24 ms·

Some school districts plan to end the year early, call remote learning too tough

206 points by itronitron 7y ago

pochamago 7y ago
Is this solvable? Does something like a VR school make it work?
- the_snooze 7y ago
  Access to reliable tech and infrastructure seems to be a big stumbling block. VR doesn't solve some of the more fundamental issues, like students not having reliable equipment and Internet connections, or the backend not being able to support the demand (whether in terms of volume or flexibility to different teaching requirements).
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    I personally do not think its a lack of high tech. A written schedule mailed every week and the ability to email or call the teacher once or twice a week would get you 90% of the value.
    - anon176 7y ago
      That is pretty much what they are doing right now in my state. Packets can be downloaded every two weeks, or picked up if they do not have access. Teacher does a zoom with the class a minimum of twice a week. But with everyone WFH, making time to work with and teach your kids is difficult. At least young students..
- anon176 7y ago
  My wife's classroom can barely get magic markers. And we are in a semi nice middle class area. The laptops the district provided for the teachers to use for remote learning can not even handle having MS Teams and Zoom running at the same time. Im sure this is solvable, yes, but it would take a lot of planning, lots of training, money and lots of IT. I am glad they got something in place and are trying to do the best they can with what they had. But wow, parents are frustrated.
awinder 7y ago
There’s a lot of hope from school systems that they will just be back next year, but hopefully there’s at least some behind the scenes work on making remote learning work. I have a lot of admiration for teachers & students working on switching over right now, in the event of further disruptions next year, they’re going to be so much better prepared.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  We're not in one of the harder-hit states but I have some insight into schools here and admin-tier folks are already phrasing it as "if we are back in the fall". They seem to be planning for the possibility of having to start the year with remote learning, or for a second shut-down if there's a rebound of the virus in the Fall or Winter after things open back up.
zarkov99 7y ago
I do not know about this. I have two kids, 7 and 10, and yes, its messy but this is mostly because the teachers have not yet realized that they need to adapt and simplify their methods and, most importantly, communicate properly with the parents. With a few simple tweaks the kids could learn just as effectively as they do in regular school, in fact probably more, provided the parents are willing and able to step in.
- arbitrary_name 7y ago
  Don't blame the teachers. They have been thrown into this with little support or guidance, nor the long term clarity that is needed to comprehensively redesign the coursework to meet existing standards - which may or may not change over the next few weeks/months. And lets not forget the equity issues inherent in redesigning classroom content for a class that now consists of kids with no internet, no laptop, old PCs with old browsers, kids being expected to look after young siblings, etc This isn't just 'tweak a few things so they work better on a laptop', it's really a fundamental shift that needs time and careful planning to address.
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    I am not blaming them exactly. Its a though situation for all involved and at least my kids teachers are clearly working as hard as they can to make this work and the school district has provided laptops and written materials to the relatively few kids that do not have access to those. Having said that, I do think they could do much better if they accepted that this situation will last indefinitely and their methods must change to rely more on parent supervision and kid autonomy.
    - eitally 7y ago
      You would think that, and they might also think that, but they're largely not allowed to behave materially differently than they are accustomed to. fwiw, until our district settled on a specific set of policies, one of my kids' teachers had already -- the first week of WFH -- setup Google Classroom, used Classdojo to communicate with parents, shared a weekly agenda with links for augmentation material, and setup Zoom meetings 3 days/wk to teach & help the class. she's had to scale back some of this because it's against policy. My other kid's teacher was absent the first two week and, since the district's policy has clarified, is following it to the letter. Thankfully, a stay-at-home dad in the class has created a class email alias, is organizing multiple online sessions per week with parent led code.org, drawing, art history, music history, daily math check-ins, and informal "recesses" (social hours). You may or may not be surprised how few parents are qualified to supervised their kids' learning.
eightysixfour 7y ago
This situation has presented an incredible opportunity to flip the education paradigm around and we are missing it. In my opinion, there are two different opportunities that should be explored: 1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others. 2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one. Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.
- ryanchants 7y ago
  From my personal experience, I do great when I can sit in a classroom and absorb what's being presented. You put the lecturer behind a screen, live or pre-recorded, and I lose most of my ability to stay on track.
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live?
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      For me the answer is “no”. I can’t do video learning without getting distracted quickly.
      - tamaharbor 7y ago
        And then Judge Judy comes on the TV...
bstar77 7y ago
I've been home schooling my son for the past 3 years. The reason why it's "too hard" is because the traditional model of learning in public schools (in the US) translates very poorly to home schooling. Once you stop focusing on grooming for optimal test-taking, a whole world opens up. Additionally, we don't do common core in our household, so my wife and I have no issues teaching my son math (we settled on Saxon math). I neither have the time nor energy to learn common core math in order to support my son.
- flatline 7y ago
  My experience with common core has been pretty awesome FWIW. I didn’t see some of the stuff our daughter did in first and second grade till the end of high school and college. No more rote arithmetic applications, it presses for actual comprehension of the material from multiple angles. Challenging, but sometimes even fun for those not mathematically inclined.
  - dorchadas 7y ago
    Yeah, a lot of the hate I saw for common core (I'm a high school math/physics teacher) comes from a lack of number sense on the adults trying to understand it. Like, I saw parents who were complaining about breaking 634x127 into (600+30+4)(100+20+7) because they didn't understand you can break it up like that and it makes it a bit easier to do the multiplication, then you can just sum the resuts. Sadly, a lot of the elementary school teachers I've encountered also lack that number sense, and some even detest(ed) math. And yet we're asking them to teach it to our kids. I'm not for charter schools usually, but I'd really love to start a charter elementary school where each subject is taught by someone trained in that subject and then with, say, a MAT in elementary ed, as opposed to just a bachelors in elementary ed. I wonder how much better kids would do in math and reading especially, when they have teachers who appreciate math and who like to study literature and read for its own sake.
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      > breaking 634x127 into (600+30+4)(100+20+7) For some people, this is simply too abstract. You can teach children the breakout method or normal method, their understanding doesn't change. They're just memorizing one procedure over another. The ability to analyze how to operations work doesn't improve with common core, it's just more steps. I've seen this first hand. I taught long division to a younger family member that was struggling with whatever nonsense method common core cooked up (something about boxes and dots and circling stuff). They had literally never seen long division, I taught them to divide the same numbers they had on the page in front of them in less than 10 minutes, and they could arrive at the correct answer consistently. I asked the kid to explain the procedure of what they were doing for the common core, they had no idea and lacked the ability to articulate the process whatsoever.
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/QC6KH https://archive.md/QC6KH
metal13 7y ago
I can't read the story, but I'm living this. And I don't blame folks for finding it too tough. It's crazy that so many commenters here seem to think that everyone is well equipped to be a teacher with zero training or experience. It's hard. It's even more crazy that no one seems to realize that most parents are acting as teachers, while trying to maintain full time jobs. This isn't just "teachers not adapting", or "we need VR". This is fundamental to the fact that most households need two working parents just to survive.
- ngngngng 7y ago
  > most households need two working parents just to survive. Only because we created a world where every household had two working parents.
