They may refuse to learn multiplication tables (a popular subject if I remember right, reciting them as far as we could, a competition) while memorizing baseball stats.
Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.
> "Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid."
"nerds" would disagree with you. I think the point that OP was trying to make is the three groups are dynamic based on the topic. So the groups are not the same for biology, maths and for literature.
Nerds are a group that have a separate definition of social peer and “cool” but aspire just as much as other groups to achieve social status or coolness.
It’s exceptionally rare to encounter any person, adult or otherwise, that genuinely holds no value in any opinion of another. And even those people hold to their own self evaluations which do not spawn from pure noise.
Comets might work best since you want the water more than the rock. You’d need a couple thousand (but if you can do one you can do a thousand) good idea.
I don't think the Chinese had presses like Gutenberg invented. Type was set in a frame, inked, and the paper pressed over the inked type manually. Gutenberg's great innovation was coupling the screw press, already in use for pressing olives and grapes for oil and juice, with movable metal type. The Chinese didn't put the two together.
Screw presses were also used in binding codexes and that’s more likely the model for what Gutenberg used for his printing press.
What I find interesting is the speculation that Gutenberg didn’t quite have type like what spread through Europe after he made his Bible, but it was something more akin to using punches to make plates. Now if I could only remember where I read this thirty years ago…
It's fast. Two skilled pressmen working together could do 200 to 250 impressions per hour or about one every 15 seconds (which might be 4, 8, 16 pages on each impression depending on page size). That was the speed text was put to paper from Gutenberg all the way until steam presses arrive at the start of the 19th century. The screw press also applies an even uniform pressure across the whole page; that's hard to do manually and impossible to do in 15 seconds. Screw-press you can do drunk, and many printers did. (Just read Ben Franklin's account of how much his fellow printshop workers drank: [0]) Source for all this: I studied early modern history and especially history of the book.
Movable type is an amazing invention, without which the whole history of the world would look utterly different. Everyone who has the slightest interest should try setting some movable type if you can find a printshop in your city offering classes (I did; it's fun). It's harder than you might think and you learn why skilled compositors and printers were quite well-paid by the standards of early-modern craftspeople. But you also see the enormous efficiency gains because once that type is set up, the marginal cost of producing each copy is low.
[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2013/06/18/strong-beer-that-he... : "My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner; a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he supposed, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour."
Mark Kurlinsky's "Paper" covers the early history of printing presses in Europe in great detail. Printers and their presses followed, or instigated, the local paper making industry. There is less focus on the evolution of moveable type there, but I'm also reading "Thinking With Type" by Ellen Lupton which hits the highlights in the history of typeface design.
Maybe AI should be the teacher, not the student. That is, used to tutor and educate, not to supply students with neatly packaged answers, but to challenge them to learn and judge when they have grasped a topic and move on to the next.
You know, a personal teaching assistant. Who wouldn't do better with one of those?
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