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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#271

Post by rdtwo »

tschwimmer wrote: post #157
throwawayboise wrote: post #4

I am very thankful that my youngest graduated high school in 2020. The last couple of months were screwed up, but there wasn't much real education lost by then; most seniors pretty much check out after Spring Break anyway. I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.

I have some bad news for you: if your child is college bound then they are about to go into another environment that has been profoundly damaged by the pandemic: a college campus. Students at my university are angry and depressed about the fact that they're paying thousands of dollars for glorified university of Phoenix. The college social scene is also obviously heavily disrupted, which is probably an underappreciat…

You but how long… gap year seemed like a good move at pandemic start but is been 2 years now with no End in sight

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#272

Post by fleddr »

tehjoker wrote: post #37

I wonder how all those kids with long covid will view decisions to physically disable them potentially for life so the state could force their parents to work. I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease with no mitigations to make money.

Force them to work, huh?

Does it really need explaining that besides making money, work is also used to keep our society running?

Do you like things such as...say, FOOD?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#273

Post by flerchin »

At least for us, in the early days, I understood the school closures to be about protecting the sometimes elderly staff, and the children from unknowns.

Now that vaccinations are widely available to both the staff and kids, I would like to see a more rigorous adherence to the rigor of the before times.

Regular bus schedules, and regular lunch times, and generally doing sports and activities, within the bounds of circumstantially necessary restrictions, would do my kids a world of good.

My 9yo has developed mildly concerning anxiety and night-terrors over this.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#274

Post by SuoDuanDao »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #158
superfrank wrote: post #18

I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…

The part about the under-20-year-old children who fell to gun violence in Chicago raised my eye. Thats a problem but I don't know it's a covid problem, and I'm not certain that people over 18 count as children.

Given how many gun deaths are suicide I wouldn't be surprised if it's a result of social isolation in response to Covid.

I strongly agree with your second point... I'm all for a longer exploratory phase of life before people settle on a career, but that seems like it should involve a more gradual adoption of adult responsibilities, not delaying them ever more.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#275

Post by woodruffw »

civilized wrote: post #170
woodruffw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've performed a very subtle conversational pivot here: I didn't assert that COVID is more deadly to children, or that public policy was structured around that hypothesis. I said that we didn't know how dangerous it was and that, among other things, treating COVID as potentially flu-like in young children was a reasonable policy. When it became clear that children weren't dying in large numbers from COVID, keeping…

I did not pivot. And to anyone reading my post, it should be so obvious that I did not pivot that your claim that I did verges on flatly dishonest. We knew COVID was not dangerous to children by early summer 2020. The article says this and the article is correct. I simply and plainly repeated this. It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing bet…

> It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.

This is the aforementioned pivot. Nobody made this claim.

The claim is that, early in the pandemic, unknowns about the dangers of COVID to children were one among many sufficient conditions for closing schools. Once we learned what we currently know, that condition lost its sufficiency. But that didn't change the sufficiency of the other conditions (read: community transmission, teacher health, &c.), which remain.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#276

Post by XorNot »

chmod600 wrote: post #246
XorNot wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question only ever asked by people in no danger (or who believe they're in no danger) of the consequences of what they propose.

No. Everyone with children asks that question, because they see the damage happening. Some reach different conclusions about the trade-off, but no parents take your absolutist position that doesn't even question the damage.

I'm sure they do: and they do from the position of being able to talk about the consequences but not actually grok the consequences. You're doing it right here: think of the children! Well sure, but okay what about the teachers, the janitorial staff, the administrative staff? Schools aren't a machine children go into and then with no other inputs, education comes out.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#277

Post by WalterBright »

bsder wrote: post #175
WalterBright wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times). To make schools safe is simple - hold classes outside. It won't work everywhere everytime, but it can work enough. It'll work fine in California, Arizona, Seattle most of the time, etc.

> The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times). Sigh. This simply isn't true. I'm no fan of the Gates Foundation as I think they helicopter in, muck everything up, and then leave picking up the pieces to the locals after they leave again. However, their transparency was at least useful. If you want effective education in younger students, it…

The WA teachers' union demanded "fully funded schools" for at least a decade. They finally got it.

There was no measurable improvement whatsoever in education.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#278

Post by basch »

nradov wrote: post #244
tdeck wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also parents are the caretakers of children. If they're sick or incapacitated or die, that's going to have a negative impact on children. As will having a greater number of essential workers becoming sick or dying.

How is that relevant? The parents will all inevitably be exposed eventually. It doesn't matter whether the exposure happens through one of their children or someone else.

ECMO shortage

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#279

Post by rdtwo »

runako wrote: post #23
babyblueblanket wrote: post #9

Are there any teachers who can really talk about solutions to the problems covid presents? Rather seriously, of what I can find anecdotally online (as I know no teachers IRL) that even trying to have in-person classes haven't really helped, because parents pull their kids out of class or a significant chunk misses school due to being out sick/quarantine and now the entire lesson plan is screwed up.

There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB. Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare. Schools have logistics problems due to students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick teachers to school, they would do that. In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents…

Schools are child care… but you can’t just remove it and leave folks with nothing. There isn’t enough private capacity if you zero out schools

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#280

Post by quadrifoliate »

ianbicking wrote: post #239

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each da…

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed.

I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays?

Stresses by the pandemic itself have likely caused parental productivity to plummet. Remember that "classrooms" are not the sterile abstractions you seem to bucket them into, they are staffed by teachers who are both employees and often parents themselves; with the accompanying stresses. They are required to face Covid, often from students who are imperfectly masked or unmasked.

I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.

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