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I hear you man. For me the most frustrating part about all of this is each platform comes with its own algorithmic placement system that has to learn your kid'

I hear you man. For me the most frustrating part about all of this is each platform comes with its own algorithmic placement system that has to learn your kid's level. My eldest kid has high-IQ exceptional needs, and by the time the algorithms would learn her level and place her accurately where she would make some progress, the classroom had already moved on to the next platform. I think I counted five different platforms for math in the past year, sometimes with multiple different logins on the same platform. It's a travesty and her growth has come to a complete halt since I stopped teaching her and gave her back to the school. My heart breaks but what can you do. As a kindergartener she was factorizing numbers in the bathtub and now as a third grader "Xtra Math" is asking her to identify whether a shape is a triangle or a circle.

alasdair_ 5y ago
Seriously. My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade. They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely. My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that. Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call. My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons. My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions. All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time. Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.
- thereticent 5y ago
  That's a strikingly similar situation to ours. Our 4th grader has autism and needed special education services, but of course those didn't exist. At the same time, our typically developing kid was starting kindergarten virtually. At one point the teacher booted him from the class meeting because he was drawing a picture instead of writing words. She told us to ensure that he only joins class ready to learn. All I can say is I'm glad we are all back in-person. The full-time dual-career parents as teacher's aides life was a fever dream of nearly snapping daily.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    Damn straight. As a final anecdote: our kids had a full-time gym teacher. They were supposed to have “gym” lessons three times a week. For the entirety of covid, their “lesson” was a single powerpoint slide with the words “go play” on it. That was the entirety of the work that needed to be done by the gym teacher for a year - post that one slide to google classroom at the appropriate times.

alasdair_ 5y ago

Seriously. My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade. They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely. My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that. Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call. My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons. My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions. All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time. Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.

thereticent 5y ago
That's a strikingly similar situation to ours. Our 4th grader has autism and needed special education services, but of course those didn't exist. At the same time, our typically developing kid was starting kindergarten virtually. At one point the teacher booted him from the class meeting because he was drawing a picture instead of writing words. She told us to ensure that he only joins class ready to learn. All I can say is I'm glad we are all back in-person. The full-time dual-career parents as teacher's aides life was a fever dream of nearly snapping daily.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  Damn straight. As a final anecdote: our kids had a full-time gym teacher. They were supposed to have “gym” lessons three times a week. For the entirety of covid, their “lesson” was a single powerpoint slide with the words “go play” on it. That was the entirety of the work that needed to be done by the gym teacher for a year - post that one slide to google classroom at the appropriate times.