181–190 of 467 posts
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.
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…
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iPhone cameras are pretty good and they're very thin. Front or back.
Yeah, if they put in any of the cameras from an iPhone (or any flagship smartphone for that matter) it would be an unbelievable leap in quality. There's no way they can't find space for it.
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'm sure any parent will say that it is impossible, and the issue is not the screen, but sitting still. I am in fact surprised that the teachers even asked to make video calls at that age. I don't know about USA preschools but here 5 years olds don't study sitting on a desk all day long, so I don't know how they can expect a kid to do that at home.
When my daughter (preschool age) had to stay home because of the virus, the teachers started to send us videos of activities to do at home, but those were for the parents, not for her.
I'm amazed how dismissive all the comments are here. I read the article and it seems totally normal for a little kid not to be able to do "school" on a laptop. Kindergarten is so much different than later years of schooling. It's not about lectures and subjects, or homework and tests. It's about much more fundamental lessons, interspersed with creativity, socialization, and learning to be separated from your parents.…
But what about children in Australia, where remote teaching has been done for many years? Are they all somehow specially gifted children, so that they manage?
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…
And on top of this, we should not be asking “can they” but instead “should they” have this kind of life.
I read it and ended being not sure what it was about. Unless you're going to end with a stance of "but we'll get through it because of COIVD" or "we should go back to school no matter what" I'm a little lost of the point here. Nobody is "doing this" to you, it's what we all have to do. Yes it impacts everyone different, but what's the message?
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You can buy a top-of-the-line $3,000 16" Macbook Pro and it comes with a garbage-tier 720p webcam that has terrible dynamic range and low-light performance. It's embarrassing . Most Windows laptops at a third of the price have significantly better webcams.
The ultrabooks that are priced to compete with MacBooks have even worse webcams than Apple uses, because they have even thinner lids and bezels. It's not a question of cost, it's the result of physical laws and design priorities. It is interesting that companies are willing to put massive, tumorous lumps and display cutouts on smartphones in the name of picture quality but not even a little bump on laptop lids.
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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.
Only if there would've been a better way. While COVID surely could've been handled a bit better overall, I don't think a lockdown was fully avoidable (note that it escaped Wuhan while the city was in a lockdown stricter than anything seen outside of Wuhan) and remote learning is, as shown above, not ideal either. So I don't think admitting that this school year was bad equals admitting a bad response to COVID.
In my opinion, the issue here isn't virtual learning (the what), the issue is how we are doing virtual learning (the how). We can't use zoom the way we use a physical classroom. It's a totally different medium. I teach a group of kindergarteners online every morning for 3 hours. The first thing we do is make sure their space is set up to allow for movement. They can jump up move, around, wiggle, whatever they want. I…
Homeschooling is much more flexible and dynamic. More breaks, more following the rabbit down the hole, more fun.
My kids can often be found reading in their makeshift forts behind the sofa, watching ants in the backyard, and clicking through the youtube videos following the curiosity from something they learned in their regular studies.