I remember waking up to go to school every morning at 6:45 and taking the bus every day at 7:05 when I was in high school in France. Most months the sun hadn't even risen yet. It was punishing, and I definitely was sleep deprived by the end of the week.
Because of the schedule, my parents had me go to sleep around 9pm but I had a hard time sleeping then and tended to not fall asleep before midnight/1 am. I'd either lie in bed thinking, or use my radio alarm clock light to read books. Honestly, I think I would have been healthier and enjoyed school a lot more if school had started 90 minutes later.
That's definitely a criteria I'd look out for when choosing a school for my son.
I was the same as a kid - I really struggled with the early mornings, and could never sleep before midnight. Come the weekend, and I was so tired I'd sleep until midday.
When I first started at high school, I was a great student, for example winning multiple prizes over the first 18 months. But the tiredness really took a toll, and for most of the rest of school I was a half zombie - I still did well at school, but I'm sure I could have achieved so much more if I wasn't so incredibly tired all the time, and it for sure took a toll on my social life too.
Us two were maybe more extreme examples, but it seems to be a common problem.
my solution worked ok: sleep at school. it's not ideal, but it also saved me from being entirely brainwashed and prevented teachers from killing my creativity.
let's not ignore the fact schools were designed long ago to 1/ shape future factory workers into well behaved blue collars, while 2/ making it possible for parents to go to work.
before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. Kids were out playing, stayed home safe or participated to gardening activities.
the issue with school is far more deep rooted into how our society sadly operates. it may be impossible to fix one without addressing the other.
> before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. Kids were out playing, stayed home safe or participated to gardening activities.
Ah yes, the good old times where nobody could read or write and your only perspective in life was to be a farmer like your father and his father before him!
I've cared sharing your comment with two farmers, they appear to be able to read so their response may not be representative of the audience you had in mind: Be a farmer just one day and you will change your mind.
I think it's wise advice as it wouldn't take long rethoric for some truth to reveal itself, and surely would be a valuable experience.
as other comment pointed out, nobody is making a value comparison, but since you are at it, at least let's not be derogatory about farmers life. there is still a good portion of the world population living that lifestyle. Having been closely in touch with some, a few interesting things stood out to me: they have outstanding communication skills and are very pragmatic, down to earth when assessing their own situation vs the urbanised population, are far less easily influenced and seem to have a gotten a far more hollistic education. they navigate a difficult economy where they produce undoubtly tremendous value yet get a small share of the reward and respect.
To get back on the thread subject, I don't recall having seen any sleep deprived farmers, despite the hard labour they have to participate in each day of their hardship seasons.
I'm not sure what is their only perspective, it may well be to be a farmer, I never asked that question since it appeared to me that they aren't suffering existential issues.
what is your perspective(s) in life? other than being able to read, write and not being a farmer?
If you mean sleep in a dorm at school, I'll have you know that didn't help either.
First class of the day was at 730 and what that really meant was rolling out of bed at 725 still in my clothes from last night and trudging over to the building next door where I would be marked present and immediately fall asleep in my desk. The first class was utterly worthless as far as I know and I learned not a thing. Shower and change of clothes and actually starting my day happend during breakfast break later.
Part of the problem, imo, is that quiet time in the dorm started at 1045 but was poorly enforced so often it was impossible to get to sleep till 1130 or later.
I just wanted to comment on how interesting it is to observe differences in upbringing and culture :)
When reading the parent comment, I naturally assumed they were talking about sleeping in class, as that wasy solution to the sleep problem as well. To this day I routinely meet people that seem to file this possibility away in the "impossible" drawer of their minds or assume that "this person doesn't look like trash that sleeps during class" and conclude that there's been a misunderstanding.
Just to be clear, I am not lashing out at you (or anyone), and just wanted to make this comment more vivid to emphasize how expectations and assumptions make it all too easy to misinterpret a statement as a "typo" of a different statement altogether.
If you were so tired, why couldn't you just sleep earlier at night? If I'm remembering my own teen years correctly, most of us chose to stay up late not because we couldn't sleep, but because we just wanted to, sleep be damned.
Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.
Don't take this personally (I really do mean it) but I think this attitude is part of the problem. My best, most alert hours are after ten pm. I can't just will those away, and I've tried. There is enormous social stigma around being a late riser. We're characterized as having low self control or accused of laziness. Perhaps that's deserved in some cases, but morning people can be those things too. I can go to bed at six pm and I'll guarantee you I'll still be a wreck at six am.
Night owls work well in the evening. Even if some of them can force themselves to operate early, is it reasonable to expect them to sacrifice their best hours?
Every body is governed by circadian rhythm. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to be, but the majority tends to overrule the minority in this great experiment we call modern society. Unfortunately, the "majority" are not developing children, but adults in authority who are less affected by disruptions to their sleep and don't have to prioritize the health and wellbeing of their charges and so don't.
The second reason is more artificial. In the US, homework is given without any consideration for work or life schedules, let alone what other classes are assigning. I went to a "school of excellence" where I took eight classes each day, five days a week, and they all assigned roughly an hour's worth of homework each night. I had no time to work and barely any time to participate in extracurriculars without staying up each night until 11pm. Because I lived in a different city, I generally had to leave by 5:45am to make my zero period.
Can you tell me what my younger self could have done differently so they were able to be asleep by 9pm?
Consensus has emerged in the last few years that the circadian rhythm is mostly regulated hormonally, with a strong genetic factor. So that would be akin to telling a black person to "just get whiter skin".
> Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.
Do you have a reliable way of doing so? If yes, you are sitting on a potential billion-dollar innovation. I'm surprised you haven't monetized it yet.
There's enough artificial light that circadian rhythm barely applies to teens. Yes, I can change my sleep schedule, and have done so multiple times. If you're tired enough to be "sleep deprived" then you're going to be perfectly capable of going to sleep at 10 instead of 1am, barring some insomniac disorder. It's dark outside at both times. Circadian rhythm doesn't overrule real sleep deprivation. If you're tired, you can sleep at night.
> There's enough artificial light that circadian rhythm barely applies to teens.
Citation needed. Circadian rhythm is influenced by a lot more than simply ambiant light.
> If you're tired enough to be "sleep deprived" then you're going to be perfectly capable of going to sleep at 10 instead of 1am, barring some insomniac disorder
Insomniac disorders... like delayed hormonal response causing the circadian rhythm to be out of phase?
> If you're tired, you can sleep at night.
Note that the author eventually sleeps. It's simply out of phase.
I have tried sleeping earlier on times I'm sleep deprived, the only result is me staying in my bed for hours on end without sleeping. As a kid, as I mentioned in my original post, my parents would put me to bed with lights out around 9. I wasn't able to sleep despite being sleep deprived.