  - ajphdiv 7y ago
    > Only Regardless, that's the situation -- so can't be ignored.
  - ip26 7y ago
    I do wonder about that sometimes. It doesn't seem to be discussed much. On the one hand inflation-adjusted GDP is 5x higher than the 60's (https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted) so even if the workforce doubled the pie got much larger. On the other hand markets like real estate have somewhat inelastic supply and higher household incomes as a result of dual earners might just bid up prices.
    - thewarrior 7y ago
      Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about this called the Two Income Trap. It’s a shame for someone who’s not an American that America has deep thinkers like Warren in politics but people like Trump and GW Bush become president.
      - zarkov99 7y ago
anigbrowl 7y ago
California is considering starting the next school year a month early, in July, to make up for the disruption, according to the governor today.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I can't access it. It's paywalled. I was a homeschooling parent and, for me and my family, it was wonderfully less burdensome than public school. A snippet from a recent comment of mine which may be pertinent, though, based on the headline and long experience with remote learning (I also have taken college classes online): Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed. This is not true. One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning. Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681334
- zarkov99 7y ago
  This is very much consistent with my experience when tutoring my kids as well as that of friends who home-schooled their children. One hour of one-on-one tutoring is easily worth 3 or 4 hours of regular school time.
linuxftw 7y ago
Public school is not optimized for learning, it's optimized for filling time with nonsense. If you care about your child's success, teach them how to do math. If they don't know how to read, teach them how to read as well. Probably 2-4 hours of instruction per day, at the absolute max end of the spectrum. Kids from the age of 8+ should be able to accomplish tasks with much less instruction time, and the bulk of the time will be individual effort. Of course, it's mundane and isolating, so don't expect them to sit for hours on end doing school work either.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Public school is what you get when you have one instructor per 20 kids with wildly different backgrounds, parent support and aptitudes. You need 10x better teachers with 1/20 of the load and much more involved parents. If you get all that, and certainly technology is the only way to get it at scale, then yes, kids can be done with academics in a small fraction of their day. They should be spending the bulk of their time in play and exploration.
Maultasche 7y ago
The school my children attend have been doing a great job with online learning. Teachers have been posting videos and worksheets on Google classroom, they have regular zoom meetings, and they have various online educational software the children can log into and learn things. The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested. So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming. If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet. So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle. For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all. I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.
- beart 7y ago
  > have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning Is this how your local school is handling it? I can't even make it through full day meetings as an adult and pretty much zone out after 20 minutes of any online meetings I'm in now.
  - eitally 7y ago
    This is how most schools are handling it. Some combo of things like Google Classroom, zoom/webex/meet meetings, and various other apps & sites and online activities. They prescribe book reading, art & PE, but those are hard to track so they're typically not part of an online curriculum. You also need to understand that if a kid has 2hr worth of work online, the odds are good they'll sit in front of the computer all day unless someone is supervising them. This is the real issue, especially for younger children.
tomohawk 7y ago
Students learn in a variety of ways. I imagine most of the HN audience excels at lecture based and book learning. To such an audience it makes sense that a single gifted lecturer could immeasurably benefit students through remote learning. Many students will fail to thrive in such a scenario. These students need different kinds of instruction. This is one thing that leads to home schooling - the government school does not provide the needed instruction methods, and the parents can either pay for private or do home schooling (or move). Source: many family members were teachers.
zaroth 7y ago
I have a 7 and 11 year old (2nd and 5th grade). With very significant parental involvement it is possible to keep them somewhat engaged and learning, although it is very much sub-optimal. They miss their classmates. They miss their teacher. They miss most of all the routine, getting to go to school, and all the fun things they got to do during the day. My 5th grader is very sad to be missing out on a graduation-like experience with a lot of end-of-year events that would typically happen for outgoing 5th graders before they leave for the middle school. This isn't an "opportunity for a new normal". This isn't a situation which can or will last "indefinitely". It is assuredly unhealthy for kids this age (to say nothing of the rest of us) to be isolated from their friends and communicating only over Zoom calls. My kids are hurting in a suburb with a big back yard, mountains of toys, a stay at home mom, and two dogs to play with. I can only imagine it must hurt the least privileged children hardest of all to have lost access to their school. I don't expect there's much of any learning going on in general below the high school level. Particularly for households which don't have parents who are willing to dedicate several hours a day to basically run the lessons. I think people who can honestly claim that their under-13-year-old is distance learning without a parent assuming a basically full-time role of teacher, are few and far between. I wonder how curriculum will adapt to incoming students in the fall. X graders who don't know approximately half of the X-1 grade material. Particularly for younger students where classes are less likely to be grouped by ability, anyone who did actually successfully learn anything from March-July is just going to have to sit through it being taught all over again to the majority of students who didn't.
- eitally 7y ago
  +1. My next door neighbor is a 3rd grade teacher in a heavily hispanic & underprivileged elementary school. She was telling me today that she still has one student -- one of her best during normal times -- who hasn't been able to get online yet. No internet access at home, lives at home with his undocumented grandparents who immigrated from Central America when his parents were killed by a gang, no one in the house speaks English. School has been closed for >1mo now. I was talking to my 5th grader's teach last weekend about the next year. She doesn't know, either, but is assuming they're just going to bake in an extra-long review period going into the year. Alternatively, at least in CA, they're contemplating starting the next school year in July rather than August, to provide more time for catch-up. To your point, though, what about the kids who were able to keep pace throughout -- are they going to be forced to repeat half a semester to maintain equity in the classroom? That would be terribly unfair.
h2odragon 7y ago
Our school district never had a hope of implementing remote learning; they're lucky to keep their WiFi working. Our daughter is in 6th grade this year; all we've heard since the schools closed a statement that school wouldn't be re-opening this year and a date range when parents could come pick up bagged locker contents. We're lucky in that we've homeschooled before (she went back to public school for the company of other kids), and we've worked out ways to encourage and help focus her natural curiosity already. I just gave her a Debian 10 system and said "holler if you get stuck"; so far she hasn't.
sys_64738 7y ago
When schools reopen then smaller class sizes will need to be the norm with social distancing in effect. More teachers will be needed so costs to tax payers will increase. Online learning doesn't work for kids. It barely works for adults. I'm not sure what else can be done.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  I guess the concern would be kids as vectors? The death rates for people under 18 have been so low that that social distancing would be rather silly if it weren't for them bringing it home.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    You might find this recent NYT article[1] about the “birth of social distancing” interesting. TLDR - In the early 2000s a high school student did a project mapping the “social network” of her school. Her father just so happened to be a scientist. He used her school project to create a model that showed by closing the schools during a pandemic in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, only 500 people got sick. Leaving the schools open would result in half of the population infected. Closing schools is one of the most effective strategies we have to prevent a contagion from spreading. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distan...
