It's flashy! It's fun! It's a waste of students' time and attention!
- Joanne Jacobs
- Mar 23
- 1 min read
"I ain't saying you treated me unkind," sang Bob Dylan. "You just kinda wasted my precious time."
From X:
Figen posts a video of a teacher who brought a PlayStation to class to use Assassin's Creed to teach about the Industrial Revolution.
This is a distraction and a waste of time, responds Tom Bennett. It gets students to expect bells and whistles.
SoL in the Wild agrees it's "100% terrible." He blames constant messages to teachers to make lessons fun, fun, fun. Learning is supposed to "feel relevant to students’ lives, be fun, and revolve around engaging, activity-based experiences," he writes. But, dressing something as a game "distracts from the content and decreases the likelihood that students actually learn the concept you’re trying to teach."
It's "cringe," he writes. "Most students don’t need, or want, school to mimic their entertainment or digital lives. They want clarity. They want teachers to get to the point and help them understand something they didn’t know before."
Merced, California schools have signed $610,000 in contracts for "education through entertainment" offered by School Yard Rap. That will pay for an "African American Affinity Camp" for 100 students, who will explore their identity, learn about African-American history, create hiphop and rap songs, DJ and dance. There's also a summer "Rap Camp" and other activities. Less than 5 percent of Merced students are black; 69 percent are Hispanic.
School Yard Rap's founder, Brandon Brown, says the African American Affinity Camp is open to all students, despite the name. His company now works with schools in 28 states.
I'm always shocked by how vapid American primary curricula are: while high school graduation requirements steadily replace what little freedom remains at the upper secondary level, compulsory educators appear to have almost no idea how to fill the time set aside for them, and their incompetent school boards frequently waste gobs of money on the fads their overpaid superintendents recommend, to the disappointment of our public taxpayers.
I think the other trend that goes with the directive to offer "fun!" is that everything should be familiar . God forbid that students should encounter something at school for the first time!
In fact, why would students expect to be already familiar with what they're learning at school? They wouldn't need to learn it, if so.
My impression is that admin / educrats began to fear that the long-standard, canonical education given out in American schools for decades was culturally distant from the students who weren't faring well in the classroom (disadvantaged, largely African-American).
This was the impetus to move away from / throw out / water down that once-canonical education, and to replace it with (variously) gimmicky and…
Over 20 years ago I took my 9 year old son to the Gettysburg battlefield. He had watched me play Sid Meier's Gettysburg many times; as we sat on Little Round Top, I pulled out the laptop and fired up the game. I showed him in the game where we were, and then pointed along Cemetery Ridge in both the game and in reality. I loaded a 20th Maine-type battle and showed where the Confederates would have come from, and I loaded a Pickett's Charge-type battle and showed how far those soldiers in the game had to march under withering fire. We also watched a few of the scenes from the Gettysburg movie when we got home.
I think I…