Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

This event is going to be extremely valuable for evaluating myriad environmental models, including climate.

And not just that. They're going to be tracking all these kids who are going to miss months of school as a big "natural experiment". Who knows how many other things they'll be able to get data on... Very sad times, but hopefully people can learn a few things while we're at it.

Most schools will offer online courses, and that is an experiment itself.. of course many students will suffer because they don't have access to computer/internet/food/working environment at home.

Not to mention, conducting a good online course takes preparation and practise (on the part of the teacher).

All these online courses are probably going to be setup over the course of like a week. I don't imagine they will be well run online courses.

Absolutely. My mom is a teacher for virtual Virginia full time and it took her at least a couple years to get in the swing of things after 25 in the classroom.

"Students who missed one month of schooling not lagging behind previous cohorts, study finds. Should the school year be shortened?"

.. school is half daycare. They need to fill the time. They'll just add more buzzwords. Probably STEM unicorn slime lab with Tensorflow.

Let 'em play!

Yup - in Israel they explicitly made exceptions to school closures for children grades 3 and under of essential personnel. (i.e. let's make sure the doctors can be at work and not staying home with their 10-year-olds)

They did that in the Netherlands as well but for all lower schooling, up to about 12years of age, for everyone in 'essential jobs' meaning from healthcare to food distribution center employees to garbage collectors. They closed the schools not for any medical reason (they even said it in the official press conference) but for avoiding mass hysteria, as there was (and still is) no evidence it is required.

A common mistake in evaluating education is to just look at subject knowledge.

Good schools teach so much more. Teamwork, friendships, presentation skills etc. Those are a lot harder to homeschool.

Having one of the most stressful events of the last 50 years happening concurrently has to confound things at least a little bit.

9/11? Vietnam? The Cold War? HIV?

This is a blip comparatively. But I take your point.

I am not so sure. 9/11: concerns USA and terrorist organisations. Vietnam: USA and Vietnam Cold War: This comes close to world wide concern.

I was just thinking that this pandemic is freaking me out more then 9/11. I lived in California during 9/11, and while the event was certainly jarring, it didn't change my day to day behavior. At the moment I'm in Spain under quarantine, and it's not clear to me what will happen in a week or a month.

For me the most disruptive moment of my life was the 2008 financial crisis. I ended up homeless for a bit, and I was not prepared for that.

This is a more stressful event than those three together.

The Vietnam War lasted for almost 20 years, killed over a million people, wounded millions more, and involved 7+ countries.

The Cold War lasted 40 years, almost resulted in world-wide nuclear war on multiple occasions, and dictates the US's extremely consequential foreign policy decisions (and the bedrock of US culture) even to this day. It is hard to overstate how influential the Cold War was and is to the US, Russia, China, and many Latin American countries.

HIV killed millions of people per year as recently as 2005, and it started out as a completely unknown infection with no known transmission mechanism that primarily attacked communities at extremely high social risk.

This pandemic will be an economic catastrophe for years that we'll feel a decade from now and it will kill many people until a vaccine is in widespread use, but it sure as hell is not "more stressful" than those events combined.

I don't wish to downplay those events but their impact was quite limited when we consider entire humanity.

I seem to remember the birth rate went up after 9/11, I wonder if we are in for a boom in Christmas babies.

>They're going to be tracking all these kids who are going to miss months of school as a big "natural experiment".

Honestly I don't know why that would be an issue. Say you go to school for 12 years and you miss 3 months because of this. That's 2% of the total time of going to school. I doubt you will have a measurable impact in performance later in life.

Hell, I slept through most of grades 7-9. I was a teenager, always sleepy and unmotivated. Then I started catching up in grade 10 and graduated at least in the top 5% of my class.

Also you can learn so much outside school, it might even be beneficial to have your parents at home, like it used to be pre-industrialization.

Well if that's what the experiment shows, that people don't need to go to school all the time for 13 years, that's useful in decision making as well.

There's no arguing that observing this will be useful to science though.

I thought the same about middle school. Total waste of time, I could have done high school right after primary school, which actually was useful.

This is one of the debates that are going to be settled:

"Do contrails contribute to climate change?"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/911_contra...

I have already begun taking daily sky photos. The week after 911 was exceptionally clear in the Detroit area. This time I'll have my own documentation.

Sure is a hell of an experiment. Can't help seeing the irony of the situation though, 2 months ago it was all climate, "The Green New Deal" and flight shaming. Well, enjoy.

I'll be amazed if things are permitted to return to normal afterwards. Environmentalists will scream the place down to make our vastly diminished lifestyles a permanent fixture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com