16 ms·

The cruel, ridiculous reality of 'virtual learning'

122 points by awnird 5y ago

jhelphenstine 5y ago
Parent here. In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020. Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).
- divbzero 5y ago
  > Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. This is true for children ages 5 and above. From that perspective school closures now offer less benefit than school closures in 2020. Children under the age of 5 still have to manage without vaccine.
  - gjs278 5y ago
  - mrhands556 5y ago
    It’s been stated the flu, even with vaccination, is more problematic to this age group than Covid-19. I think restrictions around this age group are a net negative.
    - watwut 5y ago
      It has been stated, but last time I checked it was lie. The flu kills more people of you compare all flu deaths in all categories and add estimated flu deaths (not just confirmed).
      - baskethead 5y ago
        Less than 1000 kids under the age of 18 died from Covid despite tens of millions of infections. That’s vastly less than the flu.
        divbzero 5y ago
        The best data summary I’ve seen [1] suggests that COVID-19 IFR for kids is 0.01% or less which is in line with the COVID-19 stats you cite. The same data summary [1] suggests that flu IFR for kids is probably the same order of magnitude but not “vastly less”. I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new. [1]: https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
        mrhands556 5y ago
        The CDC best estimate says under 18 IFR is 20 in 1 million or .002% https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
    - eli 5y ago
      if 5% of the kids and 7% of the staff at a school currently had the flu, I think there would be serious consideration of temporarily closing it too.
      - dorchadas 5y ago
        There absolutely is. The school system I work(ed) for closes regularly every February because of the increase in numbers in strep and flu. Our attendance gets so low that it's the only thing they can do. Usually we can tell the week before, then they give it Monday and Tuesday and then are out the rest of the week, though sometimes attendance is so low Friday they just cancel the whole week already. Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)
        caddemon 5y ago
        Teacher absences are forcing hands right now, but even from the student perspective parents seem pretty split on if they want their kids going in, so I'm interested to see how number of absences develops in the next week. The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home. It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time. Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.
- caddemon 5y ago
  In my district we have a lot of teachers that are currently COVID positive with reported symptoms. Relatively mild from most accounts (all vaccinated), but still under the weather. I wouldn't blame any of the individual teachers for calling out - I've called out from my own job for similar symptoms in the past. It's what sick days are for. Of course the system isn't built for this many people to call out sick at once. I think a week or two of virtual "learning" is inevitable in some places, but I don't mind that and I don't think there is a risk of turning into indefinite shut down like what occured in 2020.
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Yes, making people work while sick is stupid. Even without covid. The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school. Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes. I hate people.
    - nrclark 5y ago
      It's a complicated problem. I have the luxury of a tech job that lets me work from home, and forgives a couple of distracted days if my toddler's home sick with me. Not everybody is so lucky. Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors? How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week? Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in. When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.
      - nradov 5y ago
        There are dozens of endemic upper respiratory viruses, including four other coronaviruses. It's probably to our long term advantage to get infected with as many of those as possible when we're young and healthy. While the symptoms may be unpleasant and inconvenient, the resulting cellular immunity gives us some protection when we're old and frail. Short term costs versus long term benefits.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  > a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020. Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future. It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally). If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1]. Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative. My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility. Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them. 1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ 2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    I don't think I disagree. If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known. The more we learn about it, the less it seems like a real threat. But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people. It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of: 'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks' We are way past that and it shows.
    - cabalamat 5y ago
- bsder 5y ago
  > In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating. Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not. In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.
sh4un 5y ago
One of my kids thrived and loved online learning. The other didn't. The one that liked it had an outgoing energetic, tech enabled teacher that liked his job. The other teacher however was a grumpy lady that couldnt be bothered learning any technology and didn't turn on her camera, forced the kids to keep their mics and cameras off and spent more time probably being elsewhere instead of teaching. Ontario is a province that if you were to ask teachers why they are teachers, the answers at the bottom of everyone's list would be teaching, spending time with kids. Most people in Ontario hate teachers because of their odd detachment from reality.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  I don't think what you say about Ontario teachers is true. Both from my own time in school two decades ago, and seeing my kid's teachers a bit more "close up" due to zoom pretend-learning, there are a lot of great ones. The problem is unions, specifically seniority. I've found an inverse correlation between age/tenure and quality. The worst teacher my kid has had is the only one on the sunshine list (names and salaries of everyone working in the public sector who make >$100k is published in Ontario). The incentives are so fucked up due to seniority that it really damages the school system, but there are lots and lots of passionate and good teachers doing a good job despite it all.
  - sh4un 5y ago
    We're on the same page here.
  - rtikulit 5y ago
    Chesterton's fence applies. The seniority system has serious drawbacks, but it has the advantage of being simple and difficult to game. It limits the damage caused to organizations by manipulators who would use more sophisticated systems to rig the workforce for personal or political advantage. It means that the average Ontario kid will encounter an average and well-distributed selection of both good and horrible teachers. Ignore the value of that at your peril. My kids are+were in the Ontario system. I pay attention to their quality of education. Across my parenting circles there are kids in every type of school and program conceivable. I could afford to send mine to private school if I thought it necessary. One of my kids is now at a competitive university with smart and hardworking kids from across the globe and he was well-prepared by his high school. In my opinion we are getting a good distribution of good outcomes, should consider ourselves lucky, and be careful not to take our system for granted, or accidentally break it through ideology or ignorance. And almost no one knows what works and what doesn't, but I believe that part of what works is treating teaching as the serious and challenging profession that it is, and letting them get on with it. You know, pretty much what we want from our stakeholders? I am very much of the opinion that we must be all-in on one public school system, with explicit objectives: providing a good education, underpinning social cohesion, encouraging individual diversity, seeking equality of opportunity. (I am not a teacher or in any union, and neither is anyone in my family.)
