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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

#581

Post by bushbaba »

cipheredStones wrote: post #522
eadmund wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Since March 2020, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools …'[0] 'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1] $190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that p…

There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.

Rapid testing every student wouldn’t be necessary to open the schools.

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

#582

Post by selfhoster11 »

djrogers wrote: post #520
cipheredStones wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's minutiae to be concerned when someone who just tested positive for covid is talking to you with their mask down?

Given that guidance has said that close exposure for 10-15 minutes is required for transmission, yes - it does seem a little overboard.

Guidance often lags behind or doesn't match science because of political influence. What's legal doesn't determine what's right, science does.

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

#583

Post by icedchai »

chii wrote: post #474
icedchai wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it has much to do with "learning." School is basically a babysitting / daycare service. They need the kids in school so the parents can work. At least the ones not privileged enough to "work from home" on a permanent basis, like many of us are here. Remote work is often a joke, too. Many, many people are completely checked out, burnt out after having to endure too many mentally draining and often pointl…

> Many, many people are completely checked out, burnt out after having to endure too many mentally draining and often pointless zoom meetings so how come they are able to function pre-pandemic, having the same meetings in the office?

I think many were checked out already, Covid just accelerated it. The separation between home and work was blurred unexpectedly, during an extremely stressful time. People were forced into remote work. Many thought this to go on for a few months, not years.

I also feel there are more meetings now than pre pandemic.

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

#584

Post by Spivak »

whimsicalism wrote: post #505
Spivak wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No cap an actual literal xray? Metal detector sure, but your school had one of those things like at the airport?

yes. what else would they do for stuff like a backpack that set off the metal detector? even had them in middle school, not elementary though.

Look through it by hand? Like. I’ve never seen those bag scanning machines used anywhere other than airports and high security government buildings.

A non-school example would be concert venues and sports — they just metal detect you and search your bag if it lights up.

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

#585

Post by Diesel555 »

I just want to point out that I see two common arguments here which are not mutually exclusive and are for some reason used to debate one another.

1) Those not at risk are a threat to those at risk (at home, at restaurants, etc). We should be concerned not because of their own safety, but because of the risk to others.

2) The author appears to be (or children in general) overly scared based on the risk COVID poses to them. They are relatively safe. I like to look at risk in terms of things I can relate to - safer than dying from a car accident this year. Parents should worry more about driving (1:10k per year [1]) than their child dying to COVID (1:500k [2]). The difference is even greater for injured in a car vs hospitalized by COVID (magnitudes of difference).

Can we stop talking around each other and recognize both are true?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[2] https://www.ncmd.info/news/covid-deaths-children-rare/ (I could list others - most sources are children deaths / total deaths which is different than children tested positive / children deaths - and that discounts all asymptomatic / not tested children).

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

#586

Post by jakeinspace »

redisman wrote: post #563
jakeinspace wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.

This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?

That's what I meant by the right environment. I don't think it'd work well for the typical American public school.

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

#587

Post by ageofwant »

autarch wrote: post #268

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…

School is not supposed to be daycare for the economy...

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

#588

Post by dude187 »

0xCMP wrote: post #85
fourseventy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To put a bunch of students in a crowded auditorium and fears of a spreading virus as the student described... seems unnecessarily dangerous. Just purely from a crowd control perspective. To allow students to spread the virus and infect staff without intervention is negligent. This isn't even accounting for unknown long term effects and recent studies suggesting kids with covid are more likely to be type 1/2 diabetic.…

So you believe that we should NEVER have ANY events in an auditorium ever again?

Covid is here for the rest of our lives. What you say we should do now, needs to be what you think we should do permanently. Any removals of freedom you advocate for, will not end.

I think when you frame it in that reality, most realize that we don't actually want to get rid of the freedom in the ways people push for.

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

#589

Post by fifilura »

darth_avocado wrote: post #472
bryans wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really, you are talking about overall, while the data I was presenting was mostly specific to the topic at hand: School kids. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

Note that that article is very old, July 2020, the beginning of the pandemic.

The picture since then is different than "Finland closed, Sweden open".

Pretty sure most nordic countries have kept high school and below open most of the time.

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

#590

Post by LodeOfCode »

jagger27 wrote: post #492
LodeOfCode wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, yeah! My profs'd also post the list of which TA did each (sub-)question, so that if we had questions about why we lost marks we knew who direct them to (although all grading disputes had to go to the prof, to disincentivise people from arguing with the TAs)

And with two teachers, you'd also be able to have each write half the questions, and split the grading that way.

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