Nowadays, I work in a different time zone and due to work and meetings, I sleep around 3am every day. I fall asleep instantly and get my full 7-8 hours of sleep every day. Having the correct rhythm changes everything. I've never been able to do that earlier in the day and I tend to have extreme difficulty adjusting and sleeping earlier if I travel and have to deal with jetlag.
You're lucky but stop assuming that everyone is the same as you and that everyone can sleep early. If you've never known the feeling of being extremely tired and sleep deprived yet not being able to sleep then, I don't see how you can make generalisations and assume that it's the case for everyone else??
At this point, there's plenty of research that shows that your basic understanding is wrong, that circadian rhythm are not only a function of ambient light.
I cannot relate to being sleepy, lying in bed at night, yet unable to sleep. That sounds like the definition of an insomnia disorder. It seems to me that for most of the population, sleeping when sleepy is not going to be an impossible ask. Much of the difficulty goes away when you avoid artificial light, like from phones, in the evenings. It's just that teens would prefer to be sleepy rather than go to bed early and avoid phone.
When I was a teen, I didn't get much artificial light. There was no phones yet to ruin that since it was in the late 90s and iirc incandescent light bulbs do not emit as much of the problematic wavelength as modern lightbulbs. It was also light out in my bedroom between 9 and 9:30pm further reducing how much artificial light I got.
Nowadays, I'm extremely careful to use blue light filters in the evening, I use f.lux or equivalent on any devices I own (due to my work, I cannot avoid using those devices at night) and I make sure to choose appropriate lighting for my house.
It's not insomnia because if I go to sleep at 3am, I fall asleep instantly. When I go to sleep at that time and wake up every day around 10am, 11am (which I luckily can do because as an adult, I work remotely), I can be well rested, having a regular schedule and sleep very quickly. If it were insomnia, then the issue would exist
If, however, I try to go to sleep before midnight, even if I feel tired, I do not fall asleep. I'm pretty much the textbook definition of a night owl and pretty much an extreme one at that. It's not for lack of trying, because, when I first started working, I had to wake up early, had to try to go to sleep early and was unable to. It's been a significant handicap and it's why I had to find ways to get jobs that work with my schedule to improve my quality of life.
You might be right that teens have a tendency to want to push bedtime but there's also been plenty of studies that have shown that teens have better sleep when going to sleep late and waking up late. At this point, it's well established that people have different chronotype and a small minority are "night owls" to varying degrees.
Please read the research and don't make generalisations based on your own experience. I've been told before by acquaintances and family that not going to bed early and waking up early is unhealthy, lazy, name any negative adjectives you can think of. And yes, if I try hard, I can wake up early every weekday, it's just that I'll be exhausted by the end of the week, will need the weekend to recover and will have very poor quality of life.
> Much of the difficulty goes away when you avoid artificial light, like from phones, in the evenings. It's just that teens would prefer to be sleepy rather than go to bed early and avoid phone
Ahh ok, this isn't medical research. It's the good old boomer rant that "phone bad".
No, I couldn't sleep earlier, simple as that. In fact, I went on to have more serious insomnia around the time I left high school, which lasted for a few years.
Just start school later in the day. That's the solution. The real problem is that the rest of society wants to start at set times. People don't want their kids "home alone" after they've left for work or before they come home from work. All of society just isn't geared toward flexibility for its constituents.
Agreed. I know a lot of it is busing - they have to bus elementary kids then the MS/HS kids. But it should be switched at least. Young kids get up early, older kids don't.
Regardless, school in general should start later, and so should businesses. If I'm left to my own devices without external factors, I will go to sleep at 2am and get up at 10am. And that's what I did during the lockdowns. But otherwise, its punishing when I have to get up at 7am to be at work at 8 or 9.
'Early to bed, early to rise,' said Ben Franklin. Great advice for those whose chronotypes match this attitude. Not for the other 40% though ... for them, this 'virtue' is an inescapable prison.
"In morning people, sleep drive and chronotype tend to be aligned. Their internal clocks are pretty well synchronized with their over-all energy levels. For night owls, however, things get complicated. When the sun comes up, the light resets their circadian clocks, telling them to wake up. But, because of their chronotypes, they don’t have much energy and they want to go back to sleep." - [https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/moral-morn...]
In Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker there is a fascinating chapter about how teenagers are biologically programmed to sleep later and wake up later as well. He then explains that basically sending teenagers to school early in the morning is terrible health-wise and prevents optimal brain development.
Anecdata of course but I remember much like you being extremely sleepy at school all day and sleeping a lot on weekends.
It's not really a case of typos or the odd error, more like a disinterest in the truth and a preference to just write a narrative and sprinkling fake citations to make it look scientific.
Just the first person to really review it, found 15 major errors and inaccuracies in the first chapter, and gave up due to the time it would take to review the rest of the book.
On top of that, the author doubles down when called out, and doesn't want to discuss any of the actual details or admit any errors or misrepresentations, like cutting data out of a graph when it would give readers a different conclusion than the text.
Some of the errors are positively dangerous, like claiming that the recommended number of hours of sleep is 8, instead of the true figure of 7-9.
"I spent more than 130 hours over the last 2 months researching and writing this essay (~5 hours to write the outline; ~60 hours to get to the first draft; ~65 hours to edit and fact-check), which constituted essentially all of my surplus free time over this time period. Continuing at the same pace, it would take me more than 3,000 hours to check the entire book. 3,000 hours is the equivalent of 75 weeks or 1.4 years of full-time work."
1AM? you are tough mate. I was in bed by 10PM-10:30 in high school, broken in every sense of the word. If I was lucky I could actually pull off a 11PM but it was rare.
Oh I was tired just wasn't able to sleep... Once I left high school and started university, I did pretty well on a schedule of sleeping at 1/2 am and waking up around 9:30 before going to class (unfortunately skipping any classes that were scheduled from 8 to 10).
And led to a huge retardation (in the literal sense) of learning. My kid was way more active and alert, but the schools weren't prepared for this and they basically just read books together; she's way behind in math still.
That all said, school hours were set mostly because public schools double as a daycare. I don't know many people who drive in at 7am anymore, it's definitely time to reset expectations here.
High schoolers do not need daycare; they also do not need parents to dress them and get them to school. They should be able to manage those things on their own, and take care of themselves for a few unsupervised hours a day.
There are a lot of high schoolers who do not live within walking distance of their school, or who aren't safe walking to their school. Buses are unreliable, easy to miss, and public transportation can be expensive.
As others have said, in Europe (at least in the cities where I grew up) transportation is not an issue.
I went to several schools and kids being driven to school has always been an exception. They mostly walked or took public transport [0]. My sister went to high-school in a more rural area (read far-away suburb) and kids from the surrounding towns used to take the school bus.
Yet, school still started very early, a little past 8:00 AM. I absolutely loathed having to get up so early in the morning (7-ish) and used to be half asleep for the first few periods.