seibelj 5y ago
“Follow the science!” Science says kids are barely affected by Covid and it’s safe for them to go to school. “The science is wrong!”
- les_diabolique 5y ago
  Are kids not capable of carrying covid and spreading it to adults?
  - seibelj 5y ago
    Somehow all the private schools around me have been open for in-person learning safely since the lockdowns began.
  - cannaceo 5y ago
    Are adults forced to take similar precautions to children? I got an email this week that story time at the public library is canceled because of covid. No adult venues canceled.
    - les_diabolique 5y ago
      Are you suggesting children and adults have similar behaviours and understanding of situations and behave accordingly?
      - bpodgursky 5y ago
        dang 5y ago
        Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, as most users in this thread have been doing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've unfortunately been making a habit of doing this. That's not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. Would you please review the site guidelines and fix this?
lordgroff 5y ago
I resent this province more with each passing day. I'm debating whether to participate in this charade this time around, because I think it's in some ways worse than closing schools, at least for those very important early grades. With remote "learning" there is pretense that the immense damage caused by school closures is to an extent mitigated, and that's simply not even close to being true. There's much more I could write about this, but I will instead point out that this government is also locking down the very industries that are by and large small already battered business AND that were ONLY accessible to the vaccinated population (restaurants, gyms). It's also fun as a Canadian to make fun of American polarization (and sometimes do participate in these holier than thou conversations), but I also feel utterly helpless (and feel that from others) because I know full well that both the opposition parties would have done exactly the same things. There's nowhere to turn to.
- artifact_44 5y ago
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    crotch fruit seems a little bit personally abusive and definitely rude. Just imagine, me pointing out someone was rude! It must be really bad then.
  - dang 5y ago
    We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or you feel you are. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  > There's nowhere to turn to. Come move to Florida, Utah, or any of the other states getting it right.
option 5y ago
We are in Bay Area, CA. My 3 year old has speech delay. The school’s district psychologist to whom we went for evaluation told us that “most of our kids have one to two year speech and social delays now”. All corrective services for little ones, including the ones which cost $120,000/year (many don’t accept any insurance) have month long wait lists now.
mbg721 5y ago
I live in an area that has a large number of Catholic elementary and high-schools; they generally have fewer restrictions than the local public schools, and enrollment demand from non-Catholics is through the roof. Nobody wants remote learning, few people even want masks or any restrictions at all; parents hate it, students hate it, teachers hate it--as far as I can tell, nobody wants the outcome we've got, and yet somehow there's this resignation to "Well, this is how it has to be."
- gruez 5y ago
  If nobody wants it, why can't they petition the non catholic school board to drop the measures? Why is the catholic school board able to get away with less restrictions?
  - mbg721 5y ago
    The public school board is an elected body; you can show up at your city or town or village's election and pick the members you like. In practice, few voters are invested parents, and nobody pays attention to school-board candidates most of the time. (If you follow the news, Loudoun County, VA is a notable recent example of how things can go wrong.) So many public school districts are stuck with the same corruption that occurs in any public position. The Catholic schools' policy on things like this, at least near me, is dictated mostly by the diocese. The state can withhold funding for things like special-ed programs or meals if they won't play ball, but they get more autonomy as long as they aren't violating civil-rights law.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      > In practice, few voters are invested parents, and nobody pays attention to school-board candidates most of the time. The teachers' union does. Not most of the time either. All the time.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    This is going to sound dismissively cynical, but it all comes down to politics. The public school system is accountable to way more entities than the Catholic school is. Teachers Unions wield a tremendous amount of power and influence in local and state government. Actually taking on such a political machine would require an incredible amount of activism - bordering on replacing the majority of elected positions in your district. This is especially difficult because most of the lower positions are seats that the average person never thinks about or votes in. But, the unions make sure their members know about these positions and endeavor to get out the vote.
selfhifive 5y ago
The problem is with the way schools are doing it. I don't see the point of teaching kids on live video. It's better to give recorded lectures with one doubt clearing session/pop quiz every week. Live video is frustrating and the ridiculous attempts at interactivity don't help. That schools are still bothered about attendance tells you everything. Kids can watch recorded lectures any time their parents are able to supervise them. And the lectures don't have to be long because they are interruption free.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  In my unprofessional opinion the reason is to keep kids in seats. School is daycare. In addition, school is totally disconnected from reality and so kids have a lot of trouble assigning importance to it and focusing on it. If you expect all those kids to teach themselves, we had very different experiences in school. Maybe college aged and up…maybe.
- watwut 5y ago
  Do you have kids? Because online lessons with mine worked massively better then the "watch video" or "do homework whenever". They learned more in online lessons, the speed by which it moved was normal. And as bonus, I did not had to play teacher, the teacher played teacher.
  - selfhifive 5y ago
    Not arguing for "do homework whenever" weekly pop quiz/assignments to keep them on track instead. I understand that you had a great experience with online learning but not all schools have teachers who can take effective classes online.
- lordgroff 5y ago
  There is the asynchronous learning option, at least in our school board. The teachers don't like it because it's separate from the "main" program, so it's not particularly well considered (print these word sheets taken from some online source and other "education" activities). And I don't blame them, it's totally unrealistic to offer two largely separate options. As to why it's done this way? Why, pretense again, of course. If it's done during "school hours" we can pretend that mom and dad who work from home (let's hope) and can get some work done vs the reality that adults are now expected to home school on top of doing their jobs.
