Live data from Hacker News

No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

591–600 of 714 posts

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would say that spending $6 trillion in Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.

Please show receipts here. You mean the infrastructure bill? That is only 1 trillion? What do you think is going to happen if we stop maintaining our infrastructure?

It will survive for another decade or so, but without funding for maintenance and repair, at the point where it gets actually too unsafe to use or collapses during regular use it will be either a Democrat president getting under fire from Republicans for "not doing enough about infrastructure" or a Republican president blaming past Democrats for being "unwilling to fund infrastructure" - and the latter would actually be correct this time, given how Manchin acted.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#592

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…

Don't get me wrong, but where I am from parents simply don't work full-time when they have children they have to care about.

Why even have kids if you don't plan on having time for them?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not a bug, it's a feature. Why shouldn't we have socialized childcare? Our economy needs parents to be able to work 40 hours per week while raising children. If anything, we need to provide better support to families who can't afford childcare every summer.

Why do you need parents to work 40 hour weeks? Wouldn't it be more beneficial for anyone if they 'somwhow' have time raising their own children without running poor?

Many parents in Europe heavily depend on our social net, and I know that's a different debate, however single parents or families where both HAVE TO work full-time sounds like the wrong approach to me.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#594

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…

There may be differences in taxation, but there are more similarities than differences. Every resident/citizen of EU/US/UK/Australia is subject to income tax at some level. The tax rates are even roughly equivalent[1], at least at the low-to-mid end.

And yet Australia has universal healthcare (among other things). Universal healthcare isn't perfect, but it is significantly better than sickness or injury causing a risk of bankruptcy (etc).

[1]: https://sendmoneyaustralia.com/tax-rates-in-australia-compar...

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moo…

Obviously tests are imperfect, but it's silly to dismiss them as useless. Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. Children of priveleged families will always do fine.…

> Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities.

It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#596

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…

> 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

One of the problems could be that spends a lot of money also on misinformation and "dis-education". Is not a problem from US exclusively. Sign of the times.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying. We’ve treated teachers like shit for so long that many are just saying “nope, not dying for a job” because they can go make more money doing literally anything else. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel even before Covid. If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system ha…

"The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying" Isn't this exactly what the article is talking about? I think recognizing that we are doing this trade is a step in the right direction. Only then can we proceed to discuss how we should make that trade, instead of throwing kids whom have no say, and their future, right under the bus.

We can have this discussion until we’re blue in the face, but unless the state is willing to send police to round up teachers and force them to work, teachers will look out for their own health and not go to work when Covid numbers are this high. Most major city school districts had planned to reopen on schedule, but the decision to close was made for them by their staff.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably too late, this country is about to fracture. All the indicators point to a coup coming in the next few years which will launch us into an unknown realm of violence. We’re way deep into “the cool zone” now.

I highly disagree. It is never too late. I will continue to roll up my sleeves and work for change and I hope you join me.

As a member of a marginalized community, I don’t have that luxury. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. I’m doing my part in my own way.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 messa…

I'm shocked that you are shocked and blaming the teachers for not organising themselves. Who the fuck is in charge of coordinating these efforts? Teachers have a lot to do, kids to care about, other stresses, and they aren't experts in ED-tech or even technology in general. They use the tools they know about or have been told about, they aren't going out of their way to learn new tools in their spare time, it sucks but not every profession is focused on min-maxing like software engineering does, not everyone is out there thinking about how to automate their menial tasks, you need to be educated/trained in that, maybe with programming as basic school curriculum we can train a whole new generation to think about automation through software? I know I wouldn't be thinking much about that if I was a teacher.

I worked in the ED-tech space (related to music) for a while and for me it's shocking you are expecting teachers to be on top of this. The issue is systemic, the teachers are doing the best they can, the people on the top aren't trained either on using software to leverage and scale their teaching resources. There needs to be someone/some government that implements that as a policy, with experts guiding and driving the adoption of ED-tech in a better and more productive way.

> 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?

The message probably was more in line with "look at how much more work outside your expertise you'll have to do in real life, rather than just what you were hired and trained for". Seems pretty in line with our economic systems, no?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#600
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't get me wrong, but where I am from parents simply don't work full-time when they have children they have to care about. Why even have kids if you don't plan on having time for them?

I think that what you’re describing is a healthy way to do things. Impossible to answer your “why” question in anything close to a concise or complete way.

Why would anyone have kids? I adore my children and don’t want a life without them, but I also can’t provide any good rational reason to have children.

Post reply on HN