4 ms·

We keep making a bunch of products where protocols and existing software would do just fine, while hitting fewer edge cases. Know what would be better than the

We keep making a bunch of products where protocols and existing software would do just fine, while hitting fewer edge cases. Know what would be better than the ten goddamn apps and the iPad and shit they're using for our kid's school? Mailed (or emailed) worksheet packets with guidance, recorded lessons on Youtube. Mail back the worksheets, have the food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up, drop them off at the school every week or so, or just do photos-to-PDF on a phone and email them. Or they could just give each kid workbooks and textbooks like they did when I was in school but that's out of fashion now for no reason. eyeroll Several logins to manage. Apps that erase your work if you hit the wrong thing. Weird interfaces. Jank galore. Just use the fucking basics. You don't need a custom app for every single thing. Email exists. Use it.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> Several logins to manage. Apps that erase your work if you hit the wrong thing. Weird interfaces. Jank galore. Just use the fucking basics. You don't need a custom app for every single thing. Email exists. Use it. Yeah, but if you do that, how will you funnel money from the school system into private companies?
jimhefferon 6y ago
> Mail back the worksheets, have the food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up, drop them off at the school every week or so, or just do photos-to-PDF on a phone and email them. Or they could just give each kid workbooks and textbooks like they did when I was in school but that's out of fashion now for no reason. eyeroll I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is much more complicated than eyeroll suggests. For one thing, teachers would not accept physical papers in the present state of the disease. Even if a district says papers are OK after they have sat for three days (or whatever), that means that (1) they get picked up delivered to some repository (2) they would sit there for days (3) the teachers come and get them (delivering to the teachers would mean more decontamination time) (4) they take a day or two to grade. So assignments on Monday might be ready the following Monday? Then the teacher writes an email, "John you did the wrong page. Please resubmit." It is just not workable. (On my assignments there was something like a 10% confusion rate, for instance where someone did 1-10 odd instead of 1-10. I sympathise. It is a confusing time.) I did photos to PDF. After two or three weeks of back and forth with my students we got so that most of them would reliably send legible one-PDF-per-assignments. Again, life is more complicated than, "Any moron can do this." Finally, email is not a panacea. Having a hundred students emailing their assignments is an invitation for disaster. I was able to go through the college's system (we use Canvas) so it kept track of who sent what and when they sent it. As this article points out any large system has issues, but these systems exist for a reason. I and my students had issues and just had to work around them. With patience and good will we figured it out. That's what happens a lot in education. People have all kinds of life situations, there are all kinds of tech and comfort with tech, etc. It is complicated. Folks who are not teachers but are interested in some of the issues could check out the last dozen or so epsidoes of Mr Barton's Maths Podcast http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast/ http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast/ which are about teaching from home for primary and secondary teachers. Really good stuff.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  > I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is much more complicated than eyeroll suggests. Wife's a middle school teacher and ~40-50% of the other people in my social circle (not via her & her colleagues, oddly enough) are teachers, too. What they've done here (this state, post NCLB) is get rid of comprehensive curriculums with prepared material (workbooks, sheet packets, textbooks) and now districts and teachers all come up with this stuff themselves, which is clearly wasteful—why have a committee at the state-level do this once when every goddamn district can hire a couple new people to handle curriculum and rope teachers into those same committees, because they don't already have so many friggin' meetings they're starting to overlap?—so yes, hard eyeroll at the trend away from textbook + workbook as a foundation for (middle grade and lower, at least) classes. The state could have made their own such resources several times over for the waste the current system has produced, if they didn't trust a company to provide it (as was usually the case in the past). The whiplash-inducing pointless policy shifts in education, usually implemented by what sure appear to be given their observed behavior certifiable morons, is tiresome and harmful to educators and families alike (we have both perspectives). Now there are CDC suggestions that kids should have their own resources next year, but gee, we just switched away from textbooks + workbooks, which would have been great, to a mess of shared "learning centers" and junk like that (oh and got rid of all the indoor-recess toys in the kindergarten classrooms statewide to make room for those). It's pure fad-chasing, well-intentioned at best and the school admin version of résumé-driven-development at worst (and it's often the latter). When they accidentally stumble on an idea that might be good they fail to implement it correctly (i.e. they can't even follow simple directions or understand how games or human systems work, these highly-paid jokes of PhDs that run the schools). Very frustrating. Maybe your schools are doing a better job than ours but there's no possible way the tech support load & assignment screw-up rate here isn't a bigger hassle here than if it were on regular ol' paper, including the effort of shuffling that around and disinfecting it, and I think they've actually done a decent job given the tools they're being told to use (webshit and apps) and the time they had to prepare. Hell they could probably buy some kind of UV disinfectant chamber for submitted papers for what they spend on all these stupid apps every year, stick a drop-box just inside the door of the meal-delivery schoolbuses and outside the school, and call it good. What I know for sure: the only part of this where it felt like my kid was almost getting the kind of education they would in the classroom without a ton of extra effort on our parts, and it felt like we understood what they needed and what needed to be done about 100% of the time, was the first couple weeks when we did have organized packets of paper instructions and assignments they sent home before spring break just in case there were closures (they didn't yet know it'd be the whole rest of the school year, of course). And with the paper we didn't have to deal with "this login isn't working" and "I hit the wrong thing and now my work I just did is gone" and "what the fuck, I, the adult and a software professional, can't even find this thing they say is at the other end of this link (or where in the app this thing is supposed to be, or whatever)", and so on, and so on. That's for the younger kids. For the older ones, drop-off rates have been... high. Many of those kids weren't even attempting the majority of assigned work, if they were doing any of it, by a week or two into this. Very high levels of effort by some teachers had noticeable but still low effects on keeping kids engaged. We're talking north of half the kids in my wife's school essentially just skipping 4th quarter this year, and a good chunk of the rest getting maybe 10% as much out of it as they would have in school—it's that bad. I think some assignments missed due to logistics or scanning errors or whatever are nothing next to those effects.
liveoneggs 6y ago
yeah my 6 y/o hates remembering passwords. Fear of getting her password wrong almost made her afraid to use computers at all
- ativzzz 6y ago
  Time to set up a family 1password, or if you're up for teaching your family, keepass.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    Not on school-owned devices :-/ (but for something like school app/site passwords, though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine)
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      Sounds like the school owned device needs to come pre-installed with a password manager then, at least for school related activities. > though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine This works, until you have to bring the paper to school where your kids friends will inevitably find the paper and login and mess with their stuff (source: I was that friend)
      - karatestomp 6y ago
        Oh, yeah, paper should probably be stored with your liquor and only pulled out when needed (or with your guns if you're that sort, I guess). Otherwise siblings will pull some pranks.
    - liveoneggs 6y ago
      yes it's easier at home to have this stuff on the fridge for reference (also she can just ask me to login for her) but at actual school it was a real problem

