Live data from Hacker News

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

reddit.com

771–780 of 793 posts

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

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many teachers spend their money essentially replacing the role of 1) parents and 2) administrators. I know a lot of teachers spending money on hygiene products:tampons, deodorant ect, because it is distracting if students are bleeding at their desks and smell like garbage. 2) they also spend money on basic supplies, pens pencils, as well as heaters and coolers for the room because the administration blew the funds on…

Although I sympathize with the student's issues, it is not taxpayer's fault that these issues occur. For (1) the government already gives housing assistance, food stamps and a bunch of other welfare programs, so the parents can easily afford basic hygiene products and they should be paying for it, not the school. For (2) it is the administration's malice or incompetence that is burning away the money. We shouldn't in…

I don't disagree, but this is the situation teachers are in. The parents should be buying the hygiene products, but aren't so teachers are trying to fill the gaps. It is a inefficient solution to a problem that should be addressed by someone else, but they are the ones that have to deal with it in order to do their regular job.

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

#772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a teacher. We spend our own money every year.

On what? Do you buy textbooks with them? American teachers spend a lot of time, as my Asian mom would always complain, on “arts and crafts.” The volume of construction paper and pipe cleaners and other junk my kids bring home is truly astonishing. These expenses are symptomatic of curricular problems—and the solution isn’t to allocate more money for craft supplies. It doesn’t cost that much to have kids drill their t…

No post body was provided.

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

#773

Covid and democrats are destroying our country.

Please do not take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Last thing we need here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: could you please also stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments generally? You've been doing that repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#775
post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perceptions of hospitalization are a pretty reliable proxy for perceptions of overall risk, and it's clear from the data that most of the public is massively over-estimating the risk posed by COVID.

>I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection

The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

>even if asymptomatic

COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.

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

#776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not "getting through the situation". The more spread the higher the likelyhood of new variants appearing, the more people that die of completely unrelated causes due to there being no available hospital care, and the greater the economic chaos. It is a dramatically higher cost that gets paid in loss of life for those who choose not to be vaccinated and those who can't, and in staff shortages and basic infrastru…

>We're not "getting through the situation". We are, just not in the way you'd prefer. Plagues much worse than this one happen regularly, and humanity gets through it. > It is a dramatically higher cost A dramatically higher cost than what we're currently doing to our youth? That's an opinion. So some teachers die, and the profession becomes temporarily younger and more male than before due to self-selected risk profi…

In one sentence you literally admit that plagues much worse come with a human cost of life that it just astounding, and then on the next sentence you complain about children having to lose a couple months of class? Are you dense??

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

#777
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.

Yes it did. He thinks they make too much arts and crafts and they should do more times tables.

Maybe he should study child psychology and become a teacher. (As if this stuff isn't studied extensively)

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

#778

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…

> this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. Not at all. This is the fault of all the other societal damage done in the name of "stopping COVID", it's the fault of the "public health officials". Schools are constrained by zero covid policies still clung to by anti-science public health, which mandate widespread testing followed by far re…

> The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.

Just curious, what would you suggest ?

Because as far as I can tell there are no good solutions.

I suppose the difference between our countries is that until university, you get put into class with 30 people, and do all the classes together.

There are some cases when you can have different additional classes, but thats kind of limited to couple of hours a week, and would not be that hard to just leave off

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

#779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses don't mutate toward being more deadly. In fact they mutate away from it. There's active natural selection to spread faster, and be less deadly, and that's exactly what Omicron is. Why Covid was deadly in the first place was because it targeted some other animal with different defenses and had natural immunity toward it. Then it jumped species to humans and suddenly was quite deadly, but spread somewhat poorly…

Mutation is a random process. It is neither god nor bad and does not have a purpose or direction. Natural selection, -should- do those things, but we can't count on it, because we are humans, and natural selection in us works in a different way. We basically have stopped it as part of our own evolution. Nobody needs to run faster, develop claws or climb better than predators anymore The biggest problem with Covid is…

> The biggest problem with Covid is that it spreads -before- people have symptoms. Flu spreads when and after, but not before. An Omicron "improved" to kill people in a few days would still travel perfectly.

If that happens then society as a whole would react to it more strongly and it would thus spread slower. That's a natural selective force.

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

#780

Seems to me that the school is unnecessarily scaring kids more than doing anything else. These teens have almost nothing to fear from covid. Most of the rest of the country (outside major cities) almost ignores covid exists. Good article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/where-i-li...

Are we reading the same post? They are trying to ignore COVID and carry on as usual. The issues come from having so many teachers out sick. Can’t run a school without teachers. Doesn’t make sense to force kids to come in just to pack them into overcrowded auditoriums because so many teachers are sick. I don’t understand how people think schools are only a place for kids, who never interact with teachers or go home to…

> They are trying to ignore COVID and carry on as usual.

Seems like aren't really ignoring it at all. Everyone is freaked out and their behavior doesn't match the state of "ignoring" at all.

Post reply on HN