Monday: walk, rain, Walden delivery

I have eggs! Walden arrived today with 4 dozen eggs. Mmmmm. I made blondies.

We also had the second sunbasket. It was another paleo, so I added sweet potato fries. One of the weird side effects of several unrelated decisions over the last few months / years is that I own an air fryer, and I almost always have sweet potatoes in the fridge. The air fryer happened the year I bought everyone instant pots for the holidays, and my BIL said he did not want one, but he wanted an air fryer. He tried it, decided it was not a good replacement for an actual fryer, and was going to return it. I had him send it to me instead, because my constraints are different from him and based on his detailed video review, it seemed perfect. And it really is. The sweet potatoes happen because of Imperfect Foods — they almost always have organic sweet potatoes and for some reason they wound up in my Put In Every Order List and I keep eating them. Turns out the easiest and favorite way to cook them is in the air fryer with spray from costco. This is real downmarket for me, and I do not really care.

I finally awarded the Rage Certificate I printed out a while back: I gave it to myself. I completely lost it because A. was persistently dissatisfied with her self-portrait. I tried repeatedly to disengage, and she started crying to get me to come back in. I walked her through a half dozen ways to draw the braids and she did great but did not like them. She asked me to do them and she did not like what I drew. I wound up destroying the picture (no loss — she was not going to let me take a picture of it anyway, or submit it).

After a shower, a walk with M., and a snack, I thought through what to do about the real problem : A.’s perfectionism is largely NOT a problem, but art still brings it out in its most florid form — and she will not leave me out of it. If I could disengage, I would be fine, and I could treat this strictly as a boundary problem but that does not feel like a great solution here. What I decided was that, okay, the assignment is to do a portrait or self-portrait, but you can use any materials. We suck with pencils (we can’t even write well), so let’s switch to devices. Yeah, sure, whatever, fine, art is supposed to be screen-free time but FUCK THE IDEA THAT ART SHOULD NOT BE ON SCREENS. Fuck it, right in the whatever. That is a stupid rule. We have all these stupid fucking rules about screens and that is why we have such shitty solutions for online schooling, when we had a decade to get this figured out, screens distributed, broadband deployed, etc. But Nooooo, we cannot do that because we fetishize Not Screen.

I downloaded one of those idiotic apps that take a picture and make it look like a sketch. I showed it to A. and said, here, take a picture of yourself with a background you like. We were not going to pass this off as a sketch; the idea is that a photographic self-portrait is art, and selecting a filter makes it even more art. She had wanted to make it B&W, but I failed to understand what grey style meant and it took R. later on to puzzle that out, and then show where on the iPad camera the control for that was. In the meantime, I wrote a letter to the art teacher to go with the uploaded, filtered photo, explaining why we did what we did (all on me, for rage quitting). She said nice things about the resulting photo and asked what we used.

I then wasted a half hour and tried Painnt, which is what I think I would use going forward. It is pretty fun to play with this stuff, and I am pretty sure that that is part of what the art teacher is trying to accomplish: get the kids to mess around with art stuff and see what can be done with it. If only that did not involve such a fucking prejudice against screens.

A Few Remarks on Why We Wasted a Decade

Actually, more than a decade.

My sister home-schooled both her kids for a number of years, put them in brick and mortar school, and then switched one back to home-schooling this year (nice timing, right?). Obviously, the other one is doing distance learning again, and is also now signed up for home schooling as well. I had a lot of concerns about home schooling, because it can be very isolating; she dealt with that very effectively by taking the kids out for a variety of activities in a variety of contexts. I was never worried about the quality of the education they received. For the most part, they did K12, and they did it on a computer — a desktop, I believe. Partway through this process, I harassed my sister until she let me send them kindle fires, and then she became a convert to the religion of give kids screens. I also got the kids regular ereaders.

It was a tough sell. Around the same time, I was having a lot of conflict with the mother of some kids my daughter had playdates with, because we have screens, and whenever that family came over, their kids were only interested in screens — and that family was Anti Screen. I tried to pull the plug on the entire connection, because it just was not working for me in a lot of ways (not just the screen problem — there was some super weird dynamic going on with their religion, and binary thinking, and tending to cast the older boy into some really negative archetypes when he exhibited rambunctiousness, which I thought could wind up going somewhere very dark over time). But they really wanted to keep things going, so I wound up buying them some kindle fires, and weirdly, that kind of worked? I mean, when A. switched schools, we did not really see them for a while, but later I ran into the mom, and she came over to me and leaned down and said a bunch of stuff that started with you were really right and I learned so much from you and it was awkward and uncomfortable, but she is a super loving and awesome person (always was, whole family is just amazing in a lot of ways, but kind of incompatible with us) and I was obviously honored.

