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All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Adults are barely able to make it through a day of Zoom meetings without feeling

All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Adults are barely able to make it through a day of Zoom meetings without feeling drained, how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. A 5 year old does not have these skills, and will obviously act out as they have no other mechanism of dealing with it. Also, who said that this article has to have a point? The writer never claims to propose a solution, she is simply writing out her emotions for others to hear. Assuming she has been largely isolating, is it all that weird that she would talk about her experiences online?

MisterBastahrd 6y ago
I have two 7 year olds and a 9 year old. They are taught a remote curriculum, supplemented by homework in the form of online quizzes that reward correct answer with turns at a video game. They LOVE doing this homework, which is every bit as rigorous as the homework done via paper sheets, because it rewards them for getting their answers right in a way that a number at the top of a page never would. And they get their homework done quicker since procrastinating just keeps them from playing the games.
- somethoughts 6y ago
  Just out of curiosity what is the online quiz app? Is it Prodigy (www.prodigygame.com)?
  - MisterBastahrd 6y ago
    Prodigy is one of them. My 9 year old loves it because she gets to use her homework answers to get her flair for her character in the game.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  This is interesting. I’ve been using the “fluent forever” method to learn a second language and one of the things it really stresses is the importance of immediate feedback. It makes perfect sense - it’s much easier to understand your mistake and correct it in the moment. But I’d never thought about it in the context of homework. It almost seems silly that we expect kids to wait a full 24 hours or more to find out whether they’ve done a math problem correctly or not.
ghaff 6y ago
I certainly can't really deal with all-day conferences over video. I dip in and out. And I would observe that what many tech events are doing is spreading things out over more days with shorter windows per day. If a one-week workshop at MIT felt it needed to transition to shorter sessions over 3 weeks for video, that just might say something about online learning for kids.
loxs 6y ago
I don't think Zoom is the problem. It's just as bad in the classroom. The only difference is that in the classroom there is a century old system in place, designed and tested to crush children's emotions and frustrations and also designed to transform them into obedient tax cows. And in the classroom you are not witness to this process.
vkou 6y ago
> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? The same way that you expect a kid to sit more-or-less still, and not-too-disruptively in a classroom with 29 other children for 6 hours a day. When they, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, can't, we diagnose them with ADHD and give them a Ritalin patch. I get it. Remote learning isn't great. It's worse than in-person learning, which isn't a high bar to begin with. Unfortunately, in-person learning currently carries with it the risk of death and disability to teachers. We could have taken some steps to deal with that risk, three months ago (Smaller classes, isolating students from teachers, training glorified babysitters who aren't over the age of 50 to mind classes during non-instruction time, etc), but it seems that all of our leaders and planners were convinced that this COVID thing would blow over by August.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
itronitron 6y ago
I pulled my teenagers out of 'classroom' oriented school so that they can just do self-paced online courses instead of risking a repeat of the disaster from last semester when their school tried to do 'distance' learning with zoom meetings. I can't imagine a five year old doing well with this.
WalterBright 6y ago
> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.
- bdamm 6y ago
  Modern Sesame Street is a train wreck compared to the Sesame Street of the '80s and '90s. It's actually a statement about how far down contemporary culture has gone. Seems to be mostly unhinged screaming these days.
  - zanny 6y ago
    All that old material isn't gone. PBS might not be streaming all ~4k episodes of the show but the Internet has made any media accessible if you know where to look. I'm surprised there isn't more data on what educational media is actually good or not. Because then we could just use that, because there are already millions of hours of this stuff made. Largely its because the profit is in making more of it, not making available all that which came before.
  - drevil-v2 6y ago
    And it is concerning how much woke ideology is packed into SS these days. It's like they are programming children with a new social operating system.
grahamburger 6y ago
