My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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 these skills, and will obviously act out as they have no other mechanism of dealing with it.
Also, who said that this article has to have a point? The writer never claims to propose a solution, she is simply writing out her emotions for others to hear. Assuming she has been largely isolating, is it all that weird that she would talk about her experiences online?
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 agree that it was a bit optimistic to expect this of 5 year olds)
One thing that I’m not seeing discussed much is that these meetings are objectively a dehumanizing waste of the children’s time. Ten minutes to take roll, while everyone just sits there? If someone did something this pointless in a meeting of adults, they would be reprimanded.
School is to submit.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.h...
Edit: Why is something like this downvoted? I didn’t state anything other than my relevant direct experience.
Teacher has been recording a daily 7-10 minute lesson video for some of their core subjects.
Then some assignment of online math, science, writing. Then one of the popular reading sites.
The video calls have all been once per week for 30-45 minutes but mostly social for the kids to interact with each other.
Not sure who really expects 5 hours of video.
Everyone knows how fussy 5 year olds are, these readers aren't that stupid.
The thing people usually get wrong is how fussy 6-16 year olds are. That 16 year olds actually don't have that much emotional maturity or know that much practical stuff either, even with 10 more years of life and school.
The biggest crisis isn't parents with young children. It's people realizing how little their teenage kids know and how poorly those teenagers are adjusting.
One is... maybe the right way to describe it is hormones and experience?
Like, the first time you fall in love as a teenager, it's intense.
You literally have never felt that way about another person, ever. And, sure, from a cognitive development perspective, you're an adult, you just don't yet have the experience to deal with it.
That's true for a lot of life, and well beyond being a teenager.
As a teenager, you are, cognitively, a newly-minted adult. You don't know where you fit in the world, much less where you are going, and you're at the beginning stages of sorting out who you want to be. And sure, adults can give you advice, but only you can go through the process of figuring out who you are.
You are also, at the same time, both absolutely confident and totally insecure.
It's rough, full stop. My teenage years were hell on my parents.
This is compounded by American culture and education thoroughly insulating kids -- well into young adulthood! -- from developing emotional maturity or learning to accept responsibility.
That's all about upbringing, by the way. I have met teenagers that I would rank as more mature than a large number of people in their early thirties.
It's totally possible, and from what I have seen, easier -- we just don't do it.
Americans also do nothing, or at least nothing effective, to equip kids with critical life-skills: financial management, personal fitness, nutrition, martial arts, negotiation, the list goes on. The only thing we prepare them for is to "go to college".
That has to change.
The same way that you expect a kid to sit more-or-less still, and not-too-disruptively in a classroom with 29 other children for 6 hours a day.
When they, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, can't, we diagnose them with ADHD and give them a Ritalin patch.
I get it. Remote learning isn't great. It's worse than in-person learning, which isn't a high bar to begin with. Unfortunately, in-person learning currently carries with it the risk of death and disability to teachers. We could have taken some steps to deal with that risk, three months ago (Smaller classes, isolating students from teachers, training glorified babysitters who aren't over the age of 50 to mind classes during non-instruction time, etc), but it seems that all of our leaders and planners were convinced that this COVID thing would blow over by August.
A thought: students are expected to learn to function together in classroom settings over the course of their first few years in school. It's a gradual and often tedious process for everyone involved. How many children say they like sitting in class? It's a heavily researched subject. Some students never really get the hang of it. Other students learn to keep their place, but have trouble following the pace, and compensate otherwise. Or don't. Suddenly requiring teachers and children to respectively teach and learn under vastly different circumstances, EG teleconferencing from home with family around, appears a bit unrealistic. Glhf
I'd go a step further and say that many--if not most--adults can't do this at all. I would go back to college any day, where classes are a few hours a day and I set my own schedule, but personally can't imagine that I'd do well if you put me back in high school (where i did fairly well academically), with a rigid schedule of back-to-back classes. If you told me that I have to do it again, but on zoom this time... I can't even fathom what kind of punishment that would be.
New media has always met with resistance. Books were once considered poisonous trash. Now they're seen as healthy and educational. "In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, written in 360 BCE, Socrates warned that reliance on the written word would weaken individuals’ memory, and remove from them the responsibility of rememberin" https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...
Your comment makes me think that you've never interacted with an East Asian 5 year old. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; long before they take their first steps, they've started decoding the incentive structures around them. Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they act like bored inmates. That behaviour isn't innate, it's a consequence of the environment we've created for children.
It's on the basic day-to-day interactions, kids asking for something in the grocery store or in a restaurant and having a dialogue why they want it and why they can or cannot have it right now, in a way you'd tell another adult (with reservations about vocabulary and complexity of the message).
There is a much more trusting relationship between parent and child from what I see, not one of ownership or overprotection. Kids are people and are treated and talked to like that regarding their needs, desires, etc.
Seriously?
And on top of this, we should not be asking “can they” but instead “should they” have this kind of life.
Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.
