You’re just falling over yourself with cynicism. They accept answers that weren’t in the original slate of answers if they’re valid and supported.
The actuarial exam system is a complete farce. If you take your typical FCAS/FSA with 20 yrs exp and make them take an exam on the spot they will fail it.
Yeah, I know two people with kids in kindergarten, and remote schooling has been pretty bad for both of them. Home schooling (which the parents didn’t have time for) + a little enrichment + a lot of the kid frustrated by being expected to sit still.
I also have a friend with two kids in preschool who was going nuts. She said that she felt she was being a bad parent and a bad employee trying to juggle both. But they were able to find in-person child care this fall.
Absolute disaster elementary age. My kid who loves school, was despondent and unengaged during the zoom calls. Cried at the end of each zoom class. Didn’t want to participate in them. Academic superstar in person, completely stopped learning over zoom.
My preschooler who loves school hated it and regressed with potty training. A parent was required to be actively participating in unmuting and helping the kid, which is really difficult if both parents work and a lot of kids just didn’t join.
Other peers of mine with elementary students had the same experience. I do not know anyone in person who’s elementary age kids did not get depressed with the shutdown, I’m sure some people did well but I haven’t met them.
I think it’s okay for parents to come to terms that their kids don’t have it in them to learn independently like Terry Tao can. The sooner they know, the sooner they can encourage them towards career paths more suited for them. The alternative is to go spend 60k per year at Sarah Lawrence only to have them do a job they could have done without the degree.
i think with CS’s plan, we might wind up with a lot of illiterate humans, but i appreciate his passion about this topic.
That’s why I was so surprised that my neighbor says her kids (elementary and middle school) are thriving. She and her husband both work full-time.
To think critically, you have to be able to build certain mental models to help you overcome the limitations of your working memory.
A good example is math. Before you can apply math to think critically about science, you have to practice certain math skills until they become automatic.
I see this in myself. I am pretty resistant to propaganda embedded in the written word, because I have an education in how to write. This taught me, at least to some degree, how words can be used to shape thinking in non-critical ways.
I am far more susceptible to video, because I am not educated in the hidden messages and associations of video. For this reason, i have to be very careful about drawing conclusions from videos that I watch.
And I only have the concepts to express these ideas because i have been educated in these concepts.
School kind of ensnares disenfranchised communities in forcing the kids to play the rich man’s game. We basically made certain parts of their economy illegal and make it mandatory for the kids to sit half awake through lectures that pretend to prepare them for jobs they would never be considered for while preventing them from spending their main waking hours helping their own communities in ways they find to be beneficial to themselves but that we would never understand from our ivory towers.
I’m sure some do like your neighbor, but I wonder what the percent is. Reverse of the effectiveness of the vaccine maybe? 95% bad for elementary, and high school is maybe closer to Johnson and Johnson levels
If kids and their parents found school to be so beneficial, the dropout rates wouldn’t be as high as they are nor would we have laws mandating a minimum amount of education. They drop out because doing so is the most economical way to better their livelihoods and the cost of staying in school outweighs the cost of entering the workforce earlier.
If staying in school would actually help them, they would stay in school.
what about the kids who drop out to hang out and smoke pot in their parents basement?
Then they decided that’s what makes them happy. Hey look, I probably am capable enough to go further in my career than I am now but we all draw our lines in the sand somewhere.
No kids.
But…I was a kid once.
If I was in K-6: I’d love it for a brief moment, until my parents start forcing me to study everyday, then I’d feel miserable. My parents were strict, and my mom would literally sit down with me for hours to make sure I learn certain things (English included).
If I was in 8-12, I’d feel stressed about my future (partially thanks to having asian parents instilling the importance of getting into a good college)
If I was in college: shit, life would be perfect. I wish all my classes were through zoom.
There’s some truth in this. There’s a lot more “sit still and accept authority” in high school math lessons than I am comfortable with. I try to counteract that in my interactions with the kids.
And I’m helping with trigonometry. One girl said to me, “I want to be a hairdresser. I don’t need to know this stuff.” And I don’t have a good answer to that. I can explain to them why basic algebra is useful in shopping and keeping track of your finances and stuff. Trig? Well, maybe if you want to build a shelf with a diagonal support? Or take a shorter path in Minecraft? Yeah, I’ve used trig once or twice since leaving school. It’s hard for me to sell that to these kids other than as a way to understand the world.
college is when school ceased to be like prison. i wish i made more out of college life, but i didn’t mind going there.
before that, prison, other kids suck, zoom school would have been amazing and maybe i wouldn’t have all these joint issues now from that asswipe in junior high who messed up my knee and now hip.
My college-age friends hate it. Most who had the opportunity to be on campus rejected that, and went to live with their parents. (And I know a lot of families where the parents have taken in a child and that child’s romantic partner for the duration.) The learning part is going fine, but they miss the social life.
I remember being bored in math until, well, calculus. If it had been purely up to me, I might have stopped taking it. I wouldn’t have become as fully me as I could have.
Kids aren’t responsible enough to be in charge of themselves. That’s why they aren’t.
Schools aren’t working well enough for marginalized communities. And I agree that we need to listen to what those communities say they need. But that is not the same as assuming that kids should get to decide whether they go to school. Or even each individual parent deciding. And it does not logically follow that if school were beneficial that kids would be going. And even if that were true, it would not follow that the right way to make things better would necessarily be to stop requiring school.
I don’t think I’ve used trig since college Calculus.
I honestly don’t really even remember how to do trig anymore, other than SOH CAH TOA that’s been burned into my brain. What’s secant or cosecant? No idea.
I think geometric proofs and trigs are the most useless math classes that are required.
Algebra is good. Basic geometry is good (areas and perimeters). Calculus is good. Trig? gtfo.
Well, no college friends of mine would be “missing social life”, because they’d still be having a social life. I don’t exclude myself. But I was a gamer so it would just be a blessing for me.
College kids will be college kids.