It would be weird to expect young children to sit in long Zoom meetings. Are people actually doing that? I have 3 kids, the oldest two are elementary-school age. So far virtually none of their online learning has been video conference based. The younger one would sometimes do Zoom calls with his pre-k class at the end of last year, but it was just a few minutes to see his friends and sing some songs, not really about trying to learn academically. Both of them have online based activities assigned by their teachers, though. They are self-paced, somewhat gamified learning platforms (kind of like, but not actually, ABCMouse.) It's at most 1 hour a day for the younger one and maybe 2 for the older one, including 20-30 minutes of reading time. This year they are both doing in person classes two days a week and the rest from home, but again no Zoom meetings. The teachers are teaching the other half of the class on the other two days so couldn't really do in-person stuff anyway.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Our elementary school is 5 hours of Webex meetings daily. There are breaks scattered in between, but it is grueling. My 4th grader can barely manage it, but my 1st grader can’t sit still that long. Edit: Why is something like this downvoted? I didn’t state anything other than my relevant direct experience.
- flavmartins 6y ago
  Same here. Teacher has been recording a daily 7-10 minute lesson video for some of their core subjects. Then some assignment of online math, science, writing. Then one of the popular reading sites. The video calls have all been once per week for 30-45 minutes but mostly social for the kids to interact with each other. Not sure who really expects 5 hours of video.
- mordymoop 6y ago
  In the spring, my five year old, who I would call unusually patient for his age, would sometimes break down crying and beg the teacher to let him leave the meeting. One thing that I’m not seeing discussed much is that these meetings are objectively a dehumanizing waste of the children’s time. Ten minutes to take roll, while everyone just sits there? If someone did something this pointless in a meeting of adults, they would be reprimanded.
mrighele 6y ago
> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? I'm sure any parent will say that it is impossible, and the issue is not the screen, but sitting still. I am in fact surprised that the teachers even asked to make video calls at that age. I don't know about USA preschools but here 5 years olds don't study sitting on a desk all day long, so I don't know how they can expect a kid to do that at home. When my daughter (preschool age) had to stay home because of the virus, the teachers started to send us videos of activities to do at home, but those were for the parents, not for her.
- actfrench 6y ago
  A lot of US kids are forced to sit still whether they're in front of a screen or in a physical classroom. Typically it's better in preschool, but many kindergarteners only get 20 minutes a day to play if that. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/learning/do-kids-need-recess.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/learning/do-kids-need-rec...
  - Shared404 6y ago
    At an elementary school near me they would only get to do recess on Fridays, and that's assuming they behaved.
    - war1025 6y ago
      The more I hear about public schools the more I understand the outrage against public education.
      - Shared404 6y ago
        My above comment isn't even the worst thing I noticed in the last year or two before I graduated HS. (I went to a small school, with K to 12 on the same campus). I ran tech for the big "Christmas Program", which consisted of "song and dance" (loosely speaking) from kids aged pre-K to second grade. It was fairly nice, because I got to skip class. What was less nice, was hearing a pre-K teacher yell "Why did you do that!?! Doing that is going to ruin the program for your grandparents, after they go through all the trouble to come see you.", in response to a child stumbling on a line. Public education is necessary, but many implementations are flawed. Rereading this, It sounds like something you'd see on r/thathappened. I wish it were fake.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? And on top of this, we should not be asking “can they” but instead “should they” have this kind of life.
actfrench 6y ago
I don't think it's so much screens themselves, but the way they are used. New research actually suggests touch screens might improve focus in toddlers. https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/toddlers-who-use-touchscreens-show-attention-differences/ https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/toddlers-who-use-touchs... New media has always met with resistance. Books were once considered poisonous trash. Now they're seen as healthy and educational. "In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, written in 360 BCE, Socrates warned that reliance on the written word would weaken individuals’ memory, and remove from them the responsibility of rememberin" https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-always-been-dangerous https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...
codefreakxff 6y ago
Just to clarify, a "toddler" is 1-3 years old. So a 5 year old is not at all "almost a toddler". "A 5 year old does not have these skills" They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range. https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-control https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-cont... "Who said this article has to have a point?" Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. If this was the author's personal blog I would not be saying anything. But this article sits next to subjects like: - Can a Protest Movement Topple Netanyahu? - Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - Our Students Are Depending on Us, teaching through Covid-19