While US issues around transportation certainly don't help, there must be something else going on with the school schedules since they seem to be roughly the same in areas where transportation is not an issue.
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[0] I know there were exceptions for kids living far away, I was one of them since we moved during high-school, but I didn't change schools. However, this is absolutely not the norm where I grew up.
Surely it depends on the size of the city/town/village?
I grew up in a small village in rural Scotland, and there was exactly one bus a day to/from School. If I missed it, I had a 5 mile walk to get there. I got a bike at some point, but twisty rural roads were not the safest place to be riding.
I'm actually in Paris, but grated, I have no idea how things are in Barcelona or London.
I agree that transportation here has many issues and I absolutely hate it, but when I was a kid [0] I could get to school fine with the suburban train. My classmates had no issue getting there with the bus (regular, not school bus).
> Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
Sure, I can tell it from the Paris metro, too. The reason is that people tend to go away on vacation. This also explains the usual spikes in traffic jams the weekend right at the start and at the end of vacations.
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[0] I'm in my thirties, so that wasn't a long time ago
Before that, schools tend to be denser. Because I had to attend some special classes, I couldn't go to my local school and needed to go a further one. It was a 30-minute walk.
Normally, kids would go to their local schools, of which I passed one on my way. My local one was in the opposite direction, 2 minutes away from my house.
Not really, here school ends up at a given date (it’s generally around the 20th of June). It doesn’t matter if it’s Tuesday, and most parents will be still working until August.
Did you just claim London has inadequate public transport? When I lived there I had 24 hour busses that could get me from one side of the city to the other, three different train lines, a boat route, and public cycles within walking distance of my flat.
Sure, maybe in smaller cities that’s a problem, but honestly if you’re choosing to drive round London then you’re taking a massively suboptimal method of transport.
In Paris or London, kids are not given a ride to school for a lack of alternatives. No personal experience with Barcelona, but the public transport network looks pretty good, too.
Of course, public transport shouldn't be necessary for most city kids, which ought to have a school in walking and certainly biking[1] distance. It'd be interesting to see the distribution of distance to school in different locations and for different years. Increases in suburbanization are bound to increase the average distance to school; but rural kids even in my generation and more so in my parents and grandparents generation managed much longer commutes without a car as a matter of course.
[1] Maybe kids use the bike less since there's a perception that it's gotten more dangerous. A perception that's not totally wrong, at least in Germany: the number of bike accidents has increased from ~74k in 2000 to 87k in 2019[2], though at least the number of fatal accidents decreased in the same time.
You’re assuming that all schools are the same, they’re certainly not.
Yes, kids that already live in the city won’t obviously get taken to school by car, but most good schools in the periphery better have a way to handle the cars.
Well, since it's now obvious to you that children living in the city -- a city like London, Paris or Barcelona -- won't get taken to school by car, we seem to be mostly in agreement.
Growing up in the countryside, basically no kid was driven to elementary school, except maybe some first graders early on. You either walk, come by bicycle or take a bus.
I wouldn't call 8:00 "very early". Elementary school started 7:25 for me, "Gymnasium" 7:20. Didn't really have a problem with it, same with my classmates. If you keep a decent sleeping schedule, don't play games on some device right before bed or laze about all day, it's a non-issue under normal circumstances.
Is that actually a thing though? When I got my own TV, I usually went to bed at ~22:15 because that is when the first evening movie ended. And that was before and after puberty. Eventually, at age 17, I found something I really wanted to watch which aired from 22:00 to 0:00, so that's how long I stayed awake. It had nothing to do with my body. Similarly, talking with classmates, I noticed that girls went to bed earlier (like around 21:00) and that was most likely because there wasn't anything interesting for them to do at later hours, while we boys either watched TV or played games. Almost all the boys quit around 22:00 which would make it a very healthy 8 hour sleep until they got up again.
And that is aside from being physically active during the day which makes sleeping in rather simple. Of course, if you sit on your bum all the day, sleeping in does become more difficult as there is little physical exhaustion.
Lived in paris for ~23 years, and took public transports to go to school everyday starting from secondary school (~11 years old). Same was going for my siblings, and a huge part of my classmates, including those that needed to take the RER.
The metro can be unsafe at night, but usually not at times where children commute.
This article is from a Swiss University. In the Canton of Zurich, kids are supposed to be walking to school alone by age 6 (law mandates that there must be a school within $WALKING_DISTANCE of any residential building).
High schoolers that need to be taken to school by their parents are definitely the exception.
In Europe, it's very unusual for a kid older than ~9 years to be driven to school.
Here in the UK there are parking restrictions around practically every school to stop parents clogging up the roads to drop off or collect their kids. I'd suggest that's evidence that a lot of children still get taken to school by car.
I have to anecdotally disagree. I am living near to a big high school. Every morning parents, primarily mothers, drive their high school kids into school.
One has to know that every 10 minutes the train stops at the school as it has their own stop.
Busses also stop at school.
Nonetheless the amount of kids in their teens being driven to school by parents is staggering.
I also lived next to a high school. Anecdotally I can say that the amount of kids being driven to school has risen. There is a huge traffic jam now every morning, people in the nearby buildings have adapted to either leave 30min before or after the traffic jam. It definitely wasn't as bad when I was a kid.
When I was 9 years old in Europe, I was walking to school almost two kilometers on my own. And since that age I've never been hauled to any school by my parents using any means of transportation.
Here, public transport is super normal way to go to school, work, whatever. High schoolers generally do manage to catch those busses. Middle schooler do manage to catch those busses.
Once in a while someone comes in late. But, it is not that regular thing. Most of them in fact catch busses just fine.
This is simply untrue. Loads of students in the "high school" age range manage to get to school on time most days. Depending on the country, your 16-18 year old student might not even live at home.
I think discussing this topic without mentioning the country you live in is not meaningful. I assume you are not Swiss (as the article is from a swiss university)?
Because I am and I went to school by bus beginning with 12 years, and busses here are reliable (like "by minute reliable").
I'm in complete agreement, but 13 year olds cannot secure their own transportation.
Most school districts I've lived in seem designed to ensure parents drive their kids to school.
As an example, my current district won't offer a bus unless you live more than 3 miles away. 3 miles is a giant distant to walk every morning. Luckily, we live about a half mile away and she bikes to school. I wouldn't let her bike 3 miles, because it would mean crossing multiple highways.
> but 13 year olds cannot secure their own transportation.
Pretty much everyone here bikes to work at that age. Even if its 20km through wind and rain. On top of that, being dropped off by mommy and daddy does not impress your fellow students!
Over two hours of biking in rain every day sounds like quite a lot to be honest. And I definitely would not want my kid to drive 40km a day in snow or on icy road. Even if split into two 20km segments.
