This situation has presented an incredible opportunity to flip the education paradigm around and we are missing it. In my opinion, there are two different opportunities that should be explored:
1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others.
2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one.
Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.
I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners.
We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No.
I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning.
I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
> We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books
The best teachers are those that can induce pro-learning behavior in others, and books are a good medium to learn from once induced but quite poor in inducing the necessary behavior by itself. Videos are usually better than books, but tend to fall behind compared to the best in-person teachers.
That said, no school is actually teaching people how to trigger pro-learning behavior in themselves. It is always assumed that either students learn it as a side product from all the other classes, or it is the responsibility of the teacher. That in my view what is missing from the picture when we a transitioning away from in-person education system into a online system.
I took an evidence-based teaching course in grad school, and one of the things that really stuck with me was this idea that teaching should be continually framed around clear learning goals and a growth-oriented mindset.
I think a clear value proposition is something that’s really lacking for students at all levels. I remember a lot of vague “you’ll need this later” sentiment from my time in school, which is just not motivating.
That and counteracting the “I’m just not good at math (or whatever subject)” mentality would go a long way to addressing this self-learning issue
This is something I’m interested in. What did the course cover — things like active and passive learning, and constructionism? Does the book Ultralearning cover most of the same things? (Here is a summary: https://www.njlifehacks.com/ultralearning-by-scott-young-boo...)
The course is CMU’s 38-801 (evidence based teaching in STEM). I don’t think there is a course website, but CMU’s course design page has a pretty good overview of the material covered [0]. It was a cool project-based course that covered a lot of different teaching methods (including active learning), assessment and feedback, and course design. A lot of this was motivated by primary teaching and learning literature. We also read through this book [1], which I found pretty interesting.
The learning principles in the summary you linked are also major themes we covered in the course, but I think the emphasis is a bit different because the 38-801 audience is primarily future educators (who are of course also lifelong learners)
Proper teaching looks less like what most teachers do, and more like what (good) game designers do.
• Hide the tutorial for the problem, in the "shape" of the problem, so the student won't even realize they're being taught something. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE)
• Make the student/player feel a need for a new tool, before the tool is introduced. Have them try (and perhaps fail) to solve the problem without the tool first. (See the "keys and doors" discussion in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO1R6vFDBo&list=PLc38fcMFcV...)
• Gate problems behind proof of mastery of previous micro-skills, not just in the form of obvious tests, but also in the form of multi-step problems for new knowledge which can't even be approached without also having another prerequisite skill. Ensure that it becomes impossible to "leave behind" a foundational skill—i.e. ensure that the learner will get stuck without the new tool, and so realize they need to backtrack to pick up that tool, rather than flailing uselessly at the next problem.
• Meter and visualize progress. Map acquisition of micro-skills directly to some sort of measurement the student can look at (a level number; a tech tree; a skill grid), to feel that they're making progress. Ensure the system is designed such that this number goes up not just when they make progress on new skills, but also when they go back to shore up their knowledge of old skills.
I wonder if the pro-learning behaviour previously mentioned is something qualitatively different from the study skills. I mean study skills offer the mechanics for studying better. But I guess what we're looking is for something that triggers a desire/willingness to learn. I imagine that most people who have completed high school or even undergraduate courses must have experienced this at some point at some level for some subject matters. Whatever we call it, once this has been activated it becomes easier for the student to successfully direct their own learning to some extent.
My experience in learning math is that the textbooks try to provide what is right. And what is right typically becomes excessively verbose to the point that the main idea gets lost in the rightness. This is what in person coaching gets you. You get the intuition of the idea, ignoring all the nitty gritty and only when you have a firm grasp of the intuition do you explore what this intuition also means for different cases and hence the nitty gritties.
Having experienced this myself many times over, I now know exactly what to look for in a book when I am self learning. I don't know how this skill is to be taught but if remote learning was to succeed, different methods of learning needs to be outlined and taught to the students and get them to learn to select one appropriate for their learning styles and subject.
The issue is that those are usually two separate books. Students need intuition and a broader overview, but experienced professionals usually want rigor, unambiguity and completeness. In my experience there are actually very few books that do both, and I've also had professors that don't seem to find it too important to convey intuition (or even think it's counterproductive as intuition breaks down at some point).
IMO: as long as they’re organized well verbosity is good. Ever tried to read a theology book? They’re just walls of text, no nice theorem: and def: to guide you; that’s when verbosity makes things hard. On the other hand very concise books that force you to think in order to pull meaning out of them can be a lot of fun if you have the time.
Also (another opinion) you get intuition doing practice problems and playing with the idea(s), it’s almost impossible to get intuition just by reading.
I understand you. All the long ours in preparation, planning, interacting, evaluating, and for me, the compensation for all that was quite ridiculous to tell you the truth.
Students only interested in the course's diploma, asking questions like 'why am I seeing this?', 'how to apply this in the real world', 'give me a practical example in your practice' (knowing that I was only a lecturer, not a practitioner in the field, the list goes on and on.
I don't miss being on classes - what I miss is interacting with good smart students, to tell you the truth. They were the ones I target my efforts.
Your reason may be other, mine was this.
Were those online classes purely asynchronous or was there a teleconference some number of times per week? I wonder if the difference in performance is due to accountability. It's easy to slack off when you don't have to look the teacher in the eyes and explain why you didn't do what you were supposed to do.
A couple reasons: with the probable decline in numbers of students (particularly international students) I see furloughs and firings in the future at my former university. Pay cuts and furloughs are coming in my industry as well, but because the base pay is higher, there is farther to fall -- and I mean that in a good way, because I'm still living as if I made half my salary.
But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.
> I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners.
Interesting. I'm currently taking a Course through Rutger's University Online, and so far I and most in my class are also weeks ahead of schedule, and are just awaiting grading on our final projects. As for my grade on it: mine was based on an actual project I did while I was at BMW so I documented the entire process. I used it to get promoted and sent back to VW as I thought I was a better fit there so its well detailed and I got sent back in a month after, so it worked.
> I call it self-teaching for a reason.
I'm a big proponent of home schooling and online learning. I'm an autodidactic person, so I just took notes of what would be on the exam and tried my best to incorporate it when I studied at hoome and tried to find usecases to relearn it later and how I would actually understand it for future use. Its how I learned calculus, my last math class, after failing algebra because I tried doing everything the instructor's way in class--I had to go everyday to get the first failure dropped from my GPA.
To be honest, this is why I never did well in school for things that mattered on paper: I often got Bs and Cs most years and I was always told I was being an underachiever with much higher potential. The truth is I just realized that Schooling and Education are two very different things and the former did very little provided I landed a job in my career.
The classes I often got As in I just didn't care and repeated whatever the instructor said back to them or told them what they wanted to hear. Rote learning is a poor way to instruct, but it scales so they do it.
To this day I can still recall all of my essential amino acids, their molecular structures, most functional groups reactivity and about 50 reaction mechanisms and can explain them in depth because I found utility in them for my career within the laboratory: I graduated 11 years ago. Whereas when I went to office hours back then most of my peers found it hard to do that from semester to semester. I was a Cell/Molecular Biologist (that's where most of the jobs were) but excelled at Biochemistry and Microbiology because that's where my interests were but you probably couldn't tell from most of my grades. When I went into the Industry is when I really shined.
I think Online learning appeals most to people who have had an independent educational development environment, and thrive within it. I never took honors classes in school or university but in HS I was recommended for a few so was made to sit in them for a week and left as it looked like a hassle (the instructors heavily grade on class participation) only to find out later that they did that to weed the herd and the teacher often gave lots of time for independent learning to my dismay.
> I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
I think the only two professors, or teachers for that matter, that I ever liked and enjoyed speaking with iwere grinding away to be able to say the same one day.
They did it because it was pre-requisite for funding their lab/research and tenure, none of them seemed to like it very much but they were awesome at it despite that because they approached the material from an Industry perspective and often went against conventional wisdom. I still my remember Chemistry professor eating his lunch and going over certain reactions on the dry board and then going to the teacher's protest afterward to try and get back pay for teaching back-back summer courses during the budget/strike days in the CSU/UC system... I wrote on my class evaluation that 'this University does not deserve him.'
And I meant it, too, he went to Oxford for his BSc and Edinburgh for his PhD and post doc, I just thought what a waste... but he later told me in private over some drinks its because his wife taught there with tenure and his kids didn't want to leave CA so he turned down offers before the financial crises so afterward he was stuck. I hope he is well.
Younger students (K-12) need interaction with other students and their teachers, not lectures. I teach some of the most motivated and diligent students you could ask for, but after 3 weeks of online learning they were burnt out.
To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.
This has been my son's experience as well (Grade 4). We are on week 6 of home-school, and by far the thing that energizes him, lifts his mood, and gets him through his work is any interactions at all with his fellow students.
Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.
Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school
It is unfortunate, and a poor reflection on modern culture that 4th grade is too young to form strong bonds outside of school. Kids are missing the after school unstructured free/play time. Decades later, I'm sill best friends with kids I went to school with in 4th grade.
I don’t go anywhere and my kids don’t leave the street. “Sorry kids you can’t go outside for the next 3 months. I’ll keep the windows clean for you so you can look.” Tantamount to child torture.
