I can't read the article since I don't have a subscription, but I wanted to share my experiences anyways.
I have 3 boys, one each in elementary, junior high and senior high.
The remote learning experience has been dramatically different for each. Our school district has every student on Office 365, so we're in good shape technology-wise.
The senior high student has been able to just go through his texts, work on the assignments, do the tests and continue on mostly as normal. He gets through an 8 hour school day and seems to be better for it at the end.
The junior high-school student is having much more trouble. There is less material to study, and what there is is filler-heavy. He _maybe_ has 3 hours a day of actual work and is then at loose ends. I have been pulling more advanced material for him to work to keep up his education during allotted school hours, but he also doesn't have the more developed focus and discipline of his older brother.
The elementary (grade 6, so almost junior high) student has the least amount of actual work. Maybe an hour a day from his teacher. He's lucky that his teacher is accommodating and allows him to e.g. document his progress to the mun through Kerbal in career mode for the space module they're doing instead of reading a few NASA pamphlets and being bored.
The big takeaway I've had from this whole thing is that each student will only get as much out as they are willing (or forced) to put in. The opportunity to explore avenues of learning beyond and outside the established system is immense, and will probably grow some already latent educational gaps between kids.
I have a feeling a lot of parents are throwing their kids at video games and youtube, or just ignoring them altogether, whether through lack of time and resources, or lack of interest.
This is more-or-less exactly what I would expect: the younger you are, the more in-person learning matters. At the extreme end of the spectrum, imagine attempting remote preschool for a toddler (or maybe you don't have to imagine it these days). It clearly wouldn't work!
Adults are able to learn from mostly independent study. Teenagers are able to learn somewhat from independent study. Elementary school kids can maybe do some independent study, but not much.
Unavailable parents are part of the problem—but another way to phrase that is, the parent isn't available to act as a teacher (albeit one heavily aided by online resources).
>This is more-or-less exactly what I would expect: the younger you are, the more in-person learning matters.
Yes, but I think there's something else more subtle happening - younger kids have a lot less to do. I originally wrote a long diatribe with lots of facts, but it comes down to this: programs like No Child Left Behind et al. have actually lowered standards, especially by decreasing the subjects encountered at younger ages. Things that might have been taught at that age in the past have been pushed up or out.
On the other hand, re: in-person learning... watching my ten year old lap her class because she's on Khan Academy told me what I had long suspected: All of the academic things we are teaching at the early grades can be automated away. In fact, I'm fairly convinced she picked up the material better that way than the classroom approach because she had fewer distractions.
So, yes - my high schooler is even more nominally self-sufficient than my younger kids, but I think it has more to do with the amount of material she has to cover rather than age or aptitude related.
>It's broadcasted live (big mistake). End up with lots of ems and uhms.
On the other hand, expecting heavily edited presentations is probably not realistic. Heck, most presentations at company virtual events are pretty lightly edited.
I record podcasts with people who are fairly senior and have a lot of experience speaking (and are considered good at it). I can still spend a couple hours cutting back on the the umms and you knows. And dealing with just audio is a lot harder than video.
Agreed, the schools were not well-prepared for this style of learning and so it has not been particularly effective. We still participate with our kids' classes and teachers, but we rely on Khan Academy, augmented by Adventure Academy, among other things. Even so, we are not professional teachers, so I look forward to them returning to class next year.
I agree that the lesson learned here is that emergency remote learning did not work. No one was prepared for it, teachers did not have training or materials needed, students were not expecting it, it was a mess. But that doesn't mean it can't work, just that it didn't work in this emergency situation.
I don't always agree with him, but our district superintendent had remarkable foresight to make a large purchase of mobile hotspots, recognizing that they would be necessary in a remote learning environment, especially as we are not a wealthy community and have many kids without technology access at home. We have fared much better than the horror stories I've heard around the country. As others have pointed out in this thread - parents who have been able to augment with existing online sources have come out of this better as even the most well-intentioned districts just haven't had the years of preparing for online learning like an education.com, a Khan Academy, etc.
This is definitely an issue for families which don’t have access to computers & broadband internet.
For the rest, I wonder if the results would have been better if there had ideas from the home-schooling community which could have been incorporated. Granted, this would require way more effort from the parent and a different mindset. However a primer on what to expect, how to overcome obstacles, keeping kids on track, etc. Traditional schools are totally unprepared for this scenario in a remote world.
