5 ms·

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 curr

by 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.
      - dev_tty01 6y ago
        I quoted “obvious fact and not open for debate” from the previous note. Sarcasm on my part. My point is that this is NOT black and white and the net benefit of reopening is NOT an "obvious fact."
  - irishcoffee 6y ago
    > This is an obvious fact and not open for debate. Not with that attitude, nope sure isn’t. It is up for debate. I know for a fact you’re wrong. I was educated outside of any schooling system until the 9th grade. I learned basic math and was a voracious reader. I walked into 9th grade without missing a beat.
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.

by jjcon 6y ago

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.
    - dev_tty01 6y ago
      I quoted “obvious fact and not open for debate” from the previous note. Sarcasm on my part. My point is that this is NOT black and white and the net benefit of reopening is NOT an "obvious fact."
- irishcoffee 6y ago
  > This is an obvious fact and not open for debate. Not with that attitude, nope sure isn’t. It is up for debate. I know for a fact you’re wrong. I was educated outside of any schooling system until the 9th grade. I learned basic math and was a voracious reader. I walked into 9th grade without missing a beat.

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.