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

theatlantic.com

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

#411

Post by bonoboTP »

ayyy wrote: post #382
bonoboTP wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds really crazy to me, here in Hungary most kids start structured classes at 6 or 7 years old. Before that it's just playing outside, singing, listening to fairy tales, going to hiking trips, to the zoo etc. This tight grip on American kids looks extremely stressful and harmful (helicopter/bubble wrap parenting, structuring every waking hour with classes and extracurriculars, driving them everywhere, never leavin…

Odd. How does Hungary break their children down for a lifetime of labor?

There's plenty of time to do that after the age of 6-7.

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

#412

Post by dageshi »

paulcole wrote: post #312
dageshi wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had infinite money, I'd build an office on an entire floor, with the desk in the middle and a kind of walking track around it that I could do circles on, sometimes I just really have to walk.

Thinking you need infinite money to go for a walk is peak HN.

No, it's peak UK, the chances of the weather being agreeable for me to go for even a 5 minute walk without it pouring down are not good for much of the year.

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

#413

Post by andai »

Shared404 wrote: post #228
actfrench wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of US kids are forced to sit still whether they're in front of a screen or in a physical classroom. Typically it's better in preschool, but many kindergarteners only get 20 minutes a day to play if that. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/learning/do-kids-need-rec...

At an elementary school near me they would only get to do recess on Fridays, and that's assuming they behaved.

That's less than prisoners and animals get here.

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

#414

Post by hluska »

Shared404 wrote: post #321
Aeolun wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how that could possibly work, unless your goal is to create brain dead monkeys.

I'm pretty sure it is. I went to a K to 12 school for my last 4ish years of HS, and the kindergartners (the kids, not just teachers) were already almost mind-dead cult like in "Prep for the test!" and "Go $TEAM!". There were a couple really good teachers across all levels of the school, but not enough.

My opinion was pretty close to yours in my late teens/twenties but as I’ve aged and become friends with teachers, my feelings have gotten more nuanced. Those teachers make very little money, receive virtually no support from parents and are more often than not treated like babysitters, not educators. Complicating matters, school divisions are so poorly funded that despite all of that, they still fund many classroom activities out of their own pockets.

Give the teachers a break. Their jobs suck...

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

#415

Post by piva00 »

Fezzik wrote: post #405
jdietrich wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Your comment makes me think that you've never interacted with an East Asian 5 year old. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; long before they take their first steps, they've started decoding the incentive structures around them. Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they ac…

Or French ( https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-are-fre... ). Or German, or Spanish (from first hand experience). The idea that every fit a child has is a real existential crisis is uniquely American as far as I can tell. Having lived in both Spain and Germany, in native homes with children... parents there “train” their children as mini-adults far better than parents do stateside. I wish I could pin…

At least here in Sweden I can see parents treating their kids much more like people than just some annoyance that needs to be told what to do or want.

It's on the basic day-to-day interactions, kids asking for something in the grocery store or in a restaurant and having a dialogue why they want it and why they can or cannot have it right now, in a way you'd tell another adult (with reservations about vocabulary and complexity of the message).

There is a much more trusting relationship between parent and child from what I see, not one of ownership or overprotection. Kids are people and are treated and talked to like that regarding their needs, desires, etc.

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

#416

Post by barry-cotter »

adflux wrote: post #403
m0zg wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 year old is not "education" though. Everything before high school is glorified childcare, and it should be treated as such. Let kids be kids. They don't have to be "2 years ahead" just so their parents could beat their own chest, unless they're staggeringly and obviously gifted. That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainw…

Learning to read, write, basic arithmetics, communicate with others ... Glorified childcare?

I taught kindergarten for five years and am just starting as a secondary school teacher. Primary school is mostly childcare. The only important skills we assume a child who has just finished primary school can do are reading, writing and arithmetic. You can teach a nine year old to read in 40 hours. You can teach a 12 year old the primary Math curriculum in 40 hours. It takes three years to take a child with fluent Chinese who is illiterate to grade level in writing so that’s a hard upper limit on the difficulty of teaching writing.

Children learn how to communicate with others just fine in actual childcare, without being in quite so artificial a situation as age ranked classrooms where their primary occupation is pointless busywork.

Honestly glorified childcare is too kind to primary school. Glorified childcare until at least age ten would be an improvement and have nugatory effects on long term learning outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.

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

#417

Post by tehbeard »

barry-cotter wrote: post #388
Barrin92 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got similarly dismissive comments once when I pointed to the importance of PE for child development, not just physically but also social dynamics and team aspects, confidence building and so on. HN crowd is a tough audience when it comes to adolescent socialisation, not everyone benefits from sitting in front of a computer from a young age.

PE is not important for child development. Exercise is. PE is a shitty kind of torture, a crappy simulacrum of doing some kind of physical activity you actually enjoy and would do voluntarily. In thought I hated sports, in part because of PE. Exercise is great. PE is an abomination.

Sweet Jesus, this. The only way I got back into exercise was swimming, because the only PE association it had was primary school lessons that were calm and didn't involve shitty peers.

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

#419

Post by newshorts »

In a way I’m lucky, my daughter is almost 2 so she’s not dealing with long bouts of screen time yet. In other ways I’m having to somehow be two people at once, both entertaining her (because she’s too young to do that independently) and run my meetings finish my work etc. though I suspect I’m not unique.

Honestly, I love working from home and taking care of her at the same time, but (as evidence of my posting this at 3AM) I can’t continue this much longer.

I have a few more hours of work to do and I need to be up at 8:30AM for a call. Something has to change and I hate to get political but if we’d handled things a bit differently in this country, maybe she’d be back in daycare. Do I want that alternate reality? Absolutely not, but do I need it?

...maybe

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

#420

Post by emteycz »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #400
war1025 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I hear about public schools the more I understand the outrage against public education.

You should qualify that with American public education, there are lots of countries in the world that do better. In fact the country at the top of the table has pretty much banned private education.

You should consider that a lot of families in that country (Finland I assume) are moving abroad because having zero control over education of your child is not good, and schools in Helsinki might be nice, but it's not Helsinki everywhere. Even if the quality is OK, there are many kids that simply can't function in the classic subjects/tests/marks-oriented education system, and then there is bullying.
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