Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

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This is my US-based perspective:

Closing schools last year due to COVID was as bad of a policy as putting COVID patients in nursing homes (looking at you MN and NY). We knew by September of last year that kids were less impacted by COVID (they spread it less, they get less ill etc). We learned from Europe that it wasn't killing teachers at an increased rate either (a fear-based argument I heard ad nauseum in my very blue state).

There was no good science-based argument to close schools last year in the US, especially when restaurants and hair salons were reopened. But political polarization - exacerbated by the media - ensured we did the worst possible thing for our children. I am continually disgusted with every person I encounter who promoted (and in many cases still promote) remote learning.

Rich parents could afford professional tutors and create pods and go to other great lengths to ensure their kids got some education. Meanwhile the poor parents were going to work in-person and leaving their kids to fend for themselves (many of whom, at least where I live, turned to committing crimes)

The most disgusting part is the people most in favor of closing schools were rich, left-leaning white collar workers. Nevermind that the very people they purportedly want to help with their policies were the most harmed. As long as you say the right words, who cares about outcomes yeah?

I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why. Is learning not happening at work as well, especially when you're at the beginning of your career?

For me, as a junior, remote work has pretty much been devastating on the learning side of things as well as being invisible to management when it comes to career prospects. Sure, it benefited the seniors as they could more easily dodge some of the annoying responsibility of tutoring the juniors and leave early when their work was done and they had enough time to rub shoulders with management before the pandemic to have guaranteed career prospects.

So, to whit, I'm wonder if the teachers also enjoyed remote teaching more to the detriment of the kids?

> I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other way around when it comes to work

One group is composed of children, who we collectively agree need to be supervised for the good of their future and society at large. Kids are irresponsible and we cannot throw kids out of the system when they fail at those expectations. So to maximize participation, you need intervention. The other is not the same, because they are adults and held to different expectations or they are removed from the system. Attendance is not an effective measure of success in almost any work environment (where you can complete tasks remotely) so remote is fine, in these cases. There's nothing confusing about it.

I think some of it is the different priorities between children and adults. For themselves, adults might care more about convenience than learning, given that 1) they have many more important priorities than learning, and 2) adults don't have the ability to learn that much (compared to children). It's the opposite for children of course. Learning is the number one priority.

For me personally, I totally agree that remote work is worse for the learning aspect of the job, and is a total disaster for the social aspect.

>It's the opposite for children of course. Learning is the number one priority.

IDK about other kids but when I was in school, my number one priority was having fun outside with my friends or playing video games. Learning was never a priority as a kid, but a chore, a forced exercise on the hamster wheel.

"the" not "their"

> I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why.

Hot take: because school as most of us conceive it is fundamentally about soft-coercing children into ignoring that they're bored out of their mind so they can focus on something they don't really care about learning.

Remote school fails for the same reason old-school management can't be remote: because its efficacy strongly depends on the teacher's ability to coerce children, and it falls apart when you remove that ability.

(I'm curious how we'd determine if anything I just said is actually true. I'd want to look at how well Montessori schools adapted to the pandemic, but their philosophy is kind of remote-hostile too.)

> exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why.

Telework isn't ideal, but it offers us a chance to break the big city real estate hyperinflation trap. If all good jobs must be concentrated in SF, NYC, LA, and Seattle, then the choice is "no jobs or unaffordable real estate, pick one." Either way you lose. Everyone loses except property owners in those cities (who bought before the inflation).

Long term my hope is that telework and diaspora lead to re-nucleation of talent centers in lots of places all over the country, a reversal of the geographic consolidation trend of the past 20-30 years.

Of all industries, this is the one we would expect to be at the forefront of geographic de-consolidation. We could, you know, actually use this Internet thing we built.

Consider that it is not the same people that comment on every post, but those most invested in sharing their point of view.

From my anecdotal experiences, teachers did not like it, unanimously. And my N is about 50, so take it how you may.

Context: have been doing remote software work for 13-18 years (depending on whether you want to count part-time work). Had kids in fully remote school spring 2020, hybrid for most of 2020-2021 school year, fully back to school since spring 2021.

Remote work as a junior is _very_ hard, for most people. Even worse as an intern.

Remotely mentoring a junior is likewise pretty hard: you have to build in more structure than you would if you're sitting next to each other, and it requires more remote-awareness discipline on the part of the junior, which they may not have yet. Remotely mentoring an intern is pretty impossible in most cases. Taking on interns is something I have not really done, because it would not be fair to them...

For learning, remote learning in kindergarten with the tools we had last year is an absolute shit-show (starting with the fact that the kids can't read yet, so even communicating what they should be doing to them can be quite difficult). Not even the most self-motivated kids can make a lot of progress in that environment. And the kindergarten teachers I talked to completely hated it. They had to invest a lot more time than usual, for worse outcomes than usual. Of course these were teachers who cared about doing their job. :)

Remote learning in late middle to high school (think 13+) still has obvious challenges (science labs? access to equipment? a quiet space for the student to work at home?), but it's a lot closer to viable than kindergarten. The most self-motivated kids can do OK. Everyone else does somewhat worse than they do in-person, not least because they are sitting there at a device with endless temptation even more at their fingertips than in class in terms of social media and whatnot. Doing all the homework electronically can be a PITA compared to writing on paper (e.g. for geometry), but that may not be an inherent feature of remote learning.

