It’s time once again for a roundup of all the childhood-related stories I’ve noticed since the last such post that don’t fit in elsewhere. In addition to the standard post, I have a personal note, which is that unfortunately our current nanny’s health does not allow her to continue, and thus we in the process of searching and doing interviews for a new full-time nanny for our three children here in Manhattan. I hope to have someone in place by the end of the week. If you are or know someone we should consider, please do quickly contact me right away with the relevant information. You can DM me on Twitter, PM me on LesssWrong or email me through substack (or email directly if you know it). Thanks in advance.
This is my favorite of your newsletters, and it's great as always. A quick comment before I even finish reading:
On tests getting easier, and the grading rubrics being fudged - absolutely!
Go dig up the NYS Math A Regents examinations from 2002-2008 or so, including solutions and grading scales, and look at how the tests change (the increase in multiple choice) and how the raw "passing" grade slides from about 50/80 raw points to like 35/80.
Or even the SSHSAT got rid of some of the hardest question types (i.e. scrambled paragraphs).
I didn't get Paul's (and your) justification for "Another kind of lie is that unhappy childhoods are good". I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion at all - it's obviously a nuanced subject. But the reasoning "I want my kids to do great things" (who doesn't?), "and I'm not trying to give them unhappy childhoods" (who does?) seems to be little more than double-layered wishful thinking biasing opinion.
One thing that has worked for me in the "let kids play" space is Extended Day at school. When my kids (8 and 4) are at home, I sometimes struggle to convince them that they would enjoy doing things that are not watching TV - and other kids are often not around because they are busy with organized activities/dinner/bed. One might think that "extended day" is simply more school, but in my experience it's a chance for them to do creative games with their friends, in an environment where they aren't allowed to watch TV and are somewhat supervised, but are otherwise mostly left to do their own stuff. There are plenty of other kids there too.
This is exactly correct. I hated homework as a kid (Sundays had a pall of misery cast over them because there was always some nonsense hanging over my head for Monday), and the vast majority of it was pointless rote. The one exception was math. It was simultaneously the homework I loathed the most AND the most necessary. If I hadn't had to do all the other bullshit maybe I would have spent more time on math. In high school and thereafter, independently studying some conceptual things for cumulative tests and doing assigned reading also went from pointless to "actually quite useful and good and even fun sometimes". But kids under 13-14 should be spared homework. Except for math.
Homework is useful if it is customized to the individual - "practice these problems until you can do them" style assignments, or "write an essay on the assigned historical figure" - things where it will take some kids 10 minutes and others 3 hours (or 2 hours amd 20 hours for the essay), so you aren't frustrating the first group waiting for the second.
My 2 cents for homeschoolers: I homeschooled my daughter for grades 2-7. Started after 1st grade because I hated how things are at schools, stopped after grade 7 because she craved a big peer social scene, and I saw how important that really was at her age. One of the most important things I learned is that you can relax about teaching your kid a bunch of Stuff. So long as they like to read, and have a lot of books and activities they enjoy, their vocabulary, reading comprehension, general knowledge and thinking sophistication will increase naturally. They will learn a lot about things that interest them -- my daughter was quite interested in history -- and at least pick up a little bit here and there about things that don't interest them. They will probably write stuff spontaneously, and if they don't you can easily find ways to spur their motivation to do a bit of it. My daughter didn't like math, , but did like monopoly, and so picked up a fair amount of arithmetic there, also an intuitive sense of things like odds.
In the last year my before my daughter returned to school she and I spent about 2 hours per day on spelling, grammar, arithmetic and printing more neatly. She had about half an hour of homework on top of the 2 hours of daily tutoring. When she went back to school she did fine, went to college, and graduated with a degree in engineering. And while my daughter is bright, she is not one of those scary-smart 99th percentile kids.
The truth is, kids really do not learn that much in grammar school, and it is not hard to catch them up on the important things in way WAY fewer hours than they spend in school. Reading and some understanding of math are important to develop in the early years, but It's a crock of shit that kids need to be taught about subject areas bit by bit -- some simple geography in grade 2, a bit more in grade 3, capitals of countries in grade 4, etc etc. If you do not teach them about science, history, geography, government, etc. and they are not interested in learning about them on their own they will reach age 12 with very little knowledge of that stuff. But they can catch on subject areas like that quite easily. The primary school versions of that stuff bored the hell out of me when I was in school and I'll bet it bores most kids. And since it held no interest, none of it stuck to my ribs anyhow. It works fine for kids to arrive in school ignorant about such subject areas, and just learn from their middle school books & activities. At that point they're learning stuff that's complex enough to be interesting (and if they're not interested, they're mature enough to learn it in order to do decently on the test).
