Agreed.
> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools, even though my understanding was science was saying (still is saying, AFAIK) spread through the schools is relatively little and the difference to kids' learning is huge. And on parents, which is important but not as important as the impact on kids.
Our society as a whole doesn't care about young families, and it's never been so clear. There is someone to blame.
btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
> btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
Yes, if you can objectively prove that a parent isn't working then they wouldn't be protected. This is very obvious and easily quantifiable in an in-office environment, but with remote knowledge work it's much harder to prove—especially since the result would look like you're suddenly targeting parents for "not working hard enough." Most companies are risk-averse and simply prefer to tolerate underperformance.
I don't know what to make of the teachers' unions. My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception. (Being a kindergarten teacher over Zoom is hard!) And I never heard a particular teacher in my area advocate for closed or remote schools.
But school administrators blamed the teachers' unions a fair bit for being slow to reopen. In general I suspect school administrators were looking to blame someone else for their own leadership failings, but there still might be some truth in it. I could see how the unions might have adopted the position of the most risk-adverse (and/or laziest) of the teachers.
Yes, there are definitely some individual teachers who care about student learning and work hard to go back to in-person.
Unfortunately, the unions adopt the most risk-averse/lazy possible regarding remote learning. Even in 2022 there are unions pushing hard for effectively indefinite remote learning.[0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/us/teachers-unions-covid-...
There is nothing about teachers unions priorities that align in anyway with students & parents priorities.
We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.
Citation needed. There's a ton of evidence that learning has dropped dramatically with remote school. Especially for elementary students, I suspect it is near-zero.
> We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Whether teachers like it or not, a significant part of their job is childcare. Society would not fund schools at anywhere near their current rate if they didn't also provide childcare.
Schools owe students an education. As you can see from this thread, it's controversial whether adults in tech can work productively remotely. Elementary school kids by and large don't learn well remotely. Unless that changes, it's a moot point whether childcare is just a bonus or something that is owed.
As for the "pandemic" part: I agreed with the closures of schools, preschools, and day cares at the very beginning of the pandemic. It seemed reasonable at first to believe kids spread COVID-19 as much as they seem to spread colds and flus. But it was't long before there was evidence that spread through schools is modest [1], especially with reasonable precautions (e.g. masks). And it was painfully obvious education was suffering. Schools should have reopened a full year sooner than they actually did in my area (and many other areas are worse). Society has a risk budget, and this should have been the priority for spending it, not bars or travel or indulging mask/vaccine denial.
[1] I remember a fair bit of this in the news; a quick search found https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/7/618 from June 2020. I believe it's been consistent since, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103420118 from October 2021.
Almost every societal group suffered in one way or another, from school kids, single adults, the elder, small business owners and the list goes on.
There wasn't anything specifically targeted at young families. These last years sucked hard for a lot of people.
There's a reason it's protected. You can't just expect business as usual when the entire support chain of society falls over. Everyone and everything has to adapt - people, businesses, etc.