Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds Without the distraction of pissing around online, you'd think kids might stand a better chance of doing their homework. But it seems some parents blame their darlings' performance at school on crap broadband speeds. One in seven think sub-par internet speeds are negatively impacting their child's education, according to a …
"One in seven think sub-par internet speeds are negatively impacting their child's education, according to a survey of 1,000 respondents by price comparison site uSwitch."
I have to wonder how much of this is ginned up by all the commercials Verizon ran in the US showing kids in class reading reports they wrote with stuff like "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth buffering... buffering... buffering... buffering..."
Seemed Verizon's idea of education is plagiarizing, and that faster internet speeds allows you to plagiarize "better".
...and therefore, according the the study, 6 out of 7 DO NOT see it as an issue.
Majority rule. Do the math Little Darlings - that'll help your Mathematics grades.
It's therefore a non sequitur. You may have to look that term i up, Little Darlings, in a paper book called a thesaurus - and that'll help your English grades.
win/win
Until the last 18mths I had internet speeds of approx 4Mbit. At times it could be 1.5Mb and at good times 5Mbit. This was plenty enough for accessing credibility impaired sites like wikipedia and you could listen to some YT video, it might take you a long, long time to download some ripped blu-ray film but they shouldn't be doing that anyway.
Mobile phones and Games Consoles, yeah that's educational.
I guess if your kid is using Assassin's Creed for history class it's no surprise their falling behind!
Video games are not entirely accurate....
Mobile will probably be mobile games or facebook.. so again not educational
Laptops and Tablets, fair enough you can do some work on those.
Youtube? Well sometimes yes if you only watch educational feeds and not say music videos.
But alas, I cannot judge I spent my teenage years doing coding and looking at, eh, stuff.
Technology can be educational if used correctly. But not for example video games consoles!
300 baud? Ha! We could never wave t'flags that fast. One o' me pals tried to reach 10 baud but kept liftin' off t'floor - 'is solution wer to use smaller flags, but that limited range somewhat, except in t'lah-de-dah areas were they 'ad early roll-out of 'igh-powered optics from t'local Jessops store...
Mobile phones
Actually, looking at what has been pulled out from Amazon onto his Kindle junior clocks about the same on his mobile phone as on his tablet and proper Kindle combined. So mobile phone I can sort-a accept it - for example he was doing his GCSE Macbeth revision on it in the car yesterday.
Ditto for wikipedia as a starting point (but not a definitive reference).
Now games console... Gootube... Forget it.
I guess if your kid is using Assassin's Creed for history class it's no surprise their falling behind!
Assassin's Creed Origins does have a discovery mode, believe it or not. YouTube link, because it's educational, innit?
I get the impressions that today's school children are taught how to pass exams.
Schools are under huge pressure to get good exam results. That's all they care about. Helping children in the real world isn't important.
It's just like the NHS: As soon as league tables were introduced, administrators/managers looked to see what they could do to get the best results for the least effort.
"we were taught the actual subject.
I get the impressions that today's school children are taught how to pass exams."
We were taught both. What you learn to pass exams, stuff like reading the question carefully and thinking about what the examiner wants you to do are transferable skills. Reading academic papers, contracts, statements of requirements etc are all things that demand those reading and analytic skills.
But plus 1 for libraries. If I ever came across a set of light oak card cabinets like those that were in QUB Science library I'd be tempted to buy them despite having no practical use for them now.
I know from my nephew’s school that the teachers are thicker than thick.
And I know from my sister that many parents (her included) are just f’ing lazy at parenting. My 9 year old niece doesn’t know her 4 times tables (or higher). It’s totally her parents’ fault, specifically my sister - her mum. Too lazy to go through them on the daily journeys to/from school. No, you don’t need a bloody app. Just learn your damn times tables.
And parents like to blame every other factor except themselves to explain why their little darling is underperforming.
Internet and iPad are the new babysitters. “Oh you’re doing homework? Ok then.” Stupid, lazy, gullible parents who don’t supervise their kids online.
So basically, this story is total bollocks, backed up by “statistics”.
This is the same family where mum vowed son would have a Nokia dumb-phone. He’s 11.
But he’s smarter than his parents. He watched an iPhone 5c on eBay and the idiot dad bought it. My suggestion that it be IMMEDIATELY sold on eBay was well received, but not acted upon.
Like I said, they’re lazy. They don’t want confrontation with the kids - except for all the times they totally lose their shit and abuse their kids.
So the uncle is the only family member with any God damn common sense, and is constantly undermined by everyone else who don’t understand why the kids have no boundaries.
Today, parents are incredibly stupid.