I'm surprised there isn't more data on what educational media is actually good or not. Because then we could just use that, because there are already millions of hours of this stuff made. Largely its because the profit is in making more of it, not making available all that which came before.
When the lockdowns first in started in March, my 4 year old, who was 3 at the time, could barely last 15 minutes before wandering off. She has gotten better since then. She can now last 45 minutes online with her teacher, but I don’t think it’s the norm. My wife still needs to sit with her to make sure she focuses on the teacher.
I think that a lot of these parents that have young children that cannot focus online should be looking on building a small co-op for learning. Partner with 2 or 3 other trusted families and hire a teacher or share responsibilities in teaching the kids. Covid is dangerous taking some risk should be considered.
That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainwreck, because we all know that's exactly what it's going to be. Well to do folks such as myself will hire private tutors (who, BTW, work just fine through Skype, by virtue of having done it for years). Less well to do folks will suffer the incompetence of our ultra-expensive $13K/pupil-year education system where less than 1/3rd of the expense goes towards teaching.
If people in power didn't want it to be a trainwreck, they'd reach out to folks who have been in this business for over a decade and learned at least how not to fuck it up completely. Instead they're trying to duct tape something together with MS Teams it looks like, and each school district is duct taping its own bespoke thing.
Children learn how to communicate with others just fine in actual childcare, without being in quite so artificial a situation as age ranked classrooms where their primary occupation is pointless busywork.
Honestly glorified childcare is too kind to primary school. Glorified childcare until at least age ten would be an improvement and have nugatory effects on long term learning outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.
"A 5 year old does not have these skills"
They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.
https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-cont...
"Who said this article has to have a point?"
Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. If this was the author's personal blog I would not be saying anything. But this article sits next to subjects like:
- Can a Protest Movement Topple Netanyahu? - Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - Our Students Are Depending on Us, teaching through Covid-19
Different kids develop differently.
> They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.
A large amount of adults don't have these skills developed.
> Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic.
This point I agree with. At the same time, I believe purely emotional ranting pieces have a place on the web too.
Lol. Because you think they should? Love the one-size fits all statement - not.
As soon as someone has 2+ kids, they realize how ludicrous that statement is. Better yet go talk to a kindergarten teacher - I don't know how they handle kids that age that are not even theirs
These are fundamental qualities that require physical interaction!
You give me the most well-behaved kid, and I'll show you a hellion when I attempt to sit them in front of a boring "remote learning" session for a few hours.
But put in the necessary work to make learning at home productive. Nope, can't do that.
We have put in the work at our house to make e-learning possible, and it can be effective, and kids can focus, and kids can wear masks, and kids CAN still LEARN during difficult times - but it takes sacrifices from parents, be it sleep, entertainment, our phones, TV, or even time off work and living lean.
But I'm ready for it... let's hear some CAN DO stuff from the HN community!
HN crowd is a tough audience when it comes to adolescent socialisation, not everyone benefits from sitting in front of a computer from a young age.
Being picked last for every team ever wasn't great for that. It was humiliating, time after time. But worse was then being bullied in the compulsory showers every time for supposedly wanting to have anal sex with everyone, I guess because I was into music and science, not sport. Although, outside school, I was in weekly soccer, basketball and sailing competitions, and did a lot of kayaking, windsurfing, table tennis, roller skating, swimming, bike riding, tennis, handball etc etc. I can hardly believe how sporty I was compared to now, yet still was considered super-unsporty!
Ah this is another dismissive comment I guess. Maybe people like me are over-represented here! (And who this "HN crowd" I read about? Everyone but you?) I reacted to your language, I think - you presented yourself as just pointing out a fact, when you got dismissive comments from a tough crowd without your level of knowledge and understanding.
The contrarian dynamic strikes again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are a community consensus, it's that they're the fastest reactions to feel, and the fastest comments to write—especially when the topic is provocative, when most of us are reacting from cache [2].
Then a second wave of objections is generated by the first wave. Readers come to the thread, see the comment section dominated by those initial reflexive responses, and feel some version of surprised-shocked-dismayed at how "all HN commenters" seem to react in the same way. This propels them to write defenses of the article, often carefully expressing more moderate or balanced views than the first wave—but they probably wouldn't have been motivated to post anything if there hadn't been the first wave of comments to object to!
These second-wave comments tend to get more upvotes, perhaps because more people tend to share the more moderate view, but also because those comments tend to be more reflective [2] and therefore better written.
This explains why the top comment in a thread so often begins (ironically) with "Wow, I can't believe the comments here"—or from the current thread: "All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old" [3]—followed by a defense of whatever those objections were objecting to.
Eventually you get objections to the objections to the objections—which reminds me of the line "My complication had a little complication" from Brazil [4], and also epicycles.
[1] Cunningham's Law touches on this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
"No it isn't."
I'm confused why this was written or published. There is no "point".
Yes, it's very hard to keep adults much less kids cooped up in a house all day. Especially for 6+ months. But, what else are we supposed to do?
