In a topic-driven, well-developed paragraph, explain the CONNECTION between Willingham’s research findings and the researched opinions we have read and summarized about the effect that certain types of new technology are having on our brains. In your paragraph response, use summary, paraphrase, and quotations—from several sources, including Willingham’s essay.
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Devante Wrenn
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 101
22 October 2015
Why don’t students like school?
In Willingham’s prompt he says that our brains are not meant to think. We were designed to do basic things, such as walk talk and sleep. When we think we tend to overdo the brain and expand the brains potential. It is a very good thing and also it says that we aren’t dumb it just takes some of us longer think about things than others. Our brain mainly goes back to memory. We rely on memory a lot to help us through our daily activities. We have to remember how to drive and write and those are simple things that the brain gets use to and we don’t have to think to do it. Before I mention Carr going back to not thinking, I believe that Shia lebouf has a point in this. We do what he says when we don’t think. We just do it. The connection with Carr and Willingham is that they both mention how our brains work. We base everything on memory. The more vital things are it is long term memory, and not so vital is short term memory. A long term memory would be remembering your mom’s voice without seeing it but recognizing it. Short term memory would be studying for a test. Technology helps and doesn’t help in a way because we can get distracted by using it. We also can focus by using it. Music is a good way to help some people focus and memorize certain thing. If it has a good beat and rhythm and you like it you seem to have interest in it. In school we do well when we know what to do. Willingham says the good way to learn if teachers praise us and encourages us to do things. We would tend take on things well and not with a problem. Willingham is a simpler person dealing with technology and how to brain works. Carr is the more modern and advance person about this situation.
Aidan Bish
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
SWU English 1003
21 October 2015
Willingham Connection
Our brains crave the way that the Internet delivers information, but it is important to also practice deep thinking in order to ensure mental fortitude. Willingham is a researcher who asserts to educators that thinking is not easy for the brain, but also that it is well worth it when successful. He emphasizes that “working on problems that are at the right level of difficulty is rewarding, but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant.” The brain, then, seeks a happy medium that is then rewarded with the pleasure and excitement of successful thought. He encourages teachers to find a balance between providing problems to keep students engaged and allowing mental breaks so that they do not become mentally exhausted, because “curiosity prompts people to explore new ideas and problems, but when they do, they quickly evaluate how much mental work it will take to solve the problem. If it’s too much or too little, people stop working on the problem if they can.” This provides an interesting solution to the issue proposed by Carr in his book The Shallows. Carr, a researcher, writer, and “internet intellectual”, bemoans the overuse of technology and emphasizes its detrimental effect on the way we perform deep thinking. In his conclusion, Carr encourages frequent retreat to a “Sleepy Hollow”, or somewhere free from distractions where vital deep thinking can take place. Perhaps the solutions provided in Willingham’s paper can apply to Carr’s concerns, especially since their knowledge on the working of memory and the brain are vitally the same.
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ReplyDeleteBreanna Roper
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 1003
October 22 2015
Why Students don't Like School and its relation to Technology
In Daniel Willingham's essay, he introduces an idea that the human brain, contrary to popular belief, is not designed for thinking. This contradicts Carr's main argument that humans are designed to think deeply, and that technology is destroying our mental capacity. Willingham feels that thinking tends to overwork our brains we manage to actually think about something instead of just using memory to resolve a situation, which we do frequently without even realizing it. Willingham explains: " But I don’t think that content drives interest. We’ve all attended a lecture or watched a TV show (perhaps against our will) about a subject we thought we weren’t interested in, only
to find ourselves fascinated". This specific comment correlates with Carr's beliefs that
technology, the internet, and our devices are constantly distracting us, causing our minds to focus on them when we have not even had the realization of it. The major difference between these two authors' arguments is that Carr feels we are meant to think deeply, but we are sacrificing our ability to do so as we advance further into technology, and develop these so called "innovations". Willingham discusses how teachers and in my opinion, overly strict parents, should "respect students' limited knowledge and space in working memory", while Carr emphasizes the idea that we should strive to think deeply and seems to feel that we should even push ourselves to think as deeply as possible.