I had 10km from home to university. I would definitely not want to do double that amount everyday. Even as I was in shape at the time, doing it on bike everyday would be severely unappealing. It would probably also meant that biking has to be the only sport I do.
Biking 40km a day does amount to sport. Walking is not sport either, but hiking 8 hours a day amount to one too.
If nothing else, both take huge amount of time. If you go those 40km slowly (or environment prevents it), you are looking at very long commute. If you go them fast, then you cant claim it is not a sport.
Maybe, but you'll find that the first thing that needs to go if you're serious about bike-centred commuting is the idea that it is a sport. It's not, just like how commuting by car isn't a rally.
I’m not really disagreeing with you, though I will note in our district, parents who are willing to advocate for transportation options get a better result than parent who just go along. There’s a dirty little secret across the country where districts have limited bus options in order to save money (and due to driver shortages). So I’d you don’t demand that they make a bus stop near your house for your kid, they may just overlook you. I thought it wa s just my district until I did a little reading.
I think the idea is that you need to stagger the bus trips (so once bus can service 2-3 schools a day). And the high school students should be last since many families rely on older children to watch younger children in the morning.
“Should” and “can be trusted to” are two totally different things.
Much as we want to give kids responsibility and as much as some kids will thrive off it, others don’t yet that the maturity to look after themselves even for short periods.
And here lies the problem. You often end up setting up social systems to support the worst cases rather than the best of even average populous.
I figured that would get downvoted by one of the liberals on here. Unfortunately civilised society doesn’t work to ideals and thus sometimes you need to impose boundaries rather than work entirely on faith (hence why we have laws).
It’s one of those things you realise once you are responsible for kids of your own (and no, pets don’t count). Much as you cringe setting the same boundaries you hated growing up, you realise you realise they exist for a reason.
And led to a huge retardation (in the literal sense) of learning.
Which is fine (from the point of view of the people who run these schools). Because the modern HS process is designed around passing tests, and generating positive signals for admissions to elite schools. Which sometimes overlap with the goal of learning -- but in general are orthogonal to it.
By and large, "learning" as such has come to have at best anciliary value in the modern HS experience.
So what about enrichment activities such as sports or clubs? Would you timeshift them to mornings if we're starting at 10?
Continuing to tack them on to the end of the day would not only cut into traditional family time in the evening and but you'd also run out of daylight which for things like cross-country wouldn't work.
I would have liked to have slept in too, but I wouldn't want to at the expense of killing football and drama club.
I work in the lab of the author of this study. I can tell you that this was also a concern of the high school students; they were given a questionnaire about when THEY would like to start school, and they only wanted to shift start times by about half an hour for this very reason, and were concerned about when to compensate for the time, preferring shorter breaks than ending later. Fortunately for them, Swiss high school schedules are crazy with lots of big gaps, so improvements can be made to start times before sacrificing end times.
Only a small percentage of students take part in any extracurricular, especially the time intensive ones. Better to let everyone sleep in and let various sports and clubs find ways to adapt their schedules
That sounds like hell. I was forced into music and soccer for ~6 years as a child, and my complete lack of talent is the only thing that stopped my parents from keeping me at it, they thought like you and didn't care that it was miserable and boring. We are not all the same, and we don't all need to be the same.
> they thought like you and didn't care that it was miserable and boring
If kids were allowed to not do things they identify as find miserable and boring, practically everything in the world would be off the table and the next generatation would be totally and utterly fucked.
I read that as a lack of options. The advocacy here is for some kind of enrichment. Could be a mathematics club or a meditation group, it doesn't matter. Just something.
Yes. Arguably the more important societal benefit to learn in school is the soft skills of sociability, teamwork, and things in that class.
We certainly need the doctors and engineers of tomorrow, but they won't be very useful without healthy functioning societies in which can exercise these skills.
We also need a bunch of artisanal non-knowledge workers and laborers and should stop pretending those are inferior careers. A hard working, say, trashman is just as dignified as any other profession and if that's in someone's future, then we should make sure they can take and do the job with pride.
You just invented private schools, or at least everyone I have experienced ... every child (up to about 14/15 - after which you could scale back) mandatory to do sport, music, 1 extra activity/club.
Organised by the school and generally carried out 3-5pm & Saturday morning.
- 100 minute long lessons - because they found that it minimises transition time between lessons
- 35 minute lunch break and very short mid lesson breaks
- twilight lessons - lessons both before and after school to study additional subjects (which is optional)
Nah, they will move after. So then we will discuss issue of teenagers never seeing sun. And then teenagers will move late activities even later and push sleep time 2-3 hours up, to make up for it. Then we will discuss that 10am is absurdly soon.
My (primary school age) daughter greatly benefited from a more bespoke, one-to-one approach, and came on leaps and bounds during home schooling. But my wife wasn't working, so was fully available for her, which of course was not possible for everyone.
I am well aware of this. That doesn’t negate my point or the actual, correct usage of the word in non offensive fashion. There is a difference between “retarding” as is used here and calling someone ”retarded” as an insult. The difference seems to be lost on the perpetually offended.
If you use it to insult and offend, is that allowed or met with pitchforks in the US? Where I live there are many Irish, Scottisch and non native English, people use it all the time; to describe slow people and to offend. No one cares (even if they are the ones being offended). But when one of the Irish guys used it to offend a US couple who were vocal flatearthers, because they were flatearthers. Wow, that turned I a huge shouting match. Of course they left as, again, no-one here cares so they shouted and made a big stink but everyone was, eh yeah, whatever. In that case I am not sure if they were offended because of the use and connotations of the specific word (aka if he called them dumb, stupid, slow, backward etc they would have responded differently) or they were just offended. I think the latter and they used the woke thing as an excuse. But maybe that is not true: couldn't ask them in that state but I was curious.
I think that depends on your audience. I’ve worked with some people who looked at me like I just kicked their dog if I used it to refer to something as dumb in an offensive manner. Others don’t care.
Personally I’ve tried to curb my use of the offensive definition/use of the word to be respectful but don’t yell at people who do use it that way.
Yeah, agreed. Just be nice and try not to offend people. I don’t respect people with religion too much, including flatearthers, but doesn’t make much sense to aggravate people or spend energy on people I don’t care about anyway. When people start to talk gibberish, I just excuse myself and sit somewhere else. No insults needed.
Still I would say a thick skin is better; many cultures and countries you might visit will use words you find offensive in normal conversation. You might have a bad blood pressure vacation if that affects you. Like in Spain sometimes it sounds like they are stringing swear words together while they are just having a friendly conversation.
Of course, I’m actually a Spanish citizen so I’m well aware of how it can sound at times if you’re not used to it lol.
I do think not aggravating is key, but also agree that thicker skin might be wiser since you really cannot control what other people say and do. I still use words that are considered offensive at times just by nature of it being a habit but really am trying to cut down so my son doesn’t start up with them either.
