Parent here. In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.
Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).
In my district we have a lot of teachers that are currently COVID positive with reported symptoms. Relatively mild from most accounts (all vaccinated), but still under the weather. I wouldn't blame any of the individual teachers for calling out - I've called out from my own job for similar symptoms in the past. It's what sick days are for. Of course the system isn't built for this many people to call out sick at once. I think a week or two of virtual "learning" is inevitable in some places, but I don't mind that and I don't think there is a risk of turning into indefinite shut down like what occured in 2020.
Yes, making people work while sick is stupid. Even without covid.
The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school.
Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes.
It's a complicated problem. I have the luxury of a tech job that lets me work from home, and forgives a couple of distracted days if my toddler's home sick with me.
Not everybody is so lucky.
Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors?
How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week?
Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in.
When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.
There are dozens of endemic upper respiratory viruses, including four other coronaviruses. It's probably to our long term advantage to get infected with as many of those as possible when we're young and healthy. While the symptoms may be unpleasant and inconvenient, the resulting cellular immunity gives us some protection when we're old and frail. Short term costs versus long term benefits.
Why wouldn't this be true for older people too? In the case we should encourage everyone to go to work sick.
It reminds me of something from The Office;
>Dwight K. Schrute: The worst thing you can do for your immune system is to coddle it. They need to fight their own battles. If Sabre really cared about our well-being, they would set up hand de-sanitizing stations. A simple bowl at every juncture filled with dirt, vomit, fecal matter...
Well the immune system does change over development, but still it's a hot take. I don't think it's 100% incorrect, but it is going to vary wildly by the person, their current state, the exact disease, etc. In ways we don't even fully understand yet. It's also wrong to expose others to infection unnecessarily without their consent obviously, even if it would have positive health consequences long term.
But yeah, that quote from The Office is pretty hilarious, thanks for sharing!
> a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.
Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.
It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).
If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].
Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.
My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.
Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.
I don't think I disagree. If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known. The more we learn about it, the less it seems like a real threat.
But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people.
It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of:
'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks'
Before people die they have to be in the hospital. Hospitalization rates are extremely low considering the infection rate. Death rates are also very low.
This is essentially a flu at this point, even for the unvaccinated. People with 2 shots are as susceptible to omicron infection as the unvaccinated, and once the booster wanes, so will the triple boosted.
Hospitalization rates are down. Number of hospitalizations may be up but the spread is larger than it’s ever been. Omicron is 5x more contagious than the original Covid at levels we’ve never seen before as a society.
Sorry if that was unclear: yes we are saying the same thing, that more children are now in the hospital for covid. I was talking about the rate per 100k children.
It’s been stated the flu, even with vaccination, is more problematic to this age group than Covid-19. I think restrictions around this age group are a net negative.
It has been stated, but last time I checked it was lie. The flu kills more people of you compare all flu deaths in all categories and add estimated flu deaths (not just confirmed).
The best data summary I’ve seen [1] suggests that COVID-19 IFR for kids is 0.01% or less which is in line with the COVID-19 stats you cite. The same data summary [1] suggests that flu IFR for kids is probably the same order of magnitude but not “vastly less”.
I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new.
There absolutely is. The school system I work(ed) for closes regularly every February because of the increase in numbers in strep and flu. Our attendance gets so low that it's the only thing they can do. Usually we can tell the week before, then they give it Monday and Tuesday and then are out the rest of the week, though sometimes attendance is so low Friday they just cancel the whole week already.
Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)
Teacher absences are forcing hands right now, but even from the student perspective parents seem pretty split on if they want their kids going in, so I'm interested to see how number of absences develops in the next week.
The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home.
It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time.
Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.
> In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”.
That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating.
Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not.
In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.
One of my kids thrived and loved online learning. The other didn't.
The one that liked it had an outgoing energetic, tech enabled teacher that liked his job.
The other teacher however was a grumpy lady that couldnt be bothered learning any technology and didn't turn on her camera, forced the kids to keep their mics and cameras off and spent more time probably being elsewhere instead of teaching.
Ontario is a province that if you were to ask teachers why they are teachers, the answers at the bottom of everyone's list would be teaching, spending time with kids.
Most people in Ontario hate teachers because of their odd detachment from reality.
I don't think what you say about Ontario teachers is true. Both from my own time in school two decades ago, and seeing my kid's teachers a bit more "close up" due to zoom pretend-learning, there are a lot of great ones. The problem is unions, specifically seniority. I've found an inverse correlation between age/tenure and quality. The worst teacher my kid has had is the only one on the sunshine list (names and salaries of everyone working in the public sector who make >$100k is published in Ontario). The incentives are so fucked up due to seniority that it really damages the school system, but there are lots and lots of passionate and good teachers doing a good job despite it all.
Chesterton's fence applies. The seniority system has serious drawbacks, but it has the advantage of being simple and difficult to game. It limits the damage caused to organizations by manipulators who would use more sophisticated systems to rig the workforce for personal or political advantage. It means that the average Ontario kid will encounter an average and well-distributed selection of both good and horrible teachers. Ignore the value of that at your peril.
My kids are+were in the Ontario system. I pay attention to their quality of education. Across my parenting circles there are kids in every type of school and program conceivable. I could afford to send mine to private school if I thought it necessary. One of my kids is now at a competitive university with smart and hardworking kids from across the globe and he was well-prepared by his high school. In my opinion we are getting a good distribution of good outcomes, should consider ourselves lucky, and be careful not to take our system for granted, or accidentally break it through ideology or ignorance. And almost no one knows what works and what doesn't, but I believe that part of what works is treating teaching as the serious and challenging profession that it is, and letting them get on with it. You know, pretty much what we want from our stakeholders?
I am very much of the opinion that we must be all-in on one public school system, with explicit objectives: providing a good education, underpinning social cohesion, encouraging individual diversity, seeking equality of opportunity.
(I am not a teacher or in any union, and neither is anyone in my family.)
What are you smoking? What darkest Ontario timeline do you live in?
I live in Ontario, was educated here, have kids in the system, hobnob with zillions of parents, interact with my kid's teachers and know a couple socially.
Teachers are not materially hated or loved any more than any other type of worker that the public interacts with frequently. They are just people, like the rest of us.
I file comments like yours under “haters gonna hate” and “cheerleading for the race to the bottom.”
I feel like you have changed the topic, or maybe this was your topic all along and I didn't pick up on the coding. So no, it is not obvious.
As topics, “teachers” is orthogonal to “structural racism”, and I suspect that blending them together will lead to less effective responses to real but separate problems in both areas. I was very much only speaking only to “teachers”.
I'm aware of Brampton and more besides, and I won't insult you by excusing, explaining or “interpreting” racist behaviour or structural racism. You and your family deserve (and are owed), an “average” Ontario school experience largely untainted by them.
"All my experiences are fantastic and everyone ever has been fantastic to me. Gosh golly, I can't even comprehend how the other 99.9999990% of the population doesn't share my opinion"
I have an opinion, you have an opinion. You don't like my opinion, you can go fuck yourself with your fucking opinion that you and your mental illness share. Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, as most users in this thread have been doing.
Edit: you've unfortunately been making a habit of doing this. That's not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. Would you please review the site guidelines and fix this?
It's rare to be able to completely eliminate a risk.
Both of the extremes in this kinda drive me batty. On one side, I know a family that was taking distance learning as a chance to travel the world with their kids, before any vaccine was available. They have caught covid 3 times now.
I also know people that have resolved to never get covid. Why? Because it's covid. Any attempts to discuss things in more detail brings out comparisons to things such as the bubonic plague, measles, and drinking water you shit in.
Covid is contagious enough that most people are either going to get it or have had it. Why we should sacrifice children's well being to marginally delay the time at which their parents or families will be infected is beyond me.
If individual families want to choose to take their kids out of school that should be their choice. It should not be the default.
We are now nearly in the situation where most people have had it and the virus shows no signs of abating. This is not a bleak outlook simply a realistic one. You've either had it or are going to get it. The bleak outlook is the one that says you should cower alone and apart from friends and family until you do get it. Go get vaccinated and live as before.
Again, you aren't sacrificing the teacher's well being. The teacher is, anyway, most likely going to get covid. If a teacher doesn't like being exposed to children they should resign or be fired. Schools are not for the benefit of teachers but for the benefit of children.
Once vaccinated you are unlikely to require hospitalization. Actually, you're unlikely to require hospitalization regardless of vaccination but especially unlikely once vaccinated. Maybe it's sensible for people to make some minor changes to "flatten the curve" but going to remote school is no minor change and it is far worse than the negligible benefits.
While it's true you can catch the disease multiple times subsequent infections are less likely and less severe.
Get a different job. If teaching would put your children at risk, you should not teach.
Whatever a small number of teachers or students need we should not rearrange the education system for the benefit of edge cases. We should optimize for the typical case - average health people, and make adjustments to support the edge cases, not the other way around.
For age < 18, kids are 3-5x more likely to die of activities such as riding in a car and going to the pool (not to mention the good ol' flu). Virtually nobody even thinks about behavior adjustments when it comes to those activities.
You're needlessly trolling when you're labeling parents and kids speaking up against all this as right wing.
I’m not trolling. I’ve linked to facts. If you think the CDC and Surgeon General are not facts then you, sir, are trolling
Why does everyone say it’s fine for kids to get Covid because they are not dying? Again, you are trolling.
Hospitalization rates are way up with Omicron. And only reason it looked like kids were less affected by Covid was because there was a lack of testing for kids and schools were initially closed. Schools are open and infection rates are same as adults. Sure. They aren’t dying as much because adults are generally way less healthy. But they are not magically immune and we can pretend there is nothing to be concerned about
Edit: confirmed. I looked at your comment history and you seem to love trolling and posting snarky things
> Covid hospitalizations for children are at an all-time high.
I initially assumed this was true, though I also assumed that COVID-related hospitalization for children was extremely low. When I checked, though, it does not appear to be true.
