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regentrude

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regentrude last won the day on February 7

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  1. Yes, I have let my 7th grader stay home alone. Unless the kid has developmental challenges, I see no reason not to. Fwiw, back home, kids are expected to navigate public transit in 5th grade.
  2. Oh absolutely. I see wonderful motivated young people every day.
  3. We now have a small outdoor school here in our town!
  4. I believe a disconnect to nature and the outdoors fuels the current crisis. Kids spend their day in front of screens instead of playing in the mud, wading a creek, climbing trees, and becoming intimately familiar with their natural environment. When I was a kid, pediatricians recommended 2-3 hours of outdoor play each day. As an adult, I feel acutely how harmful the typical Western lifestyle is to mental health. I can take steps to adjust my life, and increasing physical exertion outdoors, way more than we think we should have, has helped me immensely. Kids don't have much agency. And when parents prioritize structured activities and constant supervision, kids don't get these experiences which I believe are crucial for healthy development. We haven't evolved over thousands of years as sedentary indoor creatures.
  5. This. Here is where I see a negative effect of the (very valid and important) focus on mental health, self-care, etc. When simply disagreeing causes young people to feel "unsafe", when criticism "traumatizes", when college students feel threatened in their emotional balance because they are exposed to different viewpoints, the pendulum has swung too far. As for the cause, the constant online presence is very likely a strong contributor. Teens lounging in echo chambers and parroting language they find appealing. And yes, it's ironic, as pp pointed out, that young people never before had such easy access to information and education, and as many options for life as now.
  6. I am not sure that this is the root of the issue. I grew up in a country where you definitely could not trust the police, where you knew the leadership was evil, where you knew that some teachers would turn you in to the secret service if you said the wrong things, where you knew that any protest would be quelled by soviet tanks, where you did not feel a shred of hope that the totalitarian system would ever crumble (when it did, it was a huge surprise to everybody; we had all expected to spend our entire lives without escape). It was an actually hopeless situation - yet it did not cause the issues we are discussing here. Plenty of other issues, but none of this learned helplessness and refusal to figure things out, (Actually, people were pretty good at figuring things out because you had to to navigate a very complicated life.)
  7. My childhood in Germany involved lots of required reading about the war and the holocaust, some including graphic accounts of torture, class trip to a concentration camp in 8th grade, teachings how to build a fallout shelter in the apartment, school-mandated pre-military retreats and camps, being graded on donning gas mask and protective suit in under 2 minutes ...
  8. @Faith-manor yes, the kids face a lot of global issues. However, is it really that much different from previous generations? They each had trauma. WWI, WWII, cold war, nuclear threat.... There is more going on. Something that makes today's student generation incredibly fragile and without resilience. If a quiz over the homework brings them to tears and "traumatizes" them, something is very very wrong.
  9. @Clemsondana We are observing something similar in our college classes. My attendance is the lowest it has been in 20 years, but even more concerning is what many instructors across disciplines report: students who attend but refuse to participate. They won't do the activities, won't turn in the completed work, play on their phones through the entire class. This is a four-year university. I regularly have students in the homework help sessions who say they don't understand how to do the problems. I ask "were you in class today?" "I'm in the online section." " ok. Did you watch today's lecture?" "No." Which means they expect me to spoonfeed them the homework solution because they couldn't be bothered to watch the lecture which contains several examples. It's aggravating.
  10. What would I do? Ignore it. What else? The woman can post on her Fb page whatever she wants. She didn't attack or slander your DD; she talked about her own son.
  11. That is unfortunate. We offer all our courses in person. Only summer courses are predominantly online because students won't be on campus.
  12. And of course they can still cheat easily with a set of button-sized camera and rice-hrain-sized ear piece, available online if you google cheating tech. It's impossible to prevent cheating.
  13. You can go to testing centers of community colleges, but staffing those is expensive, and they are already stretched to the max Oral exams will never be popular in this country because it's such a litigious society and folks would just sue. Back home, the important tests are oral, but I wouldn't want to touch this in the US.
  14. Another scary one: coming out of the Grand Canyon from a backpacking trip, about an hour below the rim, we meet a lady who carries nothing but a cell phone and sunglasses. She asks how much further it is to the river. Lady, it's another nine miles and 3000 vertical feet and you'll have to come back up and you have no water and it's already past noon. She was very determined and hard to dissuade from her plans.
  15. I don't think they think at all. On a canyoneering trip, we came across four women sitting above a drop-off with a waterfall that required rapelling down. They had a rope, but no idea what to do with it. We spent over an hour helping them down, me belaying from top, DH standing in the pool and receiving them and guiding them to dry land. It was quite remote and we were possibly the only two parties there that day.
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