Kids are far behind in school • Hacker News Board

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#201

Post by nemo44x » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

howling wrote: post #53

usrn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent high school in the woods home schooled and only socialized at church. So did all my siblings and a number of people I met at college. We all turned out fine.

Standard application of selection bias. People that don't "turn up just fine" don't go to college or browse HN.

I would imagine home schooling and socializing around something like your church will give you better odds of turning out fine. Putting your kids in public spaces exposes them to kids from all sorts of negative background that can influence your kids greatly. In essence, you want to keep your kids away from bad kids which are a function of bad parents with bad values.

Note that this is often relative. You may find the church to be full of people with bad values. Likewise, someone who is religious may not want their kids to socialize with kids that have parents that encourage things like transgenderism in pre-teen kids.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#202

Post by toast0 » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

philipov wrote: post #83

humanrebar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but a lot of people, including underage people, are motivated by reason. School ideally goes at an appropriate pace to challenge them. Partly so they pick up good study habits in a non-contrived scenario with obvious benefits. Saying busy work is important because they might need study habits in five years is not motivating.

> Being smart and understanding the material are the important endpoints. This statement contains a serious misapprehension and requires revision. My grandfather would often say that "understanding" swimming won't help you when you're drowning. You need to be able to swim. You can't get to a point where you can swim through mathematics without solving a lot of math problems. You don't become good at something by stop…

It's really hard to practice and develop study skills with material that the student is proficient in without effort.

You can understand what study skills are, but not really apply them and experience them working. Study skills can be super important, and it's nicer to develop them early rather than just in time in your third year of undergrad, but access to challenging subjects at a challenging pace in high school or earlier is hard to come by for some. In some cases, there's a hoop jumping requirement to get more challenging work, and hoop jumping is an important life skill, so there's that; but sometimes, there's no way to get more challenging work in the school system.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#203

Post by brightball » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #157

brightball wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in…

> There’s no sport in high school that comes close to pulling everybody together the same way as football. Wow, that's not my high school experience. Sports divided the student body into the popular athletic kids and the unpopular academic kids. If you celebrate the football team and not the math team, the results are predictable, and they won't be to promote math.

All of the strongest academics kids at my school were also involved in athletics in some way.

We had two valedictorians, one who was excellent at cross country and soccer while the other was a fantastic golfer. Our salutatorian was homecoming queen and a cheerleader too.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#204

Post by cassac » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

Well when you focus on activism and not academics, why would anyone be surprised that the academics suffer?

Easy fix though, lower standards! Lots of districts are already figuring that out. If you take away the primary means to hold the educational system accountable then you have teachers who are unaccountable. All of the sudden all of them are good at their jobs and the teacher mafia… I mean union… can continue to demand more money for the children and won’t even have to deliver anything measurable. It’s genius!

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#205

Post by t-3 » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

howling wrote: post #53

usrn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent high school in the woods home schooled and only socialized at church. So did all my siblings and a number of people I met at college. We all turned out fine.

Standard application of selection bias. People that don't "turn up just fine" don't go to college or browse HN.

Not sure what browsing HN has to do with anything. I turned out really badly and still browse HN. It's not like there's a gatekeeper, it's just a tech-focused message board. Nobody asked me if I went to college when I signed up.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#206

Post by brightball » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

corrral wrote: post #199

brightball wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in…

Football's the reason I dropped band when I no longer needed an arts elective. I'd have stayed in all four years, otherwise. Being required to waste an entire evening at a football game to play for a few minutes here and there was insulting . I'm pretty sure it's also the reason the curriculum was built almost entirely around the microscopic musical niche of marching band, rather than instruments & skills that were m…

The more I keep reading replies to my comments the more I'm realizing what a great high school I must have gone too.

Our marching band always got superior ratings every year in their own competitions and had a blast playing throughout all of the games. Everybody in our band seemed to have a great time with it, especially the drummers.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#207

Post by 015UUZn8aEvW » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #175

mattmcknight wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are correct that good schools are caused by good students, it's not strictly accurate to say that "statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income". Being a good student is largely a function of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is largely a function of parental intelligence and conscientiousness. Income doesn't cause intelligence or conscientiousness, although it may be partially c…

> Being a good student is largely a function of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is largely a function of parental intelligence and conscientiousness Only partially - only ~40-50% of a person's IQ are a result of parental genetics [3]. The rest is a result of the environment in which the child is raised - and there are very important factors at play that directly correlate with income of the parents: - Does…

If these family-level environmental inputs had substantial effects on adult IQ, we'd see it in the behavioral genetics research. But we don't. The adult IQs of adopted children have very little correlation with those of the adoptive parents who raised them or those of their adopted, non-biological siblings.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#208

Post by corrral » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

rufius wrote: post #110

brightball wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in…

> It’s helping to foster a sense of community and school pride. You forgot part: > It’s helping to foster a sense of community, school pride, *and brain damage*.

I can confirm that coaches, admin, and parents are still pulling the whole "oh little Bobby's not got a concussion, he's just falling asleep in class and having obvious memory problems (true fucking story) because he's really tired, not because he took a terrible hit last Friday—he's fine to play in the next game" shit. Even after all the revelations about the risks of CTE and other brain-related harm from repeated concussions.

Then there's the issue of discipline. The stereotype of athletes getting a pass on bad behavior or a little "help" on grades, because enforcing the rules would mean they'd have to miss a game or two, is based on real behavior that is very much alive today, not some relic of 1980s teen movies.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#209

Post by taeric » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #198

taeric wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. There is nothing stopping any other sport from being as central more than the amount of money and effort that currently goes to football. Often in an arms race against neighboring schools. To try and prop it up as a natural thing that is good just feels like a major problem.

There is. Other sports play a lot more games. Football has a predictable and consistent schedule, Friday nights in the fall. The limited number of home games (only 5 or 6 usually) also keeps involvement at a level that's not overwhelming for the student body. Additionally, football teams can support a lot more players than any other sport with rosters typically 50 players or more. Especially in smaller schools, this…

This is ignoring federated football. Rugby. Baseball and cricket have more games... But probably far fewer injuries and seem really able to muster fans.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not fully against football. But praising the sport that has more money spent on it for reaping the rewards of said money feels... Not that charitable to other sports.

Edit: I feel ashamed to have omitted basketball I'm my list. :(

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#210

Post by pjkundert » Mon, May 23, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #195

User23 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home schooling is quantifiably far superior to public schooling, pretty much independent of socioeconomic status[1]. As one would expect, the education level of parents did affect the results. For example, home-school students of parents without college degrees scored, on average, at the 83rd percentile for the core subjects. When one parent had a college degree, those students scored at the 86th percentile, and when…

> In fact, a concerned parent will wildly outperform a school teacher. A parent teaches maybe 2 students per day. A school teacher teaches maybe 200 students per day. It's an unfair comparison.

I'm struggling to find the purpose of this reply.

Do you believe that saying "no fair!" invalidates the superior outcomes for home-schooled children?

If billions of dollars of state funding and the teachers' aggregate decades of university education can't overcome this obstacle (which did not seem to be a problem when children in one-room schoolhouses routinely used to learn Latin), I'm wondering what other advantages anti-home-schooler central planners need, in order to force their sub-par solution on parents?

I know I'm being ... obtuse. But, seriously -- if it takes 1 or 2 hours a day to "keep up" with the standard curriculum in grade school, and "schooled" students are sent home with 1 or 2 hours of homework, after they attend "school" all day -- what is the purpose of sending kids to these institutions?

:)