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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

321–330 of 714 posts

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let's learn to account for emotional, mental, spiritual costs. Then we can talk about the productivity hit.

Those are all important too, but I think these different indicators all point in the same direction: that we should be putting a lot more effort into keeping schools open

I disagree. We need to stop the nonsense disconnected from reality and nature society of bullshit now, not later. That includes bullshit child care and education and jobs.

Essentialism is what's needed here.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#322
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

I am asking specifically about the teaching parts. A parent doesn't need to be intimately familiar with the curriculum just to manage behavior, which of course is an obvious thing a parent would have to do if the kid is home.

In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magnitude harder than with adults, but that doesn't sound good.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#323
post #287
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted, but it’s not a “schools run poorly” issue as it is frequently positioned in the Covid era.

Yeah it is. Schools are run poorly because they fail to acknowledge that they are child care and as such it needs to be consistent and reliable. If school closes for 6 months where is childcare plan b going to come from. How do you replace a skilled teacher that can handle 20-30 kids with one that does 2-3 and not cause huge pain for a family’s finances?

I'm only 40, but for my entire life school systems have been told that their number 1 job is education. Every time they're given performance metrics to hit, they're in regards to education. We as a society are telling our school system that they're an educational institution, not a child care one, and if the school system started to behave like a child care institution, we'd collectively be pissed off at them.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong. It is a larger society problem, not the school system being poorly run. They're being run with the goals that we give them in mind.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#324
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article actually says it's 233% increase in chance of death for people younger than 65, which is even scarier: > For people younger than 65 who were hospitalized with COVID-19, the risk of death in the 12 months after the infection was 233% higher than it was for people who did not have the disease, results published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine have shown. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fme…

Thanks for the correction! My mistake - but I would argue it's WAY less scary. Chance of death is already high when you're 80 (4%). An extra 133% is 5.32% chance of death. If you're 16 is 0.02%. An extra 133% is a rounding error.

It's an extra ~1,400 deaths in the 15-18 age group.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#325
post #281
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quora answer [1] by Franklin Veaux to question "How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?" explains nicely that it is not binary live/die at all. Mind though that this was written in the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have the same information as now, so numbers may be imprecise, but the explanation still stands. https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shu...

Times have changed, we are more sensitive now to death. In the past it was considered normal to lose 50k soldiers in a war, have 3 of your kids die as infants, ...

Also note that COVID has killed more people than combat deaths in all U.S. wars combined. U.S. COVID death toll is now 826K, combat death toll for major U.S. wars is a total of 666K: 291K for WW2, 214K for the Civil War, 53K for WW1, 47K for Vietnam, 33K for Korea, and then numbers start getting negligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

It's also passed the death toll in the U.S. from the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 675K (although this was out of a smaller total population).

It doesn't take a very large death toll to have a major impact on American society.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#327

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each da…

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays? Stresses by the pandemic itself hav…

For better or worse American public schools have basically become an essential service as a free day care system for busy parents. I'm not saying this is good, I think it's a huge problem, but pretending that is not the way it is doesn't help fix it. The question is how to make improvements to our education system to prevent it from being misused this way, and on top of that how to actually politically make those changes happen when there's a huge number of parents that just want to pawn their children off to the state and would oppose such improvements.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays? Stresses by the pandemic itself hav…

For better or worse American public schools have basically become an essential service as a free day care system for busy parents. I'm not saying this is good, I think it's a huge problem, but pretending that is not the way it is doesn't help fix it. The question is how to make improvements to our education system to prevent it from being misused this way, and on top of that how to actually politically make those cha…

[deleted]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#329
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed." This article's position seems to be more in line with the Republican's general stance on the pandemic. So isn't it a good thing of the left can revise its position?

This is trying to manufacture Consensus on giving up and do natural immunity from the left

I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with the actual content of the article. My statement was purely about the criticism on liberal politicians adapting something they read in the NYT. I think it's in general a positive if someone is able to change their views and revise their position when me information gets presented. Ideally we'd all be open to that regardless of the source. I know I'd be positively surprised if FoxNews were to publish a piece slamming refusal to take vaccines. The last thing I'd complain about is Republican politicians adopting that stance.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#330
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how. It matters when.

No, it doesn't matter when, a parent dying when a kid is 10 is no different than when the kid is 11. Let's not pretend people are avoiding covid for multiple years here, because statistically they aren't.

It does matter when.

Outcomes are dramatically better if your local healthcare system isn't overloaded.

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