Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

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This sounds exactly like my kids school district. They send an email telling you you have a "secure message" and you need to log in to see it. So you try to sign up to see the message, but can't because you don't have the password. So you try calling them and they say they will reply via email. What they mean is that they will send you a secure message about your inability to receive secure messages. So you call again and they transfer you to a number that is only open between 9am and 4pm on weekdays. So you call back on Monday and, because this is the start of term, can't get through, like, at all, ever. So eventually on Wednesday you get through and they transfer you again, only this time you manage to invoke XKCD 806 and get a real person who knows how to "reset" the password you never set in the first place. So you finally manage to log in to the secure messaging portal and look at the email. Oh, it's a PDF download. You download the PDF and see it's a physical letter that has been scanned in to the system manually (seriously!). The letter? The reason you went to all this trouble? It's a welcome letter to the new "secure messaging" platform, with instructions about how to reset your password...

It's hard to recover from the memories of wasted time, effort, and frustration when the schools when distance-learning only in 2020.

"We will start using Google Classroom for all communication, class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades"

Sure. Good. Come grade time:

"Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a week."

Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on Google Classroom.

"Your child has already completed x."

It was marked missing on Google Classroom.

"Please refer to Infinite Campus to see which assignments are missing."

Ok...I signed up for Infinite Campus, and I don't see anything.

"Did you use the user/pass we automatically created for each parent?"

What? No.

"Sir, we sent out this information weeks ago."

Search...search...manual search...I don't see it on Google Classroom.

"Oh, we sent it through ClassDojo."

---

This is very simplified. Google Classroom required teacher-provided codes to join "classes" for each subject, provided through...school email! School email is an unused morass for Google Classroom notification emails for every action your child or their teacher makes. Get a teacher message on ClassDojo? Sorry, can't tell if it was a mass message or directed at you, so you have to clarify whether it applies to your kid given their IEP. Got two parents using Dojo? Sorry, can't see if the other parent has already responded to a teacher message. Completed an assignment on Classroom but didn't click "Turn in"? Missing. Can't find where to enter answers? Oops, your child knows to use ImagineMathExploreLinkConnect to get to that material. Completed on that fourth-party platform, but didn't go back to Classroom to click "Turn in?" Missing. Triple checked everything but still a bunch of missing assignments in Infinite Campus? Teacher is behind on grading, and there's no way to know that, either from Infinite Campus or Google Classroom, but it was in the class newsletter we emailed to your child.

Maybe not all employers, but at least mine does not realize quite how much further parents fell behind that year than those without school-age kids, on balance.

When schools excitedly announce a new platform for learning anything, I want to punch myself in the face.

I hear you man. For me the most frustrating part about all of this is each platform comes with its own algorithmic placement system that has to learn your kid's level. My eldest kid has high-IQ exceptional needs, and by the time the algorithms would learn her level and place her accurately where she would make some progress, the classroom had already moved on to the next platform. I think I counted five different platforms for math in the past year, sometimes with multiple different logins on the same platform. It's a travesty and her growth has come to a complete halt since I stopped teaching her and gave her back to the school. My heart breaks but what can you do. As a kindergartener she was factorizing numbers in the bathtub and now as a third grader "Xtra Math" is asking her to identify whether a shape is a triangle or a circle.

Seriously.

My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade.

They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely.

My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that.

Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call.

My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons.

My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions.

All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time.

Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.

That's a strikingly similar situation to ours. Our 4th grader has autism and needed special education services, but of course those didn't exist. At the same time, our typically developing kid was starting kindergarten virtually. At one point the teacher booted him from the class meeting because he was drawing a picture instead of writing words. She told us to ensure that he only joins class ready to learn.

All I can say is I'm glad we are all back in-person. The full-time dual-career parents as teacher's aides life was a fever dream of nearly snapping daily.

Damn straight.

As a final anecdote: our kids had a full-time gym teacher. They were supposed to have “gym” lessons three times a week.

For the entirety of covid, their “lesson” was a single powerpoint slide with the words “go play” on it.

That was the entirety of the work that needed to be done by the gym teacher for a year - post that one slide to google classroom at the appropriate times.

Banking, health insurance, education

I see a trend!

It's not like Google or Amazon is better in customer friendliness. (Amazon at least has a working customer service where they get you a refund even if they have absolutely no idea wtf happened to your precious order.)

even when you keep making new accounts and "losing" the packages!

Next time just fill out the "forgot your password" form.

The one that asks for an email address and then tells you that email address isn’t in the system despite the same system sending you email? Yeah, I did. Many times.

Did you try all caps?

Similar adjustments?

Can't count how many times this kind of thing has worked.

No. No more. No more guessing, no more trouble shooting or debugging. I don't care and OP probably has more important things to do too. Sure, I can do it. Exceptionally well too! But, they aren't paying me, and users aren't shouldn't be their free, outsourced QA team.

The password reset field accepts a certain character but the login form sanitizes it differently so it won't be accepted. Or even trying to set a password with that character results in an "HTTP 50x error something went horribly wrong".

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