In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko." As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a problem with the pupils themselves. From a report: Ten-year-old Yuta Ito waited until the annual Golden Week holiday last spring to tell his parents how he was feeling -- on a family day out he confessed that he no longer wanted to go to school. For months he had been attending his primary school with great reluctance, often refusing to go at all. He was being bullied and kept fighting with his classmates. His parents then had three choices: get Yuta to attend school counselling in the hope things would improve, home-school him, or send him to a free school. They chose the last option. Now Yuta spends his school days doing whatever he wants -- and he's much happier.

Yuta is one of Japan's many futoko, defined by Japan's education ministry as children who don't go to school for more than 30 days, for reasons unrelated to health or finances. The term has been variously translated as absenteeism, truancy, school phobia or school refusal. Attitudes to futoko have changed over the decades. Until 1992 school refusal -- then called tokokyoshi, meaning resistance -- was considered a type of mental illness. But in 1997 the terminology changed to the more neutral futoko, meaning non-attendance. On 17 October, the government announced that absenteeism among elementary and junior high school students had hit a record high, with 164,528 children absent for 30 days or more during 2018, up from 144,031 in 2017.

theodp writes: The Hour of Code home page captured by the Internet Archive on Dec. 17th boasted that 835,581,513 students had been 'served' an Hour of Code. Three days later, however, the numbers had jumped to 910,905,104 served, presumably due to counter updates that were deferred during this year's event. "It has been a HUGE year -- and decade! -- for computer science education," tweeted tech-backed Code.org. All over the world, more than 910 MILLION students have started an #HourOfCode since we began this journey in 2013. Thank YOU for being part of this global movement....!"

The Hour of Code Leaderboards consistently suggest the city in the world with the greatest Hour of Code participation is tiny Boardman, OR (population 4,490), perhaps because of the Amazon data centers that an AWS Case Study notes power Code.org.

Last year, Finland launched a free online crash course in artificial intelligence with the aim of educating its citizens about the new technology. Now, as a Christmas present to the world, the European nation is making the six week program available for anyone to take. The Verge reports: Strictly speaking, it's a present for the European Union. Finland is relinquishing the EU's rotating presidency at the end of the year, and decided to translate its course into every EU language as a gift to citizens. But there aren't any geographical restrictions as to who can take the course, so really it's to the world's benefit. The course certainly proved itself in Finland, with more than 1 percent of the Nordic nation's 5.5 million citizens signing up. The course, named Elements of AI, is currently available in English, Swedish, Estonian, Finnish, and German.

Dominion Energy, the utility that supplies the Commonwealth of Virginia with most of its electricity, is about to begin an ambitious plan to roll out electric school buses in the state that will store electricity when not ferrying kids to school. "Earlier this week, it was announced that phase one, which begins in 2020, will start with 50 electric school buses built by Thomas Built Buses in partnership with Proterra and Daimler Trucks," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The buses will be Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys, an electric version of one of TBB's existing buses. Each one will carry 220kWh of lithium-ion battery storage for a range of about 134 miles (216km), and they will recharge in about three hours using Proterra's 60kW DC fast charging system.

Dominion Energy says that replacing a single diesel school bus with an EV bus has the same effect as taking more than five gasoline cars off the road, and by 2025 it hopes to have deployed 1,000 EV school buses to the Commonwealth. Should all go well, it wants 50 percent of Virginia's school bus fleet to be battery electric by 2030. The utility is offsetting the costs to school districts, in part because it wants to use the buses for vehicle-to-grid storage when they're not on the school run. In fact, a school district's suitability for V2G is the main determining factor in deciding which districts will be chosen for the first 50 buses.

Schools are increasingly adopting a "one-to-one" policy of giving each child a digital device -- often an iPad -- and most students in the U.S. now use digital learning tools in school. There's near-universal enthusiasm for technology on the part of educators. Unfortunately, the evidence is equivocal at best. Some studies have found positive effects, at least from moderate amounts of computer use, especially in math. But much of the data shows a negative impact. It looks like the most vulnerable students can be harmed the most by a heavy dose of technology -- or, at best, not helped. Why are these devices so unhelpful for learning? Various explanations have been offered. When students read text from a screen, they absorb less information than when they read it on paper, for example. But there are deeper reasons, too. Unless we pay attention to these, we risk embedding a deeper digital divide.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found. Cutting air pollution around the world to the EU's legal limit could prevent millions of people becoming depressed, the research suggests. This assumes that exposure to toxic air is causing these cases of depression. Scientists believe this is likely but is difficult to prove beyond doubt. The particle pollution analyzed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry. The researchers said the new evidence further strengthened calls to tackle what the World Health Organization calls the "silent public health emergency" of dirty air.