pdx_flyer 7y ago
As the spouse of a high school math teacher, I've seen how difficult it is for the last month. Getting kids internet service, a computer or tablet to work with, the software they need, and then just getting them to login and read or do the work. It's a real challenge. We tweaked my wife's setup and it works pretty well now, though she is dreading if they choose to do live online learning in the fall, as that will be something completely new to tackle. Currently she uses Google Classroom, Desmos, and Kahn Academy for the teaching side. She plans and distributes lessons in Google, uses Desmos for some interactive activities where Desmos scripting allows her to check work and give feedback, and Kahn Academy as some supplemental teaching to her notes. In addition she has certain hours everyday for certain classes and uses an iPad + Google Meet to show notes to her students and work problems they may have an issue with. So far that's been working. Live teaching would be a little more difficult with this setup but it could work.
- dorchadas 7y ago
  I'm a math/science teacher myself, and I've already decided the first thing I'm gonna do is buy a nice big whiteboard if we do online teaching this fall, to try to solve some of those issues. But I pray we don't have to do that, as just so much gets lost doing it at home versus in person.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    Wouldn't whiteboard software be better? Like Khan Academy uses? I've been in some physical whiteboard video chat lectures and it's rough; they rarely have a lav mic (which means the audio quality is horrible and you have problems hearing), you need enough space to frame the whiteboard properly with the camera, they're difficult to light because they're reflective, you need to write the correct size so it's legible, you have the problem you often have in person where your hand or body blocks what is being written. I find cutting to an infinite whiteboard and/or video picture-in-picture to be the easiest way to convey whiteboard ideas. Teachers seem to get really adept at writing with a mouse, but I would heavily suggest investing in a Wacom--even a used 10+ year old Wacom would be sufficient.
ojbyrne 7y ago
Seems related - California floated the idea of starting next year early: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/28/newsom-school-may-start-in-july-this-year/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/28/newsom-school-may-sta...
aazaa 7y ago
The underlying current in this article and others recently posted on the topic is that a return to in-person schools will happen next year. Districts and states need to be asking themselves: "What if that isn't possible?" There's a lot we don't know about the virus. How long does immunity last? How long will it take to get a vaccine? What happens if multiple flare-ups occur as people rush back to work, parties, cruises, and the rest? There's a growing sense that there's light at the end of the tunnel. That light was achieved by strict measures that are melting away at a blistering pace. Nobody knows what happens when you start loosening up. One possibility is unavoidable: there are more active cases today by at least an order of magnitude than there were when the restrictions were put into place. Exponential growth hasn't been suspended just because people need to return to normal. Officials interviewed in this story didn't indicate what will be happening after instruction ends for the year. It might be a good time to assess what worked and what didn't, then develop a plan and do teacher training for distance learning for Fall 2020.
- nradov 7y ago
  Of course it's possible to return to in-person schools. Some countries never closed primary schools at all. Education is essential, and it's totally worth accepting some risk.
  - g_langenderfer 7y ago
    public education's primary goal is daycare. That is not essential.
dang 7y ago
There's a related thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079. Normally we'd merge threads that are that similar, but I couldn't figure out a good way to do it, so maybe they're subtly different enough to keep both up.
grawprog 7y ago
It took me a long time to see the value of school. All through elementary school and high school I didn't give a shit, did what I needed to do to do well, never really cared about things going on at school and didnt really have many friends or anything. When I got to university it was different, I cared and tried and got involved with everything. It was a totally different experience. It made me regret the way i was in high school a bit and kinda made me wish I'd been more involved. It wasn't as pointless and ridiculous as I thought and there was no reason for me not to other than my unwillingness to. If I'd actually experienced these things, I might have gotten more out of high school and not been so hostile towards it all for so long, when in the end education only benefitted me and there's a kind of education you can only get by taking part in things with people around you. I know it's not the same, but I know there's lots of kids out there who didn't wait as long as me and know now, well before I did, what they get out of having other people around. As great as distance education can be, even if you've got your classmates there on video or something, it's still not the same as a group of students getting together and working on homework or studying, the ones that do I mean, and even for the ones that just get together, there's a lot of bonding and forming as people that happens that just can't really be replicated outside truly free interaction with other people. Even if you're all working on school work. It needs to be some kind of natural free setting. Something's missing otherwise. Again, it took me a long time to really get this.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  You're lucky you got to university. In many systems screwing up in high school is the end for that, even the remedial programs are hard to get into. After really doing poorly in high school (and prior) I was lucky to crawl my way into a community college and get into an arts program and then transfer to a university for an honors BA philosophy path after -- but I really wanted to be in CS. But because of my high school math grades that was never open to me -- and will never be even now. I ended up dropping out of my BA in my 3rd year to go catch the .com boom wave and get my first programmer gigs, and I'm still doing it 24 years later. I work now at Google, surrounded by people who look at me with blank stares when I describe my troubles with school. This whole path is why I'm deeply suspicious of educational and career models which make excessive claims to be 'meritocratic.' Measuring humans is hard, and mostly we just measure the wrong things and pull the wrong motivational levers. University I think is better because you do mostly feel like you 'own' your own educational path, and there's more room for individual learning choices.
noway421 7y ago
Too tough huh? I guess they are not getting a passing grade then.
aaron695 7y ago
We know how much more 'Distance Education' costs to run than normal schooling. Yet on a few weeks notice we somehow imagined it would work to move every student over? Even if you increased the budget to match Distance Education it takes years to train the teachers/staff and train the students. And we believe this because we fetishize 'remote' anything and just want it to work? This also being the worst of remote, it's remote from home. It's no wonder the world can't move forward.
foofoo4u 7y ago
Hmm. This is a shame. Having read "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way" by Amanda Ripley, I learned that the United States is the highest spender on technology amongst all OECD countries. You'd think with such a big budget for tech, we'd do a better job of transitioning online. If anything, based on this fact, we should be one of the best equipped in the world for it.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  The US also has a massive budget for healthcare.
- yardie 7y ago
  I’ve watched school technology budgets get shoved right into the back of the closet. The money gets spent on capital and consultants. The end users, teachers and students, are rarely given instruction on how to use all this tech. No education plan is developed to use this tech. If you’re lucky you’ll get a tech savvy teacher or precocious student who’ll make sense of it.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  Unfortunately you can't just throw technology or money at problems to solve them.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I wonder if that's because of the US' relationship with philanthropy? I have no idea about the rest of the world, but with friends who teach in the US I hear about "[So and so] donated a classroom full of iPads" with no real support or curriculum or what to do in a few years when they're out of date. They donated tech because it's sexier than donating paper and whiteboard markers. All while books are falling apart and they struggle for resources to make photocopies. I don't know of the source, but when I was in HS in the late 90s each teacher got a computer due to some initiative. None of the teachers knew what to do with it and at the time tech got obsolete quickly. A computer purchased in 1995 was dog-slow compared to what was sold in 1999. We had a "computer lab" built, but no classes or teachers qualified to teach so it was empty most of the time. You can say technology in the classroom is a chicken-and-egg problem, but that assumes technology is some savior and resources weren't better spent on traditional school resources.