Not sure what you mean, I think y'all might be talking past eachother: poster is saying they can't exactly go play outside with the neighbors right now, which is obviously true, if kids in the neighborhood are running around together, we'd just be building really efficient viral transmission chains
This is an assumption of yours for which there's insufficient evidence. Or even the evidence is currently rather pointing the other way. What I have is anecdotal evidence from here in Switzerland - adults generally keep distance while children in the neighborhood generally play with each other. We currently are down to ~120 new cases a day across Switzerland, hospitalization taken a sharp downturn and has never exceeded capacity.
It's all a game of numbers - sure, there will be some transmissions if you let children play together in open spaces, but overall, from what current data suggests, it's not a significant vector. We generally have to think like this now, there's no such thing as absolute safety and we really have to think hard about what should be restricted and what negative effects this will have long term. Isolating kids at home for months is IMO not worth it.
On a different note, neither is allowing small businesses to fail in droves even if they can provide a good hygiene concept. Switzerland has also opened up hairdressers since this week - with masks, hand sanitizing and contact tracing being mandatory for everyone. We'll see in a couple of weeks whether this works or not.
Another anecdote: Where I am in Switzerland, it's rather unusual to see kids playing together right now (except for presumably siblings). I can see a bit of a school playground from my home and the groups that visit have really dwindled over the past few months and it hasn't rebounded yet. There are usually only 1-2 kids playing at a time.
Adults more or less try to maintain distances, as you said.
it's definitely down from normal numbers of kids playing here. but those parents who allow going to playgrounds are usually OK if kids play with some distance. what I found works well is ball passing with soccer - no touch needed. badminton is also reasonable safe distance. with 'neighborhood' I meant the immediate housing project here, we have a couple of boys who are inseparable and I find the risk tolerable if those same kids play together daily. Should be simple to trace also in case the housing gets cases.
Kids are known viral factories. They tend to have higher viral loads despite not getting as sick. This is one reason we have school breaks in the winter and spring, basically to cut down transmission chains.
The crux of the conversation is: either everyone is going to catch this because of how contagious it is, or we all stay home for ~1-1.5 years until a vaccine is widely distributed. There isn't much of a middle ground.
Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly. Our intrepid leaders have had between 4-6 weeks to sort things out. Hope they did.
My kids can go play outside. This is getting absurd.
I don't think any reputable person has claimed an attempt to stop everyone from catching this. The mantra is "flattening the curve." It's been that since the beginning. We don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system like what has happened and is happening in Italy.
And shelter in place with strong social distancing has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of the virus given the current testing capacity and lack of contact tracing.
Yes I agree, flatten the curve. Then what? We social distance for a year or two? The world economy goes to hell? Can’t buy a pork chop? All because boomers stuck their parents in nursing homes?
Nah, food processors will need to come up with ways to physically distance with screening or otherwise provide PPE. Those jobs will suck and there won't be any socialization in lunch/break rooms but it will be necessary.
We will learn more during this time about how the virus works and how to treat it as well. Hopefully that knowledge will help us exit faster but we should expect this to be a long term new normal.
Travel and tourism is definitely going to take a bigger and continued hit. But there might be ways to make it work.
To everyone paranoidly sitting is strong isolation I’m saying “What is your exit strategy? The virus is not going away, there will be no vaccine for many months. Are you planning on sitting it out for a year? Two? Ten? If not, you might as well go on with your life while taking reasonable precautions and practicing hygiene.”
I don’t think paranoia means what I think you think it means.
Like most people on the site, I am well adapted to the conditions forced upon us by this pandemic.
What I can’t do is go travelling, what with the airports being closed to tourists, the hotels being closed, and the airlines cancelling any flights other than repatriations, etc. — and I can’t go to local museums, because they’re closed.
I can’t go to a pub to hang out with local furries, because the pub is closed. I probably can’t go to the large furry convention that was going to happen later this year in my city, because the hotel it would be held in is currently being used as a pop-up hospital. Even if I got around the airport problems by learning to fly (I have the money and time for lessons but not for a plane), I couldn’t go to any other cons instead because their hotels have also been converted into pop-up hospitals.
I can go for walks, but I can’t go to any parks, because they’re closed.
I’m also not comfortable with selling my old home in the UK and buying a new one in Berlin — but that’s not because of risk to me, it’s because of the situation in the UK. It’s not really a “hobby”, but it is something I had planned to do and have put off because of this.
I’m not into music or dancing or spectator sports, but those are big parts of most people’s lives — now impossible because their venues are closed.
The only thing I can do is walking (on sidewalks), passive a/v entertainment, MOOCs/etc, and video games.
Suits me, but if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.
It's not an either or situation where one size will fit all is it?
If you live in an area that's a hotspot then you need to have tighter restrictions than if not. If you know you're in an at-risk group then you need to have tighter restrictions.
Our restrictions and daily routines are naturally going to have to shift about as the virus ebbs and flows. Which is why a good local testing and contact tracing regime is essential to end the most draconian lockdowns. If you don't even know how the virus is distributed locally and can't quickly act to quarantine people who have been in contact with someone who is infected then it's very hard to say mingling together is a great idea. That said the risks of kids playing together in a neighborhood seem pretty minor if otherwise people are keeping to themselves. The likely negative consequence is that if one family has a member that tests positive then all the others in the neighborhood will need to quarantine until they can be tested or enough time passes. Here that's 14 days if you're not symptomatic or 7 days after the symptoms go if you are. Then the less likely consequence is that you're the vector that passes on the infection and it kills one of your neighbors.
We're relaxing our restrictions here a bit in Iceland on Monday and I'm really interested to see how that goes.
> Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly.
I have my hopes, if not at least until Winter.
Luckily, I have hobbies that are easily done without large groups of people and believe I can avoid groups of 10 or more people for most of summer and probably 50 people until September. (I've not spent more than a few minutes with more than 3 others for the last month and half)
Ah, covid-shaming on HN. Then they go to Costco in unfitted, unfiltering masks and bring home bunch of packages, pretending they avoided “social contact”.
It's not that simple. We live in a suburban neighborhood. When I was a kid we had tons of kids in the neighborhood I grew up in to play with. Now? My family is the only one in the neighborhood with kids. Their classmates live quite aways away across busy streets. I'd have to drive them to their classmates houses. People just don't have kids like they used to.
This jumped out at me as well. When I was that age I spent my summers riding my bike and roaming the city with my friends. The thought that kids today are entirely dependent on the structure of school for socialization is incredibly depressing. What have we done to society?
Moved into far flung suburbs separated by 4+ lane roads with large vehicles traveling 50mph+ in order to sequester the kids in the “nicest” neighborhoods so they only have well to do kids in their school.
The parent is one data point. Perhaps the one kid leans on school for social connections at this point in their life? Some kids are loaners (but still need social connections) others are very social.
Another commenter pointed out that there were only a few school-aged kids in their neighborhood. I noticed when I graduated high school there weren't many younger school-aged kids in my neighborhood even though I grew up with a good number of people nearby. When my sister moved into a newly built neighborhood when they had kids other young families moved in, too. I think neighborhoods tend to cluster with families, it cycles and may not always catch on every generation and some kids get stuck.
Those situations sound incredibly depressing, but I don't think it necessarily reflects all of society.
Yeah I'm confused by this. My oldest friend is my friend from 3rd grade who I only play video games with. We weren't ever in the same classroom and I only went over to his house twice. I haven't seen him in years but at most we've only gone a few months without doing something over the past decade+.
Maybe that's because as a child I had unsupervised access to a networked playstation and a computer. I would have loved to stay at home all day.
As an adult I hate it. When my city opened back up I took up cycling as my only mode of transport because I've taken the feeling of physical exertion for granted.
No just split the two things entirely. Have an hour of free form video chat to make fun of each other and laugh. The education there is from interacting.
It’s no different than removing sports as a separate subject. You don’t learn math or English running down a track field and you don’t learn how to swimming reading 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.
My kid's class has a parent-organized "Zoom recess" three times a week for just this. There's always a volunteer parent moderating/hosting, but it's an oppy for kids to be themselves socially.
Yes, its tough enough to get them to concentrate with all of the electronic stimulants available, and now we are forcing them to spend more time on these electronic platforms. For young people, we need to stimulate their curiosity. They need to see , touch, feel, and experience things in multiple dimensions. They have all this curiosity and energy and we squash it by expecting them to sit and listen to lectures and do worksheets. Experiential learning was falling by the wayside before this crisis, and now that is accelerating.
Living in the 3rd largest school district in America, I'm wondering if secretly ,the administrators are seeing this as an opportunity to get 1 step closer to automating away the teacher so that they can stay within budget constraints and serve more people.
Feels like it is all going the wrong way. We need to flip this narrative: massive federal funding for schools, more teachers, better pay for teachers, better facilities, more field trips, small student to teacher ratios, free tutoring.