This is just a paid, public gripe that a lot of people can relate with, but what purpose does it serve? There isn't an alternative unless the author is pushing for schools to open regardless of COVID, which I doubt.
It is
> but what purpose does it serve?
It lets the millions of other parents who find themselves suddenly in the same situation, feeling the same things, know they're not alone, and that the struggle is real!
I'm assuming you're talking about kids in the Outback, where vast distance makes it harder to have classroom instruction?
There was a recent NYT article about that[0], and my takeaway is that it's really homeschooling with support from teachers. Not a Zoom videoconference where they fake like they're in the same classroom. The parents are much more involved in the early years. Once the kids are old enough to know how to learn, then it can become more of an instruction/homework style of teaching rather than what's required for preschool and Kindergarten kids.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/world/australia/australia...
It was 1 way or 2 way radio back in the day, now wiki says it’s 1 way video stream with 2 way voice.
From wiki... “ Each student typically spends one hour per day receiving group or individual lessons from the teacher, and the rest of the day working through the assigned materials with a parent, older sibling or a hired home-stay tutor.”
As a first-time father of 2.5 years old, I worry a lot about his behavior like when he hits me for no reason and then laughs. That cannot be normal, or so I used to think.
His pediatrician assure us that this is normal toddler behavior. In fact, lack of such behavior is cause of concern. Another thing she told us is that social workers look out for extremely well-behaving kids because they might be suffering abuse.
At this stage, I personally don't have experience with school age children but I imagine it is not normal for 5 years old to be able to sit in front of laptop for several hours.
This is clearly the best we can do know.
If I were the author, I'd consider opting out of kindergarten, or do it intermittently.
How education adapted to this pandemic will be studied for years to come. Hopefully something more brilliant than Zoom will be discovered somewhere, and spread.
This world is full of can't can't can't. Everywhere we turn, if there's an inconvenience involved. If we have to do something boring. If it won't be fun. If it's hard work..... we can't do it. It can't be done.
I wish we had a "we can do this" attitude. I wish parents could say, "Don't worry, let's help each other. You may not have the time, but I do, and I'm here to help."
But I'm out of hope.
The world is filled with plenty of that, and it always has been. But plenty of people are absolutely tackling this mess with a can-do attitude. You're just not seeing it, for whatever reason.
> But I'm out of hope.
And that may be the reason ;-).
Turning off the news is the best choice I've ever made. Can't be too depressed when I don't get bombarded constantly with BS, we're too busy living our life to the best of our ability.
"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.
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 Kindergarten than any of the kids in his class.
Yes. If parents stop complaining, and get down to work, and make this fun for their kids, and have a positive attitude, even the youngest students can learn from home.
Now days we even have Zoom options, so we WILL be able to get kids eye to eye with teachers, friends, other students. I would have loved that 8 years ago.
Feel free to share with other teachers if it could benefit them. I"d also be happy to talk to your teacher or anyone else's teacher if they need support on making zoom more engaging. Also, if other teachers have ideas of activities that worked well for them, I'd love to hear!
I'll just add that one thing that's been helpful in my group is to try to focus the zoom on social-emotional learning and then do an "independent study" together period where kids work on mastery-based learning apps independently, but with their friends and a teacher there if they get stuck (Math tango is our favorite!). I find kids learn a lot better with the apps then when I teach them a lesson verbally and give them a worksheet.
Zoom represents a really interesting challenge for teachers, but there is a lot of gold to be found if you look!
I find the this reliance on proprietary shitty software annoying and absurd. Often teachers barely know manage to cobble together virtual classrooms. They lack information about alternatives and support for setting things up properly.
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.
Most school districts would need
1. the desire to transform the way they teach
2. the leadership capable of driving this change
3. the teachers who are tech-savvy or capable of learning these technologies/skills (many aren't!)
I knew virtually nothing about tech, but one day I got the idea 5 years ago for a tech startup that could help kids. I was forced to learn about technology to make it work and benefited from a lot of great mentors along the way.
Even 5 years later, I have a sharp learning curve, but a lot of the parents in my group are engineers and have helped me come up with good activity ideas and technology ideas and been really patient with me as I learned to apply them.
I bet a lot of people in this group could help their child's teacher. If you reach out, I bet your teacher would be really grateful and eager to learn too.
When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.
John Taylor Gatto is an award-winning public school teacher who was honest and brave enough to concur with you:
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Sounds like it is more about learning to keep your head down and this award winning teacher is very aware of that
Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.
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.
This tight grip on American kids looks extremely stressful and harmful (helicopter/bubble wrap parenting, structuring every waking hour with classes and extracurriculars, driving them everywhere, never leaving them to themselves etc).
My understanding is that this is at least driven in part by academia, who have gradually advocated earlier and earlier interventions for lower performing students.
(for the life of me, I can't recall what we did on rainy days)
I urge you to have more empathy with parents and kids. Kids handling remote learning badly is such a pervasive complaint right now that it defies logic that all of these parents are bad parents.
