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With Wuhan Coronavirus spreading in New York City, parents, Parent Teacher Associations, and schools seem to be inevitably headed for extended shutdowns and quarantines. The Department of Education is crossing its fingers, wiping down all surfaces, and hoping to avert the worst without closing schools, but parents are going to need contingency plans.
Do Soylentils have recommendations for online resources that members of NYC's school boards can share with the parent community to help kids keep up with their school work? Khan Academy is an excellent resource for math & science; it doesn't span every subject but something like it that grade school kids can understand would be ideal.
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Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
-- Robert Heinlein
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @11:55AM (13 children)
Teach them history. Just history.
If things get really interesting, there's going to be a lot of debate about the direction of society, policy, economy and the world. History is the single best teacher of human political behaviour.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @02:01PM (5 children)
History and small unit tactics.
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @02:43PM (4 children)
And Perl. Either because it's the absolute best tool for making text your bitch or because you hate them. Both would be valid reasons.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Friday March 13 2020, @03:05PM
Teaching them Perl, and revisiting tasks after a few weeks will also teach them fundamentals of history.
i.e. - your sources are usually not saying what you think they are on first reading.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @06:14PM (2 children)
Indeed, TIMTOWTFIU (There Is More Than One Way To F*** It Up)
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 13 2020, @07:17PM (1 child)
Are there some sites on multiple ways to mis-implement basic software functionality? Something that works for a basic test, but fails maintainability, readability, extendability, security, doesn't performance-scale ... ?
Those examples would be great to learn from, plus you'd just have to read all of 20 additional pieces of crappy code in your lifetime, but you could do it much earlier in your career.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @10:37PM
Yup. The most well known one is here [microsoft.com].
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 13 2020, @02:49PM (5 children)
Unironically. Processing and online gamification can teach coding for the very young, and Coursera offers some decent free tutorial stuff. If your kid can stand it then you can approach it as being a puzzle game. Or perhaps you could play actual puzzle games or tabletops like chess or Risk if you have those laying around. Something fun and educational.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 13 2020, @03:37PM (3 children)
I've got a chess board, kind of hard to find someone to play with, but it's fun in a casual setting. Best Chess game ever: Battle Chess. Even as a kid I could win, but it was always interesting to see the pieces fight it out.
Definition of Not Fun: Playing a computer Chess opponent that knows it all. That's what I call computer cheating. Like pitting human opponents against AIs, it's stupid. Sure, I can program a game to run, where the computer always wins too.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday March 13 2020, @03:52PM (1 child)
"Battle Chess. Even as a kid I could win"
Hah. I could beat my little kasparov chess computer at 4 reliably, 5 sometimes, out of 8 difficulty levels. I couldn't win BattleChess to save my life. I'd always sabotage my game with bad moves just to watch the fights.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 13 2020, @03:57PM
I hear that, it was quite entertaining. It runs well on DOSBox, FYI.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday March 13 2020, @07:22PM
Battle Chess also provides a nice corollary of Parkinson's law of triviality [stackexchange.com] or "bikeshedding" for programmers/content creators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @08:44AM
And, we end up with more paragons of a liberal arts education like Ethanol_fueled? I, for one, pass. Educators generally do not take advice from their failures.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday March 13 2020, @11:27PM
And make sure they remember it for the rest of their lives. Yes, I know, the US way is to protect children from moral trauma and such shit - don't do it. Show them how bad it really is. They can handle it and they don't get sick while they spread the disease. They should carry the blame for the rest of their lives. Why? So they will do something about it when they rule the world.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @12:16PM (22 children)
Put that shit on paper and you don't have to worry about connectivity issues or a lecturer getting sick. Plus they never run out of batteries and you can squish spiders with them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday March 13 2020, @01:43PM (1 child)
One would think then if they are "quarantined" that this would just be an excellent time to actually read books. After all it's not like they have something better to do. Read the classics or what not. That said I strongly suspect a lot of this quarantine time is going to be spent goofing off and doing nothing of value, perhaps just like school for a lot of pupils.
That said at least over here they are already talking about cutting down on the summer holiday break to make up for the lost school time. I'm not sure that news will go down as good as "whooo I don't have to be in school for two weeks!" -- Whoo now you have to be there during the summer instead when the weather is hot and horrible. Yay!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 13 2020, @08:00PM
A lot of the best universities have made much of their lecture material available online, pretty much everything but the textbooks. Also, at least Harvard [harvard.edu] and MIT [mit.edu] are conducting classes online after spring break, so I bet you could audit the simpler ones with a bunch of students in the same venue, but with less professional experience.
