Coronavirus spreads. But don't panic! (topical thread)

[TheGentlemanBastard]

If school campuses must be closed and children remain out in the communities, so be it. And they will be for the foreseeable future.
But I've seen very few reassurances that distance teaching will be improved. Nobody knows how long this pandemic will last.
It's not acceptable to simply say "safety first", shrug our shoulders, then give up indefinitely on educating students.

-Teresa

You're connected to the combined recorded knowledge of the world and there are low-cost and free educational tools there begging to be used. As a parent of one learning disabled child (currently prepping to sit her law school admission exams) and one too damned lazy child, I know from experience that unless you're kid is a self-motivated, self-teaching student, they're only going to be dragged through the system whether they deserve to graduate or not. That's what was happening to mine in the state's second best funded school districts. As Carlin so succinctly put it, somewhere between "head start" and "no child left behind" we lost a step.

To get my kids through school, I had to actively engage in their education. I worked with teachers and made sure they had the tools they needed and the supplementary classes they needed, largely at Khan Academy, and rarely had to spend a cent doing it. I think the responsibility of making sure kids get an education falls squarely on the parents. Not the teachers, the school administrators, the school boards, or the school districts. They get to hand out the diplomas, but making sure kids deserve one is on the parents because they're already falling down on that job. This pandemic is only exposing what many of us have known for years. We've gone from leading the world in educational quality to barely above average for reading and below average in math and science.

Perhaps when schools can afford current textbooks, instead of books ten years out of date, and the Navy has to host a fucking bake sail to get their next battleship, things will change. I'm not holding my breath for that day.