Tell HN: How USA school closure seems to be working out
The district has actually moved pretty fast on this. They set up an emergency "online teaching" teacher training day tues, e-learning resources, and upon closure on thursday they had the elearning setup for students to try out. You can see the district emergency e-learning portal page here: https://www.nsd.org/northshorelearns
My 2 kids classes will be taught using Google Classrooms starting Monday, and the last two days were for "testing" the system. The school choose Google Classrooms I think because the students already had google apps for education accounts.
Overall, Google Classrooms is better than nothing, but honestly not much. It's basically a Teacher driven CRM system with ui complexity like all google web tools, and some integration with Google Docs. I think this might be fine for middle-school or higher, but they workflows are a bit convoluted, and I can see small kids and computer illiterate parents having serious problems navigating.
The biggest problem though, is that it's all self-directed learning. Students need to proactively seek out their assignments and course materials and have the focus to read/understand it all without any explanation by a teacher. It's "okay" in my case because I can spend the time to hover over them to make sure the work gets done and the content gets read (otherwise it's just skimmed over). Students unable to self learn and parents unable to micromanage their learning are going to be severely hurt by online learning like this. Also, me micromanaging the kids took a considerable chunk of the day, as I need to check up on them every 10 minutes or so, or they have questions (aprox 5hrs/day).
I do think the school district made the right decision to close. Kids are at lowest risk of serious infection but school staff trend older and are at highest risk.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadRegarding the outbreak in Northern Italy...the fatality rate seems much much higher than South Korea or Germany. Do you have any theories on why the fatalities are so much worse?
For example, there was this anecdote this week about a woman in the US. She believes she's infected, but none of the responsible authorities will let her pass a test unless she's physically been to one of the high-risk countries. So she either self-quarantine or ignore all of it and go to work. The twist is that she's a health practitioner...
Test suppliers who develop test for hospitals and doctors offices are ramping up production as fast as they can, but it will take time.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/testing.html
That assumes that South Korea did diagnose anyone who got the virus which is unlikely. So the real number might be in hundreds of thousands.
The virus is yet to hit the rest of Europe very hard, though. Italy should be a warning to the other countries of how bad the coronavirus is.
But note that South Korea must inevitably have missed some cases, so assuming the same ratio of diagnosed to serious cases between Italy and SK. So the real number of diseased people in Italy must actually be a little higher.
This site is good for up to date, and fairly detailed numbers about Italy: https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/
They are doing a pretty good job of testing: 4000 yesterday. Oregon, by comparison, has the capacity to test about 40 a day.
Edit: also, they are not being "drastic" enough in Italy.
Scenes from a ski area: https://ladige.it/news/cronaca/2020/03/07/come-previsto-oggi...
Stay home, or if you want to go out, go for a walk in the woods or something, but don't go where it's crowded.
4.2 million, 40 tests per day 60 million, 5700 tests yesterday
Germany has 700 cases and 0 deaths. Austria has 80 cases and 0 deaths...both of these countries are adjacent to Northern Italy region, in which 233+ have died.
Saying "no theory needed" frankly raises more questions than provides answers.
When was the 1st case in Germany and when was the 1st case in Italy?
it's ~ 4%
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
This assumes a median of 8 days from onset to death in the lethal cases, and a doubling time of # infections of 4 days, which seems to be around the current level for the world outside of China. The number is very sensitive to average lethality rate, and hence also to the age & health distribution of the population.
It's completely implausible that Italy has only 5000 cases, as people who have visited Italy for their winter holidays have very frequently tested positive after returning home. They haven't all randomly met the same 5000 Italians.
I think at this point, it's still very early in the spread of infection and the distribution of infection might not be random and might be clustered around certain locations, social circles etc.
The closest data point we have is likely that South Korean church, where I think they hunted down more or less every member and tested them... Doesn't give you a true view of asymptomatic presence in the general population but does provide a cue about relative size vs. known infected...
Also suggests you've got a critical / potentially terminal patient occupying an ICU bed for 2 - 3 weeks in the process, which becomes a significant load on your available hospital capacity...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...
Anyway other countries such as Switzerland, Sweden or France aren't that behind in terms of cases per million people (Iceland was even ahead of Italy as of yesterday), perhaps 10 days or so. I don't feel like my region is particularly unlucky.
This part doesn't sound right -- the highest risk groups are 70+ years old. Hopefully the school staff retires before then. The mortality rate for people below 60 is only around 1%.
The worry with young kids is that they may still be able to spread it, putting e.g. their grandparents at huge risk.
