Problems with Remote Learning
wsj.com
wsj.com
I have 3 boys, one each in elementary, junior high and senior high.
The remote learning experience has been dramatically different for each. Our school district has every student on Office 365, so we're in good shape technology-wise.
The senior high student has been able to just go through his texts, work on the assignments, do the tests and continue on mostly as normal. He gets through an 8 hour school day and seems to be better for it at the end.
The junior high-school student is having much more trouble. There is less material to study, and what there is is filler-heavy. He _maybe_ has 3 hours a day of actual work and is then at loose ends. I have been pulling more advanced material for him to work to keep up his education during allotted school hours, but he also doesn't have the more developed focus and discipline of his older brother.
The elementary (grade 6, so almost junior high) student has the least amount of actual work. Maybe an hour a day from his teacher. He's lucky that his teacher is accommodating and allows him to e.g. document his progress to the mun through Kerbal in career mode for the space module they're doing instead of reading a few NASA pamphlets and being bored.
The big takeaway I've had from this whole thing is that each student will only get as much out as they are willing (or forced) to put in. The opportunity to explore avenues of learning beyond and outside the established system is immense, and will probably grow some already latent educational gaps between kids.
I have a feeling a lot of parents are throwing their kids at video games and youtube, or just ignoring them altogether, whether through lack of time and resources, or lack of interest.
Without the proper foundations, self directed study and distance learning won't work.
On the other hand, I feel it's too early to judge remote learning a failure because:
The delivery method doesn't match the medium. A round peg in a square hole.
Take my state for example where are classes being broadcast over the radio. It's horrible.
* The teachers talk as if the students can see the board.
* It's broadcasted live (big mistake). End up with lots of ems and uhms.
* Science teachers quote formulas verbally - Formulas students would have trouble with even in person.
Heck, the learning experience could be much better by just pointing students to khan academy.
On the other hand, expecting heavily edited presentations is probably not realistic. Heck, most presentations at company virtual events are pretty lightly edited.
I record podcasts with people who are fairly senior and have a lot of experience speaking (and are considered good at it). I can still spend a couple hours cutting back on the the umms and you knows. And dealing with just audio is a lot harder than video.
Adults are able to learn from mostly independent study. Teenagers are able to learn somewhat from independent study. Elementary school kids can maybe do some independent study, but not much.
Unavailable parents are part of the problem—but another way to phrase that is, the parent isn't available to act as a teacher (albeit one heavily aided by online resources).
Yes, but I think there's something else more subtle happening - younger kids have a lot less to do. I originally wrote a long diatribe with lots of facts, but it comes down to this: programs like No Child Left Behind et al. have actually lowered standards, especially by decreasing the subjects encountered at younger ages. Things that might have been taught at that age in the past have been pushed up or out.
On the other hand, re: in-person learning... watching my ten year old lap her class because she's on Khan Academy told me what I had long suspected: All of the academic things we are teaching at the early grades can be automated away. In fact, I'm fairly convinced she picked up the material better that way than the classroom approach because she had fewer distractions.
So, yes - my high schooler is even more nominally self-sufficient than my younger kids, but I think it has more to do with the amount of material she has to cover rather than age or aptitude related.
Our child's district did a horrible job, from our viewpoint and from the few other parents I've talked to in the same district (public).
Up the road is a private school that I hear from their parents did a fantastic job. As well as another parent in a district (public) further from us.
Edit: I'm curious to see how this affects the online schools (especially high school and below).
Storytime, a few years back one of my ex-colleagues decided to buy a ranch on the outskirts of Seattle to work remotely. What made the decision easier was that A) his pre-teen kids were already being homeschooled B) his spouse was a stay at home mom who spent a significant amount of time keeping the kids on track.
He showed me pictures of the house which looked beautiful. Sat on the edge of a lake with a backdrop against the mountains and came with a stable for horses and livestock.
Clearly remote learning isn’t going to work when it doesn’t solve the second need.
Interestingly, without TLS, the error is "Please enable cookies", whereas on HTTPS it's "403 Forbidden" after passing through an invalid cert.
One typically works.
List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
Cloudflare is in a grudge match with archive.today:
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...
