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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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in a hotel does qualify as homeless in my opinion. Same as trailer or anything that is not a fixed home. The definition of homeless doesn not equate to just to simply sleeping under the stars.

I grew up in West Virginia. A LOT of people lived in a trailer - as in they actually owned the trailer and in many cases the land, too (my parents). Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? And even if you're renting... Why count someone who rents a trailer as homeless but not someone who rents an apartment?

> Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless?

It's a social class thing. It's not about having a reliable, warm, dry, safe place to sleep. It's about whether a middle class university graduate's friends would have considered them to have failed at life. Living in a coffin sized apartment with cockroaches everywhere in New York is something they could see themselves doing at some point in their life for career goals or because of bad luck. A trailer is not the kind of place a university graduate lives in.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#432
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely astonished to see that most administrators took the summer of 2020 off, assuming that everybody would be back in school that fall and things would be normal. They wasted several months of time that could've been spent planning contingencies and how remote lear…

Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.

Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I grew up with kids whose entire childhood was in the same trailer park. They were homeless?

A decent trailer can be a more pleasant living experience than a tiny manhattan studio, I fail to see why that should qualify as homeless. Maybe using an in-between category would be helpful.

There is no in between category. They're classed as homeless because the people doing the classification are of a social class that don't consider trailers acceptable. It's not about material living conditions. It's about social class considerations.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence is always nice and comfortable as long as YOU aren't the one being affected by it. I contracted COVID from my kid, who got it from another kid in her class who went to school for 3 days after a positive test because that kid wasn't showing symptoms and their parents had nobody to watch them.

Fauci is dying to hear your anecdotal revelation.

It's not a terribly anecdotal revelation. What's reported from public schools and what's actually going on on the ground are different universes. I'm close to many folks working in the district I reside in. The district desperately needs money which comes from maximizing attendance, hell or high water. Many students and families refuse to get tested even when showing symptom or do things like send a positive kid to school while the rest of the family is crazy sick because "the test must be wrong since they aren't showing symptoms." Teachers are constantly getting sick, the numbers the district reports are basically willfully negligent under-counts, and there's no doubt that parents and teachers are getting it from kids. Now maybe it's less likely in an equal contact situation to get it from kids (I've been reading that the latest strains are more likely to sicken kids, but obviously just news reports), but I don't think that's an antidote to crazy, it just means that it could be much worse if any of the new mutations we are helping to shepherd into being happen to get good footholds in children. (I also don't mean to suggest that some of what schools do isn't just security theater style stuff as applied to a pandemic.)

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#435

Freddie de Boer just wrote something on his Substack about this - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-w... The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize. It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like: We encourag…

It will be year 3 of covid and this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. There is no perfect way to open schools, that much is certain after looking at other countries. But looking at the state of things, it doesn’t even seem like people are trying. Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capa…

> the administrators

What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens.

Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hell are these people even getting paid for? They're a net negative value to education and society.

Other countries were able to come up with protocols and standards. Yet here we are flailing around like magikarps.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#436
I feel so bad for the next generation. Society is already acting as if it's pointless to educate them because all the opportunities to extract value from the economy have (apparently) already been monopolized by earlier generations.

The whole economy feels like a first-in-best-dressed pyramid scheme. If I had been born 5 years earlier, I'm sure I would have been very well off now. Still, it wasn't a complete failure for me, I did manage to benefit from some small opportunities which were presented to me...

But when I look at the people entering the workforce today, it's much worse. Unless you're the child of a rich person, you have 0 opportunities. Social mobility is 0. The message I'm getting from society nowadays is that the game of capitalism is over so instead of wasting your time with education, you may as well emotionally prepare yourself to flip hamburgers for the next 65 years.

I'd be surprised if developed countries are still capitalist in 20 years... But who knows, maybe the elites will find a way to break the next generation's morale even further to make them feel even more hopeless so that the idea of system change wouldn't even enter their heads.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the approach of everyone being remote or no one being remote seems shortsighted.

Books have been remote learning for hundreds of years, whats wrong with remote learning especially now pupils can ask questions straight away from a pool of teachers online?

Even hundreds of years ago there were classrooms with teachers.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even wider scope, a child who "qualified moved" within the last 36 months is considered migratory i.e. homeless. This is what the definition of migratory child is. (3) MIGRATORY CHILD.—The term ‘‘migratory child’’ means a child or youth who made a qualifying move in the preceding 36 months— (A) as a migratory agricultural worker or a migratory fisher; or (B) with, or to join, a parent or spouse who is a migratory ag…

"...due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations" It isn't true that children whose permanent residence is a trailer park are counted as homeless.

>are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations

To me it reads the following aren't adequate accommodations if they are by themselves (i.e. no other housing): motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds.

I personally don't think a trailer in a trailer park with an address should be categorized as homeless, I'm just trying to interpret the law as a layperson. Maybe trailer parks were different back in 1965 (i.e. no address).

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.

Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.

I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.
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