Gaming addictions & others

[Veronica]

It's like circle surfing - going around to all the sites you read over and over to see if there is anything new.

My big worries about video games/television and kids:

I have students who are reading 2 - 3 grades below grade level. They never read at home, but they play video games/watch tv for hours. I know this from talking with them and their parents. The parents will restrict the activities for awhile, but they won't take that time to read with their kids.

Lack of parental involvement - I can't believe some of the games/shows/movies my students are allowed to watch or play. I would feel differently about it if the parents were then discussing the inappropriate things in the kids see with the kids, but they don't. I do a few read alouds that are a little on the edge in my classroom, partly so I can discuss these things with my kids because the parents aren't stepping up to the plate and doing it.

I don't know what parents are doing with their children these days. It baffles me. And I don't want you to think I have 30 hoodlums in my class. I have 26 kids who are typical - they make mistakes, they shock me with their generous and caring natures, some of them are diagnosed ADD, a couple are on serious meds. They work hard and they get lazy. They mess up and they have remorse. They drive me crazy; they make me smile.

The other four make me question daily why I am still teaching. These 4 have the ability to bring about ten of the others down to their level and influence them in ways that scare me. These 4 don't show remorse. They are bullies, instigators, defacers of property. They are well on their way to being hoodlums and thugs. And they encourage that behavior in too many of the other kids.

I've always thought it was the parents job to instill community values into their children. But I often wonder if that notion is old fashioned, pie in the sky and there are no community values anymore.

Veronica

[OakLeaf]

Oakleaf, love your sig

I wish I could claim credit for it. It's from a NY Philharmonic pre-concert talk we went to this fall, where the lecturer was discussing Mozart's A Major Violin Concerto. The line cracked up the whole audience, and I knew I'd found a new sig line.

[Crankin]

Veronica, I think your 4/30 hoodlums was pretty much par for the course in every classroom I had! The way you described the other 26 made me cry. I guess inside, I will always be a teacher.
And I also read many things to my kids that were "on the edge" because I knew their parents didn't discuss anything important with them. I would preface it by saying,"maturity alert." And then I would tell them that since I was their teacher they would have to "get over it" and not be embarrassed by frank discussions of human relationships because this is how we learn stuff. I also would say that after having 2 sons, there wasn't anything that would shock me.
And yes, I think that mostly there is very little sense of community left, unless one intentionally sets out to build it. That is why we moved back east. I was getting more and more discouraged with the transient nature of the community in AZ. Not that I didn't have a great life, good job, nice house, friends, etc, but something always felt like it was missing. Now I know what.

[Irulan]

Your kids aren't the current generation Irulan. Your kids are young adults. They are the kids I taught ten years ago- widely different from today's ten year olds.

Veronica

Maybe so, maybe not. They were all pretty obnoxious ten year old.

[uforgot]

I'm a high school math teacher and also a huge fan of the Zelda games.

1. When my trig classes start proving identities, I tell them it's like playing Zelda, problem solving! When they "get" the identity, it's like finding the key to a chest or room. You know, for me, they are the same. I have students who are zelda/RPG fans also, and they tend to be good problem solvers. (We also borrow each others games and recap/help. Talk about opening communication with the students!) Now fighting/racing games? yuk.

2. I have two sons who are dyslexic. I took them to a special reading center when they were in elementary school. I was told to go ahead and let them play side scrolling games as they scroll from left to right. Writing and reading from left to right is a skill that had to be taught to them, and those games just reinforced it. As it turns out, my sons didn't really care for video games like their friends did. They would play half an hour a day tops, and we usually all played together, watching taking turns. It really was a family thing for us.

3. Today's high schoolers are a ME generation. They are able to have what they want, go where they want, be involved in whatever they want and the parents make it happen. They've really never had to struggle for anything and neither did their parents. (my generation). I think Veronica nailed it when she indicated that the lines between adults and kids are blurred. They are. I see kids who really "run" their families, or their families revolve around the kids. Some of the Christmas gifts they received were staggering. I wish I had a nickel for every iphone that belonged to a student in my school. I love my students, most are terrific, but they really don't understand boundaries very well and they have never had to work for anything. Oh, they have jobs, but because they want them to pay for a car or somethng they really don't "need", not because they have to. Their parents also bail them out of any situation. They aren't allowed to struggle or fail. I don't know the answer.

