Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

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It’s also been a week.

Like you said, this is anything but a controlled experiment. People are trying to push through a lot of psychological stress right now. Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling — 2 young kids and a toddler in our case. It’s a lot.

If people look back at this period and use it to judge the effective remote work is, that would be pretty ridiculous. (Of course, some people who are fundamentally against remote work will do just that.) If one worked remote during a hurricane, and pretended the hurricane wasn’t the dominant factor, it would also be ridiculous.

But it is time to be asking, how could we be better set up at home? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our tools? Does the current schooling model work in the 21st century? Or is it too fragile and dependent on an old societal structure? Should we be paying teachers a lot more than we are?

Conversely, we should be talking about the ‘wisdom’ of open offices. Hindsight is 20/20, but wouldn’t regular old offices with doors that close implement a fair amount of physical distancing?

Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling

I was a homeschooling parent and was, briefly, on the board of directors and the lead mod for an educational organization because of it.

Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.

This is not true.

One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.

Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.

Public school teachers typically deal with classes of twenty or more students. Homeschooling parents have a much better student-teacher ratio and the one-on-one teaching is much more intensive than public school education.

You and your children will both experience rapid burnout if you try to spend eight hours a day actively teaching them. You don't need to and you really shouldn't. It's an unsustainable pace.

You can check Learn in Freedom for ideas etc, authored by tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult (he's a teacher by profession, but homeschooled his own kids):

https://learninfreedom.org/

I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can organize their day (such as when to take lunch) to best care for their kids.

Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video),

I think there's an opportunity to self-organize people to address these things. Out among all of us us, there's enough expertise, desire and shared need.

As in Stephenson's Diamond Age.

Ah! You know, kinda, yeah. Combine educators who can produce detailed lesson plans with performers who can deliver them, kinda like a lecturer and a TA, and it really is reminiscent of the Primer.

I've been thinking about this lately since I'm rereading it while my WFH with a 5 year old who needs to be educated.

Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.

For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.

That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.

Miranda played a much larger role in Nell's education than merely acting a role in the Primer.

Yeah wasn't there a whole subplot where she was super attached to the kid and tried to find and adopt her?

Right, but then she got absorbed into the Drummers.

The primer ... I used to dream about building this when I had kids , still do :)... Especially when I see a lot of parents being clueless/mishandle raising kids.

As a parent it would need to be FOSS though.

I've got a group of online friends from my alma mater that were thinking about this, and a bunch of the single folks volunteered to entertain kids over videochat for an hour or so, and they actually organized a Google Doc & Hangouts link to try it.

So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other.

My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me.

As a parent, I see two big problems with it:

1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.)

2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.

I think maybe we don't need a controlled experiment. Maybe we need to embrace a situation where we are forced to adapt and come up with solutions on the fly.

necessity is the mother of invention

About the open-office vs individual- in this particular case though individual offices would have been just as dangerous, since the ventilation system is all connected. although I agree the lower density of workers would have helped.

Not disagreeing that the office setup wouldn’t make a difference. But there is almost no evidence that the virus can spread through ventilation. It can only be aerosoled in very rare instances (like during intubation) and droplets would fall to the ground before reaching the ventilation systems.

Aerosols are created when flushing the toilet, and the virus is detectable in stool, so there is another vector.

Squirm; While yes, air systems are shared, modern offices (and homes) have filtered (though likely not HEPA filtered) positive pressure outlets and there is a central (hallway or more typically edge of building) negative pressure return.

While this virus does survive in aerosol form, it is not strictly airborne; This means that a non HEPA filter will likely stop it and that, from the return side; it's more likely to settle on the carpet or furniture than particularly infecting a human.

The more likely issue would be meetings of more than 1 person in a poorly ventilated room with no airflow; where aerosol virus would linger.

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