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  > Just to clarify, a "toddler" is 1-3 years old. So a 5 year old is not at all "almost a toddler". Different kids develop differently. > They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range. A large amount of adults don't have these skills developed. > Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. This point I agree with. At the same time, I believe purely emotional ranting pieces have a place on the web too.
- pm24601 6y ago
  > They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range. Lol. Because you think they should? Love the one-size fits all statement - not. As soon as someone has 2+ kids, they realize how ludicrous that statement is. Better yet go talk to a kindergarten teacher - I don't know how they handle kids that age that are not even theirs
swayvil 6y ago
God, ZOOM sucks so hard. I can't stand to look at that shit.
gautamdivgi 6y ago
All elementary school is glorified day care. Born in 76 in India(yes, I'm getting old) - but elementary school was 2.5 hours with a 1/2 hour break. I turned out ok - didn't miss out on "educational opportunity".
throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
Feelings are for mere humans, not 100x rockstars with a little blood in their red bull system.
chadash 6y ago
> The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. I'd go a step further and say that many--if not most--adults can't do this at all. I would go back to college any day, where classes are a few hours a day and I set my own schedule, but personally can't imagine that I'd do well if you put me back in high school (where i did fairly well academically), with a rigid schedule of back-to-back classes. If you told me that I have to do it again, but on zoom this time... I can't even fathom what kind of punishment that would be.
dmerks 6y ago
I was a special education teacher for a decade in both private and public settings. I worked with children of all school ages who had difficulties keeping up. I'm also a parent. A thought: students are expected to learn to function together in classroom settings over the course of their first few years in school. It's a gradual and often tedious process for everyone involved. How many children say they like sitting in class? It's a heavily researched subject. Some students never really get the hang of it. Other students learn to keep their place, but have trouble following the pace, and compensate otherwise. Or don't. Suddenly requiring teachers and children to respectively teach and learn under vastly different circumstances, EG teleconferencing from home with family around, appears a bit unrealistic. Glhf
an_opabinia 6y ago
> All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Everyone knows how fussy 5 year olds are, these readers aren't that stupid. The thing people usually get wrong is how fussy 6-16 year olds are. That 16 year olds actually don't have that much emotional maturity or know that much practical stuff either, even with 10 more years of life and school. The biggest crisis isn't parents with young children. It's people realizing how little their teenage kids know and how poorly those teenagers are adjusting.
- donw 6y ago
  I'd say that problem comes in two parts. One is... maybe the right way to describe it is hormones and experience? Like, the first time you fall in love as a teenager, it's intense. You literally have never felt that way about another person, ever. And, sure, from a cognitive development perspective, you're an adult, you just don't yet have the experience to deal with it. That's true for a lot of life, and well beyond being a teenager. As a teenager, you are, cognitively, a newly-minted adult. You don't know where you fit in the world, much less where you are going, and you're at the beginning stages of sorting out who you want to be. And sure, adults can give you advice, but only you can go through the process of figuring out who you are. You are also, at the same time, both absolutely confident and totally insecure. It's rough, full stop. My teenage years were hell on my parents. This is compounded by American culture and education thoroughly insulating kids -- well into young adulthood! -- from developing emotional maturity or learning to accept responsibility. That's all about upbringing, by the way. I have met teenagers that I would rank as more mature than a large number of people in their early thirties. It's totally possible, and from what I have seen, easier -- we just don't do it. Americans also do nothing, or at least nothing effective, to equip kids with critical life-skills: financial management, personal fitness, nutrition, martial arts, negotiation, the list goes on. The only thing we prepare them for is to "go to college". That has to change.
fatherof2 6y ago
I have 2 kids. One is 4 and the other is 8. I agree that most 5 years probably cannot sit through 30 minutes of a zoom meeting. When the lockdowns first in started in March, my 4 year old, who was 3 at the time, could barely last 15 minutes before wandering off. She has gotten better since then. She can now last 45 minutes online with her teacher, but I don’t think it’s the norm. My wife still needs to sit with her to make sure she focuses on the teacher. I think that a lot of these parents that have young children that cannot focus online should be looking on building a small co-op for learning. Partner with 2 or 3 other trusted families and hire a teacher or share responsibilities in teaching the kids. Covid is dangerous taking some risk should be considered.