Lamad123 5y ago
Why can't these articles get to the point sooner. I was expecting to read a description of "virtual learning" and how it deferred from non-"virtual learning", but several paragraphs in and all I got was Ontario this and Ontario that.
- jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  Why can't these articles get to the point sooner. The act of writing is more for the writer than his audience. That's why we post to monster threads like this one with the full knowledge that our scintillating nugget of wisdom will be lost in the quarry of ersatz nuggets.
chasd00 5y ago
I see more and more of these articles and I feel like we're being conditioned to accept an 180 degree turn by our governments on COVID response. I get the feeling that pretty soon the narrative is going to shift to getting back to normal and living with COVID. We saw that article from the NYT yesterday, a couple threads on Omicron, and now this. ...and this is even hackernews which is not a mainstream outlet. my kids did remote learning for part of last year and were able to get through it ok thanks to my retired MIL basically becoming a teacher. I feel very fortunate for that. My wife is a middle-school teacher and after the past two years she's ready to quit and we downsize in order to homeschool and side-step the public school system disaster.
- gruez 5y ago
  >I see more and more of these articles and I feel like we're being conditioned to accept an 180 degree turn by our governments on COVID response. Is there any reason to believe the government is behind it, rather the other way around? It also seems plausible that the lockdown is pissing people off, journalists are writing about it, and the government does a 180 due to public pressure.
  - kbelder 5y ago
    They may go hand-in-hand. People are getting so fed up with it that it's no longer useful to try to keep them roiled up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  On a national level, the Democrats need a return to normality by late summer at worst. The midterms are going to be brutal no matter what, and if everything is still disrupted the incumbents will be punished. Doesn't matter if it's fair, it's what will happen.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  This was my prediction in May of 2020. COVID will end when it's no longer useful. Then it will just disappear.
renewiltord 5y ago
Lol. My favourite is that I was in an Uber and I talked to this guy about his kids and how he was dealing with not having in person school. “Oh, they go to school. They’ve been going for ages”. “Wait, what? Aren’t the schools closed?” “Here, maybe, but I live in a town near Sacramento. They go to school. They were not paying attention on the computer” Then I checked and like private school kids have also been going in person for ages. Hahaha. We have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees. Oh man, the demographic outcome is going to be epic. We’ll get all these fun sociology studies out of it.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > e have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees. The poor always get shafted[1] :-( Politicians make policies to grab votes not to solve problems. If a problem gets solved, then that's a side-effect. Unfortunately education is an outcome of political will, so it figures that educational outcomes are based on popularity amongst voters, which means that those people least likely to have an informed decision on education[2] will be choosing the educational policies. [1] With WFH it's been ever more clear: the jobs that poor people do are not seated-at-a-desk jobs, so while we have been getting a better quality of life and more hours in the day, the poor have been seeing their risk exposure go up while their salaries have remained the same. [2] Poor people are more likely to have less education overall, and less experience navigating the options for education for their children.
paulryanrogers 5y ago
See also The Cruel, Ridiculous Reality of Lecture Learning. Perhaps from all this shaking up education can break out of the least effective modes and get a little more creative.
aaomidi 5y ago
If we actually had a proper international response, this would be far less of an issue. Imagine if we made kurzgesagt quality videos for essentially every subject, at an international scale, translated into hundreds of languages. We'd create a huge trove of knowledge, have a good set of lecture material to use with children and even college students. At that point we could have teachers be for guidance, chatting with, and a holding hand for children who need more help to get through the work load. This would require a federal or international level of cooperation and communication, but the end results would be absolutely wonderful.
- AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
  Khan Academy already does this. They have high quality content on a lot of subjects for K-12 and some for college level students as well. And yet, the adoption of Khan Academy is very limited. So based on that (albeit with a sample size of only 1), it's unlikely that any [inter]national effort will make any difference. Plus, people getting recorded videos for learning will feel cheated because they could have just got this for free online. What's the point of paying for education? Very few people actually have/ask doubts in class. Source: am a student.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    I wouldn't really say Khan Academy is the same quality of what I'm talking about really. Although one should ask, why aren't schools deferring to that as a resource more?
    - AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
      Khan Academy has high quality videos. They have very clear explanations, and are always factually correct. Kurzgesagt videos just add animation + story_telling to concepts. They don't add any educational value. To answer your question, an educated guess would be to justify education costs. How do you justify high costs if all you are doing is redirecting students to a free website?
tehjoker 5y ago
Has anyone ever read a book?
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    I thought it said a lot in few words. People are worried about learning loss, but tons of learning comes from books. Many people have different learning styles, but many classrooms are used simply to instill discipline in children to prepare them for low wage worklife. I'm not convinced of the catastrophic rhetoric compared to subjecting teachers and students to a virulent disease.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Books have value, but in my experience people who are self taught from books usually have a very superficial knowledge and think they know more than they really do. In order to really learn, most students need to interact with teachers who can challenge them.
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        I do agree with you, teachers are absolutely necessary to get value for many kids, but we aren't talking about completely doing away with teachers, just putting them on remote in order to prevent the spread of a deadly disease. It's sub-optimal, but I'd rather an alive dumb kid than a smart dead one (or perhaps more likely: a dumb kid with alive parents than a smart kid with dead parents). If we're really worried about losing learning, why not allocate money at the end of the pipeline so that the kids can do more free higher ed / remedial education?
        nradov 5y ago
        Fortunately the risk of death for healthy kids is virtually zero. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v...
iamleppert 5y ago
If public schools want to prepare children for their life ahead, they should be doing space repetition tasks and teach them how to sort objects as quickly as possible. Add in some life skills into there, and they will be well prepared to work in the future's Amazon fulfillment centers.
- visarga 5y ago