Redefining a word to only be offensive is silly. Some words are bad, full stop. Other words have definitions that pre-date their offensive usage and are still used in regular speech.
Pointing this out to someone looking to be offended is an attempt to fight back at that nonsense. The original comment asking to use a different word was unnecessary and not relevant to the discussion in any way.
Personally I don't see why I should immediately capitulate when these ludicrous demands are made. Defending the use of the word "retarded" is low effort and low risk, and I'll continue to do that even if it sidetracks conversations.
“Retard” is often used as a pejorative. I’ve never heard “retardation” used as a pejorative, when people use that word they seem to be using it correctly in a non offensive context.
I think the post was clear as to which meaning they were referring to. I would also argue that ‘slow’ is frequently used in the same way as one the one that you are concerned with.
I was in Grade 7 the first time they closed schools here in Ontario. I certainly didn't get enough sleep, usually around five or six, maybe seven hours at most. The second time around was even worse. I didn't do work, I didn't go outside, all I did was mess about on my computer. In general, it was- and is- a horribly unhealthy experience for me, both mentally and physically. Although, I still struggle with this "remote learning", I've matured enough to get by. Now I'm in Grade 9, and, sure enough, we're at it again.
If I were to guess how all this will end is some side effective of restrictions will read its ugly head - mental health, economic recession, or just general civil disobedience.
Then suddenly we’ll be told “trade offs need to be made” and “the vaccines provide enough protection to relax restrictions”.
The fact that we’re 2 years into it and with a population that is mostly vaccine and at a much reduced risk yet the restriction seem to be the same or worse?
The restrictions are definitely not the same as they were 2 years ago when this all started. Schools shut, everyone working from home, no bar/cafe/restaurants, no outdoor social activities qas what we had then. In the last two weeks I've been to a bar twice and the cinema. I don't know of anywhere in the world (but could be wrong) that is still in that form of lock down right now.
2 years ago exactly, yes but in the spirit of HN you should take the best possible reading. If you compare to March 2020 instead the restrictions are still less than they were then.
I'm terribly sorry for what happened to you. It shouldn't have happened. After the first few months the data was very clear that schools were safe to open. They absolutely shouldn't be closed right now.
You are a victim of cowardly bureaucrats and powerful and wealthy elderly people who desperately want to cling to more years of their lives despite already being at the end. They don't care at all if they rob you of your future. They tell themselves little lies like "kids are resilient" to make themselves feel better.
They were wrong to tell people they couldn't go to playgrounds and ignore the early science that showed that the virus didn't spread outdoors. They've never apologized for that mistake. When you see people walking around outside wearing masks, know that they have bought into a foolish lie completely removed from any form of science.
Your teachers were all too happy to have the schools closed despite being in age groups where they were also not majorly at risk especially after being vaccinated.
I live in Colorado, and we are now at a point in this state where omicron is the dominant strain. Everyone here is catching it and waking up to the fact that it's a cold and very little more. Your schools are being shut for no reason other than cowardice.
Don't be afraid to call it what it is. You are surrounded by cowards. Cowards are always quick to call the brave foolish and reckless. It's how they make themselves feel better.
Look around you and learn. You are witnessing a reality that I was naive to for far too long:
Most people would rather do what is popular than what is right. Education is not inoculation to groupthink. Rather, it often is paired with brainwashing and a propensity to outsource critical thinking to central authority figures.
If you add up all of the deaths from this virus under the age of 40, they make up less than 1% of the total. Your education was sacrificed to protect a population of people that are no longer working or paying taxes. In Japan when the nuclear accident at Fukushima happened, older plant workers stepped up to walk into the radiation to spare younger generations. In our society we did the opposite.
I hope you have a good home life because that would make you one of the more fortunate victims of these foolish lockdowns. I grew up in an abusive home in the rural southern United States. There were weeks where I begged for Monday morning to come as soon as possible so I could escape. School was a refuge for me. And and there are many many children with far worse homes than I had who were forced to be shut into them with abusive parents who were put into an even worse mood then they were typically in before the pandemic. The statistics on child abuse show this as well.
Like the fools in my nation who rushed us into the Iraq war on false pretenses, the people who are wrong now will never admit it. As the years go by and it becomes more clear that this was utter foolishness, many will pretend that they were opposed to the lockdowns and these other ridiculous policies. They will be lying.
I have two children of my own. My wife works as a kindergarten teacher. The children she is seeing in her classroom now are incredibly stunted. Every day she comes home with new stories about how bad it is. They have been locked in their houses for 2 years, given iPads as babysitters by lazy or tired or emotionally exhausted parents. It's an utter horror what the cowards have done to our children.
I know this comment will be downloaded to oblivion by the cowards. They are the majority of the people on this website. They're the majority in tech now. Most will never start companies. They just follow the path laid out for them, study algorithm interview books, and go get a desk at Google working on a widget in a product that nobody cares about it or will ever see. They all owe you an apology but they will never apologize or admit they were wrong.
On behalf of them I am sorry. Many of us tried to stop them but we were censored, we were ridiculed, we were mocked, we were fired. There were many who would raise questions about the lockdowns in private, but in public they would go along with the crowd like the cowards they were. Never be one of those. They are the worst of us.
The fact that you're on this website is a good sign so I'm sure you're going to be alright. But you're at a good age to recognize how foolish many of the adults around you are. I was in that place when I was your age.
Could not agree more... strong post. Moved from Chicago to Texas in 2020 and have been grateful for in-person schooling from the onset of the move. Watching my son's 60 year old 1st grade teacher stumble through hours of zoom was what did it for me.
Sadly, fear porn still has concerned parents forcing their kids to mask up, outdoors - even in Texas. My heart breaks for them.
Having been to various parts of Texas in the summertime on numerous occasions, I can't imagine what it's like to have to wear a mask outdoors as a child.
Glad you made the move and it sounds like you're enjoying it.
It's humid. It can't be comfortable in a mask while outdoors. Will be interesting to see the science on the impact of not being able to communicate with facial expression for a chunk of your developmental years. Maybe it will be nothing, but probably not
Yes, I'm in Austin. Love it. Knew I'd love it. Was just a matter of time before we got here. Yes, there's a broad political spectrum with people here, but by and large, people are kind and friendly. Glad I bought a house 1.5 years ago. Can't see things slowing down any time soon.
Funny enough in 2014 I almost moved to Austin. I had an offer from a local startup. Thankfully I picked up some bad vibes in the interviews and said no. A couple of months later it turned out that the company had been fraudulently winning contracts from the state with shady connections. I would have been unemployed 3 months after moving there.
My wife and I have talked about moving to Texas but we wouldn't be very close to Austin. We would probably get a big piece of land in a decidedly less hip part of the state.
