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Welcome to Arts and Ideas, in the air, under the tent, and around Baltimore, Talk
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About Tuesday. So this is where I talk about some topic of Sudbury School and
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modeling. Today I thought I'd take a crack at, at least for a bit, screen time.
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Always a perennial favorite of parents stressing out, "Oh my kids on screens too
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much time," and kids going like, "I love screens!" Anyway, so I guess the question is, is it good, is it bad,
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what's up with that? Of course the real thing is, well, if you trust the kids to
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decide for themselves, then they're just gonna do whatever they're gonna do and
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well, yeah, happens to involve screens. So whether they're good or not, that's the
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reality. So you either stop them from doing what they want to do, or you accept
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it. Now that can be the end of the story, but I think there's actually good reason
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to believe it's a perfectly reasonable activity to do. But first of all, one
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thing I want to sort of bring up that I don't usually hear most people talking
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about is, you know, from an adult perspective, computer games are pretty
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boring and tedious. I mean, if someone paid me a lot of money to play computer games
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all day long, I would quit. Like, I just wouldn't want to do that. When I was a
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kid, I played lots of computer games. Of course, they were a bit different then. My
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favorite was text-based adventure games, where you just read a description of
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something and type out what you want to do, and I loved it. Makes me sad that it
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is not a popular thing amongst kids. But in any event, you know, computer games,
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video games, these things often involve, you know, staring at the screen and
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punching a bunch of buttons and, you know, often doing a lot of
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repetitive stuff. In a certain sense, they're pretty boring and tedious. So, you
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know, the actual activity. So the thing that's interesting is, of course,
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something they're getting from the actual game, story, feedback, whatever. You
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know, a sense of accomplishment because they're working their way through
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something. A sense of constructing this mythical world in their mind. A sense of
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mastering some skills with, you know, very good feedback coming back. And, of course,
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computers are the thing that, you know, adults use all the time to do a lot of
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their work. It's very much part of the adult world, so it makes sense for kids
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to explore it and it's a very easy kind of thing to, you know, really explore a
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lot of, you know, because there's lots of stuff you can do. So that's kind of, you
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know, in a nutshell, I think, a lot of what's happening with screen time.
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It's kind of like when, you know, the mythical image of kids in a tribe
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you know, playing games of hunting or whatever, you know, and gathering.
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Like, they're practicing kind of adult skills in a way that's not
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anything really like adult skills. I mean, actually hunting a creature versus like
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kids playing at it, they don't really have a lot to do in common with each
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other. But there's certain notions, there's certain playfulness, and so
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playing with the computer, I think, is very much analogous to that. It's
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generating a comfortability with them,
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intuitiveness, even though they're not necessarily, you know, doing what I would
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think one would need to do, which is playing around with the operating system,
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using the command line, telnetting to other computers, and, you know, doing a
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bunch of programming. And that's what I would do if I wanted to learn about how
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to use a computer, but that's probably because I already know how to use a
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computer, and I know those things. So, you know, so instead, like, they play these
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computer games, and that's what I did as a kid, you know. And then, you know, over
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time, you know, like, we have a number of students who, you know, like, "Oh, I want to
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make games," and so they learn all about various things that really are useful in
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the adult world just from that interest. So there's that. But there's many others
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who don't have anything to do with that. I've certainly watched some playing of
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"Adopt Me," and that's a Roblox game, and in that game, you know, there's a
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bunch of trading going on, kind of growing. It's really kind of a bit
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like a free market UBI setup, which is kind of interesting to see. So, you know,
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like, there's no need to trade with anyone for stuff. Basically, you can get
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all the stuff from the game. I mean, there are some things that are no longer
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in the game, so you need to trade to get those things, but, you know, certainly the
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bulk of what one could do in the game is not at all inhibited from, you know,
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requiring any kind of trading, but trading is a huge part of it. And, you
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know, like, I can see, like, people trying to acquire various different pets fill
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out this board, right? So it's accomplishments, it's interacting with
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others, and it's, you know, figuring out how all this stuff works. So I think, you
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know, that's a lot of the, you know, stuff about screens. Yeah, I don't know. I guess
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basically, I mean, for me, right now, I'm watching some students who often play
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games hanging around the tree and, you know, climbing up and all that. They, you
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know, I guess for me at the school, I see students who disengage from the screen
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whenever they feel like doing so, so I don't really worry. I feel like they're
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in control. They're not addicted. They're not, you know, trying to escape anything.
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They're just, they're engaging the game because there's something interesting to
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their minds about it. I think it's largely about, like, learning their...
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learning how to learn is really what I think a lot of it is about, you know,
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learning how to master something, learning how to build these models of
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what's going on, how to experiment, you know. Oh, if I try this, that happens. If I
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try that, that happens. I mean, you know, that's not a really hard concept, but to
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really get into that, really understand that feedback and that dynamic, I think
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that takes a lot of training, you know. It's about developing the brain
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muscle memory of how to really dive into something, figure it out. So, that to
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me is what screen time is all about. Well, I hope that was useful. We generally
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don't have any problem with screen time here, and you know, the biggest problem is
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just whenever a screen access at home is pretty much not allowed or highly
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restricted, and then obviously there's sort of like a, you know, an ability to
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try to get that time here, and so I think that that can be troublesome. But I think
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in general, I mean, it doesn't happen too often. But yeah, trusting kids to figure
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it all out for themselves generally works out well, and you know, again, like
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there's a lot of socialization that happens with the computers, through the
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games. The loudest place is, you know, the computer lab, and strangely enough the
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dirtiest place. They come running out in the field and doing lots of crazy stuff,
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and then they drag it all back in there. So, so it goes. Alrighty. Well, thanks for
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listening. That was your Talk About Tuesday for the week.