Peter Cote
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 1003
22 Oct. 2015
Willingham Connection
Daniel T. Willingham points out that their are four parts to thinking: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and space in working memory. Similar to Carr’s beliefs that the brain is designed to be distracted, Willingham states that “People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, people will avoid thinking.” Willingham shows that the reason students have a tough time thinking on their own is because the brain naturally avoids thinking. The content, like Willingham says, in the way things are delivered are also a reason why people get bored and do not like school: “it’s the content that matters.” People often get bored of having ideas that they are not interested in. Sometimes they even get bored of contents they are interested in because they have solved it or heard it so many times. People also do not like if a problem is too easy or too hard like Sherry Turkle refers to as “a Goldilocks effect…not too much, not too little - just right.” Turkle relates to Willingham in the way that they both believe that people want just the right amount of internet or difficulty in problem solving. Like Willingham, Turkle shows that people like to have things just the way they want them. Turkle, Carr, and Willingham all point out that people are not the best at paying attention because their brains are not designed for it and they want things to be not too easy but not too hard.
Trevor Porter
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 1003
October 22, 2015
Willingham Connection
In Willingham's article, "Why Students Don't Like School", he explains, obviously, the issues that children face when trying to engage and enjoy school. He, and Carr, says that the brain is not meant for deep and longheld concentration. He unfolds the underlying issue they have, "it's the content that matters". If students don't enjoy what they're reading or studying, in turn, they will have a hard time concentrating and engaging in the activity. This is also true for stuff they enjoy as well, but they have done and committed to memory before. You can see this in your own life aswell even if your not a student anymore. Think about a movie you enjoy, if you've seen it before, it's not quite as entertaining as it used to be without the suspense. So people run into a wall, they want to find something that they enjoy. But they don't wont it to be too difficult or non-engaging. This goes back to what Turkle says about people wanting what's "Just Right".
Gabrielle Tallman
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
ENG 1003
22 October 2015
Why Don't Students Like School?
Daniel Willingham is the author that wrote this brilliant paper, asking the most intriguing question of, "Why is it difficult to make school enjoyable for students?" He goes on to tell us that, "People like to solve problems, but not to work on unsolvable problems." This is probably why people invented computers- so that they could do the hard thinking for us and not bore us with the easy stuff. Like Carr, Willingham tells us that multitasking is very ineffective. However, he doesn't seem to have the same "fear of technology" that many of the other writers we have read about have. He's simply stating the facts and trying to assist teachers in their attempt to making the classroom more fun and effective. Willingham rarely speaks of technology but when he does, he doesn't bash on it like Carr often does in his book, "The Shallows". Carr states that we have become less dependent on our own memory and more dependent on "artificial intelligence" but Willingham doesn't take it this far. He only brings about the idea that we rely more on memory than actual thinking. After all, we don't like to think, especially if we can't solve the problem with just the right amount of difficulty.
Kaylee Young
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 1003
22 October 2015
Willingham Connection
In Willinghams essay, “Why Don’t Students like School,” his main focus is that our brain is not for thinking therefore we do not like to think. He even says, “The brain is not for thinking.” People do not like school because they don’t want to think or solve hard problems. We try everything in our power to use reason and avoiding having to think. This somewhat compares to Carr because we use technology as a short cut to thinking. We don’t have to think as much when we have the internet to answer any of our question in a short statement. In conclusion, I believe that technology has affected our perspective on school. We think it’s pointless to learn stuff we could just look up whenever we need to use it.
Austin Bennett
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
ENG 1003
22 October 2015
Why Don't Students Like School- Connection
Daniel Willingham wrote this paper to answer the age-old and seemingly obvious question, why don't students like going to school? The answer is that the brain is not made for thinking, rather it's made to avoid it. Thinking hard about a problem is not an easy task nor is it immediately rewarding. That's where the internet comes in. Using modern technology, phones, internet, etc, requires little to no thinking on our part, so it's easy. We can avoid thinking, which is favorable, by going to our technology. Interestingly enough, Willington does not bash technology for this given his purpose of research, which is to explain that we do not enjoy thinking. Willingham encourages teachers to try new approaches to how they teach their students to keep them more engaged.