- kazen44 6y ago
  I wonder how people did this before us? pandemics have happened before and while education certainl wasn't universal as it is now, it still happened?
easytiger 6y ago
HN has a lot of users who will say and do anything to denigrate in person attendee workplaces
jdietrich 6y ago
>All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Your comment makes me think that you've never interacted with an East Asian 5 year old. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; long before they take their first steps, they've started decoding the incentive structures around them. Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they act like bored inmates. That behaviour isn't innate, it's a consequence of the environment we've created for children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_du-wUJPFWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_du-wUJPFWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU
- Fezzik 6y ago
  Or French (https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-are-french-children-better-behaved-1.2231131?mode=amp https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-are-fre...). Or German, or Spanish (from first hand experience). The idea that every fit a child has is a real existential crisis is uniquely American as far as I can tell. Having lived in both Spain and Germany, in native homes with children... parents there “train” their children as mini-adults far better than parents do stateside. I wish I could pinpoint exactly why, but I can’t, even though it is obvious if you travel even a slight amount.
  - piva00 6y ago
    At least here in Sweden I can see parents treating their kids much more like people than just some annoyance that needs to be told what to do or want. It's on the basic day-to-day interactions, kids asking for something in the grocery store or in a restaurant and having a dialogue why they want it and why they can or cannot have it right now, in a way you'd tell another adult (with reservations about vocabulary and complexity of the message). There is a much more trusting relationship between parent and child from what I see, not one of ownership or overprotection. Kids are people and are treated and talked to like that regarding their needs, desires, etc.
    - kazen44 6y ago
m0zg 6y ago
5 year old is not "education" though. Everything before high school is glorified childcare, and it should be treated as such. Let kids be kids. They don't have to be "2 years ahead" just so their parents could beat their own chest, unless they're staggeringly and obviously gifted. That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainwreck, because we all know that's exactly what it's going to be. Well to do folks such as myself will hire private tutors (who, BTW, work just fine through Skype, by virtue of having done it for years). Less well to do folks will suffer the incompetence of our ultra-expensive $13K/pupil-year education system where less than 1/3rd of the expense goes towards teaching. If people in power didn't want it to be a trainwreck, they'd reach out to folks who have been in this business for over a decade and learned at least how not to fuck it up completely. Instead they're trying to duct tape something together with MS Teams it looks like, and each school district is duct taping its own bespoke thing.
- adflux 6y ago
  Learning to read, write, basic arithmetics, communicate with others ... Glorified childcare?
  - m0zg 6y ago
    Kids learn all of that in kindergarten nowadays. The main function of primary ed is to keep kids occupied while their parents are at work. Primary ed will completely fail at that if it goes online.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    I taught kindergarten for five years and am just starting as a secondary school teacher. Primary school is mostly childcare. The only important skills we assume a child who has just finished primary school can do are reading, writing and arithmetic. You can teach a nine year old to read in 40 hours. You can teach a 12 year old the primary Math curriculum in 40 hours. It takes three years to take a child with fluent Chinese who is illiterate to grade level in writing so that’s a hard upper limit on the difficulty of teaching writing. Children learn how to communicate with others just fine in actual childcare, without being in quite so artificial a situation as age ranked classrooms where their primary occupation is pointless busywork. Honestly glorified childcare is too kind to primary school. Glorified childcare until at least age ten would be an improvement and have nugatory effects on long term learning outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.
iceman2654 6y ago
Honest question - Is it the video conferencing technology or the lack of famaliarity with the medium? I've been video coneferencing and working with developers remotely since my early 20s and never felt tired as a result of it. I could see someone who's not used to doing all day finding it a jarring experience. But wouldn't that just discipate in time as the individual adapts? Anyone else feel the same way?
sassycassie 6y ago
exactly what i was thinkin! I can barely stand to work from home. we need interaction with others! children need to be stimulated and sitting in front of a computer screen will def lead to health and mental issues. :-(

