6 ms·

Every year I see what a insurmountable advantage my kid has by having educated, comfortably well off parents. He's in 3rd grade and last week he had a homework

by plughs 7y ago

Every year I see what a insurmountable advantage my kid has by having educated, comfortably well off parents. He's in 3rd grade and last week he had a homework assignment that had to be completed on a computer. What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home? Tough luck! We're also already into 'projects' - more hours of work, more resources to buy. "oh you can do it with stuff around the house" (no you can't) No one wants to talk about it and it infuriates me. There are kids who are just out of the running from the moment they enter kindergarten, and everyone is going to blame their parents or their 'culture' and refuse to see what's right in front of them. There is no more 'public' education, only middle-income private education. It's a disgrace. edit: raspberry pi A lot of middle class parents I know would spend 10 minutes trying to understand the raspberry pi site and give up. HN tends to vastly overestimate people's technical skills. For poor parents with no tech background - forget it.

corey_moncure 7y ago
Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? It's difficult for me to imagine it, or the family that has two working parents yet legitimately can't fit $40 into the budget over the entirety of their child's career in school.
- kbrackbill 7y ago
  That's a little disingenuous, you can't just use a raspberry pi by itself. You need an SD card, keyboard, mouse (probably), display (maybe could use a TV for this if you have one). It seems like it'd be at least $100. That's still not a ton, but for a family working a bunch of minimum wage or gig jobs it's not nothing. edit: not to mention internet, router, wifi dongle or ethernet cord, etc.
  - rhacker 7y ago
    And the know how to do all of that and what to buy and where to buy it.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      An alternative would be to buy a complete used PC, which can also be had for a total of around $100.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mc32 7y ago
  Most people with jobs —even low paying jobs have newish smartphones and tablets. There likely are some parents who can’t afford those, but those parents are vanishingly small. Often times parents think that they “provide” the child and the school does the rest. Good parents, poor or otherwise know that it’s mostly on the parents to guide the kids.
  - kaitai 7y ago
    In some countries, schools exist to teach students, rather than simply warehousing them and saying it's parents' fault for not teaching everything in the hours from 3 pm - 10 pm and weekends. Truly, your comment does reflect the attitude of much of the teaching establishment: if children can't learn to read from their parents, they're hopeless [1]; if children can't learn math from their parents, they're hopeless. It's a total abdication of the vocation of teaching, and it's not universal. In Finland it's accepted that teachers teach children how to read, and accepted that every kid needs a good lunch in order to be able to concentrate. That's 'obvious' in their cultural context, but in the US cultural context poverty and struggle are just signs that God doesn't love you (the prosperity 'gospel' in action). [1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-a...
    - mc32 7y ago
      Teachers can't bear to carry that load themselves. That's ridiculous. Parents have a load to carry. Parenting isn't easy. I know people whose idea or rearing is limited to feeding, dressing and sending their kids to school. "Kids are not expensive" is what they tell me.
      - braythwayt 7y ago
        > Teachers can't bear to carry that load themselves. Why can't they bear the load? - Because they are underfunded and understaffed - Because society doesn't think it's the school's responsibility to teach If society decided that reading and writing should be taught in school, then it would be taught in school and the system would be designed such that teachers would easily handle it. Your "parents have a load to carry" in this case is throwing people under the bus like single mothers who are working two or more jobs just to put food on the table. Your attitude is that their children should be left behind because those children belong to the unlucky sperm club. And those children grow up to be disadvantaged and poor and the cycle continues indefinitely. I find it vile and revolting that HN can talk about the wonders of Elon Musk disrupting the automobile industry, can debate whether scooters will disrupt the ride sahring industry, which in turn disrupted the taxi industry, and so on... And then when it comes to poverty, the attitude is, "C'mon, carry your load or fall behind." This community talks a good line about disruption, but if the only kind of disruption that interests us is the disruption that happens to make people into billionaires, it's time to stop pretending that we're "hackers" and start calling ourselves capitalists. The education system needs to be disrupted from the bottom up, but it needs people who actually care about educating children more than negotiating term sheets.
