My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I | Hacker News Reader

My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I

theatlantic.com

324 pointsmagnifique448 comments

All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old. Adults are barely able to make it through a day of Zoom meetings without feeling drained, how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen?

The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. A 5 year old does not have these skills, and will obviously act out as they have no other mechanism of dealing with it.

Also, who said that this article has to have a point? The writer never claims to propose a solution, she is simply writing out her emotions for others to hear. Assuming she has been largely isolating, is it all that weird that she would talk about her experiences online?

I certainly can't really deal with all-day conferences over video. I dip in and out. And I would observe that what many tech events are doing is spreading things out over more days with shorter windows per day. If a one-week workshop at MIT felt it needed to transition to shorter sessions over 3 weeks for video, that just might say something about online learning for kids.

I have two 7 year olds and a 9 year old. They are taught a remote curriculum, supplemented by homework in the form of online quizzes that reward correct answer with turns at a video game. They LOVE doing this homework, which is every bit as rigorous as the homework done via paper sheets, because it rewards them for getting their answers right in a way that a number at the top of a page never would. And they get their homework done quicker since procrastinating just keeps them from playing the games.

Just out of curiosity what is the online quiz app? Is it Prodigy (www.prodigygame.com)?

Prodigy is one of them. My 9 year old loves it because she gets to use her homework answers to get her flair for her character in the game.

This is interesting. I’ve been using the “fluent forever” method to learn a second language and one of the things it really stresses is the importance of immediate feedback. It makes perfect sense - it’s much easier to understand your mistake and correct it in the moment. But I’d never thought about it in the context of homework. It almost seems silly that we expect kids to wait a full 24 hours or more to find out whether they’ve done a math problem correctly or not.

I don't think Zoom is the problem. It's just as bad in the classroom. The only difference is that in the classroom there is a century old system in place, designed and tested to crush children's emotions and frustrations and also designed to transform them into obedient tax cows. And in the classroom you are not witness to this process.

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen?

The same way that you expect a kid to sit more-or-less still, and not-too-disruptively in a classroom with 29 other children for 6 hours a day.

When they, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, can't, we diagnose them with ADHD and give them a Ritalin patch.

I get it. Remote learning isn't great. It's worse than in-person learning, which isn't a high bar to begin with. Unfortunately, in-person learning currently carries with it the risk of death and disability to teachers. We could have taken some steps to deal with that risk, three months ago (Smaller classes, isolating students from teachers, training glorified babysitters who aren't over the age of 50 to mind classes during non-instruction time, etc), but it seems that all of our leaders and planners were convinced that this COVID thing would blow over by August.

I pulled my teenagers out of 'classroom' oriented school so that they can just do self-paced online courses instead of risking a repeat of the disaster from last semester when their school tried to do 'distance' learning with zoom meetings. I can't imagine a five year old doing well with this.

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen?

Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.

Modern Sesame Street is a train wreck compared to the Sesame Street of the '80s and '90s. It's actually a statement about how far down contemporary culture has gone. Seems to be mostly unhinged screaming these days.

All that old material isn't gone. PBS might not be streaming all ~4k episodes of the show but the Internet has made any media accessible if you know where to look.

I'm surprised there isn't more data on what educational media is actually good or not. Because then we could just use that, because there are already millions of hours of this stuff made. Largely its because the profit is in making more of it, not making available all that which came before.

And it is concerning how much woke ideology is packed into SS these days. It's like they are programming children with a new social operating system.

It would be weird to expect young children to sit in long Zoom meetings. Are people actually doing that? I have 3 kids, the oldest two are elementary-school age. So far virtually none of their online learning has been video conference based. The younger one would sometimes do Zoom calls with his pre-k class at the end of last year, but it was just a few minutes to see his friends and sing some songs, not really about trying to learn academically. Both of them have online based activities assigned by their teachers, though. They are self-paced, somewhat gamified learning platforms (kind of like, but not actually, ABCMouse.) It's at most 1 hour a day for the younger one and maybe 2 for the older one, including 20-30 minutes of reading time. This year they are both doing in person classes two days a week and the rest from home, but again no Zoom meetings. The teachers are teaching the other half of the class on the other two days so couldn't really do in-person stuff anyway.

Our elementary school is 5 hours of Webex meetings daily. There are breaks scattered in between, but it is grueling. My 4th grader can barely manage it, but my 1st grader can’t sit still that long.

Edit: Why is something like this downvoted? I didn’t state anything other than my relevant direct experience.

Same here.

Teacher has been recording a daily 7-10 minute lesson video for some of their core subjects.

Then some assignment of online math, science, writing. Then one of the popular reading sites.

The video calls have all been once per week for 30-45 minutes but mostly social for the kids to interact with each other.

Not sure who really expects 5 hours of video.

In the spring, my five year old, who I would call unusually patient for his age, would sometimes break down crying and beg the teacher to let him leave the meeting.

One thing that I’m not seeing discussed much is that these meetings are objectively a dehumanizing waste of the children’s time. Ten minutes to take roll, while everyone just sits there? If someone did something this pointless in a meeting of adults, they would be reprimanded.

But it’s not pointless. Teaching children to sit still and do what they’re told by authority figures is what school is for. Pointless busywork is at minimum half of all schooling. See Unschooling Society, The Underground History of American Education or any of the many other books taught in education schools that have had no effect on the practice of education.

School is to submit.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.h...

Ha my work absolutely would do something that pointless while paying everyone 50$+ an hour to do it. These are the skills you need to succeed at big inefficient corporations

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen?

I'm sure any parent will say that it is impossible, and the issue is not the screen, but sitting still. I am in fact surprised that the teachers even asked to make video calls at that age. I don't know about USA preschools but here 5 years olds don't study sitting on a desk all day long, so I don't know how they can expect a kid to do that at home.

When my daughter (preschool age) had to stay home because of the virus, the teachers started to send us videos of activities to do at home, but those were for the parents, not for her.

A lot of US kids are forced to sit still whether they're in front of a screen or in a physical classroom. Typically it's better in preschool, but many kindergarteners only get 20 minutes a day to play if that. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/learning/do-kids-need-rec...

At an elementary school near me they would only get to do recess on Fridays, and that's assuming they behaved.

The more I hear about public schools the more I understand the outrage against public education.

My above comment isn't even the worst thing I noticed in the last year or two before I graduated HS. (I went to a small school, with K to 12 on the same campus).

I ran tech for the big "Christmas Program", which consisted of "song and dance" (loosely speaking) from kids aged pre-K to second grade. It was fairly nice, because I got to skip class. What was less nice, was hearing a pre-K teacher yell "Why did you do that!?! Doing that is going to ruin the program for your grandparents, after they go through all the trouble to come see you.", in response to a child stumbling on a line.

Public education is necessary, but many implementations are flawed.

Rereading this, It sounds like something you'd see on r/thathappened. I wish it were fake.

You should qualify that with American public education, there are lots of countries in the world that do better. In fact the country at the top of the table has pretty much banned private education.

You should consider that a lot of families in that country (Finland I assume) are moving abroad because having zero control over education of your child is not good, and schools in Helsinki might be nice, but it's not Helsinki everywhere. Even if the quality is OK, there are many kids that simply can't function in the classic subjects/tests/marks-oriented education system, and then there is bullying.

as someone from another country where homeschooling is not allowed and private education is shunned upon, let me give you the other side of the argument.

private education created a large divide between people of different social classes and it absolutely removes social cohesion. (which results in a ton of other problems).

Some kids do indeed not function in normal classrooms, but this is the reason why special needs education (i don' t know if that is the correct english term) exists. In my opinion, homeschooling does not adequately provide child with the experience it needs to grow up, especially in regards to social skills.

As a parent, I couldn't care less about social classes - I care about my child having a joyful and loving childhood. I don't want my child to be a number in a statistic that both the teachers and classmates spit on, like I was.

In my own case, putting me in special needs education (I tried) would do much more harm than good, and would not provide in any way the good experiences alternative schooling could have (sadly that didn't work out for me too).

Some kids thrive in homeschooling, some kids thrive in special needs education, some kids thrive in small group schooling, some kids thrive in democratic schools, etc, this is not a simple normal vs special needs question, and you can't say that homeschooling does not work - it works for the right individuals, and these children don't need to have anything to do with the children that need something else (as long as we don't socialize their education, of course).

Sometimes the kind of school is right but that particular one does not work and you need to put the child in a different but alike school - often impossible in socialized systems (where school is usually assigned based on residence location).

I think it's incredibly sad that we have hard science on each child being an individual with vastly differing needs, hard science on the outsized influence of childhood on later life, and yet we force children into either normal or special needs school and suppress competition and new ideas in the name of class struggle.

This music video is highly relevant, IMHO: https://youtu.be/Kd6lC14gy4c

Families are moving from Finland to avoid their world leading education system? I'm doubtful.

I am not saying there is an exodus, of course the Finnish system is excellent for many people, and it is so good that it does a good job even when the child does not fit exactly.

However yes, there are people that were forced to move away from Finland or other countries like it because their child had problems in the standardized schools, and there were cases of people that were criminalized for their different educational preferences.

I don't think that problems of the world and the competing economical ideologies should hinder education of children. While for-profit schooling exists, a large portion of private schools are cooperatives, nonprofits, informal groups etc, and private schooling is even recognized by the EU commision as extremely important in helping non-standard people. Private schools can only help, there is no way that a school that is at least average would do harm - it's the government's fault the public schools are failing, as is clear from the many and many countries where private, public, governmental, religious and other schools coexist peacefully.

Another point to consider is the differing needs of parents (e.g. the weird school-work schedule of a mother that still works on her Ph.d. while working as a researcher while having a baby; some people want to travel while their kids are young; ...); a public school simply won't accommodate to that.

Only going to recess on Fridays, if you have been good all week, that's kind of stupid and unbelievable. It's not the experience of having kids in the last 20 years, at least in the US.

That's less than prisoners and animals get here.

I don’t see how that could possibly work, unless your goal is to create brain dead monkeys.

I'm pretty sure it is.

I went to a K to 12 school for my last 4ish years of HS, and the kindergartners (the kids, not just teachers) were already almost mind-dead cult like in "Prep for the test!" and "Go $TEAM!".

There were a couple really good teachers across all levels of the school, but not enough.

My opinion was pretty close to yours in my late teens/twenties but as I’ve aged and become friends with teachers, my feelings have gotten more nuanced. Those teachers make very little money, receive virtually no support from parents and are more often than not treated like babysitters, not educators. Complicating matters, school divisions are so poorly funded that despite all of that, they still fund many classroom activities out of their own pockets.

Give the teachers a break. Their jobs suck...

To be clear, I am not blaming most teachers.

I can trace many of my current skills, interests and aspirations directly to several of my teachers, most often in contexts not directly related to their core subject.

There is the occasional teacher who is there to power trip, but they are by far the minority. The school system crushes teachers just as much as it does the kids.

Edit: Reread my comment you replied to, if I made it sound like the teachers were mind-dead, that was absolutely not my goal. I just wanted to specify that the kids themselves were like that, and worried it might be misinterpreted as the school itself being like that.

Hey friend, thanks for writing back. Sorry that I misinterpreted what you were saying.

Have a great day and thanks for this conversation!! :)

No problem, it's my fault I phrased it badly.

Same to you!

No friend, there’s no fault at all. Thanks to the way you phrased it, I got to listen to a really intelligent person explain their true feelings. That meant a lot to me and honestly, I’m more embarrassed by young me!! :)

Our currently public school system was designed to produce factory workers and conscripts, no happy, healthy kids. And at the time, and given the level of resources then, that made sense.

Basically torture

As a parent to teenagers I can say that they seem to be able to sit still in front of a computer for _hours_ as long as it is a game or a tv-show they like.

(I agree that it was a bit optimistic to expect this of 5 year olds)

Five year olds are equally able to do that. The same can be said of forty year olds (barring back problems).

> how do you expect an almost toddler to react when forced to sit in front of a screen?

And on top of this, we should not be asking “can they” but instead “should they” have this kind of life.

I don't think it's so much screens themselves, but the way they are used. New research actually suggests touch screens might improve focus in toddlers. https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/toddlers-who-use-touchs...

New media has always met with resistance. Books were once considered poisonous trash. Now they're seen as healthy and educational. "In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, written in 360 BCE, Socrates warned that reliance on the written word would weaken individuals’ memory, and remove from them the responsibility of rememberin" https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...

Just to clarify, a "toddler" is 1-3 years old. So a 5 year old is not at all "almost a toddler".

"A 5 year old does not have these skills"

They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.

https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-cont...

"Who said this article has to have a point?"

Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. If this was the author's personal blog I would not be saying anything. But this article sits next to subjects like:

- Can a Protest Movement Topple Netanyahu? - Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - Our Students Are Depending on Us, teaching through Covid-19

> Just to clarify, a "toddler" is 1-3 years old. So a 5 year old is not at all "almost a toddler".

Different kids develop differently.

> They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.

A large amount of adults don't have these skills developed.

> Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic.

This point I agree with. At the same time, I believe purely emotional ranting pieces have a place on the web too.

> They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.

Lol. Because you think they should? Love the one-size fits all statement - not.

As soon as someone has 2+ kids, they realize how ludicrous that statement is. Better yet go talk to a kindergarten teacher - I don't know how they handle kids that age that are not even theirs

God, ZOOM sucks so hard. I can't stand to look at that shit.

All elementary school is glorified day care. Born in 76 in India(yes, I'm getting old) - but elementary school was 2.5 hours with a 1/2 hour break. I turned out ok - didn't miss out on "educational opportunity".

Feelings are for mere humans, not 100x rockstars with a little blood in their red bull system.

> The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good.

I'd go a step further and say that many--if not most--adults can't do this at all. I would go back to college any day, where classes are a few hours a day and I set my own schedule, but personally can't imagine that I'd do well if you put me back in high school (where i did fairly well academically), with a rigid schedule of back-to-back classes. If you told me that I have to do it again, but on zoom this time... I can't even fathom what kind of punishment that would be.

I was a special education teacher for a decade in both private and public settings. I worked with children of all school ages who had difficulties keeping up. I'm also a parent.

A thought: students are expected to learn to function together in classroom settings over the course of their first few years in school. It's a gradual and often tedious process for everyone involved. How many children say they like sitting in class? It's a heavily researched subject. Some students never really get the hang of it. Other students learn to keep their place, but have trouble following the pace, and compensate otherwise. Or don't. Suddenly requiring teachers and children to respectively teach and learn under vastly different circumstances, EG teleconferencing from home with family around, appears a bit unrealistic. Glhf

> All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old.

Everyone knows how fussy 5 year olds are, these readers aren't that stupid.

The thing people usually get wrong is how fussy 6-16 year olds are. That 16 year olds actually don't have that much emotional maturity or know that much practical stuff either, even with 10 more years of life and school.

The biggest crisis isn't parents with young children. It's people realizing how little their teenage kids know and how poorly those teenagers are adjusting.

I'd say that problem comes in two parts.

One is... maybe the right way to describe it is hormones and experience?

Like, the first time you fall in love as a teenager, it's intense.

You literally have never felt that way about another person, ever. And, sure, from a cognitive development perspective, you're an adult, you just don't yet have the experience to deal with it.

That's true for a lot of life, and well beyond being a teenager.

As a teenager, you are, cognitively, a newly-minted adult. You don't know where you fit in the world, much less where you are going, and you're at the beginning stages of sorting out who you want to be. And sure, adults can give you advice, but only you can go through the process of figuring out who you are.

You are also, at the same time, both absolutely confident and totally insecure.

It's rough, full stop. My teenage years were hell on my parents.

This is compounded by American culture and education thoroughly insulating kids -- well into young adulthood! -- from developing emotional maturity or learning to accept responsibility.

That's all about upbringing, by the way. I have met teenagers that I would rank as more mature than a large number of people in their early thirties.

It's totally possible, and from what I have seen, easier -- we just don't do it.

Americans also do nothing, or at least nothing effective, to equip kids with critical life-skills: financial management, personal fitness, nutrition, martial arts, negotiation, the list goes on. The only thing we prepare them for is to "go to college".

That has to change.

I have 2 kids. One is 4 and the other is 8. I agree that most 5 years probably cannot sit through 30 minutes of a zoom meeting.