For ages 5-17 (school-aged kids), hospitalization rates peaked at 1.4/100k in September 2021.[1]
As of Dec 15, 2021, 655 children 0-17 have died from COVID[2]. That's certainly not good, but it's a very small number relatively speaking. Consider that in 2018, there were 3,820 for ages 0-14 due to "unintentional injury".[3]
CovidNET data is a few weeks out of date and not all parts of the country are experiencing the latest wave at the same time. AAP report based on states reporting more current data shows we are setting records for hospitalized children in several states: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-01-04/... A better criticism would be to investigate how they are defining “covid patient” because if 7% of a city has an active covid infection, you’d expect 7% of hospital patients there for other reasons to have it too.
That said the trend is not great and this will only accelerate with school back in session and community transmission very high across the country. We’re setting new national records for hospitalized adult covid patients too, for what it’s worth.
I don’t find comparisons to other causes of death of children compelling. Nor is death the only serious long term outcome to be concerned about with covid.
I resent this province more with each passing day.
I'm debating whether to participate in this charade this time around, because I think it's in some ways worse than closing schools, at least for those very important early grades. With remote "learning" there is pretense that the immense damage caused by school closures is to an extent mitigated, and that's simply not even close to being true.
There's much more I could write about this, but I will instead point out that this government is also locking down the very industries that are by and large small already battered business AND that were ONLY accessible to the vaccinated population (restaurants, gyms).
It's also fun as a Canadian to make fun of American polarization (and sometimes do participate in these holier than thou conversations), but I also feel utterly helpless (and feel that from others) because I know full well that both the opposition parties would have done exactly the same things. There's nowhere to turn to.
Don't know about Utah, but I didn't see any Florida politicians going to NY (a very pro Covid-measures state) in their free time during this pandemic. There is instead the recent case of a very famous NY politician going to Florida in her free time, no mask and all.
The images passed around were her and her boyfriend eating ice cream out in the open. Regardless I feel it's naive to think that the politicians on only one side of the aisle are so fundamentally different that they don't have the same casual disregard for laws that they don't agree with that most Americans have.
Go to the US. TN visas are super easy to obtain if you have a degree. Even most of Europe isn't as bad as Canada right now and there's paths to immigration if you can work remote, or have credentials enough to get hired.
Canada's healthcare is extremely overrated (it's basically bottom tier compared to other countries at our income level or anyone in the EU), our business environment sucks and our economic response to COVID will put us behind for the next decade; it's already showing...
US healthcare costs more but the quality of care and capacity is miles ahead. Let's face it, if you have money and/or are the class of professional that qualifies for a TN visa, you'll have health insurance and you'll receive better care than you ever could in Canada.
Look at your link, the US is #2 in the only category relating to the actual care you receive.
The main problem in Canada isn't the quality of care per se, it's the fact that our health care system is so gutted you can't access it in a timely manner with no options to get around it (ie. very little private delivery). Anything that's considered non-essential (which is quite a bit, including many quality of life procedures) takes months to years...
> Look at your link, the US is #2 in the only category relating to the actual care you receive.
That is completely untrue. The US is literally last. It's 11 out of 11. Worst outcomes across the board. From life expectancy to treatable deaths to heart attacks to infant mortality. The US is by far the worst.
If you read the report, you'll see that "care process" has nothing to do with "quality". It's about things like the efficiency of electronic medical record systems, or things like "In past two years, used a secure website, patient portal, or mobile app to request Rx refills from regular practice". etc. Yeah, the US has a lot of money to waste of frills, this makes middlemen money, instead of actual care.
> US healthcare costs more but the quality of care and capacity is miles ahead
If you read the report, this is totally the opposite. The US costs more and has the worst outcomes. You get the worst care of all developed countries.
Not only that, the US has the worst capacity! It has the lowest number of doctors per capita.
The difference between the US and Canada? If you have a lot of money and work for an employer who can absorb a lot of costs, you can pay your way out of the system in the US to get faster care. The vast vast majority of people in the US and in Canada, can't do that.
The OECD has statistics on basically every aspect of the health care system, across most developed countries. You can look at any category relating to quality of care or health system capacity and the US crushes Canada. Canada didn't even put on a very good showing on your link either. Affordability in the US is a problem, yes, but if you have the money, it's probably close to best in the world. That's why most of my family left Canada for the US years ago (also so they could earn 3x more and pay less for, well, everything that's not healthcare).
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We are in Bay Area, CA. My 3 year old has speech delay. The school’s district psychologist to whom we went for evaluation told us that “most of our kids have one to two year speech and social delays now”. All corrective services for little ones, including the ones which cost $120,000/year (many don’t accept any insurance) have month long wait lists now.
I live in an area that has a large number of Catholic elementary and high-schools; they generally have fewer restrictions than the local public schools, and enrollment demand from non-Catholics is through the roof. Nobody wants remote learning, few people even want masks or any restrictions at all; parents hate it, students hate it, teachers hate it--as far as I can tell, nobody wants the outcome we've got, and yet somehow there's this resignation to "Well, this is how it has to be."
If nobody wants it, why can't they petition the non catholic school board to drop the measures? Why is the catholic school board able to get away with less restrictions?
The public school board is an elected body; you can show up at your city or town or village's election and pick the members you like. In practice, few voters are invested parents, and nobody pays attention to school-board candidates most of the time. (If you follow the news, Loudoun County, VA is a notable recent example of how things can go wrong.) So many public school districts are stuck with the same corruption that occurs in any public position.
The Catholic schools' policy on things like this, at least near me, is dictated mostly by the diocese. The state can withhold funding for things like special-ed programs or meals if they won't play ball, but they get more autonomy as long as they aren't violating civil-rights law.
This is going to sound dismissively cynical, but it all comes down to politics. The public school system is accountable to way more entities than the Catholic school is. Teachers Unions wield a tremendous amount of power and influence in local and state government. Actually taking on such a political machine would require an incredible amount of activism - bordering on replacing the majority of elected positions in your district. This is especially difficult because most of the lower positions are seats that the average person never thinks about or votes in. But, the unions make sure their members know about these positions and endeavor to get out the vote.
Not only does this hold up in general, it holds up district by district. Districts that still had collective bargaining had better scores than one that didn't (even after controlling for confounds, it was the union status that made the difference).
Because private school parents can pull their kid out and take their tuition elsewhere. They actually have options and can make good on bargaining threats to walk away.
Additionally, you don't have public sector or really any teachers unions to deal with at private schools.
There are other factors that contribute, but aren't nearly as clear cut as those two.
The next step is “backpack funding”, or letting parents get a voucher for education that follows the student no matter where they attend school, public or private. This will drastically reduce the cost of private education, and combined with the widespread erosion of gifted programs and a general sense of mediocrity pervading modern public schooling, a vast downsizing of public education has started.
And the US was already having issues in terms of STEM competitiveness...
I believe the term is "decline" or "decadence"...
I do not approve of publicly funding parochial religious schools, for example. This is a bad road to take.
The would-be-theocrats don't even comprehend the damage their wish's fulfillment would bring.
I had the misfortune of attending such a "school" once and found it full of fake curriculi and it set me back a year at a crucial time.
It was a total joke. I attended approximately 8 different public schools prior to that and after that, including some rather lousy ones, and all were superior to these weirdo cult luckily didn't have to spend much time in.
> The next step is “backpack funding”, or letting parents get a voucher for education that follows the student no matter where they attend school, public or private. This will drastically reduce the cost of private education, and combined with the widespread erosion of gifted programs and a general sense of mediocrity pervading modern public schooling, a vast downsizing of public education has started.
This, on the face of it, seems like a good idea[1]. I don't understand why it is being downvoted.
It is a good idea for (a) the top 5% of wealthy who would send their kids to private school anyway and save money with backpacking (b) the top 5% of wealthy who hold shares in private education startups and providers. Hence you would expect it to be popular in the HN bubble where nearly everyone is in the top 5%.
It is a bad idea for smart kids whose parents are poor or don't care - they will still get the lowest-cost 'public option' but now get left behind by the 50-80% of kids whose parents care to get their kids into selective schools or ones that need top-up payments, thus cementing hereditary stratification of society.
> It is a good idea for (a) the top 5% of wealthy who would send their kids to private school anyway and save money with backpacking (b) the top 5% of wealthy who hold shares in private education startups and providers. Hence you would expect it to be popular in the HN bubble where nearly everyone is in the top 5%.
>
> It is a bad idea for smart kids whose parents are poor or don't care - they will still get the lowest-cost 'public option' but now get left behind by the 50-80% of kids whose parents care to get their kids into selective schools or ones that need top-up payments, thus cementing hereditary stratification of society.
Maybe I am missing something, but how is that worse than the current system? The top 5% are already sending their kids to the best schools currently, right?
The people who are too poor to afford the top-up in the proposed voucher system are currently not getting the best schools anyway. Under the voucher system I expect that some of the currently poor people who are not getting the best school would be able to switch to the best school that doesn't require a top-up.
Right now, as I understand it, poor people have no option to switch schools.
> how is that worse than the current system? The top 5% are already sending their kids to the best schools currently, right?
Because the taxes that were going to a public school are now going to a private one. School quality is about a lot more than money but taking money away from a struggling school isn't going to make it better.
Vouchers can mean the difference to a few kids between staying a failing public school and going to a successful private school, the money is enough for some motivated middle class families to make that change. But a lot more kids are going to be ones from families who were always going to send their kids to a private school so for them the voucher is a government-funded discount.
In theory, vouchers could be means-tested so the money only went to families truly had an economic need for it. However, means testing has costs of it own, often has loopholes, and can go against many people's sense of fairness, especially when you're talking about something for kids.
What you are describing is anecdotal and the same problem we have with Facebook - social group isolation. You have a large number of Catholic schools in your area because you have a large number of Catholics in your area. They are operating under different principles, and so attract people who want those rules. If I went to a Sushi restaurant and proclaimed that nobody wanted Pizza anymore, or to live under the tyranny of tomato sauce and cheese, because nobody in the Sushi restaurant wanted pizza it wouldn't make sense to anyone else.
