No Way to Grow Up • Hacker News Board

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#491

Post by aahortwwy » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:25 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #424

StevePerkins wrote: post #185

> "For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. " The overall tone and style of this article is just... I don't know. As a parent of elementary school children, I spent 2020 and 2021 seeing this stuff first-hand. Having arguments with other (non-parent) liberal friends on social media. Once they discovered that I was out of step on this one item of the cur…

> "The New York Times ... FUCK YOU." i'm so glad more and more people are coming to this realization. the nytimes is an awful news source, npr as well, for their unadulterated power bias: they want, and want to support, (democrat) power, and will run with any democrat narrative that meets that objective. it simply doesn't matter if the narrative has factual basis, or if a 180° reversal is required, as repetition will…

I'm depressed it's taken so long...

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#492

Post by quadrifoliate » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

geoduck14 wrote: post #421

quadrifoliate wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing! It certainly isn't. What I'm saying is that: - Your repeated statement that "Schools increase parent productivity" is far from proven in the first place (see the point about summer, which is not consider a major 'productivity hit' event at most companies, unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving). - And e…

>Schools increase parent productivity I'm a parent, and I work-from-home. We just had winter break. I had 2 kids not in school and 2 kids not in day care. I definitely had a productivity drop. I had a meeting where all 4 kids took turns interrupting me. I had things to do, and a daughter would "just appear" and ask me about some weird question. They would come in each afternoon and ask me when I was going to finish w…

Sounds like work from home isn't working great for you, you should probably go into the office to work. Oh wait, but there are probably safety concerns preventing that.

You could also get professional childcare for your children to cover the day, but you probably don't want to pay the amount it costs. I am not sure why you don't have a friend or family member watch the kids for a day; few seem to be able to depend on close friends or family members in the US to do things like this that are considered simple favors in some other countries.

What I don't understand is why you think things are any different for teachers. People act as if teachers have the same training, PPE, and pay as medical professionals. They don't.

(I realize that I'm straying a bit from the point, but so is everyone else. There are far too many anecdotes in this thread that boil down to "I had a bad day with my child's education".)

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#493

Post by throwaway55421 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:28 AM UTC

I honestly, really do despair at reading this sort of stuff.

We knew. We knew in March. We knew _straight away_, we knew that supply chains would fail, all sorts of cascading failures would happen, prices would rise, there would be all manner of mental health effects, people quitting their jobs, etc

We bloody knew. And we still know. And we've been screaming it.

But the opinion in "educated" circles is that lockdowns and restrictions are worth it no matter the cost because life has infinite value.

Even here, on Hacker News, people used to dealing in the trillions will look at e.g. coronavirus deaths in the UK and act as if they're enormous when they're just not. In 2 years (150k) coronavirus has claimed about as much as pneumonia/flu would in 5 (30k a year).

But well, yeah. My career has still disappeared, we're still intentionally depriving children of their development, we're still intentionally causing labour shortages.

And people wonder why no-one gives a toss about society any more. Because at scale you're bloody lunatics, that's why.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#494

Post by somebodythere » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #477

honkycat wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small government. So you are in favor of defunding the military?

Small doesn't mean non-existent. One of the few things even the most extreme anarcho-capitalists believe the government should do is protect it's people from a hostile takeover on behalf of a non-anarcho-capitalist nation.

I think that most anarcho-capitalists don't believe in a government or nation.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#495

Post by galaxyLogic » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:30 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #296

galaxyLogic wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to get the disease which POSSIBLY could kill them or put them to hospital and perhaps financially bankrupt them and or give them bad long-term health outcomes. That has an effect on the behavior of everybody, except of course those who believe Covid is a "democratic hoax". Also with an evolving disease you don't know what its death-rate will be and it will depend on the preventive measures you and the go…

You appear to be confused about the true mortality rate. The page you linked gives case fatality rates, which are irrelevant due to lack of testing. The vast majority of infections were never tested, and thus never counted as cases. The CDC estimated the real fatality rate at 0.6%. Vaccines and other improved therapies are now pushing that fatality rate lower. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/b…

Shutting down can prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed so they can also take care of other emergencies besides Covid.

Let's say you get to a serious car accident. But the hospital can not take you because it is full of Covid patients.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#496

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:31 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #325

323 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. fr…

COVID has averaged a “9/11” amount of deaths every 2-3 days for what, 21 months? The actual single 9/11 event caused us to panic, pass the Patriot Act, and invade two random middle eastern countries. But somehow Americans are fine with a 9/11 sized catastrophe over and over.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#497

Post by BadCookie » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:32 AM UTC

IggleSniggle wrote: post #411

quadrifoliate wrote: post #280

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…

Hello, American parent here. In non-COVID times, there are endless summer programs of all variety to provide childcare for kids during summer months. This is not the case during Thanksgiving / Winter Holiday and depending on where you are, Spring Break. As an American parent, COVID has been rough. I love spending my time with my kids, but there’s also an endless debate of “am I going to take time off work today to pr…

I send my kid to private school to get an average class size of about 8 kids. If instead I sent him to public school and donated my tuition checks to the school, my son would have a class size of >20, and I have no idea where my money would be spent.

On some level, I’m a little ashamed of sending my kid to a better school than most kids get, but I’m giving you an honest answer.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#498

Post by folli » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:34 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #456

geoduck14 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning

I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 ) seems pretty positi…

From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#499

Post by quadrifoliate » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

johnla wrote: post #393

ilteris wrote: post #367

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test resu…

My kids are in NYC public schools too. My 3rd grader opted into the state assessment tests. They release the scores with breakdowns how the kids do by grade and school. This time they didn't. I'm pretty sure it's because of how terrible the results were that it'd be a scandal.

If you're a programmer (like many on this site are), I find it hard to see how you think state assessment tests can be objective or measure real learning for a student in any statistically meaningful way. They make whiteboard coding tests look extremely subjective, fair, and balanced in comparison.

I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer.

A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions.

But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#500

Post by bronco21016 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:43 AM UTC

folli wrote: post #498

chii wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 ) seems pretty positi…

From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.

For now. But at the end of the day a Quest is essentially a smart phone with a nice screen attached to your face. There’s no reason this hardware can’t come down in price. I mean the thing is only $300 as it is. Plenty of wealthier schools send every kid home with a Chromebook of similar price.

I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.