  Or teach them neural nets and robotics so they can invent their own AI servants and live happily ever after. Especially easy to do by importing huggingface in the near future. Technology tends to spread life improvement faster and wider than education and capital. We now have access to things that were too expensive even for the rich, or too complex even for the educated. We should use our new superpowers to invent a future we like instead of complaining about change. What could a motivated group of people do in order to be as self sustaining as possible in the future? I think there are lots of ideas here.
- granshaw 5y ago
  The Brave New World cometh
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  That is quite the foolish attachment to the goddamned tediously popular hysterical technodystopian complex. The kind that sees Black Mirror in a shitty VR clone of Second Life that copies Microsoft Bob. I haven't seen anybody both bemoan a fate and suggest actions that would specifically lock them into it by massive over-specialization meaning they are unprepared for anything else. All while doing education wrong by even below mediocre standards. Education kind of has decades of lead time - trying to specialize to any specific job at the primary level is doomed to failure. At best you can get fields of fields emphasized. Education if it is to prepare has to cover at least a path to all jobs.
lsy 5y ago
One of the unpleasant things about the recent pandemic surge has been the opportunistic article-writing to relitigate controversial issues like school closures, which had, with the previous numbers, become a thing of the past, with broad agreement across the political spectrum that they were no longer necessary. Look at the trajectory of today's numbers. The schools are not going to be closed for long. But to read these articles, you'd think educators are planning to keep kids at home for the rest of their lives, rather than until the massive, unprecedented surge subsides. (You'd also think that the US compulsory schooling system was a biologically essential part of human development rather than an early-1900s social invention). "Living with COVID" doesn't mean "ignoring COVID", and I'd be interested to see viewpoints that are a bit less extreme and more open to the idea that living with a cyclic (and still-deadly) coronavirus requires seasonal adjustments to reality on the ground rather than unconditionally charging ahead with no precautions.
- desireco42 5y ago
  Totally with you. I have 3 kids, they love being online and they love going to school. Online has distinct advantage that they are instantly home and get to eat home food etc. Like the author, we are flexible and home. I can't say everything was perfect. My main goal is for none of us to get Covid, if we endured this much, I really don't need it now. There is 5 of us, if anyone gets it, everybody will get it, vaccines as you know, will not help you except keep you from dying. I think this is huge opportunity, largely wasted, to actually figure out a good way to learn online. Also, I think that most of those who complain and are working from home, they simply don't want their kids home.
  - nradov 5y ago
    You will all get Covid eventually. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
    - lsy 5y ago
      This isn't a helpful or honestly very nice comment, considering you don't know the commenter's situation or risk profile. The article you linked even makes the point that delaying onset of Covid until there are more vaccines and therapeutics is ideal. Even at high R0 with no precautions, large numbers of people never get an endemic disease, due to herd immunity. And for people with kids, it's very reasonable to try to delay onset until pediatric vaccines and therapeutics are available. The fact that Covid will become endemic is not a reason to abandon all precautions.
aaron695 5y ago
desireco42 5y ago
I don't agree with points of this post/article but what bothers me more is that we all became so inflexible and insensitive. I am perfectly fine with somebody who needs their kids to go to school. I like mine at home during wave of infections as I don't want all of us to get sick. I think they should be wearing masks but I hear there is not enough evidence to support that (and it might be true). But the point what I wanted to make is: everybody hates everyone else. Nobody is listening to anyone at all. You can't discuss this thing with no-one as they will not listen you. If you mention you understand someone hesitancy with vaccines, you are immediately labeled as Trumper, like those others currently in power are much better. That is also something you should never point out. I know, I know, others have been trying to say this as well. But it is true, if we can't talk to each other, nothing else is important. I don't have a point except that I am frustrated with this.
- ripper1138 5y ago
  Only on Twitter would you be labeled as a Trumper. Or maybe your circles are like that in real life (that would be very unfortunate). You might find a lot of people agree with you, be bold and speak your mind!
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    > Or maybe your circles are like that in real life (that would be very unfortunate) I can say fairly confidently that it's not uncommon for the college / young adult age, self-identified left. The term Republican is basically used as a soft slur or synonym for racist by many. I'm not claiming that everyone is like this, but the number is greater than I would like to see, especially considering how many of them I see as fairly smart people. I do speak up at times, but it doesn't usually matter because people generally don't actually care about the details. They just want to drop their quip to show support and move on.
spoonjim 5y ago
We damaged a generation of kids to protect a generation of octogenarians and a bunch of teachers who wouldn't assume any modicum of risk to do their jobs. I feel sad for all the lockdown kids for everything that was done to them. My kid fared well because I essentially spent all of my time teaching him stuff, which then caused me to get fired from my job, and then I got a new job at 30% higher salary.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Not going to lie, the last line had me almost spit my coffee out. Congrats on the good outcome!
xyzzy21 5y ago
The obvious answers are: Home School. Charter School. Parochial School. Private School. If you truly care about your children, why wouldn't you? If you don't, why complain? Basically a matter of economic substitutes and actually making a choice.
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  Don't forget "unschooling." My wife and I have two daughters, who are eight and thirteen years old. Neither have ever been enrolled in a state school. We've had brief experiments with structured curricula, but we've always found that they're just unsuitable for us - they require a (relatively) huge amount of time, both parents and children tire of it quickly, and most importantly, they don't seem to offer anything. We regularly test our children both informally and formally. They're learning everything their cohorts are required to know and more through simply living life alongside us. They're a bit behind their peers in some of the more formal/structured areas of grammar, but their actual verbal and written language usage is significantly beyond expectations for their age. They're both far ahead in math, history, social studies, geography, etc. For kids in particular, learning is something they do by nature. When they get bored, they learn something new. As long as the parents are invested in shaping a productive adult and are able to provide adequate resources for the kids to satisfy their curiosities, my experience leads me to believe that traditional K-12 "schooling" is entirely unnecessary.
eli 5y ago
Virtual learning is bad and I hate it, but the schools that have returned to in-person school despite very high community transmission rates are going to end up remote again soon when they run out of teachers who aren't sick or quarantined.

