I'm sure any parent will say that it is impossible, and the issue is not the screen, but sitting still. I am in fact surprised that the teachers even asked to make video calls at that age. I don't know about USA preschools but here 5 years olds don't study sitting on a desk all day long, so I don't know how they can expect a kid to do that at home.
When my daughter (preschool age) had to stay home because of the virus, the teachers started to send us videos of activities to do at home, but those were for the parents, not for her.
private education created a large divide between people of different social classes and it absolutely removes social cohesion. (which results in a ton of other problems).
Some kids do indeed not function in normal classrooms, but this is the reason why special needs education (i don' t know if that is the correct english term) exists. In my opinion, homeschooling does not adequately provide child with the experience it needs to grow up, especially in regards to social skills.
In my own case, putting me in special needs education (I tried) would do much more harm than good, and would not provide in any way the good experiences alternative schooling could have (sadly that didn't work out for me too).
Some kids thrive in homeschooling, some kids thrive in special needs education, some kids thrive in small group schooling, some kids thrive in democratic schools, etc, this is not a simple normal vs special needs question, and you can't say that homeschooling does not work - it works for the right individuals, and these children don't need to have anything to do with the children that need something else (as long as we don't socialize their education, of course).
Sometimes the kind of school is right but that particular one does not work and you need to put the child in a different but alike school - often impossible in socialized systems (where school is usually assigned based on residence location).
I think it's incredibly sad that we have hard science on each child being an individual with vastly differing needs, hard science on the outsized influence of childhood on later life, and yet we force children into either normal or special needs school and suppress competition and new ideas in the name of class struggle.
This music video is highly relevant, IMHO: https://youtu.be/Kd6lC14gy4c
However yes, there are people that were forced to move away from Finland or other countries like it because their child had problems in the standardized schools, and there were cases of people that were criminalized for their different educational preferences.
I don't think that problems of the world and the competing economical ideologies should hinder education of children. While for-profit schooling exists, a large portion of private schools are cooperatives, nonprofits, informal groups etc, and private schooling is even recognized by the EU commision as extremely important in helping non-standard people. Private schools can only help, there is no way that a school that is at least average would do harm - it's the government's fault the public schools are failing, as is clear from the many and many countries where private, public, governmental, religious and other schools coexist peacefully.
Another point to consider is the differing needs of parents (e.g. the weird school-work schedule of a mother that still works on her Ph.d. while working as a researcher while having a baby; some people want to travel while their kids are young; ...); a public school simply won't accommodate to that.
I ran tech for the big "Christmas Program", which consisted of "song and dance" (loosely speaking) from kids aged pre-K to second grade. It was fairly nice, because I got to skip class. What was less nice, was hearing a pre-K teacher yell "Why did you do that!?! Doing that is going to ruin the program for your grandparents, after they go through all the trouble to come see you.", in response to a child stumbling on a line.
Public education is necessary, but many implementations are flawed.
Rereading this, It sounds like something you'd see on r/thathappened. I wish it were fake.
I went to a K to 12 school for my last 4ish years of HS, and the kindergartners (the kids, not just teachers) were already almost mind-dead cult like in "Prep for the test!" and "Go $TEAM!".
There were a couple really good teachers across all levels of the school, but not enough.
Give the teachers a break. Their jobs suck...
I can trace many of my current skills, interests and aspirations directly to several of my teachers, most often in contexts not directly related to their core subject.
There is the occasional teacher who is there to power trip, but they are by far the minority. The school system crushes teachers just as much as it does the kids.
Edit: Reread my comment you replied to, if I made it sound like the teachers were mind-dead, that was absolutely not my goal. I just wanted to specify that the kids themselves were like that, and worried it might be misinterpreted as the school itself being like that.
Have a great day and thanks for this conversation!! :)
Same to you!
(I agree that it was a bit optimistic to expect this of 5 year olds)
One thing that I’m not seeing discussed much is that these meetings are objectively a dehumanizing waste of the children’s time. Ten minutes to take roll, while everyone just sits there? If someone did something this pointless in a meeting of adults, they would be reprimanded.
School is to submit.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.h...
Edit: Why is something like this downvoted? I didn’t state anything other than my relevant direct experience.
Teacher has been recording a daily 7-10 minute lesson video for some of their core subjects.
Then some assignment of online math, science, writing. Then one of the popular reading sites.
The video calls have all been once per week for 30-45 minutes but mostly social for the kids to interact with each other.
Not sure who really expects 5 hours of video.
Everyone knows how fussy 5 year olds are, these readers aren't that stupid.
The thing people usually get wrong is how fussy 6-16 year olds are. That 16 year olds actually don't have that much emotional maturity or know that much practical stuff either, even with 10 more years of life and school.
The biggest crisis isn't parents with young children. It's people realizing how little their teenage kids know and how poorly those teenagers are adjusting.
One is... maybe the right way to describe it is hormones and experience?
Like, the first time you fall in love as a teenager, it's intense.
You literally have never felt that way about another person, ever. And, sure, from a cognitive development perspective, you're an adult, you just don't yet have the experience to deal with it.
That's true for a lot of life, and well beyond being a teenager.
As a teenager, you are, cognitively, a newly-minted adult. You don't know where you fit in the world, much less where you are going, and you're at the beginning stages of sorting out who you want to be. And sure, adults can give you advice, but only you can go through the process of figuring out who you are.
You are also, at the same time, both absolutely confident and totally insecure.
It's rough, full stop. My teenage years were hell on my parents.
This is compounded by American culture and education thoroughly insulating kids -- well into young adulthood! -- from developing emotional maturity or learning to accept responsibility.
That's all about upbringing, by the way. I have met teenagers that I would rank as more mature than a large number of people in their early thirties.
It's totally possible, and from what I have seen, easier -- we just don't do it.