The research, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, used strict quality criteria to select and pool research data from 16 countries published up to 2017. This revealed a strong statistical link between toxic air and depression and suicide. [...] The data analyzed in the new research linked depression with air pollution particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (equivalent to 0.0025 millimeters and known as PM2.5). People exposed to an increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m^3) in the level of PM2.5 for a year or more had a 10% higher risk of getting depression. Levels of PM2.5 in cities range from as high as 114ug/m^3 in Delhi, India, to just 6ug/m^3 in Ottawa, Canada. In UK cities in 2017, the average PM2.5 level was 13ug/m^3. The researchers estimated that lowering this to the WHO recommended limit of 10ug/m^3 could reduce depression in city dwellers by about 2.5%. The available data on suicide risk was for particles ranging up to 10 micrometers (PM10). The researchers found a short-term effect, with a 10ug/m^3 increase over three days raising the risk of suicide by 2%. "The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm," the report notes.

"The studies analyzed took account of many factors that might affect mental health, including home location, income, education, smoking, employment and obesity. But they were not able to separate the potential impact of noise, which often occurs alongside air pollution and is known to have psychological effects."

theodp writes: In Teaching Academic Honesty in CS50, a new paper scheduled to be presented at SIGCSE 2020, educators behind Harvard's fabled CS50 introductory computer science course report on an unexpected benefit of the introduction of a "regret clause" that gives students who cheat 72 hours to self-report their misdeeds in return for a lesser punishment: It's made the CS50 team lose less sleep over referring "unregretful" cheaters for harsh punishment.

From the SIGCSE paper: "Invocations of that [regret] clause have led to heart-to-heart talks, referrals for mental health, and, ultimately, teachable moments for an otherwise not-previously-reached demographic. But that same clause has also contributed to an uptick in the number of cases referred to the university's honor council for disciplinary action [which may result in required withdrawal from the university], in part because we now feel more comfortable referring cases after students have had an opportunity to take ownership themselves but have chosen not to do so." Bet you didn't see that one coming, kids!

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In what has become a holiday tradition of sorts, Google is again rewarding teachers who steer kids to Google Hour of Code lessons with $100 gift codes. "When teachers in grades 2-8 complete the Google CS First activity 'Code Your Hero' with at least 20 of their students and fill out our Classroom Rewards form," explains the DonorsChoose Help Center, "they'll receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code."

According to the posted FAQ, that might work out to be about $2.50 or less per child-hour. ("We estimate that this can take up to 2 hours of class time").

For this year's Computer Science Education Week, Google has also enlisted the help of the ever-likable Chance the Rapper to get its CS First coding curriculum into classrooms, and provided a $250,000 Google.org grant to support the SocialWorks (Chance's nonprofit) and Chicago Public Schools' CS4All initiatives.

In a piece for the BBC, Chris Baraniuk writes about how the intelligence of New Caledonian crows may be far more advanced than we ever thought possible. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Intelligence is rooted in the brain. Clever primates -- including humans -- have a particular structure in their brains called the neocortex. It is thought that this helps to make advanced cognition possible. Corvids, notably, do not have this structure. [New Caledonian crows belong to the corvid family of birds -- as do jackdaws, rooks, jays, magpies and ravens.] They have instead evolved densely packed clusters of neurons that afford them similar mental prowess. The specific kind of brain they have doesn't really matter -- corvids and primates share some of the same basic capabilities in terms of problem-solving and plasticity, or being able to adapt and change in the face of new information and experiences. This is an example of convergent evolution, where completely different evolutionary histories have led to the same feature or behavior. It's easy for humans to see why the things corvids can do are useful. From identifying people who have previously posed a threat to them or others in their group to using gestures for communication -- we too rely on abilities like these.

[Christian Rutz at the University of St Andrews] is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies -- can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn't use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. In the wild, New Caledonians use their tools to scoop insects out of holes, for example in tree trunks. Footage of this behavior has been caught on camera.

