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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

#701

Post by Blackthorn »

jcims wrote: post #657
q845712 wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. S…

I think folks that work in the corporate world, particularly those in tech, engineering, manufacturing, etc, can easily underestimate how different and challenging it is to run a school in the current era of American public education. You have vocal and powerful groups and sub-groups of parents, students, teachers, unions, higher ed and the state all pulling in different directions. The feedback loops are long, the d…

I'm willing to cop to being unfair about this whole thing. My own views are colored by my own experience with administrators in my school district growing up, and the school district my wife's siblings grew up in.

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

#702

Post by kcplate »

Glyptodon wrote: post #696
kcplate wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m thrice vaccinated and think masks are the biggest scam out there. It’s a worthless political virtue signal that gives people a false sense of security. Go ahead and lock me up…

Agree that folks can sometimes treat masks more as tchotchke talismans than considerate tools, but I also think it's real obvious that you can't win a watermelon spitting contest with a mask on. And a lot of people are splattery speakers.

> but I also think it's real obvious that you can't win a watermelon spitting contest with a mask on

You could if watermelon seeds were the size of coronaviruses.

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

#703

Post by pempem »

rdtwo wrote: post #679
rayiner wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to rapid test every student every day for a year! $4,000 per kid is a ton of money for PPE, remote learning supplies, test kits, ventilation, etc. The money has mostly been set on fire.

Yep and now it’s gone. Schools are notoriously wasteful when it comes to large sums of money. Almost none of the allocations go to high ROI Items like hiring teachers or buying basic school supplies. Schools love buying tech though because it’s always a black hole for capital spending

At least in LA, its not the schools. Its, as an earlier poster said, administration. The mental association of "school" is usually a group of teachers and maybe a principal.

In multiple cities, political leadership at the mayoral level has been shown to be getting kickbacks and other favorable terms from our dear beloved employers to adopt that technology. In LAUSD it was Villaragosa and Apple.

When we say the money is "wasted", it's because there is corruption at levels higher than any individual school. Usually.

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

#704

Post by Jyaif »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #539
starkd wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's truly sad. It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. From his comments, I wonder if he actually thinks he will be dead from standing next to someone who just tested positive. The preliminary results from UK and SA indicate that this recent wave could be a blessing in that it serves as an innoculation rather than severe illness. And children his age are no…

> It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. Are we reading the same post? The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school. > And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with. Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the cl…

> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.

Bullshit.

Assuming that 20% of the teachers are sick (=coughing or not feeling well), which is a ridiculous overestimation, schools can still work perfectly well. That just means that 20% of the lessons will not happen. And if the schools' administration is not completely useless (I admit that may be a long shot), some of these lessons could be replaced by other lessons.

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

#705

Post by spicyusername »

q845712 wrote: post #580
Blackthorn wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. S…

Measured, realistic, and unexciting takes like this are so rare in these kinds of discussions. Thanks for contributing yours.

In general, things are never simple, never black and white, never simply good or bad. Things are never executed by just one person, or even one group of people, and are never executed in isolation. Everything is connected to everything else, every variable is dependent on every other variable, every action, good or bad, gets a reaction of some kind, and on and on. Social dynamics are complicated. Political dynamics are complicated. The economic incentives that often drive behavior are everywhere and aren't necessarily thoughtfully created, maintained, or even widely understood.

Its easy and it feels good to get on Twitter or on Hacker News and yell "Yea screw school administrators, they're the problem!" But it is too tidy of a worldview to even approximate being accurate and saying it doesn't help anybody get closer to solving the real problem.

If you want to help, go get involved in your local school system... if you don't... you don't need to have an opinion on every single little thing, just read the article and move along.

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

#706

Post by acdha »

Jyaif wrote: post #704
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. Are we reading the same post? The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school. > And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with. Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the cl…

> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school. Bullshit. Assuming that 20% of the teachers are sick (=coughing or not feeling well), which is a ridiculous overestimation, schools can still work perfectly well. That just means that 20% of the lessons will not happen. And if the schools' administration is not completely useless (I admit that may be a long shot), some of these lessons cou…

“Just” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it does. Schools have very little margin for soaking up absence at that scale. If one out of five teachers are out, the kids will not be doing the learning which is the stated justification for not keeping them safe at home. Teaching is hard work, not hitting play on a video, and it requires time to prepare in addition to classroom time – teachers don’t call in sick for fun, it actually creates more work for them since they still need to create the lessons and deal with the impact on their work when they’re back, and in many districts a decline in test scores will cost them money (in some, so does taking a sick day).

School administrators are extremely busy with all of the extra work they’ve been given, and if they’re babysitting students that work (often required by law) will not happen.

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

#707

Post by themaninthedark »

ceejayoz wrote: post #604
mbg721 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It really wouldn't have. It'd buy you an extra percent or two; the numbers have been vanishingly small. Mayo Clinic lost about a percent. Factor in the fact they're more likely to get sick and it's even closer to a net zero. I'm not inclined to treat antivax beliefs as "professional", especially in the healthcare field.

I have been vaccinated so definitely not antivax.

That type of thinking is completely wrong.

Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.

If the workers have made it this far, either they have had it and have immunity or they are very good at keeping themselves safe. In either case we should want them working.

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

#708

Post by staticman2 »

paul7986 wrote: post #602
paul7986 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

give kids the chance to choose to go to school or not ... most won't go and then outside of learning the biggest benefit of socializing/making freinds/fully enjoy being human which to me is with others is lost. People at my job have given the same choose and really no one goes in. COVID is scourge to the world ... whose is to blame for it? Does any one country benefit from it? What's going on with Covid in China ...…

Just getting downvoted yet no one is saying why!?!

Since you asked, your rant about China would appear to be off topic. My guess that's one reason you were downvoted.

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

#709

Post by raydev »

fleventynine wrote: post #691
raydev wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you that ICUs are not filling up right now? Here in Ontario we’ve more than doubled ICU occupancy since December 18 and the rate is currently accelerating

FYI: the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations#hospitaliz... Over those same 4 days, a significantly increasing number of the folks in those beds are testing positive with Covid, but it's not clear to me whether that is the reason they're in the ICU. The hospitals need to provide better data about the reason these patients w…

The chart explicitly says "due to COVID-19". That is the number which has doubled in a matter of weeks, and today we reported another 27 due to COVID.

The total occupied due to COVID is now 412 compared to 150 just a few weeks ago, where that old number had been the average for months.

edit: and more directly to your point

> the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days

The total number of occupied ICU beds has gone down because the number of non-COVID patients decreased. Not sure how that is relevant to our discussion.

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

#710

Post by xapata »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #343
xapata wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much protection against infection or against hospitalization?

No vaccines protect against infection. Maybe you mean does it protect against asymptomatic infection? Or asymptomatic transmission? (I don't know how effective it is for either.)

The polio vaccine doesn't protect against polio infection? I guess I'm not familiar with the technical meaning of infection.
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