I know teachers who are very supportive of mask mandates and that the schools and teachers are generally doing ok, and people who I work with who send their kids to schools with masks are very happy for the kids to have socializing opportunities.
Your friends and community are free to find a solution that works for them. But it is not the only way, and it does not make sense to condemn a system that works for the vast majority of people.
Mask mandates are collective punishment of children for no real benefit. I absolutely condemn them and they are not a system that works. Most European countries don't require young children to wear masks in schools.
And don't presume to claim that masking children is necessary to protect adults. The adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months.
The teachers on the teachers subreddit STILL go on about how bad they have it "risking their lives". It's unbelievably dramatic over what to a vaccinated person is an endemic sniffle. I think they really just want to drag out their WFH situation as long as possible, consequences to the next generation of society be damned.
A. It’s not just an endemic sniffle even for vaccinated people. I lost my sense of smell and got it back way after my quarantine ended, like months after. Plus there’s a mental fog that lifted a long time later. I got Covid after my first shot but before my second.
B. In general, being vaxxed keeps you from getting badly sick but you just can’t say.
E.g., say you’re in a group of a hundred people with a thousand guns trained at your group. Just one gun out of the thousand has a live round while ten others have blank which don’t kill but can injure. Would you be willing to face those odds? Would you be willing to ask others to face the same odds?
These are roughly the odds what you are asking teachers to take on.
Think it through longer term. Over the next couple years the odds that teachers and all the rest of us will be infected is approximately 100%. Where the exposure comes from is irrelevant. I am willing to face those odds, and to ask others to do the same.
Even if you have a 100% chance of getting COVID eventually (something that we have zero evidence for) it totally matters when you get it. Sometimes ICUs are overloaded, other times they aren't. If you wait long enough we develop drugs that help. We will make vaccines more effective with time.
What's worse, is a lot of people have long-haul COVID where they suffer severe symptoms that never seem to go away. We have no idea why. Maybe if you get COVID in 5 years we will have figured out why and you get to avoid ruining your life.
Also. COVID is not one and done. You can get it multiple times. People have gotten COVID twice, the first time they were fine, the second time they died.
Not only are you totally misinformed for wanting to "face those odds" you are risking the lives and well-being of those around you.
Hospitals have been overwhelmed during bad flu seasons many times before 2019. We didn't use that as an excuse to impose mandates and restrictions on the rest of society. Omicron is so contagious that your odds of avoiding infection for the next 5 years are approximately zero. Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies we already have are quite effective at preventing deaths. The notion of acting based on the hope that something better might appear at some indefinite point in the future is just absurd.
While reinfections can occur (just as with any coronavirus), symptoms are typically mild. The number of deaths due to reinfections are so low as to be statistically irrelevant from a public policy standpoint.
This panel discussion by several leading physicians provides a good scientific overview of the current situation. It's long, but worth a listen.
I’d like to add that we did wait about a year for the vaccines. That was the treatment that was “good enough” for life to return to normal for me. I don’t need to wait 5 more years. That treatment relieved ~85% of the original risk for me.
What’s the alternative in your hypothetical? If it’s “never socialize normally again”, then hell yes I’ll fade the mostly prop guns. Even if the alternative is two years of these measures, I think the .99 nearly no-op and .999 survival is way preferable.
This will be endemic, just like the 1968 flu is. The sooner we can get to that point, the better.
This isn’t some sort of binary choice. You could take some basic precautions in crowded spaces or try new lower risk activities to socialise with friends e.g things you do outside. You know, do what humans have done for thousands of years: adapt.
But people are so eager to go back to exactly how things were.
> What’s the alternative in your hypothetical? If it’s “never socialize normally again”, then hell yes I’ll fade the mostly prop guns. Even if the alternative is two years of these measures, I think the .99 nearly no-op and .999 survival is way preferable.
What morbid insanity. In the US 850,000 people are dead. That's more dead people than all US soldiers who have died in combat in all wars in history.
Wear a mask, get vaccinated, socially distance, and stop risking your life and that of the people you love.
The teachers are more essential than pretty much anyone else besides doctors. They just have to show up, that's part of the deal when you take on such a big responsibility. What if doctors just stopped showing up in the middle of a pandemic? Society would be fucked. And a generation of kids is fucked because teachers weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously.
Teachers compensation does not reflect the dedication and mortality risk their family should accept according to you.
You get what you pay for. Your kid is your responsibility, not your teachers. If your kid "is fucked" its because you weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously - not underpaid teachers.
Your expectation that teachers should expose their families to a pandemic for 40K pa is absurd.
My kid is my responsibility but also we collectively pay the teachers and we don't have to keep doing this. We can just defund the entire system and make it an individual responsibility (of course as most things this would fuck over the poor kids the most). If there is a moment to crush the teachers unions it is now. California parents who normally would nod their heads at whatever garbage the union feeds them are probably primed to go Margaret Thatcher on their ass. I hope someone is organizing this; they have my vote.
Great. What does that have to do with anything? No state pays teachers well relative to the opportunity cost or to the resultant workload and personal investment.
And that is in normal times. Not when rich computer-toucher randoms want them to go into COVID hotboxes Because They Said So.
"I lost my sense of smell and got it back way after my quarantine ended, like months after. Plus there’s a mental fog that lifted a long time later."
I've had exactly the same, and still haven't got my taste or smell back 100% yet. It sucks, but I still can't imagine being so selfish as to expect millions to endure endless global restrictions over some minor personal inconvenience.
I’m not a fan of endless global restrictions either.
If we don’t like to live with global restrictions at someone else’s say so, why should we expect teachers to go out to teach at our say so? As a group, they have chosen to stay home and that should be that.
It’s not war where the price for not wanting to face the enemy is a cowardice charge and a court martial. These teachers don’t want to teach in-person. End of story.
Absolutely. I wouldn't dream of expecting anyone to do anything "at our say so", be that in-person teaching, vaccine-taking, mask-wearing, close proximity in social situations...
But this thread started with the observation that many private Catholic schools ARE just getting on with the job, and as a result parents are voting with their feet and heading there in droves. These are not teachers being forced; it's just their ideology leads them to make a different risk/benefit calculation to others.
And yet this thread is full of comments arguing that the system of endless global restrictions "works for the vast majority of people". To me and many others, that just seems like wilfully ignoring the harm to our children rather than seeking a way out.
I'm sure I don't need to link to the many MANY studies that have shown how damaging lockdowns have been to our kids' outcomes, and these negative effects hit the poorest kids the hardest. We should be doing everything within our power to undo the damage, and yet so many are willing to stick with restrictions for the foreseeable future with no exit strategy. THIS is why parents are looking for a way out for their kids, and why private schools like those mentioned above are seeing enquiries sky-rocket.
Why the hate for those who seek a return to normality? I don't understand it.
Yeah well my 7 year old hates wearing pants but I still manage to get her clothed for the classroom.
The only kids I know that have a problem with masks are kids with parents that have a problem with masks. It's not a kid problem its an adult problem. Kids are adaptable but adults are whiny little assholes that are set in their ways.
If pants had been invented in 2018 in order to cure horniness, I'd treat them with the same gravitas that I give to graham crackers. One person's "set in one's ways" is another person's "doesn't change with the wind".
> If pants had been invented in 2018 in order to cure horniness
What if they'd been invented hundreds of years ago to stop the spread of disease, and prevented millions of deaths since then? Curious that you use a weak and hyperbolic analogy when the reality is so readily available.
you will see that I avoided referencing specific cultres and made claims about the past. too much racism / elitism on HN in some threads, although those issues need to be discussed too.
Well, you can call me foolish, but I don't think COVID is severe enough to be worth long-term realignment of cultural norms around wardrobe. Most people agree with me, which is why so much of the debate has been based on panic.
Just because kids aren’t actively complaining doesn’t mean it’s not bothering them. My kid is a conformist Asian like me, and we’ve been going along with masking this whole time because her private school is full of democrats. But she broke down crying last fall when she found out that we’d be doing another year of masking. It’s not just the inconvenience of the masks, or the eating outside on the ground, but the whole exercise of disrupting normal life for these kids: no field trips, no birthday parties, etc. We’re into the third year of this reduced childhood.
Masks for kids are significantly less issue then you make them be. There is maybe one in 60 kids that acts as if it is punishment and the rest just used to wear them.
And yes, I am in contact with kids. Masks don't bother them all that much.
My 12 yr old now feels naked without the mask... Perhaps the mandate isn't very useful, but kids are so adaptable (evolutionary trait!) that this isn't in general a big deal for them.
Serious question: Where do you get that rhetoric from? There has been next to zero actual restrictions forced by the federal on lower levels of government. Most of the restrictions are decided at the city and county level and plenty don’t have any restrictions at all. And conform or die? Who is messaging that death is the penalty for not following the nonexistent restrictions?
Yes, and Wickard v. Filburn proves that every breath you take is interstate commerce, but that's not consistent with how Americans have historically understood, and continue to understand, liberty.
This POV is incongruous to me. How does one believe the federal government would benefit from additional lockdowns, when everyone is so tired of living under covid? If anything, officials who impose lockdowns only decrease their popularity, even in very Blue areas.
For the sake of discussion of sensitive topics, I recommend you ditch the hyperbole and stick to facts if you want to maintain credibility with reasonable people.
I don't believe anyone has tried to literally force any restrictions down your throat, nor do I believe that the feds are killing people who don't conform to restrictions. I wouldn't associate your writing with disbelief or skepticism if it didn't contain this type of hyperbole.
Single anecdote: we took our 3rd grader from the regular school and enrolled in an online school since at that age they were not vaccinated and we were not comfortable sending a 3rd grader to a school at all.
In fact I feel that our child has done well, the entire 3rd grade curriculum is finished and will be moving to 4th grade in the middle of the school year since the online school supports that. Something that may not have happened in the regular school at all.
So, as usual, let's not generalize - every one is different, both adults and children.
We may move our child back to regular school in the fall since they can now be vaccinated.
This is interesting to me; my wife and I had a child recently, and our immediate response was "This is going to be a shit-show for years, let's look up how home-schooling works." If nothing else, we'll be spending a lot of time on the Star-Bellied Sneetches.
