Yes. Yes, we did, because we elected a bunch of people who believe not in Science, but in ‘as long as I got mine, everyone else can burn along with the world’
Provided we as a world survive this (and we will, because the power of the human spirit as a collective is hard to kill (“Even with a chain saw!”(1))) I hope that we will come through this a little more sane, and less likely to elect people such as those whom we’ve elected this time.
(1) From The Addams Family, 1991: Dr. Pinder-Schloss : The human spirit, it is a very difficult thing to kill. Grandma : Even with a chainsaw!
Oh absolutely that would be a terrible situation and I haven’t seen anyone with a school reopening plan that adequately addresses it. Also not the same as controlled exposure, with quarantine for a period of time after, of healthy people to a low viral load. Which is how a lot of vaccines work or used to work. Instead we have ethicists claiming it would be unethical to even test whether vaccines work by exposing healthy people to the virus after being supposedly immunized.
Guys, this is getting pretty far off topic, but my son just finished on-line summer school between 5th and 6th grade. It was an integrated teaching method incorporating urban planning, math, reading/comprehension, and racism awareness. They used video, reading material, guided discussion, individual activities, group activities and a whole class project. Worked pretty well for a kid with ADD, and we had some good discussions about what he was learning, particularly about how white supremacy infects every facet of American life. Plus, he got a pretty good sneak peek at the various on-line platforms he can expect to be using this fall.
Betsy DeVos’s folks have long been proponents of home schooling as well as government-subsidized private schools as competition to the public schools (where “competition” traditionally included either religious education or racial imbalance along with whatever educational competition.)
But now that there’s a Republican-linked pandemic, oh, no, kids can’t psychologically handle being homeschooled or unschooled, they NEED to be in public school, butts in their seats, not just zooming in to it on the computer.
Reopening schools has two main political objectives - make everything look normal so Trump can get re-elected, and get kids out of the house so their parents can go out to work instead of working from home, to make things look more normal.
Parent “Patient 0” goes to work, gets infected, comes home, spends a couple of pre-symptomatic days infecting their kids. (This isn’t just COVID, it’s colds, flu, lots of other diseases.)
Kid goes to school, spends a couple of pre-symptomatic days spreading it to fellow students in their class.
Newly infected kid goes home, spends a couple of pre-symptomatic days infecting their siblings and parents.
Siblings go to school, spread it to THEIR classes
Parents go to work, spread it to THEIR coworkers, presumably at a different job than Patient 0.
Parents or Coworkers optionally go to church, spread it to people who aren’t their coworkers and maybe don’t have kids at home.
I’m a Boomer, so there weren’t vaccines for measles, chicken pox, lot of childhood diseases when I was a kid, and most of us had more siblings than current kids. Most of the diseases either worked like that, or (if the parents couldn’t get infected because they’d already had measles etc.) just sibling-to-school-class-to-sibling-to-school-class transmission was enough to do the job. Different diseases had different incubation periods, but most of them had at least a day or two before the kid got a visible rash or was cranky long enough for the parent to wonder if they had a fever and take their temperature.
If we can’t get enough actual Covid testing in place before the politicians reopen the schools, then at the very minimum, we need to not only be doing masks and tracking students’ and teachers’ temperatures and asking about other symptoms, we also need to be tracking the temperatures of all their family members to get a bit more warning.
Fair point for sure. I was working on some faith that schools will be distancing, requiring masks, modifying behaviors so that your 10x is more like a 1x. Our school is taking those measures. I surely can’t know if they all are.
It’s true when I originally sampled Flatland (don’t know if it was exactly middle school but somewhere around there) I rejected it because of its politics, completely missing the satire.
Well, lots of our contemporaries manage to miss that Clemens is lampooning racism in Huckleberry Finn and condemn the book because caricatured racism, and the N-word, appear in it repeatedly. (N----r Joe is arguably the most sympathetic character in the book!)
For older kids this may work. I have little faith that early elementary kids will manage this with any real effectiveness. Given the requirements to frequently wash hands, sanitize and cleanse surfaces, distance on busses, close down communal areas (lunch rooms, playgrounds, gyms) and bring their own food and water, I am not hopeful many schools will succeed in matching best practices. I hate to sound like a gloomy Gus, but I am very pessimistic about the safety of opening schools.
Re: children are always harbigers of doom and full of viruses and germs: in the pandemic, this is different. With already endemic illnesses, children are more susceptible and often more contagious because they are immunonaive. In case of this SARS virus, we all are immunonaive.
I’m exhausted after this week, so I’ll skip on the other stuff. Long story short, WDKS, and we should not jump to conclusions. The important bit is to be careful, and not to make decisions based on assumptions which we would terribly regret.
It’s mostly younger kids I see without masks here. While not possible with all kids so young, our 3 year old wears her mask for our rare and pretty short trips to stores. Any kid 6 or older should be able to and be wearing one for any short amount of time out. I wouldn’t expect a child that young or younger to wear one all day.
Our mandate says it applies to all kids 8 and over.
Edit for typos.
No, I do remember, and yes, it was. I also remember the conclusion about women later on. I just think it would be a distraction if read in a math class context.