“We are actively dealing with problems remote learning caused. A whole generation of kids is further behind than they were tracking to be behaviorally, mathematically, and in reading scores.”
Gee I wonder what would do that, is it three+ years of unmitigated exposure to a virus that causes brain damage? No, the problem is they stayed home, which makes you developmentally challenged, as we all know. Oh, you don’t want to get COVID? Then stay home.
The education system was fucked either way because it’s being privatized and what little public education is slowly being choked by austerity minded ghouls. Long COVID has just accelerated the decline.
I said it back then and I stand by it now: they should have just held everyone back a year.
My siblings kids have both had Covid 4-5 times that I’m aware of.
I wonder how students in China are doing? If the lockdowns caused all these problems, surely the place that did the strictest lockdowns would have the most problems
I had to keep teaching online (kindergarten) during the lockdown in Shanghai. The online teaching tools provided were a little rough at the start but got better over the course of the lockdown (and after I set up dozens of macros to manage the class, and eventually some OBS gimmicks). Major difference between what I saw and what American teachers saw was supervision during class time. Almost everyone lives with their grandparents. I had to constantly beg grandma and grandpa to stop answering for students, stop hand feeding students during class so they could answer, to wear clothes during class, to tell their grandchild to wear clothes during class. My students all met academic goals pretty close to their normal ones. The only thing that was really hard to teach was tracing and copying for the computer kids, but the tablet kids did okay.
It’s not the lockdowns in a bottle, it’s how they were implemented. Lockdowns in US education had virtually no support and rules changed so frequently teachers couldn’t keep up.
There were also so many people who were “essential workers” who were mostly poor service workers. So many parents had to go to work while their children were mostly unsupervised at online school. I have no doubt China had different plans and implementations.
Long Covid is certainly a factor, but the argument isn’t that the delays are caused just by staying home specifically. It’s that they were caused by not receiving instruction, which is also obviously true. Kids lose progress just from not receiving instruction over spring break. Lockdown was, for a lot of kids, just that for a whole year.
They stayed home for less than half a year half a decade ago. Not a single school in my area was shut down for any length of time since then, except of course when there were staff shortages cause so much of the staff had Covid thanks to unmitigated spread. People are just looking for anything to blame our decline in education on that’s not just years and years of gutting public education.
less than half a year
This is a funny way of referring to six weeks
I’m teaching students right now who were 11-12 during the lockdown and it absolutely affects them. They lost important years of socialization, they’re teenagers and they don’t know how to talk to each other. They’re now also used to having the Internet do all their thinking for them.
I can literally give them the information to take notes on, ask a question that is directly answered by their notes, and their first instinct will be to Google the question and write down the first thing that comes up.
This is not exclusively a lock down problem, but it exasperated and multiplied already existing trends. Education is different now than it was four years ago. Technology went from being a tool to help learning to being a crutch to replace thinking.
Teachers are reporting behavior problems in kids who weren’t even old enough to go to school during the lockdowns, including some who were newborns at the time.
Given that you recognize there are multiple factors that are going into declining education and student performance, deep systemic problems that long predate 2020, what makes you think you have enough information to blame any of it on lockdowns?
They lost important years of socialization,
Lockdowns didn’t last for years.
I can literally give them the information to take notes on, ask a question that is directly answered by their notes, and their first instinct will be to Google the question and write down the first thing that comes up.
I had this exact problem with students (it was a widely discussed phenomenon) many years before Covid. I knew instructors frequently complaining about it even in the 00’s.
This is not exclusively a lock down problem, but it exasperated and multiplied already existing trends.
I don’t usually care when someone doesn’t know what a word means and uses it instead of the correct word, and even if I did I wouldn’t normally point it out. I’m sure I make errors like that at times too. But given the context here, I think it’s relevant and fair of me to do so. “Exasperated?” Really? Anyway, you say it’s not “exclusively” a lockdown problem, implying that lockdowns were still a major cause of the problem. But what evidence do you have that they contributed to it at all beyond a vibes-based opinion?
I’m not trying to be overly harsh with this response, but it really bothers me that people are blaming these long-standing, well-known issues on lockdowns when not only were lockdowns not the problem, but had they been longer (and better implemented in general) they could have actually saved millions of children from the cognitive decline they are now and will continue to experience as a result of a pandemic that literally gives them brain damage.
We can blame the lockdowns on everything, but not how you think
The lockdowns were a perfect opportunity for the ruling class to consolidate power and begin the process of transitioning to a different economy completely
I hear people today talk about their friends in China (they work for Fortune 500 companies and do indeed have friends in China) who were forced to take a test everyday while being on lockdown (like that’s a bad thing) and it only makes me more of a Maoist.
The best years of my life
There was some bad personal loss during lockdown, but I still miss lockdown so bad. I desperately needed the break from work and having the bonus unemployment actually cover shit instead of how unemployment normally is was gave me time to heal some from years of overwork and burnout.
But they’ll never do it again. Even if H5N1 takes off they won’t do anything like that again
Lock down did rot people’s brains to a large degree. Too many seemed to forget how to comport themselves with others.
what makes you think “lockdown” did that as opposed to the virus that attacks our brains or the increasingly heightened contradictions of our decaying society
Me in 2019: Please don’t make microplastics the lead paint of our times.
monkey paw curls
2020: A global pandemic is caused by a very infectious disease that causes brain damage.
I’m convinced we ended up with both.
Exactly. The monkey’s paw didn’t even hold up its end of the bargain with a tainted promise. Covid killed millions, is still killing at a rate that isn’t even permitted to be tracked while causing repeated incidence of brain damage with increasing severity, and yet we’re still poisoned by microplastics (along with vast swathes of the rest of the biosphere) which is likewise a serious and worsening issue that isn’t getting covered much for similar reasons that Covid is ignored and denied.
On top of that, I’d bet my life that PFAS (“forever chemicals”) are doing more harm in more places than almost anyone realizes yet. So far as “leaded paint of our time” goes, the difference now is that instead of pretending to give a shit and make at least some inadequate efforts to correct or regulate the issue, the response ranges from “yeah, there’s all kinds of nasty shit out there like lead but that’s just how things are,” to “lead isn’t actually all that bad” to “there isn’t lead in the paint, that’s a hoax so there’s nothing we need to do.” Hell, they won’t do anything about lead in the water now so long as it’s only poisoning the poors. Shit is bleak.
to be honest I’ve kind of given up. I’ve spent nearly every day of the last 5 years constantly agitating in every social group I’ve been a part of in hopes of getting them to care any little bit at all about COVID — to speak nothing of all the rest of the very valid crises you mention — and none of them listen. None. They laugh at me. They spit (intentionally coughing) on me. They don’t say it, but their actions tell me to disappear, mortally or otherwise. I have two friends remaining of a previously not-insignificant social circle because all the rest abandoned me to catching COVID from them on repeat. There has to be a point when you realize you’ve lost and I think I’ve hit it. The reaction has won. I can’t do it anymore. I’m devoted to surviving and that’s it. I gave almost 20 years of my life mired in poverty, disability, and immense hardship to activism, learning, being involved where I’m able in trying to help these people and not a damn bit of it mattered, because in the end they all think they’re God and they won’t take no for an answer. All I have left to say is you won’t catch me crying when the chickens come home to roost.