Remote kindergarten is horrible. It defeats the purpose. The lockdown is causing significant developmental harm to younger kids. Ask anyone with a five year old doing “remote” kindergarten. Even older primary school kids are being significantly stressed. Teaching elementary school via Zoom is insane. The second order effects of these lockdowns are being ignored. We are worried about nursing homes and older co-morbid people but we are literally ignoring the damage being caused to the kids. This isn’t “homeschool,” this is something else entirely and it’s brutal. Kids should be in school and the old and sick should be the ones locked down. Those with special needs as well as the poor are being especially hammered by this. A lot of crucial development happens in younger kids and losing almost half the school year isn’t a trivial thing. The mental health and developmental impacts are being ignored.
Its not even that I study with other people, it's the "what is he going on about" while in class that I miss the most. I am expecting to drop a full letter grade this semester from my average just from being online.
I teach high school, and they're not. Many of them are burnt out and struggling, even with constant teacher availability. They need the interaction and in-person support just as much as younger kids.
I'm incredibly skeptical that successful people don't just marginalize those who struggle in school when suggesting what's best. Their brains can't help but perceive the issue based on their own experience.
This. The unsuccessful ones simply won't speak up, because they know that they'll get eaten alive on any Internet forum. Or they will talk about education in general terms without mentioning their own kids.
If your kids are struggling, it must be because you are immoral, lazy, have bad "culture," etc. Internet discussions of parenting always devolve into success theater.
But the kids themselves will eventually speak up. If you follow HN for a while, you will also read stories from a surprisingly large number of successful people who had deeply negative experiences in school as kids. I got through high school by pretty much ignoring all of the "content" and doing well enough on exams to get OK grades, plus I had fairly high test scores, and didn't aim too high with my college applications.
And I'm sure I do that in some ways (although I struggled in school out of a mixture of boredom at a younger age and not knowing how to study by the time I got to college), but how does option #1 not improve the experience by providing more direct support for those struggling? Can't keep up with the lecture? Ask your group teacher to breakout and support you.
That seems like a big over simplification. Speaking for myself as someone who was very much an above-average student, I often thought I was following along fine in the lectures but then when I would go to solve a homework problem or answer a test question, only then would I realize I skipped over some important parts in my understanding. So even the best intentioned students are likely not in a position to diagnose their own understanding of the material, that's what tests and quizzes and homework are for.
And that's not even to mention, any of the students that know they aren't following along, but don't really care and would rather zone out/sit on their phone the whole lecture than get 1:1 help. Do you really expect most students will seek help for themselves?
Perhaps you could modify your plan and say that students who got lower than a B+ or something on a recent quiz are required to attend the breakout group to get help from the teacher, it's not up to them to self-select. But then you're back to... the status quo, that "breakout group" is just the regular classroom. You have one class for the advanced students to go through material quicker, and another class for everyone else. That's already the way many schools are structured.
I think the problem is that most kids don’t really care about the material—if they are not understanding it, they’ll do something else during the lecture instead of asking for help. Struggling but trying hard is far more indicative of success than easily passing tests without studying, in my opinion.
How do you keep the main teacher from getting out of sync with the students in the breakout sections? If a student needs 10 extra minutes with their group teacher to understand what is being taught how do they get caught back up to what the main teacher is covering? The only way I can see this working is if the main lecture is prerecorded, but at that point you just have a normal class except for where the group teacher has to do extra work to understand how the main teacher is explaining things. This may work better, but I'm not sure if it would be a massive improvement.
Furthermore, unless we suddenly hire a lot more teachers each student's group is going to essentially be their normal class and we are back to the whole class being kept back when someone needs extra help. Again, the only difference seems to be the main lecture is performed by someone besides the students' teacher. This could be better if the new teacher really is "world class", but I doubt it will be an extreme improvement.
As a professor, I don't think exclusive online teaching is long term viable for university students let alone school children.
But a pre-recorded lecture is usually much shorter than a live lecture. The one-way communication of a one hour class can usually be condensed into a 10-20 min video recording. This is by using a script that optimizes the time to communicate the information in the best possible way.
The rest of the time should be spent learning by doing or talking to others.
Sure, let's talk it out together. So I think that #1 may as well be, "pay the best teachers extra to record their lectures and have them for years to come." Universities do this. It's worthwhile. We should probably do that!
But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it.
I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.
This assumes I meant the lecture should be prerecorded, I actually thought more of it being live. It presents other issues as other posters have mentioned, such as catching back up after sidebars, but provides the live feedback that increases engagement,
We totally do. We still have 40% of kids not proficient at grade level, every year. This is despite tons of research into how to teach reading but schools refuse to do it. I mean some are now but it's been at a glacial pace. We have tons of academic research that is not being applied.
And there's tons of academic research that is cherry picked and doesn't hold over in all contexts. And let's not talk about replicability. In all honesty, my experience with "best practices" research is that it's kind of a joke and any author can use it to support any point they want to make, just by tailoring their subjects. And then they assume what works well in, say, inner city Detroit would work just as well in BFE Kentucky, without taking into account any cultural differences, etc. Education research is a joke, in my experience of having to read it repeatedly during my MAT.
From my personal experience, I do great when I can sit in a classroom and absorb what's being presented. You put the lecturer behind a screen, live or pre-recorded, and I lose most of my ability to stay on track.
I'm the opposite but that is largely irrelevant. First I'm a fully grown adult with intrinsic motivation. Second school should be more about socialising and hands-on learning which you can't do over Zoom. Though he isn't in school yet I'm very worried about the psychological stress this lockdown is causing my 2 year old. He is definitely not as "free" in his outside world interactions anymore. I hope this is temporary and we can reverse it through gradual rolling back of the restrictions.
It doesn't matter for me. In class I'm engaged with my professors. Over zoom I can't seem to get the words to stick in my brain. I have no idea why. I really try to stay engaged in zoom but somehow I can't.
It's not just class too. I forget what I talked about in meetings with colleagues. I talked to people from class and my coworkers about this, and I'm far from alone with these feelings and a lack of focus on zoom. Something to do with the cadence of speech, lack of body language maybe, maybe something deeper and more primal. I thought I would love working from home, now I'm itching to get back just so I can function again.
> Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live?
That's a really weird way of thinking about it. You're completely ignoring the relational aspect of learning and focusing exclusively on the artifact of a particular presentation of some content. You also seems to be assuming that everyone learns the same way without variation. Commodification and mass production are improvements in a lot of areas, but not all.
I don't think you can rank the teachers of the world from best to worst, when often the best teacher is a good-enough one that understands you.
Well, sure, I guess. I suppose a great teacher can be a positive influence beyond academics in some ineffable ways. However, as far my kids are concerned, my wife and I can provide the positive influence and the teacher can handle the academics. And that aspect of the teachers job is much more quantifiable and there are definitely people who are much better than others at it.
Can't speak for the poster, but for myself it's much easier to pay attention and be present when I have a bit of a push through the simple desire to appear engaged. Otherwise it's easier to zone out.
The difference between a simulacrum of a dog and a dog is important only in the context of what you trying to get out of a relationship with a dog. Similarly the difference between a virtual and real teacher. Since I am trying to get different things out of each the analogy is useless. That is what I was trying to communicate.
Possibly? My grades slipped in university once I realized that no one knew my name and no one much cared. Really it's about the interaction with my teacher and the desire to keep from disappointing.
This definitely works great. If you stop and give them an activity to use what they learned, or just quiz them to test for understanding it forces them to engage with the content and learn far better. This is basic active learning, and doesn't need to be live. Though it can probably work better live (e.g. zoom), say if you pause, then call on students randomly to embarrass the slackers into participating.
I don't know the difference between the world's best and very good, but Khan Academy is very good and teachers have already been turning their students onto it as supplemental education. We always had the ability to throw kids onto Khan Academy.
No,because in order for it to make a difference the student needs to be in a mental state for it to make said difference. It's just too hard for many kids to get motivated to self-teach, especially with no practical experience.
This (plus at least one other here, so it's not really "just you") makes me wonder if you/some people who find this problematic have an issue like central auditory processing disorder.
People with CAPD are often dependent to a high degree on lip reading and video feed may disrupt the connection between words and mouth movements just enough to inject too much noise into the signal. If you don't realize this is what you are doing, you can't readily compensate when it gets disrupted.
In this situation we are forced to use distance learning, I’m not saying these ideas should carry over to “normal” times, only that the situation presents an incredible opportunity for testing other methods.
I worked for 5 years as an "assistant language teacher" (ALT) in Japan. The idea is that you have the normal teacher teaching the class and an ALT who assists. At its worst you end up with the teacher lecturing and the ALT reading things out of the textbook. However at its best you have this awesome tag-team where one person is guiding the class and the other is spotting confused faces and fixing problems before they get big.
The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered.
I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.
I taught in Boston for five years. Something that almost no one outside the profession seems to understand is that a teacher's number one function is to inspire students to work. For the vast majority of students, that requires physical proximity to their teacher.
If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.
FYI, the second suggestion you list is flipping the classroom and some teachers already do this. The first option is something that does happen in multi-teacher classrooms (in my experience teaching in Japan; unsure about the US).
As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are:
1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path.
2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes.
I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.
Schools is about keeping kids and adolescents out of trouble, and free up parents to work. Ideally they also help with development and socialization, and as a bonus - might teach something.
This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves).
All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.
Hard to take advantage of opportunities when you are treading water. Teachers have met with incredibly frustrating wall after wall, trying to apply tech, trying to adapt to new conditions in which parents are giving their kids unlimited vacation, yet they are expected to keep a spreadsheet of contacts with children... There's a lot of uphill here right up front.