11 year old may be smarter than his parents but still dumb as a box o rocks.
I refurbed an all-in-one ex-customer PC for him with a brand new HDD and Win7 install for his birthday. Thicko decided to install Windows 10 “because it was offered”. Never asked his uncle, with nearly 30 years of experience. He didn’t understand why his PC was “running slow”.
The day I ask my nephew for technical support is the day I kill myself. Sometimes he tries to offer his analysis or advice and assistance. I haven’t harmed him yet.
So getting back to the original story....
Parents are idiots. They’re lazy. They’re gullible morons.
And, according to this news story, 1 in 7 will blame “t’internet” - or lack of speedy thereof - as the reason the psychopath they’re raising (badly) didn’t pass his geometry class.
Because that’s what it really says. 1 in 7 RESPONDENTS TO THIS SURVEY are thick enough to blame slow internet as the reason they’re breeding and raising under-achievers with a victim mentality.
It’s only 1 in 7, but then there’s Jeremy Corbyn. The fact that he even has a job tells you we’re all doomed. Common sense is not in fashion.
Yes. People are dumb. And they’re having children.
Indeed. The article seems to be more about sneering than informing. WTF is wrong with kids using wikipedia? We don't all have luxuries like physical libraries, or even textbooks. Well, maybe that last one has changed since my day, but I can't imagine they have textbooks that'll actually satisfy the curiosity of any but the dullest kid in a subject that interests them.
Besides, a slow internet connection is something specific. No connection, you don't waste time on it. Fast connection, you don't waste time unless by choice. But a poor connection can waste an awful lot of time.
"a poor connection can waste an awful lot of time."
poor connections work fine for PLAIN TEXT and 3 or 4 pages of search engine results (it's all done server-side after all). Waiting for CAT (read: pr0n) videos on youtube to buffer, while claiming "I'm studying", not so much.
article: "Surely we're not expecting the little dears to read books instead?"
YES. And it PROBABLY requires going to and knowledge of a library to do THAT. With any luck they WALK to the library, getting some sunshine and exercise. All good!
icon, because I _AM_ thinking of the children. I'm just not a flaming bleeding heart brainless liberal.
When _I_ was a kid, I had to walk to school, uphill, both ways, in the bad weather, carrying a buttload of books so I could do 4 hours of homework every night. Kids these days got it WAY too easy! They need to get their ritalin-filled heads out of their collective asses and stop whining on social media, texting each other instead of talking, and playing video games all the time. Kids these days...
But the original article is also highly misleading.
Article text:
“a decent home broadband connection ...
For some time now, teachers have been warning of a nationwide risk that children could fall behind if broadband speeds are not up to par[11]"
So from the tone of the article we are lead to believe that Teachers support the uSwitch contention that what is needed is a "decent home broadband connection. Yet if we look up note 11:
"Source: cable.co.uk, January 2016, available at – https://www.cable.co.uk/news/revealed-how-inadequate-expensive-school-broadband-is-holding-our-children-back-700001240/"
We see straight away (and if you bother looking up the URL it does back up the headline claim made in the URL) that Teachers were referring to School Internet connections and thus in-school usage of Internet resources not home Internet connections, and according the cable.co.uk article the main cause of inadequate school broadband is government funding.
Another misleading "fact" from the survey:
"Less than one in 10 (7%) parents say their child doesn’t utilise online resources. However, 40% say their child uses YouTube, which offers educational content such as the Crash Course channel and The Brain Scoop, 38% say they use Wikipedia and 32% turn onto BBC Bitesize[8]."
And that all important note:
"Respondents, whose children do homework, were asked ‘In terms of accessing the internet for homework and educational content, which online resources does your child[ren] use your home internet connection for?’ – 7% said that ‘My child doesn’t use online resources’, 40% said ‘Youtube’, 38% said ‘Wikipedia’ and 32% said ‘BBC Bitesize’."
So the context is homework, ie. work set by the school. What is fascinating here is the total omission of 'real' educational websites such as school portals and subject specific sites.
"Respondents, whose children do homework, were asked ‘In terms of accessing the internet for homework and educational content'"
Context is key.
These surveys might as well say that 100% of non-educational Internet usage is non educational, so the Internet isn't educational.
Or that, 100% of educational use of YouTube is educational, with the inference that YouTube is an important educational tool. Obviously that's ignoring the fact that 99.9% of YouTube is non-educational, which flies in the face of it being useful for education.
On the whole, these types of surveys are set to prove something the survey setter believes, with wording used to come to a specific goal.
