This is just wrong.

[Julianking93]

Hm. Can't say I'm surprised, to be honest.

At least they're advertising games in a positive light.

When I was in school, we had to do a paper arguing why gaming is bad.

We didn't have a choice as to what side we wanted to be on. We had to say gaming was a horrible form of media that is bad for children.

I refused. Got an F. Then told the teacher to go fuck herself.

 

[badgersprite]

I don't really think it's wrong, per se. When I was a kid, I had to do projects about advertising for things too, regardless of what they were. It was usually food, I think. It's just a brain exercise, and it is a skillset to think about, say, how things look, packaging, slogans. It doesn't actually make you like the product more. If anything, it makes you think about the marketing tricks people pull on you.

That was my experience, anyway.

 

[ultrachicken]

epic snip

Classwork does very little, if anything, to help kids manage time. With classwork, they have an allotted time period during which they do nothing but the work. Homework is done on the kids' own time. They have to learn habits that will allow them to manage the workload on their own. In the early years of education, the parents mostly do this for them, but that helps set up their habits for HS.

Repetition will only help students learn if the kid invests themselves in their work. It seems to me like you were just doing the bare minimum because you thought you were too cool to do the work. No amount of work or teachers can educate a kid who refuses to learn. You ever heard the phrase, "you only get out of school what you put in?" There's truth to that. The students have to be held accountable for when they just refuse to learn.

Tests are not a practical means of measuring knowledge of anything but the test-taker's ability to study and do well under pressure.

Frankly, if your treatment of non-school hours as a holy time that is to be protected at all costs became the norm, then students would face a massive challenge when they enter college/work. The point of school is to prepare you for the real world, not just to teach the core courses.

 

[MrGalactus]

Yes it is wrong. It's like the educational books and things with Shreck and Buzz Lightyear in them. It's disgusting.

 

[CobraX]

Welcome to the United corporations of America.

That is wrong, but that is your capitalist society in action.

At the very least they should advertise a game with some kind of value.
I'll just be on my way now.

 

[MrJohnson]

OP: That right there is an advertising supplement for "TIME For Kids" Magazine. Specifically that magazine is designed for children to read, and published by TIME, inc. It is one big ad, in a for profit magazine. I really doubt the teacher assigned it as official homework, if at all. I also really doubt the school pays for enough subscriptions or a class room to have a supplement book for each kid.

I think it far more likely you brother picked it up from one of the couple of copies of the magazine they get, and you figured it would be neat to tack on that story.

Do you live in Bellevue, Seattle or Redmond? I was there last week and it scared the shit out of me how much Microsoft nearly literally owns the entire area.

The Nintendo campus right across the street is close to the same size as the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

The NOA warehouse in North Bend could cover both of those campuses.

Microsoft hardly has a presence in Seattle.

I do contract work for NOA that takes me up in that area at least once a month. Unless they are rolling up signs as I roll into town you are exaggerating quite a bit.

This, 10x this.

 

[Wharrgarble]

We're going to be seeing a lot more of this in the future if state funding to schools keeps getting cut at the rate that it is. Advertising is a great way to reach a target audience, and a school that is suffering financially is going to jump on any chance to get extra help to keep themselves running.

It's depressing, it really is. Imagine, pencils with phone numbers stamped on them for students to call to order a subscription for People Magazine.

 

[Lem0nade Inlay]

That is wrong! It's terrible how that can be considered homework, it's a fucking advertisement. You should complain to the school, I'd like to see how they justify it...

 

[TheWwwizard]

Yes this is just wrong I believe the title of the thread summed it up pretty well.
Schools should not be allowed to advertise it's one of the things I think should be VERY illegal. *sigh* but for now if you are pissed off by it just tell your parents to file a complaint with the school about that shit.

 

[Wolfenbarg]

Okay, now that the links work and I've actually seen it... what the hell? Why? The Kinect isn't a learning tool, far from it. What is the point of this?

 

[Kurokami]

PS: I don't do homework either, but I'm smart enough to know it wasn't invented as some kind of payback by educators,

Insulting my intelligence now, are we? That's nice.

especially when THEY have to mark it

Is it done? Yes? 100%. No? 0%. NEXT

That's what most of my teachers did. Marking it is about as mindless as doing it.




God...discussing homework like this is making me remember why I loathed high school so much...and why I'm glad to have gotten the hell out two years ago. With a genuine diploma, oddly enough.

Fair point, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence, call it a slip on my end.

It seems to me you're arguing against a specific type of homework, the useless kind that's done for its own sake. I don't think you can argue against all homework citing only how stupid some have been in your experience. That's like saying Teachers are stupid because, well lets face it, many are.

 

[Mcupobob]

Homeworks is just busy work design to teach organization skills. Which in its self isn't to bad. I'm more pissed off in the fact that the school was most likely not getting paid for this. If they were it meant they were trying to get extra funding on the side through ads , so they could buy equipment or raise the teachers salary.

Instead I think the teacher did this out of laziness. I don't blame him/her for that either, its near Christmas vacation and the kids are prolly getting restless so she/he is just throwing some easy work at them.

 

[teisjm]

Well microsoft is just advertising, thats basicly what companies do to sell their stuff.

If anything the etacher is to blame for using that stuff for homework

 

[=Paranoid=]

That's a shitty teacher, to put it mildly. They were pushing Mario Paint at my school when it came out, to help creativity and make games "useful".

How about buying paintbrushes, *****?

I had the incredible machine at our school when i was a kid... Good times working out how you could get the ball into the box or light the candles with whatever you had. Stuff like this can be good in moderation.

My biggest gripe is with the idea that everything a child does should be educational and that games should be eradicated in favor of "activities", said activities not even being done in school.

Besides, the children see enough screens already, so paintbrushes, yeah?

Maybe now, but this was over 10 years ago when i was using computers at school (ye old mac). Computers were only just coming out in schools and they were a new thing for both teachers and students. I can agree with you one hundred percent about the current situation today but over a decade ago is a bit harsh. This was a very experimental learning tool for schools to use, and they had the right foresight into kids futures considering that computers are now the standard in nearly any industry you go into.