I love the Hill Country, and if you haven't had a chance you should go check out San Antonio. The Riverwalk is a tourist trap that's fun for kids, but the restaurants in other parts of San Antonio phenomenal. Tejano culture/food is amazing. I really like New Braunfels too.
Colorado as a state is a pretty great place. Our governor has been very good in the pandemic and in my opinion has probably been one of the best Democratic governors. He has a pretty strong background in business and from the very beginning of the pandemic was engaging routinely with business leaders including executives at the company I was working at then. He has that perfect mix of classic liberal values with a dash of libertarianism.
Unfortunately the county we live in has gone a little off the rails when it comes to public health. Although I am an atheist, my wife works at a Christian school and my kids get a big tuition discount, so I enrolled both of them in that school. The academics at the school are top-notch and it's pretty cool that my son's calculus and computer science teacher graduated from MIT a few years ago. The public high school doesn't compare. The fact that it was barely open last year is a whole separate issue. One of the first things I noticed is that the county health department has routinely harassed this school. They never have set foot on the public schools that my kids were at previously. I know some of the principals and confirmed that they have never had a single inspection from the county health department.
I have a strong suspicion but obviously can't prove, that the current county health director doesn't like Christians. I suspect that she has a lot of emotional scars since she is a lesbian and likely spent decades wanting to get married and having people who claim to represent Christianity preventing her from doing so. I don't fault her for that, but I do fault her for allowing her emotional feelings to clearly create a bias that influences her very much targeted and selective enforcement. Another aspect of her that I really dislike is the fact that she is a PhD in sports injuries, but acts as if this education is remotely related to viral epidemiology. She really doesn't appear to know what she's talking about and has aggressively complained in some leaked emails about the governor not "being strict enough because of his libertarian streak". She requires that student athletes wear masks while playing sports. This is insanity to me. The idea that cloth masks are effective pretty much became out of date once Delta hit. With omicron it's just absurd. We are talking about measles level transmissibility and it's been known for decades that cloth masks aren't effective for that kind of virus. The county requires that all of the athletes be vaccinated as well, so the mask requirement on top of that is a bit hard to swallow.
None of this foolishness is going to age well. My subjective opinion after reading the leaked emails is that she has definitely allowed the power to go to her head. The language she uses is very aggressive and indicates a big us versus them mentality when it comes to religious schools.
These kinds of local government officials have increasingly made Texas look good to us.
Have you traveled recently? It's a bit of a shock to go from a place where people are relatively unpanicked and show up on the west coast and realize that people are grossly overestimating their risk and acting out from that. They don't seem to be aware of how normal life is in most of the country. They have this picture of Florida as being a place where body bags are being piled up outside of hospitals. It must be painful for the minority of those folks who stop and look at the data and realize that most of the sacrifices they have made in their lives have been for nothing. Florida is spiking in new cases like many states, but the number per 100,000 is less than New York's is. That really must bother people in NY.
> When you see people walking around outside wearing masks, know that they have bought into a foolish lie completely removed from any form of science.
It's 19F outside right now. I wear a mask outside because it keeps my face warm. No idea why people haven't been doing this all along. That you just assume everyone wearing a mask outdoors is a rube says more about you than them. Your post isn't being downvoted by fools and cowards, it's being downvoted because it's rude and condescending.
As if I was talking about people in winter conditions wearing gaiters or actual ski masks to protect from the cold.
Wearing surgical masks outdoors in normal temperatures is not based in science. It's theoretical at best, but there's never been any data to refute the fact that almost all transmission occurs within households and enclosed public places. It's just fearful people calming their anxiety with something that does as much good as a copper bracelet or a crystal amulet. It's a great way for politicians to "show action", by mandating them outside in large cities after they have imposed indoor masks mandates, but still have rising cases.
Sorry I offended you by criticizing a superstitious ritual to appease the pagan god of covid.
And yes I have no business assuming that people wearing surgical masks on hiking trails in 70° weather are doing it because of the virus. I'm sure many of them are wearing it to keep their faces warm, because that totally makes sense. /s
Regardless I'd be willing to tolerate this stupidity if the schools were kept open. A little performative superstition is a price I'm willing to pay to keep kids in school. I'll wear copper bracelet, turquoise necklaces, crucifixes, whatever it takes to keep kids in school.
Kids sitting indoors isolated from their peers in front of computer screens is not a good thing. You didn't comment on that at all.
AFAIK masks outside in big cities is because people otherwise tend to forget to put them on when going inside (say in a shop). Add this to surgical masks being designed to protect others rather than the wearer, (it was really noticeable to me when after switching from a surgical to a FFP2 mask my ~hay fever symptoms disappeared), and you can see how it makes sense to switch that mandate on when it looks like hospitals are going to overflow soon.
I'm not talking about a gaiters and ski masks situation. I'm talking about a normal winter day, walking down the street, wearing a normal standard cloth mask. It keeps my face warm and I like it. If you assume I or others are doing it because of covid, it just a reflection of your personal biases.
> Kids sitting indoors isolated from their peers in front of computer screens is not a good thing. You didn't comment on that at all.
In my experience as a teacher, some of my students flourished in this setting, others did not. It's not a good thing in some ways, it's a good thing in other ways (hence this article). If you want to see more of my thoughts on this see my other post I just wrote.
I look forward to looking at your other post and hearing your experiences as a teacher. My wife and her colleagues have experiences that are not positive but perhaps that's a reflection of the age group.
I think you are not understanding that it's not a bias if I see people wearing mask outdoors in completely mild weather and assume it's for the virus. Do you really think that people need to keep their faces warm when it's 65° and sunny? If I was walking around in freezing cold temperatures complaining about this you would have some fair point although a cloth mask is a grossly inferior way to keep your face warm compared to a gator where a ski mask.
Do you wear your mask outdoors when it's 70°? If you saw someone wearing a mask outdoors and 70° weather wouldn't you assume it's for disease protection?
When you see people walking around outside wearing masks, know that they have bought into a foolish lie completely removed from any form of science.
Now you've shifted to:
it's not a bias if I see people wearing mask outdoors in completely mild weather and assume it's for the virus.
Which is much more reasonable. You've qualified it to particular situations rather than a blanket "outdoors", and then said you assume rather than you know.
Other possible explanations people wear masks outdoors other than being gullible fools:
- they forgot to take it off. That happens to me sometimes when I'm deep in thought.
- they have a cold sore and want to hide that.
- they came from indoors and their hands are full so they can't take it off.
- they came from indoors and are going indoors into another building.
etc.
Did you ever consider any of these alternatives? Or actually, have you asked any of these people why they wear a mask outdoors?
