Re:My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
by adflux on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:41AM
(#24220849)
Learning to read, write, basic arithmetics, communicate with others ... Glorified childcare?
Re:My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
by barry-cotter on Thursday August 20, 2020 @05:44AM
(#24221552)
I taught kindergarten for five years and am just starting as a secondary school teacher. Primary school is mostly childcare. The only important skills we assume a child who has just finished primary school can do are reading, writing and arithmetic. You can teach a nine year old to read in 40 hours. You can teach a 12 year old the primary Math curriculum in 40 hours. It takes three years to take a child with fluent Chinese who is illiterate to grade level in writing so that’s a hard upper limit on the difficulty of teaching writing.
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.
Re:My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
by m0zg on Thursday August 20, 2020 @04:49PM
(#24228769)
I suspect those downvoting don't have children of their own, otherwise they'd know this full well.
Re:My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
by m0zg on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:45AM
(#24220871)
Kids learn all of that in kindergarten nowadays. The main function of primary ed is to keep kids occupied while their parents are at work. Primary ed will completely fail at that if it goes online.
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.