Americans also do nothing, or at least nothing effective, to equip kids with critical life-skills: financial management, personal fitness, nutrition, martial arts, negotiation, the list goes on. The only thing we prepare them for is to "go to college".
That has to change.
The same way that you expect a kid to sit more-or-less still, and not-too-disruptively in a classroom with 29 other children for 6 hours a day.
When they, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, can't, we diagnose them with ADHD and give them a Ritalin patch.
I get it. Remote learning isn't great. It's worse than in-person learning, which isn't a high bar to begin with. Unfortunately, in-person learning currently carries with it the risk of death and disability to teachers. We could have taken some steps to deal with that risk, three months ago (Smaller classes, isolating students from teachers, training glorified babysitters who aren't over the age of 50 to mind classes during non-instruction time, etc), but it seems that all of our leaders and planners were convinced that this COVID thing would blow over by August.
A thought: students are expected to learn to function together in classroom settings over the course of their first few years in school. It's a gradual and often tedious process for everyone involved. How many children say they like sitting in class? It's a heavily researched subject. Some students never really get the hang of it. Other students learn to keep their place, but have trouble following the pace, and compensate otherwise. Or don't. Suddenly requiring teachers and children to respectively teach and learn under vastly different circumstances, EG teleconferencing from home with family around, appears a bit unrealistic. Glhf
I'd go a step further and say that many--if not most--adults can't do this at all. I would go back to college any day, where classes are a few hours a day and I set my own schedule, but personally can't imagine that I'd do well if you put me back in high school (where i did fairly well academically), with a rigid schedule of back-to-back classes. If you told me that I have to do it again, but on zoom this time... I can't even fathom what kind of punishment that would be.
New media has always met with resistance. Books were once considered poisonous trash. Now they're seen as healthy and educational. "In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, written in 360 BCE, Socrates warned that reliance on the written word would weaken individuals’ memory, and remove from them the responsibility of rememberin" https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...
Your comment makes me think that you've never interacted with an East Asian 5 year old. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; long before they take their first steps, they've started decoding the incentive structures around them. Western kids live in a weird bubble that is totally devoid of any meaningful agency, so they act like bored inmates. That behaviour isn't innate, it's a consequence of the environment we've created for children.
It's on the basic day-to-day interactions, kids asking for something in the grocery store or in a restaurant and having a dialogue why they want it and why they can or cannot have it right now, in a way you'd tell another adult (with reservations about vocabulary and complexity of the message).
There is a much more trusting relationship between parent and child from what I see, not one of ownership or overprotection. Kids are people and are treated and talked to like that regarding their needs, desires, etc.
I get it, kids can be annoying and drive you mad, but giving them appropriate responsible (this depends on the age ofcourse) and discourse seems like one if not the major task you have as a parent.
Seriously?
And on top of this, we should not be asking “can they” but instead “should they” have this kind of life.
Toddlers love sitting in front of a screen when Sesame Street is on. I guess we'll find out how educational SS actually is.
I'm surprised there isn't more data on what educational media is actually good or not. Because then we could just use that, because there are already millions of hours of this stuff made. Largely its because the profit is in making more of it, not making available all that which came before.
When the lockdowns first in started in March, my 4 year old, who was 3 at the time, could barely last 15 minutes before wandering off. She has gotten better since then. She can now last 45 minutes online with her teacher, but I don’t think it’s the norm. My wife still needs to sit with her to make sure she focuses on the teacher.
I think that a lot of these parents that have young children that cannot focus online should be looking on building a small co-op for learning. Partner with 2 or 3 other trusted families and hire a teacher or share responsibilities in teaching the kids. Covid is dangerous taking some risk should be considered.
That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainwreck, because we all know that's exactly what it's going to be. Well to do folks such as myself will hire private tutors (who, BTW, work just fine through Skype, by virtue of having done it for years). Less well to do folks will suffer the incompetence of our ultra-expensive $13K/pupil-year education system where less than 1/3rd of the expense goes towards teaching.
If people in power didn't want it to be a trainwreck, they'd reach out to folks who have been in this business for over a decade and learned at least how not to fuck it up completely. Instead they're trying to duct tape something together with MS Teams it looks like, and each school district is duct taping its own bespoke thing.
Children learn how to communicate with others just fine in actual childcare, without being in quite so artificial a situation as age ranked classrooms where their primary occupation is pointless busywork.
Honestly glorified childcare is too kind to primary school. Glorified childcare until at least age ten would be an improvement and have nugatory effects on long term learning outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.
"A 5 year old does not have these skills"
They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.
https://mom.com/kids/5106-what-age-do-kids-have-impulse-cont...
"Who said this article has to have a point?"
Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic. If this was the author's personal blog I would not be saying anything. But this article sits next to subjects like:
- Can a Protest Movement Topple Netanyahu? - Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - Our Students Are Depending on Us, teaching through Covid-19
Different kids develop differently.
> They should have learned that by age 4, which is why kids start pre-k/k at the 4/5 age range.
A large amount of adults don't have these skills developed.
> Probably because we expect more from the source - The Atlantic.
This point I agree with. At the same time, I believe purely emotional ranting pieces have a place on the web too.
Lol. Because you think they should? Love the one-size fits all statement - not.
As soon as someone has 2+ kids, they realize how ludicrous that statement is. Better yet go talk to a kindergarten teacher - I don't know how they handle kids that age that are not even theirs
The only reasons adults can do it is years and years of learning impulse controls and suppression of bad emotions for everyone's good. A 5 year old does not have these skills, and will obviously act out as they have no other mechanism of dealing with it.
Also, who said that this article has to have a point? The writer never claims to propose a solution, she is simply writing out her emotions for others to hear. Assuming she has been largely isolating, is it all that weird that she would talk about her experiences online?