I sympathize with her difficulty, but this article struck a bad tone for me. I think it was the tone in which it was written, but it seemed really self-centered. Everybody is in the same boat right now, but the author makes it sound like her family is being uniquely imposed upon. The situation is bad, and schools are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
291–300 of 467 posts
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Some places are sending 3-4 year olds to all day pre-k now too. We're working too much and public schools have become free day care systems.
Single-income family that sent a kid to all-day pre-k reporting in. We offered our kid the choice, and they enthusiastically opted for the all-day option.
I don't think it was really a hard choice, from their perspective. "Do you want to spend 3 hours having fun with friends every day, or 6 hours?" That's right up there with, "Would you rather have one cookie or two cookies?"
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had all day kindergarten in '83. First half was in English, and the second half was in French. And no, this was not a private school. This was Cincinnati Public.
I have a curious question, can you speak/do you know French now?
Sadly no. But that's because we moved from the school district the following summer. It's a bit of a sore point for me.
I have no doubt if I'd stayed there (K-6), I would have been close to fluent. After lunch was a full immersion in French. My teacher was a native speaker from Belgium. I remember having mastered counting in French, which is quite interesting considering most kindergarteners probably have not mastered counting in English.
As for an anecdote, I had one friend who stayed there through 4th grade. He still lists French as a language on LinkedIn.
[Edit] By master counting I mean having mastered the language algorithm, so to speak. Once you can count to 100, it's pretty easy to get to 200, or all the way to 999 with the knowledge at hand. It's not until one thousand that you need a new word. And, IIRC, French has a _very_ mechanical counting mechanism whereby it was even simpler. Perhaps a native speaker can weigh in here?
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#294A lot of people complain about Zoom fatigue, and while on one hand I'm fairly happy that it is a competitors offering that has ended up with being a part of that moniker, and not the product I'm working on, it is somewhat unfair to blame Zoom or the software stack for that. The main culprit for messing up meetings are the cameras and the microphones on laptops. I'm not sure if there are any vendors at all, including…
My experience and my wife's have been that even where there is dedicated videoconferencing equipment (cameras, mics, lighting, ambient sound treatment), video calls are draining.
Yes, it's worse when people are using built-in cameras and bad lighting. But it's still there in 'good' conditions.
(To add to the list of things to get: use a wired connection! Wi-Fi is an endless source of lagginess and other problems. Get a USB ethernet dongle; 100Mbit is overkill. Also, get a LED lighting panel and tripod from a photo supply store so that people can see you.)
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#295Kids 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 depends on the school. Even within a district some schools will be all day and some 1/2 day. There is no law that mandates how long kinder has to be so it's up to the schools.
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#2961. Online learning is a poor substitute for classroom learning.
2. Online learning is much harder on parents and kids.
3. We're in the middle of a pandemic, in a country that has handled it very poorly.
4. Israel tried opening schools in May, when their daily new cases were at an all time low. New cases skyrocketed after opening schools [1], with nearly 50% of new cases being traced back to schools[2].
5. Closing schools in the spring is estimated to have saved 40,000 deaths in the US[3]. At that time new daily cases were significantly lower than they are now.
Unfortunately, classrooms undo a lot of the measures that have kept new daily cases from going significantly higher. They create contacts between families that would not have been in contact otherwise, and as new data comes out, it's clear that children are just as contagious as adults.
With what we know, as hard as it is, I don't see how we can proceed with opening schools until new daily cases are much more contained. The alternative is to have a massive spike in new cases, have schools close again, and be in the same position with online learning, but with many, many more cases out there.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ees8MesX0AAbDE2?format=png&name=...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/israelis-fear-schools-reopened-...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2769034
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#297All 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…
It would be weird to expect young children to sit in long Zoom meetings. Are people actually doing that? I have 3 kids, the oldest two are elementary-school age. So far virtually none of their online learning has been video conference based. The younger one would sometimes do Zoom calls with his pre-k class at the end of last year, but it was just a few minutes to see his friends and sing some songs, not really about…
In the spring, my five year old, who I would call unusually patient for his age, would sometimes break down crying and beg the teacher to let him leave the meeting.
One thing that I’m not seeing discussed much is that these meetings are objectively a dehumanizing waste of the children’s time. Ten minutes to take roll, while everyone just sits there? If someone did something this pointless in a meeting of adults, they would be reprimanded.
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to say Americans don't love and cherish their children. But the uncomfortable truth is that our culture has become so materialist that, on a mass scale, when we look at our children, we don't really see the people they are now. We see the economic participants they will be in 15 years.
I think it's a bit different. This forcing of academics into Kindergarten is more of a panic reaction to the overall low quality of the American education system. Unfortunately, this reaction ignores cognitive science for a try-harder approach. It isn't about materialism or care. It's about having education driven by supposition instead of evidence and what we know works. Phonics would still be core to early curricul…
If there were the resources to do it well it's not a terrible idea but it would require a lot more teachers to do small group play learning where there's educational content but embedded in something enjoyable for the kids. Kids are way more capable than the level they're taught if they're given enough attention.
I'm really glad my parents had the time and conviction to put time into teaching me phonics and math early. Really gave me a leg up.
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zoom does not belong in any classroom, regardless of virtual or physical. It is proprietary software, which has a back track record on privacy and security. It is not free software respecting children's and teachers' rights and freedom. I find the this reliance on proprietary shitty software annoying and absurd. Often teachers barely know manage to cobble together virtual classrooms. They lack information about alter…
I tried a lot of different web conferencing apps and zoom was the only one that had good enough audio and visual to make it remotely possible to teach effectively. Google meet was a total disaster with a group of more than 5 kids. But, I was lucky to have parent in my group who were informed about options and could give me advice in getting going. I think it's great if teachers can take advantage of emerging and esta…
Seriously. I'm a high school teacher and we had a Google Meet training today and it's just lacking so much compared to Zoom. It's frustrating as hell.
Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
#300My daughter started Kindergarten and we're doing remote learning. She' almost 5 years old and can work a computer for the things she needs. But she can't work a zoom meeting. So I am a teacher's asst. from 8am until 2:30 pm. It's exhausting and sometimes I take a 2 hour nap afterward. It's hard on her because until a few weeks ago she would wake up, come into my office with me and watch shows on a laptop, maybe play…
Depending on the state, education isn't compulsory until 6 or 7 years. Would it be an option for you to just hold off on the structured approach for another 6-12 months and let her play?
I truly wish this were an option. I have an eight year old and a five year old. They play together wonderfully. But, since I can't let the eight year old have a gap year, I may as well have the five year old do stuff too.
The real pisser is my eight year old is one of those birthdays that can go one way or the other. She's currently the youngest in her grade. I'd love to give her a gap year from all this and just hold her back a year. She's only in the grade she is because our district in CA had strict cutoffs for kindergarten.