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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#501

Post by notreallyserio »

ianbicking wrote: post #147
monkeybutton wrote: post #14

So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be pa…

"So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better" I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they connect. Covid is keeping our schools from even being schools. It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids are removed from the c…

> and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school!

I'm not sure that was ever in doubt, but it doesn't mean classrooms are good environments for learning. "It's better than (almost) nothing" is where we're at now.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#502

Post by bena »

jdminhbg wrote: post #473
giraffe_lady wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parents don't create that pressure though. Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare. People don't have leave, paid or otherwise, to take care of their children at home, but they must go to work anyway. This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.

> Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare This doesn't make any sense. What would it look like to have "adequate childcare" for third graders? You wake up and decide whether your kid was going to school or child care that day?

This one is complicated.

Until relatively recently, married women didn't really work, not at the rate they do now. So, if the child was home, there'd be a parent, typically the mother.

But the public school system isn't all that old either. From about the early 1900s. Before that, there was no compulsory schooling. Kids would be home. Once again, typically with family as life itself was very different. Children living on a farm did not have daily interaction with large groups of children. You'd have your siblings and that's it for the most part.

And none of these changes happened in a vacuum. So the school thing and the work thing and the child care thing, they all happen because of each other and around each other. And now we've put ourselves in a situation where we use school as child care. And we realize that we've painted ourselves in a corner.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#503

Post by [deleted] »

dogleash wrote: post #480

This article is a confidence trick. By making it about COVID, the affluent readers of the New York Times can pat themselves on the back as if they weren't failing the youth prior to quarantine measures. Of course they were. I've seen it. Everyone's seen it; even if they've chosen to believe they haven't. The secondary sources have to water it down like this article if they want to talk about it at all. And the primar…

[deleted]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#504

Post by nradov »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #495
nradov wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many serious car accidents do you typically get into per year?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#506

Post by partiallypro »

dogleash wrote: post #480

This article is a confidence trick. By making it about COVID, the affluent readers of the New York Times can pat themselves on the back as if they weren't failing the youth prior to quarantine measures. Of course they were. I've seen it. Everyone's seen it; even if they've chosen to believe they haven't. The secondary sources have to water it down like this article if they want to talk about it at all. And the primar…

It is that schooling has been not great, but COVID has made it much worse. Remote learning and kids not being able to socialize has been incredibly detremental.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#507

Post by partiallypro »

honkycat wrote: post #428
throwoutway wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pendulum will swing right again > Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs These two points confict. Maybe the left should stop trying to raise the SALT tax deductions that the right reduced? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/22/democr... And I say this as someone that would benefit from raising the SALT taxes. It is wrong for them to try to raise it

You think democrats are the left?

I love this talking point, because in comparision to basically every country, US Democrats are socially very far left. It's only fiscally where they are more moderate. Which is basically the opposite of what most Americans want, yet they seem confused on why they struggle.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#508

Post by snerbles »

rdtwo wrote: post #483
tschwimmer wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can start college pretty much at any age as long as you don't already have a degree. It's obviously a huge luxury to do so, but I think you're missing out on so much social and intellectual development if you do college now that it may be worth holding out for 3 years (or maybe more). I'm not saying that college now is completely worthless, but looking from the outside and listening to what students are s…

At some point you get too old and you outgrow your college peer group. I think 2 years is the most id recommend. College is like 30% study 30% social and 40% getting the initial experience that you can use to start that first job.

I finished my degree after returning from an enlistment, and was about 8-10 years older than the typical "college-aged" peer group. Though ages tended to skew older in the ECE department I attended, with at least a quarter of the EE majors being established over-30 professionals and veterans finishing their own degrees.

Variety in age in socialization is a healthy thing, and I feel cramming entire cohorts into a 24-month bloc isn't particularly amenable to how we've evolved.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#509

Post by quadrifoliate »

ilteris wrote: post #431
quadrifoliate wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment. Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic. The sooner you can come to terms with…

Agreed, we should all come to terms with this and work towards is the point of my small rant as well. Thank you for clarifying.

Also, I wouldn't worry too much about standardized tests if you have any insight into the conditions that usually influence the results. I have details in my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805200 – in short, they can be quite easily influenced by factors extrinsic to knowledge retention even in non-pandemic times; and there have been a lot of those factors recently.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#510

Post by scottlamb »

WalterBright wrote: post #460
scottlamb wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If most people need therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died out. I don't think "normal" and "human race died out" are the only options. Your grandparents' generation may not have ever had or gotten back to what we'd consider normal today. We always hope to make the world a little better for our kids than it was for generations before. Our kids will grow into adults, and they'll find their norm…

The survivors of the pandemic will be, by and large, just fine. Like has happened with every other disaster.

When your standards are the human race dying out or not, of course they'll be fine, and the survivors of all the other disasters have been too. But as a parent of young kids, my standards are clearly higher than that. As I said before, I want the world to be better for them than it was for the survivors of all those other disasters.

On this forum, you're well-known and rightly get a lot of respect. You're a great technologist. If you were to just tell me something about programming language design, I'd generally assume you're right. If you gave rationale and sources, that's a bonus for my education.

But on this thread...how do I put this nicely. As far as I know, you're not an expert in early childhood development, you're not a public school teacher, etc. I don't even know if you've been around children going through this. It doesn't comfort me much when you say they'll be fine. You're just some guy on the Internet.

I know kids who've gone through this are struggling in many ways. My kids will probably be fine in the long run because I have the resources to help them. That still won't happen without considerable angst and effort on my part, that of their teachers, etc. Many other kids might be fine by your standards but not by mine. I'm not an expert in early childhood development either, but my understanding is there are certain critical years for language and social development that are golden opportunities. If those opportunities are missed, it's hard to fully replace them.

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