122 points by awnird 5y ago

Parent here. In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020. Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).

divbzero 5y ago
> Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. This is true for children ages 5 and above. From that perspective school closures now offer less benefit than school closures in 2020. Children under the age of 5 still have to manage without vaccine.
- gjs278 5y ago
- mrhands556 5y ago
  It’s been stated the flu, even with vaccination, is more problematic to this age group than Covid-19. I think restrictions around this age group are a net negative.
  - watwut 5y ago
    It has been stated, but last time I checked it was lie. The flu kills more people of you compare all flu deaths in all categories and add estimated flu deaths (not just confirmed).
    - baskethead 5y ago
      Less than 1000 kids under the age of 18 died from Covid despite tens of millions of infections. That’s vastly less than the flu.
      - divbzero 5y ago
        The best data summary I’ve seen [1] suggests that COVID-19 IFR for kids is 0.01% or less which is in line with the COVID-19 stats you cite. The same data summary [1] suggests that flu IFR for kids is probably the same order of magnitude but not “vastly less”. I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new. [1]: https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
        mrhands556 5y ago
        The CDC best estimate says under 18 IFR is 20 in 1 million or .002% https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
  - eli 5y ago
    if 5% of the kids and 7% of the staff at a school currently had the flu, I think there would be serious consideration of temporarily closing it too.
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      There absolutely is. The school system I work(ed) for closes regularly every February because of the increase in numbers in strep and flu. Our attendance gets so low that it's the only thing they can do. Usually we can tell the week before, then they give it Monday and Tuesday and then are out the rest of the week, though sometimes attendance is so low Friday they just cancel the whole week already. Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)
      - caddemon 5y ago
        Teacher absences are forcing hands right now, but even from the student perspective parents seem pretty split on if they want their kids going in, so I'm interested to see how number of absences develops in the next week. The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home. It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time. Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.
caddemon 5y ago
In my district we have a lot of teachers that are currently COVID positive with reported symptoms. Relatively mild from most accounts (all vaccinated), but still under the weather. I wouldn't blame any of the individual teachers for calling out - I've called out from my own job for similar symptoms in the past. It's what sick days are for. Of course the system isn't built for this many people to call out sick at once. I think a week or two of virtual "learning" is inevitable in some places, but I don't mind that and I don't think there is a risk of turning into indefinite shut down like what occured in 2020.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Yes, making people work while sick is stupid. Even without covid. The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school. Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes. I hate people.
  - nrclark 5y ago
    It's a complicated problem. I have the luxury of a tech job that lets me work from home, and forgives a couple of distracted days if my toddler's home sick with me. Not everybody is so lucky. Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors? How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week? Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in. When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.
    - nradov 5y ago
      There are dozens of endemic upper respiratory viruses, including four other coronaviruses. It's probably to our long term advantage to get infected with as many of those as possible when we're young and healthy. While the symptoms may be unpleasant and inconvenient, the resulting cellular immunity gives us some protection when we're old and frail. Short term costs versus long term benefits.
cabalamat 5y ago
> a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020. Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future. It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally). If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1]. Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative. My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility. Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them. 1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ 2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  I don't think I disagree. If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known. The more we learn about it, the less it seems like a real threat. But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people. It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of: 'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks' We are way past that and it shows.
  - cabalamat 5y ago
bsder 5y ago
> In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating. Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not. In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.

sh4un 5y ago

One of my kids thrived and loved online learning. The other didn't. The one that liked it had an outgoing energetic, tech enabled teacher that liked his job. The other teacher however was a grumpy lady that couldnt be bothered learning any technology and didn't turn on her camera, forced the kids to keep their mics and cameras off and spent more time probably being elsewhere instead of teaching. Ontario is a province that if you were to ask teachers why they are teachers, the answers at the bottom of everyone's list would be teaching, spending time with kids. Most people in Ontario hate teachers because of their odd detachment from reality.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
I don't think what you say about Ontario teachers is true. Both from my own time in school two decades ago, and seeing my kid's teachers a bit more "close up" due to zoom pretend-learning, there are a lot of great ones. The problem is unions, specifically seniority. I've found an inverse correlation between age/tenure and quality. The worst teacher my kid has had is the only one on the sunshine list (names and salaries of everyone working in the public sector who make >$100k is published in Ontario). The incentives are so fucked up due to seniority that it really damages the school system, but there are lots and lots of passionate and good teachers doing a good job despite it all.
- sh4un 5y ago
  We're on the same page here.
- rtikulit 5y ago
  Chesterton's fence applies. The seniority system has serious drawbacks, but it has the advantage of being simple and difficult to game. It limits the damage caused to organizations by manipulators who would use more sophisticated systems to rig the workforce for personal or political advantage. It means that the average Ontario kid will encounter an average and well-distributed selection of both good and horrible teachers. Ignore the value of that at your peril. My kids are+were in the Ontario system. I pay attention to their quality of education. Across my parenting circles there are kids in every type of school and program conceivable. I could afford to send mine to private school if I thought it necessary. One of my kids is now at a competitive university with smart and hardworking kids from across the globe and he was well-prepared by his high school. In my opinion we are getting a good distribution of good outcomes, should consider ourselves lucky, and be careful not to take our system for granted, or accidentally break it through ideology or ignorance. And almost no one knows what works and what doesn't, but I believe that part of what works is treating teaching as the serious and challenging profession that it is, and letting them get on with it. You know, pretty much what we want from our stakeholders? I am very much of the opinion that we must be all-in on one public school system, with explicit objectives: providing a good education, underpinning social cohesion, encouraging individual diversity, seeking equality of opportunity. (I am not a teacher or in any union, and neither is anyone in my family.)

seibelj 5y ago

“Follow the science!” Science says kids are barely affected by Covid and it’s safe for them to go to school. “The science is wrong!”