MisterBastahrd 6y ago

I have two 7 year olds and a 9 year old. They are taught a remote curriculum, supplemented by homework in the form of online quizzes that reward correct answer with turns at a video game. They LOVE doing this homework, which is every bit as rigorous as the homework done via paper sheets, because it rewards them for getting their answers right in a way that a number at the top of a page never would. And they get their homework done quicker since procrastinating just keeps them from playing the games.

somethoughts 6y ago
Just out of curiosity what is the online quiz app? Is it Prodigy (www.prodigygame.com)?
- MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  Prodigy is one of them. My 9 year old loves it because she gets to use her homework answers to get her flair for her character in the game.
elliekelly 6y ago
This is interesting. I’ve been using the “fluent forever” method to learn a second language and one of the things it really stresses is the importance of immediate feedback. It makes perfect sense - it’s much easier to understand your mistake and correct it in the moment. But I’d never thought about it in the context of homework. It almost seems silly that we expect kids to wait a full 24 hours or more to find out whether they’ve done a math problem correctly or not.

ghaff 6y ago

I certainly can't really deal with all-day conferences over video. I dip in and out. And I would observe that what many tech events are doing is spreading things out over more days with shorter windows per day. If a one-week workshop at MIT felt it needed to transition to shorter sessions over 3 weeks for video, that just might say something about online learning for kids.

loxs 6y ago

I don't think Zoom is the problem. It's just as bad in the classroom. The only difference is that in the classroom there is a century old system in place, designed and tested to crush children's emotions and frustrations and also designed to transform them into obedient tax cows. And in the classroom you are not witness to this process.

vkou 6y ago

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? The same way that you expect a kid to sit more-or-less still, and not-too-disruptively in a classroom with 29 other children for 6 hours a day. When they, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, can't, we diagnose them with ADHD and give them a Ritalin patch. I get it. Remote learning isn't great. It's worse than in-person learning, which isn't a high bar to begin with. Unfortunately, in-person learning currently carries with it the risk of death and disability to teachers. We could have taken some steps to deal with that risk, three months ago (Smaller classes, isolating students from teachers, training glorified babysitters who aren't over the age of 50 to mind classes during non-instruction time, etc), but it seems that all of our leaders and planners were convinced that this COVID thing would blow over by August.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

itronitron 6y ago

I pulled my teenagers out of 'classroom' oriented school so that they can just do self-paced online courses instead of risking a repeat of the disaster from last semester when their school tried to do 'distance' learning with zoom meetings. I can't imagine a five year old doing well with this.

WalterBright 6y ago

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.

bdamm 6y ago
Modern Sesame Street is a train wreck compared to the Sesame Street of the '80s and '90s. It's actually a statement about how far down contemporary culture has gone. Seems to be mostly unhinged screaming these days.
- zanny 6y ago
  All that old material isn't gone. PBS might not be streaming all ~4k episodes of the show but the Internet has made any media accessible if you know where to look. I'm surprised there isn't more data on what educational media is actually good or not. Because then we could just use that, because there are already millions of hours of this stuff made. Largely its because the profit is in making more of it, not making available all that which came before.
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  And it is concerning how much woke ideology is packed into SS these days. It's like they are programming children with a new social operating system.

grahamburger 6y ago

It would be weird to expect young children to sit in long Zoom meetings. Are people actually doing that? I have 3 kids, the oldest two are elementary-school age. So far virtually none of their online learning has been video conference based. The younger one would sometimes do Zoom calls with his pre-k class at the end of last year, but it was just a few minutes to see his friends and sing some songs, not really about trying to learn academically. Both of them have online based activities assigned by their teachers, though. They are self-paced, somewhat gamified learning platforms (kind of like, but not actually, ABCMouse.) It's at most 1 hour a day for the younger one and maybe 2 for the older one, including 20-30 minutes of reading time. This year they are both doing in person classes two days a week and the rest from home, but again no Zoom meetings. The teachers are teaching the other half of the class on the other two days so couldn't really do in-person stuff anyway.