But that was a couple years ago, and I have entirely given up on trying to convince anti-screen people to let their kids have their screens and explore the world of whatever the fuck. People do not like the screens, fine, whatever, be that way.

Parallel to this, we shopped for the house we live in while I was pregnant with my daughter, and then while she was quite small. We bought it when she was a few months old. We did almost the entire shopping process online, and used the builder / seller’s agent for both sides (and 3% total commission instead of 6%) (she was great — lined us up with an awesome mortgage broker, too). That was in 2008/9 time frame, so there were decent-ish websites (far better than what existed when I bought my condo in 1997) with lots of photos, but no videos at that time.

Fast forward to now: virtual tours, panos, videos all de rigeur for selling houses on line. Or so I thought! I was listening to Bloomberg and CEO of a homebuilder is on the 5 pm technology show explaining why he was so resistant to virtual tours. He was so offhand! You have to walk through the space, he says.

!!!!!

I just cannot even.

OK, when I was single, and I bought my condo, sure, I could walk through spaces. Yay.

But when I was shopping to rent an apartment in Seattle, I was living in NH. I could not walk through spaces. I needed to identify a place from a distance, and I needed to get it right. I needed floor plans and really good photos.

When we were shopping for this house, we were living in NH — drive time 35 minutes optimistically, potentially a lot more, with one kid with an autism diagnosis and nonverbal at 3, and a small baby. We wanted to walk through only to confirm what we had already decided on. We were definitely not the only homebuyers ever who shopped long-distance and/or with small children and inadequate child care. If you make it hard to assess your property online, you are basically kissing that entire slice of the market goodbye. And I think that CEO did not even know that he was doing it.

Why do I mention this?

Because all those anti-screen people (not my sister, not my friend — all the people I gave up on trying to convince, because I decided if they were that determined to go to the devil, then by all means, here, take your handbasket and stroll down that wide path straight to hell) are suddenly scrambling to figure out how to do everything for their kids on screens. And that CEO is suddenly glad he said yes to virtual tours when pressed by his apparently-competent team. And why did that happen? You know why.

There are so many things we could have done a decade ago. Khan Academy has been around about that long. It is widely regarded as pretty much the best online turnkey math curriculum out there. It works even for kids who are in need of a LOT of additional help in school. My theory is that it exists largely because resistance to online math curriculum is muted simply because most elementary school teachers really, really, really hate teaching math. And most homeschooling parents do, too.

We’ve got chromebooks and google classroom, and all kinds of other broadly available, very inexpensive and effective tools that have been cobbled together in a hurry into something that can be used to do distance learning. It did not have to be this way. We could have had something much more fully-fledged, familiar because it was used in the classroom, that supported maintaining the current curriculum, rather than sticking to mostly already learned concepts. We did not. Why did we waste a decade?

First, and more than anything else: status quo bias. Look how long it took to get to a paperless office. Hardly a surprise that classrooms would take longer.

Second, the complexity of curriculum development, and the way it is unevenly distributed. In some schools, individual teachers are making a lot of major curriculum decisions. In a lot of schools, that happens at the district level. And in a few states, that happens at the county or state levels. It is tough to design ed tech that can scale at all those levels, and to develop the marketing and support teams to interface with those levels. Part of why Khan works is because it is free. Most ed tech exists in a nebulous Nice to Have, Extras universe, in which a few bold teachers, usually early in their careers, are all fired up with new ideas.