nradov 7y ago
A better solution would be just to reopen all of the primary schools. Sweden never closed theirs because it appears that small children aren't a significant virus transmission risk. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30095-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4... For those who think schools should remain closed, please explain what we should do next school year when the pandemic is still ongoing? We obviously can't leave schools closed indefinitely and there's no guarantee of an effective vaccine anytime soon.
fortran77 7y ago
The job may be too hard for the teachers. Will they give up their pay if they end the year early? Will taxpayers--still paying all their property tax--get a refund?
fortran77 7y ago
At least California has plans to do school in July instead of just giving up: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/28/newsom-california-to-reopen-in-weeks-may-start-school-year-in-july-1280662 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/28/...
golemiprague 7y ago
If anything i have learned from all of this is that school is just babysitting and a waste of time. Kids don't need so many hours of "study", they can study most of the day material in one of two hours of decent youtube tutorials, maybe another hour of practicing. The rest is pure babysitting.
jaequery 7y ago
I think we need a poll or survey about this. I don’t think it is as bad as the article is portraying.
jaequery 7y ago
I am curious to what differentiates the ones where remote learning is working and to those that aren’t. Because I have been pleasantly surprised to see just how well remote learning have been for my kids. Our kids aren’t really any more or less disciplined as any other kids. They did whine and scared at first but slowly got used to the whole change. They are 10 and 11 doing two hour of zoom per day and the rest turn in homework via google classroom and flipgrid for presentations .
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  Wealth?
  - geomark 7y ago
    That's a big part of it. My kid goes to a British international school. Starting in Year 5 all students are required to have a laptop. So when the shutdown happened they all had devices already and were adept at using them. Teachers had some learning curve but it only took about a week to get online learning working pretty smoothly. Contrast that with public schools here that just shutdown and said they would do classes online when most public school kids here don't have a computer. Most have phones and a data plan so they are trying to do lessons via Line or Facetime. But that seems to be very ineffective.
    - eitally 7y ago
      Even in other places, that's an issue. I'm in the San Jose Unified School District here in the Bay Area, and it's hugely diverse. Because of that diversity, the district has been reluctant to mandate any specific online ed requirements, so as not to appear discriminatory toward the families who don't have the ability to participate in online learning. In return, that actively harms the families who can. Currently, all the assignments are "suggested", are ungraded, and the teachers are only "suggested" to schedule 2 online class meetings per week. what this means is that kids in families who are willing & able to maintain learning pace are being told both that 1) here is the list of weekly assignments 2) your teacher is only going to be marginally available, and 3) none of this work is going to be graded. This is the on time in my parenting experience where it's been 100% clear that private schools have a night & day advantage over public schools and districts.
throwawaysea 7y ago
Or maybe we just have the wrong teachers, who are unable to do anything but blindly follow lesson plans and structures designed for in person classes?
kumarvvr 7y ago
One disadvantage of remote learning is there is no feedback for pupil attention. Its very easy for the student to be browsing, chatting or gaming with the class going on. The best way to learn will always be a focussed, distraction free, peer supported classroom.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  distraction free? students aren't distracted in the classroom? Whether it's 200 years of passing notes, calculators, a book, or the classmate next to you the classroom has long had distractions.
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    Yes, Of Course, but unlike in a home environment, distractions in classrooms are quickly corrected.
Proven 7y ago
Let me guess what's next - they send some staff on unpaid leave and government cuts taxes to pass on these savings to middle class taxpayers?
908087 7y ago
One of my fears initially was that this pandemic would end up cementing an advertising corporation as the permanent middleman between teachers and students from this point forward. Hopefully schools become less "Googley" after this, not more.
satyg 7y ago
It is tough because it's different. Don't throw in the towel, innovate. New patterns /method will have to be used. This is an opportunity, if we figure out how to do this right, education can reach everywhere in the world.Think about the potential.
pasttense01 7y ago
For a copy of the article NOT behind a paywall: http://archive.is/sOTkP http://archive.is/sOTkP
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
basilgohar 7y ago
Disclosure: I have worked with distance/remote learning as far back as 15 years and my wife homeschools our kids. Schools (and pretty much everything else) were caught completely off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Setting-up an online education infrastructure takes a lot of work and requires significant mental retooling. Teachers need to adapt as much or more than their students to the new paradigm. Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, or Jitsi are not replacement for in-person instruction. Part of this is that in remote learning the curriculum materials and assessments need to lend themselves to greater self-guidance than those of brick-and-mortar books and other resources. This is not impossible, but also not easy to do on short notice. I am not surprised that schools are finding it simply too hard to put together packets, distribute them, and trying supplement with video conferencing when the materials are based on a different assumption. I am optimistic that this will further the reach of remote learning, but I am doubtful that the stagnant style of traditional education will shift to fully embrace it. I foresee a lot more alternative educational institutions emerging as the traditional schools very slowly adapt.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I have always learned on my own. I’ve spent the last couple of years pivoting from being a development manager, back to engineering. That may seem to be an odd choice, as I’m an excellent manager, but I don’t like being a manager, and I love engineering. I’m pretty good at that, as well. There’s really no curriculum for this kind of thing. Schools and training are all about introducing people to a subject “from scratch,” which involves a lot of “substrate.” I did sign up for an introductory course on one tech that I’m working on, and to which I have had little exposure; but, for the most part, it’s all been self-teaching. I really don’t know of a way to make that work with primary education. In my case, it’s a very personal journey, fueled by motivation. I don’t think that can be synthesized. Of course, everything also needs to be measured, which brings in a whole infrastructure for accreditation and metrics.
chrisgd 7y ago
Great opportunity to discuss internet as a regulated utility
ec2y 7y ago
Interesting article. I’ve taught three masters level classes this week and even these motivated students can find it challenging. Most are OK with passive listening, even if that’s not my favorite thing, and having some discussion, but as with in person, there can be issues trying to flip the classroom to make things more engaging and for pedagogical reasons. For example, I noticed that over 10% dropped off the zoom session on Monday, rather than discussing a case with other students in a breakout session for 15 minutes. I much prefer teaching in person where I can see their faces and get some feedback about where they are in terms of learning, interest, tiredness... and where I can more easily push them into doing group discussions that are pedagogically useful and enhance their networking skills. (Business students, not CS.)
paypalcust83 7y ago
This is really sad: schools giving up on teaching children. Not that it hasn't happened before (NCLBA, impoverished districts), but it's still sad when schools fail at their only job. Where is their shame and self-respect?
- karatestomp 7y ago
  They're seeing student and parent engagement fall off a cliff, and can't do much about it. They had nearly zero time to prep for this and the schools are all quite worried (not unreasonably) about being sued over equal-access laws so are ambivalent about introducing "new" material anyway, so much of the instruction's kinda worthless unless the teachers are ignoring their districts' directions. Meanwhile lots of the teachers are at home with... their own kids, who are trying to do remote learning, and they're trying to keep their kids' engagement from dropping off, while also teaching a rapidly-dwindling set of students almost none of whom are still trying or even "showing up", at this point. So mostly, shame is absent and their self-respect is fine, thanks.

