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School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

nytimes.com

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Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#341

Post by treesknees »

I’ve been a classroom volunteer teacher for a computer science / programming course at a local high school. I can attest that this is accurate - I’d estimate 20-25% of the class is absent on any given day that I’m there. And of the students that are present, there’s a good number of them who are checked out mentally and really don’t participate.

It’s surprising to me. Back when I was in school, I was extremely anxious missing any days. Elective classes are one thing, but I just don’t understand how students are missing multiple days of history or math or science and able to keep up.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#342

Post by ptero »

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

> you can't teach very well if 20% of the class is absent, it just creates an absurd situation for the teachers

Why is this? If true, why this problem is not appearing in private schools that pretty universally do not object to parents taking their kids away for vacations or family events as long as kids master the material.

The teacher needs to have a program of study with specific topics covered, recommended exercises for practice and required homework to check understanding for each. If a student masters the material why does anyone care if he skipped a week? And if the student does not know the material he should get a bad grade, whether he was in every class or not.

That is how the school worked where I grew up (Eastern Europe) and it seems vastly superior to the mess we have in the US today, where many public schools teach to the lowest common denominator, making capable kids bored at best and and a nuisance to the teacher at worst.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#343

Post by kwhitefoot »

willcipriano wrote: post #66
Filligree wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe sort the classes by ability, then?

Sort the classes by learning speed, the faster kids aren't expected to do more or harder class work like today instead they get longer lunches, free periods, more recess and early dismissal. Only slow kids need homework, the fast kids get it done as part of class and peer grade themselves. Frees up teaching resources for the slower kids and respects everyone's time. Puts the incentives in the right places, rewarding…

Are you rewarding diligent students or successful students? It usually ends up being the latter and the slower but diligent ones end up discouraged.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#344

Post by vundercind »

seneca wrote: post #283
elboru wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category. Have you been around kids post COVID? Winters after the pandemic have been a nightmare for many parents. My nephews have basically been "sick" the whole winter (getting sick, staying home, recovering, going back to school, getting a new virus, repeat).

I have heard this from so many people, all over the country. I've heard many parents saying they're getting repeatedly sick as their kids bring diseases home. Has anyone seen any actual research into why this is? It seems pretty serious.

We didn’t have so much as a sniffle in our house for 2+ years. Masking, distancing, and not going to restaurants—we just did not get sick. Even after the kids went back to school—we had them in a school with heavy-duty air filters in every room and high masking compliance, at the time.

Now we’re sick constantly, it seems. It’s so much worse than before. I think our immune systems are doing some catching up.

[edit] for the timing, we started getting sick a bunch right around the time masking dropped off to near-zero everywhere around us.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#345

Post by sethammons »

ballenf wrote: post #180
jawns wrote: post #18

Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe? In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness. Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces…

Before covid we'd ask our kids what they did and we'd get the usual super brief explanation but would assume that kids just didn't want to go into detail or didn't remember. After covid, we realized that their answer was closer to the truth than all the learning we imagined in our heads. To some degree elementary school has always been a large part daycare and small part teaching. But the one big change from my exper…

it is weighing the cows more often to get them bigger. The over indexing on measuring via standardized tests is costing us so much. Teachers, more and more, teach a mile wide and an inch deep and teach to the test, only to have that information thrown out of everyone's brains to get ready for the next regurgitation of the previous couple of weeks.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#346

Post by kwhitefoot »

anon__coward wrote: post #75
kwhitefoot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homework has been demonstrated over and over again to not result in higher attainment. If your children are so smart they can surely do some reading and research of their own. That's what I did back in prehistoric times (1960s and early 1970s). In the subjects I enjoyed I was consistently ahead of the bulk of the class and occasionally of the teachers simply because I read all the text books and spent time in the lib…

References please. The claim that hw does not help retention sounds pretty unbelievable.

From the abstract:

“Although previous research has shown that homework improves students’ academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students’ homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which may be less accurate than time-diary data. We use data from the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the effects of time spent on homework while attending high school on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time has no effect on these measures of academic achievement.”

Rønning, M. (2008). Who benefits from homework assignments? (Discussion Papers No. 566). Oslo, Norway: Statistics Norway, Research Department. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ908287 Full text available http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp566.pdf

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#347

Post by slices »

VancouverMan wrote: post #198
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this liminal state of "sick, but not too sick to perform". A lot of us are fortunate enough to work from home if we've just got the sniffles, which lets us perform but not infect the office. For those of us who can't just do work or school remote, I sure wish we could at least do like Japan and mask up. It seems like it should be common courtesy.

[flagged]

shorter version: Cochrane Review on efficacy of masking vs. respiratory disease

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#348

Post by Diederich »

VancouverMan wrote: post #198
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this liminal state of "sick, but not too sick to perform". A lot of us are fortunate enough to work from home if we've just got the sniffles, which lets us perform but not infect the office. For those of us who can't just do work or school remote, I sure wish we could at least do like Japan and mask up. It seems like it should be common courtesy.

[flagged]

I've never had COVID. In fact, the last respiratory infection I had was in 2019. I sing, masked, in a 90 member choir where few people do mask, and we've had a couple COVID outbreaks. In one case, the people who sat to my right and left both caught the bug.

I'm not going to speak to the particulars of the various mask mandates. That's a complicated and nuanced question. One thing I know for sure: N95 masks, properly applied, make a huge difference to (at least) the person wearing them.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#349

Post by Jensson »

analognoise wrote: post #333
troyvit wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been the same for my kids. Another thing I've noticed is that post-covid they've come home from school with more stories of the teachers just putting on videos and having the kids watch that, or else they just read crap on their tablets. What I'm saying is, it seems like education has also changed post-covid. It's like the teachers are still remote-teaching even though everybody's in the classroom. This is publi…

I’ve noticed that too! So many videos. “We watched a movie today” - what? Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours, because I never remember that as a kid. Yes it would have been a VCR rolled out and all that, but if I wanted them to just watch a movie I could do that from home. So weird.

> Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours

I remember watching video 4 times in school total. At the time teachers didn't know how to start the video player so a kid always did that, the teachers weren't used to showing videos in class at all.

Re: School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

#350

Post by whiterknight »

bombcar wrote: post #256
Nextgrid wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If purchasing power falls 30% it’s only fair that things are only working 70%. Spoiler alert: purchasing power fell way more than 30%, so we are actually lucky things work still as much as they do.

Or another way to put it, if 50% of everything is bullshit, you can cut out quite a bit and still not really effect anything. The number of TPS reports filed is not the actual value to the economy, but it gets counted in the GDP.

So the comment above admits that people are taking more time off and working less. So is your argument that the majority of work that we lost didn’t matter anyway?
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