Storytime, a few years back one of my ex-colleagues decided to buy a ranch on the outskirts of Seattle to work remotely. What made the decision easier was that
A) his pre-teen kids were already being homeschooled
B) his spouse was a stay at home mom who spent a significant amount of time keeping the kids on track.
He showed me pictures of the house which looked beautiful. Sat on the edge of a lake with a backdrop against the mountains and came with a stable for horses and livestock.
There's a third leg to the stool: Food and general welfare. Our local PTA has long put together meal / clothing care packages to send home with kids in need, but even before our distance learning program kicked in, the schools made sure to be open to provide meals for kids in need. Maybe this isn't the case everywhere, but in districts like ours with a high number of kids at the poverty level, schools are a significant provider of meals / health and welfare checks.
i think you hit on a point that means if kids are independent enough, then it can work. so it probably works fine for juniors and seniors in hs and is horrendously bad for kindergarteners
I haven't been able to access archive.is and archive.md in Firefox because of a Cloudflare error, "Please enable cookies.". It works on Chrome however.
Specifically, it seems to be the new "DNS over HTTPS" feature in Firefox, with the default Cloudflare provider. I guess 1.1.1.1 will cause the same issue.
Interestingly, without TLS, the error is "Please enable cookies", whereas on HTTPS it's "403 Forbidden" after passing through an invalid cert.
I think what we did during the lockdown doesn't count as a proper test of home schooling / remote working.
What we did here in Belgium is to force kids to stay at home and force parents to work from home WHILE the kids are there. I have 3 and none of the teachers throughout 3 months of confinement had a single Skype session with any. We're talking about <10 years old so a single teacher is normally dedicated to the kids. In effect on top of working from home we have to do the job of 3 teachers. Actually make it 6 teachers because the normal school lessons are half-day between 9 and 12 noon and in the afternoon another teacher is taking over or they just throw the pupils into a playground. So yes, it doesn't work under these circumstances.
There are kids who thriving by studying from home compared from studying/lessons in the traditional school environment. At least that has been reported on the radio/news in The Netherlands.
Fully depends on the students what kind of learning/teaching is best for them when they are allowed to plan which tasks they do instead of following the schedule of the teacher.
My (mixed income but weighted towards wealthy) community schools did excellent remote instruction, and at no time have I seen academic rigor reduced or compromised. I wonder if this is the educational equivalent of needing a product pivot and just totally doing the same thing, just with a different hat on.
Research from the university sector in the US and Europe — who invested heavily in remote learning in the past decade to try to increase their reach — is unfortunately that distance learning is an order of magnitude worse in terms of outcomes than for traditional teaching.
Headlines like this are probably the worst possible way to do reporting. It tells you what it wants you to think right up front. There is no room for critical thought or debate. There is no possibility for them to be wrong. It implies the full authority of the entire scientific community and if you disagree in the slightest you are a heretic.
This is why I like hackernews. There is much less of this crap (though obviously as we can see in this case it still happens).
The guidelines specifically encourage substituting for clickbait or thoughtstopping headlines:
If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Are you honestly suggesting that applies to WSJ headlines in general, and this specific instance in particular?
I suspect not. In which case, what—exactly—are you trying to accomplish with your comment? Muddy the waters? Convince people there's no problem? Waste people's time on irrelevant info?
The guidelines are absolutely general, not merely the WSJ.
I'll let you work out the applicability of my suggested alternate, possibly comparing it with dang's editorial choice.
I'm not sure what your specific beef is. The article, regardless of merits, would be better discussed with ... (checks and sees a changed title on HN) ... something other than the originally-submitted, WSJ-provided, headline.
I'm distinctly not a fan of the WSJ. The argument that the recent, global, crash-course on distance learning has ... proved uneven ... should hardly be controversial. It deserves a fair hearing, whether the WSJ has done so or not, and the topic seems well within HN's remit.
The guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"
I sadly can't read this article because I'm not sure how to get around the paywall, but if it actually reaches the level of linkbait it can be changed.
Unfortunately the evidence from degree-level education has, for a long time, been that distance learning is an order of magnitude worse than attending classes with a teacher.
For children the difference is likely to be even more stark.
Luckily there is lots of research on this matter to inform our decisions about what is appropriate for educating people.