206 points by itronitron 7y ago

pochamago 7y ago

Is this solvable? Does something like a VR school make it work?

the_snooze 7y ago
Access to reliable tech and infrastructure seems to be a big stumbling block. VR doesn't solve some of the more fundamental issues, like students not having reliable equipment and Internet connections, or the backend not being able to support the demand (whether in terms of volume or flexibility to different teaching requirements).
- zarkov99 7y ago
  I personally do not think its a lack of high tech. A written schedule mailed every week and the ability to email or call the teacher once or twice a week would get you 90% of the value.
  - anon176 7y ago
    That is pretty much what they are doing right now in my state. Packets can be downloaded every two weeks, or picked up if they do not have access. Teacher does a zoom with the class a minimum of twice a week. But with everyone WFH, making time to work with and teach your kids is difficult. At least young students..
anon176 7y ago
My wife's classroom can barely get magic markers. And we are in a semi nice middle class area. The laptops the district provided for the teachers to use for remote learning can not even handle having MS Teams and Zoom running at the same time. Im sure this is solvable, yes, but it would take a lot of planning, lots of training, money and lots of IT. I am glad they got something in place and are trying to do the best they can with what they had. But wow, parents are frustrated.

awinder 7y ago

There’s a lot of hope from school systems that they will just be back next year, but hopefully there’s at least some behind the scenes work on making remote learning work. I have a lot of admiration for teachers & students working on switching over right now, in the event of further disruptions next year, they’re going to be so much better prepared.

karatestomp 7y ago
We're not in one of the harder-hit states but I have some insight into schools here and admin-tier folks are already phrasing it as "if we are back in the fall". They seem to be planning for the possibility of having to start the year with remote learning, or for a second shut-down if there's a rebound of the virus in the Fall or Winter after things open back up.

zarkov99 7y ago

I do not know about this. I have two kids, 7 and 10, and yes, its messy but this is mostly because the teachers have not yet realized that they need to adapt and simplify their methods and, most importantly, communicate properly with the parents. With a few simple tweaks the kids could learn just as effectively as they do in regular school, in fact probably more, provided the parents are willing and able to step in.

arbitrary_name 7y ago
Don't blame the teachers. They have been thrown into this with little support or guidance, nor the long term clarity that is needed to comprehensively redesign the coursework to meet existing standards - which may or may not change over the next few weeks/months. And lets not forget the equity issues inherent in redesigning classroom content for a class that now consists of kids with no internet, no laptop, old PCs with old browsers, kids being expected to look after young siblings, etc This isn't just 'tweak a few things so they work better on a laptop', it's really a fundamental shift that needs time and careful planning to address.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  I am not blaming them exactly. Its a though situation for all involved and at least my kids teachers are clearly working as hard as they can to make this work and the school district has provided laptops and written materials to the relatively few kids that do not have access to those. Having said that, I do think they could do much better if they accepted that this situation will last indefinitely and their methods must change to rely more on parent supervision and kid autonomy.
  - eitally 7y ago
    You would think that, and they might also think that, but they're largely not allowed to behave materially differently than they are accustomed to. fwiw, until our district settled on a specific set of policies, one of my kids' teachers had already -- the first week of WFH -- setup Google Classroom, used Classdojo to communicate with parents, shared a weekly agenda with links for augmentation material, and setup Zoom meetings 3 days/wk to teach & help the class. she's had to scale back some of this because it's against policy. My other kid's teacher was absent the first two week and, since the district's policy has clarified, is following it to the letter. Thankfully, a stay-at-home dad in the class has created a class email alias, is organizing multiple online sessions per week with parent led code.org, drawing, art history, music history, daily math check-ins, and informal "recesses" (social hours). You may or may not be surprised how few parents are qualified to supervised their kids' learning.

eightysixfour 7y ago

This situation has presented an incredible opportunity to flip the education paradigm around and we are missing it. In my opinion, there are two different opportunities that should be explored: 1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others. 2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one. Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.

ryanchants 7y ago
From my personal experience, I do great when I can sit in a classroom and absorb what's being presented. You put the lecturer behind a screen, live or pre-recorded, and I lose most of my ability to stay on track.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live?
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    For me the answer is “no”. I can’t do video learning without getting distracted quickly.
    - tamaharbor 7y ago
      And then Judge Judy comes on the TV...

bstar77 7y ago

I've been home schooling my son for the past 3 years. The reason why it's "too hard" is because the traditional model of learning in public schools (in the US) translates very poorly to home schooling. Once you stop focusing on grooming for optimal test-taking, a whole world opens up. Additionally, we don't do common core in our household, so my wife and I have no issues teaching my son math (we settled on Saxon math). I neither have the time nor energy to learn common core math in order to support my son.

flatline 7y ago
My experience with common core has been pretty awesome FWIW. I didn’t see some of the stuff our daughter did in first and second grade till the end of high school and college. No more rote arithmetic applications, it presses for actual comprehension of the material from multiple angles. Challenging, but sometimes even fun for those not mathematically inclined.
- dorchadas 7y ago
  Yeah, a lot of the hate I saw for common core (I'm a high school math/physics teacher) comes from a lack of number sense on the adults trying to understand it. Like, I saw parents who were complaining about breaking 634x127 into (600+30+4)(100+20+7) because they didn't understand you can break it up like that and it makes it a bit easier to do the multiplication, then you can just sum the resuts. Sadly, a lot of the elementary school teachers I've encountered also lack that number sense, and some even detest(ed) math. And yet we're asking them to teach it to our kids. I'm not for charter schools usually, but I'd really love to start a charter elementary school where each subject is taught by someone trained in that subject and then with, say, a MAT in elementary ed, as opposed to just a bachelors in elementary ed. I wonder how much better kids would do in math and reading especially, when they have teachers who appreciate math and who like to study literature and read for its own sake.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    > breaking 634x127 into (600+30+4)(100+20+7) For some people, this is simply too abstract. You can teach children the breakout method or normal method, their understanding doesn't change. They're just memorizing one procedure over another. The ability to analyze how to operations work doesn't improve with common core, it's just more steps. I've seen this first hand. I taught long division to a younger family member that was struggling with whatever nonsense method common core cooked up (something about boxes and dots and circling stuff). They had literally never seen long division, I taught them to divide the same numbers they had on the page in front of them in less than 10 minutes, and they could arrive at the correct answer consistently. I asked the kid to explain the procedure of what they were doing for the common core, they had no idea and lacked the ability to articulate the process whatsoever.