You might think that some animals are smarter than others -- with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn't mean we're the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorize where food is located in the forest canopy, for example. Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialization. "New Caledonian crows, like us and other clever animals, have moods and memories. Strategies and expectations. They seem remarkably able to engage with complexity," writes Baraniuk in closing. "Evolution made this possible. But cognition, like life itself, serves more than just a need. Animal intelligence allows all sorts of fascinating phenomena to arise. [...] Nature provided the notes, but animal brains make the music. The mind, as they say, is the only limit."

The AI world is booming in a range of metrics covering research, education, and technical achievements, according to AI Index report -- an annual rundown of machine learning data points now in its third year. From a news writeup, which outlines some of the more interesting and pertinent points: AI research is rocketing. Between 1998 and 2018, there's been a 300 percent increase in the publication of peer-reviewed papers on AI. Attendance at conferences has also surged; the biggest, NeurIPS, is expecting 13,500 attendees this year, up 800 percent from 2012.
AI education is equally popular. Enrollment in machine learning courses in universities and online continues to rise. Numbers are hard to summarize, but one good indicator is that AI is now the most popular specialization for computer science graduates in North America. Over 21 percent of CS PhDs choose to specialize in AI, which is more than double the second-most popular discipline: security / information assurance.
The US is still the global leader in AI by most metrics. Although China publishes more AI papers than any other nation, work produced in the US has a greater impact, with US authors cited 40 percent more than the global average. The US also puts the most money into private AI investment (a shade under $12 billion compared to China in second place globally with $6.8 billion) and files many more AI patents than any other country (with three times more than the number two nation, Japan).
AI algorithms are becoming faster and cheaper to train. Research means nothing unless it's accessible, so this data point is particularly welcome. The AI Index team noted that the time needed to train a machine vision algorithm on a popular dataset (ImageNet) fell from around three hours in October 2017 to just 88 seconds in July 2019. Costs also fell, from thousands of dollars to double-digit figures.
Self-driving cars received more private investment than any AI field. Just under 10 percent of global private investment went into autonomous vehicles, around $7.7 billion. That was followed by medical research and facial recognition (both attracting $4.7 billion), while the fastest-growing industrial AI fields were less flashy: robot process automation ($1 billion investment in 2018) and supply chain management (over $500 million).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations could get by without higher education, an analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal found. Within the next three years, American manufacturers are, for the first time, on track to employ more college graduates than workers with a high-school education or less, part of a shift toward automation that has increased factory output, opened the door to more women and reduced prospects for lower-skilled workers.

U.S. manufacturers have added more than a million jobs since the recession, with the growth going to men and women with degrees, the Journal analysis found. Over the same time, manufacturers employed fewer people with at most a high-school diploma. Employment in manufacturing jobs that require the most complex problem-solving skills, such as industrial engineers, grew 10% between 2012 and 2018; jobs requiring the least declined 3%, the Journal analysis found. [...] Specialized job requirements have narrowed the path to the middle class that factory work once afforded. The new, more advanced manufacturing jobs pay more but don't help workers who stopped schooling early. More than 40% of manufacturing workers have a college degree, up from 22% in 1991. Looking ahead, investments in automation will continue to expand factory production with relatively fewer employees. Jobs that remain are expected to be increasingly filled by workers from colleges and technical schools, leaving high-school graduates and dropouts with fewer opportunities. Manufacturing workers laid-off in years past also will see fewer suitable openings. "At Pioneer Service, a machine shop in the Chicago suburb of Addison, Ill., employees in polo shirts and jeans, some with advanced degrees, code commands for robots making complex aerospace components on a hushed factory floor," reports The Wall Street Journal. "That is a far cry from work at Pioneer in the 1990s, when employees had to wear company uniforms to shield their clothes from the grease flying off the 1960s-era manual machines used to make parts for heating-and-cooling systems."

theodp writes: In 2003, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously faced expulsion from Harvard after launching FaceMash, a type of "hot or not" website for Harvard students that asked visitors to review pictures of female students and rate their attractiveness. So perhaps it's fitting that during next week's Hour of Code, Facebook-sponsored Code.org's signature tutorial will introduce schoolchildren aged 8 and up to Artificial Intelligence concepts by asking them to review pictures of fish and rate their "awesomeness."

