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We speak with Anthony Aguirre of Metaculus.
Try out Metaculus, it’s neat and helps one train their calibration.
Rat Chat: Maps vs Buttons; Nerds vs Normies
Big thanks to David for our intro music! I’ll add a link here for his stuff when I track it down. 🙂
We’d like to thank creators of our new outro music from the Sumerki Project! Check out their stuff here!
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I was a school teacher for a while in germany. Smartphones were a problem but not for cheating in tests. The biggest problem with smartphones was that you couldn’t easily confiscate them.. I mean, if you broke it while doing that you’d be responsible for that so we had a system where there was a box in every classroom and the student would have to put it in there when caught using it. Also, parents use their kids phones to communicate with them so taking them away and keeping them after school wasn’t possible but that wasn’t that big a deal, we kept them in the teacher’s room with a sheet of paper who it belonged to and what class that student was in, so when a student came and wanted it back we’d check if he had any more lessons that day and if he didn’t he’d get it back.
I remember that we had one phone that was confiscated mid december and was still in the box in late january because the student just forgot or didn’t care. xD
Anyway, teachers did have things to punish students with. It’s basically steps of escalation, you can give them extra work or detention and for more serious things you can write them down in the class’ log. If they got written up too often there’d be parent-teacher-meetings (so you can sorta get the people that can punish the children in ways the children care involved – but it doesn’t always work, some parents don’t know how or don’t want to.. and sometimes these talks can reveal reasons for why a student behaves that way that the teachers wouldn’t have known otherwise). You can exclude students from excursions. And in worst case scenarios you can exclude them from school (they still have to show up in the morning, get work for the subjects they’d have and have to hand that in the next day when they show up again and get more work). And if even that doesn’t help you can expell them, so they’d have to go to a different school (in our city there were probably 5 schools within 15min walking distance from my school as options… I’m not sure what would happen if that were in some rural area with no other school within reasonable distance).
There’s laws on what teachers can do, homeroom teachers can do and the principal can do, that basically define how this escalation is supposed to happen, so it’s more or less the same basis for a system of punishment in all schools.
After they’re 16 or finished 10th grade (not completely sure what’s the trigger) school is basically optional so you can in theory also tell them that they want to be there, they don’t have to be there and if they don’t behave they can get out.