les_diabolique 5y ago
Are kids not capable of carrying covid and spreading it to adults?
- seibelj 5y ago
  Somehow all the private schools around me have been open for in-person learning safely since the lockdowns began.
- cannaceo 5y ago
  Are adults forced to take similar precautions to children? I got an email this week that story time at the public library is canceled because of covid. No adult venues canceled.
  - les_diabolique 5y ago
    Are you suggesting children and adults have similar behaviours and understanding of situations and behave accordingly?
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      - dang 5y ago
        Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, as most users in this thread have been doing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've unfortunately been making a habit of doing this. That's not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. Would you please review the site guidelines and fix this?

lordgroff 5y ago

I resent this province more with each passing day. I'm debating whether to participate in this charade this time around, because I think it's in some ways worse than closing schools, at least for those very important early grades. With remote "learning" there is pretense that the immense damage caused by school closures is to an extent mitigated, and that's simply not even close to being true. There's much more I could write about this, but I will instead point out that this government is also locking down the very industries that are by and large small already battered business AND that were ONLY accessible to the vaccinated population (restaurants, gyms). It's also fun as a Canadian to make fun of American polarization (and sometimes do participate in these holier than thou conversations), but I also feel utterly helpless (and feel that from others) because I know full well that both the opposition parties would have done exactly the same things. There's nowhere to turn to.

artifact_44 5y ago
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  crotch fruit seems a little bit personally abusive and definitely rude. Just imagine, me pointing out someone was rude! It must be really bad then.
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or you feel you are. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
jimmaswell 5y ago
> There's nowhere to turn to. Come move to Florida, Utah, or any of the other states getting it right.

option 5y ago

We are in Bay Area, CA. My 3 year old has speech delay. The school’s district psychologist to whom we went for evaluation told us that “most of our kids have one to two year speech and social delays now”. All corrective services for little ones, including the ones which cost $120,000/year (many don’t accept any insurance) have month long wait lists now.

mbg721 5y ago

I live in an area that has a large number of Catholic elementary and high-schools; they generally have fewer restrictions than the local public schools, and enrollment demand from non-Catholics is through the roof. Nobody wants remote learning, few people even want masks or any restrictions at all; parents hate it, students hate it, teachers hate it--as far as I can tell, nobody wants the outcome we've got, and yet somehow there's this resignation to "Well, this is how it has to be."

gruez 5y ago
If nobody wants it, why can't they petition the non catholic school board to drop the measures? Why is the catholic school board able to get away with less restrictions?
- mbg721 5y ago
  The public school board is an elected body; you can show up at your city or town or village's election and pick the members you like. In practice, few voters are invested parents, and nobody pays attention to school-board candidates most of the time. (If you follow the news, Loudoun County, VA is a notable recent example of how things can go wrong.) So many public school districts are stuck with the same corruption that occurs in any public position. The Catholic schools' policy on things like this, at least near me, is dictated mostly by the diocese. The state can withhold funding for things like special-ed programs or meals if they won't play ball, but they get more autonomy as long as they aren't violating civil-rights law.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    > In practice, few voters are invested parents, and nobody pays attention to school-board candidates most of the time. The teachers' union does. Not most of the time either. All the time.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  This is going to sound dismissively cynical, but it all comes down to politics. The public school system is accountable to way more entities than the Catholic school is. Teachers Unions wield a tremendous amount of power and influence in local and state government. Actually taking on such a political machine would require an incredible amount of activism - bordering on replacing the majority of elected positions in your district. This is especially difficult because most of the lower positions are seats that the average person never thinks about or votes in. But, the unions make sure their members know about these positions and endeavor to get out the vote.

selfhifive 5y ago

The problem is with the way schools are doing it. I don't see the point of teaching kids on live video. It's better to give recorded lectures with one doubt clearing session/pop quiz every week. Live video is frustrating and the ridiculous attempts at interactivity don't help. That schools are still bothered about attendance tells you everything. Kids can watch recorded lectures any time their parents are able to supervise them. And the lectures don't have to be long because they are interruption free.

sjtindell 5y ago
In my unprofessional opinion the reason is to keep kids in seats. School is daycare. In addition, school is totally disconnected from reality and so kids have a lot of trouble assigning importance to it and focusing on it. If you expect all those kids to teach themselves, we had very different experiences in school. Maybe college aged and up…maybe.
watwut 5y ago
Do you have kids? Because online lessons with mine worked massively better then the "watch video" or "do homework whenever". They learned more in online lessons, the speed by which it moved was normal. And as bonus, I did not had to play teacher, the teacher played teacher.
- selfhifive 5y ago
  Not arguing for "do homework whenever" weekly pop quiz/assignments to keep them on track instead. I understand that you had a great experience with online learning but not all schools have teachers who can take effective classes online.
lordgroff 5y ago
There is the asynchronous learning option, at least in our school board. The teachers don't like it because it's separate from the "main" program, so it's not particularly well considered (print these word sheets taken from some online source and other "education" activities). And I don't blame them, it's totally unrealistic to offer two largely separate options. As to why it's done this way? Why, pretense again, of course. If it's done during "school hours" we can pretend that mom and dad who work from home (let's hope) and can get some work done vs the reality that adults are now expected to home school on top of doing their jobs.

