Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

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Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his children needed in their gym kit was a hassle, then working out how to report them as sick was a nightmare.

This seems very removed from my own school days:

- find out what the children were doing at school: you couldn't, really, the curricula were not public. You could ask your kids after school, but I guess most parents were not really that interested anyway.

- what his children needed in their gym kit: shorts, t-shirt, sneakers. Every time. What else could it be?

- working out how to report them as sick: I suppose parents called the school in the morning(?) but as teachers were usually unaware of the reasons for a child's absence anyway they might as well not have done that at all. After the first term, the schoolmates would just inform all other teachers that X was sick, assuming so from the absence. Then, when X came back to school, they would bring a hand-written note from the parents explaining.

I truly think computerized school communication is worse than notes in backpacks and the occasional mailed letter.

They send way too much useless shit, way too often, so you end up ignoring a lot of it; use way too many channels to do it; design sites poorly—how about the year's calendar on the first page for a given school, above "the fold", with a link to subscribe your preferred calendaring software to it, right there, office contact info off to the side, also above "the fold"? And no horrible excessively-complex half-broken themes making it difficult to navigate? Nah, that'd be too helpful; and everything's in several different systems, all bad, and all in various states of up-to-date or neglected, so it can be hard to guess where you need to look for something and hard to know whether it's accurate when you do find it (especially if the apparent signal is "empty" or "nothing there" or "no information"—is that true, or has it just not been updated lately?)

I fully agree, it is most expensive, less clear and sort of makes it less personal. And a nightmare for privacy. A whatsapp group chat for public announcement and phone calls/texts/meeting with the teacher proves to be more efficient.

The online gradebook was the "new thing" that I found to be a nightmare as a parent. The idea was that parents could log in to verify students are turning in their homework or get a heads up before the parent-teacher conferences if their child's grades are suffering.

The reality is that some teachers are good about getting assignments and test results input in a timely manner. Some wait and do weeks worth of assignments in one batch. Others input all of the term's assignments at the beginning and add results as they get turned in/graded, meaning student grades gradually move from failing to the final earned grade once the last exam result is added. The grades shown on the online portal had nearly nothing to do with the reality in the classroom and ended up being counterproductive. I'm glad I no longer have to deal with that system.

Worse yet, many parents of college age students expect their university to offer this same portal, despite the fact that it would be illegal for schools to do so without written permission from the student. It's been eye-opening to see parents on one message board I follow furious that they can't know their student's grades up to the minute. I can't imagine how awful those parent-child relationships must be.

> What else could it be?

Swimming trunks/swimsuit. Clean indoor trainers for basketball/volleyball/circuit training/etc, or scruffy outdoor ones for cross-country running, orienteering or anything muddy outside. In winter they may need to take something warmer if there's outdoor activities planned, some locations in the north or near mountains may even do skiing or cross-country skiing. In our school in winter time we sometimes did scottish country dancing, so you didn't really need "normal" P.E. class gear if that's what was on.

I don't know what this school in particular offered but there's a bunch of possibilities.

> (casually implies kids have multiple workout outfits/shoes and regularly engage in expensive outdoor activities)

Man, sometimes I'll run into a reminder that I grew up poor as dirt, haha

Or as poor as 90% of the world's population.

If it's any consolation, I grew up in a well off family, and had a single pair of somewhat smelly gym shorts.

The swimming trunks argument still holds though.

I grew up in a middle-class family, and as a kid I was generally expected to be aware of when we had a pool day, or a skating rink day coming up, and to be responsible for bringing the right clothing/sundries on every day in school. Using the analog technology of 'remember it', assisted by 'write it down in your day planner'[1].

[1] Which I would never do. My memory, as an eight-year old was, of course, infallible.

Ah come on "multiple workout outfits" is a little bit of a stretch of what I said. Everything I described except for the skiing stuff is normal in anything but the very poorest countries - in addition to what you listed, you didn't have a jumper for when it's cold or some old trainers for when it's muddy? I just wore my normal shorts for football whenever we went swimming (fyi my school didn't have a pool, but some do) but obviously that's not practical for girls so swimsuit was worth mentioning.

I never got to go skiing as a kid, but in Central Europe (Czechia for sure, but probably Austria, Switzerland and Slovakia) and the Nordics (importantly where that story took place) it isn't just a fancy pursuit for rich people. I know people earning like 20000 CZK/month ($10k/yr) here who go skiing.

Cross-country skiing is cheap and affordable for nearly anyone. All you need is a pair of used skis, a pair of boots, and the ability to bum a ride from a friend.

Downhill skiing is the bourgie hobby.

Well it's a bougie hobby if you fly every year with your private school to Switzerland, and get a new set of skis (deliberately exaggerating of course, it can be various levels of bougie). Cross-country is definitely cheaper (no ski pass, skis are generally cheaper) but there are plenty of places where affordable ski slopes are nearby and it's normal for someone working in (for example) a pub to own a set of skis, and be able to head out with some friends for a day of skiing

To be fair, I had everything I wanted, which was food, shelter, access to a powerful personal computer, and a lot of old sci-fi books. If other kids had all been equipped like you describe and I'd asked, my parents probably could have scrounged that stuff up for me.

I just wore my regular clothes to class and gym class, although in winter I'd change into shorts instead of exercising in jeans. I had a coat that I wore on the walk to school and one pair of shoes. Sometimes I'd have boots, but my family could only afford/only knew about cheap crap boots that'd disintegrate pretty quickly.

It blows my mind again and again living in the SF Bay Area nowadays, watching a brand new BMW pull up to Starbucks and unload a bunch of teenagers who proceed to buy $40 worth of coffee and snacks. Those dang kids don't know how good they got it! I grew up near the poverty line in the USA, so I can only imagine what it's like for engineers who grew up in actual poverty in other parts of the world.

I do not think having multiple pairs of gym shoes is normal outside of the very poorest countries. I grew up in the US and I never had multiple pairs of gym shoes. Neither did many of my friends. We had "shoes" and "dress shoes" if we were fortunate.

I grew up in the USA and only ever owned two pairs of shoes at once: my regular shoes, and shoes for church that were several sizes too big so they wouldn’t need to be replaced.

I'm not sure how it is in Stockholm, but in Norway sometimes we had gym outside in a park instead of inside, so different shoes and clothes. And if there is a school-outing to a museum or a montain hike or the dreaded "skidag", skiday, where the entire school would travel up into the montains and do various snow and ski related activates. So it can be a big deal if you don't know what your kid needs any particular day. I'm born in 2002, so they usualy solved this with notes in our backpacks. I think they now mostly solwe this via SMSes to the parents, if it's not sensitive information.

>working out how to report them as sick

Welcome to the new world. Teacher submits attendance on the computer at the beginning of every class period; if the student is absent and there's no excuse recorded then the system immediately starts robocalling all the family contacts.

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