"A.I. is learning which fish are 'awesome' and then sorting them based on the data provided by the student," explains Code.org in a post describing AI for Oceans: a #CSforGood activity, in which students create training data by answering the question of "Is this fish awesome?" by clicking on an "awesome" or "not awesome" button. It's a well-intentioned cautionary lesson in AI: Training Data & Bias, and one that seems to presume today's 3rd graders will know the correct answer to "Is it fair to use artificial intelligence to judge a fish by its looks?" better than certain circa-2003 Harvard students might have!

Some doctors say that medical students and residents are turning to YouTube to fill in gaps in their training. The video-sharing platform hosts tens of thousands of surgery-related videos, and the number keeps climbing every year. CNBC reports: CNBC found tens of thousands of videos showing a wide variety of medical procedures on the Google-owned video platform, some of them hovering around a million views. People have livestreamed giving birth and broadcast their face-lifts. One video, which shows the removal of a dense, white cataract, has gone somewhat viral and now has more than 1.7 million views. Others seem to have found crossover appeal with nonmedical viewers, such as a video from the U.K.-based group Audiology Associates showing a weirdly satisfying removal of a giant glob of earwax. Doctors are uploading these videos to market themselves or to help others in the field, and the amount is growing by leaps and bounds. Researchers in January found more than 20,000 videos related to prostate surgery alone, compared with just 500 videos in 2009.

The videos are a particular boon for doctors in training. When the University of Iowa surveyed its surgeons, including its fourth-year medical students and residents, it found that YouTube was the most-used video source for surgical preparation by far. But residents and medical students are not the only ones tuning in. Experienced doctors, like Stanford Hospital's vascular surgeon Dr. Oliver Aalami said he turned to YouTube recently ahead of a particularly difficult exposure. There's one problem with this practice that will be familiar to anybody who's searched YouTube for tips on more mundane tasks like household repairs. How can doctors tell which videos are valid and which contain bogus information? "[O]ne recent study found more than 68,000 videos associated with a common procedure known as a distal radius fracture immobilization," the report adds. "The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution. Among those, the scores were mixed. In several cases, the credentials of the person performing the procedure could not be identified at all."

Other studies are finding that YouTube's algorithm is highly ranking videos where the technique isn't optimal.

A society dedicated to preserving the "much-abused" apostrophe is to be shut down as its chairman said "ignorance and laziness" had won. From a report: John Richards, who worked in journalism for much of his career, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 after he retired. Now 96, Richards is calling time on the society, which lists the three simple rules for correct use of the punctuation mark. Writing on the society's website, he said: "Fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English language. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!" Richards started the society after seeing the "same mistakes over and over again" and hoped he would find half a dozen people who felt the same way.

"A massive database storing tens of millions of SMS text messages, most of which were sent by businesses to potential customers, has been found online," reports TechCrunch. The database belongs to a company that works with over 990 cell phone operators and reaches more than 5 billion subscribers around the world, according to the researchers.

TechCrunch writes: The database is run by TrueDialog, a business SMS provider for businesses and higher education providers, which lets companies, colleges, and universities send bulk text messages to their customers and students. The Austin, Texas-based company says one of the advantages to its service is that recipients can also text back, allowing them to have two-way conversations with brands or businesses.

The database stored years of sent and received text messages from its customers and processed by TrueDialog. But because the database was left unprotected on the internet without a password, none of the data was encrypted and anyone could look inside. Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed database earlier this month as part of their internet scanning efforts... Many of the messages we reviewed contained codes to access online medical services to obtain, and password reset and login codes for sites including Facebook and Google accounts...

One table alone had tens of millions of messages, many of which were message recipients trying to opt-out of receiving text messages.

Dropbox's Work in Progress blog shared a 2000-word "conversation with the creator of the world's most popular programming language," noting that many computer science schools are switching over from Java to Python, and arguing that "JavaScript still owns the web, and Java runs 2.5 billion Android phones, but for general purpose programming and education, Python has become the default standard."