Re fertility: Do we know of any policies that worked elsewhere? Singapore seems to be doing everything you mentioned without much results (although maybe being a highly-urban asian country stacks the deck against them too much and the counterfactual is worse).
> I would go so far as to say that it’s fine to ask children to do some amount of homework-style work, but if it’s so valuable then set aside school time for that. When the work is done, the work is done.
Realistically speaking, isn't homeschooling (or micro-schooling) the only way to achieve this?
I agree on the homework points. Our children's school sends home a ton of work for parents to instruct our kids on. Not just like worksheets, but things we need to sit and teach them. It rather makes me wonder why the teachers are not doing that. Then on top of that they have the normal worksheets and other assignments. All before 4th grade. It is non-obvious why, especially when half of it never gets looked at by the teacher so as a diagnostic tool it is not being used.
When my kids become school-aged I think it will be a pretty tough for me, as someone who (correctly, IMO) hated homework as a kid and basically found ways to never ever do it and still barely pass high school. The problem for me was not doing homework wasn't really a solution -- yeah, I got those 3 hours back and there were no long or even medium term consequences -- but also I got publicly and privately shamed constantly both at home and at school for not doing it. I don't even know if it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Eventually I discovered doing some of my homework secretly in the back of other classes and that helped a lot, but only works if you have some truly bad classes you feel comfortable ignoring, and some years I genuinely thought a lot of my classes were enjoyable.
Not sure what to even suggest to my kids as the solution.
The amount of child supervision that people believe is appropriate is insane to me. I was pushing my 1 year old in a cart back to our car in a quiet grocery store parking lot while my 3 year old walked beside me. An older woman approached me three year old, not me, and told him that a car would hit him if he didn't hold my hand.
At a children's museum, they have a large train table. There was nearly a 1:1 child to parent ratio at the table and parents routinely pulled trains from their children's hands to "do it the right way."
I organize the nursery care at our church. It is for birth to 2 years old. There are usually 5 or so kids and we have 2 people watching them in a small room for about an hour and a half. One mom won't bring her 8 month old for fear that the older kids will "knock him down." He can't pull up or walk yet so at most he will get knocked over onto soft carpet from a seated position.
I really would like to know how we got here, it's as if people uniformly went mad at some point in the last 25 years.
After a decade as a programmer, people stopped even looking at my (lack of) college education. My first years would have been easier had education been a protected class but at least in tech it mostly doesn’t matter.
For most jobs, college education is purely a class marker. The people screening applicants just want people similar to themselves.
1. Versus versus "teaching to the test". As a teacher and test-taker, I had to hear too often: "obviously, we must not teach to the test". a) If the test is lousy: agreed. As many tests I had to take in school were, esp. in my first language (I seldom knew what or how the teacher wanted me to write, much less how she/he would grade. I got As, seldom knew why; same for my Cs.) BUT: SAT or ToEFL or TIMMS or PISA are nowhere near that lousy - and teaching-to-pass-those-tests-well requires teaching a lot and very well so. Plus their requirements AND marks are transparent. No Guess the Password.
b) What do they teach if they do not teach for a test? .... And how you test they succeed at that?
c) In the end, wherever I was, there was a lot of teaching to the test, either their own ones or the much better certified ones. d) As a teacher I prefer teaching-to-a-good&clear-goal to any "open" course. And my students seem to feel similar - obviously no surprise, when I suck at open courses ;)
2. Knowing only German kindergartens I have a hard time to understand your critique of those in NY. Kindergartens as I know them are fine places for kids to "play" the way you rightly say they should: they choose their space, their specific activity, the kids they play with. Educators are available, but are mostly not micro-managing what the kids do most of the day-care-time (5-1?! lol, 10-1). As it should be. And with so few kids around nowadays, that is the only playing-with-other-kids-time they get on rainy days. btw: very fine post :)
Most kids don't know this, and adults don't like to tell them, but grade assessments don't really matter until high school or a little bit before it. Even for getting into advanced classes you're often assessed based on a test, not on homework grades.