Our district has some full-online charter schools. I have a miraculously self motivated family member who pulled off full time home self study her last 2 years of high school at one of these: she got up early and finished most of her homework before lunch.
So it's definitely not for everyone, not even for most adults. I think many people need to learn as a group. But some children can thrive with self directed study.
Unlike kids.
They used it again during a single day closure and the software worked fine that time. However, many students didn’t do it, opting instead to play in the snow. Or, some children had to go to day care since their parents weren’t staying home. When they returned to school the teachers just repeated the same lesson since not every one was on the same page.
I think remote learning is possible, but we are a far way from having the kinks worked out.
Also kids might get infected and infect other members of their household.
Preferably something with how to balance ones own telecommuting while the kids telelearn.
Let me know if you need help, I can only imagine how stressful this would be for families who aren’t used to it
“The reason we are not recommending school closures at this time is because children have not been shown to be a high-risk group for serious illness from this virus.”
https://files.constantcontact.com/82fe691f001/dc8c682d-3257-...
In regards to the quote, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
For better or worse this will end up being a wild A/B test (between Northshore and Seattle) with extremely long term implications.
So far the explanations have mostly centered around these three points:
* Many students’ parents are health care providers or work in the health care industry on the front lines of the COVID-19 response. If schools close, fewer people will be able to provide front-line support.
* Many families rely on the schools and staff for basic needs, including regular meals, health care, and child care.
* Seattle can’t provide online learning because Seattle serves a diverse community with varied access to technology ... including those who do not have access to technology or internet at home.
See: https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_...
Given the well-known downsides that you list, and the fact that it doesn’t help much, it makes sense to stay open until there are actual cases associated with the schools.
I think it's a good question. In this specific case, for Northshore, have they specified? Is it some number of weeks, months, years? Is there some inflection point in the spread they've predetermined it will go back to normal?
At minimum, producing enough test kits so that we could actually test every hypochondriac with the sniffles.
Since there's a mind-boggling shortage of test kits, reducing transmission rates for as long as possible is all that we can do.
Well that's just fucking stupid. The situation isn't "get out of school", it's "stay home".
> stay open until there are actual cases associated with the schools.
That's really fucking stupid. By then it's too late.
If you have a seven year old and both parents work an hourly job, where exactly is that kid supposed to stay?
The best they can do is get a bunch of parents together and rotate which house all the kids will stay at each day and pool their wages so no one starves.
Only privileged kids have the option to "just stay home".
Anywhere that minimizes contagion of the virus. I'm not trying to be coy or flippant. I recognize that there are hardships involved. You gave a very general scenario so I can only re-state the fundamental invariant.
> get a bunch of parents together and rotate which house all the kids will stay at each day and pool their wages
That could work. Except better not to move them around, and limit their exposure to adults who do move around. I'm not an epidemiologist so I'm not qualified to give detailed advice.
I do feel pretty confident about telling people to stay home because that's how you slow down a pandemic. The streets should be deserted right now.
Here's the messed up thing: the virus doesn't care. If we have set up our society in such a way that we can't respond properly to this thing it will fuck us up and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves. IF there are too many parents working, and not enough extended family (or whatever), and/or not enough sick leave, and/or a system that can't make and distribute tests, or any of a bunch of other factors, THEN people are going to die. A lot of people. And if enough of the die (or just get really sick all at the same time) major additional problems could occur. Most cities have only about three days of food in the pipeline. After that, the only food is our pets, and then "long pork".
The best thing you can do to stave that off is stay home now before it's too late.
Maybe our civilization are fundamentally at odds with surviving a pandemic, I hope not, but be clear about the danger here.
Sounds to me like the choice is pretty obvious. I suppose the government could step up and provide to replace your paycheck while you stay at home with your kids, but honestly, this isn't that bad of a virus to warrant that.
People that are high risk should stay home. Everyone else should wash their hands and avoid their face and avoid crowds.
> The streets should be deserted right now.
You're probably overreacting. And let's hope all the health care workers decide that work is more important than staying home.
How bad would it have to be?
For reference, only 20% of the world’s population has ever flown in airplane.
In 2020 there will be about 40 million flights. In 1965, when the measles vaccine was first introduced, there were about 5 million flights, and about 1/2 the world population.
But in both cases the majority of those flights were by the wealthiest people in the world.
So really not a significant difference in travel.
If anything it would be density that would be the problem, since a lot more people live in cities now.
