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Q: What's worse for a teenage brain, ten years' of smoking pot, or ten years' of Chinese education?
If you have any knowledge of physiology then all the better.
Cheers
9 years 5 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
It seems like you're having a bad China day/week/month/year. You should try and get a vacation or something. Get out of the country for a week or so. Failing that try and find somewhere that doesn't have so many people like a big park during work/achool hours.
If the parents watch Fox news then the kid is fucked. If too many teenagers watch Fox news then the world if fucked.
laowaigentleman:
It is pretty shitty, although Fox's problem is that it's highly ideological. I would be more scared of my kid reading Ayn Rand actually.
Have you read that? It makes a hell of an impression on teens who're bright.
There was an interesting quote from Paul Krugman about it comparing it to Lord of the Rings. It's worth digging up.
Do you think there are other cable news networks which are just as bad? I think RT can be quite fucked up at times as well as MSNBC even though I'm a lefty. MSNBC are highly disingenuous and do far more damage to the integrity of left wing politics than Fox does to the right, although I think that's only because Fox viewers lack the self awareness and critical thinking skills necessary to see this.
I was very mad at MSNBC for their act of editing footage of a black man carrying weapons and trying to make some kind of hick town hall gun issue racial. It looked so desperate it was ridiculous. This was right after the democrats won the house in the first mid-terms and Obama and his crew had it all set up for any agenda they wanted.
Sad and disappointing how badly supposedly bright people can pop a cap into their own foot.
jetfire9000:
Fox news is only one problematic media outlet in America. American political ideology is so polarized between wide over sweeping classifications of "Democrats and Republicans" that the two camps have no room for dialoge or discussion. With 2 camps, they're only an ideological battle away from achieving a political majority. They have more to gain by smearing, shaming, and outright fabricating, whereas one side reconciling with the other would be giving the other too much influence . The stakes are too high in the American political sphere for bargaining. It's best if you just do your own research on congressional voting records instead of watching MSNBC, CNN, or Fox. Most American's haven't been able to achieve a looking glass view, though, which explains why the same narratives are always allowed to persist every 4 to 8 years, and new ones are dubbed "crazy"
If you want to see how a news anchor can twist facts to suit his side in a debate, than any one of those can suffice though.
nzteacher80:
“Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.”
dongbeiren:
Agree with jetfire 100%. Fox News just gets a lot of press because it's right wing and gets a lot of viewers. MSNBC is every bit as bad but it's basically irrelevant but no one watches it. In fact, the whole American media does a pretty poor job of keeping the public informed.
mattsm84:
Yea, because hearing what Sean Hannity has to say is exactly what people under 65 are interested in.
Here's a question, why do you talk about Fox News so much? I mean honesty, the only people that care about that network are retirees and you. Isn't there some sort of UK equivalent that you'd be more familiar with? Rupert Murdoch is an international figure.
ScotsAlan:
I talk about Fox news because it affects peace on earth. All the people who watch it get to vote for who is in the most powerful office.
mattsm84:
Really, because it looks like you're just trying to use it as a means to demagogue what is to you a foreign culture. But that would be a shitty thing for you to do.
ScotsAlan:
I am not anti American Mattsm......I am anti neocon. I am a libtard. A left wing one at that :)
mattsm84:
No. I'm an American Liberal. We have nothing to do with each other.
It seems like you're having a bad China day/week/month/year. You should try and get a vacation or something. Get out of the country for a week or so. Failing that try and find somewhere that doesn't have so many people like a big park during work/achool hours.
I would say the pot.
You still see grass grow on the sidewalk
Smoking pot before your brain has fully developed is a bad idea. I have friends who over-indulged in their teenage years and almost all of them have some kind of problem.
Chinese education isn't great. It relies heavily on rote learning. It gives students large amounts of homework that isn't particularly necessary. The learning isn't targeted towards learning goals - it's more of the shotgun approach; it throws a whole heap of different stuff at the students and hopes some of it will stick. The teaching is heavily test oriented. There's an old saying about tests: "A pig doesn't get fatter the more times that you weigh it." Teachers are not reflective practitioners. Teachers don't follow modern developments in education. Teachers have poor general knowledge. These are all generalisations and only my opinion.
However... Some of the students that I have taught in my short time here in China have been some of the best and brightest students that I have ever seen. It takes some time for them to become accustomed to classroom situations where there is group work, sharing of ideas, promotion of divergent thinking and, for them, a frightening lack of structure. Once they do become accustomed to this different approach to teaching and learning they thrive.
Conclusion: Pot smoking can do long term, and possibly irreversible, harm to a developing brain. Chinese education generally sucks. Physiological damage is harder to fix than socially inflicted retardation.
Strange as it may seem, when my wife and I decided to move back the US I weighed the bad things that could happen to our hypothetical children as teenagers, things like recreational drug and alcohol use, premarital sex, etc, against having to go through the Chinese educational system. We made the obvious choice and have been back home for almost two years.
