In general, I would split the current volume of basic education into smaller subjects (with many optionals) and finer levels, and have students to make a choice how fast they want to complete them (as long as they would work towards one of these goals).
OK, really, do you want to be stuck with boring and bad textbooks and teachers to drive home the lesson, that some things are just not fun and have to be done anyways?
This can and will be done at home: brushing teeth, bathing, put on clothes, bring out the trash, wash dishes. I have a whole bag of not fun things for my kids to do, that are not fun but have to be done anyways. Turst me, they don't need it in school too. Let learning be fun.
Sorry to be lazy to not look it up, but I thought it was an interesting take on gamifying learning.
The only thing close in college was profs who would let you test out of classes, and work on a self study project for the class, I loved that.
Medication and therapy are expensive. It doesn't always work. If it works, it might not work well. If it works at all, there are often side effects. Getting into therapy is hard. Finding a therapist you click with once you get through all the hoops is even harder. Sticking with each step of the process when you have a disorder that makes sticking to things hard is hilarious once you think about it.
And so on.
People hearing the same thing over and over can be annoying to some, but for others it’s the only thing that’ll really get through a lot of our skulls and get us to try something different.
Doctors here are not aware of other medications and so I just smoke weed by the truckload :-)
Formulations with longer dose/release profiles exist - Concerta XR and Elvanse/Vyvanse are the same active stimulant (methylphenidate), but spread over the course of ~12 hours.
Personally I've found that Concerta has a ramping up and ramping down, with peak effects kicking in around 4 hours, whereas Elvanse kicked in relatively quickly at the same constant level.
Having to take ritalin (and adderall) multiple times a day with the risk of crashing in between sounds like a nightmare, and I'm glad at least here in the UK one of the first thing psychiatrists suggest trying is low dosages of the longer-acting methylphenidate derivatives.
It takes a lot of messing around with different meds and formulations to find one that works for you. It's like incredibly individual/personal; people seem to have wildly different responses to the different families of stimulants, different dosages, different delivery methods, different times of day etc etc. Takes a lot of educated effort.
It really sucks how it's so damn variable between countries or even within countries - national policies on ADHD meds and amount of knowledge your average doctor has in each country on those meds. Wildly and unhelpfully variable.
I've had Concerta, Medikinet and plain Methylphenidate and they all feel the same to me, it's the same chemical after all. Feels horribly nasty and I didn't find all the variables to make much of a difference unfortunately.
The substances that I feel have the most promise unfortunately have an uphill battle in terms of acceptance. Quite hard to find material about how psychedelics relate to ADHD.
It can take care of most of the mindnumbing work.
let’s file a bug to get the dinosaur back
It's very easy to construct examples where its summaries, while they look correct, either miss some crucial point or are outright incorrect.
(I've not done a systematic all-subject study; this is based on the comments I've seen from experts in a mere handful of domains, plus my own knowledge in my own domain).
"""Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”""" - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
It would be an ironically Greek tragedy, if the end of human civilisation were to be caused by a (written) language model, especially given how many Κασσάνδρα-analogs we have had from (given this hypothetical outcome) Socrates to Yudkowsky.
For example I read many, many scientific papers in college and they were all very boring. I feel like the big take away was how to deal with this type of communication medium which was dense, verbose and contextual. I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.
What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well crafted sources?
It would be great to raise the floor of educational material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work through some noise to find the signal.
Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it".
For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path.
Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space.
It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow.
I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff".
Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.
I work through boredom not because I like boredom and not because it's "foundational" to somebody else, but because that's the only way for me to accomplish a goal. So to the extent that somebody's particular work still requires it, I think we're going to have to find new ways to structure things to bring that experience forward in time for them.
I think the other option is to restructure things so that being bored is even less necessary. For example, the common way to think about "foundational" concepts is to structure education with a lot of boring and apparently pointless stuff up front, the promise being that it will pay off later. To me that looks like privileging the convenience and perspective of the instructor over that of the student. Can we instead swap it around so that "fundamentals" are taught in slices in close relation to purposeful activity?
As to the Montessori question, I think it depends on your understanding of boredom. My understanding is that as the student gets older, they take on larger and larger projects, so they learn how to deal with the sort of boring that comes from purposeful hard work, but not the sort of boredom that comes with blindly following authority. To me those feel pretty different, and I might more accurately call the first "tedious" rather than boring.
Framing is important, and there is a huge difference when approaching something with the attitude of "toleration" compared to "determination". The value in the skill of determination, is the realisation that with it, many things can become intrinsically more interesting and rewarding the more work you put it. When you find something that clicks and try hard at it you can end up in a feedback loop, and this is the sweet spot you want everyone to find in life.
Suggesting that hard work should only tolerated is not a fruitful path to put people on - sure some things in society like filling out paper work are inherently boring, and unfortunately the realty of current systematised education is kind of similar, but ironically nether match the reality most real cognitive or skilful work.
Perhaps more of a romantic ideal than something practical - I get that in the reality of current school environments this seems like an hopelessly subtle idea to convey in the hurricane of the massive curriculum you are trying to get them to absorb - However, ideas and wisdom can have a much longer lasting effect on a student's life than what may as well be ephemeral knowledge at that age.