School could either be mixed remote/local classrooms or a study hall/computer lab with everyone logged in.
* they've offered childcare for those who need it
* they specifically called out children who rely on meals and have offered to fulfill them
* they've offered to check out school equipment (and training?)
* they've also offered extra assistance for kids in special needs programs that need extra attention
I don't know about Seattle Public SD, but Northshore said they had a 20% absence rate before closing the district. 15% of their staff fell into high risk groups (over 60, pregnant, etc) and that's outside of people being extra cautious when they see symptoms. Realizing that it's not just teaching staff, but janitorial, bus drivers, administration, lunch staff and others makes me think it would be difficult to continue operating normally.
Thankfully, my kid is still young and his childcare doesn't plan to close. My wife is working from home, but would not be able to do anything with a young kid running around. The lesson plan sent from school seems like a huge time suck for parents. The teachers seem to be going above and beyond. They prepared individual physical packets for lesson materials, pre-recorded circle time, and are setting up and reaching out via these new platforms. I'm still not quite sure how a "school day" will look at home. He's in a preschool program, and they've let us know home participation is optional.
i am living this right now in china. everything is closed and i had to send the younger kids to the grandparents so i can help my oldest get through his school curriculum. and i am not getting any time for work. luckily my sons teachers are great too and they support where they can, but life is pretty much on hold and in survival mode.
I live in the Bay Area now and reading this thread makes me miss Seattle (lived there 2009-2011). It's one of the better cities in a pretty well-run state, with funded pensions, responsive politics that seem more resistant to special-interest capture (unions, ultra-rich), and a well-informed populace and leaders capable of doing the right thing.
Oakland, by way of comparison (where I live now) regularly has school board meetings that get shouted down by angry mobs (https://www.kqed.org/news/11781890/parent-protests-against-s...), a school district with a chronic major deficits (https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/budget-deficit-forces-...) and accounting scandals (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-schools-...), and unsurprisingly, striking teachers are demanding even higher pay in the face of all this. With such gross mismanagement and leadership without the backbone to address it, it feels almost unconscionable that I'd let my kids attend this school.
I'm not sure what to make of this other than that, if you live in an area with a healthy political culture, be thankful for it. And if you don't, pay attention, and get involved.
There is this game called Warframe that has a daily login bonus. There is no mechanism to partially skip days if you missed them. New rewards are always added as a new milestone. The end result is that there are rewards that are only available after getting the login bonus for 1000 days. If you stop playing for a year and then come back you will never catch up to the latest rewards.
- Lunch and recess (45-60 minutes).
- Passing periods (27-28 minutes).
- Lifestyle activities: art, health, gym, music, etc. (45 minutes).
Now some fluffier ones:
- Suppose, like a typical Coursera user, I can understand the content at 1.2x classroom speed. There's 60 minutes.
- The door-to-door transition period is four minutes. But settling in, packing up, pleasantries, and administrivia probably put the lecture-content-to-lecture-content time at closer to 10 minutes. So there's another 42 minutes.
There. I just found 4 hours with losing a drop of college-relevant material.
In theory, the lesson plans could be distributed to parents (or whoever is supervising) and they can teach it. For older students home alone or students who's parents are not able to teach the subject, there are many great teaching videos just an internet search away. The discipline to self-learn is something that would need to have been instilled by the parents.
It seems to me that as a society we have forgotten that the primary responsibility for teaching (let alone raising) our children is our own. Instead we pass it off to 'the system' and make a big deal about having to raise our own kids.
It is the primarily responsibility in some domains. For others, the system is designed to allocate responsibility to the education system in order to balance with the time demands of fully employed parent(s) (to support the family) and the cost that would be otherwise incurred.
Yes, you can take into account opportunity cost. However, that won't shift the responsibility, it's just the outsourcing of the labor. You can see this in any power structure (corporate, military, etc).
The reason given is that if the kids are home it is likely that the grand parents will have to care for them as the parents have to work and the elderly are the high risk group.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/no-plans-to-cl...
The damned things close every summer and nobody loses their minds.
Keep your kids home. They won't turn into mindless thralls from missing a few weeks of "education".
As I recall it I spend a lot less time on the assignments than I would in school and I learned most of what the other kinds learned (the rest was easily learned when I was back in school) - but this obviously only worked because mum was a stay at home mum and it was early enough that she could teach me.
Most of early schooling is about warehousing and training kids to behave so that adults can be around them and parents can do that in most cases. The real issues isn’t that the kids don’t learn, it is that they end up staying with the grandparents and infecting them.