What we did here in Belgium is to force kids to stay at home and force parents to work from home WHILE the kids are there. I have 3 and none of the teachers throughout 3 months of confinement had a single Skype session with any. We're talking about <10 years old so a single teacher is normally dedicated to the kids. In effect on top of working from home we have to do the job of 3 teachers. Actually make it 6 teachers because the normal school lessons are half-day between 9 and 12 noon and in the afternoon another teacher is taking over or they just throw the pupils into a playground. So yes, it doesn't work under these circumstances.
Fully depends on the students what kind of learning/teaching is best for them when they are allowed to plan which tasks they do instead of following the schedule of the teacher.
This is why I like hackernews. There is much less of this crap (though obviously as we can see in this case it still happens).
HN guidelines mandate "the worst possible way to do reporting" by not allowing submitters to alter headlines that are obviously bad.
Most HN readers wouldn't even click on the article, or even click on the comments page. But they see the headline.
If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Often a subhead or lede is a vast improvement. Here I'd argue for "The pandemic forced schools into a crash course in online education."
(Submitting to hn@ycombinator.com)
I suspect not. In which case, what—exactly—are you trying to accomplish with your comment? Muddy the waters? Convince people there's no problem? Waste people's time on irrelevant info?
I'll let you work out the applicability of my suggested alternate, possibly comparing it with dang's editorial choice.
I'm not sure what your specific beef is. The article, regardless of merits, would be better discussed with ... (checks and sees a changed title on HN) ... something other than the originally-submitted, WSJ-provided, headline.
I'm distinctly not a fan of the WSJ. The argument that the recent, global, crash-course on distance learning has ... proved uneven ... should hardly be controversial. It deserves a fair hearing, whether the WSJ has done so or not, and the topic seems well within HN's remit.
I sadly can't read this article because I'm not sure how to get around the paywall, but if it actually reaches the level of linkbait it can be changed.
For children the difference is likely to be even more stark.
Luckily there is lots of research on this matter to inform our decisions about what is appropriate for educating people.
If engineers were teachers, in one week you would see them creating github repos with reusable TeX material for every possible class that exists, and then finding a way to evaluate and rank the best material.
In contrast, every teacher creates their own material that rarely gets reused, evaluated or ranked in any way, resulting in suboptimal material and wasted effort.
Teachers know how to use photocopiers, if material isn't shared and reused the reason isn't lack of sophisticated technology.
You can use computers to teach almost anything.
I am saying that the educational material that kids are learning from could be produced in a smarter, more reusable way so that it can be objectively compared and improved.
Luckily we have learnt that this was a terrible idea and moved back towards actually teaching!
In terms of whether resources are actually shared, they are, and most lessons on a given subject within a given exam board will be largely the same in terms of materials and planning (school textbooks have teacher’s editions with worksheets and lesson plans), but will vary wildly depending on which concepts students find easy or difficult on the day.
I am talking about teachers freely collaborating and creating material that gets constantly evaluated, ranked and improved by the community in a self-organized manner, the same way open source projects work on github. That is different to using material designed by a committee from pre-Internet times.
I am talking about using a data-centric approach where the material is not assumed to be good, and it is constantly evaluated and compared against equivalent teaching material so that everyone can benefit from the best available material.
But they can't, because formats like Word, Powerpoint and PDF are not version-control friendly, and Office 365 does not scale to the same level of collaboration as Github does. LaTeX is a version control friendly format, but school teachers won't use it. They prefer to spend countless hours putting together the same content in Word and Powerpoint over and over again.
If I was in charge of education I would make LaTeX and version control mandatory for everything. In 2 years education would be 100x better.
Even if you could somehow overcome the technical hurdles, you’d run into the problem of teaching materials not possessing even a partial order.
Even if you somehow get teachers to agree on a lattice or total order for teaching artifacts, you’d need to deal with the idea that producing teaching materials is a way for the teacher to synthesize the content they are about to teach. Often the artifact is something of a byproduct of the process of the teacher making sense of the rhetorical situation the are about to undertake. If you just snag the highest rated artifact, that process doesn’t happen.