- pjkundert 7y ago
  Agreed - but the milieu is that the child is bathed in ignorance of even basic computer concepts, both at school and at home. They are also bathed in advertising, which drowns then in guilt at not being able to afford a multi-thousand dollar Windows or Macintosh rig, when a $40 Arm64 rig hooked up to a discarded flat screen TV and keyboard/mouse would be a superior learning option for their child.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? If the assignment involves a computer, the materials were probably not developed or tested on a Pi or anything similar, so, yeah, they probably often can't reasonably be completed on a Pi or lower as assigned, even if there is no technical reason that they couldn't have been developed with that in mind.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  Outside of the tech bubble, no one knows what a raspberry pi even is, let alone knowing how to hook it up.
  - corey_moncure 7y ago
    That's a very easy problem to solve given we have a captive audience of kids and their parents in a public school, wouldn't you agree? A school is purpose built to teach people new things.
- shakna 7y ago
  > Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? Any assignment that makes use of a proprietary software that the school has purchased. That is to say that there are plenty of times when a student _must_ use X software that only runs on platform Y, and the school very rarely takes into account what platforms the student may have available to them. I ran IT support for a Prepatory <-> Year 12 school. The number of times I had to gently remind the early grade teachers that not every child has access to an iPad at home and that an Android tablet cannot run iPad software was quite frequent.
  - sologoub 7y ago
    That’s why Chromebooks are a lot better choice - $150 buys you a reasonable example and you also don’t have to worry about kid breaking it and loosing weeks of work. Example: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-11-6-chromebook-intel-celeron-4gb-memory-16gb-emmc-flash-memory-black/6293618.p https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-11-6-chromebook-intel-cele... And for older kids, there’s Linux support, etc.
    - shakna 7y ago
      Teachers who cannot understand why you can't use the Apple Store on an Android fare no better at understanding that they can't run X proprietary Windows program on a Chromebook.
      - sologoub 7y ago
        That could be solvable with something like cross-over: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos Of course, in the context of low income, ideally the district would provide standardized choices or offer crossover as a supported alternative. I’m not familiar with this program, but it seems like Google has made efforts in this direction: https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/ https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/
        7y ago
Aperocky 7y ago
Raspberry Pi are created for this exact purpose, and to think the school isn't giving everyone one to educate on basic computer science is beyond me. If you eventually learn trigonometry in math within the public education framework, I see no reason why people shouldn't be educated in more basic and practical things like computers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- flukus 7y ago
  > I see no reason why people shouldn't be educated in more basic and practical things like computers Because the teachers and education department are useless. My nephews had to get an iPad for their programming class, an expensive device (and all the problems with that) that is less capable and far less practical to learn programming on. Imagine how much better school could be if kids had raspberry pis and and use free tools like gnuplot in their maths and physics classes.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Not created for 3rd grades though - they where really for the 6th form (last two years of school) to actually get some experience of computers at a lower level before going to UNI.
mcv 7y ago
> "What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home?" A friend of my son has a laptop provided by the city, presumably because his family is too poor. And because it's a laptop, he takes it with him when he comes over to play Minecraft. My son is a bit jealous, because despite his access to two excellent desktop PCs and numerous tablets, he doesn't have his own laptop. (I'll probably have to get him one when he goes to secondary school.)
mrep 7y ago
> What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home? Tough luck! Then it should be provided to the kids by the school. My girlfriend works at a poor school where a lot of the students don't even speak english and they provide laptops to all the kids whose parents cannot afford one.