Agreed - I have three kids. One is going to her school in-person. Another sits on the couch on his laptop for 4 straight hours until he gets his work done, and refuses to take a break. The last one works in 20-30 minutes sessions, doing screen time, then taking a break.
If I were to force any one of them to work like the others, it would go badly. Different people, different ways to work.
The other one is almost ten and is on ADHD medication, has borderline personality disorder issues, and while very intelligent, has problems with authority and can't focus online very well.
There's a huge randomness factor that goes into everything, including having kids. It's not deterministic.
The youngest one is very very indifferent to peer pressure. They don't give a sh!t what anyone else in their classroom thinks of them.
The real pisser is my eight year old is one of those birthdays that can go one way or the other. She's currently the youngest in her grade. I'd love to give her a gap year from all this and just hold her back a year. She's only in the grade she is because our district in CA had strict cutoffs for kindergarten.
It's hard to be a parent these days, you feel like nothing you do is ever "right".
Giving a shit about your kids is mainly what results in life-long benefits.
The sad truth is a lot of parents either don't care about their kids or care about them only as a proxy of how it reflects back on them.
Do you really think educators want to do remote learning?
My heart goes out to all the teachers who have to deal with this. It's as hard on them as it is parents and students.
I agree with you completely. We love the teachers at our kids' school and saying goodbye to them was the hardest part of leaving. They are just as frustrated. But the people who think that this solution is a reasonable one are insane.
I specifically complained that the main benefit of remote learning is the at-your-own-pace aspect of it, which is being tossed out the window. I swear the district was more concerned with the teachers putting in the correct number of working hours than with doing things that might actually work for kids.
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. Or whenever.
The first week they tried to do 8:20-11:10 (with 10 minute breaks every 50 minutes) of instruction. It really didn't work. This new schedule has been much more feasible to deal with.
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!
We're on day 3 of virtual kindergarten.
* Day #1 was a "minimum day": class from 08:35–11:50am, with a break from 09:40am–10:20am. That was okay, except for a technology fail: the (awesome) teacher has two pages of kids, so she doesn't always see when someone is "raising a quiet hand". And growing pains as kids learn the classroom etiquette. After class, we dropped off our kindergartener at the preschool where his younger sister goes. That gave him play time with other kids without exposing our family to another group of people, and it gave us some uninterrupted work time.
* Day #2 was similar, except there was a long gap between the end of the morning Zoom at 11:30am and the "circle time" at 1:45pm–2:00pm. The teacher used this to start meeting families one-by-one; the other families didn't have much assigned to do in that time. The gap was frustrating. Day #4 and #5 will be like this again, except our kid might be absent from afternoon circle time...
* Day #3 was an "asynchronous day" similar to what you're describing. It went pretty well.
Next week they're supposed to be on Zoom in the afternoon until circle time, too. I'm not looking forward to this at all, even though the afternoon time is supposed to be some of the most fun stuff (music, art, science).
It sounds like our teacher is not the one deciding all this, but I'll pass along your message anyway.
I don't know how parents with less flexible work arrangements manage this at all. There are a couple programs to support them, but I think they involve a bunch of kids in the same room in different virtual classes on different schedules, not enough adults there to help them focus, and no reason to believe it's any safer than regular school. I imagine they're quite horrible.
2. Online learning is much harder on parents and kids.
3. We're in the middle of a pandemic, in a country that has handled it very poorly.
4. Israel tried opening schools in May, when their daily new cases were at an all time low. New cases skyrocketed after opening schools [1], with nearly 50% of new cases being traced back to schools[2].
5. Closing schools in the spring is estimated to have saved 40,000 deaths in the US[3]. At that time new daily cases were significantly lower than they are now.
Unfortunately, classrooms undo a lot of the measures that have kept new daily cases from going significantly higher. They create contacts between families that would not have been in contact otherwise, and as new data comes out, it's clear that children are just as contagious as adults.
With what we know, as hard as it is, I don't see how we can proceed with opening schools until new daily cases are much more contained. The alternative is to have a massive spike in new cases, have schools close again, and be in the same position with online learning, but with many, many more cases out there.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ees8MesX0AAbDE2?format=png&name=...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/israelis-fear-schools-reopened-...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2769034
When It comes to five year olds doing schooling over video conferencing. I'm far from an expert on kids, I don't have kids and I don't want kids. But it does sound to me like a fools errand, and I'm super happy I'm not going to participate in that nightmare.
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 people. Though I'd add that comms problems are also a frequent annoyance and there's not a lot people can do there.
I'd add though that I normally move around my house when I'm working. Sitting at a desk all day in a "studio" doesn't really work for me.
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.
Yes, it's worse when people are using built-in cameras and bad lighting. But it's still there in 'good' conditions.
(To add to the list of things to get: use a wired connection! Wi-Fi is an endless source of lagginess and other problems. Get a USB ethernet dongle; 100Mbit is overkill. Also, get a LED lighting panel and tripod from a photo supply store so that people can see you.)