What's stopping parents from just telling teachers that their kids aren't going to do the pointless homework, and accepting the consequences to the student's grades?
This is my favorite of your newsletters, and it's great as always. A quick comment before I even finish reading:
On tests getting easier, and the grading rubrics being fudged - absolutely!
Go dig up the NYS Math A Regents examinations from 2002-2008 or so, including solutions and grading scales, and look at how the tests change (the increase in multiple choice) and how the raw "passing" grade slides from about 50/80 raw points to like 35/80.
Or even the SSHSAT got rid of some of the hardest question types (i.e. scrambled paragraphs).
I didn't get Paul's (and your) justification for "Another kind of lie is that unhappy childhoods are good". I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion at all - it's obviously a nuanced subject. But the reasoning "I want my kids to do great things" (who doesn't?), "and I'm not trying to give them unhappy childhoods" (who does?) seems to be little more than double-layered wishful thinking biasing opinion.
One thing that has worked for me in the "let kids play" space is Extended Day at school. When my kids (8 and 4) are at home, I sometimes struggle to convince them that they would enjoy doing things that are not watching TV - and other kids are often not around because they are busy with organized activities/dinner/bed. One might think that "extended day" is simply more school, but in my experience it's a chance for them to do creative games with their friends, in an environment where they aren't allowed to watch TV and are somewhat supervised, but are otherwise mostly left to do their own stuff. There are plenty of other kids there too.
"Most homework is truly evil."
This is exactly correct. I hated homework as a kid (Sundays had a pall of misery cast over them because there was always some nonsense hanging over my head for Monday), and the vast majority of it was pointless rote. The one exception was math. It was simultaneously the homework I loathed the most AND the most necessary. If I hadn't had to do all the other bullshit maybe I would have spent more time on math. In high school and thereafter, independently studying some conceptual things for cumulative tests and doing assigned reading also went from pointless to "actually quite useful and good and even fun sometimes". But kids under 13-14 should be spared homework. Except for math.
Homework is useful if it is customized to the individual - "practice these problems until you can do them" style assignments, or "write an essay on the assigned historical figure" - things where it will take some kids 10 minutes and others 3 hours (or 2 hours amd 20 hours for the essay), so you aren't frustrating the first group waiting for the second.
great post, Zvi. timely on my part too
My 2 cents for homeschoolers: I homeschooled my daughter for grades 2-7. Started after 1st grade because I hated how things are at schools, stopped after grade 7 because she craved a big peer social scene, and I saw how important that really was at her age. One of the most important things I learned is that you can relax about teaching your kid a bunch of Stuff. So long as they like to read, and have a lot of books and activities they enjoy, their vocabulary, reading comprehension, general knowledge and thinking sophistication will increase naturally. They will learn a lot about things that interest them -- my daughter was quite interested in history -- and at least pick up a little bit here and there about things that don't interest them. They will probably write stuff spontaneously, and if they don't you can easily find ways to spur their motivation to do a bit of it. My daughter didn't like math, , but did like monopoly, and so picked up a fair amount of arithmetic there, also an intuitive sense of things like odds.
In the last year my before my daughter returned to school she and I spent about 2 hours per day on spelling, grammar, arithmetic and printing more neatly. She had about half an hour of homework on top of the 2 hours of daily tutoring. When she went back to school she did fine, went to college, and graduated with a degree in engineering. And while my daughter is bright, she is not one of those scary-smart 99th percentile kids.
The truth is, kids really do not learn that much in grammar school, and it is not hard to catch them up on the important things in way WAY fewer hours than they spend in school. Reading and some understanding of math are important to develop in the early years, but It's a crock of shit that kids need to be taught about subject areas bit by bit -- some simple geography in grade 2, a bit more in grade 3, capitals of countries in grade 4, etc etc. If you do not teach them about science, history, geography, government, etc. and they are not interested in learning about them on their own they will reach age 12 with very little knowledge of that stuff. But they can catch on subject areas like that quite easily. The primary school versions of that stuff bored the hell out of me when I was in school and I'll bet it bores most kids. And since it held no interest, none of it stuck to my ribs anyhow. It works fine for kids to arrive in school ignorant about such subject areas, and just learn from their middle school books & activities. At that point they're learning stuff that's complex enough to be interesting (and if they're not interested, they're mature enough to learn it in order to do decently on the test).
