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My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and has been back at (virtual) teaching now for 2 weeks. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s pretty mind blowing how lit

by dchuk 6y ago

My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and has been back at (virtual) teaching now for 2 weeks. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. It’s not exactly like this snuck up on them, we’ve been locked down for 6 months now. You’d think they’d have decided on common software platforms, provided some training for the teachers, something. Luckily, my wife is fairly tech savvy so is hanging in there, but even just general things like how to have an effective virtual planning meeting is just not something she’s really ever had to do. So I’ve been trying to help her and her coworkers, like recording a half hour video where I just explained all the different capabilities of Zoom, and another where I explained Trello and Google slides. Just sad how the school administration’s plan boiled down to burying their head in the sand and hoping it would all go away. Really bolsters the narrative that they just don’t care about the teachers.

seibelj 6y ago
> they just don’t care about teachers I think you mean, they don’t care about students? Because that’s truly who is hurt here.
- briefcomment 6y ago
  It seems like they're focused on politics, since that's what gets them paid. If school choice comes around, they'll probably change their priorities.
- dchuk 6y ago
  I mean, for every 20-30 kids, there’s also an adult trying to educate them. Everyone’s fucked in the situation, and all you need to do is follow the money to understand the motivations. For example, my wife has to take real time attendance on a zoom call every morning in a 30 minute window, when everything else can be asynchronous. Why? Because schools are funded by attendance of the students, and they couldn’t be bothered to think of an alternative way to handle things.
  - steverb 6y ago
    Not that your wife can do anything about it, but... My daughter has been doing online school for two years now with a school system that has been online only for about 10 years. Their hack was to give the kids one assignment per day. A missed assignment = 1 absence. An assignment turned in a day late = 1 tardy. The teachers post the weeks assignments on weekend (before Monday morning) and it's up to the kids to determine when/how they will get them done (which is why she attends this school, as it gives her a lot of flexibility to do the other things she is interested in).
  - ev1 6y ago
    > my wife has to take real time attendance on a zoom call every morning in a 30 minute window Holy crap this is an incredibly stupid thing to be forced to do.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  > > they just don’t care about teachers > I think you mean, they don’t care about students? Because that’s truly who is hurt here. It is true in some transitive sense that the people making these decisions don't care about students, but insisting on that phrasing seems either hostile to, or at least minimising of the importance of and impact on, teachers. The school or district administration's role is to care for the students, yes, but (at least in the classroom) they do that indirectly, by choosing, training, and equipping skilled and qualified teachers. An administration who is showing contempt for its teachers is thus, indirectly, showing contempt for its students; but it's directly showing contempt for its teachers, and cutting them out of the story says that the harm they experience is not important. Teachers already are, like so many essential workers, expected to do their job endlessly without any commensurate reward; what is the point of denying the harm (for example, by saying or implying that they aren't truly hurt) that is done to them when they are not given even the basic tools to translate their passion for teaching and care for their students into commensurate results? (I would also be opposed to someone responding to claims of harm to the students by saying "why not focus on the teachers?—they're the ones who are truly hurt." There's no monopoly on suffering; we can acknowledge one group's suffering without pretending that they're the only ones.)
  - xigency 6y ago
    I don’t think you have to go that deep. We can simply say they don’t care at all. If we’re hair picking students vs. teachers then it is likely political distinction.
- taneq 6y ago
  Can't it be both? I think it's both.
- peterwwillis 6y ago
  The teachers will work themselves into an early grave just to help the kids. Nobody's doing that for teachers. Teachers are more at risk of actually dying when in-person learning is forced on them as some school districts have done. And they have their livelihood to think about (many live a little more than paycheck to paycheck). Comparatively, the kids aren't dying, they don't have bills to pay, they don't work overtime. Their parents may even be able to pull them from school, or homeschool. Worst case they might be held back a year. The students will survive this, but the teachers literally might not.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    hundereds of people a weel in the US die driving, many of them going to and from work.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      Hundreds of working people also die from floods, too. I'm not sure why that's relevant here, though. Are you against traffic laws and flood control? Will not protecting teachers from covid somehow keep them from getting in traffic accidents? I suspect the opposite is true.
      - iso1631 6y ago
        The point is we accept a certain level of risk in going to work.
