15 ms·

I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely

by sylens 5y ago

I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely astonished to see that most administrators took the summer of 2020 off, assuming that everybody would be back in school that fall and things would be normal. They wasted several months of time that could've been spent planning contingencies and how remote learning might work better than just pure zoom. I always thought that schools should have considered something I saw done at a SANS training course once. While there were ~20 people in attendance, there were also several people attending virtually. Those virtual attendees had a surrogate in the room, whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor - as if they were there in person. This allowed the instructor to teach the course as he normally would, using a full projection screen, white board, and other materials. This surrogate method would have allowed teachers to be in their classrooms drawing on blackboards, using charts, posters, and other instructional aids they've spent years building, instead of having to pivot completely to PowerPoint. It's a shame to see absolutely no creativity or thinking outside the box among school administrators.

another_story 5y ago
Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.
- jakeinspace 5y ago
  I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.
  - redisman 5y ago
    This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?
    - jakeinspace 5y ago
      That's what I meant by the right environment. I don't think it'd work well for the typical American public school.
- alach11 5y ago
  Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.
    - LodeOfCode 5y ago
      The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each. Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.
      - jagger27 5y ago
        For tests and exams it’s common for teaching assistants to mark the same few questions on every test, usually on the same page. It helps catch cheating and plagiarism and keeps grading consistent. When I was a TA we’d split the stack of paper tests evenly and rotate them every few days to grade them in parallel. It’s even easier to do the splitting if tests are submitted online.
        LodeOfCode 5y ago
        Oh, yeah! My profs'd also post the list of which TA did each (sub-)question, so that if we had questions about why we lost marks we knew who direct them to (although all grading disputes had to go to the prof, to disincentivise people from arguing with the TAs) And with two teachers, you'd also be able to have each write half the questions, and split the grading that way.
- eadmund 5y ago
  'Since March 2020, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools …'[0] 'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1] $190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that public school teachers shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies. 0: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/look-up-how-much-covid-relief-aid-your-district-is-getting/2021/09 https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/look-up-how-much-covi... 1: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts-about-american-schools/2019/01 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...
  - LodeOfCode 5y ago
    >shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies Not covid supplies, school supplies pre-covid (which they also shouldn't have needed to, but did need to nevertheless). And hiring enough surrogates would eat up a huge chunk of that $1.45 million, given that you'd need, what, ~10 per school for nearly 2 years now? Actually, that's more doable than I expected.
  - cipheredStones 5y ago
    There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.
    - bushbaba 5y ago
      Rapid testing every student wouldn’t be necessary to open the schools.
      - dude187 5y ago
        The continual testing and quarantining of healthy students and staff is what keeps schools from being able to reliably stay open.
- hidudeurcool 5y ago
  home/community school. public schools are a death trap
- rayiner 5y ago
  Just. Stop. You’re hurting kids by spreading the myth that school funding is the problem, because it allows the real problems to continue festering. US public schools are among some of the best funded in the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spending-the-most-on-education/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spend... Plus, schools have tons of unused covid relief money: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid-relief-money/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid...
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    New York City spends close to $30k per public school student. They should be able to afford anything with this kind of spending.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I'm inclined to believe this. I was in a discussion about this yesterday with friends and a clear statistic would have helped. But the chart you've got there --- I know it's not the fulcrum of your whole argument, I'm not sniping --- doesn't really make the case you make in your comment. It says that we spend 0.1% more than the OECD average on primary/secondary schools, but are boosted in the overall rankings by spending way more than any other country on tertiary schools (unsurprising).
    - rayiner 5y ago
      I usually take the G7 as the benchmark—what oil emirates like Norway or banking havens like Switzerland spend aren’t a relevant comparison to a big diversified economy like the US. We spend a bigger percentage of our economy on K-12 than all but one other G7 country. And since our GDP per capita is so high, that share of GDP represents 20%+ more purchasing power than other G7 countries. That should be more than enough. We need to stop acting like money is the problem in education.
