I am very thankful that my youngest graduated high school in 2020. The last couple of months were screwed up, but there wasn't much real education lost by then; most seniors pretty much check out after Spring Break anyway. I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.
Highly unlikely. My wife taught children who came out of Sarajevo in the mid-90s and many of them have gone on to excel in life.
Children are resilient. What is _hurting_ them is not the school closures, but the panic and uncertainty that some people have put around this.
It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified. (The unquantified is often partially quantifiable, but that would take effort , and the statistics aren't currently on the dashboard…) See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
> It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified. Are you sure that isn’t just a modern trend now that we are able to quantify so much stuff?
Modern society is just the result of countless generations of the human tendency to quantify. We just have so many things quantified now that our problems tend to be more "using the wrong quantifications" rather than "not having the right quantifications."
Except that real solutions never seem to be on the table. For example, how about atomizing school into pods of smaller numbers of students with teachers scattered around the district instead of 30+ students per teacher with 1000+ students crammed into a building or campus? This would be especially effective for the youngest students. And a "Covid Outbreak" would shut down less than a dozen students and a teacher for…
For the first half of your comment I just kept say "that takes money" in my head over and over and then you said it. Pure and simple, this comes down to money or rather the lack thereof. When I was younger I had heavily considered going into teaching until I learned how little they make and how shitty parents are to them (not all, but enough to make their jobs hell if they want). After the last two years I cannot imagine why anyone would go into teaching (or nursing for that matter). Both groups bent over backwards (by and large, obviously you are going to always have a few duds) to continue to provide the best service they could and were treated terribly (and paid terribly) in return.
Plenty of people (including some in these comments) want to wax poetic about "think of the children" or "the children are our future" but I have a hard time those same people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Why we aren't shoveling money into education (before the pandemic as well) is completely beyond me and that's coming from someone who is childless. I'm more than happy to see my taxes go up if the money is going towards education.
this is horse shit. the overall well-being of children has been declining for decades. now it has reached its precipice and snobby NYT says its because of the virus. its just a way to deflect from the truth which is that we have created a culture that enables kids to be shitty. the inmates have been running the asylum for a decade plus at our public schools. the environment that kids grow up in now is one where nobody is in control of what they experience. i remember when facebook first came out and i saw all my friends invest into it 100%. nobody ever asked, wait a second, isnt this unhealthy? isnt creating a points system for socializing a bit unfair to the less popular kids? isnt it sort of crazy to give facebook all of this information? i did my part and never made an account but nobody else did their part and nobody ever asked whether or not it was a good idea to make facebook a default entity in the lives of our children. something that everyone uses "because" and you cant choose to opt out without serious consequences for you social life which is a huge deal at that age. that was the contribution of the millennials to the the environment for our children. good job! children need an environment that is deliberately and thoughtfully controlled. not micro-managed, but controlled. soon the damage will be so great that even the dumbest people will realize this finally.
I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…
There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…
I don't think anyone is ignoring long COVID and hospital issues. Hospital capacity is discussed front and center daily and is the primary justification given for lockdowns.
Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID" symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
Except that real solutions never seem to be on the table. For example, how about atomizing school into pods of smaller numbers of students with teachers scattered around the district instead of 30+ students per teacher with 1000+ students crammed into a building or campus? This would be especially effective for the youngest students. And a "Covid Outbreak" would shut down less than a dozen students and a teacher for…
I’m inquiry: do we have enough educators for that plan?
> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligat…
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…
I couldn't agree with you more. Teachers and other school workers were not even mentioned in this article.
At this point I've lost faith in my generation, my parents' generation, and everything in between and outside of that. I don't care what your degree says or does not say. I don't care about your credentials. I don't care about your politics. Everyone has been wrong. MY YOUNG CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CONTINUE WEARING MASKS AT SCHOOL WHEN THEY ARE VACCINATED. That is no way to grow up indeed.
So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be pa…
No. You have 1st world America and 3rd world America.
The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and carry some emotional baggage forward.
The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less if helping them requires more taxes.
You can't have a years-long pandemic without consequences, good and bad. My state of Texas has had schools open almost all of this time--and we're not doing better than the other states. Where are all the folks in the United States who say that parents are the best teachers of their children, that home-schooling should rule the day, that the best care comes from families? That would imply that children would be bette…
I'm not in the US, but the home-schooling comparison is not fair from my Australian experience of it. In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no pressure from their day job. In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the teacher is setting the day's agenda…
Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education?