You absolutely need to do things differently, but kindergarden is not going to work with look at the morning message, do tasks from a list, including watching some videos, and do a check-in call once or twice a week.
[1] like latency and a/v sync. You could get pretty low latency if everyone was on land lines and called into a conference hosted at the school. But, nobody has land lines, so we're doing audio with the video over the internet. So we have the delay for the encoder, we have delay to get a big enough packet to send over IP, we've got last mile network delay (I'm at 20 ms to get out of my provider's network), plus network delay to wherever the conference server is, plus processing time, and then all that on the way back. If you're on congested wifi because nobody runs wired ethernet anymore, but you've got two kids and two adults all having to do this, that ads inconsistent delay, so now you need a jitter buffer. That is a reminder to try to set up my kid with wired networking though, thanks.
Suspect a newish iPad could work well too.
IMO, the OP article intention was only to share the pain, so that other parents know they are not alone in this challenge.
But is digital etiquette something I want Raffi to learn at age 5? He’ll have the rest of his life to figure out the niceties of interacting with people through a screen. I can’t accept that he should get acclimated to this form of school."
The author is almost onto something with this comment. I'm not an expert in this area, but virtual "education" for pre-K seems to miss the point of going to school for a 4 year old child. I would venture a guess that the impact is more about socialization and acclimating to the routine of school than learning things.
German here, no kids, so not 100% sure how it is today, but to the best of my knowledge it's still 3-5 kindergarden (no idea why you would do this via screen) and then school from 6-7 (depends on birth month, etc). And the "this should be daycare" argument doesn't fly because how would you babysit a 5y old via a video conference?
Maybe I'm just old, but I don't see anything wrong in not teaching kids a lot in a structural way before school?
Now, I know there is no guarantee there will be an effective vaccine, but if not we may learn enough whether heard immunity is enough by then.
Graduating a year later for everyone from K- to-be-seniors in Uni may or may not be much of a big deal. Lots of people take a year off before uni...
My kids are going completely bonkers. They need to see other kids (and other adults). We're sending them back only for their own mental health. We'll evaluate a few weeks in and see how the numbers look and how they feel about the classroom.
My kids don't get much pedagogically out of school, neither are great students, but my daughter at least really needs the social side. I'm not worried about them falling behind so much as I'm worried about their emotional state.
I mean, that's pretty much the entire point of Montessori school and various "lifestyle of learning" types of educational programs
I think huge swathes of the information that we force feed our children in school is mostly forgotten or un-used.
I was homeschooled as a kid, and my parents let me basically stop school at the age of 11. I was interested in computers, and by the age of 13 I had a job as a programmer, and by the age of 16 I was employed full time. I ended up going back and studying for my GED (passed it with a 98%) when I was 17 (because my parents said I couldn't get a car until I passed the GED at least).
One of my other siblings didn't even learn to read competently until the age of 10. He now has a college degree, owns a huge house, and makes six figures.
Kids are a lot more resilient than people give them credit for, and the most sure-fire way to make kids hate learning is to force them to do it.
I’m not convinced any of this remote learning stuff matters that much as long as parents have money to feed their kids and house themselves.
Canceling remote learning to spend time with the kids and giving them space to let them learn about something they’re interested in for a year probably does zero harm and might even be beneficial. I would have loved it.
Obviously bad family situations, and poverty are not helped by this - but those things are probably made worse by throwing remote learning on top of it.
Wealthy countries should have a vaccine and distribution done by end of 2021. Waiting that out is what I would do if I had kids.
Yay, now some 7-year-olds will be just as educated as some other 8-year-olds, and will be able to skip a grade when school resumes. So.. what?
Also, why don't we imagine something better than just keeping kids at home all day.
Having a year devoted to outdoor activities instead of formal education would be wonderful for everyone, including the teachers (who can still have work), parents (who can get some time away from the kids), and, most importantly, the kids (who are effectively under house arrest until they turn 12).
For example if you want to keep a kid still to listen, give them something good to fiddle with. For example, teach kids how to finger knit. And then have them do simple finger knitting while they are listening. The finger knitting is an outlet for the ansies, and they are able to pay better attention, for longer.
You also have to be more cognizant of kid limitations when you have less feedback. But we haven't done that. We have kept the same schedule. It is easier to miss a kid acting out over Zoom. And the combination is bad. We really need to tell kids to get up and do jumping jacks, come back in 15 minutes with milk and cookies.
Honestly, in my opinion we need to do this at school still, especially elementary level. We're expecting too much out of these kids, even when they're in the classroom, and it's no wonder we're seeing a rise in issues. Let the kids be kids, give them longer than 30 minutes of recess (if they even get that anymore!), give them naptime still, etc.
I'm generally against charter schools (being a high school teacher myself), but man, I wish I had the funds to start a charter elementary school. There's so much I would change.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...
[1] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...
there was little problem with user engagement as the kiddies were glued to it, and assimilated/imitated the concepts quite readily into playtimes and IRL. perhaps there is a feature set that could be explored and employed in remote learning scenarios.
i think that current educators could learn a lot by looking back at the methods of engagement.