      - wolf550e 5y ago
        Isn't money spent on education mostly teachers' salaries? So high GDP per capita just makes education more expensive, not less expensive. If education spending was mostly electronics, then higher GDP per capita would have been good for education.
- Lofty1971 5y ago
  I assume this could be done with one surrogate per teacher rather than per student and would be almost as effective.
  - another_story 5y ago
    That was my assumption, one per teacher.
Gibbon1 5y ago
The other thing is the FDA intentionally delayed approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds till well after the school year start. At the same time the CDC was pushing hopium that vaccines alone would solve the problem. Trying to dangle normalcy in front of people to entice the nimrods to get vaxed. Same time conservative political leaders are using the issue as a political football.
- astrange 5y ago
  Vaccines do get pretty close to solving it, ie it doesn't appear there are any other humanly possible solutions more effective than vaccines. (It is impossible to avoid being exposed to omicron or to get rid of it. Social distancing, lockdowns, etc, won't help this one. Vaccinating yourself/N95s/Pavloxid will help exposure not /matter/ though.)
labster 5y ago
Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily.
- vibrato2 5y ago
- yarky 5y ago
  > I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily. Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!
  - LodeOfCode 5y ago
    Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.
    - yarky 5y ago
      That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/
      - astrange 5y ago
        Bayesians are atheists, they just happen to believe in Roko's Basilisk, which obviously is nothing like a reinvention of the devil. Remember not to think of it since we can't prove it won't torture an infinite number of clones of you forever!
LodeOfCode 5y ago
>whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised hand until the messages are marked as read. Of course there are some edge cases, like temporarily ignoring a child who's repeatedly raising their hand to troll, but this still seems like it could've easily been usable by the start of fall 2020. You'd likely still need a surrogate for young children and special ed students, but you could probably eliminate ~2/3rds of them (? I'm not sure how old children need to be before they can be expected to remember they need to mark their messages & how to do so)
- sylens 5y ago
  The idea is that the teacher doesn't have to keep their eyes on a laptop screen and can mostly move about the classroom in the normal way that they would teach a lesson.
  - LodeOfCode 5y ago
    With the LED they'd only need to go look at the screen when there's a question. Actually, if you put the laptop in the middle of the front row, set the font size large, and used a clicker to go through them, the teacher could probably read the questions from anywhere at the front of the class. It'd still be an issue if you wanted to move about the back of the class while giving a lesson; but that's a hassle anyway, since the students' desks face the front, so IME it's rarely done.
accountofme 5y ago
I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.
- lumost 5y ago
  I think we can demand more of our bureaucrats, if all we expect are Bogons - all we'll get are Bogons. Increasingly, the only thing US administrators can do is spend more money on problems without delivering any improved results. This pattern is common across Academia, Private, and Public institutions.
- damiankennedy 5y ago
  I think its Vogons :-) and they do write poetry even if its the 2nd worst poetry in the galaxy.
  - accountofme 5y ago
    You are exactly correct :)
marcind 5y ago
I'd like to offer an alternative to the surrogate method... Many of the folks on our team have kids and, like so many people worldwide, were greatly disappointed by what happened in early 2020. We watched our kids suffer as this normally human-rich interaction was replaced with powerpoints and tiny talking heads. We decided to offer a solution of our own. Our team developed https://sharetheboard.com https://sharetheboard.com - an app which digitizes handwritten content in real time. The practical application here is that any analog surface/content can be shared simultaneously online, in real time. For teachers this is valuable for a number of reasons (direct feedback from educators): - it allows them to teach "as they always have" - standing in front of a board or writing on a notebook, etc. - they don't have to learn anything new - they don't have to buy new equipment - they can simultaneously address in-person and remote students (again, without "doing anything new") - they can work (in the same way) from home, when needed You'll note that many of the above points are of interest to school administrators as well. - No hardware + no learning curve = high adoption. - Mobile/scalable = fast deployment. - Low cost = well, low cost. For students (direct feedback from students): - the biggest plus is that this is as close to "like in class" as it gets: they get to see their teacher's natural body language, maintain eye contact, see the explanations evolve on a familiar medium (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.) - they can do more than ask questions: the app facilitates direct interaction with digitized content - they can focus on the lesson: the app allows you to easily save board contents any time What was meant to be a quick response to a problem is beginning to turn into an actual product. For better or for worse, some form of remote interaction seems to be in the cards (not only in education) for quite some time. Our goal is to help make it a more real/physical experience, despite being shared remotely. Interested in feedback from teachers, parents, and students on this thread.