by plughs 7y ago

corey_moncure 7y ago

Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? It's difficult for me to imagine it, or the family that has two working parents yet legitimately can't fit $40 into the budget over the entirety of their child's career in school.

kbrackbill 7y ago
That's a little disingenuous, you can't just use a raspberry pi by itself. You need an SD card, keyboard, mouse (probably), display (maybe could use a TV for this if you have one). It seems like it'd be at least $100. That's still not a ton, but for a family working a bunch of minimum wage or gig jobs it's not nothing. edit: not to mention internet, router, wifi dongle or ethernet cord, etc.
- rhacker 7y ago
  And the know how to do all of that and what to buy and where to buy it.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    An alternative would be to buy a complete used PC, which can also be had for a total of around $100.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mc32 7y ago
Most people with jobs —even low paying jobs have newish smartphones and tablets. There likely are some parents who can’t afford those, but those parents are vanishingly small. Often times parents think that they “provide” the child and the school does the rest. Good parents, poor or otherwise know that it’s mostly on the parents to guide the kids.
- kaitai 7y ago
  In some countries, schools exist to teach students, rather than simply warehousing them and saying it's parents' fault for not teaching everything in the hours from 3 pm - 10 pm and weekends. Truly, your comment does reflect the attitude of much of the teaching establishment: if children can't learn to read from their parents, they're hopeless [1]; if children can't learn math from their parents, they're hopeless. It's a total abdication of the vocation of teaching, and it's not universal. In Finland it's accepted that teachers teach children how to read, and accepted that every kid needs a good lunch in order to be able to concentrate. That's 'obvious' in their cultural context, but in the US cultural context poverty and struggle are just signs that God doesn't love you (the prosperity 'gospel' in action). [1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-a...
  - mc32 7y ago
    Teachers can't bear to carry that load themselves. That's ridiculous. Parents have a load to carry. Parenting isn't easy. I know people whose idea or rearing is limited to feeding, dressing and sending their kids to school. "Kids are not expensive" is what they tell me.
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      > Teachers can't bear to carry that load themselves. Why can't they bear the load? - Because they are underfunded and understaffed - Because society doesn't think it's the school's responsibility to teach If society decided that reading and writing should be taught in school, then it would be taught in school and the system would be designed such that teachers would easily handle it. Your "parents have a load to carry" in this case is throwing people under the bus like single mothers who are working two or more jobs just to put food on the table. Your attitude is that their children should be left behind because those children belong to the unlucky sperm club. And those children grow up to be disadvantaged and poor and the cycle continues indefinitely. I find it vile and revolting that HN can talk about the wonders of Elon Musk disrupting the automobile industry, can debate whether scooters will disrupt the ride sahring industry, which in turn disrupted the taxi industry, and so on... And then when it comes to poverty, the attitude is, "C'mon, carry your load or fall behind." This community talks a good line about disruption, but if the only kind of disruption that interests us is the disruption that happens to make people into billionaires, it's time to stop pretending that we're "hackers" and start calling ourselves capitalists. The education system needs to be disrupted from the bottom up, but it needs people who actually care about educating children more than negotiating term sheets.
pjkundert 7y ago
Agreed - but the milieu is that the child is bathed in ignorance of even basic computer concepts, both at school and at home. They are also bathed in advertising, which drowns then in guilt at not being able to afford a multi-thousand dollar Windows or Macintosh rig, when a $40 Arm64 rig hooked up to a discarded flat screen TV and keyboard/mouse would be a superior learning option for their child.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? If the assignment involves a computer, the materials were probably not developed or tested on a Pi or anything similar, so, yeah, they probably often can't reasonably be completed on a Pi or lower as assigned, even if there is no technical reason that they couldn't have been developed with that in mind.
wasdfff 7y ago
Outside of the tech bubble, no one knows what a raspberry pi even is, let alone knowing how to hook it up.
- corey_moncure 7y ago
  That's a very easy problem to solve given we have a captive audience of kids and their parents in a public school, wouldn't you agree? A school is purpose built to teach people new things.
shakna 7y ago
> Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? Any assignment that makes use of a proprietary software that the school has purchased. That is to say that there are plenty of times when a student _must_ use X software that only runs on platform Y, and the school very rarely takes into account what platforms the student may have available to them. I ran IT support for a Prepatory <-> Year 12 school. The number of times I had to gently remind the early grade teachers that not every child has access to an iPad at home and that an Android tablet cannot run iPad software was quite frequent.
- sologoub 7y ago
  That’s why Chromebooks are a lot better choice - $150 buys you a reasonable example and you also don’t have to worry about kid breaking it and loosing weeks of work. Example: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-11-6-chromebook-intel-celeron-4gb-memory-16gb-emmc-flash-memory-black/6293618.p https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-11-6-chromebook-intel-cele... And for older kids, there’s Linux support, etc.
  - shakna 7y ago
    Teachers who cannot understand why you can't use the Apple Store on an Android fare no better at understanding that they can't run X proprietary Windows program on a Chromebook.
    - sologoub 7y ago
      That could be solvable with something like cross-over: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos Of course, in the context of low income, ideally the district would provide standardized choices or offer crossover as a supported alternative. I’m not familiar with this program, but it seems like Google has made efforts in this direction: https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/ https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/
      - 7y ago

Aperocky 7y ago

Raspberry Pi are created for this exact purpose, and to think the school isn't giving everyone one to educate on basic computer science is beyond me. If you eventually learn trigonometry in math within the public education framework, I see no reason why people shouldn't be educated in more basic and practical things like computers.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
flukus 7y ago
> I see no reason why people shouldn't be educated in more basic and practical things like computers Because the teachers and education department are useless. My nephews had to get an iPad for their programming class, an expensive device (and all the problems with that) that is less capable and far less practical to learn programming on. Imagine how much better school could be if kids had raspberry pis and and use free tools like gnuplot in their maths and physics classes.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Not created for 3rd grades though - they where really for the 6th form (last two years of school) to actually get some experience of computers at a lower level before going to UNI.

mcv 7y ago

> "What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home?" A friend of my son has a laptop provided by the city, presumably because his family is too poor. And because it's a laptop, he takes it with him when he comes over to play Minecraft. My son is a bit jealous, because despite his access to two excellent desktop PCs and numerous tablets, he doesn't have his own laptop. (I'll probably have to get him one when he goes to secondary school.)

mrep 7y ago

> What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home? Tough luck! Then it should be provided to the kids by the school. My girlfriend works at a poor school where a lot of the students don't even speak english and they provide laptops to all the kids whose parents cannot afford one.