> BTW, we’re not doing home schooling exactly. We’re doing an online K-12 school.
You're following a set curriculum while the teaching is almost entirely being done by the parents and child. You're a great deal more similar to a homeschooler than normal schools. If you finish all your work for third grade in a regular school you do not go to fourth grade.
> You're a great deal more similar to a homeschooler than normal schools.
Yes you’re right. What I’d meant was that we’ve not had to spend time in figuring out what the curriculum is and how to cobble together the course material - the basic structure is provided so it was easy for us to transition to it.
The problem is with the way schools are doing it. I don't see the point of teaching kids on live video. It's better to give recorded lectures with one doubt clearing session/pop quiz every week.
Live video is frustrating and the ridiculous attempts at interactivity don't help. That schools are still bothered about attendance tells you everything.
Kids can watch recorded lectures any time their parents are able to supervise them. And the lectures don't have to be long because they are interruption free.
There is the asynchronous learning option, at least in our school board. The teachers don't like it because it's separate from the "main" program, so it's not particularly well considered (print these word sheets taken from some online source and other "education" activities). And I don't blame them, it's totally unrealistic to offer two largely separate options.
As to why it's done this way? Why, pretense again, of course. If it's done during "school hours" we can pretend that mom and dad who work from home (let's hope) and can get some work done vs the reality that adults are now expected to home school on top of doing their jobs.
In my unprofessional opinion the reason is to keep kids in seats. School is daycare. In addition, school is totally disconnected from reality and so kids have a lot of trouble assigning importance to it and focusing on it. If you expect all those kids to teach themselves, we had very different experiences in school. Maybe college aged and up…maybe.
This approach throws out one of the main objectives of school in America, which is to train kids to sit still and hold their shit together for 5-6 contiguous hours a day every day.
I don't know jack about teaching kids, but I do know a lot about teaching adults.
The crying shame I see in this whole endeavor is the emphasis on re-creating the classroom online. Half of what you teach (really in any topic) is foundational knowledge -- terms, models, history, important people and events. This is better taught offline at the learner's pace. Give then ways to monitor their understanding -- ungraded exercises, graded quizzes, papers, etc.
The best use of synchronous time to cover the higher level skills involving the application of that knowledge. This means interacting with the students in ways that give them the ability show they understand what you are teaching, letting them screw up, and gently guiding them back on the right path. This is also the hardest but most rewarding part of teaching.
Every parent talk to (I don't have kids) complains about the same thing and the source seems to be the fact this was all jammed online in a short amount of time, without teachers being able to divide their materials into these two parts. This leads to teachers just doing what they did in the classroom but in front of Zoom.
I think online learning is great, but this has led to a lot of people forming poor opinions of it, and I feel like that is a real shame. Schools should have been heading in this direction for years. The technology is there. It seems that entrenched forces have kept it from happening.
Digital workflows take time to setup. The most naive implementations are to use computers as fancy Xerox machines by printing, editing on paper, and scanning in. The next step is to stop printing and keep it on the screens. Like how paperless bills are the exact same documents but they get to save paper, postage, and mailroom staff costs. They have still constrained themselves to the features of paper. Page dimensions, each copy can only be worked on by one person at a time and the resulting version conflicts, and manual review. Finally there’s terminals that make no pretensions as to ever exporting natively to print and can exploit automated processing and data transfer APIs.
Most kids need the structure of the in-person school to be motivated to learn day by day, over a long period. If you give them a playlist and a bunch of problems to solve they will feel overwhelmed and alone.
In person school is not exactly motivating either. Trying to force information students don't care about and won't use into their heads and have them remember it is hard. Learning about things you care about is highly motivating. School has a limited amount of that.
The High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that 66% of high school students are bored in class every day. Seventeen percent say they're bored in every class every day. Two percent claim they're never bored. 82% say the material isn't interesting; 41% that it isn't relevant[1]. Middle school students are bored 36% of the time during schoolwork, versus 17% for other activities.
I agree that in person schooling also fails in motivating most children. It's a bit more effective than remote learning though. Take a look at the trajectory of MOOCs and see how hard it is to do.
I would say that most kids need classmates more than anything else, school is (IMHO) a lot about doing other things besides listening to lessons/teachers.
> I don't know jack about teaching kids, but I do know a lot about teaching adults.
What kind of adults? Most adult teaching is for adults of the top 30%. School teaching has to accommodate the bottom 30%. Teaching the top 30% and bottom 30% is very different.
Mostly corporate learning focused on specific job tasks is what I do. Building tools for online learning and using instructional design to build the training. This is very different than teaching fundamentals to kids, even beyond accommodating different skill levels. But of course it relies on people having a solid foundation. Without that you can't build anything.
There isn't one single approach that works for all kids.
My son is very fond of remote learning and would like to return to that. He could finish everything in an hour or so in the morning and then go off to do other interesting things. Having him sit through real-time classroom discussions online was counterproductive. He begged us to let him stay in online school forever.
My daughter is the opposite. She struggled mightily last year when it was all remote. She needs the structure to maintain focus, she needs to interact with her peers and with the teacher. Even if it is over Zoom, that is far better than nothing. She was begging to go back to in-person learning this year.
My dissertation utilizes something known as the ICAP Framework developed by Mickie Chi. In essence, Chi breaks down learning activities by their levels of engagement, or Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive. For example, watching a recorded lecture without any other activities would be Passive. Higher modalities of engagement will provide higher learning gains, or I > C > A > P.
To that end, Passive activities are simply not enough; they provide some learning gains, but as we're seeing, you need something more. However, some students are not ready for Interactive exercises. For my dissertation, I liken this to the common approach in Intro CS courses where the instructor introduces a new topic, like loops, then expects students to immediately be able to implement it. My philosophy is that we need those Active and Constructive exercises, things like repeating steps (or drilling) which is done in other technical skills; however, when we branch into higher cognitive areas, they're immediately shut down as "not good enough".
I argue instead that we operate within templates, or we behave like we've trained, something stemming my my martial arts background. Right now I think 'virtual learning' has an issue where they're not willing to make this slight upgrade in engagement, for whatever reasons, because its not the magic silver bullet to fix all problems. Rather, in order to improve it, virtual learning needs to add those additional lower level practices into their instruction, otherwise we'll continue this vicious cycle.
yup, i've always made this point as "we're all experiential learners" (the active and constructive). that some folks can get by ok with passive learning (aural, textual, etc.) is just a bonus for them.
Schools are still bothered about attendance because that's what all the laws require. They get funding each year based on the number of kids who showed up almost every day the year before. State laws define the number of days and hours each year that schools must be instructing students. Here's the definition for WA:
""Instructional hours" means those hours students are provided the opportunity to engage in educational activity planned by and under the direction of school district staff,"
https://www.sbe.wa.gov/faqs/instructional_hours
So yes, the way they are running is stupid. But you have to convince a lot of people before they can run it differently, and none of them are down near the level of school districts.
Taking attendance, counting credit hours, and perpetuating butts in seats incentives limits greatness in pedagogy but also guarantees a bare minimum service level. Even standardized tests can be gamed but time is the ultimate resource and is the hardest to fake.
This does not work in practice because the majority of students will postpone watching all recordings until the last possible moment and then be overwhelmed with too much work at once. With physical or virtual attendance, the students are forced to schedule their time properly, although it is less convenient for the small minority of students who have the discipline to make their own schedule.
Hence the weekly assessment. Tests or assignments every week will keep them on a sort of schedule. The most you can postpone is 7 days. It's not a perfect approach but I'd say it's a lot better than live virtual classes.
Not arguing for "do homework whenever" weekly pop quiz/assignments to keep them on track instead. I understand that you had a great experience with online learning but not all schools have teachers who can take effective classes online.
Why can't these articles get to the point sooner. I was expecting to read a description of "virtual learning" and how it deferred from non-"virtual learning", but several paragraphs in and all I got was Ontario this and Ontario that.
The act of writing is more for the writer than his audience. That's why
we post to monster threads like this one with the full knowledge that
our scintillating nugget of wisdom will be lost in the quarry of
ersatz nuggets.
I see more and more of these articles and I feel like we're being conditioned to accept an 180 degree turn by our governments on COVID response. I get the feeling that pretty soon the narrative is going to shift to getting back to normal and living with COVID. We saw that article from the NYT yesterday, a couple threads on Omicron, and now this. ...and this is even hackernews which is not a mainstream outlet.
my kids did remote learning for part of last year and were able to get through it ok thanks to my retired MIL basically becoming a teacher. I feel very fortunate for that. My wife is a middle-school teacher and after the past two years she's ready to quit and we downsize in order to homeschool and side-step the public school system disaster.
>I see more and more of these articles and I feel like we're being conditioned to accept an 180 degree turn by our governments on COVID response.
Is there any reason to believe the government is behind it, rather the other way around? It also seems plausible that the lockdown is pissing people off, journalists are writing about it, and the government does a 180 due to public pressure.
On a national level, the Democrats need a return to normality by late summer at worst. The midterms are going to be brutal no matter what, and if everything is still disrupted the incumbents will be punished. Doesn't matter if it's fair, it's what will happen.
Covid is and has been effectively over in a lot of places. In Texas, outside of major cities, virtually no one ever wore a mask since the start, to give you an idea. Even in major cities, interest is fading.
Covid doesn't come up in conversations anymore, in my circles. Around here it seems like the MSM is the only one interested in keeping it in people's attention, you know, for the clicks.
Covid's perceived relevance seems more and more dependent on where you live.
I'm in the Ozarks, on the border of Arkansas and Missouri
Outside of large public gatherings, where there are always a handful of people wearing masks, I've not seen anyone wearing a mask in public here since mid-2020.
COVID restrictions are only a "thing" for most people here when we need to physically interact with the rest of the country/world. I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to attend PyCon this year (and if it's worth it to me), and had absolutely no reference as to what "proof of full vaccination" means to them. I've never even seen a vaccine card in person. My doctor (GP) doesn't offer COVID vaccination at all, and the first couple of places I called didn't seem to know what documentation was provided. I had to call a chain pharmacy to find anyone that seemed confident that they knew what I was talking about.