In between, it's a gradient from the complete insanity of K to the sorta-maybe-viable-if-we-have-to of high school. Basically, remote stuff requires a lot more maturity and self-discipline, both for school and work...

I love working remote for various reasons, but there are plenty of times I wish I could just hop into the same room as some of my co-workers and sort things out on a big shared blackboard; the tech for this is just not there yet in practice. I would never claim that remote work is always best, or for everyone.

So maybe it's just selection bias, in terms of what you see on HN? Takes a lot longer to type something like the above than "remote work is the best"...

Because both of these things impact them in different ways.

Remote learning means they are responsible for the upkeep of their children during the day. There are more demands on their time and resources.

Remote work means they are less beholden to their employers. There are fewer demands on their time and resources.

So "remote learning bad" and "remote work good" aren't opposing opinions if you realize that their opinion isn't about the nature of "remote" but about the demands on their time and resources.

And let's not forget that all day primary school is a relatively modern invention. All the talk about socialization and whatever, somehow children got that before the invention of school.

People who complain about "the politicization" of a topic are themselves engaging in politicization of the same. But trying to use the accusation as a cudgel to get their way. It's almost as if they've defined "politicization" as "not getting my way". I've hardly met anyone who seriously used a politicization argument in a good faith manner. Not to mention, it's not a good argument either. Whether or not something is contentious is hardly ever a factor in whether or not it should or should not be done.

I mean, there are other things in his post that are telling, but he's got a certain worldview and he's going to interpret whatever data that comes through, mix it with some personal anecdotes, and spice it up with what he intuits to be correct so that his predetermined conclusion is reached.

And about whether or not teachers enjoyed remote teaching, it was a challenge. I'm sure some enjoyed it, but it would vary by grade level and socio-economic factors.

So while there are plenty of children who probably lost a year of education (although depending on the grade level, catching up isn't much of an issue), with over 700,000 dead and counting even with the precautions we did take (among those who took them, of course), it's hard to say what the effect of putting all of these kids in school along with the attendant support staff would have been. Because there's way more opportunity for cross-contamination when you do that. Especially with families with members working in public-facing essential jobs. Anyone arguing otherwise is just playing hypothetical hindsight games.

The main issue with schools is that the kids catch it, don't suffer with it much but pass it to their parents and potentially grand parents. Schools are just a great nexuses for rapidly spreading covid through communities.

It is true that kids are always spreading respiratory ailments. We've always had to live with this risk.

It seems to matter how dangerous the situation is, how helpful closing the schools actually is, and how much harm we are doing to kids in order to hopefully protect others. It doesn't help that we don't have exact numbers for some of this. Nor would people assess these risks the same, even if they agree on the numbers.

For example, some people don't think that covid is that dangerous, given that only 1 in 500 people have died and we now have a vaccine. Some people think the harm to kids is significant, especially those just starting school and how long they have been locked down. Some people question how effective closing schools has actually been, how many lives are actually being saved, or are we only delaying the inevitable spread of this through the entire population. Some people feel the opposite, they are vulnerable and want to impose on others to lesson risk to themselves.

Keeping schools closed now that we have vaccines doesn't make as much sense as before. If the vaccines are 95% effective at preventing death and hospitalization then there is 95% less reason for keeping schools closed.

I broadly agree, with vaccines I don't really think there's a good reason to keep schools closed. Before I think it made sense to err on the side of caution.

If you have ever lived with a kid it is crazy how often they and you will be sick. I lived with a friend who had an 8 year old a few years ago and went from maybe getting sick once a year to almost monthly minor illnesses. 8 year olds are basically disease factories who take no precautions.

I know what you mean, sometimes it seems that little kids always have a runny nose.

I've assumed it would be a long-term bad thing if we don't allow for this. Perhaps it is better for kids to encounter all these rhinoviruses and coronaviruses when they are young. Maybe a lot of them are like covid-19, easy to fend off when young but deadly when older. Maybe that is why people sometimes die of the common cold, because they never caught that particular virus when young.

> The most disgusting part is the people most in favor of closing schools were rich, left-leaning white collar workers

Correction: the people most in favor of closing schools were the teachers' unions. And they are a tremendous political force in the US.

Right now (Monday 27-Sept-2021) the teacher's union in NYC is arguing that retaining unvaccinated teachers is somehow good for children's safety, and brought the case in front of a Federal Court.

https://abc7ny.com/covid-vaccine-mandate-nyc-teachers-ny-hea...

> the people most in favor of closing schools were the teachers' unions.

I'm not sure they can be "most in favor" when they are groups of organizations. They are easily the groups with the most influence in how schools are structured.

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