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Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#651

Post by esalman »

usaar333 wrote: post #481
politelemon wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away? It pains me to admit that this didn't even occur to me as part of the topic of teachers being sent back. The human aspects of students-teacher relationships. I feel I've been desensitized to this after exposing myself to a constant stream of news, and now I'm thinking further about what other aspects lie behind other headlines. Thank you f…

It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. Houston today). IF you additionally filter out high risk-group teaches (known pre-existing health conditions, older than 65, etc.) excess death risk is quite low. (e.g. in the Bay Area, dying in a car crash remains far more likely (~10x) if you meet the criteri…

Second Covid19 wave in Israel has been blamed on school reopening- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/israel...

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#652

Post by analbumcover »

vlunkr wrote: post #589
analbumcover wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, it's succeeded so far. There have been and will be growing pains, but so far the standard of living has increased over time. To declare failure is just speculation. Industrialized society has been reducing the long-term carrying capacity of the earth for over a century. These effects, until recently, have been masked by intensification i.e. continually increasing consumption of resources for use as inputs o…

> Hunter-gatherer societies have routinely been found to be happier and involve significantly less work than industrialized societies. So is it a coincidence that 99.9% of hunter-gatherer societies have chosen to industrialize? > Or do you think that given that degree of climate shift occurs it is unlikely to entail a societal and/or biosphere collapse? My guess is that society wouldn't collapse, but again, this is s…

> So is it a coincidence that 99.9% of hunter-gatherer societies have chosen to industrialize?

I don't think there is much evidence of this. Would you say that hunter-gatherers in Australia, Africa, or the Americas chose to industrialize? It seems more that agrarian society was forced upon them. Likewise, industrialization isn't much of a choice once you are already in an agrarian society as failing to adapt to it will see you outcompeted and displaced or extirpated.

Your question is like asking "why do 99.9% of people choose to have sex with me if I hold a knife to their throat?" It takes some serious mental gymnastics to construe that as them wanting to have sex with you.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#653

Post by ska »

thephyber wrote: post #294
newspheasant wrote: post #278

My wife is a teacher and starting school (in person) in a week and a half. There’s no answers to questions like: - Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away? - When a teacher gets sick, what substitute teacher is going to want to teach an exposed class (also, they’ll be making sub plans with covid?)? - When they’re sick are will they be getting additional sick leave? - Do they get wo…

It's amazing to see how differently we treat the low probability, high impact events like active shooters and terrorism, but we completely fail to do the far easier task of dealing with the high probability, unknown impact events.

do you think low probability, high impact events are handled well on average?

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#654

Post by vondur »

pgrote wrote: post #638
twblalock wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster. I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work. In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't car…

>The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster. Speaking from a USA perspective, no, it was a complete shit show. And you know what? That is fine. Our school district went from completely normal one day to remote learning the next. Huge swing in what to do and how to do it. There were no plans for a global pandemic. School districts learned quickly there were external factors affecting everyone's life…

School districts really aren't doing any more training or working on remote learning. Teachers are not required to work in the Summer and therefore most will won't do anything to prepare. My wife works with multiple school districts here in SoCal. We even had one district who had negotiated with the teachers union and they did not legally have to do any online instruction at all. (Huntington Beach). So, many teachers simply did nothing, or very little. The school board there has been taking heat over it for the last couple of months.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#655

Post by analbumcover »

fnovd wrote: post #563
analbumcover wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, it's succeeded so far. There have been and will be growing pains, but so far the standard of living has increased over time. To declare failure is just speculation. Industrialized society has been reducing the long-term carrying capacity of the earth for over a century. These effects, until recently, have been masked by intensification i.e. continually increasing consumption of resources for use as inputs o…

> Hunter-gatherer societies have routinely been found to be happier and involve significantly less work than industrialized societies. Yes, grasshoppers are typically happier and less hardworking than ants. There's an old fable that comes to mind...

Yeah, I didn't expect that to go over well on a distinctly techno-optimist site.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#656

Post by tremon »

tux1968 wrote: post #501
rorykoehler wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a cultural problem. We need to change it so intrinsic motivation is the driving force behind education.

So elective rather than compulsory?

What's with the black&white? How about nurtured guidance, positive reinforcement learning or inspirational leadership? The stick isn't the only compelling force, and when it comes to education, it's probably one of the worst.

Kids are naturally curious, they're hard-wired to learn from the world around them. But you need a school system that fosters that, not hampers it.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#657

Post by [deleted] »

seibelj wrote: post #228
DenisM wrote: post #219

The Los Angelos teachers added a few other requests [1]. The introduction starts with: [...] LAUSD educators clearly want to get back into schools with their students, but the underlying question at every step must be: Given broader societal conditions, how do we open physical schools in a way that ensures that the benefit outweigh the risks [...] And then proceeds to the following recommendations, among many others:…

I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters. Parents choose to send their kids there - if the existing public school was so good, why would they send them somewhere else? It's simply about choice, and sending your own kids to the best possible option. No one would ever deny their own children the best possible education available. It's so clearly about administrators and professionals over the n…

[deleted]

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#658

Post by sfteus »

nickff wrote: post #461
sfteus wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price gouging is based on a reasonable price and is subjective. If the present situation results in inflated prices due to lack of materials or needing to run at a higher capacity, that's still reasonable. California, for example, has this written into their penal code, limiting it to a 10% increase in price of the total cost of manufacturing, which includes the increased cost of production, transportation or storage…

Would you take on the cost and risk of additional machines and employees for an ephemeral market and small margins?

For the public good? Absolutely. Even more so if the government subsidized part of it to help ensure those goods were available to their citizens.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#659

Post by [deleted] »

isthispermanent wrote: post #608
ihumanable wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. Interesting, Sweden suffered more deaths than their neighbors and does not appear to be any better off economically. Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c... Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors - https://www.cnbc.com…

Except for your NYT article, these are all pieces from more than 2 months ago. And the NYT has been exceptionally poor at reporting on covid with an even hand. What it fails to mention is that though Sweden's economy will contract by the same amount as it's Scandanavian neighbors, about -8%, it's a huge win compared to UK/Italy/France which will contract by 22-30%. src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06…

[deleted]

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#660

Post by tremon »

Avicebron wrote: post #550
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consensus on both ends of the political spectrum over the past 30 years is that public education is a failure and must be abolished through either defunding or diverting funding to charter schools. Providing more funding to public schools would undermine that goal.

I don't see it as a consensus when there has been a systematic defunding and destruction of many many education systems, especially in rural america and the inner cities. It's like saying, why did you fall in the hole I dug in front of you?

I think the GP is arguing from results, not policy. If the past 30 years have consistently resulted in the same policies of defunding and deconstruction, there's apparently a tacit agreement among all parties that that's the way to go.
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