When the lockdowns first in started in March, my 4 year old, who was 3 at the time, could barely last 15 minutes before wandering off. She has gotten better since then. She can now last 45 minutes online with her teacher, but I don’t think it’s the norm. My wife still needs to sit with her to make sure she focuses on the teacher.

I think that a lot of these parents that have young children that cannot focus online should be looking on building a small co-op for learning. Partner with 2 or 3 other trusted families and hire a teacher or share responsibilities in teaching the kids. Covid is dangerous taking some risk should be considered.

I wonder how people did this before us? pandemics have happened before and while education certainl wasn't universal as it is now, it still happened?

HN has a lot of users who will say and do anything to denigrate in person attendee workplaces

>All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old.

Your comment makes me think that you've never interacted with an East Asian 5 year old. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; long before they take their first steps, they've started decoding the incentive structures around them. Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they act like bored inmates. That behaviour isn't innate, it's a consequence of the environment we've created for children.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_du-wUJPFWQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU

Or French (https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-are-fre...). Or German, or Spanish (from first hand experience). The idea that every fit a child has is a real existential crisis is uniquely American as far as I can tell. Having lived in both Spain and Germany, in native homes with children... parents there “train” their children as mini-adults far better than parents do stateside. I wish I could pinpoint exactly why, but I can’t, even though it is obvious if you travel even a slight amount.

At least here in Sweden I can see parents treating their kids much more like people than just some annoyance that needs to be told what to do or want.

It's on the basic day-to-day interactions, kids asking for something in the grocery store or in a restaurant and having a dialogue why they want it and why they can or cannot have it right now, in a way you'd tell another adult (with reservations about vocabulary and complexity of the message).

There is a much more trusting relationship between parent and child from what I see, not one of ownership or overprotection. Kids are people and are treated and talked to like that regarding their needs, desires, etc.

the idea that people do not treat their children as other people seems so bizarre to me.

I get it, kids can be annoying and drive you mad, but giving them appropriate responsible (this depends on the age ofcourse) and discourse seems like one if not the major task you have as a parent.

I'm reading the book called unconditional parenting and it teaches a lot of this. It has an amazing effect on my 4 year old. You just literally tell them stuff and ask stuff like you would a friend or another adult. It works great. Other than that we kind of let him do things that he wants and as long as the potential danger isn't death we don't intervene.

I live in Germany and was speaking from experience.

Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they act like bored inmates.

Seriously?

Yes. Just like adults, kids thrive on meaning - having a role to play, being useful, seeing the impact they have on the world. Kids very quickly figure out the difference between real responsibility and make-work and act accordingly. Our beliefs about the abilities of children are powerful self-fulfilling prophecies.

5 year old is not "education" though. Everything before high school is glorified childcare, and it should be treated as such. Let kids be kids. They don't have to be "2 years ahead" just so their parents could beat their own chest, unless they're staggeringly and obviously gifted.

That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainwreck, because we all know that's exactly what it's going to be. Well to do folks such as myself will hire private tutors (who, BTW, work just fine through Skype, by virtue of having done it for years). Less well to do folks will suffer the incompetence of our ultra-expensive $13K/pupil-year education system where less than 1/3rd of the expense goes towards teaching.

If people in power didn't want it to be a trainwreck, they'd reach out to folks who have been in this business for over a decade and learned at least how not to fuck it up completely. Instead they're trying to duct tape something together with MS Teams it looks like, and each school district is duct taping its own bespoke thing.

Learning to read, write, basic arithmetics, communicate with others ... Glorified childcare?

Kids learn all of that in kindergarten nowadays. The main function of primary ed is to keep kids occupied while their parents are at work. Primary ed will completely fail at that if it goes online.

I taught kindergarten for five years and am just starting as a secondary school teacher. Primary school is mostly childcare. The only important skills we assume a child who has just finished primary school can do are reading, writing and arithmetic. You can teach a nine year old to read in 40 hours. You can teach a 12 year old the primary Math curriculum in 40 hours. It takes three years to take a child with fluent Chinese who is illiterate to grade level in writing so that’s a hard upper limit on the difficulty of teaching writing.

Children learn how to communicate with others just fine in actual childcare, without being in quite so artificial a situation as age ranked classrooms where their primary occupation is pointless busywork.

Honestly glorified childcare is too kind to primary school. Glorified childcare until at least age ten would be an improvement and have nugatory effects on long term learning outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.

I suspect those downvoting don't have children of their own, otherwise they'd know this full well.

Honest question - Is it the video conferencing technology or the lack of famaliarity with the medium? I've been video coneferencing and working with developers remotely since my early 20s and never felt tired as a result of it. I could see someone who's not used to doing all day finding it a jarring experience. But wouldn't that just discipate in time as the individual adapts? Anyone else feel the same way?

exactly what i was thinkin! I can barely stand to work from home. we need interaction with others! children need to be stimulated and sitting in front of a computer screen will def lead to health and mental issues. :-(

I'm amazed how dismissive all the comments are here. I read the article and it seems totally normal for a little kid not to be able to do "school" on a laptop. Kindergarten is so much different than later years of schooling. It's not about lectures and subjects, or homework and tests. It's about much more fundamental lessons, interspersed with creativity, socialization, and learning to be separated from your parents.

These are fundamental qualities that require physical interaction!

You give me the most well-behaved kid, and I'll show you a hellion when I attempt to sit them in front of a boring "remote learning" session for a few hours.

Me too! We're jugging 3 kids and working from home, and I thought the article was on point. My guess is that most of the dismissive comments are from people without kids!

I have 4 kids. I work from home. My wife works 11 hours a day away from the house. I feel like this world is full of "can't" people who aren't willing to do the extra work. We seem to have enough time to comment on Hacker News. To argue about masks on Facebook. To watch every TikTok, and spend hours on Twitter.

But put in the necessary work to make learning at home productive. Nope, can't do that.

We have put in the work at our house to make e-learning possible, and it can be effective, and kids can focus, and kids can wear masks, and kids CAN still LEARN during difficult times - but it takes sacrifices from parents, be it sleep, entertainment, our phones, TV, or even time off work and living lean.

But I'm ready for it... let's hear some CAN DO stuff from the HN community!

I don't think the point is it can't be done. I think it's just acknowledging that it's HARD. Both for the kids, and the parents.

What the hell is wrong with HARD???? Why is everyone so lazy? We are going backwards as a society. I was raised thinking that if it wasn't hard to do, it wasn't worth doing. Every uphill path should not be looked at as an arduous journey, but as an adventure with an amazing reward at the top.

I like your take on life - thanks for reminding me of this little fact.

I assume this is sarcasm, but if not, prepare for down-votes because absolutely nobody agrees with me.

> if it wasn't hard to do, it wasn't worth doing

that's a very narrow minded way of looking at the world. Kind words, hugs are very much worth it

The point is that the things that come easy for us are usually those that we value the least, so, after we put in a lot of hard work and time on something, and we had a great accomplishment, we'd say "if it wasn't hard to do, it wasn't worth doing." It's a self pat-on-the-back.

But I totally understand how if you applied this saying to EVERYTHING then it wouldn't make sense, or be seen as "narrow minded" I suppose.

I mean, fishing is pretty damn easy, but every trip I take is worth taking for the peace of mind.

Nothing is wrong with hard. But complaining about hard things, sympathy, and recognition of the difficulty is also a large portion of what makes doing hard things tolerable. Trying to shut it down will have the opposite effect of what you want.

have you been taught to tell hard from bullshit? i've been taught that hard and worthwhile are orthogonal and the amazing prize at the top sometimes is just the fact that you've made it, thanks, now get the f* back down you idiot.

Yes, sometimes I cannot tell the difference between hard and bullshit. And yes, I can be a complete idiot sometimes. So, thanks?

This comment is lacking in empathy. Not all situations can be solved by the same logic.

I'm sorry, and I agree, it wasn't. It was a frustrated post and I'm being down-voted because of it :/

I'm with you, we should approach problems with optimism not fear. However, teaching that approach to kids is a long term strategy, and helping them adapt to a new routine is a slow process, it's less about the difficulty and more about the emotional cost that you have to pay to succeed.

I have three kids, all elementary school age and I am prepping to start the school year all remote. I'm not afraid of the challenge but i'm honest with myself that it will take a toll on my kids and my marriage that I cannot avoid. No matter how hard I work, it will take time and getting into the routine cannot be done overnight.

It's okay to be daunted by that prospect.

Something being difficult and worthwhile doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient use of your time. And it doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t make those things easier. Building a computer is hard. It’s also worthwhile. I’ve built a few. But I’ve bought a lot more. It usually isn’t worth my time, effort, and energy.

And having conversations about the difficulties is how people, especially people on HN, will better understand the problem and come up with a solution that will (hopefully) leave everyone better off.

> If it wasn't hard to do, it wasn't worth doing

That might be true but if something is hard that doesn't mean it's automatically worth doing. Video conference learning might be both simultaneously hard and completely worthless.

You're right. My point is more that parents need to work really hard to be involved and turn that boring video class into something productive, interesting, and worthwhile.

So why don’t we make everything as hard as possible? Ditch the washing machine, wash your clothes by hand. Skip the grocery store, go hunt for your food instead.

What exactly is your daily routine then. Raising 4 kids while working full time with your spouse working 11 hours outside of the house is a pretty large claim.

Probably something like, get the kids dressed before the first nanny shows up at 8am...

I run my own business. Been a web consultant / developer for over 17 years. I have a pretty steady clientele right now. I work 6 to 9am, then 10-11pm, and I usually get a hour or two in during the day. Plus I work 6am to 10am weekends, maybe more if my wife isn't tired and hangs out with the kids on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

You essentially work a half day. Burying the lede here a bit.

I never get to stop working, but thanks. Every day, all day, I get email and have to respond to a vast customer base. While I may not be coding away at my computer, I have to stop about 10 times a day to respond to customers, help them solve a problem, make an update, etc. It never ends, I never get vacation, I never get a weekend, I never get a holiday. I literally had a customer call me on Christmas last year because they got a new iPad and wanted me to help them put their domain email on it.

So, no. I do NOT just work a half-day, I prioritize, I multi-task, and it's very difficult to maintain this lifestyle.

Must be nice to have flexible working hours! Many people do not have that luxury, even when working remotely.

Sure, but some parents don't have the luxury of doing fewer hours at their job during the day like you. Weekends and vacations don't count.

> it’s very difficult to maintain this lifestyle

Serious question, why bother? Any normal job would have you working less (assuming it’s true that you never get a free weekend or holiday, which I kind of doubt). What do you get out of this? The ultimate satisfaction of helping a stranger receive email instead of being with your family on Christmas?

So you have flexible hours and on top of that, even if you go to sleep immediately at 11 and wake up exactly at 6, you don't get the average amount of sleep people need.

You may be an outlier who can do this, but the average human will break down with that schedule over the long term

I've run into a number of dads that drive really hard, always at the expense of sleep. They seems to die early, 40s 50s. Might be possible.

I'm in a similar kids/work situation and it's going very rough at best. But then again I'm a completely terrible parent, barely capable as a normal functioning adult, and my kids inherited the coked up hummingbird trait from their mother.

I’m very curious about your daily schedule. I was homeschooled for 12 years, 1 of 5 kids so I’m familiar with home education and having a hard time imagining how a single adult can both work and teach and take care 4 kids.

I've run my own business for over 17 years. I get up early, work, stay up kind-of late, work, and get a lot of time in early on the weekends. It's not really that terrible. It's difficult, but doable, and I can still focus a lot of my energy on raising my kids.

I think that’s great, really. I also think that in your original comment you said that people should be focusing on what can be done with hard work rather than complaining about impossibility (paraphrasing).

Most people must work during daytime hours, and formal learning (for example, math that pushes the boundary of what you know) does not work very well for kids (or adults in my experience) in the evening. I’m glad that you have the flexibility such that you don’t have to do work 8-to-6, but that’s clearly not realistic or even possible for most people.

How does one hard work their way out of this? Start a business so you can teach during the daytime and in the meantime your kids do what exactly?

Even time off work? Do you have no understanding of other people? How can you assume that's an option for people?!

And yet, with a little time, patience, and dedication from parents, all children can be taught to be respectful, focus, and learn the way we need them to learn during a strange and complicated time.

This world is full of can't can't can't. Everywhere we turn, if there's an inconvenience involved. If we have to do something boring. If it won't be fun. If it's hard work..... we can't do it. It can't be done.

I wish we had a "we can do this" attitude. I wish parents could say, "Don't worry, let's help each other. You may not have the time, but I do, and I'm here to help."

But I'm out of hope.

If, by "a little time", you mean a few years, until they're psychologically developed enough that you can expect this of them.

"The way we need them to learn" strikes me as a very telling choice of words. This is a moment where we need to be meeting their needs, not just molding them to our expectations.

My son had to miss pre-school when he was 4.

I created a home-based program (week to week) where we learned everything I could find that would normally be in a regular pre-school curriculum.

We worked for 3 hours every morning "studying", and he was 4. I made it fun. I made it productive. We took breaks. We had snacks. We had recess. It worked.

By the end of the summer, he was reading and more prepared for Kindergarten than any of the kids in his class.

Yes. If parents stop complaining, and get down to work, and make this fun for their kids, and have a positive attitude, even the youngest students can learn from home.

Now days we even have Zoom options, so we WILL be able to get kids eye to eye with teachers, friends, other students. I would have loved that 8 years ago.

Ah, so the original comment is predicated on the assumption that all adults are capable of doing that for their kids.

Some are. Some aren't.

Same goes for the kids.

I'm saying that all adults are capable of making distance learning work for their kids. They CAN do it, but it will be HARD.

Nah.

Some parents are ESL with low literacy rates and little access to technology in their homes. It's very privileged to preach to such people and tell them they need to just get over it, stop complaining, do the hard work.

Not everyone lives the same life as you.

What you did with your child is vastly different than sitting them down in front of a computer screen for hours. You interacted with your child and gave them a social experience and hands on activities. People have to work and can't just take off to be full time teachers for their children. Sure you would have loved Zoom, but I doubt your child would have.

This is a good point. GP is arguing that their experience with their child was great, specifically because they didn't sit their child down in front of a screen and tell them to sit still and watch a pixelated head talk at them all day. And they're probably right, what they're describing sounds like an awesome learning environment.

In a weird way, they're kind of agreeing with the article here -- remote learning as it's currently structured in the average public school does not work for every kid.

The only disagreement seems to come down to whether someone's reaction to seeing a paragraph like this

> Even our worst-case scenario is a privileged one; a trashed apartment and frayed nerves are nothing in comparison with what other parents are about to undergo. My husband and I can work at home, and we can afford some assistance with child care. The huge number of parents who must work outside the home, parents who can’t afford any child care, and parents who don’t feel comfortable managing a sitter’s viral risk alongside their own are in a far worse situation.

is:

- Wow, this is a problem we should collectively work to address.

or,

- Wow, parents sure are lazy with their kids.

Effectively, what you're advocating for is that parents should all homeschool their children.

Which... I mean, that's a position some people advocate for. But if every parent was equipped to do that, then their kids wouldn't have been in public school in the first place.

I'm saying that I'm tired of parents saying they "can't" do this distance learning things, or their kids "can't" do it, because they can, and if everyone put in some positive energy and effort, we can make it a success.

I don't think everyone should homeschool.

However, I do think a lot of people put their kids in school because it's easy, not because they couldn't homeschool them.

I've been surprised several times that the immediate reaction I've gotten when I tell someone we're homeschooling is "Oh, I could never do that."

The truth is almost anyone can. I used to think it should be more regulated and only "good" parents should do it.

Then I saw a single mom with only a high school degree and terrible teaching skills take her failing boys out of public school, homeschool then for a year, and send them back to school a year later, more in advanced placement classes.

If she could achieve that on n her own, without spousal support or any of the right skills, then this is within most parents' grasp.

I suspect she was more willing to suffer and fight for her children than a lot of wealthy parents are, though.

Slightly unrelated, very sorry, but could you direct me to the resources you used while teaching your son?

> This world is full of can't can't can't.

The world is filled with plenty of that, and it always has been. But plenty of people are absolutely tackling this mess with a can-do attitude. You're just not seeing it, for whatever reason.

