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Kids are far behind in school

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Re: Kids are far behind in school

#231

Post by nemo44x »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #200
nemo44x wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement. It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken c…

What do you mean by "broken culture?"

That's it's considered acceptable for kids to be born into situations like this. This is "broken" because it reliably leads to failure and undesirable outcomes.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#232

Post by beej71 »

Allower wrote: post #69
lapcat wrote: post #55

What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in…

Quoted post unavailable.

Usually a teacher has a specific class they are teaching, and the material has certain published prerequisites. Lots of times the students don't meet those. I would argue against the assertion that it's that teacher's job to catch them up.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#233

Post by Ancapistani »

jdmichal wrote: post #143
taeric wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly possible. My priors speak otherwise, though. Just seeing my own kids accelerate in reading at different ages makes me think early success is as indicative of kid's abilities as it is executive impact. Certainly not zero. But mostly overstated.

Sometimes I'm really surprised that people have such a hard time extrapolating from their own experiences learning to children and school. Individuals will tend to learn things at their own pace. Individuals will tend to learn different things at different paces. Example: I despised history in school. The only subject I ever scored less than a B in during a quarter. I discovered it was mostly just down to how it was…

> Example: I've hired people that had zero experience in one of our programming languages. They typically end up completing their first PR in that language within a month or two -- with assistance, of course. People tend to pick things up pretty fast when it's part of their job expectations. (I always make it clear during interviewing and the hiring process that such an expectation would be present.)

This seems... extremely slow to me.

I've been doing this as a career for fifteen years, and in that time have taken three jobs in languages I'd never used. I started with JavaScript and PHP, because that was what was in use the first place I worked. I discovered Python and slowly transitioned to it and staying away from the front-end as much as possible. In the fifteen years since then, I've taken jobs where Ruby, Scala, and Clojure were the primary languages. In no case did it take me more than about a week before I was able to make minor changes, and within a month I was focusing mostly on making sure I understood the idioms in use by the language's community. At the company where Scala was the primary language, I was asked to learn Kotlin and re-implement a core part of the application stack in that language. I was able to begin that about two months after being hired, and launched the service into production about a month later. It only took that long because the ORM that I was using lacked a feature needed to support our legacy database layout, so I had to write, test, and submit a patch for it.

The above is n=1, obviously. I feel like picking up new concepts is one of my strengths, so it wouldn't surprise me much if I were able to progress more rapidly that is typical. That's not been what I've seen, though. I've mentored several junior developers who were in similar situations, including a handful whose only experience with programming with an eight week "bootcamp". I don't recall anyone who wasn't contributing simple changes without assistance a month after joining the team.

Perhaps by "with assistance", you mean that they were guided toward what concepts were important to learn quickly, and which were better deferred? If that's the case, then I completely agree: being able to ask "Should I spend time learning this?" is probably the most impactful thing that can be provided for someone learning a new skill.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#234

Post by dymk »

taeric wrote: post #85
nverno wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems lazy, using race as a proxy variable without positing a hypothesis for what it means. It doesn't tell us, as readers, anything about why some kids didn't perform as well as others.

This variable seems easy to equate to wealth and access to technology, though?

Then equate it to wealth and technology access…

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#235

Post by corrral »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #46
criddell wrote: post #16

Any guesses what the long term consequences might be? I have a hard time imagining anything more dire than the immediate consequences of social isolation during the pandemic. In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.

I'm curious which is worse, social isolation, or mass consumption of video media. I bet Netflix is worse. The social isolation was bad, no question. But during the early school lockdowns I saw first hand what 12+ hours a day of modern TV does to a person's brain in a short period of time. It's nothing like what TV was like in the 80s when I was a kid. The social isolation gets a lot of air time. I'd guess it's not th…

Backing you up that kids' entertainment is next-level bad now, especially on Netflix, which seems to have made it their mission to fund & collect as much absolute trash as they can, when it comes to kids' cartoons. And I think people were a bit correct before, that our cartoons decades ago were largely brain-rotting garbage, but it's got nothing on what kids will end up watching if you set them loose on Netflix, now. YouTube rightly gets shit on for what it considers kid-appropriate, but Netflix is terrible, too, in a different way. Wall-to-wall cotton candy for the brain. Weirdly-and-cheaply-CG-animated junk with the laziest imaginable writing. More than one person could ever consume. And the parental controls aren't sufficient to cut all the garbage out, because much of it is intended for young kids.

Since streaming services are all terrible as far as letting you control what kids can watch, we've started just manually curating content for our kids. Took them almost no time to adjust to the new options, while if they were presented alongside Netflix, they almost never chose them. They're just as happy, and the average quality of what they watch is far higher.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#236

Post by ryandrake »

brightball wrote: post #77
buildsjets wrote: post #64

Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent…

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…

> The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event.

For many small town High Schools in the US, it's not just a school-wide event, it's a town-wide event. I remember in my small town, during High School football season, the entire town mobilized around the event. Sales at local stores, drinks and catering to the field/bleachers, specials at bars post-game for the grown-ups, and so on. The football game was quite literally the most exciting and important thing going on within a 25 mile radius of the school.

As for it becoming a school-wide event, your post is only part of it: Yes, football manages to pull together a lot of the students, not just the athletes, which is positive. But it also can very negatively disrupt the academic routine. Teachers would plan lighter days and/or skip topics because "It'S FoOtBaLl DaY" and they knew everyone was mentally checked out because football game. Athletes would get special exceptions from academic expectations, get special treatment in the classroom, get treated with kid gloves discipline-wise. High School athletics was so important to the entire town that it kind of established the entire local area's social totem pole.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#237

Post by lapcat »

diputsmonro wrote: post #192
lapcat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all. I'm not saying there are no negative effects. What I would say is this: even before the pandemic, many students were not sufficiently "challenged". They were already moving more slowly than they could have moved. I…

Unless you think that every single child was previously slacking off and is capable of effectively working double time without getting overwhelmed, then it's still a problem to be concerned about.

> Unless you think that every single child was previously slacking off and is capable of effectively working double time without getting overwhelmed

I actually do think this.

"John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography

I realize that this is not financially realistic for application to every child. But the gap between how far we could push children and how far we do push children is often massive. We've always been "ok" with leaving many children behind.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#239

Post by singlow »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #200
nemo44x wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement. It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken c…

What do you mean by "broken culture?"

I think he means a culture that produces bad outcomes.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#240

Post by soderfoo »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #200
nemo44x wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement. It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken c…

What do you mean by "broken culture?"

The most charitable interpretation of "broken culture" would be America, across all slices of society, has trended towards selfish shallow values, less intellectual interests and value on hard work, more aggression and an empathy defecit.

I think this has frayed the fabric of society by damaging the reciprocity that binds families and communities, and encourages divisive and antisocial, short-term behaviors over long-term, collective decision-making.

This varies across our rich tapestry of subcultures, but I see it everywhere. Especially among government and business leaders.

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