Re fertility: Do we know of any policies that worked elsewhere? Singapore seems to be doing everything you mentioned without much results (although maybe being a highly-urban asian country stacks the deck against them too much and the counterfactual is worse).
> I would go so far as to say that it’s fine to ask children to do some amount of homework-style work, but if it’s so valuable then set aside school time for that. When the work is done, the work is done.
Realistically speaking, isn't homeschooling (or micro-schooling) the only way to achieve this?
I agree on the homework points. Our children's school sends home a ton of work for parents to instruct our kids on. Not just like worksheets, but things we need to sit and teach them. It rather makes me wonder why the teachers are not doing that. Then on top of that they have the normal worksheets and other assignments. All before 4th grade. It is non-obvious why, especially when half of it never gets looked at by the teacher so as a diagnostic tool it is not being used.
When my kids become school-aged I think it will be a pretty tough for me, as someone who (correctly, IMO) hated homework as a kid and basically found ways to never ever do it and still barely pass high school. The problem for me was not doing homework wasn't really a solution -- yeah, I got those 3 hours back and there were no long or even medium term consequences -- but also I got publicly and privately shamed constantly both at home and at school for not doing it. I don't even know if it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Eventually I discovered doing some of my homework secretly in the back of other classes and that helped a lot, but only works if you have some truly bad classes you feel comfortable ignoring, and some years I genuinely thought a lot of my classes were enjoyable.
Not sure what to even suggest to my kids as the solution.
The amount of child supervision that people believe is appropriate is insane to me. I was pushing my 1 year old in a cart back to our car in a quiet grocery store parking lot while my 3 year old walked beside me. An older woman approached me three year old, not me, and told him that a car would hit him if he didn't hold my hand.
At a children's museum, they have a large train table. There was nearly a 1:1 child to parent ratio at the table and parents routinely pulled trains from their children's hands to "do it the right way."
I organize the nursery care at our church. It is for birth to 2 years old. There are usually 5 or so kids and we have 2 people watching them in a small room for about an hour and a half. One mom won't bring her 8 month old for fear that the older kids will "knock him down." He can't pull up or walk yet so at most he will get knocked over onto soft carpet from a seated position.
I really would like to know how we got here, it's as if people uniformly went mad at some point in the last 25 years.
After a decade as a programmer, people stopped even looking at my (lack of) college education. My first years would have been easier had education been a protected class but at least in tech it mostly doesn’t matter.
For most jobs, college education is purely a class marker. The people screening applicants just want people similar to themselves.
1. Versus versus "teaching to the test". As a teacher and test-taker, I had to hear too often: "obviously, we must not teach to the test". a) If the test is lousy: agreed. As many tests I had to take in school were, esp. in my first language (I seldom knew what or how the teacher wanted me to write, much less how she/he would grade. I got As, seldom knew why; same for my Cs.) BUT: SAT or ToEFL or TIMMS or PISA are nowhere near that lousy - and teaching-to-pass-those-tests-well requires teaching a lot and very well so. Plus their requirements AND marks are transparent. No Guess the Password.
b) What do they teach if they do not teach for a test? .... And how you test they succeed at that?
c) In the end, wherever I was, there was a lot of teaching to the test, either their own ones or the much better certified ones. d) As a teacher I prefer teaching-to-a-good&clear-goal to any "open" course. And my students seem to feel similar - obviously no surprise, when I suck at open courses ;)
2. Knowing only German kindergartens I have a hard time to understand your critique of those in NY. Kindergartens as I know them are fine places for kids to "play" the way you rightly say they should: they choose their space, their specific activity, the kids they play with. Educators are available, but are mostly not micro-managing what the kids do most of the day-care-time (5-1?! lol, 10-1). As it should be. And with so few kids around nowadays, that is the only playing-with-other-kids-time they get on rainy days. btw: very fine post :)
Most kids don't know this, and adults don't like to tell them, but grade assessments don't really matter until high school or a little bit before it. Even for getting into advanced classes you're often assessed based on a test, not on homework grades.
What's stopping parents from just telling teachers that their kids aren't going to do the pointless homework, and accepting the consequences to the student's grades?