Comment by acdha
18 hours ago
I find it endlessly frustrating that this doesn’t get more prominence - there are studies from the early 20th century showing that the biggest factors in performance were things like housing and food stability, dentistry and glasses, etc. but fixing those problems drags up enough unpleasant societal choices that a lot of people prefer not to talk about it.
My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.
My wife too was a public school teacher for a decade, and resigned from sheer frustration and exhaustion. It became abundantly clear toward the end of her tenure that no amount of effort or technique was going to make the situation better. It’s really a completely broken system.
The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.