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/QC6KH https://archive.md/QC6KH

metal13 7y ago

I can't read the story, but I'm living this. And I don't blame folks for finding it too tough. It's crazy that so many commenters here seem to think that everyone is well equipped to be a teacher with zero training or experience. It's hard. It's even more crazy that no one seems to realize that most parents are acting as teachers, while trying to maintain full time jobs. This isn't just "teachers not adapting", or "we need VR". This is fundamental to the fact that most households need two working parents just to survive.

ngngngng 7y ago
> most households need two working parents just to survive. Only because we created a world where every household had two working parents.
- ajphdiv 7y ago
  > Only Regardless, that's the situation -- so can't be ignored.
- ip26 7y ago
  I do wonder about that sometimes. It doesn't seem to be discussed much. On the one hand inflation-adjusted GDP is 5x higher than the 60's (https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted) so even if the workforce doubled the pie got much larger. On the other hand markets like real estate have somewhat inelastic supply and higher household incomes as a result of dual earners might just bid up prices.
  - thewarrior 7y ago
    Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about this called the Two Income Trap. It’s a shame for someone who’s not an American that America has deep thinkers like Warren in politics but people like Trump and GW Bush become president.
    - zarkov99 7y ago

anigbrowl 7y ago

California is considering starting the next school year a month early, in July, to make up for the disruption, according to the governor today.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I can't access it. It's paywalled. I was a homeschooling parent and, for me and my family, it was wonderfully less burdensome than public school. A snippet from a recent comment of mine which may be pertinent, though, based on the headline and long experience with remote learning (I also have taken college classes online): Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed. This is not true. One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning. Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681334

zarkov99 7y ago
This is very much consistent with my experience when tutoring my kids as well as that of friends who home-schooled their children. One hour of one-on-one tutoring is easily worth 3 or 4 hours of regular school time.

linuxftw 7y ago

Public school is not optimized for learning, it's optimized for filling time with nonsense. If you care about your child's success, teach them how to do math. If they don't know how to read, teach them how to read as well. Probably 2-4 hours of instruction per day, at the absolute max end of the spectrum. Kids from the age of 8+ should be able to accomplish tasks with much less instruction time, and the bulk of the time will be individual effort. Of course, it's mundane and isolating, so don't expect them to sit for hours on end doing school work either.

zarkov99 7y ago
Public school is what you get when you have one instructor per 20 kids with wildly different backgrounds, parent support and aptitudes. You need 10x better teachers with 1/20 of the load and much more involved parents. If you get all that, and certainly technology is the only way to get it at scale, then yes, kids can be done with academics in a small fraction of their day. They should be spending the bulk of their time in play and exploration.

Maultasche 7y ago

The school my children attend have been doing a great job with online learning. Teachers have been posting videos and worksheets on Google classroom, they have regular zoom meetings, and they have various online educational software the children can log into and learn things. The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested. So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming. If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet. So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle. For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all. I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.

beart 7y ago
> have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning Is this how your local school is handling it? I can't even make it through full day meetings as an adult and pretty much zone out after 20 minutes of any online meetings I'm in now.
- eitally 7y ago
  This is how most schools are handling it. Some combo of things like Google Classroom, zoom/webex/meet meetings, and various other apps & sites and online activities. They prescribe book reading, art & PE, but those are hard to track so they're typically not part of an online curriculum. You also need to understand that if a kid has 2hr worth of work online, the odds are good they'll sit in front of the computer all day unless someone is supervising them. This is the real issue, especially for younger children.

tomohawk 7y ago

Students learn in a variety of ways. I imagine most of the HN audience excels at lecture based and book learning. To such an audience it makes sense that a single gifted lecturer could immeasurably benefit students through remote learning. Many students will fail to thrive in such a scenario. These students need different kinds of instruction. This is one thing that leads to home schooling - the government school does not provide the needed instruction methods, and the parents can either pay for private or do home schooling (or move). Source: many family members were teachers.

zaroth 7y ago

I have a 7 and 11 year old (2nd and 5th grade). With very significant parental involvement it is possible to keep them somewhat engaged and learning, although it is very much sub-optimal. They miss their classmates. They miss their teacher. They miss most of all the routine, getting to go to school, and all the fun things they got to do during the day. My 5th grader is very sad to be missing out on a graduation-like experience with a lot of end-of-year events that would typically happen for outgoing 5th graders before they leave for the middle school. This isn't an "opportunity for a new normal". This isn't a situation which can or will last "indefinitely". It is assuredly unhealthy for kids this age (to say nothing of the rest of us) to be isolated from their friends and communicating only over Zoom calls. My kids are hurting in a suburb with a big back yard, mountains of toys, a stay at home mom, and two dogs to play with. I can only imagine it must hurt the least privileged children hardest of all to have lost access to their school. I don't expect there's much of any learning going on in general below the high school level. Particularly for households which don't have parents who are willing to dedicate several hours a day to basically run the lessons. I think people who can honestly claim that their under-13-year-old is distance learning without a parent assuming a basically full-time role of teacher, are few and far between. I wonder how curriculum will adapt to incoming students in the fall. X graders who don't know approximately half of the X-1 grade material. Particularly for younger students where classes are less likely to be grouped by ability, anyone who did actually successfully learn anything from March-July is just going to have to sit through it being taught all over again to the majority of students who didn't.

eitally 7y ago
+1. My next door neighbor is a 3rd grade teacher in a heavily hispanic & underprivileged elementary school. She was telling me today that she still has one student -- one of her best during normal times -- who hasn't been able to get online yet. No internet access at home, lives at home with his undocumented grandparents who immigrated from Central America when his parents were killed by a gang, no one in the house speaks English. School has been closed for >1mo now. I was talking to my 5th grader's teach last weekend about the next year. She doesn't know, either, but is assuming they're just going to bake in an extra-long review period going into the year. Alternatively, at least in CA, they're contemplating starting the next school year in July rather than August, to provide more time for catch-up. To your point, though, what about the kids who were able to keep pace throughout -- are they going to be forced to repeat half a semester to maintain equity in the classroom? That would be terribly unfair.

h2odragon 7y ago

Our school district never had a hope of implementing remote learning; they're lucky to keep their WiFi working. Our daughter is in 6th grade this year; all we've heard since the schools closed a statement that school wouldn't be re-opening this year and a date range when parents could come pick up bagged locker contents. We're lucky in that we've homeschooled before (she went back to public school for the company of other kids), and we've worked out ways to encourage and help focus her natural curiosity already. I just gave her a Debian 10 system and said "holler if you get stuck"; so far she hasn't.

sys_64738 7y ago

When schools reopen then smaller class sizes will need to be the norm with social distancing in effect. More teachers will be needed so costs to tax payers will increase. Online learning doesn't work for kids. It barely works for adults. I'm not sure what else can be done.

dehrmann 7y ago
I guess the concern would be kids as vectors? The death rates for people under 18 have been so low that that social distancing would be rather silly if it weren't for them bringing it home.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  You might find this recent NYT article[1] about the “birth of social distancing” interesting. TLDR - In the early 2000s a high school student did a project mapping the “social network” of her school. Her father just so happened to be a scientist. He used her school project to create a model that showed by closing the schools during a pandemic in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, only 500 people got sick. Leaving the schools open would result in half of the population infected. Closing schools is one of the most effective strategies we have to prevent a contagion from spreading. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distan...

