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

theatlantic.com

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

#161

Post by lucb1e »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #94
Shorel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't fix much of that stuff after he is 7 years old. Educate the child so you don't have to jail the adult. At least that's the common wisdom grandmothers say in my country. Some study I found that also mentions the seven-year milestone: https://news.softpedia.com/news/Our-Personality-Is-Fully-Dev...

Well about 1/4 of the prison population has ADHD and half are dyslexic. Female prison populations also have a very high rate of BPD. The grandmother's where you're from might benefit from learning about pervasive developmental disorders and the effects of trauma. Some people are dealing with stuff that isn't their fault and that they never got adequate support for.

BPD is "Borderline personality disorder", for anyone else not familiar with that TLA.

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

#162

Post by Analemma_ »

jonahbenton wrote: post #141
actfrench wrote: post #73

"forced to sit in front of a screen" is the key phrase here. What if we didn't force them to sit, but allowed them to stand and move about freely, come and go when they please, have some autonomy and decision making power around what goes on in class (e.g. share preferences for what they want to learn) and give them frequent movement breaks (a good set of headphones, an ipad with a wide lens attached allows that). Wh…

It's a much bigger question/challenge than lack of hardware. With all respect, the model this assumes for how kids work... is just not how kids work. It's not how attention works. Think about it like a movie. Kids at different ages will sit through movies of different lengths and subjects. Those movies have production budgets- of minimum thousands of dollars per second even at the lowest end, and shooting and editing…

The author does allude to this, by mentioning that remote learning is almost worse than nothing.

Honestly, we probably should just cancel at least the first half of the school year altogether, but that would mean admitting how utterly dismal our Covid response has been, and so it is not politically possible. Thus a whole generation of kids have to deal with this nonsense. It's a shame.

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

#163

Post by jstanley »

candu wrote: post #154
dstick wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some deeper meaning to 1 + 1 = 2 you could enlighten us on? Most teachers I’ve met seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across.

Well, if you want to be _extremely rigorous_, there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica ;) Less flippantly: pedagogically, there's a big difference between "here's your addition tables, memorize them" and "if I have 1 of _anything_ and another 1 of that same thing, I now have 2 of that thing." The latter offers way more opportunities for further thought: by that logic, if I have 2 things and…

I'm pretty sure that is already how addition is taught. I'm not a fan of formal education at all, but I'm not sure what you think schools are missing here?

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

#164

Post by easde »

bdamm wrote: post #150
ghaff wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume thinness is part of the problem--my high-end Logitech webcam is about an inch thick. Also webcam quality was probably just not much of a consideration until fairly recently. But, even if someone doesn't more or less set up a studio as I've done to a degree and some of my colleagues have done, there are some pretty basic things related to lighting and webcam height that can be done pretty easily by most peopl…

iPhone cameras are pretty good and they're very thin. Front or back.

Unfortunately, they're not thin compared to a laptop lid. Especially with the taper near the edges that Macbooks and many other high-end laptops have. There are some exotic optical solutions out there that allow for thinner lenses but I doubt we'll see those in laptops anytime soon.

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

#165

Post by lucb1e »

klipt wrote: post #15
organsnyder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the amount of brain development that happens at young ages, this is daunting to consider.

Kids spending more time playing outside and some less time on stressful academics is probably good for them. We didn't evolve to sit sedentary in a classroom.

Why did we ever send them into classrooms in the first place if it's "probably good for them [to spend] more time playing outside and some less time on stressful academics"?

I think it's "probably good" for them to learn something, too. It's not as if it's a 9-5 job after which they come home, do housework, file taxes, try to socialize with the family a bit, and go to bed exhausted. They do still have time to be kids besides school at that age (barring less common cases like toxic families and extreme poverty, of course).

Also, we didn't evolve to read books, use chairs, power our stove with electricity from hydroelectric power plants, etc., but I'd rather not cut those out of my life either. We did evolve to run many miles behind prey, but I don't mind not practicing that. It's a really weird argument that a lot of people seem to use, "we didn't evolve to", which can be applied to virtually everything we do today. It seems to be a placeholder for when something seems disagreeable to you but you can't actually articulate why or be bothered to look into whether that is the case.

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

#167

Post by tboyd47 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #108
tboyd47 wrote: post #35

I just pulled my own kids out of public school because I can't stomach it either. I can't in good conscience subject my kids to 6 hours of online class 5 days a week. Whether or not you want to judge me for feeling this way or call me nasty names, "psychic torture" is exactly how I'd describe the solution these educators have come up with.

Our first week was rough. But our school came up with a much better schedule for our kindergartener. Class is now from 8:20-9am, meet in small group with the teacher for 30 minutes (time depends upon your group), then closing instruction at 12:45pm-1:15pm. The rest of the time is "self study". Basically, you have assignments you need to do and complete with your kid. You can do it during self study time. Or at night.…

I imagine most school districts, including ours, will land on something like what you just described, albeit after a period of jerking parents around. Since your school was only planning on three hours a day, sounds like they are more flexible than mine, which demands six. I understand even the most school-marmiest of homeschooling parents wouldn't impose more than 1-2 hours of class on 5 and 6-year-olds.

I have been preparing for the possibility of homeschooling all summer, so we were ready to pull the trigger. I just didn't expect it to be Day 2!

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

#168

Post by M277 »

dpcan wrote: post #65
mumblemumble wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, by "a little time", you mean a few years, until they're psychologically developed enough that you can expect this of them. "The way we need them to learn" strikes me as a very telling choice of words. This is a moment where we need to be meeting their needs, not just molding them to our expectations.

My son had to miss pre-school when he was 4. I created a home-based program (week to week) where we learned everything I could find that would normally be in a regular pre-school curriculum. We worked for 3 hours every morning "studying", and he was 4. I made it fun. I made it productive. We took breaks. We had snacks. We had recess. It worked. By the end of the summer, he was reading and more prepared for Kindergart…

Slightly unrelated, very sorry, but could you direct me to the resources you used while teaching your son?

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

#169

Post by ghaff »

easde wrote: post #164
bdamm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone cameras are pretty good and they're very thin. Front or back.

Unfortunately, they're not thin compared to a laptop lid. Especially with the taper near the edges that Macbooks and many other high-end laptops have. There are some exotic optical solutions out there that allow for thinner lenses but I doubt we'll see those in laptops anytime soon.

Cameras are also a really big deal in the context of smartphones. I assume a lot of silicon is devoted to making them work well with a small sensor in a smallish footprint. Apple is probably not going to add a couple hundred dollars to a MacBook BOM (and maybe a bump for the lens) for a better webcam--at least they wouldn't have before the current situation. Who knows now? Maybe a top-notch webcam is a selling point. Many people still wouldn't set up lighting and eliminate backlighting to give it a chance.

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

#170

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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.

This isn't to the actual study (which I'm having trouble finding), but to the NEA's policy brief on all day kindergarten.

https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/18001_Full-Day_Kindergarten_...

The TL;DR being that all day Kindergarten is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. As a result, many districts are moving towards full day.

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