I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control • Hacker News Board

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

#761

Post by kcplate » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

CogitoCogito wrote: post #752

kcplate wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I had hoped that the entire pandemic would have gone away once vaccines became available, but that hope was clearly misplaced Where did you get that hope from? You said the information you were getting did not provide that hope, that it set expectations to what they are. If you didn’t get that idea from the authorities touting the vaccine…where did you get it? Likely it was the assumption that these vacc…

> If you didn’t get that idea from the authorities touting the vaccine…where did you get it? It was optimism. I was hoping that the strains wouldn't evolve so quickly. My optimism was misplaced. > Likely it was the assumption that these vaccines would work like all the others. Ignoring the methods (e.g. mrna), this vaccine _does_ work like all the others. It increases the likelihood that your body will be able to suc…

> You seem to imagine a "vaccine" to be something that is able to entirely protect a host from the disease and entirely protect a host from spreading it.

No, I simply trusted in the advertised protection against Covid infection by the mRNA vaccines would exceed 90%, I was hopeful that if I was one of the unlucky 10% to contract it, that the case would be mild. I was trusting what we were being told. When the reality set in, so did skepticism. Optimism to realism.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...

“Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.”

I guess I don’t understand someone who claims they knew that the vaccines would not be effective in stopping the spread of the virus, but were still optimistic and hopeful that the vaccines would end the pandemic. You generally don’t go from realism to optimism. It’s usually the other way around.

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

#762

Post by xapata » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 8:56 AM UTC

CogitoCogito wrote: post #754

xapata wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the problem is that you imagine "infection" to mean "disease" or something similar. Infection means that the pathogen gets in your body and starts to grow. There is no vaccine that can prevent that. What a vaccine can do is to cause your body to respond to an infection more quickly and more effectively. If you're lucky, the response comes so quickly that you never knew you were infected. So that aside, what d…

No, I meant symptomatic spread. I don't care much about getting sick. I worry about winding up in the hospital. As far as I know, the 3rd dose of Moderna and Pfizer are both effective at keeping me out of the hospital. I don't know the exact rates, but I've met plenty of people who had mild illness recently.

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

#763

Post by random314 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

yes_really wrote: post #760

alar44 wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The comment you are replying to didn't even touch on "what are the appropriate ages to learn multiplication". That level of discussion is really astonishingly low. You respond to something the parent comment didn't even touch on, and half of your comment is offenses to the parent commenter.

You missed this "Teachers generally spend their own money on the basics. Pencils, pens, paper, deodorant, tampons, etc."

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

#764

Post by zwirbl » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 9:52 AM UTC

CryptoPunk wrote: post #694

tomjakubowski wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I see in the survey is that people have largely overestimated the impact of the pandemic, how many people have been infected and how many have died. In other words, they overestimated the current progression of the pandemic at the scale of society. That doesn't indicate people misunderstand the risk of the disease at personal scale.

This survey specifically looks at risk at the personal scale, and finds the same order of over-estimation: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

This only holds if hospitalization is the only thing to be concerned about and in my opinion is just as misleading as focusing solely on death rate. I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection, even if asymptomatic (which by definition doesn't lead to hospitalization), specifically on stamina/concentration.

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

#765

Post by native_samples » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 9:52 AM UTC

tylerhou wrote: post #232

native_samples wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break it to you but most people hospitalized with COVID are already vaccinated in many health systems. That's true in the UK for instance. US data is often garbage so it's harder to say there but it's unlikely to be different. Most people are vaccinated + vaccines don't work very well = most COVID hospitalizations are vaccinated.

> most COVID hospitalizations are vaccinated. Do you have a source for this? The math doesn’t add up (vaccinated are 10-15x less likely to be hospitalized, and around 60% of US is vaccinated, implies around 6/46 hospitalized people are vaccinated) and all the sources I could find show that unvaccinated people take up most hospitalizations and even more ICU beds, which is the limiting resource. https://www.wndu.com/20…

US data is unfortunately unusable. Hospitals routinely classify anyone they don't have data on as unvaccinated and they don't have data much of the time. Germany pulls the same trick, it was covered in a national newspaper and they didn't change it. Public health is utterly corrupt, you have to work very hard to find data that is slightly less corrupted than normal.

In the UK data quality is better than normal for some reason, perhaps due to the nationalized healthcare system making it easier to set consistent standards. And there the majority of COVID patients in hospital are vaccinated according to the ICNARC audits. It's not a big majority but it's there, and this is not confounder/game-playing free data either. They keep classifying people as unvaccinated for quite some time after their first shot for example, which is problematic because there's some evidence people are more likely to get infected immediately after their first dose. But that gets added to the unvaccinated side of the ledger. There are other problems e.g. people have to go to hospital to be hospitalized, but they tell vaccinated people they're protected from hospitalization, then declare victory when those people don't turn up. Given how marginal many cases are (they may or may not really need to be there but you can't know what would have happened in the alternative case), this is a form of circular reasoning.

