4 ms·

The public needs to know the ugly truth. Students are SIGNIFICANTLY behind

27 points by vyrotek 3y ago

wdh505 3y ago
Zillow has ratings for schools. I looked up the ones near my house, and they are all half of what I expected. I guess I will send my kids to public then teach at home too.
- galdosdi 3y ago
  Just be careful they don't absorb too much of an anti-intellectual attitude from peer pressure and end up resistant to activities that sound like learning.
clipsy 3y ago
I've been hearing this for decades -- it was a common refrain after the passing of NCLB -- and it's always presented as some dramatic new thing. I suspect the reality is that people who become teachers value education higher than the general populace and are dismayed to see first hand how little the average person has ever cared. (I'm open to be persuaded by actual data, just to be clear; the rapid and substantial changes in pedagogy during the pandemic may very well have had some unique impact. I'm just not interested in one or two teachers' anecdata.)
- sshine 3y ago
  There is the bias you describe. There may also be a perception that leaving out old knowledge is somehow a "loss", not noticing or recognising the entrance of new knowledge. When I studied, there wasn't room for learning git, and now CI pipelines are on the curriculum. And I may take learning git for granted because I know it. So yes, a lot of sample size = 1 mentality.
  - Xeyz0r 3y ago
    I think teachers can observe changes in generations by the way they think and the way they study stuff
robotburrito 3y ago
I have to hope this is mostly FUD or these teachers are using examples from dysfunctional communities drowning in poverty and crime. Otherwise we are headed towards idiocracy where anything complicated was just automatically handled by AI created when the populace was capable which let the society stagnate on auto pilot.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  There are too many examples of this from teachers presenting the same or very similar issues with their own name and face visible. Either this is the most coordinated FUD campaign I've seen or the world is gonna be really damn scary when that generation gets to vote. They'll literally believe anything on Snapchat/TikTok/Youtube and will do zero common sense checks on it - because they don't know how to.
  - xetplan 3y ago
    Why would anyone be surprised by this when a meaningful % of children basically did nothing for 2 years during COVID. I forget what city it was but there was a meaningful % of children who didn't log in at all during covid. They didn't just not pay attention, they didn't even log in to the class. I know for myself, if I had been young during COVID my education would be frozen at that time. Then on top of that replace the classroom with Tiktok bullshit.
  - trealira 3y ago
    The people who don't know what an even number is probably won't vote. It's already a challenge to get people to vote in national elections as it is, let alone local elections (in the US).
Xeyz0r 3y ago
In general, the educational system is more affordable and available for a lot more people than it was before. And technology made it more accessible in a sense of fast education. Now you just can Google anything and your knowledge is not so deep. By some researchers technology can damage our attention and analyzation abilities, so we cannot really say that people became stupid in someways. I think the way we think is becoming different
DamnInteresting 3y ago
Point 1: Negative "kids these days" sentiments are as old as humanity, and so far they are universally incorrect[1]. Point 2: This is a link to a reddit post with zero citations. It is anecdote, not data. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916
galdosdi 3y ago
> But even if their search phrases are good, they do not click on the links. They just read the excerpt Google provided them. If the answer is not in the excerpts, they give up. I have seen this behavior A LOT with my middle school aged child and friends here in the USA. It baffles me and I try to encourage clicking through as well as evaluating sources whenever it comes up. A lot of stuff that isn't a big deal if you don't have kids becomes a big deal when you do, because you can no longer say "any intelligent person will just critically think and not (for example) blindly trust the AI generated Q&As on the top of google search results, even when they occasionally give subtly wrong or even blatantly absurd info" -- because kids are still developing and don't yet have good critical thinking skills. Yes, they need to learn those skills, but that takes time, years even, and in the meantime, Google becomes a pipeline for misinformation for them. Between this and the way they abuse their Google Classroom and Google Chromebook products to push addictive feeds (Youtube shorts) in the schools, Google is the new Joe Camel and I regret ever having worked for them.