Similarly, I've recently started seeing posts online about not being able to find rapid COVID tests. I already have a handful at home, but thinking there might be a shortage I checked while I was out shopping - both Walmart and Walgreens in my town are fully stocked, and there are even some gas stations that have them at the checkout.
The "post-COVID world" is very different depending on the population density and prevailing political views of where you live.
Lol. My favourite is that I was in an Uber and I talked to this guy about his kids and how he was dealing with not having in person school. “Oh, they go to school. They’ve been going for ages”.
“Wait, what? Aren’t the schools closed?”
“Here, maybe, but I live in a town near Sacramento. They go to school. They were not paying attention on the computer”
Then I checked and like private school kids have also been going in person for ages.
Hahaha. We have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees. Oh man, the demographic outcome is going to be epic. We’ll get all these fun sociology studies out of it.
> e have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees.
The poor always get shafted[1] :-( Politicians make policies to grab votes not to solve problems. If a problem gets solved, then that's a side-effect.
Unfortunately education is an outcome of political will, so it figures that educational outcomes are based on popularity amongst voters, which means that those people least likely to have an informed decision on education[2] will be choosing the educational policies.
[1] With WFH it's been ever more clear: the jobs that poor people do are not seated-at-a-desk jobs, so while we have been getting a better quality of life and more hours in the day, the poor have been seeing their risk exposure go up while their salaries have remained the same.
[2] Poor people are more likely to have less education overall, and less experience navigating the options for education for their children.
Khan Academy already does this. They have high quality content on a lot of subjects for K-12 and some for college level students as well. And yet, the adoption of Khan Academy is very limited.
So based on that (albeit with a sample size of only 1), it's unlikely that any [inter]national effort will make any difference.
Plus, people getting recorded videos for learning will feel cheated because they could have just got this for free online. What's the point of paying for education? Very few people actually have/ask doubts in class. Source: am a student.
Khan Academy has high quality videos. They have very clear explanations, and are always factually correct. Kurzgesagt videos just add animation + story_telling to concepts. They don't add any educational value.
To answer your question, an educated guess would be to justify education costs. How do you justify high costs if all you are doing is redirecting students to a free website?
> Kurzgesagt videos just add animation + story_telling to concepts. They don't add any educational value.
Animation and story are a great way to educate somebody in a broad way. For depth, even in something like mathematics, there's 3Blue1Brown's animation style.
I thought it said a lot in few words. People are worried about learning loss, but tons of learning comes from books. Many people have different learning styles, but many classrooms are used simply to instill discipline in children to prepare them for low wage worklife. I'm not convinced of the catastrophic rhetoric compared to subjecting teachers and students to a virulent disease.
Books have value, but in my experience people who are self taught from books usually have a very superficial knowledge and think they know more than they really do. In order to really learn, most students need to interact with teachers who can challenge them.
I do agree with you, teachers are absolutely necessary to get value for many kids, but we aren't talking about completely doing away with teachers, just putting them on remote in order to prevent the spread of a deadly disease. It's sub-optimal, but I'd rather an alive dumb kid than a smart dead one (or perhaps more likely: a dumb kid with alive parents than a smart kid with dead parents).
If we're really worried about losing learning, why not allocate money at the end of the pipeline so that the kids can do more free higher ed / remedial education?
If public schools want to prepare children for their life ahead, they should be doing space repetition tasks and teach them how to sort objects as quickly as possible. Add in some life skills into there, and they will be well prepared to work in the future's Amazon fulfillment centers.
Or teach them neural nets and robotics so they can invent their own AI servants and live happily ever after. Especially easy to do by importing huggingface in the near future.
Technology tends to spread life improvement faster and wider than education and capital. We now have access to things that were too expensive even for the rich, or too complex even for the educated.
We should use our new superpowers to invent a future we like instead of complaining about change. What could a motivated group of people do in order to be as self sustaining as possible in the future? I think there are lots of ideas here.
That is quite the foolish attachment to the goddamned tediously popular hysterical technodystopian complex. The kind that sees Black Mirror in a shitty VR clone of Second Life that copies Microsoft Bob. I haven't seen anybody both bemoan a fate and suggest actions that would specifically lock them into it by massive over-specialization meaning they are unprepared for anything else.
All while doing education wrong by even below mediocre standards. Education kind of has decades of lead time - trying to specialize to any specific job at the primary level is doomed to failure. At best you can get fields of fields emphasized. Education if it is to prepare has to cover at least a path to all jobs.
One of the unpleasant things about the recent pandemic surge has been the opportunistic article-writing to relitigate controversial issues like school closures, which had, with the previous numbers, become a thing of the past, with broad agreement across the political spectrum that they were no longer necessary. Look at the trajectory of today's numbers. The schools are not going to be closed for long. But to read these articles, you'd think educators are planning to keep kids at home for the rest of their lives, rather than until the massive, unprecedented surge subsides. (You'd also think that the US compulsory schooling system was a biologically essential part of human development rather than an early-1900s social invention).
"Living with COVID" doesn't mean "ignoring COVID", and I'd be interested to see viewpoints that are a bit less extreme and more open to the idea that living with a cyclic (and still-deadly) coronavirus requires seasonal adjustments to reality on the ground rather than unconditionally charging ahead with no precautions.
Totally with you. I have 3 kids, they love being online and they love going to school. Online has distinct advantage that they are instantly home and get to eat home food etc. Like the author, we are flexible and home. I can't say everything was perfect.
My main goal is for none of us to get Covid, if we endured this much, I really don't need it now. There is 5 of us, if anyone gets it, everybody will get it, vaccines as you know, will not help you except keep you from dying.
I think this is huge opportunity, largely wasted, to actually figure out a good way to learn online.
Also, I think that most of those who complain and are working from home, they simply don't want their kids home.
This isn't a helpful or honestly very nice comment, considering you don't know the commenter's situation or risk profile. The article you linked even makes the point that delaying onset of Covid until there are more vaccines and therapeutics is ideal. Even at high R0 with no precautions, large numbers of people never get an endemic disease, due to herd immunity. And for people with kids, it's very reasonable to try to delay onset until pediatric vaccines and therapeutics are available. The fact that Covid will become endemic is not a reason to abandon all precautions.
The Delta and Omicron variants are so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity. Everyone will eventually be infected. Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies are quite effective at preventing deaths.
Unless exit criteria and offramps for restrictions are explicitly specified, they are essentially saying they want to do this forever. They're just passing the buck to some other govt agency to tell them when it's ok to exit.
Maybe we come back to this after the Omicron wave has subsided and see whether your fear has been realized or whether the schools have reopened? I'm not really sure what the cause for concern about indefinite restrictions is here. If a school calls a snow day, do people demand exit criteria and offramps, just in case they decide to keep the schools closed through the summer?
No. Not defining metrics in advance isn't saying it will go on forever. Not in a rapidly evolving pandemic. A lot of localities that did choose metrics-driven approaches months or years ago regretted it because they choose transmission rate or community spread as the primary driver. That number is currently through the roof, implying the most severe measures are needed for the foreseeable future.
I often go for a run without a predefined route, but that doesn't mean I want to run forever.
I don't agree with points of this post/article but what bothers me more is that we all became so inflexible and insensitive.
I am perfectly fine with somebody who needs their kids to go to school. I like mine at home during wave of infections as I don't want all of us to get sick. I think they should be wearing masks but I hear there is not enough evidence to support that (and it might be true).
But the point what I wanted to make is: everybody hates everyone else. Nobody is listening to anyone at all. You can't discuss this thing with no-one as they will not listen you. If you mention you understand someone hesitancy with vaccines, you are immediately labeled as Trumper, like those others currently in power are much better. That is also something you should never point out.
I know, I know, others have been trying to say this as well. But it is true, if we can't talk to each other, nothing else is important.
I don't have a point except that I am frustrated with this.
Only on Twitter would you be labeled as a Trumper. Or maybe your circles are like that in real life (that would be very unfortunate). You might find a lot of people agree with you, be bold and speak your mind!
> Or maybe your circles are like that in real life (that would be very unfortunate)
I can say fairly confidently that it's not uncommon for the college / young adult age, self-identified left. The term Republican is basically used as a soft slur or synonym for racist by many. I'm not claiming that everyone is like this, but the number is greater than I would like to see, especially considering how many of them I see as fairly smart people.
I do speak up at times, but it doesn't usually matter because people generally don't actually care about the details. They just want to drop their quip to show support and move on.
We damaged a generation of kids to protect a generation of octogenarians and a bunch of teachers who wouldn't assume any modicum of risk to do their jobs. I feel sad for all the lockdown kids for everything that was done to them. My kid fared well because I essentially spent all of my time teaching him stuff, which then caused me to get fired from my job, and then I got a new job at 30% higher salary.
My wife and I have two daughters, who are eight and thirteen years old. Neither have ever been enrolled in a state school. We've had brief experiments with structured curricula, but we've always found that they're just unsuitable for us - they require a (relatively) huge amount of time, both parents and children tire of it quickly, and most importantly, they don't seem to offer anything.
We regularly test our children both informally and formally. They're learning everything their cohorts are required to know and more through simply living life alongside us. They're a bit behind their peers in some of the more formal/structured areas of grammar, but their actual verbal and written language usage is significantly beyond expectations for their age. They're both far ahead in math, history, social studies, geography, etc.
For kids in particular, learning is something they do by nature. When they get bored, they learn something new. As long as the parents are invested in shaping a productive adult and are able to provide adequate resources for the kids to satisfy their curiosities, my experience leads me to believe that traditional K-12 "schooling" is entirely unnecessary.
Virtual learning is bad and I hate it, but the schools that have returned to in-person school despite very high community transmission rates are going to end up remote again soon when they run out of teachers who aren't sick or quarantined.
225 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadVaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).
The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school.
Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes.
I hate people.
Not everybody is so lucky.
Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors?
How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week?
Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in.
When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.
It reminds me of something from The Office;
>Dwight K. Schrute: The worst thing you can do for your immune system is to coddle it. They need to fight their own battles. If Sabre really cared about our well-being, they would set up hand de-sanitizing stations. A simple bowl at every juncture filled with dirt, vomit, fecal matter...
But yeah, that quote from The Office is pretty hilarious, thanks for sharing!
Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.
It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).
If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].
Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.
My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.
Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.
1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people.
It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of:
'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks'
We are way past that and it shows.
Agreed. A really aggressive lockdown right at the start would have made sense.
Before people die they have to be in the hospital. Hospitalization rates are extremely low considering the infection rate. Death rates are also very low.
This is essentially a flu at this point, even for the unvaccinated. People with 2 shots are as susceptible to omicron infection as the unvaccinated, and once the booster wanes, so will the triple boosted.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-sym...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/childrens-national-...
Hospitalization rates are down. Number of hospitalizations may be up but the spread is larger than it’s ever been. Omicron is 5x more contagious than the original Covid at levels we’ve never seen before as a society.
And that number is trending up. It has actually being trending up since Delta: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036e2.htm
This is true for children ages 5 and above. From that perspective school closures now offer less benefit than school closures in 2020.
Children under the age of 5 still have to manage without vaccine.
I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new.
[1]: https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)
The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home.
It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time.
Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.
That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating.
Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not.
In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.
The one that liked it had an outgoing energetic, tech enabled teacher that liked his job.
The other teacher however was a grumpy lady that couldnt be bothered learning any technology and didn't turn on her camera, forced the kids to keep their mics and cameras off and spent more time probably being elsewhere instead of teaching.
Ontario is a province that if you were to ask teachers why they are teachers, the answers at the bottom of everyone's list would be teaching, spending time with kids.
Most people in Ontario hate teachers because of their odd detachment from reality.
My kids are+were in the Ontario system. I pay attention to their quality of education. Across my parenting circles there are kids in every type of school and program conceivable. I could afford to send mine to private school if I thought it necessary. One of my kids is now at a competitive university with smart and hardworking kids from across the globe and he was well-prepared by his high school. In my opinion we are getting a good distribution of good outcomes, should consider ourselves lucky, and be careful not to take our system for granted, or accidentally break it through ideology or ignorance. And almost no one knows what works and what doesn't, but I believe that part of what works is treating teaching as the serious and challenging profession that it is, and letting them get on with it. You know, pretty much what we want from our stakeholders?
I am very much of the opinion that we must be all-in on one public school system, with explicit objectives: providing a good education, underpinning social cohesion, encouraging individual diversity, seeking equality of opportunity.
(I am not a teacher or in any union, and neither is anyone in my family.)
I live in Ontario, was educated here, have kids in the system, hobnob with zillions of parents, interact with my kid's teachers and know a couple socially.
Teachers are not materially hated or loved any more than any other type of worker that the public interacts with frequently. They are just people, like the rest of us.
I file comments like yours under “haters gonna hate” and “cheerleading for the race to the bottom.”
I file comments like yours unders "Jesus, that white privilege must taste so fucking wonderful".
That's why you can probably find an amazingly large amount of people not in your acceptable pigmentation that don't agree with you one bit.
I think the Brampton school board just had a lawsuit that sums that shit up nicely.
As topics, “teachers” is orthogonal to “structural racism”, and I suspect that blending them together will lead to less effective responses to real but separate problems in both areas. I was very much only speaking only to “teachers”.
I'm aware of Brampton and more besides, and I won't insult you by excusing, explaining or “interpreting” racist behaviour or structural racism. You and your family deserve (and are owed), an “average” Ontario school experience largely untainted by them.
I have an opinion, you have an opinion. You don't like my opinion, you can go fuck yourself with your fucking opinion that you and your mental illness share. Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.
Science says kids are barely affected by Covid and it’s safe for them to go to school.
“The science is wrong!”
I got an email this week that story time at the public library is canceled because of covid. No adult venues canceled.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been making a habit of doing this. That's not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. Would you please review the site guidelines and fix this?
Both of the extremes in this kinda drive me batty. On one side, I know a family that was taking distance learning as a chance to travel the world with their kids, before any vaccine was available. They have caught covid 3 times now.
I also know people that have resolved to never get covid. Why? Because it's covid. Any attempts to discuss things in more detail brings out comparisons to things such as the bubonic plague, measles, and drinking water you shit in.
If individual families want to choose to take their kids out of school that should be their choice. It should not be the default.
Based on what? Also, you can get it more than once. This is a pretty bleak outlook.
> Why we should sacrifice children's well being
Why should we sacrifice the teacher's well being?
> delay the time at which their parents or families will be infected is beyond me.
Because getting sick isn't guaranteed and getting sick can land people in the hospitals and clog our healthcare system.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
The CDC estimated that 44% of the US population had been infected as of September 2021. Obviously that number will be higher now.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Again, you aren't sacrificing the teacher's well being. The teacher is, anyway, most likely going to get covid. If a teacher doesn't like being exposed to children they should resign or be fired. Schools are not for the benefit of teachers but for the benefit of children.
Once vaccinated you are unlikely to require hospitalization. Actually, you're unlikely to require hospitalization regardless of vaccination but especially unlikely once vaccinated. Maybe it's sensible for people to make some minor changes to "flatten the curve" but going to remote school is no minor change and it is far worse than the negligible benefits.
While it's true you can catch the disease multiple times subsequent infections are less likely and less severe.
Whatever a small number of teachers or students need we should not rearrange the education system for the benefit of edge cases. We should optimize for the typical case - average health people, and make adjustments to support the edge cases, not the other way around.
There was a study in the UK from the summer of last year that said the majority of unvaxxed people had antibodies to it. (Sorry, don't have the URL)
Omicron is more transmissible, so if most had been infected then, an ever higher proportion will have been infected now.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
Closely related: Floria wants to stop Covid testing so that their reported infection rates will drop.
https://cbs12.com/news/local/florida-surgeon-general-signals...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-sym...
For age < 18, kids are 3-5x more likely to die of activities such as riding in a car and going to the pool (not to mention the good ol' flu). Virtually nobody even thinks about behavior adjustments when it comes to those activities.
You're needlessly trolling when you're labeling parents and kids speaking up against all this as right wing.
Why does everyone say it’s fine for kids to get Covid because they are not dying? Again, you are trolling.
Hospitalization rates are way up with Omicron. And only reason it looked like kids were less affected by Covid was because there was a lack of testing for kids and schools were initially closed. Schools are open and infection rates are same as adults. Sure. They aren’t dying as much because adults are generally way less healthy. But they are not magically immune and we can pretend there is nothing to be concerned about
Edit: confirmed. I looked at your comment history and you seem to love trolling and posting snarky things
And who is going to teach the kids when all the teachers are sick or possibly infectious?
I initially assumed this was true, though I also assumed that COVID-related hospitalization for children was extremely low. When I checked, though, it does not appear to be true.
For ages 5-17 (school-aged kids), hospitalization rates peaked at 1.4/100k in September 2021.[1]
As of Dec 15, 2021, 655 children 0-17 have died from COVID[2]. That's certainly not good, but it's a very small number relatively speaking. Consider that in 2018, there were 3,820 for ages 0-14 due to "unintentional injury".[3]
1: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html
2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
3: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_o...
That said the trend is not great and this will only accelerate with school back in session and community transmission very high across the country. We’re setting new national records for hospitalized adult covid patients too, for what it’s worth.
I don’t find comparisons to other causes of death of children compelling. Nor is death the only serious long term outcome to be concerned about with covid.
I'm debating whether to participate in this charade this time around, because I think it's in some ways worse than closing schools, at least for those very important early grades. With remote "learning" there is pretense that the immense damage caused by school closures is to an extent mitigated, and that's simply not even close to being true.
There's much more I could write about this, but I will instead point out that this government is also locking down the very industries that are by and large small already battered business AND that were ONLY accessible to the vaccinated population (restaurants, gyms).
It's also fun as a Canadian to make fun of American polarization (and sometimes do participate in these holier than thou conversations), but I also feel utterly helpless (and feel that from others) because I know full well that both the opposition parties would have done exactly the same things. There's nowhere to turn to.
Come move to Florida, Utah, or any of the other states getting it right.
Canada's healthcare is extremely overrated (it's basically bottom tier compared to other countries at our income level or anyone in the EU), our business environment sucks and our economic response to COVID will put us behind for the next decade; it's already showing...
Funny that you say that and then tell that person to move to the US, the only country with a healthcare system that is positively disastrous compared to the Canadian one. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
Look at your link, the US is #2 in the only category relating to the actual care you receive.
The main problem in Canada isn't the quality of care per se, it's the fact that our health care system is so gutted you can't access it in a timely manner with no options to get around it (ie. very little private delivery). Anything that's considered non-essential (which is quite a bit, including many quality of life procedures) takes months to years...
That is completely untrue. The US is literally last. It's 11 out of 11. Worst outcomes across the board. From life expectancy to treatable deaths to heart attacks to infant mortality. The US is by far the worst.
If you read the report, you'll see that "care process" has nothing to do with "quality". It's about things like the efficiency of electronic medical record systems, or things like "In past two years, used a secure website, patient portal, or mobile app to request Rx refills from regular practice". etc. Yeah, the US has a lot of money to waste of frills, this makes middlemen money, instead of actual care.
> US healthcare costs more but the quality of care and capacity is miles ahead
If you read the report, this is totally the opposite. The US costs more and has the worst outcomes. You get the worst care of all developed countries.
Not only that, the US has the worst capacity! It has the lowest number of doctors per capita.
The difference between the US and Canada? If you have a lot of money and work for an employer who can absorb a lot of costs, you can pay your way out of the system in the US to get faster care. The vast vast majority of people in the US and in Canada, can't do that.
https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/health-at-a-glance-united-...
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/ae3016b9-en/1/3/1/index....
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/ae3016b9-en/1/3/1/index....