You could also go outside and play -- if you're lucky, that protective coat of dirt can barricade/encapsulate the viruses and leave you with just good-old bacteria. No surfaces, no stagnant air transmissibility, easy to stay more than 2m away from people, the daystar ... what's not to like?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 13 2020, @02:04PM (14 children)
That's some crowd-think for ya - TP has sold out in our local stores.
While there's merit in the physical textbook, I feel like we have vastly transcended the limitations of that media. Maybe more "textbook like" resources on the web would be a good thing - certainly easy enough to digitize the old paper these days. One e-ink display tablet costs less than most college level textbooks today. I have also been impressed with the array of audiobooks available for checkout from the local library system.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @02:41PM (10 children)
Nah, not really. There's very little that can't be adequately conveyed on paper. Videos especially are an enormous waste of time and resources, unless they're of the "hold your mouth just like this and it's much easier to get the door panel off a 92 Ford Ranger" variety.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 13 2020, @03:46PM (9 children)
As a consumer of content, I tend to agree, however... the resources used in distributing a YouTube video are quite a bit less than what's involved in printing and distributing something like a competent model specific repair manual, particularly when you consider that any reasonably competent rube can make a "howto" remove that door panel video that's more helpful than any repair manual ever printed, and that repair manual represents many thousands of specialist professional hours invested in creating the content, and many more thousands in the publishing and distribution channels - all to hand you something that's frankly difficult to comprehend.
Back when video was first coming to the internet, I had a coworker comment "now, that's something I can appreciate, I'm not very good at getting information from a printed page." As my eyesight continues to deteriorate with age, I think I understand now what drives some people to never become very good at reading comprehension - and, even if their eyesight is perfect, the "processing layers" behind that optical channel may not be as proficient at information processing for some people as others.
Video information processing - like watching talking heads on news/propaganda/brainwashing channels - is very close to what everyone experiences every waking hour of the day, so most of us should be fairly competent at it - the printed page is more of a specialty skill, even for those who have been subjected to 12+ years of schooling.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @04:51PM (8 children)
Sounds like a good argument for making your kids read to me. Reading ain't an ability you have or don't (at least not if you've been taught the alphabet and the basics), just a level of competency in a skill. Now some folks may start off worse like with lots of things in life but that's really not an excuse since everyone has something they suck at but have to do anyway.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 13 2020, @06:55PM (7 children)
If you believe that anybody can learn to do anything if they just try hard enough, you haven't met my kids, or Gaaark's.
The most successful people I know, and know of, delegate the things they suck at to others who don't suck at them. If we all lived in the wild frontier, far enough to not see the smoke of our nearest neighbors' cookfire, then sure - individualism and jack of all trades is the way to success; nobody I know, or know of, actually lives that way in this century - though many wish they did.
Should kids learn to read? Yeah, that's the value set I grew up with and I still see the value in it. Should kids learn how to do long division in their head? It's an interesting challenge, and good for those who can do it - but in the world where everybody had a smartphone in their pocket (which can cost less than 8 hours of minimum wage to buy outright), I think that being able to communicate effectively - both expressively and receptively - via Google and YouTube videos, may well be the way of the future. Even in our (born in the 1960s) generation, I know a fella from Kentucky who never learned to read or write, but brings home a reliable six figures by managing crews that do conveyor belt installation - he's got valuable skills, they just don't involve letters on a page.
I guess the point here is: the kids should be learning something valuable - but reading and interpretation of Plato's dialogues is probably nowhere near as valuable today as it was in the 1960s, and even the printed page is slipping in the overall scheme of things.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @10:48PM (6 children)
Your kids are very much a tiny exception and not really relevant to general rules. For the overwhelming majority, it's not even trying. If they keep doing it, it sinks in regardless of if they try or not.
Second paragraph sounds like you're trying to make excuses for expected failure. Do that and I guarantee you that you will fail. Allow your kids to do it and ditto for them. Forbid it and they might still fail but it won't be because they just gave up.
Man, I don't care about no Plato. Reading romance novels or even Calvin and Hobbes would do just fine. It's about the repetition until the experience chases away the incompetence not about the content.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 13 2020, @11:50PM (2 children)
You're right, I have a distorted perspective because of these two 1%'er kids in the house - before I had those kids I also had a distorted perspective in your direction.
