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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#581

Post by School-Cotton »

fundad wrote: post #512
yupper32 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding a new group of friends who disregard health experts isn't exactly a great long-term plan. It's amazing that everyone's responses are basically, "the answer is simple! we just completely ignore the experts! we've been doing it all along!" I'm wondering when even the experts start saying "Damn this isn't worth it". What year of masking, remote learning, social distancing, etc. do they start to give up too? 3 ye…

Giving up is the long term plan, what makes it worse if your new friends are there already? Is it more comfortable to wait for your current friends to decide that it’s not worth it to social distance so they socialize more? BTW School is open, kids are in-person. Indoor masking is here to stay wherever there are humans.

> Indoor masking is here to stay wherever there are humans.

Huh? Indoor mask usage is low to zero in many parts of the US (and I assume the rest of the world too).

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#582

Post by watwut »

cm2187 wrote: post #143
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.

It always surprises that left-leaning politicians and media were the most fervent advocates of school closures, because it has disproportionately affected kids from the poorest backgrounds. What I see around me is that educated couples invested the time to make up for the lack of school education (and were typically home working themselves), so those kids will probably do OK, other kids were left on their own all day…

The pandemic is also affecting kids from poorest backgrounds. They are the most likely to loose caregiver due to it. They are more likely to be cared for by grandparents too. 1 in 500 kids lost caregiver overall. That affects them too.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#583

Post by uniqueuid »

watwut wrote: post #576
uniqueuid wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha sure! What I implied is: There are many things we need to learn about life in public spaces, including trivial things such as: What is a stall, where is the toilet paper, how do other people behave, what's the etiquette etc etc.

Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#584

Post by watwut »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #274
droopyEyelids wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part about the under-20-year-old children who fell to gun violence in Chicago raised my eye. Thats a problem but I don't know it's a covid problem, and I'm not certain that people over 18 count as children.

Given how many gun deaths are suicide I wouldn't be surprised if it's a result of social isolation in response to Covid. I strongly agree with your second point... I'm all for a longer exploratory phase of life before people settle on a career, but that seems like it should involve a more gradual adoption of adult responsibilities, not delaying them ever more.

Suicides went down during Covid.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#585

Post by Kbelicius »

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…

> Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation.

A person as an individual is rarely in total ownership of any situation. The only thing that we could say an individual has total ownership of is his own actions, which is a totally different thing to what you are saying.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#586

Post by Gareth321 »

somebodythere wrote: post #494
BobbyJo wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure they do. They just call countries "collectives."

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#587

Post by syki »

throwoutway wrote: post #418
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…

Research after research comes out pointing to the fact that parents should be directly involved in their children's education. > Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run It is sad that this is the case

Consider the median in terms of intelligence. For each subject taught in school take the median in terms ability to explain things to a child in a constructive way. Almost everyone falls below the median in multiple categories. Hence what’s best for the child, and society too, is to attempt to organize things in such a way that the child is taught by people above the median in intelligence and above the median in teaching ability in the subject taught by that person. At scale this requires a government solution unless we are ok saying “screw you” to those who are less than rich.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#588

Post by in3d »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #280
ianbicking wrote: post #239

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…

Your numbers are completely off. The median salary for 10 months of work per year for high school teachers in 2020 was $62,870 and $60,970 for kindergarten and elementary teachers (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/home....). But this is a large underestimate of the total compensation because it doesn't take into account generous benefits and pensions. In Illinois, for example, 39% of all education spending goes to pensions: https://madisonrecord.com/stories/608526182-nearly-40-cents-.... There is also a very high job stability.

I don't mind the best teachers being paid more but we have to be honest with our numbers first.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#589

Post by abyssin »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #531
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

What shocked me (here in Australia) was that every teacher is creating their own resources to give to the kids. They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher. Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year! How is there not a national lev…

I’m shocked by the same thing in Belgium. Most of teachers’ work outside class could be automated if they decided to work collaboratively. I still can’t understand why they decide not to, and frankly I’m a bit worried that such people are in charge of teaching my kids.

As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#590

Post by Ntrails »

inciampati wrote: post #562
diebeforei485 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like European countries handled school much better. Rapid tests 1-2 times a week for all students. Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.

This is absolutely not uniform in Europe. The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.

I hold to my initial opinion that the price of closing any schools at all for > 1 week was too high and simply should never have happened. I state that in the certainty that more people would have died of covid overall had schools been left open.
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