I can't for the life of me figure out why you would bother putting your kid through 6 hours a day of virtual pre-k, when you have to be right there to watch them anyway.
As our society has progressed in the last 50 years, almost half of children only have one adult in the household.
The nuclear family as defined by two generation households is not ideal, we have found it amazingly helpful during the pandemic to have three generations in the same house, which is less common in our area of America.
I'm not nearly as worried about the 3 R's. I just don't expect that we'll find there's much long term difference between kids who are taught to read in 1st and second grade, and kids who are taught to read in kindergarten and 1st grade.
Honestly, I love working from home and taking care of her at the same time, but (as evidence of my posting this at 3AM) I can’t continue this much longer.
I have a few more hours of work to do and I need to be up at 8:30AM for a call. Something has to change and I hate to get political but if we’d handled things a bit differently in this country, maybe she’d be back in daycare. Do I want that alternate reality? Absolutely not, but do I need it?
...maybe
A few years ago I worked with an extremely good painter. Second generation professional painter. Very impressive fellow.
Just by working with him my painting skills went up a couple levels. I'm way better than I was.
There was no formal instruction. No teaching. Just working together. Seeing how he does things. Watching him with a brush.
The same thing just recently happened with a drywall guy I worked near. A superpro. I am MUCH better at mudding drywall now. No instruction occurred. Just by working near him.
This is an ancient and well-known phenomenon. Call it psychic communication. Call it mind-melding. Whatever it is, it's real.
And this virtual education is a joke. PAINFULLY bullshit. I advise all students to blow that time-wasting shit right off.
I'd really like for everyone to have a home Internet connection that is symmetric gigabit or better. For some reason, in at least one town in the US, you can get Comcast Internet access that is gigabit down but only 30 mbps up. This is not good enough when you have multiple people who are trying to do things online at the same time. It is all fine if all you're doing is streaming movies/music (downloading)_but uploading videos or conference calls by video means we need decent upload as well.
I don't see a solution other than fiber to the home. Would love to see municipal fiber to be honest.
On a side note you clearly didn't mean it in the negative sense but the rhetoric of "arbitrary option for improvement technology/advance is privileging the elite" bugs me as very zero sum. If any ammount of additional resources can yield at least a smaller edge then by definition the elite can perform better. The only alternative to that situation category is "no additional human effort can help". The framing in effect spitefully disregards the masses of "non-elite" both within and without access to the option and implicitly dismisses anything which helps because another gets helped more.
Schools provide surveillance into things like child abuse, the need for hearing aids, the need for speech therapy classes .. and school lunches provide nutrition standards for many underprivileged children. All of that in gone.
I know plenty of friends who taught on-line University classes prior to 2020 who told me the students cheat and the courts are pretty much bullshit. You get out of any program what you put into it, and college students have the ability to put things into their programs. Children needs socialization with other human beings.
The threat to children is minuscule. The threat to teachers under 40 years of age is also not great. We can pay the wages of older teachers and help them find new roles, quickly remove teachers who become CoV2 positive and find means to keep the schools open. Closing down schools is the worst idea possible.
[0]: http://adam.curry.com/enc/1593719588.319_scottatlasonschools...
The threat is not negligible. Students act as carriers, like they always have, and then the super-spreader event occurs through teacher and staff contacts, who take it with them and continue the spread. That's without speaking about transport.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavi...
I think the root cause is the fragmented family system in the US. Marriages and divorces happen so much that the ultimate sufferers are the children.
A society that is so fragile socially, will eventually collapse.
Tech illiteracy is rampant, and many people don't know even the basics of using computers. Not only that, but due to poverty, most don't even have computers and just use mobile phones. For many, this was the first time they got to use a PC/Laptop. A large group just used mobile phones, though. Then you have the internet... it's just not usable for live conferencing, so when they tried it, it was awful.. then the classes were recorded, with low quality and resolution to have small filesizes for private schools. Most public schools basically did away with the whole thing and the kids didn't get any classes at all.
On top of all of that, the educational system (regular education, not the higher education) here is already bad in-class.
In the end, they just decided to cancel the exams, and had the students do a pass/fail research paper about a topic. Although most schools basically just made everyone pass.
Universities were differently handled, though. Also, grade 12 was handled regularly (the students already don't attend school) with regular physical exams since it's an important year.
All children of designated [minimum age / grade level] take classes remotely. The schools then re-open for children beneath that age who need the attention and dedicated professionals to help them learn, spread out in all the now-free classrooms that were taken by their upperclassmen.
I think part of the problem is that the adult is expected to still put in 40 hours a week while raising a child, which is not easy, especially when you only have 2 parents.
I was lucky enough to be raised in a family where one parent stayed home, and it made my childhood so much more richer than if I had gone to kindergarten and followed the standard programs those years.
My parents remembered the programs from their childhood, and did not want me in there.
I grew up in USSR, but I don't think it's that much different in the U.S.