27 points by vyrotek 3y ago

Zillow has ratings for schools. I looked up the ones near my house, and they are all half of what I expected. I guess I will send my kids to public then teach at home too.

galdosdi 3y ago
Just be careful they don't absorb too much of an anti-intellectual attitude from peer pressure and end up resistant to activities that sound like learning.

clipsy 3y ago

I've been hearing this for decades -- it was a common refrain after the passing of NCLB -- and it's always presented as some dramatic new thing. I suspect the reality is that people who become teachers value education higher than the general populace and are dismayed to see first hand how little the average person has ever cared. (I'm open to be persuaded by actual data, just to be clear; the rapid and substantial changes in pedagogy during the pandemic may very well have had some unique impact. I'm just not interested in one or two teachers' anecdata.)

sshine 3y ago
There is the bias you describe. There may also be a perception that leaving out old knowledge is somehow a "loss", not noticing or recognising the entrance of new knowledge. When I studied, there wasn't room for learning git, and now CI pipelines are on the curriculum. And I may take learning git for granted because I know it. So yes, a lot of sample size = 1 mentality.
- Xeyz0r 3y ago
  I think teachers can observe changes in generations by the way they think and the way they study stuff

robotburrito 3y ago

I have to hope this is mostly FUD or these teachers are using examples from dysfunctional communities drowning in poverty and crime. Otherwise we are headed towards idiocracy where anything complicated was just automatically handled by AI created when the populace was capable which let the society stagnate on auto pilot.

theshrike79 3y ago
There are too many examples of this from teachers presenting the same or very similar issues with their own name and face visible. Either this is the most coordinated FUD campaign I've seen or the world is gonna be really damn scary when that generation gets to vote. They'll literally believe anything on Snapchat/TikTok/Youtube and will do zero common sense checks on it - because they don't know how to.
- xetplan 3y ago
  Why would anyone be surprised by this when a meaningful % of children basically did nothing for 2 years during COVID. I forget what city it was but there was a meaningful % of children who didn't log in at all during covid. They didn't just not pay attention, they didn't even log in to the class. I know for myself, if I had been young during COVID my education would be frozen at that time. Then on top of that replace the classroom with Tiktok bullshit.
- trealira 3y ago
  The people who don't know what an even number is probably won't vote. It's already a challenge to get people to vote in national elections as it is, let alone local elections (in the US).

Xeyz0r 3y ago

In general, the educational system is more affordable and available for a lot more people than it was before. And technology made it more accessible in a sense of fast education. Now you just can Google anything and your knowledge is not so deep. By some researchers technology can damage our attention and analyzation abilities, so we cannot really say that people became stupid in someways. I think the way we think is becoming different

DamnInteresting 3y ago

Point 1: Negative "kids these days" sentiments are as old as humanity, and so far they are universally incorrect[1]. Point 2: This is a link to a reddit post with zero citations. It is anecdote, not data. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916

galdosdi 3y ago

> But even if their search phrases are good, they do not click on the links. They just read the excerpt Google provided them. If the answer is not in the excerpts, they give up. I have seen this behavior A LOT with my middle school aged child and friends here in the USA. It baffles me and I try to encourage clicking through as well as evaluating sources whenever it comes up. A lot of stuff that isn't a big deal if you don't have kids becomes a big deal when you do, because you can no longer say "any intelligent person will just critically think and not (for example) blindly trust the AI generated Q&As on the top of google search results, even when they occasionally give subtly wrong or even blatantly absurd info" -- because kids are still developing and don't yet have good critical thinking skills. Yes, they need to learn those skills, but that takes time, years even, and in the meantime, Google becomes a pipeline for misinformation for them. Between this and the way they abuse their Google Classroom and Google Chromebook products to push addictive feeds (Youtube shorts) in the schools, Google is the new Joe Camel and I regret ever having worked for them.