The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.
---"Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course"
While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.
Wouldn't they get familiar with their new online teachers pretty quickly?
Local teachers would provide the personal interaction during work periods where kids come online and get help.
Grade 2 and younger are already learning through tv. Big Bird is rarely in person but kids know and learn from him. Is Barney still around? The Wiggles? Those top performs seem to hold attention as well as the local puppet show.
This doesn't work for a young child on their own (think grade school) but it might (intriguing model that I haven't seen yet) work with smaller groups of kids learning together - say, all the first graders on your block at somebody's house with limited exposure to others.
That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me.
A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.
This is my experience, too, and I don't have an fully engaged adult able to help. The kids can obviously move 2-5x faster than they do during normal school, but doing so absolutely requires an engaged adult. There are just too many things an elementary aged kid doesn't have experience with yet for them to be able to solve their own problems (or stay focused).
My 5th grader got reprimanded today for spending 30min on fonts & colors on an essay that itself only took 30min... as a simple example. Another example: I regularly have to prevent both kids from accessing Youtube during school time.
Totally. We were making massive amounts of progress on our own and virtual school curriculum mostly gets in the way. We've largely stopped going to the video sessions and are just doing some of the school work on top of our own. Thankfully the teacher has been accommodating / letting it go so far and the school work itself has been minor.
With all respect, I used to work in EdTech and had thoughts about Ed exactly like this- before I had 3 kids and got involved in the local public school, sat on the PTA, raised funds, won elected office on the school board and dealt with issues at the policy level.
There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly.
Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation.
That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s.
What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act.
There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world.
Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper.
And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together.
So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron.
The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while
we are in this phase where that is required.
Why do you believe, or what evidence do you have, for elementary educators spending most of their time keeping children on task? I have asked elementary teachers about this trope and pleasantly surprised to learn that most students do not require constant redirection. Likewise, their classes not much different from higher level classes excepting for the rigor of the subject matter. So, I'd love to read any evidence you have for your statement in case these teachers and their schools were an exception instead of the norm.
Perhaps it can start in high school. I completely agree that there is a developmental caveat here that makes the approach a no-go for younger students.
I've this "inverted classroom" approach work well, although it can have problems also; if the course isn't self-paced (which I think is much better) you have to make really sure that students aren't overloaded with video lectures, because it's easy to "fall behind." It can't be an excuse for instructors to cram more stuff into an already packed course.
Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of:
- course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties
- schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading
- scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course
- self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule
What do you do when a significant number of students can't view the video lecture or participate in video breakout rooms for 1:1 support because they lack access to the internet?
This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.
per your #1, my school district is doing that. One designated teacher [per grade, per subject] is recording lectures that are posted to a central repository. this content is assigned out, along with supplementary work, via Google Classroom at the class level. Each class teacher, then, schedules their own class video meetings to "check-in" and offer support for students who need it.
My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor.
Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content.
#2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.
Doesn’t work particularly well with early primary school kids though. Interactivity is a big part of learning and that’s close to impossible remotely.
The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.
I can't believe no one is talking about MOOCs and how MOOCs are part of our daily lives and yet they have been absolutely toothless in taking over the system.
I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.
Having kids now and being a kid, both are wrong. Education is not in-person lectures with work from home and were not for decades. And having best teacher making video may end up with bad video while not having your best teacher in contact with any kids.
And it is not like passive watching videos would be something new in education either.
A good remote learning solution wouldn't involve teachers lecturing. Teaching is not about merely presenting information to be absorbed.
Teaching requires a feedback loop. What does the child need to know? What do they know already? Are they engaged? Can they explore the problem space themselves and get feedback and direction?
Large public districts have many magnet programs that can experiment here too. Some of the issues with the magnet program are getting people to the school. 10 miles in LA could take you an hour during rush hours. A high school program that combined distance work with going to campus only a couple days out of the week would be very beneficial and mirror a college environment better than anything else.
I have reservations about fully remote programs, because in my newly remote grad program right now I am worthless with zoom only lectures, and I'm not alone.
Ranking attempts tend to go bad and become hellish and/or are abused to get rid of people for personal or political reasons while bypassing normal processes and protections against firing.
I mean, software developers love stack ranking, right? We can go ahead and fire anyone who doesn't close X Jira tickets per month, I'm sure. Lines of code? Business impact? (oh, sorry, that critical bugfix you did doesn't fit in our measurement framework so you're underperforming, have a PIP).
"Wait but we can just measure performance with tests" LOL OK, if you thought "teaching to the test" was bad before...
And anyway they do already measure performance with year-over-year student progress on state tests, and there are consequences if you suck at it for too long. At least around here. There's enough leeway that it's not horrible but it's also not great and does encourage some of those teach-to-the-test behaviors that people claim to hate. A good teacher would 100% for sure teach better not being judged under that system, and it's one of many things that push them out of teaching—even if they do fine on the metrics, it contributes to frustration and job dissatisfaction, having to do less-than-optimal things or else stress about test scores[1]. A bad one, perhaps, is better for being so judged.
[1] Example: several of these kids are effectively two grade levels behind on [subject]. Do I try to fill in those gaps, and leave them with little understanding of the material that will be on this year's test and so nearly certain to miss every question, or do I treat of the earlier material only when absolutely necessary so they see most of this year's stuff (even if understanding it poorly), so score a little higher than they would otherwise? The former is definitely better for the students, but if you get a "low" class you're (the teacher) gonna be fucked on your standardized testing scores if you do that. This is a real, and not uncommon, situation to be in.
You can probably phrase this as "teachers would be" and make the same, realistic point without attracting as much ire? It was my first thought too. Another option would be to have a rotation.
I agree 100%. I think after say 1st grade, most schools are enormously inefficient, their main value is providing free day care and (somewhat) supervised socialization opportunities. The actual academic work is easily done at home with little supervision.
A huge thing with elementary schools is fitness. For some kids, gym class is the only time they are physically active. I went to a private middle school that had a rule that you needed to play a sport, even if it meant just being a benchwarmer. Only the football players were chubby at that school.
Where I live they let home-school kids participate in public school teams. My friends who home-schooled their kids told me that was the best of both worlds.
Much more structured than my home-school PE. I would just roller-blade and bike around town, because I had a single mother who couldn't waste time driving me around to see friends. She would just approximate my distance into a PE journal and that was that.
why are you people trying to end everything that's in-person? what is so harmful about in person activities?! there's an ugly anti-humanist component in the tech world.
I can't read the story, but I'm living this. And I don't blame folks for finding it too tough.
It's crazy that so many commenters here seem to think that everyone is well equipped to be a teacher with zero training or experience. It's hard.
It's even more crazy that no one seems to realize that most parents are acting as teachers, while trying to maintain full time jobs.
This isn't just "teachers not adapting", or "we need VR". This is fundamental to the fact that most households need two working parents just to survive.
My household doesn't need this, but my partner wants to work. There's a lot of situations where this is the case. A large percentage of women want to be in the workforce and are not forced to be there.
I think it's very natural to want to work. Women having the option to work is a wonderful thing, and we need to keep making progress towards equal opportunities and pay.
I think a good amount of the problem then became, these new normal double income households then decided they also wanted children. So we slowly convinced ourselves that both parents can work while raising children, which doesn't really work. Your child ends up being raised by day care.
It's a good example of having your cake and eating it too.
AFAIK, studies and history demonstrated opposite to be true, if there is an opportunity not to work and lead comfortable life, most people choose not to work.
If you have enough of a guarantee of leading a comfortable life (e.g. you inherit a large fortune), then sure.
But for most people, leaving their professional career is hardly reversible in the long term, and means becoming economically dependent on their partner. Which only works if the couple stays together (and the partner keeps their job).
I hope I can stay together with my partner for life but even if so, I wouldn't be too comfortable if she left her career and became economically dependent: what if I die early, for example? A career is a hedge against adversity.
Even staying together, if a big economic crisis comes, with two jobs it's easier that at least one of us will keep their income than with one.
On the other hand markets like real estate have somewhat inelastic supply and higher household incomes as a result of dual earners might just bid up prices.
Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about this called the Two Income Trap. It’s a shame for someone who’s not an American that America has deep thinkers like Warren in politics but people like Trump and GW Bush become president.
For many, they're trying to work, act as teacher, and dealing with disruptive younger children. One of our friends is insanely effective and focused at her job, handles every family stress thrown at her, but neared her wits' end recently trying to handle it all. Capable older child and needy middle child was one thing, but the very distracting youngest tipped it over the edge.
Just had the same discussion with my wife. We are a single income household. My wife, got a degree in early education, but never went into teaching. Our household is very fortunate to be in this position. While I work in my office she is able to help the kids. She spends a lot of time helping them. Even she mentioned how sad it was that lots of kids were not participating in their learning (she talks with the teachers). But I reminder her about how she went to school for early education and she has the time to devote to helping our kids succeed. She agreed. Not easy at all. Without her my kids would not be coping as well as they are. It would be difficult for me to assist as much as she does with my normal day job.