        peterwwillis 6y ago
        The point you've just tried to make is that it's fine to force teachers to risk death in a classroom, because they might also get hit by a car driving into work? You need to work on your rhetoric.
        iso1631 6y ago
        We force people to risk death driving to work, why is covid different?
chrisgd 6y ago
Exactly. My 8 year old is online and he has at least 8 apps he is responsible for checking or turning in work. And none of them talk to each other but clearly the district signed up for a bunch of different things
deevus 6y ago
My partner graduated as a primary school teacher at the end of last year, and this pandemic bs has caused her to not have a single day of work since March or April. Casual days were just starting to pick up but after lockdown there has been no casual work at all.
darkerside 6y ago
Never assume malice where incompetence would suffice. I've found it to be generally true that when people don't know how to solve a problem, they will ignore it. This would have been a great time to bring in consultants on remote work. A nationally organized program would have been ideal so you could benefit from scale in doing sessions, and avoid patchwork solutions. Too bad our DoE is completely dysfunctional, led by a person who likely prefers it not to exist, a pattern for this administration.
- briefcomment 6y ago
  I think it can be a mixture of both. People who don't have the drive, goodwill, and skills (i.e. incompetance) to take on extra work will sometimes willfully ignore problems (i.e. malice). This only increases in an environment where demand is locked in for whatever reason. And it gets even worse when replacing the supply is hamstrung by bureaucracy.
- dchuk 6y ago
  It’s both incompetence and complete cowardice in the face of an extreme challenge.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    There doesn't seem to be any incentive to do anything different when the failure to deliver doesn't seem to have any punishment. You can just say its inevitable that things are bad and thats good enough.
- xmprt 6y ago
  I don't think anyone here is claiming that malice is the reason the system is like this. There's so much incompetence from leadership at all levels that the situation we're in now was pretty much inevitable.
- ragebol 6y ago
  At what point does being incompetent turn malicious, if you are in a position of leadership? Choosing to continue ignoring a real problem you cannot handle is pretty bad. At least get some advice or allow competent people to take the wheel. Of course in this instance, the blame flows uphill and then falls of a cliff.
kbenson 6y ago
> it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. I think you're underestimating the effect of poor direction from their districts, and in turn poor direction to the districts from the state and federal government on this. Up until a month or so before the start of the school semester, we were still receiving communications about "if we start with in-classroom learning". These schools have set budgets, and large expenditures are planned and paid for over years, and to be faced with a hard fork in the road choice over a summer about whether to put all your eggs into distance learning (when many politicians were vowing students would be in classrooms) or to try for a hybrid approach, or to assume the politicians know what they're talking about and kids will all be in class come late August/early September, it's not hard to see how this situation could turn out as bad as it had. Extreme circumstances require solid leadership. All it would have taken would have been the President (or even someone high in the Department of Education with the President's blessing, so it wasn't contradicted a day later) to say "we're hoping students will be able to return to class come the start of school, but we're allocating funds and directing districts to prepare for the eventuality that it may not happen, either overall or in their locality." and that clear signal that schools needed to prepare for this and would be supported in doing so would have made all the difference. This whole year has been a comedy of errors. Like so many of those, what you're really seeing is just a tragedy.
- dchuk 6y ago
  I very much agree. The whole situation is just crossing fingers and hoping things will go away as a replacement for pragmatism in the face of no good options. Complete failure of leadership at every single level.
  - genidoi 6y ago
    Or really just where the buck is meant to stop. The problem is that a pandemic is an n-th order effect nightmare, with a distinctly low failure threshold based on covid's epidemiological parameters. A country's commander in chief needs to listen to scientific expertise & provide clear public communication and apolitical leadership to avoid this kind of calamity, which just didn't happen.
icelancer 6y ago
>> it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. Is it? I have two kids in grade school and it was eminently obvious. My partner thought they'd get their shit together and was shocked when they didn't; school year delayed, laptops not ready (we live in a lower income area, not all families have means to afford devices), and the teachers completely unprepared to adapt to online learning. I told my partner we should move the kids into private schooling that was prepared for it or just home school for a year while keeping them enrolled in the district to keep tax money local. They said to give the school a chance. Government-run services are incredibly awful at adapting to anything in a "short" period of time, time and time again. Try getting permits for a house or business. Anyone who runs a small business inherently understands how generally useless government agencies are.