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

> Several logins to manage. Apps that erase your work if you hit the wrong thing. Weird interfaces. Jank galore. Just use the fucking basics. You don't need a custom app for every single thing. Email exists. Use it. Yeah, but if you do that, how will you funnel money from the school system into private companies?

jimhefferon 6y ago

> Mail back the worksheets, have the food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up, drop them off at the school every week or so, or just do photos-to-PDF on a phone and email them. Or they could just give each kid workbooks and textbooks like they did when I was in school but that's out of fashion now for no reason. eyeroll I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is much more complicated than eyeroll suggests. For one thing, teachers would not accept physical papers in the present state of the disease. Even if a district says papers are OK after they have sat for three days (or whatever), that means that (1) they get picked up delivered to some repository (2) they would sit there for days (3) the teachers come and get them (delivering to the teachers would mean more decontamination time) (4) they take a day or two to grade. So assignments on Monday might be ready the following Monday? Then the teacher writes an email, "John you did the wrong page. Please resubmit." It is just not workable. (On my assignments there was something like a 10% confusion rate, for instance where someone did 1-10 odd instead of 1-10. I sympathise. It is a confusing time.) I did photos to PDF. After two or three weeks of back and forth with my students we got so that most of them would reliably send legible one-PDF-per-assignments. Again, life is more complicated than, "Any moron can do this." Finally, email is not a panacea. Having a hundred students emailing their assignments is an invitation for disaster. I was able to go through the college's system (we use Canvas) so it kept track of who sent what and when they sent it. As this article points out any large system has issues, but these systems exist for a reason. I and my students had issues and just had to work around them. With patience and good will we figured it out. That's what happens a lot in education. People have all kinds of life situations, there are all kinds of tech and comfort with tech, etc. It is complicated. Folks who are not teachers but are interested in some of the issues could check out the last dozen or so epsidoes of Mr Barton's Maths Podcast http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast/ http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast/ which are about teaching from home for primary and secondary teachers. Really good stuff.