> But I'm out of hope.

And that may be the reason ;-).

Turning off the news is the best choice I've ever made. Can't be too depressed when I don't get bombarded constantly with BS, we're too busy living our life to the best of our ability.

Unfortunately the laziness is all around us where I live. We’ve struggled for the last 10 years to find more than 2 or 3 other families that think the way we do.

"I'm amazed how dismissive all the comments are here"

The contrarian dynamic strikes again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

dang I didn't find your link super helpful. What is the contrarian dynamic?

"Threads often get an initial wave of negative comments, followed by a second wave of objections to the objections. What determines the initial wave of comments is not community opinion—rather, it's what's the easiest thing to make reflexive objections to. Those comments are the first to show up because those reflexive reactions take the least time. Thoughtful comments require reflection, which is much slower" ?

Thank you.

The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are propelled by people making objections. [1]

The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are a community consensus, it's that they're the fastest reactions to feel, and the fastest comments to write—especially when the topic is provocative, when most of us are reacting from cache [2].

Then a second wave of objections is generated by the first wave. Readers come to the thread, see the comment section dominated by those initial reflexive responses, and feel some version of surprised-shocked-dismayed at how "all HN commenters" seem to react in the same way. This propels them to write defenses of the article, often carefully expressing more moderate or balanced views than the first wave—but they probably wouldn't have been motivated to post anything if there hadn't been the first wave of comments to object to!

These second-wave comments tend to get more upvotes, perhaps because more people tend to share the more moderate view, but also because those comments tend to be more reflective [2] and therefore better written.

This explains why the top comment in a thread so often begins (ironically) with "Wow, I can't believe the comments here"—or from the current thread: "All of these comments make me think HN has never interacted with a 5 year old" [3]—followed by a defense of whatever those objections were objecting to.

Eventually you get objections to the objections to the objections—which reminds me of the line "My complication had a little complication" from Brazil [4], and also epicycles.

[1] Cunningham's Law touches on this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215135

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyHilwSRo28#t=61

A lot of these bad ideas aren't even in comments any more, I've been seeing them more and more in hyper short blog posts, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109726

I guess it's an easy way to get high up on HN.

"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition."

"No it isn't."

That’s not an argument, that’s simple contradiction!

I disagree. The meta insight of the contradiction elevates it to the level of an argument. The contradiction serves as an argument in this case.

Edit: Interestingly the argument is the antithesis of the contradiction!

I got similarly dismissive comments once when I pointed to the importance of PE for child development, not just physically but also social dynamics and team aspects, confidence building and so on.

HN crowd is a tough audience when it comes to adolescent socialisation, not everyone benefits from sitting in front of a computer from a young age.

Yeah, the lack of social interaction is a killer for a lot of child development. Kids on the spectrum whose primary problem is interaction skills are really getting screwed by the current situation.

PE is not important for child development. Exercise is. PE is a shitty kind of torture, a crappy simulacrum of doing some kind of physical activity you actually enjoy and would do voluntarily. In thought I hated sports, in part because of PE. Exercise is great. PE is an abomination.

Sweet Jesus, this. The only way I got back into exercise was swimming, because the only PE association it had was primary school lessons that were calm and didn't involve shitty peers.

> confidence building

Being picked last for every team ever wasn't great for that. It was humiliating, time after time. But worse was then being bullied in the compulsory showers every time for supposedly wanting to have anal sex with everyone, I guess because I was into music and science, not sport. Although, outside school, I was in weekly soccer, basketball and sailing competitions, and did a lot of kayaking, windsurfing, table tennis, roller skating, swimming, bike riding, tennis, handball etc etc. I can hardly believe how sporty I was compared to now, yet still was considered super-unsporty!

Ah this is another dismissive comment I guess. Maybe people like me are over-represented here! (And who this "HN crowd" I read about? Everyone but you?) I reacted to your language, I think - you presented yourself as just pointing out a fact, when you got dismissive comments from a tough crowd without your level of knowledge and understanding.

I understand dealing with children, I'm not being dismissive (at least I don't think I am) of that.

I'm confused why this was written or published. There is no "point".

Yes, it's very hard to keep adults much less kids cooped up in a house all day. Especially for 6+ months. But, what else are we supposed to do?

This is just a paid, public gripe that a lot of people can relate with, but what purpose does it serve? There isn't an alternative unless the author is pushing for schools to open regardless of COVID, which I doubt.

> This is just a paid, public gripe that a lot of people can relate with

It is

> but what purpose does it serve?

It lets the millions of other parents who find themselves suddenly in the same situation, feeling the same things, know they're not alone, and that the struggle is real!

That's fair enough, but that's not a fair indictment on virtual education (per the headline). The premise stinks.

It is the beginning of remote-learning science. Anecdotes allow estimations of impact and the creation of hypotheses. If nobody talks about a problem, does it exist?

Saying you can relate to what the author describes means that you can fill in the iceberg below the surface. I'm not sure I can say that for those without kids developing an appreciation for the magnitude of this iceberg is possible without having a child. I'm still learning how to dad and part of that is sharing the experience of the phase transition from childless to parent with those who have yet to or choose not to pass through the transition. With enough time and thought (which is hard to come by when you have a kid), maybe I'll get there.

But what about children in Australia, where remote teaching has been done for many years? Are they all somehow specially gifted children, so that they manage?

Can you say more about the format of remote learning in Australia? Age ranges? How much video per day? In my school district, they are looking at 4 hours (2, 2-hour blocks) of "live learning" in-person per day, for 5-6 year olds. I can't imagine they're doing that in Oz?

Probably referring to this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air

I can only assume they are talking about “school of the air”. Very much not the norm here, it’s very remote students hours from towns taking school remotely.

It was 1 way or 2 way radio back in the day, now wiki says it’s 1 way video stream with 2 way voice.

From wiki... “ Each student typically spends one hour per day receiving group or individual lessons from the teacher, and the rest of the day working through the assigned materials with a parent, older sibling or a hired home-stay tutor.”

This is interesting!

These children might develop an amazing self-sufficiency or some advanced self-organization skills (if they manage to deal with it well). I often wonder how I myself would have turned out, if I had been taught this way or similarly.

I don't know all that much about how it's done there, so I can't really answer that.

I'm assuming you're talking about kids in the Outback, where vast distance makes it harder to have classroom instruction?

There was a recent NYT article about that[0], and my takeaway is that it's really homeschooling with support from teachers. Not a Zoom videoconference where they fake like they're in the same classroom. The parents are much more involved in the early years. Once the kids are old enough to know how to learn, then it can become more of an instruction/homework style of teaching rather than what's required for preschool and Kindergarten kids.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/world/australia/australia...

Finally a comment that makes some sense. This should be near the top, really.

What is your brilliant solution then???

This is clearly the best we can do know.

Often it's easier to find a solution by talking about a problem, rather than staying silent until you've solved it on your own.

I don't have a brilliant solution. But it's also not clear to me that this is the best we can do now. It might be better to skip the whole thing entirely.

If I were the author, I'd consider opting out of kindergarten, or do it intermittently.

How education adapted to this pandemic will be studied for years to come. Hopefully something more brilliant than Zoom will be discovered somewhere, and spread.

This is the first thing that came to mind, not the best we can do.

Heck, older kids have problems. My brother has a large screen for the computer and his son did his first Zoom class and freaked out. The 30+ faces staring at him was just too much. My brother had to switch to the view that just shows the speaker. It was still a pain for the whole day. It's just not physical so it becomes watching a TV show for the whole day. There is something about the physical presence of others that makes things better.

> You give me the most well-behaved kid, ...

As a first-time father of 2.5 years old, I worry a lot about his behavior like when he hits me for no reason and then laughs. That cannot be normal, or so I used to think.

His pediatrician assure us that this is normal toddler behavior. In fact, lack of such behavior is cause of concern. Another thing she told us is that social workers look out for extremely well-behaving kids because they might be suffering abuse.

At this stage, I personally don't have experience with school age children but I imagine it is not normal for 5 years old to be able to sit in front of laptop for several hours.

In my opinion, the issue here isn't virtual learning (the what), the issue is how we are doing virtual learning (the how). We can't use zoom the way we use a physical classroom. It's a totally different medium. I teach a group of kindergarteners online every morning for 3 hours. The first thing we do is make sure their space is set up to allow for movement. They can jump up move, around, wiggle, whatever they want. I also take huge advantage of the screen share feature. If kids have a question about bugs, we look on youtube together for a great bug video. Every morning they get to pick a video on cosmic kids yoga, and then we do cosmic kids together. Considering she's the best kids yoga teacher in the world, we're taking advantage of the online medium to give them the best possible experience. When I read to them, I also screen share, so they can follow along (a much better way to get kids to read a long than in a classroom where I have to hold the book up.). Are there advantages to a physical classroom? Absolutely. Do we live in an age of technology? Yes, this is absolutely true. Let's learn to use these incredible tools well with our kids, rather than just dismissing them because they don't replicate the classroom experience.

This is how my class is structured and the activities we do. https://www.modulo.app/manishamodule

Feel free to share with other teachers if it could benefit them. I"d also be happy to talk to your teacher or anyone else's teacher if they need support on making zoom more engaging. Also, if other teachers have ideas of activities that worked well for them, I'd love to hear!

I'll just add that one thing that's been helpful in my group is to try to focus the zoom on social-emotional learning and then do an "independent study" together period where kids work on mastery-based learning apps independently, but with their friends and a teacher there if they get stuck (Math tango is our favorite!). I find kids learn a lot better with the apps then when I teach them a lesson verbally and give them a worksheet.

Zoom represents a really interesting challenge for teachers, but there is a lot of gold to be found if you look!

Zoom does not belong in any classroom, regardless of virtual or physical. It is proprietary software, which has a back track record on privacy and security. It is not free software respecting children's and teachers' rights and freedom.

I find the this reliance on proprietary shitty software annoying and absurd. Often teachers barely know manage to cobble together virtual classrooms. They lack information about alternatives and support for setting things up properly.

I tried a lot of different web conferencing apps and zoom was the only one that had good enough audio and visual to make it remotely possible to teach effectively. Google meet was a total disaster with a group of more than 5 kids. But, I was lucky to have parent in my group who were informed about options and could give me advice in getting going. I think it's great if teachers can take advantage of emerging and established technology if it helps them teach well.

Seriously. I'm a high school teacher and we had a Google Meet training today and it's just lacking so much compared to Zoom. It's frustrating as hell.

With respect to open source, there is Jitsi which I have seen exactly one person use for a small gathering. So shall we make things more difficult by requiring the use of open source (which I generally support)?

Jitsi is free software afaik, so a higher ethical standard than open source, although it classifies as open source because of this automatically. Aside from that, I think we should require free software and only switch to "merely open source", if there is no free software alternative.

Of course we should not simply require such a thing, but we should instead try to help, by making tutorials for easy setup of tools, for example Jitsi. We should create a guide, which any computer class teacher should be able to follow. Not an easy to meet criteria though. Perhaps people could also offer support for teachers for setting things up. Whatever we do, we should support teachers as well, not only make a requirement and we should not tie this support to any costs for the teachers.

I don't disagree, but that’s a failure of the other offerings to exceed the value proposition of Zoom.

Well said!

It's great that you are a technology-savvy teacher who is capable of taking advantage of these tools. Unfortunately, a large number of teachers and school districts do not have the skills, resources, or leadership to support this kind of experience for their students and teachers.

Most school districts would need

1. the desire to transform the way they teach

2. the leadership capable of driving this change

3. the teachers who are tech-savvy or capable of learning these technologies/skills (many aren't!)

A lot of teachers tend to have really high emotional intelligence which makes them great caregivers, but may not have great tech skills. I'd love to see school districts provide more professional development to teachers in effective strategies using online teaching. I don't think this is even taught in teacher's college. But hopefully now with the world changing, this will change as well. I'd be happy to provide training to any teacher who wants tips on using technology to teach. The great news is a lot of teachers are really highly motivated to learn and really highly motivated to teach well so I am sure they would pick up these skills quickly given the opportunity.

I knew virtually nothing about tech, but one day I got the idea 5 years ago for a tech startup that could help kids. I was forced to learn about technology to make it work and benefited from a lot of great mentors along the way.

Even 5 years later, I have a sharp learning curve, but a lot of the parents in my group are engineers and have helped me come up with good activity ideas and technology ideas and been really patient with me as I learned to apply them.

I bet a lot of people in this group could help their child's teacher. If you reach out, I bet your teacher would be really grateful and eager to learn too.

This would have been a fine excuse in the spring, but the school district and teachers have had all summer to catch up the technology side. I know my school district pushed back the start date just to put teachers through 2 weeks of intensive tech training.

This is usually the first mistake new homeschoolers make - trying to recreate the "school" experience in their homes. It nearly always fails.

Homeschooling is much more flexible and dynamic. More breaks, more following the rabbit down the hole, more fun.

My kids can often be found reading in their makeshift forts behind the sofa, watching ants in the backyard, and clicking through the youtube videos following the curiosity from something they learned in their regular studies.

Kudos to you. My son’s Kindergarten is starting in one week and I hope he gets an experience like this.

seems like a problem in search of a solution. why shouldn't you be able to shop for the best online learning experience in this situation

That’s one of many antipatterns in this situation we are in.

Kids can't learn all day long in a classroom. I don't know why we expect them to be able to do it remotely. School has always been 1/3 learning 2/3 baby sitting.

When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.

> When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.

Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.

Yes I was born in 92 and it was all day when I went.

My son's school changed to full day this year (Los Gatos, CA area) - but I think all the other schools in the district were full day already. When he did Kindergarten few years ago, it was for half a day.

Arizona does not fund full day kindergarten

It's half day in SF (source: daughter is in lafayette). Private pre-K can be full day (it's basically glorified daycare).

This isn't to the actual study (which I'm having trouble finding), but to the NEA's policy brief on all day kindergarten.

https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/18001_Full-Day_Kindergarten_...

The TL;DR being that all day Kindergarten is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. As a result, many districts are moving towards full day.

My kid's Kindergarten is still half day. As far as I know half-day kindergarten is still the standard in my state (Utah.)

I had "all-day" (0800 - 1400, same as the elementary grades) kindergarten in Florida in 1985.

I had all day kindergarten in '83. First half was in English, and the second half was in French. And no, this was not a private school. This was Cincinnati Public.

I have a curious question, can you speak/do you know French now?

Sadly no. But that's because we moved from the school district the following summer. It's a bit of a sore point for me.

I have no doubt if I'd stayed there (K-6), I would have been close to fluent. After lunch was a full immersion in French. My teacher was a native speaker from Belgium. I remember having mastered counting in French, which is quite interesting considering most kindergarteners probably have not mastered counting in English.

As for an anecdote, I had one friend who stayed there through 4th grade. He still lists French as a language on LinkedIn.

[Edit] By master counting I mean having mastered the language algorithm, so to speak. Once you can count to 100, it's pretty easy to get to 200, or all the way to 999 with the knowledge at hand. It's not until one thousand that you need a new word. And, IIRC, French has a _very_ mechanical counting mechanism whereby it was even simpler. Perhaps a native speaker can weigh in here?

Small nitpick: Kindergarteners are expected to count to 100. At least, that's the case in my county (Wake) in a state not known for K-12 excellence (North Carolina).

Ok, I edited my comment to clarify. I did not mean count to 100 as mastering counting. I meant count _almost_ arbitrarily high.

And small world. My wife hails from Forsyth county.

You must’ve been learning the Belgian version, because French numbers in France are kind of a mess.

Like English there are special words for some of the “teens” numbers, which is the least of the troubles. Compare deux (two) and douze (twelve) to huit (eight) and dix-huit (ten-eight, or eighteen). Mildly annoying, but we have special cases for “eleven” and “twelve” in English too, no big deal.

Then some of the tens are weird too. While quatre (four) and quarante (forty) are clear, six (six) and soixante (sixty) are a bit tricky, while deux (two) and vingt (twenty) don’t seem to be related. These are then combined in uneven ways, with twenty one being “vingt et un” (twenty and one), while other numbers using the hyphenated form of vingt-cinq (twenty-five). Again, annoying, but manageable.