- dchuk 6y ago
  I didn’t mean I was expecting them to nail it and am surprised they didn’t, I meant my mind was blown that they whiffed so hard that it doesn’t seem like they even swung the bat.
deleted 6y ago
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sixothree 6y ago
When the first two cases in my city were reported there was a swirl of questions related to where those people had been and who they had been in contact with. There were no answers. We weren't going to do contact tracing or take any measures to contain this thing. That was the eye-opening moment for me. We've had 6 months to prepare and instead we spent the summer arguing about masks. Incredible to look back on the lack of leadership and planning at all levels. Never in my life have I been so disappointed with the people around me.
Twirrim 6y ago
> My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and has been back at (virtual) teaching now for 2 weeks. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. It’s not exactly like this snuck up on them, we’ve been locked down for 6 months now. You’d think they’d have decided on common software platforms, provided some training for the teachers, something. I have to say our school district has been great. They've picked standard central platform (https://www.schoology.com/ https://www.schoology.com/) that provides all the links the kids need, been training the teachers on them and got them support. Under that portal they've got just a few specific websites that serve a central purpose. Teachers are allocating work under one portal, though it might mean they need to go use a special interactive maths website or something on another site, but they have SSO working so it's smooth and effortless. It did take a long time for the state to make decisions and make proper resources available, which severely tied the school district's hands, but they did their best to assume the most pessimistic situation they could and worked towards that while waiting for the funds to be released for more. Apart from the screw ups around initial passwords on email accounts it has been an incredibly smooth process. My 3rd grade kid hasn't had to seek help from us for the technical side at all after initial logging in.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Remote kindergarten? What's the point?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Cynically, keeping kids occupied so that parents can work. This is also (IMO) why in my country (NL) and others they are and have been so pushy on opening up the schools again, because it's a hit on employee availability and productivity. The other less cynical factor of course is kids' education, but at the same time, ours was homeschooled for a while during the pandemic before the summer vacation and he's learned a lot more and more broad things than he did in his own school (history through youtube, music / singing er... also through youtube, maths, etc)
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    My kids aren't quite kindergarten age yet but I doubt they won't need attention just because there is an online class. Better off sticking them in front of khan academy or similar.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Remote kindergarten does not make it easier on parents, it makes it harder. It is parents who have to manage start times, end times, muting, general helping when kid minimizes app. It is also parents who have to redirect kid back as the kid looses attention and wanders away (completely normal at kindergarten age).
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    No, the cynical take is "because they need funding".
skunkworker 6y ago
It's sad how unprepared districts were over this summer when they could have been prioritizing and figuring out solutions. Within about 2 hours of working through workflows I was able to help out a family member in primary education figure out what could be bought to buy and what kinds of questions to ask their administration. In the end we made a high value and bang-for-your-buck setup by purchasing great but older and used components such as a 1920x1200 IPS U2412m monitor off ebay for $99. A ring light with camera mount, Apple Pencil, AirServer for showing the iPad on screen and being able to cast. Amongst other components I wasn't using and let them borrow like a Apple Trackpad and wireless keyboard. The thing that saddened me was teachers who only found out weeks before the start of school were having to figure out their setups and were unaware of how technology could be integrated for a benefit and didn't know what they didn't know. Stuff like using an iPad with an Apple Pencil and AirServer on a mac to cast a lesson drawn onto the desktop and then share that with a zoom meeting.
mschuster91 6y ago
>It’s not exactly like this snuck up on them, we’ve been locked down for 6 months now. You’d think they’d have decided on common software platforms, provided some training for the teachers, something. In Germany we have the same problem. A side effect of our politicians not wanting to modernize anything fundamental in the education system for years. Hell, Bavaria still bans cellphones in schools.
Thlom 6y ago
This is an aside, but is there a curriculum in kindergarten in your country? Kindergartens were closed for a couple of months in my country, but there were no virtual "teaching" at all. I don't know what in the lords name my kids would get out of any virtual teaching. It's not like it's a school where there's things to learn. They mostly play outside and at most learn to sit by a table and eat a meal, to get dressed and put on their shoes and how to hold a pencil. And stuff like that. I find it interesting how different pre-school is in different countries.
