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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#571

Post by bradlys »

snerbles wrote: post #508
rdtwo wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-m…

Your experience isn’t likely common. Most people I went to college with at university were under the age of 25. The overwhelming majority so. I graduated at 23 and was consistently the oldest or tied for oldest in many of my classes. Outside of community college or graduate programs - people age 26+ are very uncommon.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#572

Post by bradlys »

tschwimmer wrote: post #157
throwawayboise wrote: post #4

I am very thankful that my youngest graduated high school in 2020. The last couple of months were screwed up, but there wasn't much real education lost by then; most seniors pretty much check out after Spring Break anyway. I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.

I have some bad news for you: if your child is college bound then they are about to go into another environment that has been profoundly damaged by the pandemic: a college campus. Students at my university are angry and depressed about the fact that they're paying thousands of dollars for glorified university of Phoenix. The college social scene is also obviously heavily disrupted, which is probably an underappreciat…

Terrible advice. Gap year is a waste of time and is reserved for rich kids. You won’t be doing anything meaningful with your life due to COVID anyway. You have no employable skill set. You don’t have money because you’re a broke ass 18 year old. If your idea of fun is breaking your back bussing tables at a restaurant 40 hours a week then feel free to get a degree and do it after.

I wouldn’t bother and have seen the effects on people who did skip the last year or two. It’s been terrible for them. They’ve basically been stuck at home doing jack shit and watching years of their life disappear without any progress on literally any front.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#573

Post by em-bee »

dcolkitt wrote: post #392
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…

Salaries aren’t determined by essential-ness, they’re determined by supply and demand. Obviously a nursing home aid is a lot more “essential” than a FAANG engineer, but the latter is paid substantially more. It sounds flowery and noble to pay people based on how “important” their jobs are to society. But it’s simply no way to run an economy.

how about "salaries are determined by the amount of profit they can generate"?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#574

Post by graycat »

So, from the OP NYT article, Covid is causing the schools and student learning to suffer.

I question if the suffering is necessary:

For Covid, I'm old enough to be at risk of death if I got Covid, but I've had both shots of the Moderna vaccine and also its booster. I may be wrong, but with these shots I f'get about Covid -- I assume I can't get it or transmit it. Again I would hope that others would do the same. Again I may be wrong but I assume that then we could all f'get about Covid, masks, mandates, lock downs, closings, etc. at work, in restaurants, airplanes, schools, etc.

But, for education, hmm .... Dad was pretty good at that, got about the best Master's in education available when he was in college. Then one of his points was that could get a good education in a one room school house with all grades in the one room with just one teacher.

One of the lessons I got from a lot of years in school and some years of teaching is "Learning is not a spectator sport". That is, learning happens mostly from work between the ears of the learner.

To me, these are very special, especially good, times for learning -- we have the Internet. Darned near anything anyone might want to learn is on the Internet as text or videos, including in organized full courses.

I know a family with three kids, 10, 7, and 2. They go to a private school, three short days a week and then study at home. It appears that Covid has not hurt their education and that they are doing fine. At the school, each mother volunteers one day a month. Since there are only about 12 school days a month, it takes only 12 students to have a mother there each school day.

I would hope that parents could do well with their kids educations through (a) reading and writing essays, (b) math through graphing data, compound interest, exponententials, areas, and volumes, (c) other topics such as literature, geography, history, music, etc.

Then somewhere about age 10-12, the kids should be able to do well learning, with some guidance and standardized testing, essentially on their own from materials on the Internet or, in some cases, from books. Uh, some kids, even in some of the worst schools, somehow do really well learning basketball, baseball, football, soccer, auto mechanics, and more -- properly motivated they should also be able to learn chemistry, biology, calculus, physics, computer programming, etc.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#575

Post by watwut »

kamaal wrote: post #527
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…

>>American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment. All societies in all aspects are like this. Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation. Sure every once in a while there are bigger problems and the society has to come together. But by and large, we are all on our own. Acknowledg…

Some societies make it easier for people to have good outcomes and some make it harder. Pretending it is not so makes it impossible to fix root causes of issues.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#576

Post by watwut »

uniqueuid wrote: post #570
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…

Thank you for this comment, it's incredibly true. Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school. * Kids go to school to get emotional care. * Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen. * Kids go to school to learn social behavior. * Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work. * Kids go to s…

I kinda hope they go to bathroom at home too. I agree it is better for kids to be in school then not, but lets not pretend there is no basic learning going on at home.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#577

Post by kwhitefoot »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #486
jdminhbg wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

> The US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd The US also spends way more on healthcare and has worse outcomes. Those countries also have way different societies, taxation regimes, healthcare, attitudes towards vaccination, and social safety nets. It's hard to find a country that you can f…

> It's hard to find a country that you can fairly compare the US to in all respects.

Surely that is the point of making the comparisons: to highlight the differences, omissions, and additions so that they can be addressed.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#578

Post by watwut »

zookatron wrote: post #327
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…

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…

Isn't that a good thing? The externalities are universally good - single parents have it significantly easier. Even married moms have easier time to find work or occupation outside of the house - whether for money or to not be restless and isolated.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#579

Post by hhmc »

toolz wrote: post #334
hhmc wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter when. Outcomes are dramatically better if your local healthcare system isn't overloaded.

US staffed beds are down 7% for the year, what makes you think it's not getting worse?

For one, I don’t live in the US

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#580

Post by watwut »

asdff wrote: post #218
Jensson wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance. Is this really true if the entire class missed a few years? It is very different having one kid who missed a lot and then later interacts with kids who all didn't miss a lot, and a class where every kid is behind a couple of years.

It's not like every kid is falling behind though. Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright. Zoom and a mask isn't ideal, but a lot less stressful in comparison to something that could easily have given you significant PTSD.

I kinda agree that long term harms are overstated. I will even add they are overstated for ideological reasons.

> Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright.

But, this is not true. If you look at generations that grew in hard times, they were doing worst. Generations that grew in war are more violent then peace generations. They have more mental health issues, drink more and so on. Famines have long term impact too. There were even studies about Holocaust survivors - even their children have more anxieties and similar mental health issues. The even affected parenting and communication of survivors enough to change children.

Education achievements now are better then they were in those generations.

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