pdx_flyer 7y ago

As the spouse of a high school math teacher, I've seen how difficult it is for the last month. Getting kids internet service, a computer or tablet to work with, the software they need, and then just getting them to login and read or do the work. It's a real challenge. We tweaked my wife's setup and it works pretty well now, though she is dreading if they choose to do live online learning in the fall, as that will be something completely new to tackle. Currently she uses Google Classroom, Desmos, and Kahn Academy for the teaching side. She plans and distributes lessons in Google, uses Desmos for some interactive activities where Desmos scripting allows her to check work and give feedback, and Kahn Academy as some supplemental teaching to her notes. In addition she has certain hours everyday for certain classes and uses an iPad + Google Meet to show notes to her students and work problems they may have an issue with. So far that's been working. Live teaching would be a little more difficult with this setup but it could work.

dorchadas 7y ago
I'm a math/science teacher myself, and I've already decided the first thing I'm gonna do is buy a nice big whiteboard if we do online teaching this fall, to try to solve some of those issues. But I pray we don't have to do that, as just so much gets lost doing it at home versus in person.
- pfranz 7y ago
  Wouldn't whiteboard software be better? Like Khan Academy uses? I've been in some physical whiteboard video chat lectures and it's rough; they rarely have a lav mic (which means the audio quality is horrible and you have problems hearing), you need enough space to frame the whiteboard properly with the camera, they're difficult to light because they're reflective, you need to write the correct size so it's legible, you have the problem you often have in person where your hand or body blocks what is being written. I find cutting to an infinite whiteboard and/or video picture-in-picture to be the easiest way to convey whiteboard ideas. Teachers seem to get really adept at writing with a mouse, but I would heavily suggest investing in a Wacom--even a used 10+ year old Wacom would be sufficient.

ojbyrne 7y ago

Seems related - California floated the idea of starting next year early: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/28/newsom-school-may-start-in-july-this-year/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/28/newsom-school-may-sta...

aazaa 7y ago

The underlying current in this article and others recently posted on the topic is that a return to in-person schools will happen next year. Districts and states need to be asking themselves: "What if that isn't possible?" There's a lot we don't know about the virus. How long does immunity last? How long will it take to get a vaccine? What happens if multiple flare-ups occur as people rush back to work, parties, cruises, and the rest? There's a growing sense that there's light at the end of the tunnel. That light was achieved by strict measures that are melting away at a blistering pace. Nobody knows what happens when you start loosening up. One possibility is unavoidable: there are more active cases today by at least an order of magnitude than there were when the restrictions were put into place. Exponential growth hasn't been suspended just because people need to return to normal. Officials interviewed in this story didn't indicate what will be happening after instruction ends for the year. It might be a good time to assess what worked and what didn't, then develop a plan and do teacher training for distance learning for Fall 2020.

nradov 7y ago
Of course it's possible to return to in-person schools. Some countries never closed primary schools at all. Education is essential, and it's totally worth accepting some risk.
- g_langenderfer 7y ago
  public education's primary goal is daycare. That is not essential.

dang 7y ago

There's a related thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079. Normally we'd merge threads that are that similar, but I couldn't figure out a good way to do it, so maybe they're subtly different enough to keep both up.

grawprog 7y ago

It took me a long time to see the value of school. All through elementary school and high school I didn't give a shit, did what I needed to do to do well, never really cared about things going on at school and didnt really have many friends or anything. When I got to university it was different, I cared and tried and got involved with everything. It was a totally different experience. It made me regret the way i was in high school a bit and kinda made me wish I'd been more involved. It wasn't as pointless and ridiculous as I thought and there was no reason for me not to other than my unwillingness to. If I'd actually experienced these things, I might have gotten more out of high school and not been so hostile towards it all for so long, when in the end education only benefitted me and there's a kind of education you can only get by taking part in things with people around you. I know it's not the same, but I know there's lots of kids out there who didn't wait as long as me and know now, well before I did, what they get out of having other people around. As great as distance education can be, even if you've got your classmates there on video or something, it's still not the same as a group of students getting together and working on homework or studying, the ones that do I mean, and even for the ones that just get together, there's a lot of bonding and forming as people that happens that just can't really be replicated outside truly free interaction with other people. Even if you're all working on school work. It needs to be some kind of natural free setting. Something's missing otherwise. Again, it took me a long time to really get this.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago
You're lucky you got to university. In many systems screwing up in high school is the end for that, even the remedial programs are hard to get into. After really doing poorly in high school (and prior) I was lucky to crawl my way into a community college and get into an arts program and then transfer to a university for an honors BA philosophy path after -- but I really wanted to be in CS. But because of my high school math grades that was never open to me -- and will never be even now. I ended up dropping out of my BA in my 3rd year to go catch the .com boom wave and get my first programmer gigs, and I'm still doing it 24 years later. I work now at Google, surrounded by people who look at me with blank stares when I describe my troubles with school. This whole path is why I'm deeply suspicious of educational and career models which make excessive claims to be 'meritocratic.' Measuring humans is hard, and mostly we just measure the wrong things and pull the wrong motivational levers. University I think is better because you do mostly feel like you 'own' your own educational path, and there's more room for individual learning choices.

noway421 7y ago

Too tough huh? I guess they are not getting a passing grade then.

aaron695 7y ago

We know how much more 'Distance Education' costs to run than normal schooling. Yet on a few weeks notice we somehow imagined it would work to move every student over? Even if you increased the budget to match Distance Education it takes years to train the teachers/staff and train the students. And we believe this because we fetishize 'remote' anything and just want it to work? This also being the worst of remote, it's remote from home. It's no wonder the world can't move forward.

foofoo4u 7y ago

Hmm. This is a shame. Having read "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way" by Amanda Ripley, I learned that the United States is the highest spender on technology amongst all OECD countries. You'd think with such a big budget for tech, we'd do a better job of transitioning online. If anything, based on this fact, we should be one of the best equipped in the world for it.

Polylactic_acid 7y ago
The US also has a massive budget for healthcare.
yardie 7y ago
I’ve watched school technology budgets get shoved right into the back of the closet. The money gets spent on capital and consultants. The end users, teachers and students, are rarely given instruction on how to use all this tech. No education plan is developed to use this tech. If you’re lucky you’ll get a tech savvy teacher or precocious student who’ll make sense of it.
ativzzz 7y ago
Unfortunately you can't just throw technology or money at problems to solve them.
pfranz 7y ago
I wonder if that's because of the US' relationship with philanthropy? I have no idea about the rest of the world, but with friends who teach in the US I hear about "[So and so] donated a classroom full of iPads" with no real support or curriculum or what to do in a few years when they're out of date. They donated tech because it's sexier than donating paper and whiteboard markers. All while books are falling apart and they struggle for resources to make photocopies. I don't know of the source, but when I was in HS in the late 90s each teacher got a computer due to some initiative. None of the teachers knew what to do with it and at the time tech got obsolete quickly. A computer purchased in 1995 was dog-slow compared to what was sold in 1999. We had a "computer lab" built, but no classes or teachers qualified to teach so it was empty most of the time. You can say technology in the classroom is a chicken-and-egg problem, but that assumes technology is some savior and resources weren't better spent on traditional school resources.