Lamad123 5y ago

Why can't these articles get to the point sooner. I was expecting to read a description of "virtual learning" and how it deferred from non-"virtual learning", but several paragraphs in and all I got was Ontario this and Ontario that.

jimmyvalmer 5y ago
Why can't these articles get to the point sooner. The act of writing is more for the writer than his audience. That's why we post to monster threads like this one with the full knowledge that our scintillating nugget of wisdom will be lost in the quarry of ersatz nuggets.

chasd00 5y ago

I see more and more of these articles and I feel like we're being conditioned to accept an 180 degree turn by our governments on COVID response. I get the feeling that pretty soon the narrative is going to shift to getting back to normal and living with COVID. We saw that article from the NYT yesterday, a couple threads on Omicron, and now this. ...and this is even hackernews which is not a mainstream outlet. my kids did remote learning for part of last year and were able to get through it ok thanks to my retired MIL basically becoming a teacher. I feel very fortunate for that. My wife is a middle-school teacher and after the past two years she's ready to quit and we downsize in order to homeschool and side-step the public school system disaster.

gruez 5y ago
>I see more and more of these articles and I feel like we're being conditioned to accept an 180 degree turn by our governments on COVID response. Is there any reason to believe the government is behind it, rather the other way around? It also seems plausible that the lockdown is pissing people off, journalists are writing about it, and the government does a 180 due to public pressure.
- kbelder 5y ago
  They may go hand-in-hand. People are getting so fed up with it that it's no longer useful to try to keep them roiled up.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
On a national level, the Democrats need a return to normality by late summer at worst. The midterms are going to be brutal no matter what, and if everything is still disrupted the incumbents will be punished. Doesn't matter if it's fair, it's what will happen.
throwawayboise 5y ago
This was my prediction in May of 2020. COVID will end when it's no longer useful. Then it will just disappear.

renewiltord 5y ago

Lol. My favourite is that I was in an Uber and I talked to this guy about his kids and how he was dealing with not having in person school. “Oh, they go to school. They’ve been going for ages”. “Wait, what? Aren’t the schools closed?” “Here, maybe, but I live in a town near Sacramento. They go to school. They were not paying attention on the computer” Then I checked and like private school kids have also been going in person for ages. Hahaha. We have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees. Oh man, the demographic outcome is going to be epic. We’ll get all these fun sociology studies out of it.

lelanthran 5y ago
> e have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees. The poor always get shafted[1] :-( Politicians make policies to grab votes not to solve problems. If a problem gets solved, then that's a side-effect. Unfortunately education is an outcome of political will, so it figures that educational outcomes are based on popularity amongst voters, which means that those people least likely to have an informed decision on education[2] will be choosing the educational policies. [1] With WFH it's been ever more clear: the jobs that poor people do are not seated-at-a-desk jobs, so while we have been getting a better quality of life and more hours in the day, the poor have been seeing their risk exposure go up while their salaries have remained the same. [2] Poor people are more likely to have less education overall, and less experience navigating the options for education for their children.

paulryanrogers 5y ago

See also The Cruel, Ridiculous Reality of Lecture Learning. Perhaps from all this shaking up education can break out of the least effective modes and get a little more creative.

aaomidi 5y ago

If we actually had a proper international response, this would be far less of an issue. Imagine if we made kurzgesagt quality videos for essentially every subject, at an international scale, translated into hundreds of languages. We'd create a huge trove of knowledge, have a good set of lecture material to use with children and even college students. At that point we could have teachers be for guidance, chatting with, and a holding hand for children who need more help to get through the work load. This would require a federal or international level of cooperation and communication, but the end results would be absolutely wonderful.

AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
Khan Academy already does this. They have high quality content on a lot of subjects for K-12 and some for college level students as well. And yet, the adoption of Khan Academy is very limited. So based on that (albeit with a sample size of only 1), it's unlikely that any [inter]national effort will make any difference. Plus, people getting recorded videos for learning will feel cheated because they could have just got this for free online. What's the point of paying for education? Very few people actually have/ask doubts in class. Source: am a student.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  I wouldn't really say Khan Academy is the same quality of what I'm talking about really. Although one should ask, why aren't schools deferring to that as a resource more?
  - AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
    Khan Academy has high quality videos. They have very clear explanations, and are always factually correct. Kurzgesagt videos just add animation + story_telling to concepts. They don't add any educational value. To answer your question, an educated guess would be to justify education costs. How do you justify high costs if all you are doing is redirecting students to a free website?

tehjoker 5y ago

Has anyone ever read a book?

dang 5y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  I thought it said a lot in few words. People are worried about learning loss, but tons of learning comes from books. Many people have different learning styles, but many classrooms are used simply to instill discipline in children to prepare them for low wage worklife. I'm not convinced of the catastrophic rhetoric compared to subjecting teachers and students to a virulent disease.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Books have value, but in my experience people who are self taught from books usually have a very superficial knowledge and think they know more than they really do. In order to really learn, most students need to interact with teachers who can challenge them.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      I do agree with you, teachers are absolutely necessary to get value for many kids, but we aren't talking about completely doing away with teachers, just putting them on remote in order to prevent the spread of a deadly disease. It's sub-optimal, but I'd rather an alive dumb kid than a smart dead one (or perhaps more likely: a dumb kid with alive parents than a smart kid with dead parents). If we're really worried about losing learning, why not allocate money at the end of the pipeline so that the kids can do more free higher ed / remedial education?
      - nradov 5y ago
        Fortunately the risk of death for healthy kids is virtually zero. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v...

iamleppert 5y ago

If public schools want to prepare children for their life ahead, they should be doing space repetition tasks and teach them how to sort objects as quickly as possible. Add in some life skills into there, and they will be well prepared to work in the future's Amazon fulfillment centers.