- tallanvor 6y ago
  What you think of as kindergarten would be termed daycare in the US, or potentially preschool, depending on the age of the children. In the US, kindergarten is the first year of compulsory education - traditionally children would go for half a day, but I think more and schools offer it as a full day now to take into account having both parents in the workplace.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    This is the first time I’ve heard of kindergarten being less time in school than any of the other grades. I went 30+ years ago, and never heard of anyone going for half a day.
    - felipemnoa 6y ago
      Used to be half a day in my time. I suspect it is different in different countries.
    - voortuckian 6y ago
      Some states in the U.S. only fund 1/2 day kindergarden. Full day exists, but requires the parents to pay more for that.
    - dx87 6y ago
      I was in kindergarten in the early 90s and it was a half day. The school had two sessions though, so half the kids had morning classes, the other half had afternoon classes.
goldenManatee 6y ago
Consider posting your tutorial on YouTube for other teachers to watch and spread.
choeger 6y ago
It is kind of sad, but according to my observations the age of the children is proportional to the degree of organization and proactivity shown by their teachers. Of course, administration could and should have helped. And maybe I am not seeing a lot of things going on, but I did not notice teachers organising themselves, sharing materials or video lectures, or curating literature for their students. The frustrating aspect of remote schooling is that there are thousands of underemployed teachers, there is a network that allows every one of them to reach out to millions of students. And yet all I ever heard was about single teachers being stressed to prepare and correct exercises for the maybe 100 students the would have met in-person otherwise.
yomly 6y ago
Cambridge University fully committed to a full-remote year of teaching back in May. At the time this seemed slightly radical, but really they just gave everyone (students, teachers and administrators) a full 5 months to PLAN around a DECISION. Meanwhile, other universities like KCL and LSE were still playing "wait and see" until even a few weeks ago. Even if Cambridge were wrong, and everything is all well and good and we'll be home by Christmas it'll be easier and cheaper to revert back to normal than the clusterfuck that will be going on in places stuck in limbo/denial. As anyone with some experience knows - trying to plan during instability or planning for two eventualities is basically impossible and a whole bunch of institutions AND countries have pissed away the past 6 months. Kudos to Cambridge for showing some strong leadership.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  Student weren't going to leave Cambridge no matter what. They could offer a subpar year and everyone would still "show up." Same reason Harvard can charge $55k for watching its free videos this year. In April parents were already talking about "pods" as an alternative to remote learning in K-12 schools. If the average K-12 school wasn't promising what parents wanted - in person education - the parents would get it somewhere else, pulling their student and the ~10k funding that comes with the student right from the school. This was the ONLY factor at play and is highly predictive of the preparedness of remote learning at various institutions. The bigger takeaway is that parents, not students or teachers, are almost always the antagonists.
tgv 6y ago
My wife works at an institute for higher education that's allowed to call itself "university of applied sciences" abroad. Their board has come up with the silliest of policy documents over the summer, which can almost be summarized as "strive for high quality education, and keep safe", leaving all of the practical matters to be decided in 2 weeks time by the department heads. There didn't even think of some way to coordinate head counts among departments that share buildings. On their website's front page, there's a link "Corona virus -> read more", which gives a 404. That's a "university". Those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach, apparently become director of education.
sjg007 6y ago
The common software platforms like google meet, seesaw and even zoom are not sufficient.
doctorOb 6y ago
A teacher friend's district claimed to be investing in training their teachers, but all it boiled down to was a high level overview of google docs, with no guidance on adapting a curriculum.
ugh123 6y ago
Our school district, LAUSD, spent most of the summer arguing with their union and even delayed roll out of the program citing "we've finally come to an agreement with the union about...". Regardless, I do think teachers are putting up with a lot and likely stressed more than usual while their leaders fail miserably.
spaceisballer 6y ago
Thankfully our county did prepare and I’m actually fairly impressed because I’m hearing horror stories from other friends in different counties. It would have been extremely helpful if our Department of Education was out ahead of this, instead Betsy DeVos has been absent while the President has been saying we need to have kids back in person. Absence of leadership is the theme of this administration. I’m not sure how anyone in the world can look at the US as a leader anymore.
deleted 6y ago
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daemoens 6y ago
Every part of our government failed with this pandemic. From federal to state to county, no one really took it seriously. Both sides fucked this one up.