karatestomp 6y ago
> I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is much more complicated than eyeroll suggests. Wife's a middle school teacher and ~40-50% of the other people in my social circle (not via her & her colleagues, oddly enough) are teachers, too. What they've done here (this state, post NCLB) is get rid of comprehensive curriculums with prepared material (workbooks, sheet packets, textbooks) and now districts and teachers all come up with this stuff themselves, which is clearly wasteful—why have a committee at the state-level do this once when every goddamn district can hire a couple new people to handle curriculum and rope teachers into those same committees, because they don't already have so many friggin' meetings they're starting to overlap?—so yes, hard eyeroll at the trend away from textbook + workbook as a foundation for (middle grade and lower, at least) classes. The state could have made their own such resources several times over for the waste the current system has produced, if they didn't trust a company to provide it (as was usually the case in the past). The whiplash-inducing pointless policy shifts in education, usually implemented by what sure appear to be given their observed behavior certifiable morons, is tiresome and harmful to educators and families alike (we have both perspectives). Now there are CDC suggestions that kids should have their own resources next year, but gee, we just switched away from textbooks + workbooks, which would have been great, to a mess of shared "learning centers" and junk like that (oh and got rid of all the indoor-recess toys in the kindergarten classrooms statewide to make room for those). It's pure fad-chasing, well-intentioned at best and the school admin version of résumé-driven-development at worst (and it's often the latter). When they accidentally stumble on an idea that might be good they fail to implement it correctly (i.e. they can't even follow simple directions or understand how games or human systems work, these highly-paid jokes of PhDs that run the schools). Very frustrating. Maybe your schools are doing a better job than ours but there's no possible way the tech support load & assignment screw-up rate here isn't a bigger hassle here than if it were on regular ol' paper, including the effort of shuffling that around and disinfecting it, and I think they've actually done a decent job given the tools they're being told to use (webshit and apps) and the time they had to prepare. Hell they could probably buy some kind of UV disinfectant chamber for submitted papers for what they spend on all these stupid apps every year, stick a drop-box just inside the door of the meal-delivery schoolbuses and outside the school, and call it good. What I know for sure: the only part of this where it felt like my kid was almost getting the kind of education they would in the classroom without a ton of extra effort on our parts, and it felt like we understood what they needed and what needed to be done about 100% of the time, was the first couple weeks when we did have organized packets of paper instructions and assignments they sent home before spring break just in case there were closures (they didn't yet know it'd be the whole rest of the school year, of course). And with the paper we didn't have to deal with "this login isn't working" and "I hit the wrong thing and now my work I just did is gone" and "what the fuck, I, the adult and a software professional, can't even find this thing they say is at the other end of this link (or where in the app this thing is supposed to be, or whatever)", and so on, and so on. That's for the younger kids. For the older ones, drop-off rates have been... high. Many of those kids weren't even attempting the majority of assigned work, if they were doing any of it, by a week or two into this. Very high levels of effort by some teachers had noticeable but still low effects on keeping kids engaged. We're talking north of half the kids in my wife's school essentially just skipping 4th quarter this year, and a good chunk of the rest getting maybe 10% as much out of it as they would have in school—it's that bad. I think some assignments missed due to logistics or scanning errors or whatever are nothing next to those effects.

liveoneggs 6y ago

yeah my 6 y/o hates remembering passwords. Fear of getting her password wrong almost made her afraid to use computers at all

ativzzz 6y ago
Time to set up a family 1password, or if you're up for teaching your family, keepass.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  Not on school-owned devices :-/ (but for something like school app/site passwords, though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine)
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    Sounds like the school owned device needs to come pre-installed with a password manager then, at least for school related activities. > though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine This works, until you have to bring the paper to school where your kids friends will inevitably find the paper and login and mess with their stuff (source: I was that friend)
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      Oh, yeah, paper should probably be stored with your liquor and only pulled out when needed (or with your guns if you're that sort, I guess). Otherwise siblings will pull some pranks.
  - liveoneggs 6y ago
    yes it's easier at home to have this stuff on the fridge for reference (also she can just ask me to login for her) but at actual school it was a real problem