"Normal" looking/seeming people do have challenges, and we should all try to overcome to the best of our abilities, but... if you want to succeed like Richard Branson, you don't keep bashing your head against things that just don't work for you, no matter how that makes you compare with the rest of the world. To succeed, you do what you excel at, and let others who are better than you do the things they excel at - and hopefully somewhere along the line learn how to respect and cooperate with people with different abilities.
Back in High School, I really thought Laura Whatsherface was just not trying to learn Geometry when I was assigned to tutor her, and maybe she was just lazy, maybe with no-holds barred, a cattle prod and 30 days in a locked room I could have gotten her demonstrating geometric proofs. I'm sure there are plenty of people, particularly of the Mrs. degree seeking variety, who could do a whole lot better in maths if they applied themselves diligently, but, then, is that really leading them to better lives when they take time away from practicing skills of their competitive quest to land the most lucrative mates?
Make me king of the world, give me sufficient loyal subjects that I can reasonably well protect myself from assassination for 30+ years and enforce the policies I decree, I'll fix it all - and meaningful improvements in education for all are near the top of the list. Meanwhile, even the leaders of the free world are just herding cats, at best, and we mostly evolved without that kind of central control - our instincts to pursue, and avoid, learning of various skills probably do more to propagate our personal genome better than following of societal rules and norms ever will. As for my personal kingdom, my kids read just fine, they'll read out loud all damn day long with the slightest encouragement - getting them to do something beyond the mechanics of reading is the challenge.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 14 2020, @12:41PM
We ain't talking geometric proofs that nearly nobody is going to actually use, we're talking reading. Reading is a fundamental skill that nobody should allow themselves to suck at if it can at all be avoided.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:05PM
The difficulty with mathematics is that it is a huge tower of concepts. Mathematics is built on mathematics.
If your learning has missed a brick on the way up, everything above it is incomprehensible.
When I tutor, I start with asking questions from the advanced to the elementary -- something like a binary search in the student's knowledge base.
After that it's often easy to teach the missing brick and the rest can fall into place.
But if the student has learned to fear mathematics, the binary search will fail in a flood of tears.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @04:38AM
It seems that people have been trained to believe that they are helpless outside of classrooms, to the point where learning anything is nigh impossible. This while many proclaim that schools help students 'learn how to learn.' It's a shame that in an age where people have access to a vast amount of high-quality information, most do not take advantage of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @08:49AM (1 child)
That much is more than obvious, Oh Buzzard of Might. Do you think you could display your ignorance in yet further fashions? Don't know much about History, don't know much Biology. Can't remember the French I took. Wait, TMB, do you know your ancestral tongue? Illiterate is one thing, but to not know the language of one's fathers, oh, dear.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:02PM
Gotta learn to walk before you can run, ari. They ain't getting through Plato if they can't get through a modern novel in their own language.
My ancestral language? Perl 4? If you're asking about Chickasaw, why would I bother learning that? So I can talk to the few dozen people on the planet who speak it when every last one of them also speak English? Pass.
Languages are tools. I like like tools and will occasionally collect a completely useless one just for the novelty but the Chickasaw language isn't even useful for reading ancient writings in their native tongue because there are none to read. It was a spoken-only language until the 20th century.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @09:49PM (2 children)
> TP has sold out in our local stores.
Off-topic I know, but I'm curious how the panic buyers plan on soiling all that TP? I mean it's a double ended pipe--once they run out of food they will stop shitting pretty soon afterwords.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @10:49PM
Bet you bastards are all wishing you'd spent as much time learning to fish as I have now, eh?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:09PM
I'm in Canada. One of our paper manufacturers has made a formal announcement that they have more than enough capacity to provide Canada with toilet paper through the coronavirus pandemic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday March 13 2020, @02:26PM (2 children)
You also don't have to worry about expensive support contracts, getting locked in to a vendor, constantly buying/throwing away equipment that does more damage to the environment than cutting down a few trees, don't have to worry about compatiblity issues, getting owned by Russian hackers, updates that bork the system for who knows how long, built in eye-raping advertising, and so on.
That said, there is a time and place for both on-line and books, but to really learn things you ocasionally have to be around actual, real, people and away from on-line distractions. There is just not much getting around that.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @02:38PM (1 child)
The spider squishing thing's what really sells me. I don't mind spiders in theory or when their appearance isn't combined with close proximity and unexpectedness but a surprise spider right next to me is going to be vehemently sqooshed with whatever I happen to have in hand, be it a book or a baby.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @04:04PM
One spider will get my daughter to do one weeks worth of cardio at once.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Sulla on Saturday March 14 2020, @12:16AM
When society collapses and all you fools are sitting there with your useless phones, my blackberry will still be able to perform its primary function and do it well -- killing spiders. It has the added advantage of being smaller and somewhat lighter than a textbook.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:55AM
Assuming that you still have internet, a fun diversion for anyone, kids included, would be this year's pi day video from Vi Hart -- http://vihart.com/pi-day-rant-2020/ [vihart.com] She's just clever!