by dchuk 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago

> they just don’t care about teachers I think you mean, they don’t care about students? Because that’s truly who is hurt here.

briefcomment 6y ago
It seems like they're focused on politics, since that's what gets them paid. If school choice comes around, they'll probably change their priorities.
dchuk 6y ago
I mean, for every 20-30 kids, there’s also an adult trying to educate them. Everyone’s fucked in the situation, and all you need to do is follow the money to understand the motivations. For example, my wife has to take real time attendance on a zoom call every morning in a 30 minute window, when everything else can be asynchronous. Why? Because schools are funded by attendance of the students, and they couldn’t be bothered to think of an alternative way to handle things.
- steverb 6y ago
  Not that your wife can do anything about it, but... My daughter has been doing online school for two years now with a school system that has been online only for about 10 years. Their hack was to give the kids one assignment per day. A missed assignment = 1 absence. An assignment turned in a day late = 1 tardy. The teachers post the weeks assignments on weekend (before Monday morning) and it's up to the kids to determine when/how they will get them done (which is why she attends this school, as it gives her a lot of flexibility to do the other things she is interested in).
- ev1 6y ago
  > my wife has to take real time attendance on a zoom call every morning in a 30 minute window Holy crap this is an incredibly stupid thing to be forced to do.
JadeNB 6y ago
> > they just don’t care about teachers > I think you mean, they don’t care about students? Because that’s truly who is hurt here. It is true in some transitive sense that the people making these decisions don't care about students, but insisting on that phrasing seems either hostile to, or at least minimising of the importance of and impact on, teachers. The school or district administration's role is to care for the students, yes, but (at least in the classroom) they do that indirectly, by choosing, training, and equipping skilled and qualified teachers. An administration who is showing contempt for its teachers is thus, indirectly, showing contempt for its students; but it's directly showing contempt for its teachers, and cutting them out of the story says that the harm they experience is not important. Teachers already are, like so many essential workers, expected to do their job endlessly without any commensurate reward; what is the point of denying the harm (for example, by saying or implying that they aren't truly hurt) that is done to them when they are not given even the basic tools to translate their passion for teaching and care for their students into commensurate results? (I would also be opposed to someone responding to claims of harm to the students by saying "why not focus on the teachers?—they're the ones who are truly hurt." There's no monopoly on suffering; we can acknowledge one group's suffering without pretending that they're the only ones.)
- xigency 6y ago
  I don’t think you have to go that deep. We can simply say they don’t care at all. If we’re hair picking students vs. teachers then it is likely political distinction.
taneq 6y ago
Can't it be both? I think it's both.
peterwwillis 6y ago
The teachers will work themselves into an early grave just to help the kids. Nobody's doing that for teachers. Teachers are more at risk of actually dying when in-person learning is forced on them as some school districts have done. And they have their livelihood to think about (many live a little more than paycheck to paycheck). Comparatively, the kids aren't dying, they don't have bills to pay, they don't work overtime. Their parents may even be able to pull them from school, or homeschool. Worst case they might be held back a year. The students will survive this, but the teachers literally might not.
- iso1631 6y ago
  hundereds of people a weel in the US die driving, many of them going to and from work.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Hundreds of working people also die from floods, too. I'm not sure why that's relevant here, though. Are you against traffic laws and flood control? Will not protecting teachers from covid somehow keep them from getting in traffic accidents? I suspect the opposite is true.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      The point is we accept a certain level of risk in going to work.
      - peterwwillis 6y ago
        The point you've just tried to make is that it's fine to force teachers to risk death in a classroom, because they might also get hit by a car driving into work? You need to work on your rhetoric.
        iso1631 6y ago
        We force people to risk death driving to work, why is covid different?