And then there are the extra special case numbers like seventy, which in France is apparently soixante-dix, or literally “sixty ten”. In some countries this is a much more reasonable “septante”, but not in France. The French actually count their seventies like “soixante-dix-sept”, which translates into “sixty seventeen”, or seventy seven in English.

And then there’s eighty. Holy crap, the number eighty. In French eighty is apparently “quatre-vingts”, or “four twenties”. Whoever came up with that was a brilliant sadist. Requiring some basic multiplication just to count to eighty is downright evil stuff, especially for young kids. Ditto for whoever made ninety “quatre-vingts-dix” (four twenties ten).

Note: I am not a native French speaker; I’m just learning.

The French use the vigesimal system (base-20). I learned this fact while learning Norwegian, which doesn't use a base-20 system anymore, expect almost everybody above 50y still use the Danish system (also base-20, like French), which was indeed very confusing.

In Spanish it's more or less the same as French when it comes to naming numbers, except more predictable spelling and it's base-10: dos (two), doce (twelve), ocho (eight), dieciocho (eighteen), ochenta (eighty), noventa (nighty), cien (one hundred) and so on.

In the case of e.g dos (two) and veinte (twenty), were there doesn't seem to be any relationship, the root of veinte is "dwi" (dos), but it lost a sound somewhere along the way. Two, dos, duo, dual, double, all share the same indo-european root.

Why isn’t 60 in French something like tres-vingt? French is a language full of exceptions which need to be memorised and which are rather random.

Excuse me but I understand vigesimal (base-20) like a potency. The French are not following through on that at all.

If you have a look at Mayan math you will understand how to do "proper" vigesimal.

With proper I mean that what we consider single digit numbers (0-9) which is a range of ten, to be the basis of single digits.

The Mayans actually could represent first twenty (0-19) as one "single digit".

Their idea of numbers was just much more composable than ours is.

I’ll try to give a short explanation:

There are three "words" which make Mayan numbers. A dot, a line and a shell.

The dot represents a one, the bar represents a five, the shell represents a zero.

5 dots make a line (similar to Roman)

One dot above one shell makes twenty. (1 * 20). Like we consider a one and a zero (10) to be greater than 9.

One dot above one shell above one shell makes 400 (1 * 20 * 20)

One dot above one dot above one dot makes 421 ((1 * 20 * 20) + (1 * 20) + (1 * 1))

Compared to the potency of this mathematical language the idea that French are using vigesimal is laughable, because they only denote their 80 like this.

It’s quite fascinating how logical and functional their math was, they were using the potency of zeros long before we Europeans discovered that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F53HuD2lcb8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals

French is actually a significant language in Cincinnati?

I've never been there and it isn't exactly close to the Ontario or Quebec provinces of Canada.

No, it is not. Occasionally bilingual lower educational programs become very popular, and French is a common choice, especially in places far away from the American Southwest. A lot of cities I’ve lived in have had a Lycée Français in them, although I’m not sure if they’re related (I don’t have kids, so I never checked).

I mean, it is literally across the river from Louisville.

Kidding. No, and they pronounce the city of Versailles, IN ver-sales.

I'm pretty sure I went to kindergarten all day and that was in the early 1970s.

I remember my mother saying how a neighbour forgot it was his turn to pick up me and my fellow neighbourhood classmates. It was at 4pm after he was off work and I'm pretty sure I would have started at 8am or 9am.

I would have gone to kindergarten in the early 1970s, but my mom put me in first grade instead. She told me years later, jokingly, that it was because kindergarten was only half a day but first grade was all day so she would have more free time. I'm pretty sure the half day vs. all day part was true even if it wasn't her real reason (her real reason was that she knew I'd be bored in kindergarten).

You remember the end time pretty clearly but are you sure about the start time? My kindergarten had 2 groups - a morning group and an afternoon group, so a 4pm pickup time could have just meant you were in the afternoon group.

All day in Texas.

Some places are sending 3-4 year olds to all day pre-k now too. We're working too much and public schools have become free day care systems.

I'm disappointed that some people associate not working full time and raising/teaching your children as somehow oppressive. Having to commute and farting in an office chair all day seems more oppressive to me.

Single-income family that sent a kid to all-day pre-k reporting in. We offered our kid the choice, and they enthusiastically opted for the all-day option.

I don't think it was really a hard choice, from their perspective. "Do you want to spend 3 hours having fun with friends every day, or 6 hours?" That's right up there with, "Would you rather have one cookie or two cookies?"

In San Diego, it is full day for kindergarten, with many younger kids attending full day tk (transitional kindergarten).

It depends on the school. Even within a district some schools will be all day and some 1/2 day. There is no law that mandates how long kinder has to be so it's up to the schools.

If you were in kindergarten in 1992, that makes you just about old enough to be the parent of some HackerNews kid who now posts that his or her parents went to kindergarten for half a day.

Interesting. I went to kindergarten in 1986 or so, and it was all day (US, New Jersey).

I was in primary school in the 80s and it was like .. 8am to 2:30 I think? ... pretty much stayed that way until high school, which I think let out at 3:30 or 4 ... mostly because we all rode the same buses and they had to go to each school to load up.

In Indiana at least it was semi-optional in '88 and I think they just had a morning class and an afternoon class to double the number of kids who got to go. But I mean, I'm pretty sure they went full-day as soon as it was possible. It's free childcare and way more households now are dual income.

Kindergarten in the US became far more academically focused after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the adoption of Common Core curriculum. Most schools also changed the age cutoff date for kindergarten so the average student is now slightly older.

> Kindergarten in the US became far more academically focused after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the adoption of Common Core curriculum.

My understanding is that this is at least driven in part by academia, who have gradually advocated earlier and earlier interventions for lower performing students.

Sounds really crazy to me, here in Hungary most kids start structured classes at 6 or 7 years old. Before that it's just playing outside, singing, listening to fairy tales, going to hiking trips, to the zoo etc.

This tight grip on American kids looks extremely stressful and harmful (helicopter/bubble wrap parenting, structuring every waking hour with classes and extracurriculars, driving them everywhere, never leaving them to themselves etc).

Same with Finland. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-jo...

Most research shows that academic study vs play in preschool makes little difference in how kids turn out later in life. And that play might even be better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/well/family/let-kids-play...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/well/family/taking-playti...

Of course it is harmful. And that together with standardized tests, textbooks stuffed with information that neither the editors fully read is a recipe for a bad outcome. And it doesn't end there, professors are bombarded with so much bureaucratic crap that many of them who would otherwise put up with really bad pay just to be able to teach kids simply give up, but that's just a tangent here.

When kids play they learn a whole lot more about the world, social interactions, their bodies and what not. Kids can learn some things quite early and it is not a bad idea to teach them early either a second language or to read early or some other useful skills. But the problem is this has been exaggerated greatly and way too much is pushed on them.

Well clearly you are incorrect because all of the smart people said we have to test to make sure that the kids are learning and we can only make sure that the kids learn by sitting them down and making sure they know the trivia for the test to make sure their learning, because the smart people said the test will make them learn, by making sure their learning.

On the bright side, for every one of the above administrators there is a teacher who actually wants to help kids grow.

Edit: Teacher -> Administrator. I haven't met teachers who actually like standardized testing.

You make fun of the educational structure, but it's base structure can clearly succeed if given the right support from the family and the correct budget. Japan has done exceedingly well (though a little over stressed - there can be balance) with a very similar base model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Japan

I understand that bashing all things American has become en vogue, but some things have just become corrupted due to lack of proper maintenance, really. Much like our health care system which has become over saturated with special interest and privatisation instead of a patient focus.

We've forgotten how to keep our eye on the prize, as it were, and lost focus on what the goal actually is.

> You make fun of the educational structure, but it's base structure can clearly succeed if given the right support from the family and the correct budget.

I did not mean to make fun of the structure itself so much as point out it's failings in our current environment, as you pointed out, Japan does it well, if a bit stressfully.

> I understand that bashing all things American has become en vogue

This was not my intent, I'm sorry if it came across that way.

> things have just become corrupted due to lack of proper maintenance, really.

I would argue that it's not just a lack of maintanence. There are a number of people who actively work against correct education because "That's not how we do it". I think you summed it up well with

> We've forgotten how to keep our eye on the prize, as it were, and lost focus on what the goal actually is.

Edit: Having read the other comment, it sounds like Japan has issues as well. I still believe this model could be successful, but it would appear it's hard to get right.

Elementary school in Japan is OK. It kind of goes off the rails after that though, with success in life largely dependent on a few exams, the content of which is not properly taught in school so everybody with the slightest ambition has to go to cram school (juku) to make up for it.

Anecdote and first-hand experience deny the claim that they're doing well. The criticisms section on the wiki cites a lot more than just stress and bullying:

> The Japanese educational system has also been criticized for failure to foster independent thinkers with cultural and artistic sensibility. Japanese students that attend schools overseas often face difficulty adapting and competing in that environment due to lack of international viewpoints.

I don't want to say Americans don't love and cherish their children. But the uncomfortable truth is that our culture has become so materialist that, on a mass scale, when we look at our children, we don't really see the people they are now. We see the economic participants they will be in 15 years.

I think it's a bit different. This forcing of academics into Kindergarten is more of a panic reaction to the overall low quality of the American education system. Unfortunately, this reaction ignores cognitive science for a try-harder approach.

It isn't about materialism or care. It's about having education driven by supposition instead of evidence and what we know works. Phonics would still be core to early curriculum, for example, if we followed the science. It's harder to teach than "whole word" reading, but phonics actually works and we have decades of evidence, and mountains of cognitive science to show us why.

I agree that there needs to be a more evidence-based approach. Though, I don't quite follow you on the specific example. The scientific consensus that I'm familiar with (based on trying to figure out, a couple years ago, how best to support a young child who was very eager to learn to read) is that you get the best outcomes when you use both approaches, and the current thinking is that no reading instruction program that is based on just phonics or just whole word can be considered a complete reading instruction program.

From what we now know, the "whole word" or "whole language" approach seems to be actively harmful. It is linked to the dramatic increase in dyslexia in the regions where it is used to teach English reading.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

> ...it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

Turns out this was previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447

If there were the resources to do it well it's not a terrible idea but it would require a lot more teachers to do small group play learning where there's educational content but embedded in something enjoyable for the kids. Kids are way more capable than the level they're taught if they're given enough attention.

I'm really glad my parents had the time and conviction to put time into teaching me phonics and math early. Really gave me a leg up.

Odd. How does Hungary break their children down for a lifetime of labor?

There's plenty of time to do that after the age of 6-7.

> ..playing outside, singing, listening to fairy tales, going to hiking trips, to the zoo..

That sounds like wonderful early childhood activities, healthy for the body and mind.

Having gone to a Japanese kindergarten, I remember it being a friendly experience, similar to what you described. However, as soon as basic school starts (6~7 years old), it can get stressful depending on the region, public/private school, and parents' social class and expectations.

Also, this doesn't mean we were always just let loose. The "teachers"/"nurses" (not sure of the word) taught us a great deal of stuff, like different tree types and bird species etc. We'd have a poster with different birds on the wall and we'd then listen and look for them in the parks etc. We learned to identify trees based on their leaves and so on. We learned about national holidays and what they meant (so a bit of history even), to do crafts, like Easter decorations and so on. So I don't mean we were like feral children without any guidance, it just wasn't structured like school.

Turns out a lot of education is just child care. And now parents are having to see it firsthand instead of offloading it to a professional.

It's not fair to call it "just child care".. teachers are professionals who provide both care and education.

Got a kid in kinder to this very day it's only 3 hours...

> Kids can't learn all day long in a classroom

John Taylor Gatto is an award-winning public school teacher who was honest and brave enough to concur with you:

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

> School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know

Sounds like it is more about learning to keep your head down and this award winning teacher is very aware of that

Grade schools usually have recess too.

(for the life of me, I can't recall what we did on rainy days)

We had recess when i was a kid too. It lasted for 15 minutes out of a nearly 8 hour day.

As a former middle school teacher, I can concur that most of the day is "educational themed day care" primarily about teaching kids to submit to authority and keep their heads down. Actual learning can be accomplished with far greater value by having mostly quiet reading sessions interspersed with outdoor play. Even fiction reading is a huge benefit, as most of our "reading" classes are all about talking about reading, not actually practicing it, so most students only improve their BS skills.

I can't help but feel that many of the dismissive comments here must be either from folks without kids, or from people that got lucky with a well-mannered child. You think those good manners were all your amazing parenting? You probably deserve some credit, but I think you also lucked out more than you realize. Haven't you seen parents with multiple kids and those kids have wildly different dispositions?

I urge you to have more empathy with parents and kids. Kids handling remote learning badly is such a pervasive complaint right now that it defies logic that all of these parents are bad parents.

Ah... this. So much this.

> Haven't you seen parents with multiple kids and those kids have wildly different dispositions?

Agreed - I have three kids. One is going to her school in-person. Another sits on the couch on his laptop for 4 straight hours until he gets his work done, and refuses to take a break. The last one works in 20-30 minutes sessions, doing screen time, then taking a break.

If I were to force any one of them to work like the others, it would go badly. Different people, different ways to work.

Yep. There's variance. I have one kid who can crush online classes sporadically and do tons of heads-down work with minimal supervision and is just six years old.

The other one is almost ten and is on ADHD medication, has borderline personality disorder issues, and while very intelligent, has problems with authority and can't focus online very well.

There's a huge randomness factor that goes into everything, including having kids. It's not deterministic.

I so agree. My youngest was proud when they came home with "red lights". The other child was devastated when the teacher looked at her cross-eyed.

The youngest one is very very indifferent to peer pressure. They don't give a sh!t what anyone else in their classroom thinks of them.

Yes. Anyone with more than one child will know that the main thing we know about kids is that "no two are alike."

My daughter started Kindergarten and we're doing remote learning. She' almost 5 years old and can work a computer for the things she needs. But she can't work a zoom meeting. So I am a teacher's asst. from 8am until 2:30 pm. It's exhausting and sometimes I take a 2 hour nap afterward. It's hard on her because until a few weeks ago she would wake up, come into my office with me and watch shows on a laptop, maybe play some Minecraft. Now I wake her up instead, and prep her for school, which is in the same office she used to have fun in. She has been adjusting slowly, but it has not been without breakdowns on all our parts.

You have trained your 5 yo to just watch shit on the laptop?? And you think that’s all perfectly fine?? Wow.

Depending on the state, education isn't compulsory until 6 or 7 years. Would it be an option for you to just hold off on the structured approach for another 6-12 months and let her play?

That's a scary prospect considering all the studies and news articles that say that putting your kids in school as early as 4 can result in life-long benefits.

It's hard to be a parent these days, you feel like nothing you do is ever "right".

> putting your kids in school as early as 4 can result in life-long benefits.

Giving a shit about your kids is mainly what results in life-long benefits.

The sad truth is a lot of parents either don't care about their kids or care about them only as a proxy of how it reflects back on them.

I find that hard to understand. Isn’t having a kid something you do exactly so you have someone to care for and nurture?

> Isn’t having a kid something you do exactly so you have someone to care for and nurture?

Ideally, yes.

In practice, not as often as anyone would hope.

Sometimes out of actual ill intent towards the kids.

Probably most times just due to parents being dealt a raw hand and them not having the wherewithal to give their kids the amount of attention they'd like to.

About 1/3 of children in the US were unplanned, and I imagine another (but not coincident) 1/3 are unwanted.

Yes, and for 51% of the time it's all a priceless, privileged joy. And the other 49% is you feeling guilty because you are short of time trying to parent, work, keep and maintain a house; you want to encourage a broader palate or cook once for everyone but they gripe about what you've cooked, antagonise each other, mess up the house in creative new ways, etc.

That's assuming you are an engaged parent and intended to have them.

I imagine school is an effective piece of the puzzle because it offers peers plus dedicated, trained professionals keeping everyone on track without having to also clean the house, take client calls, cook, etc.

Back up the comment chain though, I think in a year like this and at younger ages, you can relax any homeschool attempts. Months ago when quarantine peaked in South Australia, we took our kids out of school and had a very free-form program. Get up late, make bread together, do a bit of gardening, play Lego, building challenges, drawing, screen time, etc. Combo of bumming around at home with practical, learning activities. Fine by the kids and less stress for parents.

Citation needed. Most research I've seen says that it's the socialization and free play aspects that are important, not the academic content.