by sylens 5y ago

another_story 5y ago

Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.

jakeinspace 5y ago
I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.
- redisman 5y ago
  This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?
  - jakeinspace 5y ago
    That's what I meant by the right environment. I don't think it'd work well for the typical American public school.
alach11 5y ago
Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.
  - LodeOfCode 5y ago
    The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each. Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.
    - jagger27 5y ago
      For tests and exams it’s common for teaching assistants to mark the same few questions on every test, usually on the same page. It helps catch cheating and plagiarism and keeps grading consistent. When I was a TA we’d split the stack of paper tests evenly and rotate them every few days to grade them in parallel. It’s even easier to do the splitting if tests are submitted online.
      - LodeOfCode 5y ago
        Oh, yeah! My profs'd also post the list of which TA did each (sub-)question, so that if we had questions about why we lost marks we knew who direct them to (although all grading disputes had to go to the prof, to disincentivise people from arguing with the TAs) And with two teachers, you'd also be able to have each write half the questions, and split the grading that way.
eadmund 5y ago
'Since March 2020, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools …'[0] 'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1] $190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that public school teachers shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies. 0: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/look-up-how-much-covid-relief-aid-your-district-is-getting/2021/09 https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/look-up-how-much-covi... 1: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts-about-american-schools/2019/01 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...
- LodeOfCode 5y ago
  >shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies Not covid supplies, school supplies pre-covid (which they also shouldn't have needed to, but did need to nevertheless). And hiring enough surrogates would eat up a huge chunk of that $1.45 million, given that you'd need, what, ~10 per school for nearly 2 years now? Actually, that's more doable than I expected.
- cipheredStones 5y ago
  There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    Rapid testing every student wouldn’t be necessary to open the schools.
    - dude187 5y ago
      The continual testing and quarantining of healthy students and staff is what keeps schools from being able to reliably stay open.
hidudeurcool 5y ago
home/community school. public schools are a death trap
rayiner 5y ago
Just. Stop. You’re hurting kids by spreading the myth that school funding is the problem, because it allows the real problems to continue festering. US public schools are among some of the best funded in the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spending-the-most-on-education/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spend... Plus, schools have tons of unused covid relief money: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid-relief-money/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid...
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  New York City spends close to $30k per public school student. They should be able to afford anything with this kind of spending.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I'm inclined to believe this. I was in a discussion about this yesterday with friends and a clear statistic would have helped. But the chart you've got there --- I know it's not the fulcrum of your whole argument, I'm not sniping --- doesn't really make the case you make in your comment. It says that we spend 0.1% more than the OECD average on primary/secondary schools, but are boosted in the overall rankings by spending way more than any other country on tertiary schools (unsurprising).
  - rayiner 5y ago
    I usually take the G7 as the benchmark—what oil emirates like Norway or banking havens like Switzerland spend aren’t a relevant comparison to a big diversified economy like the US. We spend a bigger percentage of our economy on K-12 than all but one other G7 country. And since our GDP per capita is so high, that share of GDP represents 20%+ more purchasing power than other G7 countries. That should be more than enough. We need to stop acting like money is the problem in education.
    - wolf550e 5y ago
      Isn't money spent on education mostly teachers' salaries? So high GDP per capita just makes education more expensive, not less expensive. If education spending was mostly electronics, then higher GDP per capita would have been good for education.
Lofty1971 5y ago
I assume this could be done with one surrogate per teacher rather than per student and would be almost as effective.
- another_story 5y ago
  That was my assumption, one per teacher.

