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Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to see how differently we treat the low probability, high impact events like active shooters and terrorism, but we completely fail to do the far easier task of dealing with the high probability, unknown impact events.

Well, that’s true, except that it’s not easy. Easy to talk about, sure, but not easy to implement without backlash from the moneyed interests that exist.

Most of the world has reacted better than the US. I agree it's not easy, it has not been easy for anyone. But the unwillingness/incapability of the US to suffer backlash from their own moneyed interests is not the norm. It's a symptom of a dysfunctional system. It shouldn't be normalized.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#472

My wife is a teacher. She's quitting in two weeks so that she can give her mandatory 30-day notice in time for the beginning of the semester. The planning being done for the next school year where we live is complete bullshit. The politicians and administrators running the planning have no idea about the realities. They are driving these hybrid models with kids doing remote and in-person learning in alternative days/…

Even if they rotate kids in and out to keep crowds down, they still need separate facilities or FEMA level decontamination daily with same day testing for employees like those working the cafeteria and would interact with all sets of students...

We need to double resources for schools and teachers anyway but even if we had the time and funding it would be less than ideal to combat the pandemic too.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think homeschooling is usually like you're describing. Most of the people I have met who were homeschooled were not social adjusted or developed and didn't seem 'normal' by most standards. Most of them had parents who were either extremely religious or some other ideological tendency (survivalist, etc).

If you as a parent are grappling with the idea of homeschooling, know that you don’t have to do it the way those parents did. What you saw is not an indictment of homeschooling, but of those parents that decided to do it that way.

I took the GRE in 9th grade and started taking classes at a community college. There are alternative paths out there where you can still socialize. There are more MOOCs and online schools, but I still think learning to deal with others is a real skill that you have to develop and is immensely important in life.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks. Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishin…

Curious. Is there anything stopping individual states from doing this? Surely a federal system should enable individual states to act independently to some extent. They must have their own budgets and are to determine how resources are allocated. No?

In many cases states have tried to obtain supplies directly from manufacturers and suppliers only to have the Federal Government step in and prevent them from actually taking possession of the needed materials.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/hospitals-face-a-whi...

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#475
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous fear mongering. There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals. https://datausa.io/profile/naics/hospitals 800/5100000 = .00016 They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population. Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open. Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID. Deat…

>There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals. And most of them are wearing full PPE when possible for many hours a day, if anything your numbers point to the effectiveness of masks. >Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open. I really don't understand your point of view at all. The US had more cases yesterday than the entire EU combined. We had roughly…

Steadily increasing is true but misleadingly dire sounding. It is increasing by tiny amounts (and already plateauing in Arizona). That is ok.

I have no objection to mask wearing.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#476
post #461
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price gouging is based on a reasonable price and is subjective. If the present situation results in inflated prices due to lack of materials or needing to run at a higher capacity, that's still reasonable. California, for example, has this written into their penal code, limiting it to a 10% increase in price of the total cost of manufacturing, which includes the increased cost of production, transportation or storage…

Would you take on the cost and risk of additional machines and employees for an ephemeral market and small margins?

But you wouldn't be taking on that cost and risk. That's the whole point of subsidizing manufacturing. To alleviate said cost and risk in desperate times.

You know, like a global pandemic. That's a pretty desperate time, IMO.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#477
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re fulfilling the Idiocracy prophecy. Those who think about their life choices are less likely to breed than those who are more reckless and have children with less hesitation. The similar survival rate of children of the two groups means the more-reckless genes & culture will out-propagate the less-reckless genes & culture. I’m pretty sure less-reckless is what we need more of, but without some extreme and quest…

This. Think of the marshmallow study where long-term planning kids turned out richer than the short-term minded ones. We need to push back against the Idiocracy mindset. It is our prerogative as the less reckless to breed and propagate our genes, and teach our culture to our young. As you mentioned, the force of nature is against that, so we need campaigns, perhaps by the State, for the “careful thinkers” to breed an…

The marshmallow test also selects for kids with food insecurity, you know.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters The left doesn't hate charters, it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable. That's a subset of charters plus all vouchers. Actual public charters, by which public schools are granted some variance of generally applicable rules to trial new methods are not a problem to the left; the hijacking of that process to c…

it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable As opposed to existing publicly subsidized public schools that are not effectively accountable?

Charters are explicitly reductions in institutional legal accountability, and unlike public (charter or not) schools, the chief decision makers so released from accountability with private schools are not accountable by election, either.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#479
post #358

What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point. Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want thin…

>Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.

No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus. And the signal/noise ratio right now is absolutely tiny, especially considering how much damage the media has done by unambiguously turning this into an opportunity to bash Trump. Regardless of how you feel about the presidency, if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests (both left and right) began; and while I do believe it is shameful that we were caught with our pants down, scrambling to gather supplies nearly 3 months late, I'll remind you that so was everyone else.

Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. We also shouldn't be applying the same policies to urban and rural areas.

You know what would really answer this question to me? What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR? That's pretty much worst case exposure and seeing as I haven't heard of doctors dying in droves, I'm inclined to start believing that people do have and/or develop immunity and the fatality/complication rate really is extremely low, for whatever reason. But I need data to be sure.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster. I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work. In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't car…

Even for parents like myself that are really, really trying to make it work, it's a nonstarter. I have a 7 year old, and his computer is right next to mine where I am working remote, and I can supervise, except I'm in meetings often and it's hard to keep him on track. There's no peer pressure from other students to behave, the teacher has poor equipment and is barely intelligible sometimes, and there's every incentiv…

The alternative option is hybrid remote/on-site schooling, where the kids are on campus half-day, rotating groups a few days a week, on an alternating week schedule. That gets critical face-to-face time, albeit with social distancing, that is necessary (particularly for elementary) to support a workable remote learning plan on the other days.

This is what my school district, for example, was planning on doing until the teachers union organized a walk-out.

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