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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

#571

Post by LodeOfCode »

sylens wrote: post #487
LodeOfCode wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised…

The idea is that the teacher doesn't have to keep their eyes on a laptop screen and can mostly move about the classroom in the normal way that they would teach a lesson.

With the LED they'd only need to go look at the screen when there's a question. Actually, if you put the laptop in the middle of the front row, set the font size large, and used a clicker to go through them, the teacher could probably read the questions from anywhere at the front of the class. It'd still be an issue if you wanted to move about the back of the class while giving a lesson; but that's a hassle anyway, since the students' desks face the front, so IME it's rarely done.

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

#572

Post by parrellel »

fourseventy wrote: post #80
0xCMP wrote: post #63

From the description it seems like a good problem to solve is "how do we get students the support they needed in 2020 while not creating a dangerous situation?" they should treat homerooms as the place students stay all day to attend classes semi-remotely. This allows teachers to work while quarantining and students to keep learning if at home temporarily. An issue with covid is it spreads so fast but symptoms may be…

COVID is not dangerous to students. Look up the number of deaths of people under the age of 18 due to COVID. It's basically nothing.

CDC Reports 2.5X increase in juvenile diabetes in child Covid patients...

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

#573

Post by ceejayoz »

mbg721 wrote: post #564
ceejayoz wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances. > But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now? We've done it several times. After…

We sort of expected that when you spend a trillion or two of our federal tax dollars, the hospitals might get better at dealing with it. This does not appear to have been the case.

Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.

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

#574

Post by dragonwriter »

fourseventy wrote: post #80
0xCMP wrote: post #63

From the description it seems like a good problem to solve is "how do we get students the support they needed in 2020 while not creating a dangerous situation?" they should treat homerooms as the place students stay all day to attend classes semi-remotely. This allows teachers to work while quarantining and students to keep learning if at home temporarily. An issue with covid is it spreads so fast but symptoms may be…

COVID is not dangerous to students. Look up the number of deaths of people under the age of 18 due to COVID. It's basically nothing.

> COVID is not dangerous to students. Look up the number of deaths of people under the age of 18 due to COVID.

“Does not cause much near-term mortality from acute disease” and “is not dangerous” are...not the same thing.

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

#575

Post by timcederman »

nojs wrote: post #407
oezi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what you say is just plain wrong. - Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient. - Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive. - Vaccines are very effective even against transmission. - Nobody is aiming for 0 Covid anymore (except some Australians and China I guess), but getting through the winter wave without too many fellow citizens dead should be something we spend some effort on. Co…

> except for some Australians Australia has more new daily cases per capita than US right now, according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Take a look at Western Australia

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

#576

Post by dude187 »

0xCMP wrote: post #63

From the description it seems like a good problem to solve is "how do we get students the support they needed in 2020 while not creating a dangerous situation?" they should treat homerooms as the place students stay all day to attend classes semi-remotely. This allows teachers to work while quarantining and students to keep learning if at home temporarily. An issue with covid is it spreads so fast but symptoms may be…

> "how do we get students the support they needed in 2020 while not creating a dangerous situation?"

Provide a pre-2020 schooling environment to them, opened up completely like normal with no masks, "social distancing", etc. Do it _immediately_.

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

#577

Post by mbg721 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #573
mbg721 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We sort of expected that when you spend a trillion or two of our federal tax dollars, the hospitals might get better at dealing with it. This does not appear to have been the case.

Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.

It would work better than shooting from the hip and firing all the unvaccinated health professionals.

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

#578

Post by timcederman »

telman17 wrote: post #283
bunfunton wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It’s not really harmful to children. Note all the verbage in the news that says “hospitalized with covid” instead of “hospitalized because of covid”. They are going to the hospital mostly due to other reasons

I don't have the source available but was told that the concern was there is some kind of evidence that the vaccine had a low chance of causing long term heart issues in some children, which is why it hasn't been approved for children under 5 yet.

No, it hasn't been approved because the dose they tested didn't produce enough of an immune response.

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

#579

Post by mden »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #26
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #14

[flagged]

>It offers anti-vaxxers a road out of their self-radicalization. They are able to tone down their conspiracy and blame the government for having been "chipped", and so it's not like they "betrayed their cult" but they were forced to. I think that yours (and most people's) idea of the typical "anti-vaxxer" is a convenient caricature packaged and served to you by mass media and memes, that you've never actually listene…

Chiming in with the rest. Most, maybe all, anti-vaxxers I've interacted with (friends, family, acquaintances) have provided reasons such as 1) the vaccine changes my dna, 2) micro-chips (by an Amazon SWE!), 3) the vaccine only affects people with weak will power (this one was new to me, though it was also laced with God-protects the worthy or something like that). Luckily most of these people eventually were persuaded or to some extent bullied into getting a vaccine. So no, I don't think most anti-vaxxers have well reasoned beliefs that they are holding strong to, though I'm sure some of those do exist.

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

#580

Post by q845712 »

Blackthorn wrote: post #435
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…

> 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 hel…

I had a spouse in public school administration (until she burned out during the pandemic) and a parent who is still a public school teacher, so I have a little extra empathy - these people are just people. Some of them have just started a new role and didn't get to learn the basics before plunging into a pandemic. Some of them were a couple years from retirement and had been hoping to coast without any big changes. Some of them are great. Some of them are miserable.

It's like any other collection of people, except maybe what's hard to remember if you're in tech is that in public bureaucracies there's no high pay, inherently "interesting problems," or prestige factor attracting the bright and ambitious; just job security and pensions attracting the risk averse and allowing anyone toxic who makes it in to remain.

The district my wife left had double digits percentage turnover in their senior administrative roles during the pandemic - that would be enough to keep most organizations from operating to their full potential.

Additionally, they really don't get to make their own decisions - not only is there a chain of command but there's a surprising number of things that have to wait for school board approval and quite a few sets of regulations to navigate. I've been in regulated tech like medical device, and my perception is that what the school admins deal with is a whole other level.

While agreeing with everyone that "raisin d'oatmeal" is genius, and while also agreeing that it's clear that the US has basically failed at running public schools, please don't claim the administrators are somehow the sole agents of this. Like many things in this country it's born of a complicated web of political power being wielded in both good and bad faith by people with varying opinions of what would be best across many decades and scales.

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