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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

Is the issue that the parents can't help the students with homework? In Grade school I generally did all of my homework. Sometimes my parents would help but it stopped after going to high school. They did get me in an ACT prep course and I also took the SAT early since I was in a gifted program.

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TFA says that the general problem is that

1. Parents are now the primary enforcement mechanism for doing schoolwork, which is not a role they have necessarily been trained to do

2. Teachers do not coordinate the amount of schoolwork, so parents are in the unenviable position of essentially executing multiple lesson plans in place of the multiple teachers, each which is probably complex in its own right.

2 was a problem when I went to public school normally and 8 teachers each giving 45mins-1 hr of homework easily added up and ate into free time. Now parents are actually exposed to the problem.

>1. Parents are now the primary enforcement mechanism for doing schoolwork, which is not a role they have necessarily been trained to do

Parents were always the primary enforcement mechanism for doing homework, what would the school do if a kid was getting all Fs because they didn't care? The most a school can do is force kids to be quiet, and even then if the kids refuse to be quiet the school can't punish them - a child that does not voluntarily submit to punishments like sitting and not talking can only be sent home.

they can be physical isolated at school...not that id know anything about it...changing subject...

There is a world of difference between just homework, and being essentially the teacher's proxy for the entire school day.

I didn't say homework, I said schoolwork, which is quite intentional since a teacher does a lot more than just assign homework.

How do you plan to enforce this quiet time while holding down a job in another room, or conducting a video call, or trying to code something up while a 6 year old screams constantly?

How did you do it when they came home with eight hours of homework?

This may come as a shock to you, but I didn't have to be working a job at the same time.

Before, most of homework was done in afterschool club. Overall there was little of it and kids new exactly what to do.

Now we have to also explain and there is a lot of it. That is massive difference.

We keep running into issues where our kids didn't know (or claim not to know) that a particular assignment was due, or required, or sometimes even assigned. This seems to happen a lot more than it happened when they were on-site, so I do tend to believe that there's a huge coordination/communication problem going on.

It doesn’t help that we’re on the third school district prescribed app.

Bloomz, to Google Classroom (which seemed completely DOA), and now SeeSaw which might be okay.

There are many issues. Perhaps the most obvious is that parents cannot teach their children and work simultaneously, while children accustomed to the classroom setting are unable to focus on a task independently at home. Either the attempts at schooling or the attempts at working are dropped - dropping the schooling seems like the better choice for families that need a paycheck.

Part of it is that. Part of it is being in a good learning environment (imagine self isolating with an alcoholic abusive parent and learning at the same time, at 6 years old). Theres also issues with differential access to technology and internet. A lot of low income students have fallen of the face of the earth when LAUSD went online.

The issue for me is that my kindergartner feels far more comfortable simply telling me "I don't want to do that now" than she does for her teacher. Her teacher never has to yell/scold/punish, but she is motivated to do it for her teacher and not for me. And I refuse to yell at her (I'll admit, I have, it did get her attention and made her cry, but I felt awful and I don't think it was a positive even if it resulted in a temporary attitude change).

She's a smart kid and self aware enough to be able to discuss it with me, and say that it is simply different getting instructions from a teacher than from someone she is so close to. She knows I'll love her whether or not she does her work. And there is also the peer pressure aspect, being in a class full of students is motivating compared to being at home.

I haven't given up, but I have given up on attempting to do everything the teacher assigns. It is not worth the stress, for both me and my daughter.

As the parent two elementary school children, it’s a struggle to get them to pay attention during the zoom class instead of chat with their friends. Getting them to do the assignments is always struggle, and now it’s even harder. They’ll just stop and start playing Minecraft, but you can’t take the computer or Minecraft away because that’s where the assignments are, and so you have pretty much watch them constantly.

And then there’s the regular meltdowns.

But the real kicker? The school district sends a letter saying to do the assignments, but they’re not assessing anyone, and instead it’s pass-fail based on the last report card. So none of this actually matters!

>it’s a struggle to get them to pay attention during the zoom class

Given the attention a lot of adults pay during boring Zoom calls or virtual events that don't grab their attention, I would say the elementary school children are in good company.

> They’ll just stop and start playing Minecraft, but you can’t take the computer or Minecraft away because that’s where the assignments are, and so you have pretty much watch them constantly

The zoom classes don't sound very valuable.

In contrast, playing Minecraft and chatting with friends are both valuable forms of self-directed education that should probably be encouraged.

> So none of this actually matters!

More Minecraft, less Zoom. :D

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