Young kids are not great at playing by themselves. Pretty much the only way to get a preschooler who can't read yet out of your hair for an extended period of time is to give them an iPad or TV.

This is better with more open space. A toddler I know can occupy himself for hours outside, but you have to keep a watchful eye for what he's getting into, so it's not as relaxing for a caregiver as a tablet or phone.

I truly wish this were an option. I have an eight year old and a five year old. They play together wonderfully. But, since I can't let the eight year old have a gap year, I may as well have the five year old do stuff too.

The real pisser is my eight year old is one of those birthdays that can go one way or the other. She's currently the youngest in her grade. I'd love to give her a gap year from all this and just hold her back a year. She's only in the grade she is because our district in CA had strict cutoffs for kindergarten.

Very similar experience here. It's been crushing to see how the remote is just draining for the kiddos. Seeing glimpses of hope and growth, but still painful at the same time.

Our Kindergarten teacher made cut out images of all the buttons and walked each kid how to mute and unmute. It’s been a week and they seem to have gotten the conferencing part down. The other online tools is what we have problems with, they aren’t made for kids who can’t read. They slapped on some click to speak function that doesn’t work. Also all the services are overloaded and always throwing 500s.

I just pulled my own kids out of public school because I can't stomach it either. I can't in good conscience subject my kids to 6 hours of online class 5 days a week. Whether or not you want to judge me for feeling this way or call me nasty names, "psychic torture" is exactly how I'd describe the solution these educators have come up with.

Educators did not come up with this plan, politicians did by their lack of any sort of COVID response.

Do you really think educators want to do remote learning?

My heart goes out to all the teachers who have to deal with this. It's as hard on them as it is parents and students.

Ah, excuse me, I didn't mean to slight the real educators. I meant the phony ones who think this is a reasonable plan.

I agree with you completely. We love the teachers at our kids' school and saying goodbye to them was the hardest part of leaving. They are just as frustrated. But the people who think that this solution is a reasonable one are insane.

> I meant the phony ones who think this is a reasonable plan.

I'm not sure what you mean by "reasonable", but I've yet to come across a single educator or administrator who thinks remote school is a good thing. They all think it's just the least bad among a set of bad options. Where are you finding educators who think it's actually net-positive and not just an unfortunate reality?

I dunno. Somebody had to come up with it. I have no clue who that is.

Maybe reasonable just means "least bad" in the current context.

Yea, it's a tough situation; I wish you and your family the best.

Hope you didn't take my comment the wrong way either -- I'm just looking out for all good teachers out there :)

I would prefer this but my wife and I both work, I didn't want to make my kid re-test into grade level/honors, and they didn't release the "on screen 8am, off screen 2pm" schedule until last week.. oh well I guess we will see how it goes.

I specifically complained that the main benefit of remote learning is the at-your-own-pace aspect of it, which is being tossed out the window. I swear the district was more concerned with the teachers putting in the correct number of working hours than with doing things that might actually work for kids.

Our first week was rough. But our school came up with a much better schedule for our kindergartener.

Class is now from 8:20-9am, meet in small group with the teacher for 30 minutes (time depends upon your group), then closing instruction at 12:45pm-1:15pm.

The rest of the time is "self study". Basically, you have assignments you need to do and complete with your kid. You can do it during self study time. Or at night. Or whenever.

The first week they tried to do 8:20-11:10 (with 10 minute breaks every 50 minutes) of instruction. It really didn't work. This new schedule has been much more feasible to deal with.

I imagine most school districts, including ours, will land on something like what you just described, albeit after a period of jerking parents around. Since your school was only planning on three hours a day, sounds like they are more flexible than mine, which demands six. I understand even the most school-marmiest of homeschooling parents wouldn't impose more than 1-2 hours of class on 5 and 6-year-olds.

I have been preparing for the possibility of homeschooling all summer, so we were ready to pull the trigger. I just didn't expect it to be Day 2!

The district I teach at (high school) is requiring two hours for kindergartners, three for 1st and 2nd graders, and 4 for all the rest. Everyone is done by noon, and teachers are there until three to answer any questions people have while working on assignments. I think for the lower levels, it definitely might be best.

Though a coworker has a son starting kidnergarden in a neighboring district, and they're there from 8-2:30, with planned time for recess and lunch. However, they're only in the main class for 30 minutes at the beginning and the end, and then each kid goes into a small group instruction with an instructor, and gets one-on-one time. I'm interested to see how that will work out overall, as it sounds like it could be a good compromise if you can get enough instructors.

Nice! That's what I was hoping for but it's not going quite like that.

We're on day 3 of virtual kindergarten.

* Day #1 was a "minimum day": class from 08:35–11:50am, with a break from 09:40am–10:20am. That was okay, except for a technology fail: the (awesome) teacher has two pages of kids, so she doesn't always see when someone is "raising a quiet hand". And growing pains as kids learn the classroom etiquette. After class, we dropped off our kindergartener at the preschool where his younger sister goes. That gave him play time with other kids without exposing our family to another group of people, and it gave us some uninterrupted work time.

* Day #2 was similar, except there was a long gap between the end of the morning Zoom at 11:30am and the "circle time" at 1:45pm–2:00pm. The teacher used this to start meeting families one-by-one; the other families didn't have much assigned to do in that time. The gap was frustrating. Day #4 and #5 will be like this again, except our kid might be absent from afternoon circle time...

* Day #3 was an "asynchronous day" similar to what you're describing. It went pretty well.

Next week they're supposed to be on Zoom in the afternoon until circle time, too. I'm not looking forward to this at all, even though the afternoon time is supposed to be some of the most fun stuff (music, art, science).

It sounds like our teacher is not the one deciding all this, but I'll pass along your message anyway.

I don't know how parents with less flexible work arrangements manage this at all. There are a couple programs to support them, but I think they involve a bunch of kids in the same room in different virtual classes on different schedules, not enough adults there to help them focus, and no reason to believe it's any safer than regular school. I imagine they're quite horrible.

1. Online learning is a poor substitute for classroom learning.

2. Online learning is much harder on parents and kids.

3. We're in the middle of a pandemic, in a country that has handled it very poorly.

4. Israel tried opening schools in May, when their daily new cases were at an all time low. New cases skyrocketed after opening schools [1], with nearly 50% of new cases being traced back to schools[2].

5. Closing schools in the spring is estimated to have saved 40,000 deaths in the US[3]. At that time new daily cases were significantly lower than they are now.

Unfortunately, classrooms undo a lot of the measures that have kept new daily cases from going significantly higher. They create contacts between families that would not have been in contact otherwise, and as new data comes out, it's clear that children are just as contagious as adults.

With what we know, as hard as it is, I don't see how we can proceed with opening schools until new daily cases are much more contained. The alternative is to have a massive spike in new cases, have schools close again, and be in the same position with online learning, but with many, many more cases out there.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ees8MesX0AAbDE2?format=png&name=...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/israelis-fear-schools-reopened-...

[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2769034

A lot of people complain about Zoom fatigue, and while on one hand I'm fairly happy that it is a competitors offering that has ended up with being a part of that moniker, and not the product I'm working on, it is somewhat unfair to blame Zoom or the software stack for that. The main culprit for messing up meetings are the cameras and the microphones on laptops. I'm not sure if there are any vendors at all, including Apple which is the laptop vendor I use, which has god quality camera and microphones on their kit. I'm lucky enough to work in a group where everyone has dedicated video conferencing kit, and this makes a big difference. The quality gap between someone on system with proper camera and microphones, and someone calling in on laptop is huge. I get that not everyone can go out and buy dedicated kit, and maybe the dedicated kit don't work with you video conferencing vendor. But getting the people you work with on a decent USB camera with inbuilt microphones, is something everyone should have a look at. The chances are high it will make your days more pleasant.

When It comes to five year olds doing schooling over video conferencing. I'm far from an expert on kids, I don't have kids and I don't want kids. But it does sound to me like a fools errand, and I'm super happy I'm not going to participate in that nightmare.

You can buy a top-of-the-line $3,000 16" Macbook Pro and it comes with a garbage-tier 720p webcam that has terrible dynamic range and low-light performance. It's embarrassing. Most Windows laptops at a third of the price have significantly better webcams.

I assume thinness is part of the problem--my high-end Logitech webcam is about an inch thick. Also webcam quality was probably just not much of a consideration until fairly recently.

But, even if someone doesn't more or less set up a studio as I've done to a degree and some of my colleagues have done, there are some pretty basic things related to lighting and webcam height that can be done pretty easily by most people. Though I'd add that comms problems are also a frequent annoyance and there's not a lot people can do there.

I'd add though that I normally move around my house when I'm working. Sitting at a desk all day in a "studio" doesn't really work for me.

iPhone cameras are pretty good and they're very thin. Front or back.

Yeah, if they put in any of the cameras from an iPhone (or any flagship smartphone for that matter) it would be an unbelievable leap in quality. There's no way they can't find space for it.

If you look at iFixit teardowns, even the front camera modules are practically the full thickness of the phone, which is much thicker than a MacBook lid.

Unfortunately, they're not thin compared to a laptop lid. Especially with the taper near the edges that Macbooks and many other high-end laptops have. There are some exotic optical solutions out there that allow for thinner lenses but I doubt we'll see those in laptops anytime soon.

Cameras are also a really big deal in the context of smartphones. I assume a lot of silicon is devoted to making them work well with a small sensor in a smallish footprint. Apple is probably not going to add a couple hundred dollars to a MacBook BOM (and maybe a bump for the lens) for a better webcam--at least they wouldn't have before the current situation. Who knows now? Maybe a top-notch webcam is a selling point. Many people still wouldn't set up lighting and eliminate backlighting to give it a chance.

A top notch camera is not "a couple hundred dollars" on a BOM. Google Pixel 4a costs $350 for the whole device and it has a great camera, more than enough to serve as a webcam.

You need a 2.1 MP camera to get 1080p, which the vast majority of laptop webcams don't do. The last time you could get a 2.1 MP main camera in any half decent phone was probably back in 2015. Laptop makers just didn't care, it wasn't a priority for most users before Covid.

Apple got over having a "camera bump" on their phones years ago. On laptops they have way more options--the most straightforward would be to put a matching notch in the bottom-case for when it closes.

Finally higher quality build-in cameras are being included in iMacs. I hope very soon they start making their way into their laptops.

The ultrabooks that are priced to compete with MacBooks have even worse webcams than Apple uses, because they have even thinner lids and bezels. It's not a question of cost, it's the result of physical laws and design priorities.

It is interesting that companies are willing to put massive, tumorous lumps and display cutouts on smartphones in the name of picture quality but not even a little bump on laptop lids.

It's pretty obvious why, people make buying decisions on phones based on the quality of the cameras, both the back camera and the "selfie" camera. They don't do that on laptops because historically whatever was there was good enough.

Am I going crazy or is the webcam in my 2012 macbook pro better than the new one?

I’ve been using ChromeOS tablet as my video conferencing rig with front firing speakers and good microphone array. No echo and no overheated MacBook Pro.

Suspect a newish iPad could work well too.

My experience and my wife's have been that even where there is dedicated videoconferencing equipment (cameras, mics, lighting, ambient sound treatment), video calls are draining.

Yes, it's worse when people are using built-in cameras and bad lighting. But it's still there in 'good' conditions.

(To add to the list of things to get: use a wired connection! Wi-Fi is an endless source of lagginess and other problems. Get a USB ethernet dongle; 100Mbit is overkill. Also, get a LED lighting panel and tripod from a photo supply store so that people can see you.)

I'm sure better equipment and software helps, but there's all sorts of mostly unavoidable issues [1] that make a video call harder than meeting in person. If your school is replacing several hours a day of in person meeting with several hours a day of video calls, it's going to be awful.

You absolutely need to do things differently, but kindergarden is not going to work with look at the morning message, do tasks from a list, including watching some videos, and do a check-in call once or twice a week.

[1] like latency and a/v sync. You could get pretty low latency if everyone was on land lines and called into a conference hosted at the school. But, nobody has land lines, so we're doing audio with the video over the internet. So we have the delay for the encoder, we have delay to get a big enough packet to send over IP, we've got last mile network delay (I'm at 20 ms to get out of my provider's network), plus network delay to wherever the conference server is, plus processing time, and then all that on the way back. If you're on congested wifi because nobody runs wired ethernet anymore, but you've got two kids and two adults all having to do this, that ads inconsistent delay, so now you need a jitter buffer. That is a reminder to try to set up my kid with wired networking though, thanks.

As a parent of a 5-year old myself, it strikes me the lack of empathy in the HN community. The pandemic is a challenging situation for all parents as there is not enough information to decide on the best course of action.

IMO, the OP article intention was only to share the pain, so that other parents know they are not alone in this challenge.

"I even think Raffi might be able to improve his digital etiquette—to get better at waiting his turn to speak without slamming the computer shut because he’s bored, to sit through a lesson without whining or screaming.

But is digital etiquette something I want Raffi to learn at age 5? He’ll have the rest of his life to figure out the niceties of interacting with people through a screen. I can’t accept that he should get acclimated to this form of school."

The author is almost onto something with this comment. I'm not an expert in this area, but virtual "education" for pre-K seems to miss the point of going to school for a 4 year old child. I would venture a guess that the impact is more about socialization and acclimating to the routine of school than learning things.

This honestly has me puzzled.

German here, no kids, so not 100% sure how it is today, but to the best of my knowledge it's still 3-5 kindergarden (no idea why you would do this via screen) and then school from 6-7 (depends on birth month, etc). And the "this should be daycare" argument doesn't fly because how would you babysit a 5y old via a video conference?

Maybe I'm just old, but I don't see anything wrong in not teaching kids a lot in a structural way before school?

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think you're misinterpreting what kindergarten is in the States. Kindergarten here is the first year of schooling, and is associated with primary schools. Generally, 5 is the minimum age to start, with a cutoff month. Thus, the kids are expected to be taught in the structural way of school.

It is sort of structural. Kindergarten is to help kids transition to the structural aspect of schooling. It is usually very much filled with physical activity and creativity.

If remote learning is leaving a lot to be desired where kids aren’t really getting much benefit academically and it’s stressing people out, is there a possibility to pause education for a year and resume a year from now?

Now, I know there is no guarantee there will be an effective vaccine, but if not we may learn enough whether heard immunity is enough by then.

Graduating a year later for everyone from K- to-be-seniors in Uni may or may not be much of a big deal. Lots of people take a year off before uni...

Sure, but don’t expect other people to follow suit. They will hire private teachers and remote home school to get ahead.

That's been the case with or without school.

I guess that may happen for kids who go to private school (public in U.K.) but for kids in public schools, skipping a grade when the schools know their status before the pause might be harder to do. Additionally it’d likely be a minority of students—most would take the opp to remain refreshed and current rather than learning new subject matter.

Get ahead of what?

I’m not convinced any of this remote learning stuff matters that much as long as parents have money to feed their kids and house themselves.

Canceling remote learning to spend time with the kids and giving them space to let them learn about something they’re interested in for a year probably does zero harm and might even be beneficial. I would have loved it.

Obviously bad family situations, and poverty are not helped by this - but those things are probably made worse by throwing remote learning on top of it.

Wealthy countries should have a vaccine and distribution done by end of 2021. Waiting that out is what I would do if I had kids.

I failed 7th grade because my parents were divorcing in the middle of it and literally everybody including my family acted like it was the end of my school career and I'd never recover and get a real job and would be SOO behind my peers.

I'm 100% on the "yeah you can take a year off, it'll be ok or better in the end" side of things. I can't imagine myself at 13 having to deal with that + quarantine/2020.

Yeah - I’d argue that social response and the psychological toll from it does ten times more damage than the actual “failure” of seventh grade.

People can spend decades afraid to learn because some shitty teacher made them feel dumb when they were young.

I'm not an expert on education, I'm not going to speculate on the psychological effects of having a year without school on a kid. I don't think I'm qualified to do that.

Outside of developmental effects though, by the time you get to college does it really matter if someone is one year older than another person? Is anyone going to get rejected from a first job interview just because they're 26 instead of 25?

Plenty of people take gap years before they go to college, so my concern with taking a year off school wouldn't be, "but how will they ever catch up?" It would be about the resources that parents are relying on, the developmental effects of having a routine interrupted to that degree, the ability of parents to keep working, early socialization, etc...