I've been home schooling my son for the past 3 years. The reason why it's "too hard" is because the traditional model of learning in public schools (in the US) translates very poorly to home schooling. Once you stop focusing on grooming for optimal test-taking, a whole world opens up.
Additionally, we don't do common core in our household, so my wife and I have no issues teaching my son math (we settled on Saxon math). I neither have the time nor energy to learn common core math in order to support my son.
My experience with common core has been pretty awesome FWIW. I didn’t see some of the stuff our daughter did in first and second grade till the end of high school and college. No more rote arithmetic applications, it presses for actual comprehension of the material from multiple angles. Challenging, but sometimes even fun for those not mathematically inclined.
Yeah, a lot of the hate I saw for common core (I'm a high school math/physics teacher) comes from a lack of number sense on the adults trying to understand it. Like, I saw parents who were complaining about breaking 634x127 into (600+30+4)(100+20+7) because they didn't understand you can break it up like that and it makes it a bit easier to do the multiplication, then you can just sum the resuts.
Sadly, a lot of the elementary school teachers I've encountered also lack that number sense, and some even detest(ed) math. And yet we're asking them to teach it to our kids. I'm not for charter schools usually, but I'd really love to start a charter elementary school where each subject is taught by someone trained in that subject and then with, say, a MAT in elementary ed, as opposed to just a bachelors in elementary ed. I wonder how much better kids would do in math and reading especially, when they have teachers who appreciate math and who like to study literature and read for its own sake.
For some people, this is simply too abstract. You can teach children the breakout method or normal method, their understanding doesn't change. They're just memorizing one procedure over another. The ability to analyze how to operations work doesn't improve with common core, it's just more steps.
I've seen this first hand. I taught long division to a younger family member that was struggling with whatever nonsense method common core cooked up (something about boxes and dots and circling stuff). They had literally never seen long division, I taught them to divide the same numbers they had on the page in front of them in less than 10 minutes, and they could arrive at the correct answer consistently. I asked the kid to explain the procedure of what they were doing for the common core, they had no idea and lacked the ability to articulate the process whatsoever.
> You can teach children the breakout method or normal method, their understanding doesn't change
Adults utterly confused about (600+30+4)(100+20+7) do prove that they did not understood what is going on. The follow the algorithm, but don't know how to do expressions. And they have been taught the old method.
Also, this (600+30+4)(100+20+7) not be too abstract for average intelligence adult.
I think it's quite possible that your view of 'average' is skewed. Again, you can teach (600+30+4)(100+20+7) but they're not going to understand why it works. They're just going to memorize the steps because that's what someone showed them. That's why common core is a failure. It's a more complex series of steps to arrive at the same result.
If you don't understand that 634 = 600+30+4 or don't understand how parenthesis works by the time you are 12 and you are average or somewhat bellow intelligence, your school system failed you.
Not if you draw the picture. A rectangle with height divided into 60 and 2, width 20. Then it's obvious the total area is the sum of the two parts. My kids got very comfortable early on with that notation. Switching to the standard algorithm was tough, even after they understood why it was equivalent, because the diagram just makes so much more sense.
Or you could even just build it up from basics, which is how I would expect it to be done. It's clear that 220 is the same as 120+120, then you can show that 320 = 220+120, etc etc. If they learn it that way at first, it should be clear to them that (60+2)(20) = 6020+220.
>> I've seen this first hand. I taught long division to a younger family member that was struggling with whatever nonsense method common core cooked up (something about boxes and dots and circling stuff).
Yeah, this is happening to my oldest child - they're on multiplication and division and when I showed them short and long division, they had no idea what I was doing. Common core mathematics is far more memorization and repetition. You don't derive how to actually solve the problem. It's shocking to me that this is the sole method we're teaching kids.
EDIT: And I actually like the Common Core methodology. But it's very mathematically incomplete.
wtf -- you're 100% wrong. Common Core exactly shows you how to solve problems. It precisely does not focus on rote memorization. Yes, you need to memorize "math facts", but this is limited to simple multiplication tables (and similar). The entire point of Common Core is to teach multiple algorithms by which students can solve problems for which they recognize the pattern.
Back in the 90s, when I was in school, I don't recall this kind of rigor in math at all until I got to Calc 2 and needed to actually focus on memorizing patterns & rules for solving integrals. Everything, at that time, was rote memorization.
> It precisely does not focus on rote memorization.
This is where the disconnect is. It may have very well been designed with that goal in mind, but common core is is memorization in another form. The form of memorization is worse than the traditional form because it involves more steps, and the steps are very unintuitive.
I don't think kids will be able to explain why it works. They might be able to recite definitions and phrases that they were forced to memorize, but they won't be able to put it into their own words. I know, because I've seen it first hand from a kid I consider to be bright. We can blame parents, we can blame teachers, but it doesn't matter. Common core is not optimized or appropriate for childhood education in the US.
> Common core is not optimized or appropriate for childhood education in the US.
Then maybe the problem is with the teachers/parents and not the Common Core? Of course the kids won't understand it if their teachers don't understand it. Just like kids won't enjoy/understand reading if their teachers don't read and talk about reading, etc.
These are incompatible, which is what I am saying and the parent above my comment is also saying.
>> simple multiplication tables (and similar)
If you fail to memorize these, you can derive the answer using your fallback to addition, which you've been shown how to do. In Common Core textbooks and in the class my oldest is in, these are assumed facts. Breaking down how to derive multiplication and division is at least a failure of the teacher in the class, if not the methodology, though I suspect the teacher is pretty good.
Common Core relies on a lot of memorization and pattern matching. This is fine, and good for everyday use. It is not learning it from first principles, which makes it hard when your pattern matching engine isn't working properly.
Both methods should be taught in an integrated fashion. I support Common Core - and have for a long time - as an adjunct. Not as the primary method of teaching math. Most kids will find Common Core easier, I'll readily admit that. It also has better carryover to everyday use, as I've already admitted. But it lacks rigor.
>> Back in the 90s, when I was in school, I don't recall this kind of rigor in math at all until I got to Calc 2
We're likely the same age. My arithmetic classes were far more rigorous than most of my mathematics classes beyond that up until Linear Algebra.
> I saw parents who were complaining about breaking 634x127 into (600+30+4)(100+20+7) because they didn't understand you can break it up like that and it makes it a bit easier to do the multiplication, then you can just sum the resuts.
That's just a more explicit explanation of multiplication in pre-common core math. It's just a different explanation for the same thing.
That's exactly the problem though. Parents and some teachers don't realize that. They have no clue what they're actually doing, they just follow the algorithm. Which means they have no number sense either, and don't get that they can break up into easier to solve ways and play around with numbers.
No, it's an extremely big deal as they're the ones tasked with teaching kids how to do it. Blind leading the blind, and so they just memorize whatever new algorithm there is with no explanation from the teacher as to why it works, because the teacher themselves don't know! It makes it a real pain in the ass when they get to high school and try to work with variables, as they have no clue how numbers work.
I'm unsure of what everyone's concern with common core is. It was way easier to teach my kid's once I realized that it's just what I've always been doing in my head without anyone telling me to.
It's just about breaking apart problems into digestible pieces.
I don't have a problem with common core, I like that kids gets to see all the different ways to solve a problem. The problem I see is that schools are testing all the different methods instead of asking the students to use the method to solve the problem.
There's some value in that. Not as a long term principle, but I am all for having students learn a variety of methods and have to spend some time working through those methods. But only to make sure the students are giving the different methods a shot and actually finding the one that makes the most sense to them, rather than just sticking with whatever was learned first. If they're never given the chance to just work with their method of choice after, it's pointless.
This is a great point. I found myself both admiring and hating some of my son's school work recently in that it illustrated and described mental problem solving exceptionally well, then gruelingly pushed him to repeatedly explain the model rather than simply use it. Pages upon pages of dissection and regurgitation. My son could understand the model just fine, but was perplexed as to why he had to go over it like that.
That's because public school uses memorization as a cheap stand-in for understanding. It's easy to internalize 2+2=4, but it's impossible to internalize the quadratic equation. At some point, you need to just know the procedure and it's application, and most importantly, recognize when to use it in novel situations.
It took about a one paragraph explanation to not only realize this is how I already do things in my head, but to suddenly become much better at it because I can now slow down and conceptualize the whole process when necessary.
I learned math in the "traditional" method through several levels of calculus in college (decades ago) and found a young relative's common core math curriculum to be extremely cumbersome and far more confusing for the student. In my opinion its far better to teach a student to understand a mathematical principle than to force them to absorb your prescribed method of understanding. You could know a mathematical principle backwards and forwards and be an expert in the field and still end up baffled at the nonsensical "core curriculum" methods and jargon.
Math education in the U.S. is notoriously behind the rest of the world. It's about time. Speaking as someone who barely passed undergrad calculus and still has nightmares from that 7 problem 4 hour final exam.
Honestly, a lot of it is because of elementary school teachers in my opinion. I don't want to bash them too much, but they often struggle(d) with math. They don't have much of a number sense, and now we're asking them to teach our kids how to have number sense (which is what common core does; it shows that 65+37 = 70+32, etc etc). I actually remember my 6th grade math teacher specifically for this reason. She explained things to us in a way that gave us number sense, instead of just memorizing rote steps. It made my math skills so much better, and I'm still thankful for that today. Sadly, it was only one teacher at the entire school.