They also write that the language's recently-retired creator Guido van Rossum "thinks Python may be closer to our visual understanding of the structures that we are representing in code than other languages." "While I was researching my book, CODERS," says author Clive Thompson, "I talked to a lot of developers who absolutely love Python. Nearly all said something like 'Python is beautiful.' They loved its readability -- they found that it was far easier to glance at Python code and see its intent. Shorn of curly brackets, indented in elegant visual shelves, anything written in Python really looks like modern poetry." They also find that Python is fun to write, which is more important than it may seem. As Thompson writes, "When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration."

Building the priority of the programmer's time into the language has had a curious effect on the community that's grown around it. There's a social philosophy that flows out of Python in terms of the programmer's responsibility to write programs for other people. There's an implicit suggestion, very much supported by Van Rossum in the ways he talks and writes about Python, to take a little more time in order to make your code more interpretable to someone else in the future. Expressing your respect for others and their time through the quality of your work is an ethos that Van Rossum has stealthily propagated in the world. "You primarily write your code to communicate with other coders, and, to a lesser extent, to impose your will on the computer," he says...

Part of the enduring appeal of Python is the optimism and humility of starting over. "If you've invested much more time into writing and debugging code, you're much less eager to throw it all away and start over." Co-founder and CEO, Drew Houston wrote the first prototype of Dropbox in Python on a five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York. "The early prototypes of Dropbox were thrown away, largely, many times," says Van Rossum....

What has he taken away from his thirty year journey with Python? "I have learned that you can't do it alone, which is not an easy lesson for me. I've learned that you don't always get the outcome that you went for, but maybe the outcome you get is just as good, or better."
Though two decades ago van Rossum had tried a short-lived project called Computer Programming 4 Everybody (or CP4E), he now says "I'm not so sure that it needs to happen anymore. I think computers have made it to that point, where they're just a useful thing that not everybody needs to know what goes on inside."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp also flagged van Rossum's remarks that "there are certain introductions to programming that are fun for kids to do, but they're not fun for all kids, and I don't think I would want to make it a mandatory part of the curriculum."

The San Diego Public Library system just wiped out overdue fines for 130,000 people. It's part of a growing trend, reports NPR: The changes were enacted after a city study revealed that nearly half of the library's patrons whose accounts were blocked as a result of late fees lived in two of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "I never realized it impacted them to that extent," said Misty Jones, the city's library director.

For decades, libraries have relied on fines to discourage patrons from returning books late. But a growing number of some of the country's biggest public library systems are ditching overdue fees after finding that the penalties drive away the people who stand to benefit the most from free library resources. From San Diego to Chicago to Boston, public libraries that have analyzed the effects of late fees on their cardholders have found that they disproportionately deter low-income residents and children. Acknowledging these consequences, the American Library Association passed a resolution in January in which it recognizes fines as "a form of social inequity" and calls on libraries nationwide to find a way to eliminate their fines....

Lifting fines has had a surprising dual effect: More patrons are returning to the library, with their late materials in hand. Chicago saw a 240% increase in return of materials within three weeks of implementing its fine-free policy last month. The library system also had 400 more card renewals compared with that time last year. "It became clear to us that there were families that couldn't afford to pay the fines and therefore couldn't return the materials, so then we just lost them as patrons altogether," said Andrea Telli, the city's library commissioner. "We wanted our materials back, and more importantly, we wanted our patrons back..."

in San Diego, officials calculated that it actually would be saving money if its librarians stopped tracking down patrons to recover books. The city had spent nearly $1 million to collect $675,000 in library fees each year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A new study published by the Brookings Institution takes a closer look at jobs that are the most exposed to artificial intelligence (AI), a subset of automation where machines learn to use judgment and logic to complete tasks -- and to what degree. For the study, Stanford University doctoral candidate Michael Webb analyzed the overlap between more than 16,000 AI-related patents and more than 800 job descriptions and found that highly-educated, well-paid workers may be heavily affected by the spread of AI.

Workers who hold a bachelor's degree, for example, would be exposed to AI over five times more than those with only a high school degree. That's because AI is especially good at completing tasks that require planning, learning, reasoning, problem-solving and predicting -- most of which are skills required for white collar jobs. Other forms of automation, namely in robotics and software, are likely to impact the physical and routine work of traditionally blue-collar jobs. [...] Well-paid managers, supervisors and analysts may also be heavily impacted by AI. Anima Anandkumar, director of machine learning research at Nvidia, said workers should evaluate the future of their own roles by asking three questions: Is my job fairly repetitive? Are there well-defined objectives to evaluate my job? Is there a large amount of data accessible to train an AI system? If the answer to all three of these questions is yes, Anandkumar says AI exposure is likely and suggests workers should aim for jobs that require more creativity and human intuition.

