| As a 17 year student from Germany in his last year of school, I only now realize that school was - and still kinda is- a rather positive experience.
Homeschooling is downright terrible(though it's no ones fault) A lot of us like to think that the sole purpose of school is to educate kids, so they can go into society with a portfolio of knowledge and practical skills. While in reality it is just a part of it. I would argue that "kindergartening" kids, so parents can work a 9to5 job, and socialization are just as - if not more- important.
The pandemic gave us no time to prepare, so education is the only thing that we are able to do. Kids are left to do homework, and nothing else. They do the shitty bits of school without the fun part stripped away. Currently some teachers VASTLY overestimate how much work can actually get done within 45-90 minutes. Do you really think that kids actually do 90 minutes of work? It mostly boils down to 15-30 minutes of truly productive time, a good chunk of time is spent with chitchat and ... _I don't even know_ . A skill school never taught very well is time-management.
Any deadline you give to students WILL be procrastinated by most students to the very last second. Thanks to the wonders of modern online-platforms, such as Moodle, you can have deadlines at arbitrary times, such as 12am at night. Late deadlines are made with good intent, but are horrible in practice. Believe me that some student indeed do their homework at 11pm to turn it in at 12 am. Which undeniably is terrible for a kids mental-health. As a student who gets through school without any effort at all, I am now forced to do repetitive and _stupid_ homework for the sole purpose of being busy. Before I could simply participate in class and show that I understood the material, while others were doing their work I was tolerated to just read a book (as long as I participated in class). I truly miss just hanging around with my friend :(
Discord just can't replace face-to-face interaction. The only thing positive aspect is that I have a lot of time to spend on personal projects. I finally feel comfortable with IDA and x32dbg and my C-programming (and Golang, Python) skills have improved greatly :D
Although I often feel unmotivated to actually do personal projects and go through depressive phases :/ Although not entirely related, I suggest reading Paul Grahams essay on nerds: http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html |