(Score: 1) by noelhenson on Friday March 13 2020, @12:23PM (1 child)
This is the way I would go. My daughter used it for a year in a transition from home schooling to a great public high school.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 13 2020, @02:12PM
There are literally hundreds to choose from:
https://www.elementaryeducationdegree.com/leading-sites/ [elementaryeducationdegree.com]
Find one that fits, and the whole virus thing should blow over before you get bored with it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Roo_Boy on Friday March 13 2020, @01:15PM
Okay this isn't a short term "look at this website" but advanced learning via remote means isn't new, just check School of the Air (newsy type link) https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-culture/2010/08/australias-school-of-the-air/ [australiangeographic.com.au].
Heck these folks first did education by pedal radios! A broadband connection has a bandwidth just a little higher :P
Distance Ed works just the same for Quarantined Ed.
--- The S.I. prototype "Average Punter" is kept in a tube of inert gas in Geneva.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @10:17PM (6 children)
Oh, I see what you did there.
You're such a tool. Why ask here? Why not just ask Fox News where you are obviously getting your other opinions from? Do you at least believe there is an issue here, or is this just a Democrat/Fake News/North Korea/China plot to take down our Lord and Savior?
Careful with that Khan Academy stuff. Your kids just might pick up some critical thinking skills and you'll find them to be quite a nuisance when you start going off later about the next "foreign virus".
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Saturday March 14 2020, @12:26AM (5 children)
As far as anyone can tell this coronavirus spread out of Wuhan or the nearby area. The name being useful for indicating where the virus began and as something easy for the public to recognize, compared to 2019-nCoV that was also used. Not sure why 2019-nCoV had to be replaced by Covid19. My bigger viral naming objection is calling the 1918 influenza the Spanish Flu instead of the "F6 Haskell County FluNado" or something equally fun working on the other possibility of origin in Northern China.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @02:23AM (4 children)
Wuhan ooronavirus is easier to remember than Covid19? So is this SARS? No? Oh, it must be that other coronavirus MERS? No? Oh its different than both of those? How the hell do I know if you just call it a coronavirus?
"Look over there at that vehicle"
"Oh, the car?"
"Yes, is that a Ford?"
"No, it's a car"
"Is that a Chevy?"
"No it's a car"
And by the way, why is it a top Republican talking point to use the inaccurate name for this anyway? Things that make you go: hmmmmm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @03:16AM
> Things that make you go: hmmmmm
What do you do when you know that you know
that you know you're wrong.
You've got to face the music
You've got to listen to the cosmic song.
- Sun Ra
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:07PM (2 children)
For the same reason we name cars Mustang and Corvette instead of an MD5 hash of all their part numbers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:14PM (1 child)
We're trying to *sell* covid-19?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:47PM
More fundamental. Mustang or Corona virus are easily remembered. Covid-19 means nothing to anyone who doesn't know why it's named that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @06:17AM (1 child)
I enrolled my kids in Connections Academy awhile ago.
https://www.connectionsacademy.com/ [connectionsacademy.com]
It's a fully accredited nationwide K-12 program, entirely online.
It has instructors and "class time" which is via video conference plus they have a really awesome curriculum that goes very into depth with tons of subjects.
My kids can learn at their own pace. In my opinion it's way better than the common core "teach the test" junk the local schools have been passing off as an education around here.
Schools have closed here, my kids don't notice the difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @08:56AM
Sure it does. "Instructors" that were fired from Domino's Pizza? Instructors who are failed uber drivers? There is a reason educators have to have professional certification, because the general public has no ability to judge competence, and so they constantly fall for scams like University of
PhallusPhoenix and Corinthian, and Betsy DeVos, and On-line For-Profit University [youtube.com], "Let's profit of each other!"(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Tuesday March 17 2020, @12:27AM
https://learn.concord.org/ [concord.org]
Many of them are simulations. Most of of what they do is FOSS. The activities cover a variety of topics for different ages. Concord Consortium works closely with classroom teachers to make worthwhile stuff -- funded mainly by grants. I have a lot of respect for them.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.