According to the report, some of the jobs that face the highest exposure to AI in the near future include: Chemical engineers, political scientists, nuclear technicians, and physicists.

Texas Instruments' $100 calculators have been required in classrooms for more than twenty years, as students and teachers still struggle to afford them. From a report: Texas Instruments released its first graphing calculator, the TI-81, to the public in 1990. Designed for use in pre-algebra and algebra courses, it was superseded by other Texas Instruments models with varying shades of complexity but these calculators remained virtually untouched aesthetically. Today, Texas Instruments still sells a dozen or so different calculator models intended for different kinds of students, ranging from the TI-73 and TI-73 Explorer for middle school classes to the TI-Nspire CX and TI-Nspire CX CAS ($149), an almost smartphone-like calculator with more processing power. But the most popular calculators, teachers tell me, include the TI-83 Plus ($94), launched in 1999; the TI-84 Plus ($118), launched in 2004; the very similar TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, also launched in 2004; and the TI-89 Titanium ($128).

Thompson (anecdote in the story), like many teachers, works in a district where it's a financial impossibility to ask students and their parents to shell out $100 for a new calculator. (Graphing calculators of any brand are recommended at Thompson's school, and they are essential for the curriculum.) So the onus falls on him and other teachers, who rely on their teacher salaries -- Thompson makes $62,000 a year -- to fill in the gaps. At first, Thompson bought cheaper calculators: four-function, $3 calculators. This, he quickly realized, would be insufficient. "A lot of students were angry and actually left the class and went to the classroom of the more experienced teacher next to me and asked to borrow her calculators," he told me. The bulky, rectangular Texas Instruments calculators act more like mini-handheld computers than basic calculators, plotting graphs and solving complex functions. Seeing expressions, formulas, and graphs on-screen is integral for students in geometry, calculus, physics, statistics, business, and finance classes. They provide students access to more advanced features, letting them do all the calculations of a scientific calculator, as well as graph equations and make function tables. Giving a child a four-function calculator -- allowing for only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division -- would leave them woefully underprepared for the requirements of more advanced math and science classes. Further reading: This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race.

Slashdot reader Thelasko says his oldest child made some "interesting" statements when they came home from first grade: One particular phrase that bothers me is, "I can read pictures." Recently, I heard a radio show on NPR about whole-language reading instruction, and how it's a terrible way to learn. I've since learned that this is a hotly debated topic. I learned to read in a phonics-only setting. To me, this is the only way to read. I don't look at pictures, or the rest of the sentence unless I am completely clueless about what a word is. This whole-language approach just seems wrong. Have any Slashdot members been through this experience with their children?

Did anyone find good research supporting one way or the other, not just opinion? What is your opinion on whole-language versus phonics only reading instruction?
Other Slashdot readers shared some thoughtful comments. I75BJC wrote: From my personal experience, the Whole Word Method of learning to read did not help me. It limited my vocabulary and, especially, my ability to learn new words by myself. In a word, the Whole Word Method "SUCKS". Big time!

My 3rd grade teacher was horrified at our lack of reading skills (after 2 years of the Whole Word Method) and began teaching Phonics to the class. That helped but she could not dedicate the time to Phonics as if it were the way to read. It helped a lot but it didn't undo the damage that the Whole Word Method caused. Having been taught both Phonics and the Whole Word Method, I would say, from experience, that Phonics is the better method. As an Education Major in college, I would state that my professional opinion is that Phonics is vastly superior.

BTW, the debate between Phonics and the Whole Word Method has been going on for decades -- more than 50 years...
And Iamthecheese wrote: Some children learn better by listening, some by reading, some by doing. Some will learn by phonics best, some by getting cues, and most from a combination of these. You know what a child needs? Teachers and parents who love them enough to try different methods if the child is struggling. That's what's missing.

Schools that are glorified daycare and parents who don't have time for their children are the problem. Fix that and everything falls into place. Love the children enough to make sacrifices for them and treat them as individuals...
Where do other Slashdot readers stand on this debate? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Are we teaching children the wrong way to read?