garmaine 6y ago
Our elementary school is 5 hours of Webex meetings daily. There are breaks scattered in between, but it is grueling. My 4th grader can barely manage it, but my 1st grader can’t sit still that long. Edit: Why is something like this downvoted? I didn’t state anything other than my relevant direct experience.
flavmartins 6y ago
Same here. Teacher has been recording a daily 7-10 minute lesson video for some of their core subjects. Then some assignment of online math, science, writing. Then one of the popular reading sites. The video calls have all been once per week for 30-45 minutes but mostly social for the kids to interact with each other. Not sure who really expects 5 hours of video.
mordymoop 6y ago
In the spring, my five year old, who I would call unusually patient for his age, would sometimes break down crying and beg the teacher to let him leave the meeting. One thing that I’m not seeing discussed much is that these meetings are objectively a dehumanizing waste of the children’s time. Ten minutes to take roll, while everyone just sits there? If someone did something this pointless in a meeting of adults, they would be reprimanded.

mrighele 6y ago

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? I'm sure any parent will say that it is impossible, and the issue is not the screen, but sitting still. I am in fact surprised that the teachers even asked to make video calls at that age. I don't know about USA preschools but here 5 years olds don't study sitting on a desk all day long, so I don't know how they can expect a kid to do that at home. When my daughter (preschool age) had to stay home because of the virus, the teachers started to send us videos of activities to do at home, but those were for the parents, not for her.

actfrench 6y ago
A lot of US kids are forced to sit still whether they're in front of a screen or in a physical classroom. Typically it's better in preschool, but many kindergarteners only get 20 minutes a day to play if that. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/learning/do-kids-need-recess.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/learning/do-kids-need-rec...
- Shared404 6y ago
  At an elementary school near me they would only get to do recess on Fridays, and that's assuming they behaved.
  - war1025 6y ago
    The more I hear about public schools the more I understand the outrage against public education.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      My above comment isn't even the worst thing I noticed in the last year or two before I graduated HS. (I went to a small school, with K to 12 on the same campus). I ran tech for the big "Christmas Program", which consisted of "song and dance" (loosely speaking) from kids aged pre-K to second grade. It was fairly nice, because I got to skip class. What was less nice, was hearing a pre-K teacher yell "Why did you do that!?! Doing that is going to ruin the program for your grandparents, after they go through all the trouble to come see you.", in response to a child stumbling on a line. Public education is necessary, but many implementations are flawed. Rereading this, It sounds like something you'd see on r/thathappened. I wish it were fake.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen? And on top of this, we should not be asking “can they” but instead “should they” have this kind of life.

actfrench 6y ago

I don't think it's so much screens themselves, but the way they are used. New research actually suggests touch screens might improve focus in toddlers. https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/toddlers-who-use-touchscreens-show-attention-differences/ https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/toddlers-who-use-touchs... New media has always met with resistance. Books were once considered poisonous trash. Now they're seen as healthy and educational. "In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, written in 360 BCE, Socrates warned that reliance on the written word would weaken individuals’ memory, and remove from them the responsibility of rememberin" https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-always-been-dangerous https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...

codefreakxff 6y ago

Just to clarify, a "toddler" is 1-3 years old. So a 5 year old is not at all "almost a toddler". "A 5 year old does not have these skills" They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range. https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-control https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-cont... "Who said this article has to have a point?" Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. If this was the author's personal blog I would not be saying anything. But this article sits next to subjects like: - Can a Protest Movement Topple Netanyahu? - Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - Our Students Are Depending on Us, teaching through Covid-19