I'd love to start a charter elementary school (as much as I generally dislike the concept of a school getting state/federal funding with no testing accountability) where each subject is taught by someone who actually studied the subject, not just "elementary education". Then you might see kids enjoy math and understand it, as their teachers understand and enjoy it and can teach that; it's infectious. I wouldn't be surprised if reading scores also raised when kids are taught by people who clearly enjoy reading and are passionate about reading.
I think math is taught too slow in the U.S.. I remember learning to add, then once I got whatever score on the flash card assessment I got to learn to subtract, then multiply, then divide. Slowly, painfully, and in a way that leaves you bored early, causing you to checkout and fall behind, then you are left wondering why you suck at math later in life.
I think we could stand to move the math curriculum up 3-4 years. Geometry and trigonometry can be taken in 5th grade instead of 9th, algrebra 1-2 in 6-7th grade, then calc in 8th grade, instead of waiting until high school to take these courses. Then in high school, you could offer advanced courses and an actual course progression in statistics, rather than solely AP stats.
Tone down the difficulty, maybe, but there is no reason why these concepts shouldn't be introduced a lot sooner. Basic algebra is pretty intuitive, and in geometry classes you are kinda just plugging and chugging sines and cosines with your calculator anyway. This is coming from someone who sucks at math and wishes they didn't.
In the 6th grade, you were mentally developed enough to understand some of the basic concepts of algebra. Someone (most) in the 3rd or 4th grade isn't developed enough to understand those concepts. This would be analogous to teaching elementary school students latin roots, it just doesn't make much sense, and their ability to dissect particular words is of little to no value at that stage in their development.
This isn't true. Kids start learning algebraic concepts in roughly 2nd grade, and are well-acquainted with the concept of variables, algorithms, order of operations, roots & exponents, converting fractions to decimals & vice versa, etc before they get out of 5th grade. The only fundamental key concept I don't think they're taught, that is critical in algebra 1, is how to solve systems of equations.
It wouldn't improve yours if you're doing that, but the point of it is to teach the kids number sense and how numbers work and can be manipulated to make problems easier.
Nightmare is a strong word, but it is very hard. We have a 3yo, a 3rd grader and a 5th grader. If it weren't for the 3yo we'd probably be in decent shape because our kids are generally pretty mature and well-adjusted, and academically competent. That said, they've had to not just focus on continuing to learn the curriculum, but also learn a bunch of new tools (with little help), and also learn to type because handwriting isn't really an option anymore. They're struggling through the "this is the first time I'm alone with a computer" growing pains. The toddler is the real monkey wrench, to the point where I've started trying to split the older kids' schedules so one focuses on school in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and they split time interacting with their little sister. It's not remotely fair to anyone and I feel horribly guilty about it, but it's where we are right now and everyone's making the best of it.
Yeah, that's where I am at. My partner works full-time (1-2 days in the office, the rest remote), and I work two full-time jobs (my company + another FT job) remotely, with no childcare.
Our lives/schedules were built around 20 hours of childcare/school per week, and without it, it's been a nightmare. Productivity is at an all-time low. Not really sure what to do about it.
No. I'm a remote software developer and my wife is a mom. We optimized our life to be able to do this effectively and have complete freedom. Took a while to get to this point, but we're there and enjoying the rewards.
As the spouse of a high school math teacher, I've seen how difficult it is for the last month. Getting kids internet service, a computer or tablet to work with, the software they need, and then just getting them to login and read or do the work. It's a real challenge.
We tweaked my wife's setup and it works pretty well now, though she is dreading if they choose to do live online learning in the fall, as that will be something completely new to tackle. Currently she uses Google Classroom, Desmos, and Kahn Academy for the teaching side. She plans and distributes lessons in Google, uses Desmos for some interactive activities where Desmos scripting allows her to check work and give feedback, and Kahn Academy as some supplemental teaching to her notes. In addition she has certain hours everyday for certain classes and uses an iPad + Google Meet to show notes to her students and work problems they may have an issue with. So far that's been working.
Live teaching would be a little more difficult with this setup but it could work.
I'm a math/science teacher myself, and I've already decided the first thing I'm gonna do is buy a nice big whiteboard if we do online teaching this fall, to try to solve some of those issues. But I pray we don't have to do that, as just so much gets lost doing it at home versus in person.
Wouldn't whiteboard software be better? Like Khan Academy uses? I've been in some physical whiteboard video chat lectures and it's rough; they rarely have a lav mic (which means the audio quality is horrible and you have problems hearing), you need enough space to frame the whiteboard properly with the camera, they're difficult to light because they're reflective, you need to write the correct size so it's legible, you have the problem you often have in person where your hand or body blocks what is being written.
I find cutting to an infinite whiteboard and/or video picture-in-picture to be the easiest way to convey whiteboard ideas. Teachers seem to get really adept at writing with a mouse, but I would heavily suggest investing in a Wacom--even a used 10+ year old Wacom would be sufficient.
Do you happen to know what that whiteboard software is and if it's available for the iPad? My wife loves the Apple Pencil for writing her math notes because it is so similar to writing on a document camera (which is what they use in the classrooms).
Oh, right! An iPad and Apple Pencil is probably more commonly available. I'm not entirely sure about iPad software and integration with video chat. If it's prerecorded she might be able to use whatever she wants and iPad's screen recording.
What might be easier (if you have a compatible Mac) is to use Sidecar [1]. A desktop app will probably have more options for drawing and more options for integrating with video chat software.
I'm not familiar with the landscape of software out there. There's a whole bunch, but I don't know what's good. Maybe a web-based whiteboard could be done on her iPad while she streams video and shared from a desktop?
For reference, Khan Academy uses [2] SmoothDraw [3] (Windows Only) and a Wacom Bamboo.
I really enjoyed using Explain Everything on the iPad when I was making videos for my math classes. You can have prepared slides, with what you've drawn out pre-recorded but still edit in realtime. Show or hide features like webcam video, easily bring in outside resources like images, graphs, videos, etc... and record the live session and play it back later.
Can you do screen share and use a drawing/navigational tablet instead? I've done some whiteboarding interview/collab this way and it's surprisingly effective for a lower cost and higher resolution.
The problem is I'd have to get a tablet too. I haven't looked into whiteboards yet, so it still might be cheaper. Of course, I might also just take my laptop to my classroom and use that one.
I got a nav tablet for $80 (bamboo wacom) and it worked great for a year before the usb leads came loose. Look for smth in the $120~~ range and you will save on buying a whiteboard (which has a singular purpose). Keep in mind, I invested for art, but found much more versatility.
And/or secondhand is a viable option. That bamboo can also be set up wirelessly with a wireless chip and a rechargable batt. That's what I did when the usb connector failed.
Disclosure: I have worked with distance/remote learning as far back as 15 years and my wife homeschools our kids.
Schools (and pretty much everything else) were caught completely off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Setting-up an online education infrastructure takes a lot of work and requires significant mental retooling. Teachers need to adapt as much or more than their students to the new paradigm. Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, or Jitsi are not replacement for in-person instruction.
Part of this is that in remote learning the curriculum materials and assessments need to lend themselves to greater self-guidance than those of brick-and-mortar books and other resources. This is not impossible, but also not easy to do on short notice. I am not surprised that schools are finding it simply too hard to put together packets, distribute them, and trying supplement with video conferencing when the materials are based on a different assumption.
I am optimistic that this will further the reach of remote learning, but I am doubtful that the stagnant style of traditional education will shift to fully embrace it. I foresee a lot more alternative educational institutions emerging as the traditional schools very slowly adapt.
I have a 7 and 11 year old (2nd and 5th grade). With very significant parental involvement it is possible to keep them somewhat engaged and learning, although it is very much sub-optimal.
They miss their classmates. They miss their teacher. They miss most of all the routine, getting to go to school, and all the fun things they got to do during the day. My 5th grader is very sad to be missing out on a graduation-like experience with a lot of end-of-year events that would typically happen for outgoing 5th graders before they leave for the middle school.
This isn't an "opportunity for a new normal". This isn't a situation which can or will last "indefinitely". It is assuredly unhealthy for kids this age (to say nothing of the rest of us) to be isolated from their friends and communicating only over Zoom calls.
My kids are hurting in a suburb with a big back yard, mountains of toys, a stay at home mom, and two dogs to play with. I can only imagine it must hurt the least privileged children hardest of all to have lost access to their school.
I don't expect there's much of any learning going on in general below the high school level. Particularly for households which don't have parents who are willing to dedicate several hours a day to basically run the lessons. I think people who can honestly claim that their under-13-year-old is distance learning without a parent assuming a basically full-time role of teacher, are few and far between.
I wonder how curriculum will adapt to incoming students in the fall. X graders who don't know approximately half of the X-1 grade material. Particularly for younger students where classes are less likely to be grouped by ability, anyone who did actually successfully learn anything from March-July is just going to have to sit through it being taught all over again to the majority of students who didn't.