Nonetheless it'd be weird if the USA and Germany were radically different to the UK in this regard.

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

#766

Post by Valakas_ » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 10:04 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #298

MattGaiser wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always been true in a way. A lot of schools have nothing to offer the top 10% of students, so the students/parents of the students who broke away from the pack were finding ways to learn on their own/have their kids learn on their own.

Top 10% of what? I was technically in the top 10% of my high school class, GPA wise. I also got a national merit scholarship, and had learned computer programming. I would simply not have had the self discipline or motivation to learn everything on my own, no matter how good the learning materials were. Oddly enough, even through college, there were subjects that I easily taught myself, such as electronics and progra…

I was in the top 1% both in highschool and college and for me going in person, in terms of learning, was (and still is) a waste of time. I would learn MUCH faster outside of classes. I much prefer a recording of a class which i can watch, rewatch, play at 2x, take notes without stress and note down all my questions, than a regular in person class.

The only thing I got from being in person was friends. But that can be achieved in other ways without having to be forced to sit on a class. Group studying is one, and helps a lot in learning.

If people choose a course and then don't have motivation for it that's a totally different problem. The problem lies not in tricks to make the person do it anyway, but on them reassessing why they chose that course in the first place. I always had motivation to do my course on my own because I chose it for a reason. And if kids are too young to see why they might want to do this specific course, then maybe the course itself needs to change to be a tiny bit more practical and fun.

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

#767

Post by wolf550e » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #753

tptacek wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to believe this. I was in a discussion about this yesterday with friends and a clear statistic would have helped. But the chart you've got there --- I know it's not the fulcrum of your whole argument, I'm not sniping --- doesn't really make the case you make in your comment. It says that we spend 0.1% more than the OECD average on primary/secondary schools, but are boosted in the overall rankings by spen…

I usually take the G7 as the benchmark—what oil emirates like Norway or banking havens like Switzerland spend aren’t a relevant comparison to a big diversified economy like the US. We spend a bigger percentage of our economy on K-12 than all but one other G7 country. And since our GDP per capita is so high, that share of GDP represents 20%+ more purchasing power than other G7 countries. That should be more than enoug…

Isn't money spent on education mostly teachers' salaries? So high GDP per capita just makes education more expensive, not less expensive. If education spending was mostly electronics, then higher GDP per capita would have been good for education.

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

#768

Post by kevincox » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 11:49 AM UTC

Terry_Roll wrote: post #357

ubiquitysc wrote: post #291

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?

The biggest problem is that a huge component of school is socialization. Interacting with other kids in an low-control setting.

Much like conferences the "hallway class" is a huge component.

Ass onto that that many kids are bad at focusing on online classes and the whole situation is not up to the standard of in-persin schooling (with current systems).

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

#769

Post by herbst » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 12:09 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #683

herbst wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a POV thing. Where I am it is even considered weird that the US sees food a responsibility of educational services.

Two reasons for schools to provide food: - Students are generally compelled to be proximate to educational services for long stretches of time. Logistics of not coupling them would be inefficient. - Students don't learn effectively when they are chronically hungry. Providing education to hungry students isn't maximizing society's investment in these comparatively expensive services. - Bonus reason: for many students,…

Students here eat too, the different is they eat what they, or their parents want them to. And when they want to. Most schools also sell food. Nobody has to be hungry.

The difference is there is no super cheap daily meal all students have to choose from. And also kids and public schools can get healthy food if their parents want to/ can afford it.

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

#770

Post by peatmoss » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

herbst wrote: post #769

peatmoss wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons for schools to provide food: - Students are generally compelled to be proximate to educational services for long stretches of time. Logistics of not coupling them would be inefficient. - Students don't learn effectively when they are chronically hungry. Providing education to hungry students isn't maximizing society's investment in these comparatively expensive services. - Bonus reason: for many students,…

Students here eat too, the different is they eat what they, or their parents want them to. And when they want to. Most schools also sell food. Nobody has to be hungry. The difference is there is no super cheap daily meal all students have to choose from. And also kids and public schools can get healthy food if their parents want to/ can afford it.

Based on your description, I gather you are not in the United States :-)

In my opinion the best case is a society where all kids have parents with the care and understanding to send them to school with nutritious, healthy food. And that students have healthy choices and that they have the means to purchase.

But the kicker, is that in the United States (and some other countries), this is not the case. In the United States, children in dysfunctional or impoverished homes or no home are common enough that it's more efficient to broadly provide support in this manner.

Side note: my wife, who previously was a teacher, and I lived in New Zealand for a few years. New Zealand didn't have a school nutrition program, but probably needed one. My wife did a fair amount of substitute ("relief") teaching in a poor area north of Wellington when we first arrived, and gave her lunch away to hungry students often enough that she knew to pack several sandwiches. So, even countries with comparably strong social supports can run into this issue.