The OECD has statistics on basically every aspect of the health care system, across most developed countries. You can look at any category relating to quality of care or health system capacity and the US crushes Canada. Canada didn't even put on a very good showing on your link either. Affordability in the US is a problem, yes, but if you have the money, it's probably close to best in the world. That's why most of my family left Canada for the US years ago (also so they could earn 3x more and pay less for, well, everything that's not healthcare).
https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20180131/us-...
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The Catholic schools' policy on things like this, at least near me, is dictated mostly by the diocese. The state can withhold funding for things like special-ed programs or meals if they won't play ball, but they get more autonomy as long as they aren't violating civil-rights law.
The teachers' union does. Not most of the time either. All the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10#Effect_o...
"the law reduced average test scores on the state’s standardized exam by approximately 20% of a standard deviation": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277571...
"8 percent reduction in total compensation" https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/rb71.pdf
Not only does this hold up in general, it holds up district by district. Districts that still had collective bargaining had better scores than one that didn't (even after controlling for confounds, it was the union status that made the difference).
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0160449X1988337...
Not only that, teacher shortages are worse, and they're much worse in rural areas.
https://search.proquest.com/openview/5ae518d77f9e44551206208...
So the outcome is: Teachers make less money, there are fewer teachers to be had, and students are scoring much worse.
A win-win-win for conservatives!
Additionally, you don't have public sector or really any teachers unions to deal with at private schools.
There are other factors that contribute, but aren't nearly as clear cut as those two.
I believe the term is "decline" or "decadence"...
I do not approve of publicly funding parochial religious schools, for example. This is a bad road to take. The would-be-theocrats don't even comprehend the damage their wish's fulfillment would bring.
I had the misfortune of attending such a "school" once and found it full of fake curriculi and it set me back a year at a crucial time. It was a total joke. I attended approximately 8 different public schools prior to that and after that, including some rather lousy ones, and all were superior to these weirdo cult luckily didn't have to spend much time in.
Public funding? public standards.
This, on the face of it, seems like a good idea[1]. I don't understand why it is being downvoted.
[1] I'm not in the US, if that helps.
It is a bad idea for smart kids whose parents are poor or don't care - they will still get the lowest-cost 'public option' but now get left behind by the 50-80% of kids whose parents care to get their kids into selective schools or ones that need top-up payments, thus cementing hereditary stratification of society.
>
> It is a bad idea for smart kids whose parents are poor or don't care - they will still get the lowest-cost 'public option' but now get left behind by the 50-80% of kids whose parents care to get their kids into selective schools or ones that need top-up payments, thus cementing hereditary stratification of society.
Maybe I am missing something, but how is that worse than the current system? The top 5% are already sending their kids to the best schools currently, right?
The people who are too poor to afford the top-up in the proposed voucher system are currently not getting the best schools anyway. Under the voucher system I expect that some of the currently poor people who are not getting the best school would be able to switch to the best school that doesn't require a top-up.
Right now, as I understand it, poor people have no option to switch schools.
Because the taxes that were going to a public school are now going to a private one. School quality is about a lot more than money but taking money away from a struggling school isn't going to make it better.
Vouchers can mean the difference to a few kids between staying a failing public school and going to a successful private school, the money is enough for some motivated middle class families to make that change. But a lot more kids are going to be ones from families who were always going to send their kids to a private school so for them the voucher is a government-funded discount.
In theory, vouchers could be means-tested so the money only went to families truly had an economic need for it. However, means testing has costs of it own, often has loopholes, and can go against many people's sense of fairness, especially when you're talking about something for kids.
They rely on private school tuition to further subsidize public schools via reduced enrollment but not reduced budget.
I know teachers who are very supportive of mask mandates and that the schools and teachers are generally doing ok, and people who I work with who send their kids to schools with masks are very happy for the kids to have socializing opportunities.
Your friends and community are free to find a solution that works for them. But it is not the only way, and it does not make sense to condemn a system that works for the vast majority of people.
And don't presume to claim that masking children is necessary to protect adults. The adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months.
B. In general, being vaxxed keeps you from getting badly sick but you just can’t say.
E.g., say you’re in a group of a hundred people with a thousand guns trained at your group. Just one gun out of the thousand has a live round while ten others have blank which don’t kill but can injure. Would you be willing to face those odds? Would you be willing to ask others to face the same odds?
These are roughly the odds what you are asking teachers to take on.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies are quite effective at preventing deaths.
What's worse, is a lot of people have long-haul COVID where they suffer severe symptoms that never seem to go away. We have no idea why. Maybe if you get COVID in 5 years we will have figured out why and you get to avoid ruining your life.
Also. COVID is not one and done. You can get it multiple times. People have gotten COVID twice, the first time they were fine, the second time they died.
Not only are you totally misinformed for wanting to "face those odds" you are risking the lives and well-being of those around you.
While reinfections can occur (just as with any coronavirus), symptoms are typically mild. The number of deaths due to reinfections are so low as to be statistically irrelevant from a public policy standpoint.
This panel discussion by several leading physicians provides a good scientific overview of the current situation. It's long, but worth a listen.
https://youtu.be/GklHGYY8vN8
This will be endemic, just like the 1968 flu is. The sooner we can get to that point, the better.
But people are so eager to go back to exactly how things were.
What morbid insanity. In the US 850,000 people are dead. That's more dead people than all US soldiers who have died in combat in all wars in history.
Wear a mask, get vaccinated, socially distance, and stop risking your life and that of the people you love.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You get what you pay for. Your kid is your responsibility, not your teachers. If your kid "is fucked" its because you weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously - not underpaid teachers.
Your expectation that teachers should expose their families to a pandemic for 40K pa is absurd.
Poorly, in a normal environment.
Laughably, with what you are demanding they do for you.
There's a whole lot of "other people should endanger themselves for me" around this topic and it deserves some introspection.
https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...
And that is in normal times. Not when rich computer-toucher randoms want them to go into COVID hotboxes Because They Said So.
Yeah what if that happened in medicine and related fields:
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/physicians/more-docs-consid...
https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2021/08/california...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ems-workers-retiring-higher-rat...
I've had exactly the same, and still haven't got my taste or smell back 100% yet. It sucks, but I still can't imagine being so selfish as to expect millions to endure endless global restrictions over some minor personal inconvenience.
If we don’t like to live with global restrictions at someone else’s say so, why should we expect teachers to go out to teach at our say so? As a group, they have chosen to stay home and that should be that.
It’s not war where the price for not wanting to face the enemy is a cowardice charge and a court martial. These teachers don’t want to teach in-person. End of story.
But this thread started with the observation that many private Catholic schools ARE just getting on with the job, and as a result parents are voting with their feet and heading there in droves. These are not teachers being forced; it's just their ideology leads them to make a different risk/benefit calculation to others.
And yet this thread is full of comments arguing that the system of endless global restrictions "works for the vast majority of people". To me and many others, that just seems like wilfully ignoring the harm to our children rather than seeking a way out.
I'm sure I don't need to link to the many MANY studies that have shown how damaging lockdowns have been to our kids' outcomes, and these negative effects hit the poorest kids the hardest. We should be doing everything within our power to undo the damage, and yet so many are willing to stick with restrictions for the foreseeable future with no exit strategy. THIS is why parents are looking for a way out for their kids, and why private schools like those mentioned above are seeing enquiries sky-rocket.
Why the hate for those who seek a return to normality? I don't understand it.
The only kids I know that have a problem with masks are kids with parents that have a problem with masks. It's not a kid problem its an adult problem. Kids are adaptable but adults are whiny little assholes that are set in their ways.
What if they'd been invented hundreds of years ago to stop the spread of disease, and prevented millions of deaths since then? Curious that you use a weak and hyperbolic analogy when the reality is so readily available.
Go to any store, chin-maskers are with maskless kids, while parents with N95 masks are without kids or with fully masked kids.
And yes, I am in contact with kids. Masks don't bother them all that much.
Unless one lives in a walled community and there is no movement in or out of that wall, what happens in one community affects everyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't believe anyone has tried to literally force any restrictions down your throat, nor do I believe that the feds are killing people who don't conform to restrictions. I wouldn't associate your writing with disbelief or skepticism if it didn't contain this type of hyperbole.
Single anecdote: we took our 3rd grader from the regular school and enrolled in an online school since at that age they were not vaccinated and we were not comfortable sending a 3rd grader to a school at all.
In fact I feel that our child has done well, the entire 3rd grade curriculum is finished and will be moving to 4th grade in the middle of the school year since the online school supports that. Something that may not have happened in the regular school at all.
So, as usual, let's not generalize - every one is different, both adults and children.
We may move our child back to regular school in the fall since they can now be vaccinated.
Hopefully by the time your child is a little older things would have settled. Best wishes!
BTW, we’re not doing home schooling exactly. We’re doing an online K-12 school.
You're following a set curriculum while the teaching is almost entirely being done by the parents and child. You're a great deal more similar to a homeschooler than normal schools. If you finish all your work for third grade in a regular school you do not go to fourth grade.
Yes you’re right. What I’d meant was that we’ve not had to spend time in figuring out what the curriculum is and how to cobble together the course material - the basic structure is provided so it was easy for us to transition to it.
Live video is frustrating and the ridiculous attempts at interactivity don't help. That schools are still bothered about attendance tells you everything.
Kids can watch recorded lectures any time their parents are able to supervise them. And the lectures don't have to be long because they are interruption free.
As to why it's done this way? Why, pretense again, of course. If it's done during "school hours" we can pretend that mom and dad who work from home (let's hope) and can get some work done vs the reality that adults are now expected to home school on top of doing their jobs.
The crying shame I see in this whole endeavor is the emphasis on re-creating the classroom online. Half of what you teach (really in any topic) is foundational knowledge -- terms, models, history, important people and events. This is better taught offline at the learner's pace. Give then ways to monitor their understanding -- ungraded exercises, graded quizzes, papers, etc.
The best use of synchronous time to cover the higher level skills involving the application of that knowledge. This means interacting with the students in ways that give them the ability show they understand what you are teaching, letting them screw up, and gently guiding them back on the right path. This is also the hardest but most rewarding part of teaching.