chrisgd 6y ago

Exactly. My 8 year old is online and he has at least 8 apps he is responsible for checking or turning in work. And none of them talk to each other but clearly the district signed up for a bunch of different things

deevus 6y ago

My partner graduated as a primary school teacher at the end of last year, and this pandemic bs has caused her to not have a single day of work since March or April. Casual days were just starting to pick up but after lockdown there has been no casual work at all.

darkerside 6y ago

Never assume malice where incompetence would suffice. I've found it to be generally true that when people don't know how to solve a problem, they will ignore it. This would have been a great time to bring in consultants on remote work. A nationally organized program would have been ideal so you could benefit from scale in doing sessions, and avoid patchwork solutions. Too bad our DoE is completely dysfunctional, led by a person who likely prefers it not to exist, a pattern for this administration.

briefcomment 6y ago
I think it can be a mixture of both. People who don't have the drive, goodwill, and skills (i.e. incompetance) to take on extra work will sometimes willfully ignore problems (i.e. malice). This only increases in an environment where demand is locked in for whatever reason. And it gets even worse when replacing the supply is hamstrung by bureaucracy.
dchuk 6y ago
It’s both incompetence and complete cowardice in the face of an extreme challenge.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  There doesn't seem to be any incentive to do anything different when the failure to deliver doesn't seem to have any punishment. You can just say its inevitable that things are bad and thats good enough.
xmprt 6y ago
I don't think anyone here is claiming that malice is the reason the system is like this. There's so much incompetence from leadership at all levels that the situation we're in now was pretty much inevitable.
ragebol 6y ago
At what point does being incompetent turn malicious, if you are in a position of leadership? Choosing to continue ignoring a real problem you cannot handle is pretty bad. At least get some advice or allow competent people to take the wheel. Of course in this instance, the blame flows uphill and then falls of a cliff.

kbenson 6y ago

> it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. I think you're underestimating the effect of poor direction from their districts, and in turn poor direction to the districts from the state and federal government on this. Up until a month or so before the start of the school semester, we were still receiving communications about "if we start with in-classroom learning". These schools have set budgets, and large expenditures are planned and paid for over years, and to be faced with a hard fork in the road choice over a summer about whether to put all your eggs into distance learning (when many politicians were vowing students would be in classrooms) or to try for a hybrid approach, or to assume the politicians know what they're talking about and kids will all be in class come late August/early September, it's not hard to see how this situation could turn out as bad as it had. Extreme circumstances require solid leadership. All it would have taken would have been the President (or even someone high in the Department of Education with the President's blessing, so it wasn't contradicted a day later) to say "we're hoping students will be able to return to class come the start of school, but we're allocating funds and directing districts to prepare for the eventuality that it may not happen, either overall or in their locality." and that clear signal that schools needed to prepare for this and would be supported in doing so would have made all the difference. This whole year has been a comedy of errors. Like so many of those, what you're really seeing is just a tragedy.

dchuk 6y ago
I very much agree. The whole situation is just crossing fingers and hoping things will go away as a replacement for pragmatism in the face of no good options. Complete failure of leadership at every single level.
- genidoi 6y ago
  Or really just where the buck is meant to stop. The problem is that a pandemic is an n-th order effect nightmare, with a distinctly low failure threshold based on covid's epidemiological parameters. A country's commander in chief needs to listen to scientific expertise & provide clear public communication and apolitical leadership to avoid this kind of calamity, which just didn't happen.

icelancer 6y ago

>> it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. Is it? I have two kids in grade school and it was eminently obvious. My partner thought they'd get their shit together and was shocked when they didn't; school year delayed, laptops not ready (we live in a lower income area, not all families have means to afford devices), and the teachers completely unprepared to adapt to online learning. I told my partner we should move the kids into private schooling that was prepared for it or just home school for a year while keeping them enrolled in the district to keep tax money local. They said to give the school a chance. Government-run services are incredibly awful at adapting to anything in a "short" period of time, time and time again. Try getting permits for a house or business. Anyone who runs a small business inherently understands how generally useless government agencies are.

dchuk 6y ago
I didn’t mean I was expecting them to nail it and am surprised they didn’t, I meant my mind was blown that they whiffed so hard that it doesn’t seem like they even swung the bat.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sixothree 6y ago

When the first two cases in my city were reported there was a swirl of questions related to where those people had been and who they had been in contact with. There were no answers. We weren't going to do contact tracing or take any measures to contain this thing. That was the eye-opening moment for me. We've had 6 months to prepare and instead we spent the summer arguing about masks. Incredible to look back on the lack of leadership and planning at all levels. Never in my life have I been so disappointed with the people around me.

