4 ms·

At least in many (most) schools in the US K-8 education is pretty worthless. As a parent I would be just fine with my kids skipping a grade (uhm, zoom-ing throu

by ptero 6y ago

At least in many (most) schools in the US K-8 education is pretty worthless. As a parent I would be just fine with my kids skipping a grade (uhm, zoom-ing through one, that is). College though is a real education, and I want it to be face to face. I (and them) accept the risk, based on what is known today. My 2c.

jimbob45 6y ago
I was only tolerable as a 9th grader because of the ladder of chaos that was middle school. While I may not have learned much in the way of academics, I grew immeasurably socially.
jjcon 6y ago
I think it’s easy to forget how hard learning is after you have already mastered something. You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8. If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8. Very much depends on the school district. In many urban school districts, it's better than being in the house, but its hardly enriching.
- irishcoffee 6y ago
  You learn how to read and you learn basic math. That’s really it from a useful educational standpoint. Happy to debate it.
  - nradov 6y ago
    My children have learned far more than reading and basic math in their K-8 schools. This is an obvious fact and not open for debate. Distance learning is not an acceptable replacement. It's time to immediately reopen all primary schools. Education is essential and worth the risk.
    - FreeFull 6y ago
      Are you ready to take responsibility for all the people that would either die or have their health damaged by the virus? Including probably a significant number of teachers, parents, and even a few children?
    - dev_tty01 6y ago
      You have decided it is worth the risk to your family in your judgement. Fine. But to which risk are you referring? The risk to your children? How about the risks to the teachers? How about the other staff? How about the child's grandparents? How about the other children in the classroom and their families? You are asking a large number of people to take considerable risk because you have decided classroom education RIGHT NOW is "worth the risk." Nobody is suggesting the end of classroom education. The question is whether doing the best we can with distance learning for a time and postponement of classroom eduction until better treatments and/or vaccines come on line is a better choice. It is really not a big sacrifice to ensure the safety of about 4 million teachers and maybe another million or two staff persons. Assuming the death rate is optimistically only 0.2%, that is about 12,000 teachers and staff deaths. Ignoring the thousands of other deaths originating from these cases, are you really saying that 12,000 deaths is a realistic price to pay so your child can go back into the classroom NOW rather than next year? Really? The fact that this would be a very bad choice seems an "obvious fact and not open for debate."
      - mikecoles 6y ago
        Nice way to intentionally misinterpret the stats Unless most of your teachers are living in nursing homes, your numbers are way off.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        GP isn’t proposing that only their child attend school. Instead, it’s an entire generation of children who will benefit from the delta of an extra in-person year of instruction. Similarly, whatever factor you apply to count deaths, you can only count deaths above the baseline when considering the change in school policy. It’s quite far from your side of “obvious fact and not open for debate”, IMO.
- melq 6y ago
