alt Hacker News> A teacher is constantly deciding how to engage a student, whether to say something, draw on the whiteboard, play a game, or change topics entirely.
If it's really true that a teacher's job nowadays is to constantly try to cater to the whims of easily bored and distracted kids, then I pity both the teachers and the kids.
This isn't a new thing though, nobody likes having to sit around all day and listen to someone talk and kids are the worst at that. They're young and have so much energy so a teacher has always needed to adjust the learning to make it something that the kids can learn from while paying attention and not disrupting the class. One of my favorite things my teacher once did after we read Gary Paulsen's Hatchet was have a 'survival expert' come in and talk about some of the things that Brian had to do and how some others (real people) had to do the same thing. The size comparison he showed us between a full grown man and a moose blew my mind as a kid.