The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#191

Post by loco5niner » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #163

loco5niner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't trust every teacher to teach well. The simple fact is, there are good teachers and there are bad teachers. Ultimately, it's the parents job to make sure kids are brought up well. That means helping teach during some years and stepping back more in some years. Parent involvement is a must.

Sometimes parents are unable or unwilling to bring up their kids well. What should happen to those kids?

I don't see how parents failing to do their job changes what I said.

But to answer your unrelated question: Of course, responsible adults, which includes teachers, should help them as well as they can.

Unfortunately, try as they might, only parents can do a parents job. Really, it comes down to providing a good family to as many kids as possible.

Divorce, broken families, single parent homes, foster care, etc... They all fall short of what a good solid Mom/Dad home (with a good relationship between Mom and Dad) can provide a kid. That's where we should be focusing.

Oh, and while I'm at it: World Peace.

*edit - Unfortunately, we can't do anything about people dying or getting sick. But short of that, people really need to be responsible about the situation they are in when they bring kids into the world. And then they need to take care of those kids.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#192

Post by conductr » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 11:03 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #168

conductr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think it’s a new form of keeping up with the Jones. Which is why it happens in the privileged set. Stay at home parent? Nanny? Housekeeper? Dad present at all activities? Coaching the team? All things are social signals and increased parental activity is how parents compete with each other.

The fun part of social signals is that you can choose your own. You can hire a nanny and sneer at parents who can't hack high-powered careers, or you can be with your kids and sneer at the gunners who can't raise their own children. Or you can work long days and have no nanny and pass your kid from cousin to uncle to latchkey because you are a normal human being with no time to play status games of the privileged.

Ya I agree. I think the lifestyle signals are the new thing since the old signals (homes, cars, material things) could be faked through debt. The car you drive doesn’t send a signal anymore unless it’s a Bentley or lambo etc.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#193

Post by jpindar » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 11:43 PM UTC

jimhefferon wrote: post #2

I teach in a college. Many's the time I've been waiting to get into a classroom because the folks in there are wrapping up an exam, and students come out, instantly produce the phone, and I hear, "Hi mom, I did OK on the quiz, I think ..." That's too much.

That seems strange to me. When I was in school (many years ago) I think I called home maybe once a week, and I don't remember talking about schoolwork much.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#194

Post by milliondollar » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 12:56 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #182

emiliobumachar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great! FYI, it's called a Flipped Classroom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

I tried it when I was teaching Calculus... Turns out, recording video lectures so that they are lively and watchable is hard . The students loved the couple of videos I posted, but then I burned out making them - since doing that was in addition to actually being in class, grading, and working on my thesis. So I went back to the more traditional (and ineffective setting) - one thing I regret about that semester. Howe…

Why did you feel it necessary to invent the lectures yourself? Surely there are world class lectures out there that you could leverage and then use your time more effectively in the person to person setting?

Seems like we are missing the whole potential of the digital (infinitely scalable one to many lectures) by constantly reinventing the wheel.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#195

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #107

laurieg wrote: post #58

As someone considering starting a family, I have literally no idea what parenting is anymore. When I was younger I was pretty much left to my own devices, sent off to play with my brother and then packed off to school when old enough. My parents were too busy working, cooking and cleaning to do much fancy extra curricular stuff. I do wonder now what I should be doing to prepare for parenthood. I feel that perhaps it'…

I'm working on kid #2, and my takeaway is this: "parenting science" is like "nutritional science." It's almost entirely bullshit, and little to no progress has been made in the field ever. There is no use paying attention to it, other than doing/not doing the obvious things. (Don't eat too many calories; don't emotionally destroy your kids.) Your kids will turn out how they are going to turn out. Instinctively, you'l…

Don't miss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#196

Post by thomasfedb » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 4:58 AM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #81

thomasfedb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High school kids have class scheduling issues that aren't just automatically sorted out by the school? Heck. Not my experience for sure!

Turns out a lot of the scheduling software out there was written by people who without formal training or who weren't paying attention in their algorithms course. E.g., one year: Me: requests A and B Friend: requests A and non-honors B hour 4: Me in non-honors B; friend in gym. hour 5 (only hour honors B is offered): Me in A; friend in honros B. Based on a few years of observations, I'm almost certain courses were fi…

I don't know the details, but I know my school had a person from IT with a computer science degree on secondment to the studies department at the beginning of each year to get the timetable sorted out. The phrase "least constraints matching" is something I remember being mentioned when I asked.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#197

Post by afarrell » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 6:33 AM UTC

indigochill wrote: post #75

afarrell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice that The things you list are things that can learn online from youtube and video games. - Geography Now: https://youtu.be/DxxZOsfsIUM - Crash Course Computer Science: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNlUrzyH5r6... - 6.004 EdX: https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-part-1-dig... - Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Sid Meyer’s Pirates, Railroad Tycoon, bunches of kids games teach…

One of Coursera's top courses is a course on learning how to learn, which is really about learning the balance of self-discipline (both how to do it and why it works). It works not just for learning, but also for time management and other things: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn Don't know about online courses for things like emotional health, but I see no reason there couldn't be.

You know, thats a good course to reference.

Giving it a second think, a lot of CBT is skills-based, so I think I’d like to agree. Though, I suspect that such a mooc for anxiety does not yet exist

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#198

Post by Trill-I-Am » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 6:44 AM UTC

recursive wrote: post #142

bkmartin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wholly and categorically untrue. Parenting today is much different than it was 100 years ago. The way we approach children, discipline children, and help them grow into their best selves has changed a lot. And it is based on lots of research. It is also based on all of the work that therapists do with adults after their parents have messed them up so bad with their horrible parenting. Every child will be thei…

The argument is not that parenting has stayed the same. It's that there's no measurable improvement in results from all the changes. So the argument goes, the changes aren't worth much, so don't worry about it.

What about crime rates going down and teen pregnancy going down?

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#199

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

semafour wrote: post #113

dragonwriter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My dad's always saying "There's no book on parenting." This is both literally factually wrong and basically correct in its underlying message. There are, of course, very many books on parenting and very many being published every day. What there isn't, though, is something correct, clear, authoritative, comprehensive, accessible, and easily filtered out by the layman from the noise of all the stuff published which…

For an authoritative source, you might try "Caring for your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5", by the American Academy of Pediatrics. https://www.amazon.com/Caring-Your-Baby-Young-Child/dp/05533...

It's authoritative though less than comprehensive, and more (though, unless I'm conflating it with something else, not entirely) focussed on physical health.

But, yes, I absolutely do think it's a good one.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#200

Post by bunderbunder » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #158

gowld wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did reading become "education theater" ? I hope your master wasn't in statistics, because you made a poor extrapolation from data.

Reading that's strictly there because you have to isn't going to engender a love of reading, it's going to smother it. I also doubt that it'll be effective at teaching the skill of reading - it'll be works that ignored from those who don't care to do it. I read because I loved it and was exposed to it at a young age from home, not because school required me to read.

For that matter, it's not that I'm opposed to asking the kids to spend time reading. It's an excess of assigned reading as homework that seems worrisome to me, precisely because it might mean that the only exposure some kids get to reading is a bunch of crap busywork reading. As soon as you start regimenting a thing like this, you suck all the joy out of it.

What if, instead, schools simply set aside a chunk of time out of the school day for reading, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 30, and leave it entirely up to the individual kids to decide what it is that they read?