The cruel, ridiculous reality of 'virtual learning'

I know teachers who are very supportive of mask mandates and that the schools and teachers are generally doing ok, and people who I work with who send their kids to schools with masks are very happy for the kids to have socializing opportunities.

Your friends and community are free to find a solution that works for them. But it is not the only way, and it does not make sense to condemn a system that works for the vast majority of people.

Single anecdote: we took our 3rd grader from the regular school and enrolled in an online school since at that age they were not vaccinated and we were not comfortable sending a 3rd grader to a school at all.

In fact I feel that our child has done well, the entire 3rd grade curriculum is finished and will be moving to 4th grade in the middle of the school year since the online school supports that. Something that may not have happened in the regular school at all.

So, as usual, let's not generalize - every one is different, both adults and children.

We may move our child back to regular school in the fall since they can now be vaccinated.

Canada's healthcare is extremely overrated (it's basically bottom tier compared to other countries at our income level or anyone in the EU), our business environment sucks and our economic response to COVID will put us behind for the next decade; it's already showing...

Come move to Florida, Utah, or any of the other states getting it right.

The poor always get shafted[1] :-( Politicians make policies to grab votes not to solve problems. If a problem gets solved, then that's a side-effect.

Unfortunately education is an outcome of political will, so it figures that educational outcomes are based on popularity amongst voters, which means that those people least likely to have an informed decision on education[2] will be choosing the educational policies.

[1] With WFH it's been ever more clear: the jobs that poor people do are not seated-at-a-desk jobs, so while we have been getting a better quality of life and more hours in the day, the poor have been seeing their risk exposure go up while their salaries have remained the same.

[2] Poor people are more likely to have less education overall, and less experience navigating the options for education for their children.

Technology tends to spread life improvement faster and wider than education and capital. We now have access to things that were too expensive even for the rich, or too complex even for the educated.

We should use our new superpowers to invent a future we like instead of complaining about change. What could a motivated group of people do in order to be as self sustaining as possible in the future? I think there are lots of ideas here.

All while doing education wrong by even below mediocre standards. Education kind of has decades of lead time - trying to specialize to any specific job at the primary level is doomed to failure. At best you can get fields of fields emphasized. Education if it is to prepare has to cover at least a path to all jobs.

Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.

It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).

If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].

Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.

My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.

Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.

1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating.

Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not.

In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.

This is true for children ages 5 and above. From that perspective school closures now offer less benefit than school closures in 2020.

Children under the age of 5 still have to manage without vaccine.

So based on that (albeit with a sample size of only 1), it's unlikely that any [inter]national effort will make any difference.

Plus, people getting recorded videos for learning will feel cheated because they could have just got this for free online. What's the point of paying for education? Very few people actually have/ask doubts in class. Source: am a student.

The crying shame I see in this whole endeavor is the emphasis on re-creating the classroom online. Half of what you teach (really in any topic) is foundational knowledge -- terms, models, history, important people and events. This is better taught offline at the learner's pace. Give then ways to monitor their understanding -- ungraded exercises, graded quizzes, papers, etc.

The best use of synchronous time to cover the higher level skills involving the application of that knowledge. This means interacting with the students in ways that give them the ability show they understand what you are teaching, letting them screw up, and gently guiding them back on the right path. This is also the hardest but most rewarding part of teaching.

Every parent talk to (I don't have kids) complains about the same thing and the source seems to be the fact this was all jammed online in a short amount of time, without teachers being able to divide their materials into these two parts. This leads to teachers just doing what they did in the classroom but in front of Zoom.

I think online learning is great, but this has led to a lot of people forming poor opinions of it, and I feel like that is a real shame. Schools should have been heading in this direction for years. The technology is there. It seems that entrenched forces have kept it from happening.

My son is very fond of remote learning and would like to return to that. He could finish everything in an hour or so in the morning and then go off to do other interesting things. Having him sit through real-time classroom discussions online was counterproductive. He begged us to let him stay in online school forever.

My daughter is the opposite. She struggled mightily last year when it was all remote. She needs the structure to maintain focus, she needs to interact with her peers and with the teacher. Even if it is over Zoom, that is far better than nothing. She was begging to go back to in-person learning this year.

And here are the required numbers in other states https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab1_1-2020.asp

So yes, the way they are running is stupid. But you have to convince a lot of people before they can run it differently, and none of them are down near the level of school districts.

To that end, Passive activities are simply not enough; they provide some learning gains, but as we're seeing, you need something more. However, some students are not ready for Interactive exercises. For my dissertation, I liken this to the common approach in Intro CS courses where the instructor introduces a new topic, like loops, then expects students to immediately be able to implement it. My philosophy is that we need those Active and Constructive exercises, things like repeating steps (or drilling) which is done in other technical skills; however, when we branch into higher cognitive areas, they're immediately shut down as "not good enough".

I argue instead that we operate within templates, or we behave like we've trained, something stemming my my martial arts background. Right now I think 'virtual learning' has an issue where they're not willing to make this slight upgrade in engagement, for whatever reasons, because its not the magic silver bullet to fix all problems. Rather, in order to improve it, virtual learning needs to add those additional lower level practices into their instruction, otherwise we'll continue this vicious cycle.

As to why it's done this way? Why, pretense again, of course. If it's done during "school hours" we can pretend that mom and dad who work from home (let's hope) and can get some work done vs the reality that adults are now expected to home school on top of doing their jobs.

They learned more in online lessons, the speed by which it moved was normal. And as bonus, I did not had to play teacher, the teacher played teacher.

My wife and I have two daughters, who are eight and thirteen years old. Neither have ever been enrolled in a state school. We've had brief experiments with structured curricula, but we've always found that they're just unsuitable for us - they require a (relatively) huge amount of time, both parents and children tire of it quickly, and most importantly, they don't seem to offer anything.

We regularly test our children both informally and formally. They're learning everything their cohorts are required to know and more through simply living life alongside us. They're a bit behind their peers in some of the more formal/structured areas of grammar, but their actual verbal and written language usage is significantly beyond expectations for their age. They're both far ahead in math, history, social studies, geography, etc.

For kids in particular, learning is something they do by nature. When they get bored, they learn something new. As long as the parents are invested in shaping a productive adult and are able to provide adequate resources for the kids to satisfy their curiosities, my experience leads me to believe that traditional K-12 "schooling" is entirely unnecessary.