"Public education" teaches kids to conform, submit, normalize, and suppress their own imagination and enthusiasm. I don't think it's worth the "socialization", which can be accomplished in many other ways.
But even worse, the conditioning forces children to develop an inner dialogue, something many adults spend the rest of their lives trying to silence.
I am grateful to my parents for letting me have quiet time for thinking and reflection when I was a child.
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?
It's a shame what is happening, and it's not really clear how to fix the problem. How to safely maintain the social needs of humans during a pandemic is currently an unsolved problem, and no, Zoom isn't the answer. We'll probably see heightened suicide and crime rates for the duration of the lockdowns.
Honestly think if a single good thing comes out of all of this it will be the rethinking of schooling.
If I have kids no way will I risk their raw potential at the hands of what is currently considered a teacher.
Really? I mean, I'm not for public schools, but this is a little obtuse don't you think?
But in some ways, Zoom could be better. You can mute people that interrupt the class, or simply remove them from the meeting, preventing them from disrupting everyone else. And you have a chat where you can keep asynchronous discussions.
Yet, schools are far from perfect, and standardization is not necessarily beneficial. The current way students are grouped results in kids with behavioral problems being grouped with well behaved students, to the detriment of both.
One group gets their bad behavior reinforced, and the other group gets slowed down and demoralized. It doesn't have to be that way.
I do fear for the skills of reading a physical book though...
Do you need skills for that which are different from reading a computer screen? I only see limitations like no ctrl+f or hyperlinks, so fewer skills needed rather than more.
* Kids have 3 Zoom meetings a day - ~90 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes right before lunch, 30 minutes right after lunch.
* My kids may be outliers, but they are great at self-managing their time, pay attention well, seem engaged, seem to enjoy the format well enough.
* Classmates seem equally engaged and pliant during meeting times.
* Main complaints: technology is still weak overall, curriculum is a little bit too day by day ..
But nothing as drastic as the original article.
Online instructional hours doesn't begin in their school until 1st grade. Kindergarten has learning materials sent to the homes.
Online virtual pre-K is just lunacy.
Anyone expecting a 5 year old to do virtual education has never met a 5 year old. I'm sure off that.
I know my parents growing up would have been in a world of hurt if they had to home school - it was hard enough making ends meet as it was.
This situation is going to really entrench and amplify socioeconomic inequality - for the first time in generations we could see a world where only the very wealthy/privileged are able to give their kids a good education.
FWIW 'leave of absence' isn't really a concept for many, many jobs.
A five year old is far from having been raised. As a parent of a 6 year old I know a bunch of other parents that have similar experiences where their kids are revolting against being forced to sit in front of a virtual teacher for hours every day.
Some study I found that also mentions the seven-year milestone: https://news.softpedia.com/news/Our-Personality-Is-Fully-Dev...
Of course the 7 year old is acting out, but it's probably more to do with being stuck in a box/house all day with no interaction with their friends. And no, Zoom calls don't class as interaction for kids. This child desperately needs to play outside, not stuck behind a blurry screen learning maths.
There are many benefits to remote learning, and I know it will come as a shock to people who buy into the 'kids need to socialize' group-think, but the 'socializing' they do in school tends to be very limited in time (a couple of 10-15 minute breaks on the playground, talking at lunch, disrupting classes and not listening to the teacher), and then there is the problem of bullying and cliques of students excluding 'non-conforming' students. Mental health at school isn't handled well. Fairness is out the window. School shootings are growing exponentially.
https://www.ecori.org/public-safety/2019/9/7/us-school-shoot...
Schools suck.
I'd rather my child get his socializing from extracurricular activities with peers he knows and gets along with than dealing with the failures of our educational system.
This article decries remote learning and offers nothing to move the conversation forward on what WOULD work. The author makes no point at all other than complaining about how her child can't sit still. And I'm saying I bet her child can't sit still in a physical school either, so its not about remote learning. It is because suddenly she has to be the one to deal with it instead of the teacher hidden away in a school building. The author wants to paint a picture of how bad remote learning is, when really it's just not suited for her child. It works fine for many other kids.
Impulse control is tough for all.
I wonder if virtual school would be better shooting for that model.
Get rid of the "dead time". Just teach the lessons and adjourn.
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.
Actually, this already falls flat in the first section. At least 90% of adult fail on that one. How are they supposed to teach something to their children that they themselves don't even understand? And teaching is usually much more difficult than understanding something yourself.
Which brings us to "school should teach that". But schools are not designed for that and teachers are not qualified for that. Hell, it's already an exception to meet a teacher who can properly convey the meaning of "1+1=2", not to mention a teacher who can teach children, who are not their own, how to process difficult emotions. Good luck with that
Compare that to a friend's son, who is the same age as ours but has some developmental delays of some type (I assume). Their teacher told them that they had to "get this dealt with"; in other words, "fix your kid so I don't have to deal with him". Not exactly a welcoming and comforting environment for a child who needs to be met halfway.