Agreed. When this all started, a number of academics who have been studying remote learning spoke out. There was already a push to move some high school classes online in my province for some stupid cost saving reasons before this all started
Technology is not an emphasis in teacher education.
If engineers were teachers, in one week you would see them creating github repos with reusable TeX material for every possible class that exists, and then finding a way to evaluate and rank the best material.
In contrast, every teacher creates their own material that rarely gets reused, evaluated or ranked in any way, resulting in suboptimal material and wasted effort.
Computer Science professors are well educated in technology, yet I see much more sharing of material between primary school teachers than among computer science professors.
Teachers know how to use photocopiers, if material isn't shared and reused the reason isn't lack of sophisticated technology.
I'm curious to know how much classroom teaching experience you have? I agree a motivated person can learn almost anything from an internet enabled computer, but I disagree that you can teach almost anything. In my experience they're not useful for teaching children fundamental skills like math, writing, music, etc.
I am not saying we should put each kid in front of a computer, at least at the beginning.
I am saying that the educational material that kids are learning from could be produced in a smarter, more reusable way so that it can be objectively compared and improved.
You say that, but there are standardised learning programmes like this that were very popular 30-40 years ago, such as the SMILE System for teaching maths. These relied on the idea that, given the opportunity, students would find their level and progress just as well as if there was a teacher giving the whole class the same lesson.
Luckily we have learnt that this was a terrible idea and moved back towards actually teaching!
In terms of whether resources are actually shared, they are, and most lessons on a given subject within a given exam board will be largely the same in terms of materials and planning (school textbooks have teacher’s editions with worksheets and lesson plans), but will vary wildly depending on which concepts students find easy or difficult on the day.
I am talking about teachers freely collaborating and creating material that gets constantly evaluated, ranked and improved by the community in a self-organized manner, the same way open source projects work on github. That is different to using material designed by a committee from pre-Internet times.
I am talking about using a data-centric approach where the material is not assumed to be good, and it is constantly evaluated and compared against equivalent teaching material so that everyone can benefit from the best available material.
But they can't, because formats like Word, Powerpoint and PDF are not version-control friendly, and Office 365 does not scale to the same level of collaboration as Github does. LaTeX is a version control friendly format, but school teachers won't use it. They prefer to spend countless hours putting together the same content in Word and Powerpoint over and over again.
If I was in charge of education I would make LaTeX and version control mandatory for everything. In 2 years education would be 100x better.
As a teacher who uses versioned TeX for all of my artifacts, this isn’t the panacea you hope for. Many of my documents will only compile on my machine because I a have a bunch of dependencies scattered about. There are also many types of artifact that require an order of magnitude more work to produce in TeX compared to something like OmniGraffle or PowerPoint.
Even if you could somehow overcome the technical hurdles, you’d run into the problem of teaching materials not possessing even a partial order.
Even if you somehow get teachers to agree on a lattice or total order for teaching artifacts, you’d need to deal with the idea that producing teaching materials is a way for the teacher to synthesize the content they are about to teach. Often the artifact is something of a byproduct of the process of the teacher making sense of the rhetorical situation the are about to undertake. If you just snag the highest rated artifact, that process doesn’t happen.
I have 3 boys, one each in elementary, junior high and senior high.
The remote learning experience has been dramatically different for each. Our school district has every student on Office 365, so we're in good shape technology-wise.
The senior high student has been able to just go through his texts, work on the assignments, do the tests and continue on mostly as normal. He gets through an 8 hour school day and seems to be better for it at the end.
The junior high-school student is having much more trouble. There is less material to study, and what there is is filler-heavy. He _maybe_ has 3 hours a day of actual work and is then at loose ends. I have been pulling more advanced material for him to work to keep up his education during allotted school hours, but he also doesn't have the more developed focus and discipline of his older brother.
The elementary (grade 6, so almost junior high) student has the least amount of actual work. Maybe an hour a day from his teacher. He's lucky that his teacher is accommodating and allows him to e.g. document his progress to the mun through Kerbal in career mode for the space module they're doing instead of reading a few NASA pamphlets and being bored.
The big takeaway I've had from this whole thing is that each student will only get as much out as they are willing (or forced) to put in. The opportunity to explore avenues of learning beyond and outside the established system is immense, and will probably grow some already latent educational gaps between kids.
I have a feeling a lot of parents are throwing their kids at video games and youtube, or just ignoring them altogether, whether through lack of time and resources, or lack of interest.