  >If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers. I'm not sure this is true. From my own experience studying math, I often heard people remark upon how hard it must be and how only a small subset of people would ever be able to understand the concepts in a graduate level math course. I don't agree with this at all. In my opinion, the reality is that learning is incremental, and everything new builds upon something that you've previously learned (hopefully). This is particularly true with math. I don't think that I had to work any harder to learn linear algebra in undergrad than I did to learn differential calc in highschool. I think the delta in difficulty between geometry and algebra, pre-calc and calc 1, diff eq and real analysis, is basically the same. But that is only true if you have a solid understanding of whatever came before. This is of course a minor nitpick with your last point, because I agree with your overall point that k-8 learning is important. I think it's important precisely because of the reasons I mentioned before: you need to have a strong foundation in 'last years' concepts if you are going to succeed in learning this years.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  K-8 is primary school, right? Its value is mostly not in education. If it was it would look very different. Mastery based learning would be the norm, not unknown. Spaced repetition would be incorporated everywhere so what was taught was retained. There would be no social advancement. The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old. If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.
  - otoburb 6y ago
    I am just a parent of two K-8 children so not entirely up to speed on the latest theory and practice of ZPD. But when I first read about this before my first was born I understood ZPD to be "empathetic tutoring" which seems increasingly difficult to execute correctly when student:teacher ratios exceed 4:1, and ideally 1-1 for maximum benefit. ZPD works, but nobody has been able to implement this at-scale, let alone in the K-8 public school system.
threatofrain 6y ago
K-8 is when you get formally or informally put in a track for math, and most probably in an enduring way.
- Olreich 6y ago
  That’s a failing of the education system, not a victory. Math education is absolutely terrible. There’s no building of foundations and fundamental relationships to provide people with easy learning. It only gets worse further up the chain. It took 3Blue1Brown to make the connection for me between i, the unit circle, and e. They seem fundamentally linked, but no math education ever put them into the same sentence other than to give a few rote examples of famous equations. Maybe my education was just garbage, but none of the stuff in k-6 was built upon. They threw out my foundation in numbers and handed me a list of valid rules in the form of equations and identities. If you do the quadratic formula, you get the roots. Cos^2 + sin^2 = tan, etc. I was on the track to math, sure. But that’s because I was good at memorizing useless trivia and utilizing it on tests, not because I was good at math. Same goes for most of my classes. There was one dude that actually got it, but he definitely didn’t get it from our teachers.
Olreich 6y ago
College education is just as often useless as well. All that college education money hasn’t gone to teaching staff or classrooms or lecture halls. It’s going to administrative buildings, sports complexes, and dorms. The teaching at colleges has stayed largely the same as it ever has been, with few of the professors actually passionate about transferring the knowledge to the next set of students. You only get a great professor every once in a great while, most of the rest are unintelligible or disinterested. I’m not willing to pay 150k to get one great educator maybe. With Wikipedia, YouTube science communicators, and videos of actually great lecturers across the years, the knowledge portion of college education is covered for free. The other benefit of college is networking with people who might remember you enough to help you get a job in the future. For many it also increases their exposure to different thought, which is valuable in today’s society. I feel like something should replace college on the social aspects too, as it’s a hugely inefficient system for it right now.