I mentioned this anecdote to our son's teacher and her first comment was "wow... is she an older teacher?" And yes, she was. She's been working with kids for 30 years, probably isn't as flexible in terms of learning strategies as younger teachers are, and, probably even worse, has been underpaid (and under-respected) for that whole time, so she's surely just burnt out and waiting for retirement at this point.
Maybe if teaching paid decent money we'd have more teachers who could put in the time and emotional energy to nurture their students, rather than just putting them through the pipeline, and who wouldn't get so cynical and short-tempered by the end of their career.
It reminds me of the Mark Twain quote "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt."
It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear neurotic than open it and remove all doubt.
I don’t believe parent comment was a “shallow dismissal”, it was an accurate and “deep” dismissal.
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.
Downvotes make me laugh harder!
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 destroying objects.
My sense is that that, if you aren't currently trying to usher a preschooler through this experience, you don't actually know how your kid would have handled this situation as a preschooler. And if you are doing it and it is going well, you should count your blessings.
Really?
I can't imagine either of my kids doing things like that - perhaps a brief outburst, sure, but it would have been immediately followed by an appropriate response from a parent.
> My sense is that that, if you aren't currently trying to usher a preschooler through this experience, you don't actually know how your kid would have handled this situation as a preschooler.
While we're not under exactly those circumstances, our youngest is six and we've always homeschooled. I also have a number of public school teachers in my family, and from my perspective the problem is 100% the approach. Distance learning can absolutely be effective, but trying to force the rhythm of a government school onto it is a flawed concept.
On the other hand... if they restructured it so it would be effective from an educational standpoint, they'd have a much more difficult time getting those kids back into classrooms when the time comes. I strongly suspect that the programs that are in place are designed more to ease the transition back into the classroom than to educate.
All we could really do was make sure they were physically separated as much as possible. That helped a lot. But the times they got close, she usually took advantage and did something to hurt him. E.g. if he was near her path to the bathroom, she would step on his hand while walking close to him.
Ultimately, she just grew out of it around 4 years old. But it was a really stressful and unfun time period.
She's 5 now, and the twins are 3. She loves playing with them. Until she doesn't of course, but even still - for the past 1.5 years she doesn't want to do anything without them.
The key problem here(and it's not a small one) is that we need to give ALL kids access to this hardware to support their learning, not just a few. Right now only 18% of US households have a device. I've seen school districts short 20,000 computers.
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 commitments that are tens to hundreds or more person hours per video second.
Expecting a live performer to engage not just 1 passive kid but n active kids with a new show every day over a screen- where every mistake or every blip doesn't get edited out in post but actually has to be dealt with in real time, while each kid has their own dynamics, their own family situations, their own issues PRESENT WITH THEM while all this is going on....
In terms of the quantity of human attention at production time to ensure consumer engagement- the ratio between a movie and a live person on the other side of the screen is, like, 1,000,000 to 1.
It is NOT POSSIBLE to solve the engagement problem in the way that remote school is expected to solve for it and there is no model, resource, technology, or anything that makes it work.
This is coming from a long time ed tech advocate, having built games and education platforms and worked in schools and having 3 kids of my own.
What we are doing with remote school is INSANITY.
Unfortunately, the alternatives are also insane.
There is no solving anything. There's no what if. There's no answer.
And more pointedly- it sounds like the poster here does not have kids.
Pro tip, no offense intended- if you don't have kids- don't weigh in on these issues. You don't know what you're talking about. And you don't have any idea how much you don't know what you're talking about. It isn't worth it for you or for anyone else to engage.
Have a nice day.
I agree, but would also add that even if you do have kids, they probably have personalities and circumstances unlike everyone else's kids. And that in all likelihood your sample size is too hilariously small to be able to produce useful broad generalizations from your experience.
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.
I feel that the class content seems sufficiently engaging (compared to my own kinder experience of strict butts-in-chair, all forward facing desks and a blackboard in a physical class), but even then, it requires dividing my attention between work and making sure the kid is on task.
The third grader has some experience with remote learning from before summer vacations, so things are relatively more smooth when the class is on, but we still need to keep tabs on when recess breaks are supposed to end. His teacher apparently has quite a bit more experience w/ remote learning from teaching classes during summer, and the class appears fairly engaging, with good usage of share screen and multimedia. But I do feel like the quality of learning seems low. Not sure if it's because of US standards. My son's curriculum hasn't really touched multiplication yet, but I distinctively remember having that mastered in 3rd grade, and also singapore math booklets that my wife bought to complement studies also apply both multiplication and division extensively at 3rd grade level)
It can also be challenging to juggle both parents AND both kids having zoom meetings simultaneously, since meetings are mutually disruptive, especially with loud multimedia activities. I feel like the parts that work the best are the ones similar to my old-school education: giving instructions on a task, then letting kids do them, recess, rinse and repeat. I'm not really sold on the high tech gimmicks (videos w/ songs etc).
Also trying to figure out how to throw up the Zoom conference on the TV. I think it'll probably be much more natural for the kids.