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School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

nytimes.com

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Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#221

Post by bombcar »

from-nibly wrote: post #112
williamcotton wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor sniffles and sneezes should not result in anyone staying home. The pandemic has clearly altered this mentality but it doesn’t seem like a good trajectory. A little cold is barely an inconvenience.

No. Keep your kids home if they are sick. An screw every parent who thinks this way. My family got sick 6 times in the last 12 weeks because of this nonsense. If your kid is sick it's your fault if other kids catch what they have. I dont care if it's "just the sniffles" It causes so much inconveniece for my family.

Unfortunately even if you have a "zero sniffles and max masking" policy schools are just a breeding ground for germ transmission. You're usually "infectious" before you're symptomatic, so it spreads like wildfire anyway.

School sicknesses are so common that it might almost be argued that the point of public education is to make sure everyone is exposed to as many diseases as possible.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#222

Post by muaytimbo »

Kids don't want to be at school, teachers don't want to be at school, local residents don't want to fund schools.

In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts.

Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#223

Post by tayo42 »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #109
jawns wrote: post #18

Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe? In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness. Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces…

There is this liminal state of "sick, but not too sick to perform". A lot of us are fortunate enough to work from home if we've just got the sniffles, which lets us perform but not infect the office. For those of us who can't just do work or school remote, I sure wish we could at least do like Japan and mask up. It seems like it should be common courtesy.

This sick but nothing really state you mention is weird now.

I think i never used to think of it, but after the pandemic like if my throat is a little sore but I don't feel tired or groggy am I still just expected to sit inside?A weak cold can linger for days, weeks sometime. I get multiple ways of thinking about it.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#224

Post by nostrademons »

kube-system wrote: post #200
christkv wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This winter has been brutal with kids. One bug after another.

If it were simply that, wouldn't we see a similar effect across socioeconomic backgrounds? Colds don't discriminate.

I think we are seeing a similar spike across all backgrounds - other news stories in this press cycle have highlighted that one thing unusual about this surge in absences is that it's affecting affluent and poor districts alike, and that well-off kids are missing school too.

Anecdotally that seems to be the case in my kids' school district (although one complicating factor is that a lot of kids have family back in India or China and go back for long absences at winter break), and the culprit is generally illnesses, which have been extremely rough the past 2 winters.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#225

Post by bombcar »

justrealist wrote: post #195
mikewarot wrote: post #152

Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what. Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it. They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary. Why woul…

Look this sounds really good on the internet, but this is disconnected from reality. The kids chronically truant are POOR and have no structural support at home. They are not depressed upper-middle-class-kids. The more-informed (albeit misinformed) demographic you're describing is not the problem.

This is exactly true. The doomerism might affect a few, and I'd suspect more in college, but at the elementary and high school level there are much simpler and obvious explanations.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#226

Post by muaytimbo »

anon__coward wrote: post #75
kwhitefoot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homework has been demonstrated over and over again to not result in higher attainment. If your children are so smart they can surely do some reading and research of their own. That's what I did back in prehistoric times (1960s and early 1970s). In the subjects I enjoyed I was consistently ahead of the bulk of the class and occasionally of the teachers simply because I read all the text books and spent time in the lib…

References please. The claim that hw does not help retention sounds pretty unbelievable.

HN is a fact free zone, didn't you know that?

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#227

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mikewarot wrote: post #152

Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what. Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it. They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary. Why woul…

I feel that people that graduated high school in 2020 had the worst experience (at least in the US) of any cohort in at least 50 years. They didn't get to experience really the end of high school, and those that started college in the fall didn't really get to experience the beginning of college, when many people make lifelong friends. Now they're graduating in 2024, where the vibe on many campuses is one of division, suspicion and despair over the Israel/Gaza war, and they're likely to see greatly diminished economic prospects (especially compared to anyone who graduated college in tech from say 2010 to 2021). Not to mention the general "vibe in the air" is one of pessimism in the US.

I have a ton of empathy for these people, and it makes me count my lucky stars for being a Gen Xer. Honestly, I feel like Gen X is the luckiest of all the generations. People generally don't blame us for f'ing everything up, we had the luck of growing up before the Internet and smartphones where we still got to just play and have relatively unstructured "kid lives", many of us graduated into the booming, optimistic 90s. Many of us got to buy houses before they became unobtainably expensive. Sure, we had the epidemic of parental divorce, and if anything that hope of the 90s has, at least for me, turned to jadedness in many areas, but I just feel so lucky to have been born when I was.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#228

Post by whazor »

rel2thr wrote: post #15

i feel like this is just explained by sick days, flu season was crazy this year post-covid people are more hesitant to send their kids to school slightly sick or when there are sick siblings / parents in the household.

This!

We don't send our kid to school with fever. Sending your kid to school with a low fever used to be very normal. But post-COVID we are more tempted to check the temperature when the head feels warm. But actually the better way to 'measure' a fever is how much a child is playing and energetic.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#229

Post by bombcar »

mydriasis wrote: post #160

Talked to my niece about this, she's highschool age. She says that during covid, her school set up all of the infrastructure for remote learning, and they _still offer it_ -- that is, if she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to go to class much at all, save for the school's attendance policy... which means that while she has a 4.0, she's also near truancy. For a lot of folks, school was never good. If I had the choic…

They count doing the remote stuff as truancy?

Given that I would do as much of my course work as fast as I could so I could slack off the rest of the time, if I'd've had distance learning as an option in high school I'd've been all over it (and perhaps learned not to double contract).

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#230

Post by trgn »

williamcotton wrote: post #149
trgn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut agrees with you, but then we'll be keeping our young kids out of preschool to go see the eclipse. So much for principles lol.

We’re in luck in central Texas as they’ve canceled most school for the eclipse!

that's awesome! we have to drive about 2 hours to path of totality.
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