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Comment by albertop | Hacker News Reader

Well quelle surprise - when you close the schools for two years you doom the generation of kinds.

Better than dooming many of the kids and their parents.

That's the thing about natural disasters - they're disasters. Bad things happen and there is no business as usual option.

Basically no kids would be doomed and only a tiny fraction of their parents. It's the grandparents who'd get decimated.

Why couldn't grandparents have been kept safe while the kids went to school?

How could this be achieved against an airborne illness that children are largely asymptomatic for? This is true of many adults too - you can't really guarantee that the elderly will be safe unless they can be quarantined, which for almost all simply wasn't possible. Assisted living homes were the first place COVID tore through, which are largely sequestered from children.

If you don't think you can quarantine old people and people with actual immune system issues, why do you think you can quarantine healthy children?

I honestly don't think either could have really been achieved. But it's illogical to recognize that it's impossible for one group to justify pulling out all the stops to quarantine children.

Why would I respond to you when you ignored my central question and then misrepresented what I said? I said you can't quarantine old people and then act as if everything is business as usual in the outside world - the disease will get in.

Doomed? Most likely they will gradually recover most of the gap over the coming years.

From the piece:

> However, fewer than half of students at each grade had teachers who were quite or extremely confident in their ability to address learning gaps that may have occurred due to pandemic-related school closures.

So _hopefully_ but I'm not sure that _most likely_.

This might be more indicative of the view many teachers have towards their profession now. There's a reason there are teacher shortages across the country

A third of my graduating highschool class was not literate. Color me skeptical.

They're not doomed. If anything this will show the hyper fixation on academic schooling is misguided. Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use.

Most academics is for the enrichment of the school and instructors, not because it's an effective education.

You're downvoted but you're correct. Rates of people going to universities have collapsed, especially among men.

They're having to start campus diversity for programs now in some places as a form of affirmative action in schools that became too gynocentric.

It's even worse actually - a school admin recently was removed because they dare question the effectiveness of diversity initiatives. It's a new Reagan era.

> Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use.

This has to be one of the of the most worn out stupid takes. The point of teaching things like math and science which people "will never use in real life" is to teach problem solving and critical thinking. NO ONE actually thinks knowing the quadratic formula is useful in and of itself.

Idk how they're teaching the quadratic formula nowadays, but when it was taught to me it was taught as a fact to be used later on. The problem solving and critical thinking time could have been spent on working through and coming up with it

>Idk how they're teaching the quadratic formula nowadays, but when it was taught to me it was taught as a fact to be used later on.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could actually say that and believe it. In what scenario would a person that is not actively working in a STEM field (and frankly even then) ever need to solve a quadratic equation by hand? When most kids can barely handle using the formula on it's own I don't think deriving it is going to add any value to anyone other than already advanced students.

I believe that's false. It's easier to understand something if it's tied together and built on other things you already know. Simply being handed a formula and told to use it does neither of those thing.

As you said, what good is being given a formula and told to use it for problem solving if you can barely understand it. Instead do the problem solving to derive the equation.

I think my point is that the average student can barely comprehend using the formula, they certainly aren't going to follow a derivation of it.

And my point was the the average student is presented with this giant, for them, formula as a finished thing and have no way to grok it.

And that if you instead start with squares and rectangles and built up to it, it'll be less daunting.

But my point wasn't about this one formula specifically, but about the approach in general.

Not sure this makes sense pedagogically. I would challenge you to try this in a classroom of average middle schoolers and see how it goes. I don't think you grasp the difficulties here.

Not sure why you think it doesn't make sense pedagogically. Counting and numbers are taught before addition.

Then addition is "proved" in terms of those.

Then multiplication is "proved" using addition.

One building on the next.

The proof for 1+1=2 is something like 150+ pages. We don't give that to kindergarten kids do we.

Hence the use "prove" rather than prove.

But the length of the real proof is beside the point. We teach them about 1 and 2 before going to 1+1=2. And when we do go to 1+1=2, we show it to them using objects and counting. We don't simply tell "here's the function for addition, just put numbers into to to solve problems".

And it is used later on, probably every day until you graduate. Most people probably won't use it at their jobs, but things that are useful during your studies are useful period.

You will learn more problem solving in a day building a shed than you will the quadratic formula. "Critical thinking" is the unproven excuse so that schools can collect tax dollars.

I know for a fact that there are plenty of people in the US country who can build sheds all day but cannot distinguish fact from fiction and believe wholeheartedly that a man named Qanon is trying to save the country from blood sucking child cannibals. So I don't buy that line for a second.

Perhaps, but the quadratic formula only takes a minute to learn, so you can't expect it to yield as much as a day of shed building.

Also, NOT knowing the quadratic formula will make it much harder to solve hundreds of other math related problems. And the same is of course true for most of fundamental math knowledge.

But whatever you may think about the usefulness of mathematics, I can assure you that it's not a giant conspiracy to siphon money from tax payers. Every math teacher you can find (anyone in a STEM field, really) is 100% genuinely convinced that mathematics is extremely useful in a multitude of ways. They could of course all be mistaken, and devwastaken have seen the truth, but I don't think that is very likely.

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