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My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

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Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#151

Post by icelancer »

pyzon wrote: post #62

I can't help but feel that many of the dismissive comments here must be either from folks without kids, or from people that got lucky with a well-mannered child. You think those good manners were all your amazing parenting? You probably deserve some credit, but I think you also lucked out more than you realize. Haven't you seen parents with multiple kids and those kids have wildly different dispositions? I urge you t…

Yep. There's variance. I have one kid who can crush online classes sporadically and do tons of heads-down work with minimal supervision and is just six years old.

The other one is almost ten and is on ADHD medication, has borderline personality disorder issues, and while very intelligent, has problems with authority and can't focus online very well.

There's a huge randomness factor that goes into everything, including having kids. It's not deterministic.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#152

Post by rrobukef »

coderholic wrote: post #68
supergeek133 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand dealing with children, I'm not being dismissive (at least I don't think I am) of that. I'm confused why this was written or published. There is no "point". Yes, it's very hard to keep adults much less kids cooped up in a house all day. Especially for 6+ months. But, what else are we supposed to do? This is just a paid, public gripe that a lot of people can relate with, but what purpose does it serve? The…

> This is just a paid, public gripe that a lot of people can relate with It is > but what purpose does it serve? It lets the millions of other parents who find themselves suddenly in the same situation, feeling the same things, know they're not alone, and that the struggle is real!

It is the beginning of remote-learning science. Anecdotes allow estimations of impact and the creation of hypotheses. If nobody talks about a problem, does it exist?

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#153

Post by bdamm »

WalterBright wrote: post #139
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #40

All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Adults are barely able to make it through a day of Zoom meetings without feeling drained, how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. A 5 year old does not have the…

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.

Modern Sesame Street is a train wreck compared to the Sesame Street of the '80s and '90s. It's actually a statement about how far down contemporary culture has gone. Seems to be mostly unhinged screaming these days.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#154

Post by candu »

dstick wrote: post #125
marta_morena_25 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a crazy idea that needs to come before this: What if we taught our adult population to process their difficult emotions instead of suppressing them and stay active and move freely while working and studying. Actually, this already falls flat in the first section. At least 90% of adult fail on that one. How are they supposed to teach something to their children that they themselves don't even understand? And t…

Is there some deeper meaning to 1 + 1 = 2 you could enlighten us on? Most teachers I’ve met seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across.

Well, if you want to be _extremely rigorous_, there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica ;)

Less flippantly: pedagogically, there's a big difference between "here's your addition tables, memorize them" and "if I have 1 of _anything_ and another 1 of that same thing, I now have 2 of that thing." The latter offers way more opportunities for further thought: by that logic, if I have 2 things and I take 1 away, I now have 1 thing! If I have 2 rocks and 2 sheep, I can count the sheep by laying out 1 rock per sheep! And since I can add more things, maybe there are more numbers for those amounts of things too? And what about differently-sized things? Or parts of things? Or...

That's the difference between getting "1 + 1 = 2" across as a literal by-the-book fact, and getting it across as an invitation to build / connect ideas and ask further questions.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#155

Post by tsimionescu »

trhway wrote: post #134
toper-centage wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that is incompatible with 30 children in a classroom being managed but a single underpaid teacher.

so, who is up for a startup - an AI-agent as a teacher, each child gets his own teacher, or several simultaneously, basically personalized Muppet show guiding the child through the intricacies of 1+1=2 and how to write "mom". For the older students - some FPS (multi-played by the whole class or school against school) with math and other problems to unlock new more powerful weapons/etc. should work too - anybody who d…

Oh sure, we'll just get some AI capable of teaching children, I'm sure GPT-3 with a little prompting is more than enough for that.

And of course, what else could maths education value other than speed of figuring out problems? After all, Cauchy was famed as the fastest differentiator in the west, wasn't he?

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#156

Post by lhorie »

floren wrote: post #123
learc83 wrote: post #97

Kids can't learn all day long in a classroom. I don't know why we expect them to be able to do it remotely. School has always been 1/3 learning 2/3 baby sitting. When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.

> When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day. Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.

It's half day in SF (source: daughter is in lafayette). Private pre-K can be full day (it's basically glorified daycare).

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#157

Post by nordsieck »

nradov wrote: post #126
learc83 wrote: post #97

Kids can't learn all day long in a classroom. I don't know why we expect them to be able to do it remotely. School has always been 1/3 learning 2/3 baby sitting. When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.

Kindergarten in the US became far more academically focused after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the adoption of Common Core curriculum. Most schools also changed the age cutoff date for kindergarten so the average student is now slightly older.

> Kindergarten in the US became far more academically focused after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the adoption of Common Core curriculum.

My understanding is that this is at least driven in part by academia, who have gradually advocated earlier and earlier interventions for lower performing students.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#158

Post by lucb1e »

sologoub wrote: post #46

Personal counter-anecdote. When I was I think about the same age (5-6), my mom would take me in the office and occasionally my only entertainment would be a DOS computer with a few basic games. From what I’m told, I was very motivated to get to the said games and quickly learned commands and my way around the command line - skill that turned out to be pretty useful in life. For “Raffi”, being a true digital native an…

> I do fear for the skills of reading a physical book though...

Do you need skills for that which are different from reading a computer screen? I only see limitations like no ctrl+f or hyperlinks, so fewer skills needed rather than more.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#159

Post by CydeWeys »

bdamm wrote: post #150
ghaff wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume thinness is part of the problem--my high-end Logitech webcam is about an inch thick. Also webcam quality was probably just not much of a consideration until fairly recently. But, even if someone doesn't more or less set up a studio as I've done to a degree and some of my colleagues have done, there are some pretty basic things related to lighting and webcam height that can be done pretty easily by most peopl…

iPhone cameras are pretty good and they're very thin. Front or back.

Yeah, if they put in any of the cameras from an iPhone (or any flagship smartphone for that matter) it would be an unbelievable leap in quality. There's no way they can't find space for it.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#160

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Don't see how being "forced to sit in front of a screen" is any different from being forced to sit in a classroom.

Honestly think if a single good thing comes out of all of this it will be the rethinking of schooling.

If I have kids no way will I risk their raw potential at the hands of what is currently considered a teacher.

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