| > for menial tasks Before this gets me flamed as thinking of young people as lesser, I don't. Different people feel differently about different tasks at different points in their life. I read an article a while back about a fad teaching method for reading that is devastating reading skills in places where it's used. It focuses on teaching children the skills that illiterate readers use to compensate, e.g. guessing words from context, looking at the pictures, memorization of standard books. Instead of sounding things out or other traditional tools. A point the writer made is that reading phonetically is utterly mind numbingly boring for adults, but it is absolutely not boring for a child that is learning to read-- they make continual incremental progress, they can quickly unlock new words. It's very exciting for them. It's not just limited to children. In my teens through twenties I loved doing sysadmin stuff, wiring up and configuring this program to that, scripting this operation or that. Decades later that stuff is boring to me, and my own systems are more likely to be left in the configuration equivalent of a blinking 12:00 except where required. It was exciting while I was learning stuff and could feel my mastery increasing. But having reached whatever level I reached, it's now just boring. I'd rather mop a floor, at least some far away developer isn't going to botch my mopped floor with a security update in the middle of the night. In any case, my point is that a task which is menial to an experienced adult isn't necessarily so to someone with less experience. |