I certainly haven't conducted street surveys of any kind, but yes I actually have asked people in a polite and kind manner why they are wearing mask outside. I did this when I would go pick up my son from his school and we all had to wait out front in about half of the parents were wearing mask while waiting outdoors. As I recall this was in May. I did ask a lady whose daughter was in my son's class. She bluntly stated that it was due to an abundance of caution regarding the virus. In neighboring Boulder County, it was mandatory to wear a mask while picking up children outside of school. I know this for a fact because I accompanied a buddy to pick up his daughter one day and we had to wear masks to comply with the school regulations.
I find it odd that you are expecting me to have a null hypothesis that the masks that have become widely worn in large cities in the midst of a pandemic are not related to the pandemic.
If it was remotely common to see people wearing face coverings 2 years ago I would understand your point. It wasn't as we all know. It became a thing as a result of the pandemic.
That being said all of the explanations you offered are reasonable although the cold sore one was rather amusing to me. I haven't had one in many years but I'm sure by the time I get my next one the masks Will be long gone and I will wish they were a thing again.
The aspect of it that does bug me is the performative nature of explicitly putting on masks in outdoor situations. President Biden came to my area yesterday due to the recent wildfires we experienced. He was outdoors the entire time wearing a mask along with his entire team. He's sitting there trying to connect with people who have lost their homes but they can't see each other's faces at all. For no reason at all based on science. The performative nature of this is rather obvious because you frequently see scenes where they are not wearing a mask of any sort until a camera shows up in which case they immediately put a mask on before posing for the picture.
My primary complaint is not people incidentally wearing a mask as they come out of a building but people who are fairly aggressive and demanding that others wear face coverings outdoors whenever they are near them. I had to go to LA for work several months ago and discovered that it is common to have people yell out their car windows at you if you were walking around on a horse trail in a suburban neighborhood (I was somewhere not too far from Brentwood on this trail) without a mask on. My coworker was laughing when I looked at him with an incredulous face. His response was "that's how it is out here."
Anyway you make a good point that I should not be so quick to judge in the case of the exceptions above. Fair. I will concede. That being said requiring people legally to wear them outdoors is stupid and nonsensical and not in line with any form of science.
Thinking that lockdowns are a solution to anything, including a pandemic, was a neat way to drive many people insane. I won’t tell my personal… happenings… but I double on your difficulty.
Please elaborate how are lockdowns not a solution to stop the spread of a pandemic, because they most certainly are, and stopped every country's health system to get to the terrible state Italy's got at the beginning.
It's actually quite easy - the virus is airborne. If most people stay indoors and don't meet other people, the spread is significantly stopped.
Those are valid and debatable issues, and a lot can be said about them ( like that the economic downturn isn't optional and is due to the pandemic, as countries like Sweden and states in the US which didn't do any sort of lockdown showed us).
However, the question is do lockdowns help against a pandemic? I don't see how anyone can argue with that. The downsides are indeed significant and need to be taken into account, but it's just a fact that lockdowns severely limit the spread of an airborne virus like COVID-19.
We don’t have the figures yet, that’s why we think lockdowns helped. But cholesterol doesn’t kill immediately. Alcohol doesn’t kill immediately. Loneliness doesn’t kill immediately, it slowly settles as friendships got destroyed in anger during the pandemic, and new meetups didn’t arrive, and the guy becomes homeless 5 years later. It may take years, but a lot of human misery will have been triggered by choosing lockdowns. We don’t even have the figures yet.
> severely limits the spread of an airborne virus
Yes, while we’re locked, and then it just takes weeks to recirculate as normal. It took >1 year to get the vaccines, only a 1 year lockdown would have solved us, therefore it is …not a solution to anything to lock people down.
Not a secret that solitary confinement in prisons is used to destroy someone. Lockdowns made a lot of people completely crazy, particularly the people you don’t notice immediately. But who cares, we’ve solved Covid! Wait, we didn’t.
We solved the initial exponential growths that were threatening to or did overload the medical system. It was the only possible solution.
Edited to add: furthermore, in most countries deaths not related to Covid fell drastically compared to previous years, including suicides. Yes, the fallout medium-long term is still to come, but you can't deny that it did stop the immediate very dangerous impact. In countries like Italy and France military hospitals had to be deployed, and many in intensive care were transferred to neighbouring countries. You can't just dismiss this and say people stuck alone at home had it worse than those on the ventilators.
Did you even read it? They're arguing that keeping a strict lockdown for long has too serious negative effects, not that it isn't effective in combating an airborne virus, which it is.
Furthermore, it's from October 2020, more than a year ago. We have vaccines now and they're helping, but not stopping the virus fully. Hospitals are still filling up in some places, and for that various stages of restrictions up to lockdown are the main ways stop it.
Too little, too late. If only we have been much faster and stronger to react we could have avoided this WHOLE epidemic with a mere ~1 month hard lockdown... (instead we indeed seem to have picked one of the worst ways to deal with it, short of course of no measures at all)
Because improving learning outcomes is only 1 of the jobs schools have. Providing public child care and supervision is another main one and there priorities can conflict.
This reminds me of the book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. He writes about the centrality of sleep to the proper development of young minds. Early school starting times – particularly in the US, where almost half of public high schools start before 7.20am – are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers. There is serious evidence, Walker suggests, for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia.
It seems that adolescents tend to like to sleep for longer than older adults. That just seems how people are wired at different stages of life; nothing wrong with either preference. But the older adults run society, which means that getting up early is seen as the “productive” and “A-type” thing to do, and in turn we end up structuring people’s schedules accordingly. Adolescents of course don’t get a vote on when school is supposed to start.
There was a movement in my town to push back school start times. However, there are some non-immediately-obvious consequences. Due to limited school buses, school start times need to be staggered, so the options were either to push all school start times back or swap school start times so adolescents start later and younger students start earlier. Pushing all start times back would have resulted with some schools ending around 6pm or 7pm, and swapping start times would have elementary schoolers arriving home before their middle/high schooler babysitters. While it still could have been all worked out, the district came to the conclusion that it would require too large a logistical shift to be practical.
I taught high school remotely in the spring of 2020 and I thought it was wonderful. Medical professionals reported a large uptick in mental health issues for teens and consequently our district will probably never close like that again (but think of the children!). From my perspective, however, I noted that many of my students who were miserable in school due to social issues flourished during the shutdown. Personally, I never felt better (sleep!) and the experience has prompted me to plan towards early retirement.
I always wondered if the medical professionals in our area fully understood the impact on ALL our students and not just the ones who normally flourish with in-person schooling.
One thing I've noticed (obviously completely anecdotal) in the workplace is the vocality of who's suffering during the pandemic is biased heavily to extroverts.
The introverts never mention how they feel until directly asked and they usually like the new arrangement better
So in meetings it often creates a biased sense of everything being bad, but actual surveys of the employees paints a different picture.
