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DangerouslyUnstable's avatar

I don't go around having arguments with strangers about this, but I have had a continuing discussion with my parents about the reality of "sugar rushes". According to my parents, when I was a child, I was _incredibly_ bad at handling sugar and they could immediately tell whether or not I had any. Of course, I was actually pretty good at sneaking candy, and they caught me in a pretty small minority of cases.

My view on the way that the science fits in with the lived experience of parents everywhere is that high sugar intake _usually_ occurs in very specific circumstances: birthday parties, sleep overs, etc. Those activities are likely to be high-excitement and lots of rambunctiousness going on. The perception is: child eats 1/2 of a birthday cake, then runs in circles until they fall over, and those things both happened, but the science says it's not related to the sugar. Luckily, we don't need to invalidate the experience of "child ran around like a maniac". That _did_ happen, it's just (in my opinion) more likely due to the environment in which the sugar was consumed rather than the sugar itself.

I did eventually learn to stop arguing with my parents about this (note: I'm far too old for it to be about regulating my own sugar content, more about discussions about parenting my own kids), or anyone else for that matter. It's too trivial, and people's opinions are too set on it.

Maybe my own experiences will change my mind in defiance of the data in the next few years. We will see.

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Brett Paul Bellmore's avatar

"I think that our implementation of ‘remote learning’ made things dramatically worse for children."

And, this is important to realize, to a very large extent schools never went back to the pre-Covid procedures. Often they're just conducting remote learning with the students in the schools instead of at home.

It's a bit better because the teachers are on hand if the student has the initiative to ask a question. But it's not the way they were conducting classes pre-Covid.

If I had my choice, they'd take all those Chrome books and put them in a landfill somewhere, and go back to non-electronic learning again. Again and again I'm seeing this electronic learning model have problems for my son, who was a straight A student before Covid, and now struggles to maintain a mix of A's and B's. The electronic learning has inserted too many failure points that are unrelated to the actual academics.

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