Hacker News Reader

Comment by dj_mc_merlin | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

> 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).

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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".

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

> 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 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...

>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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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

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. :-(

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com