Important Note: this is a press release for a study linked at the bottom that cannot be found in the target system. I'd really appreciate if we tried to post the original paper vs. the university's PR piece when submitting this sort of topic. As is, all I got out of it was the headline "Teenagers prefer to sleep in later", because there's no mention of the methodology or underlying data supporting any claims specific to the experiment we're all currently running.
In spite of national and state level legislation aimed to standardize schooling, the reality is that education tends to be a local product. That is - I’ve heard bad stories from parents in parts of the country and world, but locally our kids really didn’t experience much negative. Our superintendent ordered chromebooks and hot spots for the district in December 2019 (!!!) because he was so afraid of what was coming. We are just a rural 30,000 person community so it may have been a lot easier for us to mobilize than other places. My own three kids are very different types of students, but it wasn’t a bad experience for any of the three. It was actually a blessing for my youngest - she was able to set her own schedule each day and as a result jumped way ahead academically. Now that we are back in the classroom, I definitely see more sleep and quality of life issues.
I think your superintendent ordering chromebooks in dez 2019 is great, but how did he know. Basically the first whistle blowing was on 30.12.19 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
Don’t remember the detailed timeline, but there were popular subreddits with reports from China and individual people were definitely taking action. Even r/wsb was in on the stock market crash back in January.
Same with WFH during the pandemic. My sleep quality was incredible and quality of life was through the roof.
My @sshole boss plucked us all back into the office just before Xmas and I'm back where I started.
Note: if you're a boss and hate your staff being WFH, some of us hate you right back and will be looking for a new job. Factor that into your bullsh!t policies and untrustworthiness.
I'm a father of an 11 and a 13 year old. and the School from home lockdown period was fine for us. no real issues. I worked, I set them up with PC's and good internet. all was handled fairly easily.
Could easily do it all again if we had to. but I doubt we will. (australia)
I used to fall asleep on my bus journey and in class. I was punished for cheating because I had opened a test without realising what it was. Granted, I stayed awake into the early hours of the morning reading books but I still think schools should be starting much later. Though, schools are primarily daycares, so that wouldn't work.
Night owls perform best in evening hours. There's more and more research about this - hopefully this will get incorporated into school and work system in coming years. At the moment its just "one for all" approach and it works great for larks, but brings problems to owls (not only in schools, but later on in adult life).
All three of my kids start school at 9am. We don't even have to wake them up. They wake up on their own and it's no rush to get them to school. It's fantastic.
The study seems to limit itself to 3 months which is basically a vacation. I'm curious if those adolescents think after a year that their quality of life is better.
Fascinating. Just from the title, would have expected the total opposite: Adolescents not sleeping properly because they are indoors too much and on the screen all day. Also generally degraded personal hygiene (dental mostly) because of the later reason.
I have never found good information about that anywhere, but I would like to know: At which time in the morning does school start in your country usually?
This article shows there are positive and negative consequences to remote learning. It would be a mistake to see only the negative consequences, and then to insist that we return to the old way of doing things, which also had negative aspects. We have to admit that everything is different now regarding education. The future won't look like May 2020, but it also won't look like 2019 and prior either.
Forcing the issue on teachers is proving to be very bad for morale. Already, they were overworked and underpaid, but now they are being called lazy, their profession is being reduced to "babysitting", they are being demonized as anti-American and traitors, they are being harassed by parents who claim they are teaching their children socialist propaganda and pushing liberal agendas, school boards meetings have broken out into fisticuffs... it's getting to be too much.
You can see evidence of this on the /r/teachers forum, which as of late has been a sea of negative posts in what used to be a pretty positive place. This has gotten enough attention that it was covered recently in the media [0].
Forbes notes that 48% of teachers are thinking of quitting during a time when there's already a teacher shortage [1]. I would not be surprised to see a mass exodus of teachers if things get worse. My school district was closed last week because there weren't enough substitute teachers to handle all of the students. For some districts, even a single teacher quitting would mean an entire school would have to close.
The way forward is not backward. We need a new model that embraces positive aspects of remote and in person. We have to redefine what school is and is not. School cannot be a place where parents send their kids so that they are free to work. That can't be what it is for.
I really liked an idea I saw which is probably impractical, but interesting nonetheless. The idea was to cut the work week to 4 days and turn substitute teaching into something like jury duty; once a month, you've got to go into school and teach or assist a teacher. I like this idea because it brings more community involvement into schools, which I think is missing now in our society.
I noticed kids playing outside more in parks. But also, think of the benefit of missing out on hours and hours of preaching from their teachers. They can just research things on the internet now. And come to their own conclusions.
At the time when schooling started, 6 years old kids were not considered to need babysitting or daycare. They were to large extend able to move around the world independently. If they were not in school, they either did useful work for parents, in shops or played with other kids (or did mess on the streets).
The origin of kindergarten is daycare - for 4 years old playing in streets with literally zero adult supervision.
Not at all.
Mass schooling eas originally designed to teach the low-skilled to work on complicated machines in large factories.
Modern society demands both parents working, a single parent can no longer cover even the cost of housing for an entire family. As is has become so expensive.
Let alone medical expenses, hobbies, tutition etc.
tldr; Schools turned into daycare facilites when housing became so expesive that both parents must work full time.
This is the natural result when society is designed in some way to extract everything possible from every individual. Basic survival is monetized, promises are broken, in a race to the bottom.
A lot of what teachers do is exactly just that—basically talking at the pupils, as if they were vessels who are supposed to have their heads filled up with knowledge.
Proper learning is supposed to be more active and pupil-directed. Look at the Deweyite schools in America.
If you find that to be a belittling description then I’m sorry, but that’s largely what teachers do. And it’s been critiqued for a long time by thoughtful people who care about pedagogy, so you can’t simply dismiss it as some kind of “woe be the state of education” phenomenom.
“Proper education” is student, culture and even teacher dependent. There is no singular best practice. So many of the sit down, shut up models of education in other countries produce students which routinely trounce US students in math and science. At the same time, so does Finland.
My point above is that the belittling is a major part of the problem. You want to denigrate an entire profession, sure, but it has consequences, something we're seeing as experienced teachers leave the profession.
> “Proper education” is student, culture and even teacher dependent. There is no singular best practice.
In my experience it is not productive to have this kind of conversation with teachers since they will go back and forth between (1) general, vague praise for mass education, and then (2) vacuous, relativistic statements that says nothing about education other than “it’s relative” once they are confronted with concrete problems.
They seem to identify too strongly with their teacher identity to be up for that discussion.
Because of the schedule, my parents had me go to sleep around 9pm but I had a hard time sleeping then and tended to not fall asleep before midnight/1 am. I'd either lie in bed thinking, or use my radio alarm clock light to read books. Honestly, I think I would have been healthier and enjoyed school a lot more if school had started 90 minutes later.
That's definitely a criteria I'd look out for when choosing a school for my son.