I think those are all valid concerns, and (again) I'm not going to pretend that I can speak on them. But I'm not worried about, "some other kid will be one year ahead."

You can't push pause on human development, though. Having your first job interview at 26 instead of 25 doesn't matter. Missing out on a year of socialization when you're 6 almost certainly does.

You're still taking in input and experiencing the world.

I was really young for the grade I was in which made things harder than necessary. It would have been easier to be a year older.

You'd still get the socialization anyway, you'd just have one year with a little less (and I'm not really convinced that remote socialization via remote learning is particularly helpful, whatever alternative socialization outside of remote learning is probably just as good or better).

Get ahead on placement exams. Schools have only so many teachers for Algebra. Also not all kids are doing remote education.

How does that work? The idea is to just resume schooling where you left off a year prior. In what way can anyone get ahead? Kids who didn't pause would simply be in a higher grade, others in a lower grade, but so what?

"Get ahead" in what sense?

Yay, now some 7-year-olds will be just as educated as some other 8-year-olds, and will be able to skip a grade when school resumes. So.. what?

Also, why don't we imagine something better than just keeping kids at home all day.

Having a year devoted to outdoor activities instead of formal education would be wonderful for everyone, including the teachers (who can still have work), parents (who can get some time away from the kids), and, most importantly, the kids (who are effectively under house arrest until they turn 12).

You can pause education but a child is a learning machine and they aren't going to stop learning just because you stop teaching them. They'll just learn in unstructured ways without direction.

I meant a pause in institutionalized learning—of course I expect them to learn other things around the home.

Is that really such a bad thing?

I mean, that's pretty much the entire point of Montessori school and various "lifestyle of learning" types of educational programs

I think huge swathes of the information that we force feed our children in school is mostly forgotten or un-used.

I was homeschooled as a kid, and my parents let me basically stop school at the age of 11. I was interested in computers, and by the age of 13 I had a job as a programmer, and by the age of 16 I was employed full time. I ended up going back and studying for my GED (passed it with a 98%) when I was 17 (because my parents said I couldn't get a car until I passed the GED at least).

One of my other siblings didn't even learn to read competently until the age of 10. He now has a college degree, owns a huge house, and makes six figures.

Kids are a lot more resilient than people give them credit for, and the most sure-fire way to make kids hate learning is to force them to do it.

> I mean, that's pretty much the entire point of Montessori school and various "lifestyle of learning" types of educational programs

> Kids are a lot more resilient than people give them credit for, and the most sure-fire way to make kids hate learning is to force them to do it.

We dropped Montessori precisely because they don't force kids to learn.

My mom is a teacher.

We visited over christmas when our eldest was in 2nd year in Montessori. Mom evaluated our child and told use that she was 1+ behind in development. Our child was uninterested in learning and the teachers were not "forcing" her to learn.

When we visited

You are likely to get loads of people who are unhappy to be paying property tax for something that isn't happening.

The issue is what to do with the kids in the meantime. Most parents have to work, even if it's at home. And even if they can pay attention to the kids... what can they do? Social events, clubs, camps, activities are all shut down. My kids climbing gym is closed to them, and I don't know if they'll be able to ski at the local boring ski hill this winter even.

My kids are going completely bonkers. They need to see other kids (and other adults). We're sending them back only for their own mental health. We'll evaluate a few weeks in and see how the numbers look and how they feel about the classroom.

My kids don't get much pedagogically out of school, neither are great students, but my daughter at least really needs the social side. I'm not worried about them falling behind so much as I'm worried about their emotional state.

There are very practical techniques for addressing these problems. However they aren't widely known.

For example if you want to keep a kid still to listen, give them something good to fiddle with. For example, teach kids how to finger knit. And then have them do simple finger knitting while they are listening. The finger knitting is an outlet for the ansies, and they are able to pay better attention, for longer.

You also have to be more cognizant of kid limitations when you have less feedback. But we haven't done that. We have kept the same schedule. It is easier to miss a kid acting out over Zoom. And the combination is bad. We really need to tell kids to get up and do jumping jacks, come back in 15 minutes with milk and cookies.

This is very interesting. What other techniques exist, apart from finger-knitting which are unobtrusive and help as an outlet?

> We really need to tell kids to get up and do jumping jacks, come back in 15 minutes with milk and cookies.

Honestly, in my opinion we need to do this at school still, especially elementary level. We're expecting too much out of these kids, even when they're in the classroom, and it's no wonder we're seeing a rise in issues. Let the kids be kids, give them longer than 30 minutes of recess (if they even get that anymore!), give them naptime still, etc.

I'm generally against charter schools (being a high school teacher myself), but man, I wish I had the funds to start a charter elementary school. There's so much I would change.

It's slightly amusing to me that people are upset kids are "forced to sit still" in zoom as if the didn't have just as much trouble being "forced to sit still" in traditional classroom environments. The big difference is that parents weren't around to see how much suffering this very unnatural forcing of kids to sit still was causing them. A lot of schools have 30 minutes of recess if they're lucky. All kids, especially kinesthetic learners need to be able to move to learn. It's part of the process.

It's very clear that you have some weird grudge and have never actually set foot in an elementary school classroom, where kids are very frequently moving around and active. Talk to literally any elementary school teacher.

While I agree with your broader point, kinesthetic learning isn't real [0], and modeling education on the idea of learning styles can be harmful [1].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...

[1] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...

VARK might not be real, but ADHD is and if someone attempts to force my youngest to sit still it doesn't go well for anyone. OTOH let him move while setting boundaries has worked wonders.

there were these PBS programs called sesame street, the electric company and even one actually called zoom.

there was little problem with user engagement as the kiddies were glued to it, and assimilated/imitated the concepts quite readily into playtimes and IRL. perhaps there is a feature set that could be explored and employed in remote learning scenarios.

i think that current educators could learn a lot by looking back at the methods of engagement.

Most studies show that unless kids come from low income families the differences between kids who go to pre-k and kids who don't are gone by 3rd grade or so. And for low-income kids it's only advantageous if it's "high quality" preschool.

I can't for the life of me figure out why you would bother putting your kid through 6 hours a day of virtual pre-k, when you have to be right there to watch them anyway.

The problem is not so much that kids can’t handle virtual education as much as we not being able to care for our kids because we have a jobs. Think about it... Do you think it’s normal for a human child to be institutionalized just because his/her parents are working? Where is their hunter-gatherer band when your kids need it? Nothing about 2020 nuclear family society is normal for a human child. Nothing at all.

Exactly. Academic education (subject mastery and developing tools to learn), childcare (being safe and happy and engaged while parents are working) and social learning (making friends, learning to work/collaborate with a group) are generally bundled together as one concept in a very weird way. As families, communities and as a nation, we need to strive to provide enriching childcare to our kids, great social experiences and quality education to them. Sometimes these things happen at the same time, but they don't have to. And sometimes they are best addressed separately. If we start thinking and addressing them individually, we might find ways to do all of them better.

your points seem to be contradicting each other. hunter gatherers would naturally have institutionalized child care - when some people go gathering, some people go hunting and some people stay put and look after the tribe's children if they aren't ready to do either. this is about as far from a nuclear family as you can get though, especially if the tribal culture isn't monogamous and e.g. a child can have many fathers who equally accept a child as theirs.

Until very very recent times a child would accompany the parents in their daily activities and help.

how do the children learn how to pick up roles as a hunter and/or gatherer in the system you portray?

When the kids are big enough to learn something, they take those kids and teach them.

What age is that when it comes to something like gathering? Like around the time to be able to recognize shapes and point out things?

When your attention span allows you to be useful and when you are not slowing down adults.

It takes more than one adult to give children enough direction per unit time for proper development.

As our society has progressed in the last 50 years, almost half of children only have one adult in the household.

The nuclear family as defined by two generation households is not ideal, we have found it amazingly helpful during the pandemic to have three generations in the same house, which is less common in our area of America.

I expect that the next school year will be a virtual “gap” year. As the author illustrates, anything we do with remote learning is just wishful thinking.

Given the amount of brain development that happens at young ages, this is daunting to consider.

Kids spending more time playing outside and some less time on stressful academics is probably good for them. We didn't evolve to sit sedentary in a classroom.

It is just _insane_ how night and day my 3-year-old is in terms of his ability to sit and focus, after he has sufficient "go wild" time in the yard, playground, street, or basement.

I'm not sure how much school has changed, but for me, in the 90s, the ~90 minutes (split into three uneven segments) per day of physical activity was just not enough. Could have used half and half.

In the elementary schools in my district, kids are lucky if they get 30 minutes of recess a day (more often it's like 15-20), even at kindergarten. It's a huge mess, and we're expecting 5 years olds to behave like 15 year olds. No nap-time anymore either.

I'm worried for the kids that don't get to play outside and/or socialize in such a situation though. Which sadly will exist.

Why did we ever send them into classrooms in the first place if it's "probably good for them [to spend] more time playing outside and some less time on stressful academics"?

I think it's "probably good" for them to learn something, too. It's not as if it's a 9-5 job after which they come home, do housework, file taxes, try to socialize with the family a bit, and go to bed exhausted. They do still have time to be kids besides school at that age (barring less common cases like toxic families and extreme poverty, of course).

Also, we didn't evolve to read books, use chairs, power our stove with electricity from hydroelectric power plants, etc., but I'd rather not cut those out of my life either. We did evolve to run many miles behind prey, but I don't mind not practicing that. It's a really weird argument that a lot of people seem to use, "we didn't evolve to", which can be applied to virtually everything we do today. It seems to be a placeholder for when something seems disagreeable to you but you can't actually articulate why or be bothered to look into whether that is the case.

The important things that kids are learning at these ages are the psychosocial things - how to wait your turn, how to resolve conflicts, how to share, etc. None of this, I'm guessing, can be replicated in online learning, anyway. And my understanding is that that stuff is best learned at specific developmental periods. We just have to do our best to make sure our kids are getting it outside of school.

I'm not nearly as worried about the 3 R's. I just don't expect that we'll find there's much long term difference between kids who are taught to read in 1st and second grade, and kids who are taught to read in kindergarten and 1st grade.

In a way I’m lucky, my daughter is almost 2 so she’s not dealing with long bouts of screen time yet. In other ways I’m having to somehow be two people at once, both entertaining her (because she’s too young to do that independently) and run my meetings finish my work etc. though I suspect I’m not unique.

Honestly, I love working from home and taking care of her at the same time, but (as evidence of my posting this at 3AM) I can’t continue this much longer.

I have a few more hours of work to do and I need to be up at 8:30AM for a call. Something has to change and I hate to get political but if we’d handled things a bit differently in this country, maybe she’d be back in daycare. Do I want that alternate reality? Absolutely not, but do I need it?

...maybe

I'm a general contractor. I remodel houses.

A few years ago I worked with an extremely good painter. Second generation professional painter. Very impressive fellow.

Just by working with him my painting skills went up a couple levels. I'm way better than I was.

There was no formal instruction. No teaching. Just working together. Seeing how he does things. Watching him with a brush.

The same thing just recently happened with a drywall guy I worked near. A superpro. I am MUCH better at mudding drywall now. No instruction occurred. Just by working near him.

This is an ancient and well-known phenomenon. Call it psychic communication. Call it mind-melding. Whatever it is, it's real.

And this virtual education is a joke. PAINFULLY bullshit. I advise all students to blow that time-wasting shit right off.

A glaring irony for me here is that historically, wealthier families have significantly more access to online courses. Rather than being the great force for democratization of education we all hoped for, research shows they are privileging the elite. What if we worked to expand access to online courses and improve them for all? https://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/blog/18957-MOOCs-Are-Not-the-S...

> What if we worked to expand access to online courses and improve them for all?

I'd really like for everyone to have a home Internet connection that is symmetric gigabit or better. For some reason, in at least one town in the US, you can get Comcast Internet access that is gigabit down but only 30 mbps up. This is not good enough when you have multiple people who are trying to do things online at the same time. It is all fine if all you're doing is streaming movies/music (downloading)_but uploading videos or conference calls by video means we need decent upload as well.

I don't see a solution other than fiber to the home. Would love to see municipal fiber to be honest.

Working to expand and improve is a worthy goal. I believe before the lockdown it remained an under invested niche for those not suitable for the existing schooling like outright remote (rural to even rural), very ill children, or those who had especially severe social issues from the "Lord of the Flies/prison run by the prisoners dynamic" dysfunctional norm structure of schools and bullying. It was viewed as the worse option especially for corner cases before it got forced into primetime at scale.

On a side note you clearly didn't mean it in the negative sense but the rhetoric of "arbitrary option for improvement technology/advance is privileging the elite" bugs me as very zero sum. If any ammount of additional resources can yield at least a smaller edge then by definition the elite can perform better. The only alternative to that situation category is "no additional human effort can help". The framing in effect spitefully disregards the masses of "non-elite" both within and without access to the option and implicitly dismisses anything which helps because another gets helped more.

I'd agree it would be extremely rare to find a child who does well with virtual school. The obvious question is, "What is the better option?" The clinical, disconnected nature of any return to a physical classroom will result in many of the same disadvantages as virtual school from home. All it does is basically transfer the burden of child care. This is a difficulty every parent currently faces, and this article would be a lot more valuable if it proposed a better option.

The schools need to be open. Child abuse ER visits are up 35%[0]. Let that sink in. If a child goes to the ER for abuse, it's not because they have a black eye. They likely have broken bones, or are unresponsive. Thirty-five percent!

Schools provide surveillance into things like child abuse, the need for hearing aids, the need for speech therapy classes .. and school lunches provide nutrition standards for many underprivileged children. All of that in gone.

I know plenty of friends who taught on-line University classes prior to 2020 who told me the students cheat and the courts are pretty much bullshit. You get out of any program what you put into it, and college students have the ability to put things into their programs. Children needs socialization with other human beings.

The threat to children is minuscule. The threat to teachers under 40 years of age is also not great. We can pay the wages of older teachers and help them find new roles, quickly remove teachers who become CoV2 positive and find means to keep the schools open. Closing down schools is the worst idea possible.

[0]: http://adam.curry.com/enc/1593719588.319_scottatlasonschools...

Israel saw a clear correlation between schools opening, and the spread ofthe virus, in a way that affected the entire country. [0]

The threat is not negligible. Students act as carriers, like they always have, and then the super-spreader event occurs through teacher and staff contacts, who take it with them and continue the spread. That's without speaking about transport.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavi...

Isn't it sad that as a society, it has come down to schools to provide security to children, as opposed to their own family.

I think the root cause is the fragmented family system in the US. Marriages and divorces happen so much that the ultimate sufferers are the children.

A society that is so fragile socially, will eventually collapse.

> Isn't it sad that as a society, it has come down to schools to provide security to children, as opposed to their own family.

It hasn't. Families _are_ the primary way we provide security for children. No family is perfect but most keep their kids safe. Some don't, all over the world, so we have checks and balances. People trained to fill that role are called "mandated reporters". Teachers are arguably the most important mandated reporters because they spend so much time with the kids every weekday.

And even well-meaning, financially secure parents can miss things like the need for speech therapy. Teachers know what's developmentally normal, know what resources are available, etc.

> I think the root cause is the fragmented family system in the US. Marriages and divorces happen so much that the ultimate sufferers are the children.

How do the stats compare in some other country that doesn't have as much divorce?

> No family is perfect but most keep their kids safe

Curious, what percentage of families, on average, do you think are "Not perfect"?

When I say "no family is perfect", I mean just that: exactly 100% of families are "not perfect" in how we raise our kids. But I don't mean abuse; I mean we all make mundane mistakes in how we handle situations rather than being like the grown-ups on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, maybe that we plunk the kids down in front of the TV sometimes when we should spend more quality time with them, etc.

Keeping kids safe from child abuse is a pretty low bar and most families meet it. According to one stat I found [1], at least 1% of kids are abused every year. That's horrible and would be even worse if not for mandated reporters, but it doesn't mean that schools provide security for kids and families don't.

[1] https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/nationa...

It's much, much worse in third world countries. Egyptian here.