Anna Newton
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English 1003
22 October 2015
Why Don't Students Like School?
Daniel Willingham,a professor of cognitive psychology and author of "Why Don't Students Like School," expresses his research of how human's think, and how the brain works in this article. He states that, "the brain is not designed for thinking. It's designed to save you from having to think.." (1). The human memory system is much more reliable than the thinking system, and that is why our brains tend to use background knowledge on a problem, rather than start from scratch. In this article, Willingham is trying to convey the message that, "solving a problem is pleasurable, but the problem must be easy enough to be solved yet difficult enough that it takes some mental effort" (10) to teachers, and educators to make learning less stressful, and more enjoyable. Steven Johnson, a well known author, would add to this article because he believes that technology stimulates the brain more than books. Therefore, he would refer educators that technology would help students engage more in school. Although, Willingham only mentions technology briefly, he is not against the use of it, unlike Nicholas Carr. Carr states that technology, like Google, is taking over the way our brains think, but as Willingham put it "thinking is uncertain" (6), therefore technology cannot "think" for us, but help us gather information to memorize.
Logan Radwanski
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 1003
22 October 2015
-Willingham Connection-Dr. Willingham starts off with the same idea & belief Carr expresses, our brains aren’t designed for thinking and we have to train to think so. As Willingham states “It’s designed to save you from having to think, because the brain is actually not good a thinking.” Isn’t that what Google and the Net were designed for? They help us think less and obtain the information we desire to know then having to go through the difficulty of having to look for it, which can be a turn off for some. For Willingham expressed how “working on problems that are too easy or difficult is unpleasant” then causing one not wanting to learn or work on the problem. For then the Internet can be helping us although this contradicts Carr’s idea the Internet is hurting our brains and the way we think. But how we truly think is based off “when combine information (from the environment and from long-term memory)” stated by Willingham. In ways Carr and Willingham agree with one another but how technology is affecting our memories and way of thinking are contradicting one another. Such as our long-term and short term memories and way of thinking are Internet are being damaged as Carr tells in his book The Shallows. Willingham dives in deeper with memory and thinking emerging with working memory and the ideas of our memory system is better than our thinking system. Also how thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain which Carr never addresses. Willingham takes a new perspective with how students learn and that’s different how Carr, Franzen, and Turkle have taken their ideas and how are minds are changing due to technology.
Carter Groomes
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
ENG 1003
22 October 2015
Why Don’t Students Like School?
Daniel Willingham in this article, “Why Don’t Students Like School?” explains what society needs to do to change this. The solutions he comes up with all comes back to the way we think. Willingham states, “Humans don’t think very often because our brains are designed not for thought, but for avoidance of thought.” Nicholas Carr and Willingham somewhat agree on this argument. Carr believes that the brain cannot think deeply, but only because of the affect technology has had on us. Willingham goes on to say that “successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and space in working memory.” With that being said, our memory is more well founded than our thinking process. Teachers need to be giving problems to where students can use their memory system, so the problem will be easier. Carr believes that technology is damaging our memory system, but Willingham has proven that this is not true.
Hunter Hebert
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
English 1003
22 October 2015
Why Don’t Students Like School? Connection
In Daniel Willingham’s article, Why Don’t Students Like School?, he presents the idea that the reason students tend to not enjoy school is for the simple, biological reason that “our brains are designed not for thought, but for avoidance of thought.”, contradictory to the whole process of school itself. This directly relates to Carr’s statements that our brains have the capabilities to think and process information, however we must train our brains to accomplish these tasks. While Carr’s argument is that our brains struggle to process information because of the distractions of the internet, Willingham states that “working on problems that are at the right level of difficulty is rewarding, but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant.”, therefore, emphasizing the importance for teachers to carefully select problems to stimulate the brain’s thinking process. In opposition to Carr, however, Willingham agrees to the use of technology. Technology can be used to present alternate forms of learning to students, especially ways that stimulate the brain’s memory processes, which Willingham states as a part of 3 of the 4 factors which contribute to successful thinking.