About broccoli there are two things to remember: there are different cultivars, and F1 hybrids are normally more sweet and tender that classic cultivars. Another thing is how they’re cooked One thing is if they’re boiled, another thing is make them in the oven with Besciamella, ham, and grana cheese
By the way kids are normally more prone than adult to get germs because are cabit careless. As a kid i have eaten eggs second after the chickens made them, I have wrestled with friends and their dogs in the summer afternoons, I’ve drank raw milk directly form the cows and so on. Luckily I didn’t get any serious bug. On the other hand climbing trees to get fruits had some consequences and a couple of times I had to go in A&E…
But a good school will learn these aspect while formally learning other things. Mathematics could be all on creative problem solving, at school one has to have relations with other people and should adapt. Problem is if the idea of the parents is that the main purpose of schooling is to put the kids in a room when they have to do other things.
Exactly, of course they would. Most do not. And there aregroups whose mission is to move in that direction, who have produced some amazing resources. Instead we get lots of standardized testing. It always made me sad that I read books like The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland in English class and not math class. Wouldn’t it be great if 4th-6th grade math classes took some time to read those and talk about them? I’d recommend Flatland but its 19th century politics haven’t aged well. Of course, this would also require teachers that understood the math they were teaching at a deeper level than most of mine did.
And I don’t think most parents consciously think that. Or rather, they think of it as a pleasant side effect of school’s main purpose.
Not much of modern secondary education resembles a lecture. Heck, that wasn’t even the case way back when I was in high school.
ETA:
Because that’s not how viral infections work. You could get rapid low level spread in a school and generate exactly the kind of herd immunity effect you describe - right up to the point that an immunocompromised teacher catches it and becomes a massive virus factory. The 48 hours of spread after that is where dozens of people get seriously sick.
Mine did in the early 2000s, about 90% of the time. Teachers tried to have discussions and activities, but most people got away with not participating much, and they were thin on actual thinking and exploring anyway.
Uhm, I always read the first part of Flatland as a biting satire of Victorian politics, but that’s perhaps a bit advanced for middle-schoolers. (It appears to have escaped even you.)
If you have good resources showing what that looks like in practice in a typical school, I’d genuinely love to see it. A priori, I’m skeptical. There have always been lots of projects in school, but very few led to any sort of real learning or deeper understanding, and the things I have heard from friends who are teachers make it sound like things on that front have gotten worse or stayed the same.
Actually, one of the school projects that taught me the most was a 7th grade math paper on math in astronomy. I looked back at it once when I was in college (while I was tossing old notebooks to clean out my room), and my explanations of the above-grade-level math were mostly right. That paper got a failing grade because the teacher didn’t understand it.
I’m somewhat biased, as my parents are retired high school teachers. I observed their classes many times over the years due to misalignment in my school schedule and their districts’, when I would go with them.
They didn’t lecture. They led class discussions of the materials and set up group projects then circulated from one group to the other.
My kids only very rarely had teachers who lectured, and those teachers often were sent for further training to update their approach, since it means they aren’t following the common core standards. Which, by the way, are here:
While it doesn’t spell it out in minute detail, when it says things like “informed by other top-performing countries,” that means mostly discussion and project-based teaching methods rather than dry didactic methods.
Yes. Yes, we did, because we elected a bunch of people who believe not in Science, but in ‘as long as I got mine, everyone else can burn along with the world’
Provided we as a world survive this (and we will, because the power of the human spirit as a collective is hard to kill (“Even with a chain saw!”(1))) I hope that we will come through this a little more sane, and less likely to elect people such as those whom we’ve elected this time.
(1) From The Addams Family, 1991: Dr. Pinder-Schloss : The human spirit, it is a very difficult thing to kill. Grandma : Even with a chainsaw!
Oh absolutely that would be a terrible situation and I haven’t seen anyone with a school reopening plan that adequately addresses it. Also not the same as controlled exposure, with quarantine for a period of time after, of healthy people to a low viral load. Which is how a lot of vaccines work or used to work. Instead we have ethicists claiming it would be unethical to even test whether vaccines work by exposing healthy people to the virus after being supposedly immunized.
Guys, this is getting pretty far off topic, but my son just finished on-line summer school between 5th and 6th grade. It was an integrated teaching method incorporating urban planning, math, reading/comprehension, and racism awareness. They used video, reading material, guided discussion, individual activities, group activities and a whole class project. Worked pretty well for a kid with ADD, and we had some good discussions about what he was learning, particularly about how white supremacy infects every facet of American life. Plus, he got a pretty good sneak peek at the various on-line platforms he can expect to be using this fall.
Betsy DeVos’s folks have long been proponents of home schooling as well as government-subsidized private schools as competition to the public schools (where “competition” traditionally included either religious education or racial imbalance along with whatever educational competition.)
But now that there’s a Republican-linked pandemic, oh, no, kids can’t psychologically handle being homeschooled or unschooled, they NEED to be in public school, butts in their seats, not just zooming in to it on the computer.
Reopening schools has two main political objectives - make everything look normal so Trump can get re-elected, and get kids out of the house so their parents can go out to work instead of working from home, to make things look more normal.
Parent “Patient 0” goes to work, gets infected, comes home, spends a couple of pre-symptomatic days infecting their kids. (This isn’t just COVID, it’s colds, flu, lots of other diseases.)
Kid goes to school, spends a couple of pre-symptomatic days spreading it to fellow students in their class.
Newly infected kid goes home, spends a couple of pre-symptomatic days infecting their siblings and parents.
Siblings go to school, spread it to THEIR classes
Parents go to work, spread it to THEIR coworkers, presumably at a different job than Patient 0.
Parents or Coworkers optionally go to church, spread it to people who aren’t their coworkers and maybe don’t have kids at home.
I’m a Boomer, so there weren’t vaccines for measles, chicken pox, lot of childhood diseases when I was a kid, and most of us had more siblings than current kids. Most of the diseases either worked like that, or (if the parents couldn’t get infected because they’d already had measles etc.) just sibling-to-school-class-to-sibling-to-school-class transmission was enough to do the job. Different diseases had different incubation periods, but most of them had at least a day or two before the kid got a visible rash or was cranky long enough for the parent to wonder if they had a fever and take their temperature.
If we can’t get enough actual Covid testing in place before the politicians reopen the schools, then at the very minimum, we need to not only be doing masks and tracking students’ and teachers’ temperatures and asking about other symptoms, we also need to be tracking the temperatures of all their family members to get a bit more warning.
Fair point for sure. I was working on some faith that schools will be distancing, requiring masks, modifying behaviors so that your 10x is more like a 1x. Our school is taking those measures. I surely can’t know if they all are.