+1. My next door neighbor is a 3rd grade teacher in a heavily hispanic & underprivileged elementary school. She was telling me today that she still has one student -- one of her best during normal times -- who hasn't been able to get online yet. No internet access at home, lives at home with his undocumented grandparents who immigrated from Central America when his parents were killed by a gang, no one in the house speaks English. School has been closed for >1mo now.
I was talking to my 5th grader's teach last weekend about the next year. She doesn't know, either, but is assuming they're just going to bake in an extra-long review period going into the year. Alternatively, at least in CA, they're contemplating starting the next school year in July rather than August, to provide more time for catch-up. To your point, though, what about the kids who were able to keep pace throughout -- are they going to be forced to repeat half a semester to maintain equity in the classroom? That would be terribly unfair.
Our school district never had a hope of implementing remote learning; they're lucky to keep their WiFi working. Our daughter is in 6th grade this year; all we've heard since the schools closed a statement that school wouldn't be re-opening this year and a date range when parents could come pick up bagged locker contents.
We're lucky in that we've homeschooled before (she went back to public school for the company of other kids), and we've worked out ways to encourage and help focus her natural curiosity already. I just gave her a Debian 10 system and said "holler if you get stuck"; so far she hasn't.
It took me a long time to see the value of school. All through elementary school and high school I didn't give a shit, did what I needed to do to do well, never really cared about things going on at school and didnt really have many friends or anything.
When I got to university it was different, I cared and tried and got involved with everything. It was a totally different experience. It made me regret the way i was in high school a bit and kinda made me wish I'd been more involved. It wasn't as pointless and ridiculous as I thought and there was no reason for me not to other than my unwillingness to.
If I'd actually experienced these things, I might have gotten more out of high school and not been so hostile towards it all for so long, when in the end education only benefitted me and there's a kind of education you can only get by taking part in things with people around you.
I know it's not the same, but I know there's lots of kids out there who didn't wait as long as me and know now, well before I did, what they get out of having other people around. As great as distance education can be, even if you've got your classmates there on video or something, it's still not the same as a group of students getting together and working on homework or studying, the ones that do I mean, and even for the ones that just get together, there's a lot of bonding and forming as people that happens that just can't really be replicated outside truly free interaction with other people. Even if you're all working on school work. It needs to be some kind of natural free setting. Something's missing otherwise. Again, it took me a long time to really get this.
You're lucky you got to university. In many systems screwing up in high school is the end for that, even the remedial programs are hard to get into. After really doing poorly in high school (and prior) I was lucky to crawl my way into a community college and get into an arts program and then transfer to a university for an honors BA philosophy path after -- but I really wanted to be in CS. But because of my high school math grades that was never open to me -- and will never be even now. I ended up dropping out of my BA in my 3rd year to go catch the .com boom wave and get my first programmer gigs, and I'm still doing it 24 years later. I work now at Google, surrounded by people who look at me with blank stares when I describe my troubles with school.
This whole path is why I'm deeply suspicious of educational and career models which make excessive claims to be 'meritocratic.' Measuring humans is hard, and mostly we just measure the wrong things and pull the wrong motivational levers.
University I think is better because you do mostly feel like you 'own' your own educational path, and there's more room for individual learning choices.
There’s a lot of hope from school systems that they will just be back next year, but hopefully there’s at least some behind the scenes work on making remote learning work. I have a lot of admiration for teachers & students working on switching over right now, in the event of further disruptions next year, they’re going to be so much better prepared.
We're not in one of the harder-hit states but I have some insight into schools here and admin-tier folks are already phrasing it as "if we are back in the fall". They seem to be planning for the possibility of having to start the year with remote learning, or for a second shut-down if there's a rebound of the virus in the Fall or Winter after things open back up.
The school my children attend have been doing a great job with online learning. Teachers have been posting videos and worksheets on Google classroom, they have regular zoom meetings, and they have various online educational software the children can log into and learn things.
The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested.
So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming.
If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet.
So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle.
For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all.
I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.
> have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning
Is this how your local school is handling it? I can't even make it through full day meetings as an adult and pretty much zone out after 20 minutes of any online meetings I'm in now.
This is how most schools are handling it. Some combo of things like Google Classroom, zoom/webex/meet meetings, and various other apps & sites and online activities. They prescribe book reading, art & PE, but those are hard to track so they're typically not part of an online curriculum.
You also need to understand that if a kid has 2hr worth of work online, the odds are good they'll sit in front of the computer all day unless someone is supervising them. This is the real issue, especially for younger children.
Students learn in a variety of ways. I imagine most of the HN audience excels at lecture based and book learning. To such an audience it makes sense that a single gifted lecturer could immeasurably benefit students through remote learning.
Many students will fail to thrive in such a scenario.
These students need different kinds of instruction. This is one thing that leads to home schooling - the government school does not provide the needed instruction methods, and the parents can either pay for private or do home schooling (or move).
Hmm. This is a shame. Having read "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way" by Amanda Ripley, I learned that the United States is the highest spender on technology amongst all OECD countries. You'd think with such a big budget for tech, we'd do a better job of transitioning online. If anything, based on this fact, we should be one of the best equipped in the world for it.
I wonder if that's because of the US' relationship with philanthropy? I have no idea about the rest of the world, but with friends who teach in the US I hear about "[So and so] donated a classroom full of iPads" with no real support or curriculum or what to do in a few years when they're out of date. They donated tech because it's sexier than donating paper and whiteboard markers. All while books are falling apart and they struggle for resources to make photocopies.
I don't know of the source, but when I was in HS in the late 90s each teacher got a computer due to some initiative. None of the teachers knew what to do with it and at the time tech got obsolete quickly. A computer purchased in 1995 was dog-slow compared to what was sold in 1999. We had a "computer lab" built, but no classes or teachers qualified to teach so it was empty most of the time. You can say technology in the classroom is a chicken-and-egg problem, but that assumes technology is some savior and resources weren't better spent on traditional school resources.
I’ve watched school technology budgets get shoved right into the back of the closet. The money gets spent on capital and consultants. The end users, teachers and students, are rarely given instruction on how to use all this tech. No education plan is developed to use this tech. If you’re lucky you’ll get a tech savvy teacher or precocious student who’ll make sense of it.
I am curious to what differentiates the ones where remote learning is working and to those that aren’t. Because I have been pleasantly surprised to see just how well remote learning have been for my kids. Our kids aren’t really any more or less disciplined as any other kids. They did whine and scared at first but slowly got used to the whole change. They are 10 and 11 doing two hour of zoom per day and the rest turn in homework via google classroom and flipgrid for presentations .
That's a big part of it. My kid goes to a British international school. Starting in Year 5 all students are required to have a laptop. So when the shutdown happened they all had devices already and were adept at using them. Teachers had some learning curve but it only took about a week to get online learning working pretty smoothly. Contrast that with public schools here that just shutdown and said they would do classes online when most public school kids here don't have a computer. Most have phones and a data plan so they are trying to do lessons via Line or Facetime. But that seems to be very ineffective.
I'm in the San Jose Unified School District here in the Bay Area, and it's hugely diverse. Because of that diversity, the district has been reluctant to mandate any specific online ed requirements, so as not to appear discriminatory toward the families who don't have the ability to participate in online learning. In return, that actively harms the families who can. Currently, all the assignments are "suggested", are ungraded, and the teachers are only "suggested" to schedule 2 online class meetings per week. what this means is that kids in families who are willing & able to maintain learning pace are being told both that 1) here is the list of weekly assignments 2) your teacher is only going to be marginally available, and 3) none of this work is going to be graded.
This is the on time in my parenting experience where it's been 100% clear that private schools have a night & day advantage over public schools and districts.
That seems quite bad. It's a graphic example of how when it comes to public schools, or public policy in general, things get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in the interest of "fairness" regardless of how unfair it is for those who are ready and able to do more. I don't know how that would get fixed, other than, as you said, moving to private. When you are paying directly (versus indirectly via taxation) you can demand a lot more.
Interesting article. I’ve taught three masters level classes this week and even these motivated students can find it challenging. Most are OK with passive listening, even if that’s not my favorite thing, and having some discussion, but as with in person, there can be issues trying to flip the classroom to make things more engaging and for pedagogical reasons. For example, I noticed that over 10% dropped off the zoom session on Monday, rather than discussing a case with other students in a breakout session for 15 minutes. I much prefer teaching in person where I can see their faces and get some feedback about where they are in terms of learning, interest, tiredness... and where I can more easily push them into doing group discussions that are pedagogically useful and enhance their networking skills. (Business students, not CS.)
We know how much more 'Distance Education' costs to run than normal schooling.
Yet on a few weeks notice we somehow imagined it would work to move every student over? Even if you increased the budget to match Distance Education it takes years to train the teachers/staff and train the students.
And we believe this because we fetishize 'remote' anything and just want it to work?
This also being the worst of remote, it's remote from home.
I have always learned on my own. I’ve spent the last couple of years pivoting from being a development manager, back to engineering.
That may seem to be an odd choice, as I’m an excellent manager, but I don’t like being a manager, and I love engineering. I’m pretty good at that, as well.
There’s really no curriculum for this kind of thing. Schools and training are all about introducing people to a subject “from scratch,” which involves a lot of “substrate.”
I did sign up for an introductory course on one tech that I’m working on, and to which I have had little exposure; but, for the most part, it’s all been self-teaching.
