This is when you have complex indescribable emotions for reasons you cannot describe. I feel like the Feeling Monster is still too simple to handle complex indescribable emotions, which is where the biggest problems are.
This data is cool, but I can't help but ask. Does a more data-driven teaching style actually help or does it harm? If there's any teachers or previous teachers out there, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Quite interesting to see the differences of this monster being used vs. Google Forms using emojis. I would guess there's an age gap of who may use the monster and who may relate more to emojis.
Hey Microsoft people reading this. I'm an engineer training to be an attachment based psychotherapist. Please get in touch and say hi if you want to understand the way we think about emotional development. My email is in my profile
That's what Sesame Street is for. Microsoft just re-invented digital muppets and they're like 'holy shit nobody has seen such a thing before.' It's clippy for kids!
yeah it strikes me as a complete waste of time. nobody needed this 70 years ago, they learned reading writing and arithmetic fine and no weird "tools" required. why is msft wasting time on this? using senior designer time on whether some character should have thumbs and eyebrows? what???
>yeah it strikes me as a complete waste of time. nobody needed this 70 years ago.
On the contrary. As someone currently raising children, I can confidently say that historically, we have done a terrible job of teaching people how to have, be OK with, and process feelings in a healthy way. We may not have done this 70 years ago, but we certainly needed it then, just as much as we do now.
And that's setting aside the fact that, "We didn't need X back in the day, so why do we need it now?" is a generally terrible take.
is it? people did fine 70 years ago. nobody ever walked me through "how to process emotions" cuz most people figure that out fine. like yeah there are prob autistic kids or sm who need help but everyone normal doesn't need that.
The "normal" person holding down a C-level job providing for his family only to hurl plates at his wife whenever he's mad is "doing fine".
The "normal" person going to a therapist every week is "doing fine".
The otherwise friendly person who gets filled with road rage every time they're behind the wheel is "doing fine".
Your friend who kinda takes jokes too personally and gets cries whenever y'all crack wise is "doing fine".
The point is that while we may all figure out how to process emotions, we don't always nail it. "Normal people" are not always fine. Plenty of people have problems handling their emotions, and how you handle your emotions impacts you and those around you. Many people are raised under the impression that expressing certain emotions, or acting on them in certain ways, is wrong. This approach changes that.
Good for you, you figured it out. But you're displaying an incredible amount of ignorance by going, "Well, I turned out just fine, so why can't everyone else?". Nobody else has the exact same upbringing you had.
If you go back some number of years, you’ll find that people “did fine” while having their teeth rot and fall out at the age of 35. Then we invented dental hygiene. Seeing as how poor emotion management is at the root of so many personal and social problems, I think habituating people to tending to this aspect of their health is a great idea.
That said, I could do without all the “safe spaces” lingo, which is performative and alienating.
What an uninformed opinion. Just because you don’t need them doesn’t mean nobody does. Autism is a real problem, and solving real problems is something companies do for profit, not because it’s “PC”.
ole reliable "you came to a different conclusion than me so you must be uninformed". come on. this is not MS' core competency and it's a diversion of resources. i'm hearing about how azure has capacity problems but they're sinking dollars into this?
why not just let the autism research guys or whatever develop this stuff?
How do you know that resources were diverted? Are you suggesting that the same people responsible for Azure's capacity issues are the same people working on this? Because these are two wholly different things that require different subsets of skills.
>why not just let the autism research guys or
whatever develop this stuff?
Why not just let the plumber fly the plane? Why not just let the cook captain the ship?
Autism researchers partner with people who can develop these tools. That's what's happening here.
Because we should, and we do, get smarter with every generation. This Feelings Monster seems to focus on soft skills and SEL. Still, your comments imply you may have issues with advancing educational tools or with technology companies investing in educational features over profits.
Yes, learning arithmetic on chalkboards worked fine, but should we stop improving our methods and tools because we've already met some arbitrary bar of what you think was once good enough? No, we should improve them by any measure whenever we have the chance.
really? have our educational outcome metrics grown to reflect that? why are we lagging so much further behind other nations than we were at that time?
yes, i have issues with companies investing in anything over profits. that's generally how companies operate. while i recognize there are those who disagree i think charity belongs separately.
and anyway character development is the purview of parents not schools. public education should teach specific academic material and nothing more.
> and anyway character development is the purview of parents not schools. public education should teach specific academic material and nothing more.
Since they have the kids about 8 hours a day, about 5 days per week, about 9 months per year, during formative ages, 13 years in a row, schools can't help but teach character development, even if they don't try to.
Americans love teacher's aids, and school districts drop big money on what is often gimmickry. I think this is part of why American educational outcomes at the k-12 level are often poor. Other countries don't have special teacher's editions of the textbook with answer keys, because teachers don't need them.
Universal free school meals will do far more to improve learning and social outcomes than more techno-gimmickry. I think blackboards are generally still better for most elementary school classrooms than hugely expensive digital displays because blackboards are something kids understand, there's no technology gap between seeing it and being able to use it.
When I started school a long time ago, we had little desks with a flip up lid that had a tiny blackboard in it, and bits of chalk to draw with. At a later stage teachers produced giant set-squares, protractors, and compasses designed to hold chalk instead of pencil lead. You don't need elaborate tools for a lot of foundational concepts.
Honestly, this country seems bend on turning education into fast food, with teachers being mere machine operators with more and more 'education product' experience and less and less knowledge of the subject they're supposed to be teaching. You can easily take what you learned working in a McDonalds and be productive in a KFC, but it doesn't mean you're a good cook.
This is when you have complex indescribable emotions for reasons you cannot describe. I feel like the Feeling Monster is still too simple to handle complex indescribable emotions, which is where the biggest problems are.