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
> Just to clarify, a "toddler" is 1-3 years old. So a 5 year old is not at all "almost a toddler". Different kids develop differently. > They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range. A large amount of adults don't have these skills developed. > Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. This point I agree with. At the same time, I believe purely emotional ranting pieces have a place on the web too.
pm24601 6y ago
> They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range. Lol. Because you think they should? Love the one-size fits all statement - not. As soon as someone has 2+ kids, they realize how ludicrous that statement is. Better yet go talk to a kindergarten teacher - I don't know how they handle kids that age that are not even theirs

swayvil 6y ago

God, ZOOM sucks so hard. I can't stand to look at that shit.

gautamdivgi 6y ago

All elementary school is glorified day care. Born in 76 in India(yes, I'm getting old) - but elementary school was 2.5 hours with a 1/2 hour break. I turned out ok - didn't miss out on "educational opportunity".

throwaw4y-plate 6y ago

Feelings are for mere humans, not 100x rockstars with a little blood in their red bull system.

chadash 6y ago

> The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. I'd go a step further and say that many--if not most--adults can't do this at all. I would go back to college any day, where classes are a few hours a day and I set my own schedule, but personally can't imagine that I'd do well if you put me back in high school (where i did fairly well academically), with a rigid schedule of back-to-back classes. If you told me that I have to do it again, but on zoom this time... I can't even fathom what kind of punishment that would be.

dmerks 6y ago

I was a special education teacher for a decade in both private and public settings. I worked with children of all school ages who had difficulties keeping up. I'm also a parent. A thought: students are expected to learn to function together in classroom settings over the course of their first few years in school. It's a gradual and often tedious process for everyone involved. How many children say they like sitting in class? It's a heavily researched subject. Some students never really get the hang of it. Other students learn to keep their place, but have trouble following the pace, and compensate otherwise. Or don't. Suddenly requiring teachers and children to respectively teach and learn under vastly different circumstances, EG teleconferencing from home with family around, appears a bit unrealistic. Glhf

an_opabinia 6y ago

> All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Everyone knows how fussy 5 year olds are, these readers aren't that stupid. The thing people usually get wrong is how fussy 6-16 year olds are. That 16 year olds actually don't have that much emotional maturity or know that much practical stuff either, even with 10 more years of life and school. The biggest crisis isn't parents with young children. It's people realizing how little their teenage kids know and how poorly those teenagers are adjusting.

donw 6y ago
I'd say that problem comes in two parts. One is... maybe the right way to describe it is hormones and experience? Like, the first time you fall in love as a teenager, it's intense. You literally have never felt that way about another person, ever. And, sure, from a cognitive development perspective, you're an adult, you just don't yet have the experience to deal with it. That's true for a lot of life, and well beyond being a teenager. As a teenager, you are, cognitively, a newly-minted adult. You don't know where you fit in the world, much less where you are going, and you're at the beginning stages of sorting out who you want to be. And sure, adults can give you advice, but only you can go through the process of figuring out who you are. You are also, at the same time, both absolutely confident and totally insecure. It's rough, full stop. My teenage years were hell on my parents. This is compounded by American culture and education thoroughly insulating kids -- well into young adulthood! -- from developing emotional maturity or learning to accept responsibility. That's all about upbringing, by the way. I have met teenagers that I would rank as more mature than a large number of people in their early thirties. It's totally possible, and from what I have seen, easier -- we just don't do it. Americans also do nothing, or at least nothing effective, to equip kids with critical life-skills: financial management, personal fitness, nutrition, martial arts, negotiation, the list goes on. The only thing we prepare them for is to "go to college". That has to change.

fatherof2 6y ago

I have 2 kids. One is 4 and the other is 8. I agree that most 5 years probably cannot sit through 30 minutes of a zoom meeting. When the lockdowns first in started in March, my 4 year old, who was 3 at the time, could barely last 15 minutes before wandering off. She has gotten better since then. She can now last 45 minutes online with her teacher, but I don’t think it’s the norm. My wife still needs to sit with her to make sure she focuses on the teacher. I think that a lot of these parents that have young children that cannot focus online should be looking on building a small co-op for learning. Partner with 2 or 3 other trusted families and hire a teacher or share responsibilities in teaching the kids. Covid is dangerous taking some risk should be considered.