Tech illiteracy is rampant, and many people don't know even the basics of using computers. Not only that, but due to poverty, most don't even have computers and just use mobile phones. For many, this was the first time they got to use a PC/Laptop. A large group just used mobile phones, though. Then you have the internet... it's just not usable for live conferencing, so when they tried it, it was awful.. then the classes were recorded, with low quality and resolution to have small filesizes for private schools. Most public schools basically did away with the whole thing and the kids didn't get any classes at all.

On top of all of that, the educational system (regular education, not the higher education) here is already bad in-class.

In the end, they just decided to cancel the exams, and had the students do a pass/fail research paper about a topic. Although most schools basically just made everyone pass.

Universities were differently handled, though. Also, grade 12 was handled regularly (the students already don't attend school) with regular physical exams since it's an important year.

A good friend of mine who works in the NYC public school system had, what I thought to be, an excellent idea for how we could handle this situation.

All children of designated [minimum age / grade level] take classes remotely. The schools then re-open for children beneath that age who need the attention and dedicated professionals to help them learn, spread out in all the now-free classrooms that were taken by their upperclassmen.

I'm genuinely curious if we stuck VR headsets on kids, and had the proper software, if their would be any better results. I'm one of the people who think there won't be a VR/AR revolution any time soon, but I do think there are narrow sets of applications and games the benefit A LOT from it. I don't know if education is one of those, but I'm am very interested in finding out.

I don't think you'll get kids, particularly young kids to wear those for more than a few minutes at a time.

I don't have kids of my own, but I know parents, and I was also parented when I was a child.

I think part of the problem is that the adult is expected to still put in 40 hours a week while raising a child, which is not easy, especially when you only have 2 parents.

I was lucky enough to be raised in a family where one parent stayed home, and it made my childhood so much more richer than if I had gone to kindergarten and followed the standard programs those years.

My parents remembered the programs from their childhood, and did not want me in there.

I grew up in USSR, but I don't think it's that much different in the U.S.

"Public education" teaches kids to conform, submit, normalize, and suppress their own imagination and enthusiasm. I don't think it's worth the "socialization", which can be accomplished in many other ways.

But even worse, the conditioning forces children to develop an inner dialogue, something many adults spend the rest of their lives trying to silence.

I am grateful to my parents for letting me have quiet time for thinking and reflection when I was a child.

My daughter is only 1, and has gone to daycare through the entire pandemic, but I can say with near certainty that if she was a few years older, I would rather hire a nanny to take her to the park everyday rather than put her in a virtual kindergarten class. It sounds absolutely awful and pointless. I don't see how a child could learn anything from it.

I read it and ended being not sure what it was about.

Unless you're going to end with a stance of "but we'll get through it because of COIVD" or "we should go back to school no matter what" I'm a little lost of the point here.

Nobody is "doing this" to you, it's what we all have to do. Yes it impacts everyone different, but what's the message?

Couldn't agree more. This article fails the "so what" test. What are they recommending be done instead?

We don't understand education at all. I'm seriously worried for the current cohort. Young children are missing the necessary face-to-face learning and social relationship-building that being in class provides, but it doesn't stop there. Some fresh college students are now paying full-price for 100% online classes, completely missing the college experience in the process, probably getting a subpar education -- if you're gonna play the "college is a normalized scam" card, then now is the time.

It's a shame what is happening, and it's not really clear how to fix the problem. How to safely maintain the social needs of humans during a pandemic is currently an unsolved problem, and no, Zoom isn't the answer. We'll probably see heightened suicide and crime rates for the duration of the lockdowns.

Don't see how being "forced to sit in front of a screen" is any different from being forced to sit in a classroom.

Honestly think if a single good thing comes out of all of this it will be the rethinking of schooling.

If I have kids no way will I risk their raw potential at the hands of what is currently considered a teacher.

>Don't see how being "forced to sit in front of a screen" is any different from being forced to sit in a classroom.

Really? I mean, I'm not for public schools, but this is a little obtuse don't you think?

My point is the whole thing of wanting kids to sit down and be quiet is flawed.

Look at how much we medicate kids just to sit there nicely and be quiet and don't fidget in a class, follow the justification backwards and all you get to is that schools don't know how to deal with how young boys deal with boredom.

School should teach real skills, how to do your own research and how to create something from nothing and the rest will fall into place.

Zoom is not a replacement for a classroom. You can switch tasks from Zoom to something else, like a game, web browser, or any other distraction.

But in some ways, Zoom could be better. You can mute people that interrupt the class, or simply remove them from the meeting, preventing them from disrupting everyone else. And you have a chat where you can keep asynchronous discussions.

Yet, schools are far from perfect, and standardization is not necessarily beneficial. The current way students are grouped results in kids with behavioral problems being grouped with well behaved students, to the detriment of both.

One group gets their bad behavior reinforced, and the other group gets slowed down and demoralized. It doesn't have to be that way.

Personal counter-anecdote. When I was I think about the same age (5-6), my mom would take me in the office and occasionally my only entertainment would be a DOS computer with a few basic games. From what I’m told, I was very motivated to get to the said games and quickly learned commands and my way around the command line - skill that turned out to be pretty useful in life. For “Raffi”, being a true digital native and having command of all of these communication nuances could be quite valuable in life. Who knows, maybe the “drained” experience his parents have won’t translate to him in the future because it will be second nature.

I do fear for the skills of reading a physical book though...

> I do fear for the skills of reading a physical book though...

Do you need skills for that which are different from reading a computer screen? I only see limitations like no ctrl+f or hyperlinks, so fewer skills needed rather than more.

While there are certainly advantages to digital reading, there's also something to be said for a traditional book. Patience and sustained attention are developed skills, and we have yet to learn what effects a failure to practice them at a young age may have on a developing brain.

Ah, so it's not about reading a book versus some other medium, it's about patience and sustained attention because a book won't have notifications and pop-ups. Alright, then we're on the same page :)

Here's a crazy idea. Maybe 5 years old is too young for formal education to begin with.

Father of 3 elementary school students (and 1 cute toddler) weighing in with actual experience so far:

* Kids have 3 Zoom meetings a day - ~90 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes right before lunch, 30 minutes right after lunch.

* My kids may be outliers, but they are great at self-managing their time, pay attention well, seem engaged, seem to enjoy the format well enough.

* Classmates seem equally engaged and pliant during meeting times.

* Main complaints: technology is still weak overall, curriculum is a little bit too day by day ..

But nothing as drastic as the original article.

My wife teaches 1st grade.

Online instructional hours doesn't begin in their school until 1st grade. Kindergarten has learning materials sent to the homes.

Online virtual pre-K is just lunacy.

Are people really trying to get primary kids to do stuff on Zoom? I mean my nephews had Zoom classes during the lockdown but it was like 1 hour a day, and they got assignments for the next hours. Obviously no one expects kids to sit still behind a laptop for 6 - 8 hours.

Anyone expecting a 5 year old to do virtual education has never met a 5 year old. I'm sure off that.

5 is a crucial age in child development. Get offline and home school. Take a leave of absence if you really have to. Talk to your employer.

That's nice and great advice for parents who can afford that. Unfortunately most parents aren't in a position to do that.

I know my parents growing up would have been in a world of hurt if they had to home school - it was hard enough making ends meet as it was.

This situation is going to really entrench and amplify socioeconomic inequality - for the first time in generations we could see a world where only the very wealthy/privileged are able to give their kids a good education.

FWIW 'leave of absence' isn't really a concept for many, many jobs.

I sympathize with her difficulty, but this article struck a bad tone for me. I think it was the tone in which it was written, but it seemed really self-centered. Everybody is in the same boat right now, but the author makes it sound like her family is being uniquely imposed upon. The situation is bad, and schools are doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Wow. Agree with all the other comments. I read the whole article, and there is some next level self-centered entitlement here that has wholly passed on to "Raffi" the 5 year old who is only now learning not to deliberately make his little brother cry, and who has learned that spitting his drink on a laptop makes mommy and daddy take him to the park. While I want to empathize with the parents, the fact that they blame remote learning for all their problems rather than realizing that they have raised a hellion and dumped him on the poor teachers at school... and are bitter that now they have to deal with their own child... wow... yeah, definitely not the parents problem. Everything is to blame on remote learning! We better re-open the schools again so parents don't have to deal with their children!

Yeah, I'm really missing the message here.

> they have raised a hellion

A five year old is far from having been raised. As a parent of a 6 year old I know a bunch of other parents that have similar experiences where their kids are revolting against being forced to sit in front of a virtual teacher for hours every day.

You can't fix much of that stuff after he is 7 years old. Educate the child so you don't have to jail the adult. At least that's the common wisdom grandmothers say in my country.

Some study I found that also mentions the seven-year milestone: https://news.softpedia.com/news/Our-Personality-Is-Fully-Dev...

The common wisdom is wrong. Of course personalities develop after 7 years old. People's personalities develop well into adulthood. Adults are capable of developing, continuing to mature, and changing their behaviors. Who I was at age 7 is not who I am today. Who I was at age 18 is not who I am today.

Do people really think that anyone who fights with a sibling past the age of 7 is destined for prison? I guess I need to start making a plan for when I'm arrested.

Well about 1/4 of the prison population has ADHD and half are dyslexic. Female prison populations also have a very high rate of BPD.

The grandmother's where you're from might benefit from learning about pervasive developmental disorders and the effects of trauma.

Some people are dealing with stuff that isn't their fault and that they never got adequate support for.

BPD is "Borderline personality disorder", for anyone else not familiar with that TLA.

Maybe have have some empathy for the parents who are working from home, before you start insulting their parenting?

Of course the 7 year old is acting out, but it's probably more to do with being stuck in a box/house all day with no interaction with their friends. And no, Zoom calls don't class as interaction for kids. This child desperately needs to play outside, not stuck behind a blurry screen learning maths.

I do work from home, and my 10 year old is doing remote learning.

There are many benefits to remote learning, and I know it will come as a shock to people who buy into the 'kids need to socialize' group-think, but the 'socializing' they do in school tends to be very limited in time (a couple of 10-15 minute breaks on the playground, talking at lunch, disrupting classes and not listening to the teacher), and then there is the problem of bullying and cliques of students excluding 'non-conforming' students. Mental health at school isn't handled well. Fairness is out the window. School shootings are growing exponentially.

https://www.ecori.org/public-safety/2019/9/7/us-school-shoot...

Schools suck.

I'd rather my child get his socializing from extracurricular activities with peers he knows and gets along with than dealing with the failures of our educational system.

This article decries remote learning and offers nothing to move the conversation forward on what WOULD work. The author makes no point at all other than complaining about how her child can't sit still. And I'm saying I bet her child can't sit still in a physical school either, so its not about remote learning. It is because suddenly she has to be the one to deal with it instead of the teacher hidden away in a school building. The author wants to paint a picture of how bad remote learning is, when really it's just not suited for her child. It works fine for many other kids.

Schools do suck, but those 15+60 minutes free time and all class time (which is inherently social) are SO incredibly valuable.

> This article decries remote learning and offers nothing to move the conversation forward on what WOULD work. The author makes no point at all other than complaining about how her child can't sit still. And I'm saying I bet her child can't sit still in a physical school either, so its not about remote learning.

Agreed, though I'd put that down to schools being un-engaging and useless and that gets _worse_ with remote. I'd be in favour of making 30-40% of the school day free time, like it is in high school. For knowledge work like learning, more hours doesn't necessarily mean more output, and it's really destructive to put that onto students.

School doesn't suck. Just because you had a bad experience doesn't mean the rest of us did.

This isn't unusual stuff for a 5 year old...

our society is now learning to respect sexual orientation, women, trans, other cultures and ethnicities, but children everywhere are just treated like slaves or worst. When I was around 9 I made an oath to never lie to myself and others and pretend "school time" was fun. It was a fucking prison, and I hated it. We are still in Middle Ages.

Virtual school/eLearning only makes sense for 2nd graders and up. Perhaps some bright 1st-graders could excel, but it really just doesn’t work for any younger than that. This is indeed an unfortunate situation that the world is in for this age group of young learners.

I think quick sessions in smaller groups or even 1:1's are better. Give the kids their tasks/activities to do for the day and get out of their way. Some administrations seem to have ridiculous requirements that say kids have to be glued to a screen for X hours a day.

It's not just kids - we ran a week long course online for senior military commanders - 4 hours a day of structured discussion, another couple hours per day of self paced - my kid's grade one class was better behaved and more attentive.

Impulse control is tough for all.

My wife said the years she was home schooled they did school for about two or three hours a day because that was all that it really required.

I wonder if virtual school would be better shooting for that model.

Get rid of the "dead time". Just teach the lessons and adjourn.

Do people here experience a difference in feeling drained between a day of Zoom meetings and a day of regular meetings? This article is the first time I've seen this mentioned. For me, a day of regular meetings is just as draining.

All of this is stupid. For kids too young to distance learn, group them in fours or sixes and send them to one of the family’s houses to spend all day doing whatever the fuck they want. You’re not going to teach them math over Zoom.

Here's a crazy idea: What if we raised our children to process their difficult emotions instead of suppress them and stay active and move freely while working and studying (instead of sitting in a chair at a desk)

I feel I would thrive in a movement based work environment. I think and articulate much better when walking.

If I had infinite money, I'd build an office on an entire floor, with the desk in the middle and a kind of walking track around it that I could do circles on, sometimes I just really have to walk.

Thinking you need infinite money to go for a walk is peak HN.

No, it's peak UK, the chances of the weather being agreeable for me to go for even a 5 minute walk without it pouring down are not good for much of the year.

I live in the Pacific Northwest where it’s a similar climate. I know we don’t get much right here in the US but we have invented raincoats!

Try floor sitting. It's not perfect in the summer months since you get less airflow around the legs, but it lets you move a little and stretch as you think which is very healthy. Dozens of postures possible. It can be done cheaply, cheaper than a "normal" desk setup:

1. Folding floor desk(ideally taller and wider than a breakfast tray so there is leg room)

2. Lap desk for peripherals. This makes computer interactions ergonomic, no more hunching or reaching.

3. Floor chair/backrest so you can recline and get some back support in long sessions.

Plus all of it can fold compactly so it works well in a limited footprint.

It's not what teachers are used to or desire, and the educational system is primarily designed for teachers.

The education system is primarily designed for controlling costs, and making children easy to manage.

Unfortunately that is incompatible with 30 children in a classroom being managed but a single underpaid teacher.

so, who is up for a startup - an AI-agent as a teacher, each child gets his own teacher, or several simultaneously, basically personalized Muppet show guiding the child through the intricacies of 1+1=2 and how to write "mom".

For the older students - some FPS (multi-played by the whole class or school against school) with math and other problems to unlock new more powerful weapons/etc. should work too - anybody who didn't do the homework and thus fails to solve the problems fast naturally becomes a bad teammate and the peer pressure is the king at that age.

Oh sure, we'll just get some AI capable of teaching children, I'm sure GPT-3 with a little prompting is more than enough for that.

And of course, what else could maths education value other than speed of figuring out problems? After all, Cauchy was famed as the fastest differentiator in the west, wasn't he?

Not sure if serious...

Lol if you think kids will peer pressure other kids into doing their "FPS maths homework" then you're seriously out of touch.

Here is a crazy idea that needs to come before this: What if we taught our adult population to process their difficult emotions instead of suppressing them and stay active and move freely while working and studying.

Actually, this already falls flat in the first section. At least 90% of adult fail on that one. How are they supposed to teach something to their children that they themselves don't even understand? And teaching is usually much more difficult than understanding something yourself.

Which brings us to "school should teach that". But schools are not designed for that and teachers are not qualified for that. Hell, it's already an exception to meet a teacher who can properly convey the meaning of "1+1=2", not to mention a teacher who can teach children, who are not their own, how to process difficult emotions. Good luck with that

Is there some deeper meaning to 1 + 1 = 2 you could enlighten us on? Most teachers I’ve met seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across.

"seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across" yeah, that's part of the problem. They already know that 1+1=2, or so you'd think. But you would be hard pressed to find a teacher who can actually explain WHY 1+1=2 (which is based in how our number system was created and using proof by induction). Anyway, that is besides the point, since you won't teach children math with college approaches, but the important thing is that most teachers don't understand what they teach, they just "say what they remember".

