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My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

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Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#131

Post by treis »

danShumway wrote: post #33
mjayhn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I failed 7th grade because my parents were divorcing in the middle of it and literally everybody including my family acted like it was the end of my school career and I'd never recover and get a real job and would be SOO behind my peers. I'm 100% on the "yeah you can take a year off, it'll be ok or better in the end" side of things. I can't imagine myself at 13 having to deal with that + quarantine/2020.

I'm not an expert on education, I'm not going to speculate on the psychological effects of having a year without school on a kid. I don't think I'm qualified to do that. Outside of developmental effects though, by the time you get to college does it really matter if someone is one year older than another person? Is anyone going to get rejected from a first job interview just because they're 26 instead of 25? Plenty o…

You can't push pause on human development, though. Having your first job interview at 26 instead of 25 doesn't matter. Missing out on a year of socialization when you're 6 almost certainly does.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#132

Post by TwistedWeasel »

dpcan wrote: post #70
coderholic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the point is it can't be done. I think it's just acknowledging that it's HARD. Both for the kids, and the parents.

What the hell is wrong with HARD???? Why is everyone so lazy? We are going backwards as a society. I was raised thinking that if it wasn't hard to do, it wasn't worth doing. Every uphill path should not be looked at as an arduous journey, but as an adventure with an amazing reward at the top.

I'm with you, we should approach problems with optimism not fear. However, teaching that approach to kids is a long term strategy, and helping them adapt to a new routine is a slow process, it's less about the difficulty and more about the emotional cost that you have to pay to succeed.

I have three kids, all elementary school age and I am prepping to start the school year all remote. I'm not afraid of the challenge but i'm honest with myself that it will take a toll on my kids and my marriage that I cannot avoid. No matter how hard I work, it will take time and getting into the routine cannot be done overnight.

It's okay to be daunted by that prospect.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#133

Post by elliekelly »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #61
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #40

All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Adults are barely able to make it through a day of Zoom meetings without feeling drained, how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. A 5 year old does not have the…

I have two 7 year olds and a 9 year old. They are taught a remote curriculum, supplemented by homework in the form of online quizzes that reward correct answer with turns at a video game. They LOVE doing this homework, which is every bit as rigorous as the homework done via paper sheets, because it rewards them for getting their answers right in a way that a number at the top of a page never would. And they get their…

This is interesting. I’ve been using the “fluent forever” method to learn a second language and one of the things it really stresses is the importance of immediate feedback. It makes perfect sense - it’s much easier to understand your mistake and correct it in the moment. But I’d never thought about it in the context of homework. It almost seems silly that we expect kids to wait a full 24 hours or more to find out whether they’ve done a math problem correctly or not.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#134

Post by trhway »

toper-centage wrote: post #76
actfrench wrote: post #54

Here's a crazy idea: What if we raised our children to process their difficult emotions instead of suppress them and stay active and move freely while working and studying (instead of sitting in a chair at a desk)

Unfortunately that is incompatible with 30 children in a classroom being managed but a single underpaid teacher.

so, who is up for a startup - an AI-agent as a teacher, each child gets his own teacher, or several simultaneously, basically personalized Muppet show guiding the child through the intricacies of 1+1=2 and how to write "mom".

For the older students - some FPS (multi-played by the whole class or school against school) with math and other problems to unlock new more powerful weapons/etc. should work too - anybody who didn't do the homework and thus fails to solve the problems fast naturally becomes a bad teammate and the peer pressure is the king at that age.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#135

Post by sologoub »

einarfd wrote: post #105

A lot of people complain about Zoom fatigue, and while on one hand I'm fairly happy that it is a competitors offering that has ended up with being a part of that moniker, and not the product I'm working on, it is somewhat unfair to blame Zoom or the software stack for that. The main culprit for messing up meetings are the cameras and the microphones on laptops. I'm not sure if there are any vendors at all, including…

I’ve been using ChromeOS tablet as my video conferencing rig with front firing speakers and good microphone array. No echo and no overheated MacBook Pro.

Suspect a newish iPad could work well too.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#136

Post by itronitron »

lovich wrote: post #81
dpcan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 4 kids. I work from home. My wife works 11 hours a day away from the house. I feel like this world is full of "can't" people who aren't willing to do the extra work. We seem to have enough time to comment on Hacker News. To argue about masks on Facebook. To watch every TikTok, and spend hours on Twitter. But put in the necessary work to make learning at home productive. Nope, can't do that. We have put in the…

What exactly is your daily routine then. Raising 4 kids while working full time with your spouse working 11 hours outside of the house is a pretty large claim.

Probably something like, get the kids dressed before the first nanny shows up at 8am...

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#137

Post by visarga »

causality0 wrote: post #17

hit his parents, hit his brother, broke things, and spat a cup of juice all over my laptop. Barring some kind of psychiatric problem like ODD, that's a significant failure of discipline, the responsibility for which lies squarely on the shoulders of the parent. I would not trust any kind generalized behavioral prediction from someone who can't keep a five year old from striking their siblings and intentionally destro…

How would you propose to keep a 5 year old from doing anything except for shadowing their every move all day long? Would that work?

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#139

Post by WalterBright »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #40

All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Adults are barely able to make it through a day of Zoom meetings without feeling drained, how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. A 5 year old does not have the…

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen?

Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.

Re: My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

#140

Post by edgyquant »

floren wrote: post #123
learc83 wrote: post #97

Kids can't learn all day long in a classroom. I don't know why we expect them to be able to do it remotely. School has always been 1/3 learning 2/3 baby sitting. When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.

> When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day. Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.

Yes I was born in 92 and it was all day when I went.
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