Third, there are a lot of hidden purposes served by the digital divide. While chromebooks and so forth are quite cheap, and there are counties and states big enough to be able to save money by developing their own ed tech curriculum if they wanted to, all of the decision makers belong to either the elites, or the next step down from the elites (depending on how you define them). Before the Now, you could not avoid articles about how Billionaire in Tech has Kids Who Went to Waldorf Schools or WTF, and never even touched anything electronic until blah blah blah blah. This is like, pale skin never touched by the sun is desirable when the riffraff work in the fields, but a tan is desirable when the riffraff work on lines in gargantuan factories, especially in winter because it shows you can afford a cruise to the Bahamas. If you got rich in tech, you can afford to raise kids who have no access to tech. It will not negatively affect their access to the top schools. The next tier down (oh, how I know this) apes what the top does. So while the next tier down cannot necessarily hard core send their kids to Waldorf schools, they can probably do Montessori for preschool, kindergarten and maybe first or second grade, and buy something to lock up the screens except for the half hour or whatever a day that the kids are allowed to play some Educational “Game”. They were all Oh So Eager to share how hard it was to enforce it, but how important it was to do so. Virtue signaling. Intense, pervasive, virtue signaling.

Fine, whatever, but let’s stop and think about this. The riffraff are going to be stuck pushing buttons on some kind of screen, whether that is in a restaurant, a call center or selling stuff. Their parents are pretty motivated to get the kids to develop some kind of screen expertise, often because they can see in their own lives how not being great at that tech thing has really hampered their own prospects. They do not have a lot of money. They do not live in neighborhoods with Xfinity or Fios, or whatever. Screen time limits in their households are defined by having to share devices with siblings, or a parent. This is the digital divide that people lament, and say, oh, equity issues, we cannot do distance learning / learning from home, it is unfair.

It is unfair, because the elite and the next tier down have established that having too much device time is Bad For Children. Obviously, then, the elite and the next tier down will not participate in funding adequate devices and screens for people who cannot afford them. I mean, _that would be like buying cocaine for babies_ or something.

The purpose served by the anti-screen fetish is that it entirely absolves those with the resources to provide all people in our society with the tool that gives access to literally everything — the phone book, the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the atlas, newspapers, books, magazines — from having to actually help people get, maintain and replace that tool at decent intervals.

(I might note that a lot of the hand-wringing over childhood obesity smacks of similar attempts to avoid actually having to pay up to make sure kids in poorer families get enough nutritious food to eat that is appealing to them. But this is plenty long enough already.)

So. We wasted a decade. If you participated in this nonsense, please feel shame. I normally do not approve of shame. I am making an exception here. Being opposed to screens is right up there with Jazz is the Devil’s Music, and Novels Will Rot Your Brain, and all those ridiculous accusations leveled at comic books and rock and roll. (I had an all caps statement that you should feel ashamed, but I have drawn back from that.)

Now that you feel bad (or are successfully feeling great for being on the right side of this thing!) I have a suggestion: pretend you were always in favor of screens, but you just pretended to enforce screen limits, and do what you can to support the development of enterprise ed tech. Specifically, we need things that you can pay an enormous fraction of the school budget for, that replaces every last piece of paper and book in sight. And we need it to be customizable to represent the curriculum desired by whoever is picking curriculum locally (in some places, that will be the state or county, but in my area, it will be the district), and it needs to smoothly integrate our teachers in a way that the union can be forced to cope with. We have teachers. They are local. We are not going to try to put the teachers out of business with ed tech. That will straight up not work, and I recognize that.

We were always in favor of screens. No one, at any point in this whole process, seriously thought it would be a good idea to deliver boxes of workbooks and worksheets to every kid in their district to get them to the end of the school year. We were willing to do that on a case by case (ha ha) basis as necessary, but what we actually wound up doing was a hybrid of PBS stations and programming, and screens.

I am pretty sure we all agree that, from an educational perspective, an interactive screen is probably better than one that is not.

If you are sitting here wondering, how did you just write all that and never mention Zoom, that is precisely my point. I have been asking a lot of people what their kids’ school experience is like, and the Watch the Teacher Teach a Lesson Using Zoom parts are far and away the worst parts, from Montessori preschool up through law school. Nobody wants that. Videoconferencing is useful, and will be a component of schooling (discussion, probably, office hours type things, definitely), but we need distance learning that does not lean heavily on pointing an iPhone at a teacher in front of a white board while she tries to speak audibly to a group of kids scattered in houses around town with unpredictable interruptions and who honestly are Just Not That Into This Whole School Thing Anyway. Standing up and lecturing live is not that brilliant in person; doing it online is just stupid. If someone is so magnetic as to be worth watching, record it and use it as part of the canned curriculum that can be consumed asynchronously. The teacher’s expertise is much better directed to answering questions and leading a discussion.