Every parent talk to (I don't have kids) complains about the same thing and the source seems to be the fact this was all jammed online in a short amount of time, without teachers being able to divide their materials into these two parts. This leads to teachers just doing what they did in the classroom but in front of Zoom.
I think online learning is great, but this has led to a lot of people forming poor opinions of it, and I feel like that is a real shame. Schools should have been heading in this direction for years. The technology is there. It seems that entrenched forces have kept it from happening.
The High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that 66% of high school students are bored in class every day. Seventeen percent say they're bored in every class every day. Two percent claim they're never bored. 82% say the material isn't interesting; 41% that it isn't relevant[1]. Middle school students are bored 36% of the time during schoolwork, versus 17% for other activities.
[1]Yazzie-Mintz 2010, pp.6-7
[2] Larson and Richards 1991, pp. 427-29
What kind of adults? Most adult teaching is for adults of the top 30%. School teaching has to accommodate the bottom 30%. Teaching the top 30% and bottom 30% is very different.
My son is very fond of remote learning and would like to return to that. He could finish everything in an hour or so in the morning and then go off to do other interesting things. Having him sit through real-time classroom discussions online was counterproductive. He begged us to let him stay in online school forever.
My daughter is the opposite. She struggled mightily last year when it was all remote. She needs the structure to maintain focus, she needs to interact with her peers and with the teacher. Even if it is over Zoom, that is far better than nothing. She was begging to go back to in-person learning this year.
To that end, Passive activities are simply not enough; they provide some learning gains, but as we're seeing, you need something more. However, some students are not ready for Interactive exercises. For my dissertation, I liken this to the common approach in Intro CS courses where the instructor introduces a new topic, like loops, then expects students to immediately be able to implement it. My philosophy is that we need those Active and Constructive exercises, things like repeating steps (or drilling) which is done in other technical skills; however, when we branch into higher cognitive areas, they're immediately shut down as "not good enough".
I argue instead that we operate within templates, or we behave like we've trained, something stemming my my martial arts background. Right now I think 'virtual learning' has an issue where they're not willing to make this slight upgrade in engagement, for whatever reasons, because its not the magic silver bullet to fix all problems. Rather, in order to improve it, virtual learning needs to add those additional lower level practices into their instruction, otherwise we'll continue this vicious cycle.
And here are the required numbers in other states https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab1_1-2020.asp
So yes, the way they are running is stupid. But you have to convince a lot of people before they can run it differently, and none of them are down near the level of school districts.
They learned more in online lessons, the speed by which it moved was normal. And as bonus, I did not had to play teacher, the teacher played teacher.
The act of writing is more for the writer than his audience. That's why we post to monster threads like this one with the full knowledge that our scintillating nugget of wisdom will be lost in the quarry of ersatz nuggets.
my kids did remote learning for part of last year and were able to get through it ok thanks to my retired MIL basically becoming a teacher. I feel very fortunate for that. My wife is a middle-school teacher and after the past two years she's ready to quit and we downsize in order to homeschool and side-step the public school system disaster.
Is there any reason to believe the government is behind it, rather the other way around? It also seems plausible that the lockdown is pissing people off, journalists are writing about it, and the government does a 180 due to public pressure.
Covid doesn't come up in conversations anymore, in my circles. Around here it seems like the MSM is the only one interested in keeping it in people's attention, you know, for the clicks.
Covid's perceived relevance seems more and more dependent on where you live.
Outside of large public gatherings, where there are always a handful of people wearing masks, I've not seen anyone wearing a mask in public here since mid-2020.
COVID restrictions are only a "thing" for most people here when we need to physically interact with the rest of the country/world. I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to attend PyCon this year (and if it's worth it to me), and had absolutely no reference as to what "proof of full vaccination" means to them. I've never even seen a vaccine card in person. My doctor (GP) doesn't offer COVID vaccination at all, and the first couple of places I called didn't seem to know what documentation was provided. I had to call a chain pharmacy to find anyone that seemed confident that they knew what I was talking about.
Similarly, I've recently started seeing posts online about not being able to find rapid COVID tests. I already have a handful at home, but thinking there might be a shortage I checked while I was out shopping - both Walmart and Walgreens in my town are fully stocked, and there are even some gas stations that have them at the checkout.
The "post-COVID world" is very different depending on the population density and prevailing political views of where you live.
“Wait, what? Aren’t the schools closed?”
“Here, maybe, but I live in a town near Sacramento. They go to school. They were not paying attention on the computer”
Then I checked and like private school kids have also been going in person for ages.
Hahaha. We have chosen a very specific demographic (poor to middle class kids in big liberal cities) and decided to just cut them off at the knees. Oh man, the demographic outcome is going to be epic. We’ll get all these fun sociology studies out of it.
The poor always get shafted[1] :-( Politicians make policies to grab votes not to solve problems. If a problem gets solved, then that's a side-effect.
Unfortunately education is an outcome of political will, so it figures that educational outcomes are based on popularity amongst voters, which means that those people least likely to have an informed decision on education[2] will be choosing the educational policies.
[1] With WFH it's been ever more clear: the jobs that poor people do are not seated-at-a-desk jobs, so while we have been getting a better quality of life and more hours in the day, the poor have been seeing their risk exposure go up while their salaries have remained the same.
[2] Poor people are more likely to have less education overall, and less experience navigating the options for education for their children.
Perhaps from all this shaking up education can break out of the least effective modes and get a little more creative.
Imagine if we made kurzgesagt quality videos for essentially every subject, at an international scale, translated into hundreds of languages.
We'd create a huge trove of knowledge, have a good set of lecture material to use with children and even college students.
At that point we could have teachers be for guidance, chatting with, and a holding hand for children who need more help to get through the work load.
This would require a federal or international level of cooperation and communication, but the end results would be absolutely wonderful.
So based on that (albeit with a sample size of only 1), it's unlikely that any [inter]national effort will make any difference.
Plus, people getting recorded videos for learning will feel cheated because they could have just got this for free online. What's the point of paying for education? Very few people actually have/ask doubts in class. Source: am a student.
Although one should ask, why aren't schools deferring to that as a resource more?
To answer your question, an educated guess would be to justify education costs. How do you justify high costs if all you are doing is redirecting students to a free website?
Animation and story are a great way to educate somebody in a broad way. For depth, even in something like mathematics, there's 3Blue1Brown's animation style.
If we're really worried about losing learning, why not allocate money at the end of the pipeline so that the kids can do more free higher ed / remedial education?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Technology tends to spread life improvement faster and wider than education and capital. We now have access to things that were too expensive even for the rich, or too complex even for the educated.
We should use our new superpowers to invent a future we like instead of complaining about change. What could a motivated group of people do in order to be as self sustaining as possible in the future? I think there are lots of ideas here.
All while doing education wrong by even below mediocre standards. Education kind of has decades of lead time - trying to specialize to any specific job at the primary level is doomed to failure. At best you can get fields of fields emphasized. Education if it is to prepare has to cover at least a path to all jobs.
"Living with COVID" doesn't mean "ignoring COVID", and I'd be interested to see viewpoints that are a bit less extreme and more open to the idea that living with a cyclic (and still-deadly) coronavirus requires seasonal adjustments to reality on the ground rather than unconditionally charging ahead with no precautions.
My main goal is for none of us to get Covid, if we endured this much, I really don't need it now. There is 5 of us, if anyone gets it, everybody will get it, vaccines as you know, will not help you except keep you from dying.
I think this is huge opportunity, largely wasted, to actually figure out a good way to learn online.
Also, I think that most of those who complain and are working from home, they simply don't want their kids home.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
The risk to healthy children is virtually zero.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v...
"Two week to bend the curve" - 2020
"Get the vaccine and you won't get Covid" - 2021
"The vaccines the light at the end of the tunnel, we just need 80%+ to hit herd immunity" - 2021
Now we're two full years into this and the restrictions are the same or worse than when Covid first hit.
Huh?
I often go for a run without a predefined route, but that doesn't mean I want to run forever.
I am perfectly fine with somebody who needs their kids to go to school. I like mine at home during wave of infections as I don't want all of us to get sick. I think they should be wearing masks but I hear there is not enough evidence to support that (and it might be true).
But the point what I wanted to make is: everybody hates everyone else. Nobody is listening to anyone at all. You can't discuss this thing with no-one as they will not listen you. If you mention you understand someone hesitancy with vaccines, you are immediately labeled as Trumper, like those others currently in power are much better. That is also something you should never point out.
I know, I know, others have been trying to say this as well. But it is true, if we can't talk to each other, nothing else is important.
I don't have a point except that I am frustrated with this.
I can say fairly confidently that it's not uncommon for the college / young adult age, self-identified left. The term Republican is basically used as a soft slur or synonym for racist by many. I'm not claiming that everyone is like this, but the number is greater than I would like to see, especially considering how many of them I see as fairly smart people.
I do speak up at times, but it doesn't usually matter because people generally don't actually care about the details. They just want to drop their quip to show support and move on.
Home School.
Charter School.
Parochial School.
Private School.
If you truly care about your children, why wouldn't you? If you don't, why complain?
Basically a matter of economic substitutes and actually making a choice.
My wife and I have two daughters, who are eight and thirteen years old. Neither have ever been enrolled in a state school. We've had brief experiments with structured curricula, but we've always found that they're just unsuitable for us - they require a (relatively) huge amount of time, both parents and children tire of it quickly, and most importantly, they don't seem to offer anything.
We regularly test our children both informally and formally. They're learning everything their cohorts are required to know and more through simply living life alongside us. They're a bit behind their peers in some of the more formal/structured areas of grammar, but their actual verbal and written language usage is significantly beyond expectations for their age. They're both far ahead in math, history, social studies, geography, etc.
For kids in particular, learning is something they do by nature. When they get bored, they learn something new. As long as the parents are invested in shaping a productive adult and are able to provide adequate resources for the kids to satisfy their curiosities, my experience leads me to believe that traditional K-12 "schooling" is entirely unnecessary.