Twirrim 6y ago

> My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and has been back at (virtual) teaching now for 2 weeks. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. It’s not exactly like this snuck up on them, we’ve been locked down for 6 months now. You’d think they’d have decided on common software platforms, provided some training for the teachers, something. I have to say our school district has been great. They've picked standard central platform (https://www.schoology.com/ https://www.schoology.com/) that provides all the links the kids need, been training the teachers on them and got them support. Under that portal they've got just a few specific websites that serve a central purpose. Teachers are allocating work under one portal, though it might mean they need to go use a special interactive maths website or something on another site, but they have SSO working so it's smooth and effortless. It did take a long time for the state to make decisions and make proper resources available, which severely tied the school district's hands, but they did their best to assume the most pessimistic situation they could and worked towards that while waiting for the funds to be released for more. Apart from the screw ups around initial passwords on email accounts it has been an incredibly smooth process. My 3rd grade kid hasn't had to seek help from us for the technical side at all after initial logging in.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Remote kindergarten? What's the point?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Cynically, keeping kids occupied so that parents can work. This is also (IMO) why in my country (NL) and others they are and have been so pushy on opening up the schools again, because it's a hit on employee availability and productivity. The other less cynical factor of course is kids' education, but at the same time, ours was homeschooled for a while during the pandemic before the summer vacation and he's learned a lot more and more broad things than he did in his own school (history through youtube, music / singing er... also through youtube, maths, etc)
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  My kids aren't quite kindergarten age yet but I doubt they won't need attention just because there is an online class. Better off sticking them in front of khan academy or similar.
- watwut 6y ago
  Remote kindergarten does not make it easier on parents, it makes it harder. It is parents who have to manage start times, end times, muting, general helping when kid minimizes app. It is also parents who have to redirect kid back as the kid looses attention and wanders away (completely normal at kindergarten age).
- humanrebar 6y ago
  No, the cynical take is "because they need funding".

skunkworker 6y ago

It's sad how unprepared districts were over this summer when they could have been prioritizing and figuring out solutions. Within about 2 hours of working through workflows I was able to help out a family member in primary education figure out what could be bought to buy and what kinds of questions to ask their administration. In the end we made a high value and bang-for-your-buck setup by purchasing great but older and used components such as a 1920x1200 IPS U2412m monitor off ebay for $99. A ring light with camera mount, Apple Pencil, AirServer for showing the iPad on screen and being able to cast. Amongst other components I wasn't using and let them borrow like a Apple Trackpad and wireless keyboard. The thing that saddened me was teachers who only found out weeks before the start of school were having to figure out their setups and were unaware of how technology could be integrated for a benefit and didn't know what they didn't know. Stuff like using an iPad with an Apple Pencil and AirServer on a mac to cast a lesson drawn onto the desktop and then share that with a zoom meeting.

mschuster91 6y ago

>It’s not exactly like this snuck up on them, we’ve been locked down for 6 months now. You’d think they’d have decided on common software platforms, provided some training for the teachers, something. In Germany we have the same problem. A side effect of our politicians not wanting to modernize anything fundamental in the education system for years. Hell, Bavaria still bans cellphones in schools.

Thlom 6y ago

This is an aside, but is there a curriculum in kindergarten in your country? Kindergartens were closed for a couple of months in my country, but there were no virtual "teaching" at all. I don't know what in the lords name my kids would get out of any virtual teaching. It's not like it's a school where there's things to learn. They mostly play outside and at most learn to sit by a table and eat a meal, to get dressed and put on their shoes and how to hold a pencil. And stuff like that. I find it interesting how different pre-school is in different countries.

