Gaashk
6d ago
In addition to what others have said, hormonal birth control is, indeed, under explored and under discussed. If you go to a doctor and ask for birth control, she won't necessarily talk about the psychological side affects of it, and it can cause changes in sexual preferences related to hormonal cycles.
Gaashk
5d ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
Gaashk
5d ago
I did unschooling for middle school. I did in fact run out of Terry Pratchett novels before I ran out of time. Then I read ancient Roman and Greek epics. It wasn't balanced, but it was about as good as public middle school.
Gaashk
5d ago
So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.
I found an interesting comment on that by someone involved in the program:
Matt Bateman
The “brazilian teachers” are software developers and academic specialists who work on the curriculum and platform. They run the coaching calls because they are the ones who need to know what’s not working and fix it on the app side. Not sure about Brazil but some of them are indeed remote.
So that's interesting. I guess the hope is to eventually need even less human interaction, it's one of those "training your AI replacement" positions. Which brings me back to: what are the Guides doing in the morning? They've selected for kids who won't disrupt everyone to get actual human interaction, so they presumably aren't conducting classroom management. Are they spending half the day preparing the extracurricular programs?
Gaashk
5d ago
The only thing I remember about elementary (homeschool co-op) Spanish class is making hot chocolate with the hand carved mixer and singing a chocolate song in Spanish.
Gaashk
5d ago
Another interesting comment from the Substack:
Jessica Lopez
As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.
There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.
This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.
N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.
Gaashk
5d ago
I suppose a "good regulatory environment" is one where the nuns can teach for cheap, the children can bring their own lunches, and any children who don't do well under those circumstances can go to public school instead at much higher cost to the state. If there are still enough nuns.
Gaashk
4d ago
From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.
My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.
Gaashk
4d ago
I guess I can see the appeal.
Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.
Gaashk
4d ago
It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.
I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.
Gaashk
4d ago
Or, alternately, they are much more expensive, unless you consider the mother's labor to be completely worthless. If her labor is actually worthless, and the alternative is that she just sits at home watching TV all day, then she probably won't be very good as a homeschool teacher, either.
Apparently Arizona offers about $4,000/child.
Gaashk
4d ago
I am very glad that the person who built the house I own:
- Installed a metal roof
- Planned ahead for water flow, and intentionally designed the landscaping around it.
A big house like that might be hard to cool in the summer. I don't have any specific suggestions -- we can't afford a full house air conditioner, so we're all in the main room with the window unit in during summer afternoons, and use open windows and fans at night.
Gaashk
4d ago
A couple of thoughts:
- Almost nobody is good at getting preferred behaviors from people who don't want to cooperate. Even good managers are not all that good at it, they refuse to hire almost everyone, and sometimes fire people when things aren't working out. Paying more sometimes helps, but there are a decent number of unemployable people out there. All of them were once children who's teachers couldn't remove them from class for more than about 10 minutes at a time unless they physically assaulted someone.
- Almost nobody is good at social science research, including actual social science and educational researchers.
- Elementary teachers are not selected for their educational research and testing abilities, they are selected for patience with small children, helping them learn to get along with each other, and the ability to work within a system that isn't all that well designed, where nobody can ever be expelled and almost nobody can be fired or demoted.
- Individual teachers can't decide anything about curriculum, schedules, or class compositions. Which are almost everything. They can conduct classroom management, and do actually iterate a lot on who sits next to whom, sticker charts, fidgets, and so on.
- "If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work." It depends on what you mean by work. If you have an unstable client who keeps freaking out and throwing things around the room and pulling random people's hair, and your method works to decrease that but not to improve other metrics, did it work?
Gaashk
4d ago
in the corporate world
Is that synonymous with "doing paid labor?" It's not usually used that way.
I tried looking up some information about this from BLS:
Mothers of younger children remained less likely to participate in the labor force than mothers with older children. In 2024, 68.3 percent of mothers with children under age 6 participated in the labor force compared with 78.0 percent of mothers whose youngest child was ages 6 to 17.
Caring for children under six is daycare more than schooling, so I'll leave that out. So apparently 22% of mothers are full time homemakers or unemployed. 3.4% of children are homeschooled, according to the internet.
What's the base rate of unemployment for women without children? I couldn't find that quickly -- the overall prime age labor force participation rate is 78% for women, the same as for mothers of school aged children, and 88% for men. So maybe there's some room for 10% of women who could be in the labor force, but aren't? Of whom 3%-4% are homeschooling?
That's not literally nobody, but someone who's going to do a good job homeschooling their kids won't be at the absolute bottom or capability, either. What are they otherwise doing while their kids are in school?
Gaashk
4d ago
Indeed. I'm not quite anonymous enough here to talk about this in detail, but it's very much an issue. Trainings can become incredibly hollow if the administrators aren't fully on board, so that teachers don't even understand or have access to the full ideas behind what they're supposed to be implementing, even if they want to do it.
Gaashk
4d ago
The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture
What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).
Gaashk
3d ago
Homemaking no longer takes a full day, when done in a sane fashion and without small children at home.
Gaashk
3d ago
I used ChatGPT once to do a required writing task that I thought was useless and didn't want to do. I did edit it for some semblance of accuracy, but did not exactly read it, nor do I remember what it said. If I thought it mattered or was a useful thing to do I would have written it myself, I like writing essays, including college essays.
Gaashk
2d ago
Does orthodoxy really have such a strong norm towards ‘children must be PERFECT in liturgy or not go’?
No, the children can play nicely while whispering, nap, color, flop about a bit on the rug, or walk in and out as they're able to behave quietly or not. One priest said that he'd rather they were there and screaming than not there, but nobody behaves like they believe him, including his own wife and children.
Mostly, though, if we can't receive Communion, can't hear or concentrate on the prayers, can't sing, can't hear the sermon because we spend it either suppressing child activity or in a different room, then where are we even doing?
Edit: We'd probably do better if we had a specific goal, and should probably go talk to a priest about it. I know.
Inconveniently, babies are one of the big things that leads women to not want sex over long periods of time.
Oxytocin comes up medically in the context of childbirth and lactation, and is heavily involved in breast feeding. So, if you stimulate a breast feeding mother's nipples, her body will produce oxytocin... and milk. She will likely then think of the baby. Doctors give oxytocin during delivery to make contractions stronger (or, if they only need them a bit stronger, can use a breast pump).
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