Not in the US but I recently helped my niece in math (7th grade) remotely since they now do fractions and also negative numbers. When I tested if she could calculate a random sum with unequal denominators she tried to add them up like someone who never saw fractions before. Also the school teaching sounds like chaos, classes are split and they apparently didn't even have an opportunity to go through the test in class together. My sister is worried since her grades dropped this year and considers putting her into another school because other subjects aren't great either. Luckily she's now going to in-person tutoring.
No Way to Grow Up
161–170 of 714 posts
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not in the US, but the home-schooling comparison is not fair from my Australian experience of it. In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no pressure from their day job. In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the teacher is setting the day's agenda…
Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education?
> Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education?
Because an enormous amount education is classroom management and behavioral conditioning, neither of which are easy to do remotely.
This is sometimes talked about pejoratively. E.g., "so much of school is just babysitting". It's true in content. But the dismissive tone ignores the reality that for a vast majority of children, learning how to stay on task, especially in a suboptimal environment like a classroom or open office, is much more difficult than learning the actual content of any particular lesson.
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…
You can say the opposite about the other side as well... Anything short of eradication (which is impossible) means nonstop lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates and making the unvaccinated pariahs. What I don't understand is why you would shut down schools and enforce silly unhelpful mask mandates on them when the science shows children do not spread the disease in any meaningful way and are not badly affected by it.…
Schools in my district are shut down because there aren’t enough substitute teachers to fill in for sick or retired faculty. The older ones are getting sick and dying, or quitting before they do. The younger ones don’t want to be paid $35k a year to be screamed at by parents for not teaching subjects the way parents want them to be taught.
Browse /r/teachers some time. It used to be a sub full of teachers venting steam about their students and sharing helpful tips. These days it’s just one post after another about teachers who are fed up and either quitting or planning to quit. They are proposing a new subreddit to handle the influx of complaints.
If your “stay open” analysis begins and ends with the immune system and virus response of the students, then your analysis is incomplete because you are missing a huge dynamic that is at play here.
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#164I wonder how all those kids with long covid will view decisions to physically disable them potentially for life so the state could force their parents to work. I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease with no mitigations to make money.
> kids with long covid ... physically disable them potentially for life At what point do we decide that totally evidence-free hysterical claims like this are as much misinformation as anti-vaxx posting is?
I wonder how we'll look back at this in 10 years.
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#165I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…
There is a dangerous level of cognitive dissonance around school closures that effects nearly everyone. I have to filter arguments by finding out if the people making them have or do not have kids in school. People with kids in school just want schools open. Teachers and administrators want schools open. ...and therefore politicians want schools open. There are a lot of vested interests that bias toward opening schoo…
[deleted]
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our taxation system is already set up for these kinds of transactions, and we definitely should be putting more money into teacher salaries and education.
No we should not. They all get a pension. Do you know how much pensions cost? There are people on waiting lists to fill teacher positions. The benefits make up for the low bank deposit.
Maybe it is time we start to rethink the benefits then? If it is not financially viable then its time for something new. Maybe the government could take after how the private sector pays
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem I see is that kids are not (yet) organized. There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their behavior.
> There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their behavior. So, is your suggestion the kids should get organized to deliberately spread or threaten to spread COVID in order to control adult behavior?
No, I'm sure there are more diplomatic ways.
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not in the US, but the home-schooling comparison is not fair from my Australian experience of it. In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no pressure from their day job. In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the teacher is setting the day's agenda…
Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education?
Because kids are the responsibility of their parents, and parents are not the responsibility of their kid (well, until those kids are adults themselves at least). Why would you expect a 5-year-old to take care of their adult parents? And why wouldn't you expect an adult parent to take care of their 5-year-old?
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is obvious what will happen. The education system will crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences, presumably with other elite children. This will allow some ch…
I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.
[deleted]
Re: No Way to Grow Up
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. As the article explains, this uncertainty might explain at most a couple months of the initial response. It was very obvious, very early, that the risk to children was low and did not fit the age profile of the flu. Nearly all the debate around closing schools was in regards to their role as general transmission hubs (many argued that kids didn't even transmit COVID enough to worry about) and the risk to teachers…
You've performed a very subtle conversational pivot here: I didn't assert that COVID is more deadly to children, or that public policy was structured around that hypothesis. I said that we didn't know how dangerous it was and that, among other things, treating COVID as potentially flu-like in young children was a reasonable policy. When it became clear that children weren't dying in large numbers from COVID, keeping…
I did not pivot. And to anyone reading my post, it should be so obvious that I did not pivot that your claim that I did verges on flatly dishonest.
We knew COVID was not dangerous to children by early summer 2020. The article says this and the article is correct. I simply and plainly repeated this.
It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.
Please dispense with any further nonsense about subtlety. Speak plainly and without subtlety, as I am doing.