I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
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Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#2Dayam. What a sh*t show.
1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan.
2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick, it's insane to "power through it" by getting more people sick. As much as people want "normalcy" because they're pandemic fatigued, it's not worth killing another million people. Heck, if lockdowns were done strictly similar to authoritarian countries like China or even resembling France's new laws, this pandemic wouldn't have reached endemic community spread. But no: must have no-mask "mah freedumbs".
3. Positive-tested non-symptomatic teachers should be setup with the technical capabilities to teach from home to school.
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#3Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any non-standard concepts to roll out... (well, I guess some more moodle installs. but that's really not the biggest thing that needs solving. and do testing at schools now, but even that's seems to have been winged quite a lot.)
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#4Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any…
Well... Most Asian countries seem to only fail your definition because the situation there was mostly okay 18 months ago, so they didn't have room to improve.
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#5The pandemic is constantly reminding us how our institutions weeded out all agency and were running on inertia. Still are trying to, in fact.
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#6Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any…
Well... Most Asian countries seem to only fail your definition because the situation there was mostly okay 18 months ago, so they didn't have room to improve.
fair point, clarified with an edit. (i.e. the standard is not "what were you doing 18 months ago", but "how prepared are you for schooling in a covid wave now vs how prepared you were 18 months ago")
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#7Dayam. What a sh*t show. 1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan. 2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick,…
Regarding 2, France is still not in lockdown despite having a much higher number of cases per capita than the US (400k cases for 66M people last monday), and schools are run to the ground in a similar manner than what is described in the reddit post, if not worse (they relaxed the isolation and testing rules very recently). edit: maybe you were referring to the "vaccine pass", but since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else).
Lockdown is not being implemented because "omicron is mild". We have a somewhat good vaccination rate despite the strong antivax movement, but that is still leaving millions at risk, not in small part thanks to our asinine so-called leadership.
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#8Dayam. What a sh*t show. 1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan. 2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick,…
I believe it's hard to appreciate the frustration and costs that closing schools causes, at least for children to be too young to be left without supervision.
I can't think of any other measure that gets even close. The effects of restaurant closures can be mitigated by throwing money at the problem. If you have to stay home and take care of children, your career will suffer even if you are compensated for lost income.
There really isn't an easy solution to it. Maybe getting creative on the local level would help: taking turns among a (small) group of parents, or hiring a single person to take care of maybe 5 or 6 kids. Maybe getting the older children to watch the younger ones, etc. But everything comes with its own drawbacks, usually by reintroducing pathways to spread.
One measure that seems to be missing, and that I cannot find fault with right now, is changing structures to keep classes fixed, possibly with only a single teacher (per week?). For younger children, it's quite possible for, say an English teacher to also teach biology. Having fixed classes is also common in many countries. It means you can't accomodate electives, of course.
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#9I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers. There aren’t enough subs to cover for the teachers. We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks. It’s a perfect time to pivot to remote to lower the strain our on failing healthcare system.
Heck even if you have enough teachers the people who make things happen like bus drivers, aides, helpers, food prep are going to be knocked out too.
My district had two hundred cases of covid in staff alone this week. That’s 10% of the staff. And we were remote.
Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
#10I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers. There aren’t enough subs to cover for the teachers. We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks. It’s a perfect time to pivot to r…
People are afraid that if districts go remote it’ll be a repeat of 2020, where there was no consensus of when it was safe to go back to in-person schooling. There is distrust on both sides (the teachers and the school district/parents) and I can’t see them agreeing on a rubric at this point in time. Yet another way Covid is exposing the divisions in our society.