kazen44 6y ago
I wonder how people did this before us? pandemics have happened before and while education certainl wasn't universal as it is now, it still happened?

easytiger 6y ago

HN has a lot of users who will say and do anything to denigrate in person attendee workplaces

jdietrich 6y ago

>All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Your comment makes me think that you've never interacted with an East Asian 5 year old. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; long before they take their first steps, they've started decoding the incentive structures around them. Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they act like bored inmates. That behaviour isn't innate, it's a consequence of the environment we've created for children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_du-wUJPFWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_du-wUJPFWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU

Fezzik 6y ago
Or French (https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-are-french-children-better-behaved-1.2231131?mode=amp https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-are-fre...). Or German, or Spanish (from first hand experience). The idea that every fit a child has is a real existential crisis is uniquely American as far as I can tell. Having lived in both Spain and Germany, in native homes with children... parents there “train” their children as mini-adults far better than parents do stateside. I wish I could pinpoint exactly why, but I can’t, even though it is obvious if you travel even a slight amount.
- piva00 6y ago
  At least here in Sweden I can see parents treating their kids much more like people than just some annoyance that needs to be told what to do or want. It's on the basic day-to-day interactions, kids asking for something in the grocery store or in a restaurant and having a dialogue why they want it and why they can or cannot have it right now, in a way you'd tell another adult (with reservations about vocabulary and complexity of the message). There is a much more trusting relationship between parent and child from what I see, not one of ownership or overprotection. Kids are people and are treated and talked to like that regarding their needs, desires, etc.
  - kazen44 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

5 year old is not "education" though. Everything before high school is glorified childcare, and it should be treated as such. Let kids be kids. They don't have to be "2 years ahead" just so their parents could beat their own chest, unless they're staggeringly and obviously gifted. That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainwreck, because we all know that's exactly what it's going to be. Well to do folks such as myself will hire private tutors (who, BTW, work just fine through Skype, by virtue of having done it for years). Less well to do folks will suffer the incompetence of our ultra-expensive $13K/pupil-year education system where less than 1/3rd of the expense goes towards teaching. If people in power didn't want it to be a trainwreck, they'd reach out to folks who have been in this business for over a decade and learned at least how not to fuck it up completely. Instead they're trying to duct tape something together with MS Teams it looks like, and each school district is duct taping its own bespoke thing.

adflux 6y ago
Learning to read, write, basic arithmetics, communicate with others ... Glorified childcare?
- m0zg 6y ago
  Kids learn all of that in kindergarten nowadays. The main function of primary ed is to keep kids occupied while their parents are at work. Primary ed will completely fail at that if it goes online.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  I taught kindergarten for five years and am just starting as a secondary school teacher. Primary school is mostly childcare. The only important skills we assume a child who has just finished primary school can do are reading, writing and arithmetic. You can teach a nine year old to read in 40 hours. You can teach a 12 year old the primary Math curriculum in 40 hours. It takes three years to take a child with fluent Chinese who is illiterate to grade level in writing so that’s a hard upper limit on the difficulty of teaching writing. Children learn how to communicate with others just fine in actual childcare, without being in quite so artificial a situation as age ranked classrooms where their primary occupation is pointless busywork. Honestly glorified childcare is too kind to primary school. Glorified childcare until at least age ten would be an improvement and have nugatory effects on long term learning outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.

iceman2654 6y ago

Honest question - Is it the video conferencing technology or the lack of famaliarity with the medium? I've been video coneferencing and working with developers remotely since my early 20s and never felt tired as a result of it. I could see someone who's not used to doing all day finding it a jarring experience. But wouldn't that just discipate in time as the individual adapts? Anyone else feel the same way?

sassycassie 6y ago

exactly what i was thinkin! I can barely stand to work from home. we need interaction with others! children need to be stimulated and sitting in front of a computer screen will def lead to health and mental issues. :-(