visarga 5y ago
Or teach them neural nets and robotics so they can invent their own AI servants and live happily ever after. Especially easy to do by importing huggingface in the near future. Technology tends to spread life improvement faster and wider than education and capital. We now have access to things that were too expensive even for the rich, or too complex even for the educated. We should use our new superpowers to invent a future we like instead of complaining about change. What could a motivated group of people do in order to be as self sustaining as possible in the future? I think there are lots of ideas here.
granshaw 5y ago
The Brave New World cometh
Nasrudith 5y ago
That is quite the foolish attachment to the goddamned tediously popular hysterical technodystopian complex. The kind that sees Black Mirror in a shitty VR clone of Second Life that copies Microsoft Bob. I haven't seen anybody both bemoan a fate and suggest actions that would specifically lock them into it by massive over-specialization meaning they are unprepared for anything else. All while doing education wrong by even below mediocre standards. Education kind of has decades of lead time - trying to specialize to any specific job at the primary level is doomed to failure. At best you can get fields of fields emphasized. Education if it is to prepare has to cover at least a path to all jobs.

lsy 5y ago

One of the unpleasant things about the recent pandemic surge has been the opportunistic article-writing to relitigate controversial issues like school closures, which had, with the previous numbers, become a thing of the past, with broad agreement across the political spectrum that they were no longer necessary. Look at the trajectory of today's numbers. The schools are not going to be closed for long. But to read these articles, you'd think educators are planning to keep kids at home for the rest of their lives, rather than until the massive, unprecedented surge subsides. (You'd also think that the US compulsory schooling system was a biologically essential part of human development rather than an early-1900s social invention). "Living with COVID" doesn't mean "ignoring COVID", and I'd be interested to see viewpoints that are a bit less extreme and more open to the idea that living with a cyclic (and still-deadly) coronavirus requires seasonal adjustments to reality on the ground rather than unconditionally charging ahead with no precautions.

desireco42 5y ago
Totally with you. I have 3 kids, they love being online and they love going to school. Online has distinct advantage that they are instantly home and get to eat home food etc. Like the author, we are flexible and home. I can't say everything was perfect. My main goal is for none of us to get Covid, if we endured this much, I really don't need it now. There is 5 of us, if anyone gets it, everybody will get it, vaccines as you know, will not help you except keep you from dying. I think this is huge opportunity, largely wasted, to actually figure out a good way to learn online. Also, I think that most of those who complain and are working from home, they simply don't want their kids home.
- nradov 5y ago
  You will all get Covid eventually. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
  - lsy 5y ago
    This isn't a helpful or honestly very nice comment, considering you don't know the commenter's situation or risk profile. The article you linked even makes the point that delaying onset of Covid until there are more vaccines and therapeutics is ideal. Even at high R0 with no precautions, large numbers of people never get an endemic disease, due to herd immunity. And for people with kids, it's very reasonable to try to delay onset until pediatric vaccines and therapeutics are available. The fact that Covid will become endemic is not a reason to abandon all precautions.

aaron695 5y ago

desireco42 5y ago

I don't agree with points of this post/article but what bothers me more is that we all became so inflexible and insensitive. I am perfectly fine with somebody who needs their kids to go to school. I like mine at home during wave of infections as I don't want all of us to get sick. I think they should be wearing masks but I hear there is not enough evidence to support that (and it might be true). But the point what I wanted to make is: everybody hates everyone else. Nobody is listening to anyone at all. You can't discuss this thing with no-one as they will not listen you. If you mention you understand someone hesitancy with vaccines, you are immediately labeled as Trumper, like those others currently in power are much better. That is also something you should never point out. I know, I know, others have been trying to say this as well. But it is true, if we can't talk to each other, nothing else is important. I don't have a point except that I am frustrated with this.

ripper1138 5y ago
Only on Twitter would you be labeled as a Trumper. Or maybe your circles are like that in real life (that would be very unfortunate). You might find a lot of people agree with you, be bold and speak your mind!
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  > Or maybe your circles are like that in real life (that would be very unfortunate) I can say fairly confidently that it's not uncommon for the college / young adult age, self-identified left. The term Republican is basically used as a soft slur or synonym for racist by many. I'm not claiming that everyone is like this, but the number is greater than I would like to see, especially considering how many of them I see as fairly smart people. I do speak up at times, but it doesn't usually matter because people generally don't actually care about the details. They just want to drop their quip to show support and move on.

spoonjim 5y ago

We damaged a generation of kids to protect a generation of octogenarians and a bunch of teachers who wouldn't assume any modicum of risk to do their jobs. I feel sad for all the lockdown kids for everything that was done to them. My kid fared well because I essentially spent all of my time teaching him stuff, which then caused me to get fired from my job, and then I got a new job at 30% higher salary.

Mikeb85 5y ago
Not going to lie, the last line had me almost spit my coffee out. Congrats on the good outcome!

xyzzy21 5y ago

The obvious answers are: Home School. Charter School. Parochial School. Private School. If you truly care about your children, why wouldn't you? If you don't, why complain? Basically a matter of economic substitutes and actually making a choice.

Ancapistani 5y ago
Don't forget "unschooling." My wife and I have two daughters, who are eight and thirteen years old. Neither have ever been enrolled in a state school. We've had brief experiments with structured curricula, but we've always found that they're just unsuitable for us - they require a (relatively) huge amount of time, both parents and children tire of it quickly, and most importantly, they don't seem to offer anything. We regularly test our children both informally and formally. They're learning everything their cohorts are required to know and more through simply living life alongside us. They're a bit behind their peers in some of the more formal/structured areas of grammar, but their actual verbal and written language usage is significantly beyond expectations for their age. They're both far ahead in math, history, social studies, geography, etc. For kids in particular, learning is something they do by nature. When they get bored, they learn something new. As long as the parents are invested in shaping a productive adult and are able to provide adequate resources for the kids to satisfy their curiosities, my experience leads me to believe that traditional K-12 "schooling" is entirely unnecessary.

eli 5y ago

Virtual learning is bad and I hate it, but the schools that have returned to in-person school despite very high community transmission rates are going to end up remote again soon when they run out of teachers who aren't sick or quarantined.