I really don’t know of a way to make that work with primary education. In my case, it’s a very personal journey, fueled by motivation. I don’t think that can be synthesized.
Of course, everything also needs to be measured, which brings in a whole infrastructure for accreditation and metrics.
distraction free? students aren't distracted in the classroom? Whether it's 200 years of passing notes, calculators, a book, or the classmate next to you the classroom has long had distractions.
There's a related thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079. Normally we'd merge threads that are that similar, but I couldn't figure out a good way to do it, so maybe they're subtly different enough to keep both up.
When schools reopen then smaller class sizes will need to be the norm with social distancing in effect. More teachers will be needed so costs to tax payers will increase. Online learning doesn't work for kids. It barely works for adults. I'm not sure what else can be done.
I guess the concern would be kids as vectors? The death rates for people under 18 have been so low that that social distancing would be rather silly if it weren't for them bringing it home.
You might find this recent NYT article[1] about the “birth of social distancing” interesting.
TLDR - In the early 2000s a high school student did a project mapping the “social network” of her school. Her father just so happened to be a scientist. He used her school project to create a model that showed by closing the schools during a pandemic in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, only 500 people got sick. Leaving the schools open would result in half of the population infected. Closing schools is one of the most effective strategies we have to prevent a contagion from spreading.
It is tough because it's different. Don't throw in the towel, innovate. New patterns /method will have to be used. This is an opportunity, if we figure out how to do this right, education can reach everywhere in the world.Think about the potential.
The underlying current in this article and others recently posted on the topic is that a return to in-person schools will happen next year.
Districts and states need to be asking themselves: "What if that isn't possible?"
There's a lot we don't know about the virus. How long does immunity last? How long will it take to get a vaccine? What happens if multiple flare-ups occur as people rush back to work, parties, cruises, and the rest?
There's a growing sense that there's light at the end of the tunnel. That light was achieved by strict measures that are melting away at a blistering pace. Nobody knows what happens when you start loosening up.
One possibility is unavoidable: there are more active cases today by at least an order of magnitude than there were when the restrictions were put into place. Exponential growth hasn't been suspended just because people need to return to normal.
Officials interviewed in this story didn't indicate what will be happening after instruction ends for the year. It might be a good time to assess what worked and what didn't, then develop a plan and do teacher training for distance learning for Fall 2020.
Of course it's possible to return to in-person schools. Some countries never closed primary schools at all. Education is essential, and it's totally worth accepting some risk.
This is really sad: schools giving up on teaching children. Not that it hasn't happened before (NCLBA, impoverished districts), but it's still sad when schools fail at their only job.
They're seeing student and parent engagement fall off a cliff, and can't do much about it. They had nearly zero time to prep for this and the schools are all quite worried (not unreasonably) about being sued over equal-access laws so are ambivalent about introducing "new" material anyway, so much of the instruction's kinda worthless unless the teachers are ignoring their districts' directions. Meanwhile lots of the teachers are at home with... their own kids, who are trying to do remote learning, and they're trying to keep their kids' engagement from dropping off, while also teaching a rapidly-dwindling set of students almost none of whom are still trying or even "showing up", at this point.
So mostly, shame is absent and their self-respect is fine, thanks.
I was a homeschooling parent and, for me and my family, it was wonderfully less burdensome than public school.
A snippet from a recent comment of mine which may be pertinent, though, based on the headline and long experience with remote learning (I also have taken college classes online):
Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.
This is not true.
One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.
Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.
This is very much consistent with my experience when tutoring my kids as well as that of friends who home-schooled their children. One hour of one-on-one tutoring is easily worth 3 or 4 hours of regular school time.
The job may be too hard for the teachers. Will they give up their pay if they end the year early? Will taxpayers--still paying all their property tax--get a refund?
Public school is not optimized for learning, it's optimized for filling time with nonsense.
If you care about your child's success, teach them how to do math. If they don't know how to read, teach them how to read as well. Probably 2-4 hours of instruction per day, at the absolute max end of the spectrum. Kids from the age of 8+ should be able to accomplish tasks with much less instruction time, and the bulk of the time will be individual effort. Of course, it's mundane and isolating, so don't expect them to sit for hours on end doing school work either.
Public school is what you get when you have one instructor per 20 kids with wildly different backgrounds, parent support and aptitudes. You need 10x better teachers with 1/20 of the load and much more involved parents. If you get all that, and certainly technology is the only way to get it at scale, then yes, kids can be done with academics in a small fraction of their day. They should be spending the bulk of their time in play and exploration.
A better solution would be just to reopen all of the primary schools. Sweden never closed theirs because it appears that small children aren't a significant virus transmission risk.
For those who think schools should remain closed, please explain what we should do next school year when the pandemic is still ongoing? We obviously can't leave schools closed indefinitely and there's no guarantee of an effective vaccine anytime soon.
My wife's classroom can barely get magic markers. And we are in a semi nice middle class area. The laptops the district provided for the teachers to use for remote learning can not even handle having MS Teams and Zoom running at the same time.
Im sure this is solvable, yes, but it would take a lot of planning, lots of training, money and lots of IT.
I am glad they got something in place and are trying to do the best they can with what they had. But wow, parents are frustrated.
Access to reliable tech and infrastructure seems to be a big stumbling block. VR doesn't solve some of the more fundamental issues, like students not having reliable equipment and Internet connections, or the backend not being able to support the demand (whether in terms of volume or flexibility to different teaching requirements).
I personally do not think its a lack of high tech. A written schedule mailed every week and the ability to email or call the teacher once or twice a week would get you 90% of the value.
That is pretty much what they are doing right now in my state. Packets can be downloaded every two weeks, or picked up if they do not have access. Teacher does a zoom with the class a minimum of twice a week.
But with everyone WFH, making time to work with and teach your kids is difficult. At least young students..
I do not know about this. I have two kids, 7 and 10, and yes, its messy but this is mostly because the teachers have not yet realized that they need to adapt and simplify their methods and, most importantly, communicate properly with the parents. With a few simple tweaks the kids could learn just as effectively as they do in regular school, in fact probably more, provided the parents are willing and able to step in.
Don't blame the teachers. They have been thrown into this with little support or guidance, nor the long term clarity that is needed to comprehensively redesign the coursework to meet existing standards - which may or may not change over the next few weeks/months.
And lets not forget the equity issues inherent in redesigning classroom content for a class that now consists of kids with no internet, no laptop, old PCs with old browsers, kids being expected to look after young siblings, etc
This isn't just 'tweak a few things so they work better on a laptop', it's really a fundamental shift that needs time and careful planning to address.
I am not blaming them exactly. Its a though situation for all involved and at least my kids teachers are clearly working as hard as they can to make this work and the school district has provided laptops and written materials to the relatively few kids that do not have access to those. Having said that, I do think they could do much better if they accepted that this situation will last indefinitely and their methods must change to rely more on parent supervision and kid autonomy.
You would think that, and they might also think that, but they're largely not allowed to behave materially differently than they are accustomed to.
fwiw, until our district settled on a specific set of policies, one of my kids' teachers had already -- the first week of WFH -- setup Google Classroom, used Classdojo to communicate with parents, shared a weekly agenda with links for augmentation material, and setup Zoom meetings 3 days/wk to teach & help the class. she's had to scale back some of this because it's against policy. My other kid's teacher was absent the first two week and, since the district's policy has clarified, is following it to the letter. Thankfully, a stay-at-home dad in the class has created a class email alias, is organizing multiple online sessions per week with parent led code.org, drawing, art history, music history, daily math check-ins, and informal "recesses" (social hours).
You may or may not be surprised how few parents are qualified to supervised their kids' learning.
How are they not allowed to behave differently in these times? At least in my district there is a huge variance in how the teachers are handling it so it seems they have a fair bit of latitute.
The wife of one of my good friends was on the county school board for 12 years. According to her, it was an unspoken secret was that parental involvement was the biggest predictor of / contributor to student success. The reason it was taboo was because you absolutely cannot expect anything from the parents. It was political suicide.
I would put dollars on the table that such is already happening for every parent that is willing and able to do it, because they were already doing it before too.
100% this, and all those parents are also now wondering and worrying what will happen to their child next school year, when they're either at or ahead of grade level, but half their class is most of a semester behind.
I had been reasonably happy in public elementary school until now, but am seriously considering private schools for next year because I'm convinced this reacclimation process will be much, much smoother with fewer regressions.
It was taboo from a political perspective. You can't tell parents they are failing their children, and still expect them to vote for you next election...
I have a six and nine year old. We are both working full time and even with a sitter the kids only get a couple hours of “school” in per day, tops. The six year old really not so much. If one of our jobs goes away we may actually be able to provide our kids an education but “remote learning” like we have now requires a dedicated parent educator or kids old enough and interested enough to be self directed. I don’t think it will ever be viable at scale.
I am in almost identical situation, two kids, roughly same age, both parents work full time. My wife and I had a rough time in the first couple of weeks but now the kids have gotten into a routine. They plan their day a day before and they are able to get through all the assigned work in about 5 hours. I think this can work. Everybody is still figuring it out but its seem to me we can and will do much better when the materials are better structured for online access and there is better communication between parents and teachers.
