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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

#491

Post by dehrmann »

sva_ wrote: post #365

I read this post earlier today, and found it quite shocking. I really hope this is an exception rather than the normal. I previously didn't think about it this way, and thought closing schools was the more sensible choice. But we're failing a whole generation like this. It more and more feels like we live in a society that sarcrifices their young, just to keep old people on their life support machines a little longer…

> we live in a society that sarcrifices their young...

Maybe. The other thing I've been seeing is a lot of leaders not making hard choices and picking the perpetual compromise path that never leads anywhere.

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

#492

Post by jagger27 »

LodeOfCode wrote: post #458
germinalphrase wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each. Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons Edit2: Actually, for feedback-la…

For tests and exams it’s common for teaching assistants to mark the same few questions on every test, usually on the same page. It helps catch cheating and plagiarism and keeps grading consistent.

When I was a TA we’d split the stack of paper tests evenly and rotate them every few days to grade them in parallel. It’s even easier to do the splitting if tests are submitted online.

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

#493

Post by micromacrofoot »

adventured wrote: post #382
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The National School Boards Association says that 1,384,000 public school students are homeless. Holy fucking crap. (Sorry I don't normally react like that, and even given homeless might not be "living on street", that is a horrific statistic)

> even given homeless might not be "living on street", that is a horrific statistic It would be a horrific statistic, if it were even remotely close to being accurate. The US had 580,000 total homeless in 2020. [1] That's up from the recent lows before the pandemic when it was ~50,000 lower (and it's dramatically lower than prior to the start of the federal Housing First program). If the NSBA is claiming 1.4 million,…

“Homeless” is defined in different ways for different purposes, it’s not deception.

There’s homeless as in “in a shelter or on the street” and there’s homeless as in “lives temporarily with friends or family”… lots of ways to slice it

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

#494

Post by iainmerrick »

fisherjeff wrote: post #370
double_nan wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m mostly curious about why the maturity period was prolonged by 5-10 years from what the human race had 100 or 1000 years ago. I’m not talking about education but the transition from youths to adulthood.

In 1922, a 14-year-old in the US could expect to live maybe another 40 years; in 2022, that number is likely to be at least 70. As a fraction of life expectancy, adolescence is actually relatively short right now.

Do you have a citation for that? I’m not sure it’s correct (although I don’t have any links of my own handy either, sorry!)

My impression was that infant mortality was a great deal higher back then, but there wasn’t as big a disparity after that as people tend to assume. People didn’t hit old age in their 50s and 60s, they often lived into their 80s and beyond, just like today.

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

#495

Post by Rebelgecko »

darth_avocado wrote: post #461
labster wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If students only come in every other day, schools will only receive 50% funding in the US. In Japan, schools are often privately funded, but a solution that cuts public funding of education by half in the US is a non-starter. It would likely take a constitutional amendment in California to change the school budget formula. But we’re not going to have a third year of COVID anyway. Nearly everyone is going to catch the…

I’m not aware of this funding logic but how does this even work? Like in COVID, all students were remote, but finding never stopped. And last I checked, if my kid doesn’t go to school for a week, school funding doesn’t get impacted. I mean coming in on alternate days doesn’t mean you’re not learning, you can still do online classes on that day.

California school funding formulae are a big complicated mess, but student attendance does play a role in budgets during regular times. Every day of school your kid misses costs the district about $50. Some districts even nag parents for donations after absences[1]

However for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, they set a baseline so that schools received funding based off of their 2019-2020 (preCOVID, normalized) average daily attendance. This was good for big schools that had lower enrollment but caused issues for suburban/rural districts that saw a lot of growth.

[1]: https://www.mbusd.org/apps/form/form.MBUSD.qZBxuUG.Ee

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

#496

Post by iggldiggl »

axby wrote: post #139
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitaliza…

> I don't know much about virology but I understand exponential growth. It looks like the cases are doubling every 2 weeks (edit: I guess this might even be a few days? See [0]). In a few months, almost everyone will get it. In the last two week period, won't half the population catch it? In that case, even with 100% vaccination, hospitalizations would still be 1/20 of half the maximum due to COVID. Right?

As people become infected and gain immunity (in reality not always perfectly and not necessarily until the end of times, but on average they'll definitively do, and right now we're only talking about a simplified thought model anyway), they drop out of the pool of people available for further infections and therefore slow down the growth rate.

While still only a simplified approximation, logistic growth is therefore a better model than naive unchecked exponential growth, and the maximum case rate will be somewhat lower than "half the population gets infected in the last doubling step".

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

#497

Post by vibrato2 »

labster wrote: post #404
sylens wrote: 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…

Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how peopl…

No post body was provided.

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

#498

Post by dehrmann »

spookthesunset wrote: post #444
corey_moncure wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within 200 years, the madness we are living through will find its place in the history book next to the Salem witch trials and the War of the Worlds, that is, assuming we live through it.

Absolutely. History will not look kindly upon this barbaric crap we subjected ourselves to for the last 2 years. Masks, lockdowns, all of it is just modern day rain dances. We think we can somehow control and contain a highly infectious virus. Ha. Yeah right.

Ironically, our controls might have selected specifically for uncontrollable strains.

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

#499

Post by orbifold »

bryans wrote: post #364
darth_avocado wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Sweden suffered 1,504 deaths per million, while Finland had 295. To call them "similar" is disinformative, at best.

The end point matters, we can’t be sure what the final death toll per Million will be in Finnland or Sweden.

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

#500

Post by thebigjewbowski »

jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #480

>90% of conversations about covid, it has taken over daily life this is what the powers that be want to happen. they want you to live in a state of panic and fear. when i was in school (i am 30 now), i had many severe illnesses like pneumonia twice, shingles, mono, staph. nobody ever gave a shit, and nobody died.

I was thinking along the same lines. My coworkers get tested all the time, mostly for no real reason. Ironically one guy was out with covid for a few days after being vaccinated and boosted.

All indications are that omicron is more often than not a cold… how many of the teachers would have normally come to work with a cold?

I like to think back to Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown telling everybody to come on down in 2019/early 2020 and wonder if all the panic wasn’t incited on a near daily basis, would this would be as big of a problem?

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