To some extent yes, I do agree with you, but if your student at least understands why they are needing to, or shows reasonable expectation that it will actually improve their life later on, you stop fighting the kid the entire way and learning becomes a whole lot easier.

I do agree that teachers shouldn't enable it, but I don't believe the proper response is to throw the blame strictly on the kids and remove a resource to them. Removing said resource isn't going to make them want to be there, or make them learn anything. You need to address that issue first, otherwise it's just going to move to the next distraction (like talking to your peers or just skipping class altogether)

Bingo.

Everyone wants a cheatcode at life. But there is no cheatcode for learning things. You have to do the hard work, which is hours and hours of boring repetitive stuff. That's how your brain works and improves and retains information, from repetitive exposure. That's why living in a foreign country massively accelerates your language skill, because you're constantly exposed to the language intead of working in an isolated way for like 30m each day.

It's hilarious that people agree with the 10,000 hour rule for learning guitar or something, but magically think that rule shouldn't apply to school work. You know what it also applies to, physical fitness. Nobody can cheat at getting faster or stronger without doing hours and hours of hard training, and nobody thinks it's problem for kids to spend 20 hours a week at football practice... but god forbid we think students should need to study 20 hours a week...

Like we know what works. Americans, teachers and students both, are just pathologically lazy and want to shortcut and cheatcode everything. Meanwhile the students who are learning and successful put in the time and the effort. And of course everyone else resents those kids and mocks them as losers.

Even my own nephew spent a good chuck of his graduation mocking and deriding the top performing kids as losers with no lives, meanwhile he's a B+ student who spends 30 hours week paying video games and whining how he isn't a better student and life isn't fair... and if you try to point out to him that being a A student would require less video games and more studying, he gets angry and tells you he wants to have 'have fun'. OK buddy, you made your choice then, and you got your results. He is under the delusion he's B+ average should have gotten him into MIT or something because he is 'cooler' than the kids who studied way harder.

Typical American entitled attitude. I'm sure he will make a great CEO someday.

Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn't particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.

In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn't keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.

The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn't positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.

I am not going to pretend that boredom can't factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?