And that doesn't pair well with children's insatiable "why" requests, even if they don't utter them. Teaching children is actually harder than teaching adults, because most adults largely gave up on the "why" and just settle on "I gotta remember that, if I want to pass the next exam" (school did a good job with them I guess).

So why 1+1=2? There is a lot of depth in that that is left unanswered and children are forced to memorize the answer. From then on, a sharp decline of cognitive ability follows as they "graduate" through our excellent school systems...

Poh-Shen Loh has a math course for middle school kids, and a weekly live interactive youtube stream specifically to answer questions kids ask teachers.

One on his channel is to explain to kids how the determinant works, why matrix multiplication is done in that specific order, etc. Check them out sometime esp his Friday 'ask math anything' live lectures.

Well, if you want to be _extremely rigorous_, there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica ;)

Less flippantly: pedagogically, there's a big difference between "here's your addition tables, memorize them" and "if I have 1 of _anything_ and another 1 of that same thing, I now have 2 of that thing." The latter offers way more opportunities for further thought: by that logic, if I have 2 things and I take 1 away, I now have 1 thing! If I have 2 rocks and 2 sheep, I can count the sheep by laying out 1 rock per sheep! And since I can add more things, maybe there are more numbers for those amounts of things too? And what about differently-sized things? Or parts of things? Or...

That's the difference between getting "1 + 1 = 2" across as a literal by-the-book fact, and getting it across as an invitation to build / connect ideas and ask further questions.

I'm pretty sure that is already how addition is taught. I'm not a fan of formal education at all, but I'm not sure what you think schools are missing here?

We were extremely lucky to have a great K teacher who really wanted to work with us and our son to help him through his difficult time adjusting to school. We worked with him quite a bit, and by the "end of the year" (i.e. spring break, when lockdown started), he was processing his feelings of overwhelmedness much better, and going to her (and just collapsing into a heap in her lap) when he felt overwhelmed.

Compare that to a friend's son, who is the same age as ours but has some developmental delays of some type (I assume). Their teacher told them that they had to "get this dealt with"; in other words, "fix your kid so I don't have to deal with him". Not exactly a welcoming and comforting environment for a child who needs to be met halfway.

I mentioned this anecdote to our son's teacher and her first comment was "wow... is she an older teacher?" And yes, she was. She's been working with kids for 30 years, probably isn't as flexible in terms of learning strategies as younger teachers are, and, probably even worse, has been underpaid (and under-respected) for that whole time, so she's surely just burnt out and waiting for retirement at this point.

Maybe if teaching paid decent money we'd have more teachers who could put in the time and emotional energy to nurture their students, rather than just putting them through the pipeline, and who wouldn't get so cynical and short-tempered by the end of their career.

Good luck!

"Virtual pre-kintegarden?" That's childcare, not education.

Yes, agreed, but parents are desperate. Kids need kids to play with, at least they see other kids on the screen. It's a really unfortunate situation for the development of small children.

I don’t think distance learning should exist for kids under 12 or so. Pandemic has shut schools? Have them group into pods of 6 and go to a different family’s house every day and just play.

Funny, the kid is behaving like the parent. Where could that come from?

Give your kid a copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HowStuffWorks

"we hadn’t paused to think about how jarring it would be for Raffi, who had only recently learned that the people in the TV set weren’t tiny puppets." L M A O

Daycare has been a part of public education since the beginning. As they separate, people will be shocked at small the education part is.

Kids learn a lot from Peers;

I stopped reading since it's obviously just a rant but this seems like it's about preschool remote kindergarten - clickbaty title

We'll swap it out for the subtitle, which is a lot more specific.

I honestly couldn't get past the first four paragraphs. The author has... issues. Personally I wouldn't write an article like this to let the whole world in on my neuroticism.

It reminds me of the Mark Twain quote "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt."

It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear neurotic than open it and remove all doubt.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

While I 100% agree with the intent of the HN guideline, there are times when calling out crazy as crazy is fully warranted. I believe this is one of those cases.

I don’t believe parent comment was a “shallow dismissal”, it was an accurate and “deep” dismissal.

"I honestly couldn't get past the" is an internet trope. "The author has issues" is true of everybody. "Neurotic" is calling names in this context [1]. It seems like a shallow dismissal to me. There's another guideline which applies here too:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Posts about parenting may be the most emotionally triggering of all categories that come up on HN. As readers, we're all responsible for containing the reflexive reactions that come up in us when encountering something intense, and instead of rushing to the comments to dismiss or attack it, waiting awhile until something more reflective emerges, in which case an interesting comment may result.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[1] So is "crazy" for that matter. That's an extreme thing to say, and I'm sure you don't really mean it.

Are you a moderator here Dang? If not how about you simply report and move on ... looking at your posting history a very large percentage of it is you trying to tell others how to use the site.

The rules are fine however let those who are charged with enforcing them do so rather than trying to control others.

Yes, dang is a (the?) moderator.

https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...

Yes, and lord I can't imagine what a dreadful scold those comments would make me if it weren't my job to post them.

Sorry for the confusion. We considered putting 'mod' tags beside our usernames but it just felt wrong, so as with most things about HN, people have to figure it out as they go, and it's always ok to ask questions.

Purely from my own perspective, if this is deep then I'd like to see a 'deeper' dismissal in that case. I read the first 4 paragraphs, and I didn't see anything that warranted the word 'crazy'.

Developmental problems? Maybe, although I'd honestly like to see some stronger evidence from people claiming that. Non-typical learning styles? Maybe? But we're talking about a 5 year old, temper tantrums are completely normal.

A lot of commenters here arguing fiercely that there's something deeply wrong with a toddler who's used to being in a physical space with physical people within a specialized environment, having a different reaction to being sat in front of a static screen for an extended period of time in a home setting.

A lot of commenters dismissing the idea that virtual meetings might be more draining or difficult for some people, which seems very... I'm surprised to see that attitude on HN of all places, we should know better than anyone that different people deal with isolation and physical proximity in different ways.

If the original poster can point to specific language that makes them think something is wrong with the parent or child, then they should point to that language. I think it's inappropriate and shallow to throw around labels like 'crazy' just because a child is misbehaving.

Yeah, I read it and ended being not sure what it was about.

Unless you're going to end with a stance of "but we'll get through it because of COIVD" or "we should go back to school no matter what" I'm a little lost of the point here.

Nobody is "doing this" to you, it's what we all have to do.

Better to keep your fingers off the keyboard than fail to offer a single point of contention while rather unpleasantly abusing the author. I wonder why you even felt the need to comment. Are perceived neurotics open season?

Watching parents realize that taxpayer funded daycare is the only thing making parenting tolerable has been my favorite part of the pandemic. It almost makes up for the taxes.

Downvotes make me laugh harder!

I do love how entitled parents are. WAHHHHHH. I want a free babysitter for my children that I can't stand to be around. WAAHHHHH.

Its about educating the kids, not babysitting. I expect my kids to learn something at school and socialize. Little kids especially do better in groups where everyone does the same thing, distance learning is a real tragedy for these kids. The kids are just reacting to a situation that is out of their control and they can't fully understand. Its really hard for parents/caregivers. We have to tag-team it at my house where we have mom or grandma during the day and dad at night. My son will spend 5 hours fighting you over 5 minutes of simple work that he can easily do - when he decides not to do it there is nothing that will motivate him, no reward great enough, no consequence harsh enough. Its easy to judge others but you never know what your future might hold.

hit his parents, hit his brother, broke things, and spat a cup of juice all over my laptop.

Barring some kind of psychiatric problem like ODD, that's a significant failure of discipline, the responsibility for which lies squarely on the shoulders of the parent. I would not trust any kind generalized behavioral prediction from someone who can't keep a five year old from striking their siblings and intentionally destroying objects.

I thought I was failing as a parent because my 3 year old sometimes _still_ pushes my 1 year old. I feel terrible for the child and for the parent(s) who have created a _lot_ of work for themselves, the child, and maybe even society. But I also feel a wee bit of relief of, "okay so maybe I'm being too hard on myself."

The late 3's were tough with our oldest. When our twins turned 6 months she totally had it out for the boy twin and would near constantly try to hurt him. It really didn't matter what we did or threatened. 5 minutes after a timeout, or us taking away something she wanted, she would be back at it again. Oh yes, she didn't like timeouts - she would kick and scream and cry during those timeouts. But it didn't matter.

All we could really do was make sure they were physically separated as much as possible. That helped a lot. But the times they got close, she usually took advantage and did something to hurt him. E.g. if he was near her path to the bathroom, she would step on his hand while walking close to him.

Ultimately, she just grew out of it around 4 years old. But it was a really stressful and unfun time period.

She's 5 now, and the twins are 3. She loves playing with them. Until she doesn't of course, but even still - for the past 1.5 years she doesn't want to do anything without them.

I've literally never met a 5-year-old who doesn't do things like this when they're upset. Judging by what was happening on other families' screens when watching my son's online kindergarten last spring, it would seem that these kinds of challenges with the Zoom learning experience certainly aren't unique to my or my friends' families, either. This despite it seeming to me like a particularly happy and cohesive kindergarten class for the first part of the school year.

My sense is that that, if you aren't currently trying to usher a preschooler through this experience, you don't actually know how your kid would have handled this situation as a preschooler. And if you are doing it and it is going well, you should count your blessings.

> I've literally never met a 5-year-old who doesn't do things like this when they're upset.

Really?

I can't imagine either of my kids doing things like that - perhaps a brief outburst, sure, but it would have been immediately followed by an appropriate response from a parent.

> My sense is that that, if you aren't currently trying to usher a preschooler through this experience, you don't actually know how your kid would have handled this situation as a preschooler.

While we're not under exactly those circumstances, our youngest is six and we've always homeschooled. I also have a number of public school teachers in my family, and from my perspective the problem is 100% the approach. Distance learning can absolutely be effective, but trying to force the rhythm of a government school onto it is a flawed concept.

On the other hand... if they restructured it so it would be effective from an educational standpoint, they'd have a much more difficult time getting those kids back into classrooms when the time comes. I strongly suspect that the programs that are in place are designed more to ease the transition back into the classroom than to educate.

>perhaps a brief outburst, sure

so you can imagine it... because it happens

The comment to which I was replying listed several things: “hit his parents, hit his brother, broke things, and spat a cup of juice all over my laptop.”

By “outburst”, I specifically mean “showing outward signs of intense emotion that they are unable to handle appropriately”.

you either don't have kids plural or won the lottery.

How would you propose to keep a 5 year old from doing anything except for shadowing their every move all day long? Would that work?

Clear, consistent rules with consistent consequences. When my son was five he never hit his sister but he did hit his friend, which resulted in his first and only spanking and an apology to the kid and his mother. I'm not saying you or any parent can fix all discipline problems, but you can draw one or two lines your kids know absolutely they cannot cross.

"forced to sit in front of a screen" is the key phrase here. What if we didn't force them to sit, but allowed them to stand and move about freely, come and go when they please, have some autonomy and decision making power around what goes on in class (e.g. share preferences for what they want to learn) and give them frequent movement breaks (a good set of headphones, an ipad with a wide lens attached allows that). What if we engaged them more so they were excited to see what was happening on their screen? Kids aren't any more excited to sit and do something boring than we are.

The key problem here(and it's not a small one) is that we need to give ALL kids access to this hardware to support their learning, not just a few. Right now only 18% of US households have a device. I've seen school districts short 20,000 computers.

A balance ball seems to be working better than a hard wood chair was for the seven year old to handle 3-4 hours of Zoom. Posture is much better too.

Also trying to figure out how to throw up the Zoom conference on the TV. I think it'll probably be much more natural for the kids.

Google Chrome and macOS can both do desktop mirroring (to a Chromecast device or Apple TV respectively), so then you just need a webcam with a long cable you can stick on top of the TV.

Yes and I’d even go so far as to say I‘m not sure the “screen” really has much to do with the difficulty. I had a hard time sitting and paying attention in class 25 years ago. All of my teachers “solved” this by putting me in the front row so they could keep an eye on me and remind me to sit again. But my 3rd grade teacher gave me a desk in the back row so I could sit in my chair, sit on my desk, or stand without bothering the other students. It turned out I could pay attention when I wasn’t forced to assume the learning position.

It's a much bigger question/challenge than lack of hardware.

With all respect, the model this assumes for how kids work... is just not how kids work. It's not how attention works.

Think about it like a movie. Kids at different ages will sit through movies of different lengths and subjects. Those movies have production budgets- of minimum thousands of dollars per second even at the lowest end, and shooting and editing commitments that are tens to hundreds or more person hours per video second.

Expecting a live performer to engage not just 1 passive kid but n active kids with a new show every day over a screen- where every mistake or every blip doesn't get edited out in post but actually has to be dealt with in real time, while each kid has their own dynamics, their own family situations, their own issues PRESENT WITH THEM while all this is going on....

In terms of the quantity of human attention at production time to ensure consumer engagement- the ratio between a movie and a live person on the other side of the screen is, like, 1,000,000 to 1.

It is NOT POSSIBLE to solve the engagement problem in the way that remote school is expected to solve for it and there is no model, resource, technology, or anything that makes it work.

This is coming from a long time ed tech advocate, having built games and education platforms and worked in schools and having 3 kids of my own.

What we are doing with remote school is INSANITY.

Unfortunately, the alternatives are also insane.

There is no solving anything. There's no what if. There's no answer.

And more pointedly- it sounds like the poster here does not have kids.

Pro tip, no offense intended- if you don't have kids- don't weigh in on these issues. You don't know what you're talking about. And you don't have any idea how much you don't know what you're talking about. It isn't worth it for you or for anyone else to engage.

Have a nice day.

The author does allude to this, by mentioning that remote learning is almost worse than nothing.

Honestly, we probably should just cancel at least the first half of the school year altogether, but that would mean admitting how utterly dismal our Covid response has been, and so it is not politically possible. Thus a whole generation of kids have to deal with this nonsense. It's a shame.

> that would mean admitting how utterly dismal our Covid response has been

Only if there would've been a better way. While COVID surely could've been handled a bit better overall, I don't think a lockdown was fully avoidable (note that it escaped Wuhan while the city was in a lockdown stricter than anything seen outside of Wuhan) and remote learning is, as shown above, not ideal either. So I don't think admitting that this school year was bad equals admitting a bad response to COVID.

> if you don't have kids- don't weigh in on these issues

I agree, but would also add that even if you do have kids, they probably have personalities and circumstances unlike everyone else's kids. And that in all likelihood your sample size is too hilariously small to be able to produce useful broad generalizations from your experience.

I have two kids doing remote learning (one in kinder, one in 3rd grade). Since the 5yo is only on her 3rd day of remote learning ever, I'm spending more time "babysitting" her session. The class does involve some amount of physical movement (e.g "now go bring something square") and leaving the zoom meeting for 30 min periods to focus on drawing activities, but then I need to be on top of whether the kid is still engaged (or whether she wandered off to play with legos) and of what times the zoom class resumes. When you're dealing w/ a class of 20-30 small kids, there's a also good chunk of time wasted on logistics (fumbling w/ zoom password, waiting for kids to rejoin the meeting, "jimmy, you need to mute/unmute yourself", "please raise your hand if you want to talk" reminders, etc).

I feel that the class content seems sufficiently engaging (compared to my own kinder experience of strict butts-in-chair, all forward facing desks and a blackboard in a physical class), but even then, it requires dividing my attention between work and making sure the kid is on task.

The third grader has some experience with remote learning from before summer vacations, so things are relatively more smooth when the class is on, but we still need to keep tabs on when recess breaks are supposed to end. His teacher apparently has quite a bit more experience w/ remote learning from teaching classes during summer, and the class appears fairly engaging, with good usage of share screen and multimedia. But I do feel like the quality of learning seems low. Not sure if it's because of US standards. My son's curriculum hasn't really touched multiplication yet, but I distinctively remember having that mastered in 3rd grade, and also singapore math booklets that my wife bought to complement studies also apply both multiplication and division extensively at 3rd grade level)

It can also be challenging to juggle both parents AND both kids having zoom meetings simultaneously, since meetings are mutually disruptive, especially with loud multimedia activities. I feel like the parts that work the best are the ones similar to my old-school education: giving instructions on a task, then letting kids do them, recess, rinse and repeat. I'm not really sold on the high tech gimmicks (videos w/ songs etc).

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