My parents went through the depression and I wasn't handed anything. I, in turn, wanted my kids to have what I didn't. It's too late, but I wonder, did I give them too much? Did I do too much for them? Should I have allowed them to fail more? Is this just getting worse and worse as each generation appears? Even the kids whose parents are involved with them are startled when I ask them not to touch my bike, or my stereo, or no, they can't use my computer. (Students aren't allowed on teacher computers) I ask nice, they respond nicely but are truly startled that it isn't all there for them to touch and use.

By the way, my hat is off to you elementary teachers. I don't know how you do it!

Boy did I ramble. Sorry...

[Tuckervill]

Interesting idea, that can be applied to video games, as well. Written by a friend of mine who is an economist.

Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children
Pam Sorooshian
January 2005

Conclusion: Restricting tv-watching time increases the marginal utility of tv watching and causes children to become extremely strongly attracted to it and to value tv-watching above other, nonrestricted, activities.

"Utility" is a word used by economists to mean the pleasure, satisfaction, usefulness, or whatever other value a person gets from a product or service. Gaining utility is the reason why a person buys a product or engages in an activity. Just like businesses make decisions in such a way as to maximize total profits, individuals make decisions in such a way as to maximize their "total utility." Economists view people as "utility-maximizing" agents. Through an economist's eyes, we're all going through our lives making constant comparisons — choosing minute-by-minute what to do, what to eat, what to buy, what to wear, what to say, and everything else, and every time we choose, we do it so as to increase our total utility as much as possible. Imagine you are standing in an ice cream store and choosing a flavor — what an economist sees is that your brain is rapidly going through all the choices, figuring out how much utility you'd gain from a scoop of strawberry versus a scoop of rocky road and so on, and then picking the one that gives you the most utility. (Notice that utility has to be predicted — we could be wrong in our pick, but we do our best given the information we have. I could decide that strawberry is my pick for today — that's the flavor that I prefer right now — the one that will give me the most utility. And then I might discover, to my dismay, that it doesn't live up to my expectations and I might WISH I could change my mind. It happens. So, our choices are actually based on our "expected" utility gains.)

Okay — there is a lot more I could say about "utility" and if you have objections to this way of seeing the world, we can talk about them. But, I'll leave that for later, and, after introducing one more idea, I'll move on to what this has to do with children and television-watching restrictions.

First, imagine you're in that ice cream shop and you've bought that strawberry cone because it had a high utility value to you. You eat it up and it is delicious and you compute the expected utility of ANOTHER ice cream cone and decide to buy one. You eat it. YUM. Now you compute the expected utility of a third ice cream cone. So — what do you think? Is the 2nd ice cream cone going to give you as much ADDITIONAL utility as the 1st did? Will the 3rd one be expected to add as much to your total utility as the 1st or 2nd ones did? What's going to happen as you eat more ice cream cones? After you've had one, the expected utility of the next is lower than the expected utility was for the first. And after you've had two, the expected utility for the third will be lower than the expected utility for the second one was. They still might have value to you, they still give you utility, just not as much extra utility.

The "extra" utility you get from having "one more" of something, is called "marginal utility."
And - marginal utility goes DOWN as you have more and more of the same thing.

EVEN if you chose different flavors for each of your ice cream cones, you'd have chosen the highest-utility flavor first and so subsequent cones would provide lower and lower marginal utility.

This way of looking at choices is applicable to almost everything we do.

What's your favorite thing to do? Watch movies? Read a book? Garden? Go to Disneyland? Why don't you just do THAT all the time and nothing else? I mean — if it is your favorite, then doesn't IT give you higher utility than anything else. Why do you ever stop doing it?

The answer is that as you do more and more of something, the marginal utility of doing even more of it, goes down. As its marginal utility goes down, other things start to look better and better.

But — when you restrict an activity, you keep the person at the point where the marginal utility is really high.

When you only allow a limited amount of tv, then the marginal utility of a little more tv is high and EVERY other option looks like a poor one, comparatively. Watching more tv becomes the focus of the person's thinking, since the marginal utility is so high. Relax the constraints and, after a period of adjustment and experimentation to determine accurate marginal utilities, the focus on tv will disappear and it will become just another option.