just would not make it a required part of a curriculum.
| freetanga wrote:
| I am native from a non-English speaking country. Went to a
| bilingual school, picked English with A-levels and the works.
|
| Picked French at 15, but really got serious in my early 20s. It
| has allowed me to re-read a lot of my favourites (Dumas, Verne,
| Flaubert) in their original language. Also a lot of what I
| consider cornerstone of modern society in their original
| versions (Zola, Le Bon).
|
| Had to pick up Portuguese on the job at 25, my previous
| experience learning languages made it fairly easy to do.
|
| I discovered new songs, movies, plays, and authors with each
| new language.
|
| Now I speak 4 languages, and I want to get to a fifth in the
| next decade (some Chinese, Arabic or German).At least to me it
| has opened my professional and intellectual viewport. It has
| made me better at abstraction, and while travelling across wide
| parts of the world, I never feel too disconnected (Americas,
| large parts of Europe, Africa and Oceania feel very accesible
| to me.)
|
| I can see how if English is your native tongue the value of
| learning other languages might seem marginal, but for the rest
| of the world being at least bilingual is a necessity.
| ametrau wrote:
| I think the language thing is because it's part of the meme /
| romantic idea that learning a foreign language is something
| everyone should do. I think it's more for the parents when
| shopping around for paid schools and to yeah tick a box on some
| gov list for state schools.
|
| I also regret the time I spent learning Japanese and Italian.
| There's limited time to get a lot across to kids. It needs to
| be thought out. Those hours were completely wasted for me (no
| side benefits, nothing).
| MichaelMug wrote:
| Mandarin and Spanish are absolutely worth learning. Anyone who
| tells you differently is limiting themselves. There is a much
| larger economy that doesn't speak English.
| bormaj wrote:
| Generally I think school is meant to give you the basic
| foundation and as you progress in life you develop
| specializations and dive deeper into things you care about.
| Maybe you don't use everything you learned in school and that's
| fine, but for the next person it may have exposed them to a
| subject they found enlightening.
|
| Personally, I do think learning a language is best achieved
| through immersion rather than brief 45-60min classes. It's not
| ideal but it still works to a degree.
| therealfiona wrote:
| This is what they enforced during basic training. We had like
| 5min to shove 1000 calories into our mouth, and if someone in
| front of you got up before you were done, you had about 20
| seconds to finish and get up before being yelled at to leave.
|
| In Elementary school, my friends and I would come up with things
| to do at recess, talk about our weekends, and plan sleep overs.
| This is bonding time that is gotten no where else. (Assuming the
| kids are not dropped off an hour before school starts, or picked
| up after the parents get done working at 5pm)
|
| Extend the day by 10 minutes and give the kids that extra time.
| dataflow wrote:
| [delayed]
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