Gibbon1 5y ago

The other thing is the FDA intentionally delayed approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds till well after the school year start. At the same time the CDC was pushing hopium that vaccines alone would solve the problem. Trying to dangle normalcy in front of people to entice the nimrods to get vaxed. Same time conservative political leaders are using the issue as a political football.

astrange 5y ago
Vaccines do get pretty close to solving it, ie it doesn't appear there are any other humanly possible solutions more effective than vaccines. (It is impossible to avoid being exposed to omicron or to get rid of it. Social distancing, lockdowns, etc, won't help this one. Vaccinating yourself/N95s/Pavloxid will help exposure not /matter/ though.)

labster 5y ago

Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily.

vibrato2 5y ago
yarky 5y ago
> I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily. Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!
- LodeOfCode 5y ago
  Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.
  - yarky 5y ago
    That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/
    - astrange 5y ago
      Bayesians are atheists, they just happen to believe in Roko's Basilisk, which obviously is nothing like a reinvention of the devil. Remember not to think of it since we can't prove it won't torture an infinite number of clones of you forever!

LodeOfCode 5y ago

>whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised hand until the messages are marked as read. Of course there are some edge cases, like temporarily ignoring a child who's repeatedly raising their hand to troll, but this still seems like it could've easily been usable by the start of fall 2020. You'd likely still need a surrogate for young children and special ed students, but you could probably eliminate ~2/3rds of them (? I'm not sure how old children need to be before they can be expected to remember they need to mark their messages & how to do so)

sylens 5y ago
The idea is that the teacher doesn't have to keep their eyes on a laptop screen and can mostly move about the classroom in the normal way that they would teach a lesson.
- LodeOfCode 5y ago
  With the LED they'd only need to go look at the screen when there's a question. Actually, if you put the laptop in the middle of the front row, set the font size large, and used a clicker to go through them, the teacher could probably read the questions from anywhere at the front of the class. It'd still be an issue if you wanted to move about the back of the class while giving a lesson; but that's a hassle anyway, since the students' desks face the front, so IME it's rarely done.

accountofme 5y ago

I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.

lumost 5y ago
I think we can demand more of our bureaucrats, if all we expect are Bogons - all we'll get are Bogons. Increasingly, the only thing US administrators can do is spend more money on problems without delivering any improved results. This pattern is common across Academia, Private, and Public institutions.
damiankennedy 5y ago
I think its Vogons :-) and they do write poetry even if its the 2nd worst poetry in the galaxy.
- accountofme 5y ago
  You are exactly correct :)

marcind 5y ago

I'd like to offer an alternative to the surrogate method... Many of the folks on our team have kids and, like so many people worldwide, were greatly disappointed by what happened in early 2020. We watched our kids suffer as this normally human-rich interaction was replaced with powerpoints and tiny talking heads. We decided to offer a solution of our own. Our team developed https://sharetheboard.com https://sharetheboard.com - an app which digitizes handwritten content in real time. The practical application here is that any analog surface/content can be shared simultaneously online, in real time. For teachers this is valuable for a number of reasons (direct feedback from educators): - it allows them to teach "as they always have" - standing in front of a board or writing on a notebook, etc. - they don't have to learn anything new - they don't have to buy new equipment - they can simultaneously address in-person and remote students (again, without "doing anything new") - they can work (in the same way) from home, when needed You'll note that many of the above points are of interest to school administrators as well. - No hardware + no learning curve = high adoption. - Mobile/scalable = fast deployment. - Low cost = well, low cost. For students (direct feedback from students): - the biggest plus is that this is as close to "like in class" as it gets: they get to see their teacher's natural body language, maintain eye contact, see the explanations evolve on a familiar medium (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.) - they can do more than ask questions: the app facilitates direct interaction with digitized content - they can focus on the lesson: the app allows you to easily save board contents any time What was meant to be a quick response to a problem is beginning to turn into an actual product. For better or for worse, some form of remote interaction seems to be in the cards (not only in education) for quite some time. Our goal is to help make it a more real/physical experience, despite being shared remotely. Interested in feedback from teachers, parents, and students on this thread.