tallanvor 6y ago
What you think of as kindergarten would be termed daycare in the US, or potentially preschool, depending on the age of the children. In the US, kindergarten is the first year of compulsory education - traditionally children would go for half a day, but I think more and schools offer it as a full day now to take into account having both parents in the workplace.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  This is the first time I’ve heard of kindergarten being less time in school than any of the other grades. I went 30+ years ago, and never heard of anyone going for half a day.
  - felipemnoa 6y ago
    Used to be half a day in my time. I suspect it is different in different countries.
  - voortuckian 6y ago
    Some states in the U.S. only fund 1/2 day kindergarden. Full day exists, but requires the parents to pay more for that.
  - dx87 6y ago
    I was in kindergarten in the early 90s and it was a half day. The school had two sessions though, so half the kids had morning classes, the other half had afternoon classes.

goldenManatee 6y ago

Consider posting your tutorial on YouTube for other teachers to watch and spread.

choeger 6y ago

It is kind of sad, but according to my observations the age of the children is proportional to the degree of organization and proactivity shown by their teachers. Of course, administration could and should have helped. And maybe I am not seeing a lot of things going on, but I did not notice teachers organising themselves, sharing materials or video lectures, or curating literature for their students. The frustrating aspect of remote schooling is that there are thousands of underemployed teachers, there is a network that allows every one of them to reach out to millions of students. And yet all I ever heard was about single teachers being stressed to prepare and correct exercises for the maybe 100 students the would have met in-person otherwise.

yomly 6y ago

Cambridge University fully committed to a full-remote year of teaching back in May. At the time this seemed slightly radical, but really they just gave everyone (students, teachers and administrators) a full 5 months to PLAN around a DECISION. Meanwhile, other universities like KCL and LSE were still playing "wait and see" until even a few weeks ago. Even if Cambridge were wrong, and everything is all well and good and we'll be home by Christmas it'll be easier and cheaper to revert back to normal than the clusterfuck that will be going on in places stuck in limbo/denial. As anyone with some experience knows - trying to plan during instability or planning for two eventualities is basically impossible and a whole bunch of institutions AND countries have pissed away the past 6 months. Kudos to Cambridge for showing some strong leadership.

an_opabinia 6y ago
Student weren't going to leave Cambridge no matter what. They could offer a subpar year and everyone would still "show up." Same reason Harvard can charge $55k for watching its free videos this year. In April parents were already talking about "pods" as an alternative to remote learning in K-12 schools. If the average K-12 school wasn't promising what parents wanted - in person education - the parents would get it somewhere else, pulling their student and the ~10k funding that comes with the student right from the school. This was the ONLY factor at play and is highly predictive of the preparedness of remote learning at various institutions. The bigger takeaway is that parents, not students or teachers, are almost always the antagonists.

tgv 6y ago

My wife works at an institute for higher education that's allowed to call itself "university of applied sciences" abroad. Their board has come up with the silliest of policy documents over the summer, which can almost be summarized as "strive for high quality education, and keep safe", leaving all of the practical matters to be decided in 2 weeks time by the department heads. There didn't even think of some way to coordinate head counts among departments that share buildings. On their website's front page, there's a link "Corona virus -> read more", which gives a 404. That's a "university". Those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach, apparently become director of education.

sjg007 6y ago

The common software platforms like google meet, seesaw and even zoom are not sufficient.

doctorOb 6y ago

A teacher friend's district claimed to be investing in training their teachers, but all it boiled down to was a high level overview of google docs, with no guidance on adapting a curriculum.

ugh123 6y ago

Our school district, LAUSD, spent most of the summer arguing with their union and even delayed roll out of the program citing "we've finally come to an agreement with the union about...". Regardless, I do think teachers are putting up with a lot and likely stressed more than usual while their leaders fail miserably.

spaceisballer 6y ago

Thankfully our county did prepare and I’m actually fairly impressed because I’m hearing horror stories from other friends in different counties. It would have been extremely helpful if our Department of Education was out ahead of this, instead Betsy DeVos has been absent while the President has been saying we need to have kids back in person. Absence of leadership is the theme of this administration. I’m not sure how anyone in the world can look at the US as a leader anymore.

deleted 6y ago

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daemoens 6y ago

Every part of our government failed with this pandemic. From federal to state to county, no one really took it seriously. Both sides fucked this one up.