nradov 7y ago

A better solution would be just to reopen all of the primary schools. Sweden never closed theirs because it appears that small children aren't a significant virus transmission risk. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30095-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4... For those who think schools should remain closed, please explain what we should do next school year when the pandemic is still ongoing? We obviously can't leave schools closed indefinitely and there's no guarantee of an effective vaccine anytime soon.

fortran77 7y ago

The job may be too hard for the teachers. Will they give up their pay if they end the year early? Will taxpayers--still paying all their property tax--get a refund?

fortran77 7y ago

At least California has plans to do school in July instead of just giving up: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/28/newsom-california-to-reopen-in-weeks-may-start-school-year-in-july-1280662 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/28/...

golemiprague 7y ago

If anything i have learned from all of this is that school is just babysitting and a waste of time. Kids don't need so many hours of "study", they can study most of the day material in one of two hours of decent youtube tutorials, maybe another hour of practicing. The rest is pure babysitting.

jaequery 7y ago

I think we need a poll or survey about this. I don’t think it is as bad as the article is portraying.

jaequery 7y ago

I am curious to what differentiates the ones where remote learning is working and to those that aren’t. Because I have been pleasantly surprised to see just how well remote learning have been for my kids. Our kids aren’t really any more or less disciplined as any other kids. They did whine and scared at first but slowly got used to the whole change. They are 10 and 11 doing two hour of zoom per day and the rest turn in homework via google classroom and flipgrid for presentations .

texasbigdata 7y ago
Wealth?
- geomark 7y ago
  That's a big part of it. My kid goes to a British international school. Starting in Year 5 all students are required to have a laptop. So when the shutdown happened they all had devices already and were adept at using them. Teachers had some learning curve but it only took about a week to get online learning working pretty smoothly. Contrast that with public schools here that just shutdown and said they would do classes online when most public school kids here don't have a computer. Most have phones and a data plan so they are trying to do lessons via Line or Facetime. But that seems to be very ineffective.
  - eitally 7y ago
    Even in other places, that's an issue. I'm in the San Jose Unified School District here in the Bay Area, and it's hugely diverse. Because of that diversity, the district has been reluctant to mandate any specific online ed requirements, so as not to appear discriminatory toward the families who don't have the ability to participate in online learning. In return, that actively harms the families who can. Currently, all the assignments are "suggested", are ungraded, and the teachers are only "suggested" to schedule 2 online class meetings per week. what this means is that kids in families who are willing & able to maintain learning pace are being told both that 1) here is the list of weekly assignments 2) your teacher is only going to be marginally available, and 3) none of this work is going to be graded. This is the on time in my parenting experience where it's been 100% clear that private schools have a night & day advantage over public schools and districts.

throwawaysea 7y ago

Or maybe we just have the wrong teachers, who are unable to do anything but blindly follow lesson plans and structures designed for in person classes?

kumarvvr 7y ago

One disadvantage of remote learning is there is no feedback for pupil attention. Its very easy for the student to be browsing, chatting or gaming with the class going on. The best way to learn will always be a focussed, distraction free, peer supported classroom.

smileysteve 7y ago
distraction free? students aren't distracted in the classroom? Whether it's 200 years of passing notes, calculators, a book, or the classmate next to you the classroom has long had distractions.
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  Yes, Of Course, but unlike in a home environment, distractions in classrooms are quickly corrected.

Proven 7y ago

Let me guess what's next - they send some staff on unpaid leave and government cuts taxes to pass on these savings to middle class taxpayers?

908087 7y ago

One of my fears initially was that this pandemic would end up cementing an advertising corporation as the permanent middleman between teachers and students from this point forward. Hopefully schools become less "Googley" after this, not more.

satyg 7y ago

It is tough because it's different. Don't throw in the towel, innovate. New patterns /method will have to be used. This is an opportunity, if we figure out how to do this right, education can reach everywhere in the world.Think about the potential.

pasttense01 7y ago

For a copy of the article NOT behind a paywall: http://archive.is/sOTkP http://archive.is/sOTkP

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

basilgohar 7y ago

Disclosure: I have worked with distance/remote learning as far back as 15 years and my wife homeschools our kids. Schools (and pretty much everything else) were caught completely off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Setting-up an online education infrastructure takes a lot of work and requires significant mental retooling. Teachers need to adapt as much or more than their students to the new paradigm. Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, or Jitsi are not replacement for in-person instruction. Part of this is that in remote learning the curriculum materials and assessments need to lend themselves to greater self-guidance than those of brick-and-mortar books and other resources. This is not impossible, but also not easy to do on short notice. I am not surprised that schools are finding it simply too hard to put together packets, distribute them, and trying supplement with video conferencing when the materials are based on a different assumption. I am optimistic that this will further the reach of remote learning, but I am doubtful that the stagnant style of traditional education will shift to fully embrace it. I foresee a lot more alternative educational institutions emerging as the traditional schools very slowly adapt.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I have always learned on my own. I’ve spent the last couple of years pivoting from being a development manager, back to engineering. That may seem to be an odd choice, as I’m an excellent manager, but I don’t like being a manager, and I love engineering. I’m pretty good at that, as well. There’s really no curriculum for this kind of thing. Schools and training are all about introducing people to a subject “from scratch,” which involves a lot of “substrate.” I did sign up for an introductory course on one tech that I’m working on, and to which I have had little exposure; but, for the most part, it’s all been self-teaching. I really don’t know of a way to make that work with primary education. In my case, it’s a very personal journey, fueled by motivation. I don’t think that can be synthesized. Of course, everything also needs to be measured, which brings in a whole infrastructure for accreditation and metrics.

chrisgd 7y ago

Great opportunity to discuss internet as a regulated utility

ec2y 7y ago

Interesting article. I’ve taught three masters level classes this week and even these motivated students can find it challenging. Most are OK with passive listening, even if that’s not my favorite thing, and having some discussion, but as with in person, there can be issues trying to flip the classroom to make things more engaging and for pedagogical reasons. For example, I noticed that over 10% dropped off the zoom session on Monday, rather than discussing a case with other students in a breakout session for 15 minutes. I much prefer teaching in person where I can see their faces and get some feedback about where they are in terms of learning, interest, tiredness... and where I can more easily push them into doing group discussions that are pedagogically useful and enhance their networking skills. (Business students, not CS.)

paypalcust83 7y ago

This is really sad: schools giving up on teaching children. Not that it hasn't happened before (NCLBA, impoverished districts), but it's still sad when schools fail at their only job. Where is their shame and self-respect?

karatestomp 7y ago
They're seeing student and parent engagement fall off a cliff, and can't do much about it. They had nearly zero time to prep for this and the schools are all quite worried (not unreasonably) about being sued over equal-access laws so are ambivalent about introducing "new" material anyway, so much of the instruction's kinda worthless unless the teachers are ignoring their districts' directions. Meanwhile lots of the teachers are at home with... their own kids, who are trying to do remote learning, and they're trying to keep their kids' engagement from dropping off, while also teaching a rapidly-dwindling set of students almost none of whom are still trying or even "showing up", at this point. So mostly, shame is absent and their self-respect is fine, thanks.