by ptero 6y ago

jimbob45 6y ago

I was only tolerable as a 9th grader because of the ladder of chaos that was middle school. While I may not have learned much in the way of academics, I grew immeasurably socially.

jjcon 6y ago

I think it’s easy to forget how hard learning is after you have already mastered something. You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8. If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers.

MiroF 6y ago
> You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8. Very much depends on the school district. In many urban school districts, it's better than being in the house, but its hardly enriching.
irishcoffee 6y ago
You learn how to read and you learn basic math. That’s really it from a useful educational standpoint. Happy to debate it.
- nradov 6y ago
  My children have learned far more than reading and basic math in their K-8 schools. This is an obvious fact and not open for debate. Distance learning is not an acceptable replacement. It's time to immediately reopen all primary schools. Education is essential and worth the risk.
  - FreeFull 6y ago
    Are you ready to take responsibility for all the people that would either die or have their health damaged by the virus? Including probably a significant number of teachers, parents, and even a few children?
  - dev_tty01 6y ago
    You have decided it is worth the risk to your family in your judgement. Fine. But to which risk are you referring? The risk to your children? How about the risks to the teachers? How about the other staff? How about the child's grandparents? How about the other children in the classroom and their families? You are asking a large number of people to take considerable risk because you have decided classroom education RIGHT NOW is "worth the risk." Nobody is suggesting the end of classroom education. The question is whether doing the best we can with distance learning for a time and postponement of classroom eduction until better treatments and/or vaccines come on line is a better choice. It is really not a big sacrifice to ensure the safety of about 4 million teachers and maybe another million or two staff persons. Assuming the death rate is optimistically only 0.2%, that is about 12,000 teachers and staff deaths. Ignoring the thousands of other deaths originating from these cases, are you really saying that 12,000 deaths is a realistic price to pay so your child can go back into the classroom NOW rather than next year? Really? The fact that this would be a very bad choice seems an "obvious fact and not open for debate."
    - mikecoles 6y ago
      Nice way to intentionally misinterpret the stats Unless most of your teachers are living in nursing homes, your numbers are way off.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      GP isn’t proposing that only their child attend school. Instead, it’s an entire generation of children who will benefit from the delta of an extra in-person year of instruction. Similarly, whatever factor you apply to count deaths, you can only count deaths above the baseline when considering the change in school policy. It’s quite far from your side of “obvious fact and not open for debate”, IMO.
melq 6y ago
>If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers. I'm not sure this is true. From my own experience studying math, I often heard people remark upon how hard it must be and how only a small subset of people would ever be able to understand the concepts in a graduate level math course. I don't agree with this at all. In my opinion, the reality is that learning is incremental, and everything new builds upon something that you've previously learned (hopefully). This is particularly true with math. I don't think that I had to work any harder to learn linear algebra in undergrad than I did to learn differential calc in highschool. I think the delta in difficulty between geometry and algebra, pre-calc and calc 1, diff eq and real analysis, is basically the same. But that is only true if you have a solid understanding of whatever came before. This is of course a minor nitpick with your last point, because I agree with your overall point that k-8 learning is important. I think it's important precisely because of the reasons I mentioned before: you need to have a strong foundation in 'last years' concepts if you are going to succeed in learning this years.
barry-cotter 6y ago
K-8 is primary school, right? Its value is mostly not in education. If it was it would look very different. Mastery based learning would be the norm, not unknown. Spaced repetition would be incorporated everywhere so what was taught was retained. There would be no social advancement. The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old. If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.
- otoburb 6y ago
  I am just a parent of two K-8 children so not entirely up to speed on the latest theory and practice of ZPD. But when I first read about this before my first was born I understood ZPD to be "empathetic tutoring" which seems increasingly difficult to execute correctly when student:teacher ratios exceed 4:1, and ideally 1-1 for maximum benefit. ZPD works, but nobody has been able to implement this at-scale, let alone in the K-8 public school system.

threatofrain 6y ago

K-8 is when you get formally or informally put in a track for math, and most probably in an enduring way.

Olreich 6y ago
That’s a failing of the education system, not a victory. Math education is absolutely terrible. There’s no building of foundations and fundamental relationships to provide people with easy learning. It only gets worse further up the chain. It took 3Blue1Brown to make the connection for me between i, the unit circle, and e. They seem fundamentally linked, but no math education ever put them into the same sentence other than to give a few rote examples of famous equations. Maybe my education was just garbage, but none of the stuff in k-6 was built upon. They threw out my foundation in numbers and handed me a list of valid rules in the form of equations and identities. If you do the quadratic formula, you get the roots. Cos^2 + sin^2 = tan, etc. I was on the track to math, sure. But that’s because I was good at memorizing useless trivia and utilizing it on tests, not because I was good at math. Same goes for most of my classes. There was one dude that actually got it, but he definitely didn’t get it from our teachers.

Olreich 6y ago

College education is just as often useless as well. All that college education money hasn’t gone to teaching staff or classrooms or lecture halls. It’s going to administrative buildings, sports complexes, and dorms. The teaching at colleges has stayed largely the same as it ever has been, with few of the professors actually passionate about transferring the knowledge to the next set of students. You only get a great professor every once in a great while, most of the rest are unintelligible or disinterested. I’m not willing to pay 150k to get one great educator maybe. With Wikipedia, YouTube science communicators, and videos of actually great lecturers across the years, the knowledge portion of college education is covered for free. The other benefit of college is networking with people who might remember you enough to help you get a job in the future. For many it also increases their exposure to different thought, which is valuable in today’s society. I feel like something should replace college on the social aspects too, as it’s a hugely inefficient system for it right now.