Kids are basically losing a year and a half of education. Last spring a local high school stopped teaching new subject material after going remote in March and told kids they only had to finish 60% of the work they had already been given in order to pass. It was an extremely low bar that many kids just blew off. The ones that followed through didn't actually learn anything for the credit they got though and were just pushed along to the next level in the fall (where more garbage learning was waiting with no end in sight). You don't see a problem with this? Kids from this generation are going to be noticably stupider. And that's just the education side of things. The social damage being done is bad too. A generation of mentally ill zombies who just stare at screens, eat their parents weed gummies and blow their heads off after sending some dick pics on snapchat.

that was going to be the endgame before the pandemic anyway

I don't know anyone who thinks these aren't problems, but again, this is so dramatic. Yes, many have suffered this past year, and yes some at the margins will not recover. And yes, there have been scary social trends that began before Covid, and have only been made worse since (suicides among young women, for example). But the generation will be ok.



Sure, but they endured and the country continued to move forward. I don't really believe Covid stacks up with The Great Depression, World/Civil wars, etc... I don't believe a generation has been permanently damaged any worse than any in the past.

This thread turned one year old last week

And somehow we've all aged 16 years in that same time.

More like we all aged to 16 years

This was a good early exchange

if y'all are getting younger then that's the first good argument I've heard for moving to the right

19% fatality was juuuusstttt a bit off

I hope everyone reads that in a Bob Uecker voice.

Mentally. Still bald and bloated

My kids are having a snow day from virtual school tomorrow. What a fucking world!

Israel blocking all vaccines to Palestine is pure and peak Israel.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... o-settlers

Meanwhile in Europe, the company the EU contracted and bought hundreds of millions of doses off, are now Welching on the deal and effectively aren’t even answering calls.
Serious monorail vibes. But on a vast scale.
What we’re they thinking buying a vaccine off a company with a name like that anyways? Sounds like a front set up by a gamer kid in his bedroom

Philadelphia’s largest vaccine was literally run by gamer kids who did exactly what you would guess they would do:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... d-vaccine/

Maybe demanding the vaccine effectively at cost was not such a great idea.

The EU has really shit all over themselves with the vaccine.

tree_ is the EU of RM

Well, don't because they're the fucking problem. They were before the pandemic and they are now. I've got two kids. One is in 5th grade and the other in 8th. The 5th grader is crushing it. In distance learning, he wakes up at 6:30 so he can get a start on the work his teacher has planned for the day. I could be smoking meth in the kitchen and he'd be fine. The 8th grader, on the other hand, despite having his phone taken away months ago and only being allowed to play Xbox on weekends, is a daily struggle. We get emails from his teachers pretty much weekly about missing work. But we get emails. And we have online access to his grades. It's a lot of extra work, but some time in 2008, I blew a hot load into my wife and we agreed to keep it and do the best we could for it. He's not likely to be a great scientist, but he's going to pass all of his classes and learn a few things because we're on his ass. If we were smoking meth in the kitchen, he'd have straight F's. Distance learning works for self-sufficient kids and kids who have involved parents.

My wife and I are both high school teachers in different districts. Both districts have severely lowered standards. I'll just write about mine. As the end of the first trimester approached, admin fucking mandated we pass kids who achieved 50% with a D- or a P if they chose. No one fails. Anyone below 50% gets NG. A few weeks into trimester 2 admin mandated that because so many kids failed classes in trimester 1, we wouldn't be able to serve them all through after school credit recovery or summer school, so if a student applied for a contract to make up the first trimester, that teacher would have to provide work for them to do to make up that credit. Across 4 grades, 7 students applied. Most, if not all, of them are currently failing the same classes in trimester 2. The failing masses do not care, and their parents apparently don't care either.

Teaching is so thankless right now. We have Google meets that are mandatory, but not really. I have kids who have never attended one all year. I have students I have never seen in 5 months. Some are doing quite well, and why shouldn't they since I am forced to provide instruction via recordings and all of the materials they need? I teach 5 classes. I'll give you one as an example. It's a junior World Literature class. 34 kids are enrolled. Halfway through the grading period and 21 are below 60%. 3 are at 0% and another 2 are in single digits. Half of the passing kids have A's. We meet for online class twice a week. Average attendance is 17 students. Of those 17, 5 turn on cameras.

This pandemic has highlighted the biggest issue in our society: most parents suck at parenting because they make every excuse as to why they don't do it. School has long been free daycare. With daycare shuttered, the parents have taken to daydrinking and memes while their kids unknowingly set the table for hard lives. I feel bad for the kids, not the parents. Kids are dumb. Their brains aren't fully formed. They're going to suffer lifetime consequences because they have shitty parents. And these poor fuckers are going to model their parenting after their shity parents, and the impact of this pandemic wil actually last for generations.

So, funding is not the most important driver of student success, its cultural norms and parental involvement?

Thats wild.