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School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

nytimes.com

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Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#311

Post by fullshark »

madamelic wrote: post #298
anon291 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this attitude. Most sw engineers at a startup are well compensated salary wise. Who cares if you also have a lottery ticket.

If you go and look at levels.fyi as an engineer in a startup, you get almost the exact same cash compensation as a FAANG engineer but now you have a bigger slice of a lottery ticket, can grow your career faster, and generally you are likely to have a 'free spirit' kind of workplace. Even if the startup goes 'total loss', you lose nothing compensation-wise and get picked up 48 hours - 3 weeks later by another place. M…

There's no allure, but I'm old enough now to realize what a job actually is (a way to trade your time for appreciating assets).

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#312

Post by linuxftw »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #303
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…

> would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to? Would you every worry about doing ok academically but falling behind socially?

Have you talked to children that attend public school today? School is not helping them socially whatsoever.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#313

Post by partiallypro »

linuxftw wrote: post #308
partiallypro wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not blaming the kids. I'm blaming the parents, I felt like I made this pretty explicit in my second paragraph. Virtually no kid wants to go to school. That's irrelevant. Some kids don't want to eat anything but junk food. You shouldn't let them. You're the parent. You cannot allow your kid to be truant. You are nearly guaranteeing them poverty, that is abuse and neglect, and it should be punished. There are s…

For most of human existence, the great unwashed masses were illiterate, and society seemed to plod along just fine. Where's the sense in forcing children to spend the best years of their lives as automatons to an education system, just to be baristas at Starbucks anyway? Everyone simply can't work a white collar job, somebody has to clean the toilets. We should at least let those people enjoy their childhood.

Your argument is basically "the poor should stay poor and uneducated," which I reject, and society should reject. Kids that are truant are more likely to become criminals (idle hands and idle minds do bad things a lot of the time,) be homeless, draw welfare, require public support, etc. That's not ideal. We can easily stop that from happening, we should not encourage it. You say they'll work at Starbucks, it's just as likely they will just not have a job at all.

Some truancy is because their parents can't enforce what their kids are doing (though some are just really bad parenting), or are too poor too (work double shifts, etc.) We can support those people with social programs, while also making sure their kids go to school and making sure the schools are funded, even hinging the programs on truancy. Incentives work.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#314

Post by secstate »

elboru wrote: post #301
seneca wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination". I can assure you, the people newly complaining about "liberal indoctrination" in schools don't mean science and math. It's fine to disagree with people about what should be taught, but it's not productive to ignore how much e…

This. Even if I don’t fully agree with the motives, it’s dishonest to say they are just afraid of science and math ignoring the politicized atmosphere we’ve been dealing with in recent years across all spectrums of society.

Gah, it's not even the politicization! I dare you to sit through a 3rd grade class at your neighborhood school. Nothing gets done. They do projects with little to no mooring to curriculum. That is, unless you live in a top percentile district that values curriculum mapping, but then you were already going to be in the middle class at least. In the meantime, most of these schools are day cares so parents can work. Marx wasn't that wrong.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#315

Post by vundercind »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #258
ptero wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about just piling in the van and driving somewhere? What about schools not sticking their nose too far out into the parts of life that they should not control? Like where and when we take our kids on vacations. If my kids get good grades and catch up on any missed homework the school should not get spun up about them missing some days. Turning schools into a mild version of prisons is not good for anyone -- ki…

you can't teach very well if 20% of the class is absent, it just creates an absurd situation for the teachers it's not that hard, if you commit to going to school, then just try to go and do vacations during school holidays otherwise, just home school

This is true, high absentee rates make teachers’ jobs much harder. It’s the kind of thing that seems ok when it’s just your student, but if everyone behaves that way, it harms the whole class.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#316

Post by vundercind »

williamcotton wrote: post #108
vlunkr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, lots of travel is based around life events. I can’t control the fact that funerals and weddings can happen at any time of year.

We’re going to two in-law weddings this year and missing a single day of school. Fly in, fly out. Funerals are bereavement leave from school so you don’t need to worry. I feel like 90% of midwesterners would be agreeing with me…

Is there a regional component to this?

Some of the “meh, missing two weeks a year for vacations isn’t a big deal” attitudes in this thread are very surprising to me, also as a midwesterner.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#317

Post by UncleEntity »

darby_eight wrote: post #177
Workaccount2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics and climate change? I'd be slacking off because it is clear that AI is going to be the brain job top dog by the time I get to career stage.

I see a lot more kids mocking AI on TikTok than fearing it, but I might be looking in the wrong place.

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” ― Nicholas Klein

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#318

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #243
gilbetron wrote: post #94

My wife and I have noticed this, and it is really bizarre because it is across all kinds of demographics. We consider school mandatory for our son, except for medical reasons or significant events (funeral, for instance). Nearly all of his friends, even those that have teacher parents, will often be out of school, "because we wanted to go skiing" or "didn't feel like it today". I don't get it at all, like I didn't ge…

> still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug > feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work. Can you take an A or “advanced work” to the deli and exchange it for a sandwich? The people you are criticizing realised the pointlessness of it all and that extra work (or knowledge) beyond a baseline doesn’t make a measurable difference worth the extra effort.

[deleted]

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#319

Post by silverquiet »

partiallypro wrote: post #290
silverquiet wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny - in a sense I pretty much agree with you; I had to be cajoled into school and everything as well and found it fundamentally miserable. Certainly I understand that without an education the future is quite grim (especially for me as I have some physical disability). But after that treatment, I decided it was not something I could ever put a child through, so in that sense I have some sympathy for these pare…

I think people should have kids, society and humanity cannot survive without children and children can be a gift. However, if you're going to be a bad parent and don't see their lives as your responsibility, not just for their own sake but for the sake of society... don't have kids. But if you do, and you -allow- your kid to be truant or become a criminal, etc., you should be punished and held personally liable.

Do you think people set out to be bad parents? And do you think that they can be punished into being good parents? It seems pretty tough to me.

And yes, the idea of having children in order to feed them into the same meat-grinder of education and employment that I went through in order to perpetuate some cycle for reasons unfathomable to me is about the least convincing reason to do so. I used to think I was an outlier, but as fertility rates fall near continuously, I'm beginning to suspect that I was just early in realizing it.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#320

Post by [deleted] »

usea wrote: post #252
andy99 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you prioritize making your kids sit in school over taking them and doing something fun like a vacation, given the option? My first thought reading the headline was that more people are realizing the irrelevance of school and work, and prioritizing other things.

Because school is important and not at all irrelevant.

[deleted]
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