I mean, they asked people whose children used the Internet for study, and only wanted answers relevant to educational use. Completely ignorant of children who don't use the Internet educationally, and those who don't use the Internet at all.
Frankly, I'm surprised such a massive number of respondents said their kids didn't study on the Internet, when a prerequisite seemed to be that your kid DID study online.
On average, parents say their child does 3.9 hours of homework a week
Although the article makes no mention of it I assume that we are talking about primary school age children here. Even so 3.9 hours per week seems modest indeed.
And the sample size isn't all that great either. How were they selected?
I was slow at math in primary, homework was seemingly hours and hours and hours as the sun set and I wasn't getting released to play...
I was good at math, and actually enjoyed it, but had issues staying focused and motivating myself. I would sit at my desk and do basically everything but the homework in front of me. I remember listening to a local AM station I liked switch to low power as the sun went down, while I sat there with my homework in front of me.
It wouldn't be until adulthood that I'd be diagnosed with inattentive-type ADD, but looking back that's clearly what was going on.
"I can't see why primary school pupils require homework....My primary school was rural , four pupils in my class."
My primary school wasn't much bigger than yours. My grandchildrens' primary school, only a couple of miles away, is probably at least the same size as a whole year (four classes) was at my grammar school. Rural schools are bigger, and maybe a bit less rural than they were. And they do have homework.
3.9 hours probably mixes young kids (no homework) and older kids (with homework). An example of the meaninglessness of statistics with insufficient context. As is indeed the whole of this article.
Maybe it's just something like 3.9 hours of homework online? Excluding offline homework, and excluding online non-homework. A figure like that coming from just asking parents would tell more about the parents perceptions than the kids, but if it came from logging in to a schools' IT system it could actually mean something.
The uSwitch press release is here:
https://www.uswitch.com/media-centre/2018/03/digital-poverty-line-poor-broadband-services-see-1-2-million-children-falling-behind/
"Switch.com surveyed a sample of 1,000 UK parents of children aged 5-18 from the 5th to the 8th of March. Results have been weighted to nationally representative criteria. 952 respondents identified themselves as parents of children who do homework."
So the 3.9 hours is the avereage of children aged 5 who bring home one reading book each week to children aged 18 who are expected to do homework and revise for three or possibly four A-levels. I think the conclusion is whatever you would like it to be.
"So the 3.9 hours is the avereage of children aged 5 who bring home one reading book each week to children aged 18 who are expected to do homework and revise for three or possibly four A-levels. I think the conclusion is whatever you would like it to be."
Yep. There are just too many variables. The difference between expected learning between 5yr olds and 18yr olds just isn't worth even taking the time to sort out, and certainly not any valuable insight gained from that age range spread over 985 respondents. WTF uswitch? Deadline creep?
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....but both my kids, primary and middle (yes we still use the better system), have much of their homework via the schools online portal.
This may come as a surprise, but times have moved on from chalk boards.
The access they have to resources shames that of our mulit-million Pound company. No need for crappy plugins, runs on Apple, Android, Windows, Linux and Chromebooks.
From their they get access to much of the work they have done in the classroom, library books and other resources. The work they do is far more engaging than a tatty torn book with half the pages missing.
Yes, i'm sure some parents are blaming internet speeds (but of course we don't know how loaded the questions were) and YouTube can be a source of education (lost count how many times I've used it to fix everything from a machine machine to a complex bit of IT kit).
And maybe, in rural areas, their schools rely less on the IT infrastructure.....
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (*)
It has always been someone else's fault. Society as such has not changed at all. We do the same thing in different ways. Who, in all honesty, wants to take responsibility? It is, and always has been, easier to blame someone else. As Douglas Adams quite succinctly put it: SEP.
That is to say, my personal SEP-field is *very* strong.
(*) Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-1890)
There are a lot of online systems used for testing and homework here that are notoriously heavy on the network, the client, and presumably the crap servers as well. Since homework assignments are now only given as 'log in to see what you've got' on systems that drop users like a leaf-shedding maple in fall, it wasn't unusual here to spend the entire family's evening trying to post results by midnight for automated grading.
Being rural didn't help--anything better than smoke signals or tty is 'broadband' out here.
I'd blame it on one of these factors:
1. Not reading to kids at bed time, or getting them to read to you - instead letting them play their tablet for 10 minutes whilst chilling out on your phone.
2. Too much Roblox and Minecraft, too little homework and practical skills like painting, writing and mathematics.
3. ...
Actually just lazy parents. I say this as one who's guilty of this on occasion myself. It's got bugger all to do with internet speeds.. as 99.9%* of reasonable people will agree.
*Statistics made up, but so is the reason for the drop in school performance.
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