I get you’re spitballing here, and I’m going to admit this isn’t the most data-driven argument, but here goes: you’re saying take away the kid’s friends, ratchet up the bullying, make sure they hit puberty at the wrong time, make sure they suck at sports, obliterate the chance of them having a successful romantic interaction, and the reward is one of two things: still being bored in classes with the same problems, or having “dumb kid” problems in the exact same classes that are harmful to dumb kids.
Again… total leaf-node in your essay and sometimes “bad” ideas can just expand imagination for what sort of outside-the-box solutions we should consider. Felt this was worth calling out as a uniquely bad idea.
Also I did this, I skipped 8th grade. Which was silly. I was actually hit-or-miss behind in humanities classes, for a similar reason you call out in math: no teacher noticed I had a mental process error where I didn’t know the difference between reading and processing a sentence and unpacking the sentence’s meaning, and The Odyssey was hard enough to show that difference. (Today, honestly, I still can’t follow the plot of Elden Ring and Christopher Nolan movies and stuff, but I’m very good at themes and theses once I know what’s going on.) I would have needed, yeah, something around 4 years jump to be stimulated in a math class again, which is actually what happened at PROMYS my sophomore-junior summer. PROMYS was somewhat socially smoothed out too. I was still young-ish but more on the bell curve in age instead of just youngest in my class by a full year.
So I pretty much just think of high school as a black hole in my life plot, between a more-or-less happy childhood and more-or-less happy college experience, with some sun peaking out (mixed metaphor sorry) during PROMYS. And that’s how I described it in high school too. This should sound sad, and it is sad, because just finding some creative way to turn 4 years of youth into something no better than sitting in a waiting room a little too long (and that’s already the upgraded “alternative thought” in place of thoughts of self-harm or something) is a bad ends, even if I’m a happy-ish worker bee now.
If I had to offer an alternative proposal. It seems that remote learning is, you know, bad socially, but maybe a little strategic remote learning here and there to accelerate someone in math or get them reading harder fiction sooner, across a larger pool of kids, isn’t all bad? Like are we going to humor the thesis that being bored in the same classes is key to making friends at lunch? If you think so, the problem is probably one kid being an isolate, not the system just working that way normally.
I get you’re spitballing here, and I’m going to admit this isn’t the most data-driven argument, but here goes: you’re saying take away the kid’s friends, ratchet up the bullying, make sure they hit puberty at the wrong time, make sure they suck at sports, obliterate the chance of them having a successful romantic interaction, and the reward is one of two things: still being bored in classes with the same problems, or having “dumb kid” problems in the exact same classes that are harmful to dumb kids.
Again… total leaf-node in your essay and sometimes “bad” ideas can just expand imagination for what sort of outside-the-box solutions we should consider. Felt this was worth calling out as a uniquely bad idea.
Also I did this, I skipped 8th grade. Which was silly. I was actually hit-or-miss behind in humanities classes, for a similar reason you call out in math: no teacher noticed I had a mental process error where I didn’t know the difference between reading and processing a sentence and unpacking the sentence’s meaning, and The Odyssey was hard enough to show that difference. (Today, honestly, I still can’t follow the plot of Elden Ring and Christopher Nolan movies and stuff, but I’m very good at themes and theses once I know what’s going on.) I would have needed, yeah, something around 4 years jump to be stimulated in a math class again, which is actually what happened at PROMYS my sophomore-junior summer. PROMYS was somewhat socially smoothed out too. I was still young-ish but more on the bell curve in age instead of just youngest in my class by a full year.
So I pretty much just think of high school as a black hole in my life plot, between a more-or-less happy childhood and more-or-less happy college experience, with some sun peaking out (mixed metaphor sorry) during PROMYS. And that’s how I described it in high school too. This should sound sad, and it is sad, because just finding some creative way to turn 4 years of youth into something no better than sitting in a waiting room a little too long (and that’s already the upgraded “alternative thought” in place of thoughts of self-harm or something) is a bad ends, even if I’m a happy-ish worker bee now.
If I had to offer an alternative proposal. It seems that remote learning is, you know, bad socially, but maybe a little strategic remote learning here and there to accelerate someone in math or get them reading harder fiction sooner, across a larger pool of kids, isn’t all bad? Like are we going to humor the thesis that being bored in the same classes is key to making friends at lunch? If you think so, the problem is probably one kid being an isolate, not the system just working that way normally.