I was coping with thoughts that I'm personally very unlikely to get killed and the same with my immediate family. But my sister-in-law has a friend who just delivered a baby (healthy) and she's in the ICU with Covid. Then Grant from Myth busters died, not of Covid but still reminding me that healthy people can die at 49. Anyway, denial doesn't work very well when I'm sober.
Right now I'm hoping that "science" is having its watershed moment, as real life experiments play out nationally, and that it will be visually obvious that states that use science to base their decisions fare so much better than those who don't
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I worry that the opposite will happen. Real time science is notoriously messy, and this seems to be particularly true in the current crisis, where all sorts of rules and norms are being ignored in the name of expediency. Certainly the governments which have most loudly proclaimed to be following "the science" haven't had the best results.
Compared to the ones that are following the Bible? (or rather, the stock market?)
Joining you in wordless rage. And I am beside myself watching "reopen the schools" become the position of those who don't care about safety or who think the virus is a hoax. Making it next to impossible to argue for providing resources and figuring out ways to do it safely-- ie the missing federal money and planning. Apparently we have to just choose between everyone risk their lives and (mostly) women quit their jobs to stay home with the kids. Rage and fear. Such a lovely morning cocktail.
i think just being angry isn't constructive. You need need to do something more constructive, like start your own paramilitary organization to help overthrow the State.
I'm right there with you. And two of my nearest and dearest have responsibility for making decisions about opening which are just agonizing and awful.
In very-slightly-happier news, Philadelphia has just canceled major parades and events into early 2021. This is clearly the right thing to do, and gives people enough warning to lessen some of the anger/frustration/financial impact that people would feel if it were canceled closer to the date. I'm very modestly hopeful that this will be useful for other officials trying to wrap their heads around another year-plus of this pandemic.
I didn't watch the interview, but apparently science journalist Ed Yong had some pointed words on CNN about the likelihood of a country that cannot equitably provide healthcare suddenly becoming able to equitably provide a vaccine next year. There are obviously a zillion unknowns, but I suspect his general point is true: The exact same factors that drive the appalling racial and ethnic health disparities we see now will play out again in the vaccine realm, though hard to know whether that means people of color will be more likely to be made vulnerable to untested vaccines or less likely to receive access to proven vaccines.
The other semi-hopeful thing was that this long interview with Dr. Fauci gave more detail on the vaccine development process than I'd previously seen anywhere else. I'm glad to hear that we are manufacturing millions of doses of all four vaccines in testing now, just in case one of them works out and we need to hit the ground running with widespread vaccination in December or whenever.
My suspicion is that Trump's push to open schools has made in less likely that schools will open here in the fall. Trump's support makes it look risky and politically motivated.
Here is what all school districts should do, but this won't happen:
100% of instruction is online. Let teachers do their jobs entirely focused on remote learning.
Establish small pod daycares for all age kids, run by essentially camp counselors, who help kids of all ages navigate their online lessons. Entirely optional for any family who needs their kids to be in a semi-social situation, out of the house. Your entire family goes to one pod, with 3-4 other families, any ages. Oversight of the counselors is somewhat via the fact that they have ~10-15 teachers able to semi-eavesdrop, as well as a more formal supervisor.
Use a ton of community spaces - not just the schools, but the libraries, hotel convention centers, empty office parks, etc.
Fund it as a massive WPA-style federal program.
We're basically doing the pod daycare for our older kid (7) (did she ever have a blog pseudonym?): she's in an in-person daily 4-hour pod with 3 other kids and a teacher we hired. Her younger sister (3) and another podmate's younger sibling are both in regular daycare though. Which is podded by state daycare guidelines, but still more exposure than the 4-kid pod, for sure. I wonder if we could make a 4-family pod including younger siblings if the daycares close again.
I intend to be dead anyway by 2060 (Who wants to live to 109?), but what will kill us around then is not science denialism but climate change, which people who count don't so much deny as ignore, because it's a boiling the frog thing*, and everybody thinks they can kick it down the road for now. But it will have more and more unforeseen side effects; my money is on a drug resistant strain of Yersinia pestis spreading like Covid.
*I know the damn amphibians have more sense in reality; but humans don't.
They have christened their pod MR DOG, using the first initial of every kid plus the teacher.
I SO want the plan in 9. Schools are not daycare, but daycare matters too.
That was the best floating-baby picture ever.
I've been telling people that in person college classes aren't happening in the fall for a while now. It is just a scam to pull in money. Dr Sarah Taber is on it:https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1283032858911739904?s=20
I know most people boil frogs but I think they tastes much better coming off the grill.
None of you are doing that well at the wordless rage thing.
Then Grant from Myth busters died
That's terrible!
Sir ordered Wordless Rage?
(I'm banning myself now)
Our local college, in a currently low-covid area, has a plan that involves testing the shit out of everybody and everyone wears a goddam mask. It seems like the most workable possible solution - provided the testing capacity actually exists. They are standing up a university lab to handle all the testing, but I worry about things like availability of reagents, whatever that means.
I've got outrage fatigue about this administration. I still hate them but it's an intellectual thing at this point. Being angry at my job is fresh. Of course, those are tangled up at this point because the coronavirus is why I'm trying to parent at the same time as I'm trying to deal with new and unpleasant responsibilities.
11: I have another family with whom we've podded and just this week hired a nanny for a few hours a week. I'm floating the idea of continuing this into the fall when she and I return to the classroom (although the nanny is the youngest's preschool teacher so....) I have no idea if we're sending the Calabat back to school. He misses it so much but every scenario I thought we'd have this fall did not include one where where Utah was literally hoping the LDS church would tell people to wear masks as cases spike because governating is too hard for the current governor to mandate anything.
and funnily enough, I think I remember your daughter's name (G?) but not her blog nickname.
I can hardly remember any real names here.
This seems like a bad sign for our upcoming school year but even worse since we've already wiped out our gains because people wanted to go get drunk in public.
Wanted to get drunk in public without the expense of buying their own paper bag.
A paper bag isn't a great mask and still hard to drink through.
In MA federal court, US rescinds order blocking foreign students staying in country for online classes. Bow before the combined might of MIT and Harvard.
Most paper bags come with a hole in one end.
Months ago I saw a pod-plus plan I quite liked, in a doomy "what if no immunity?" way. Everyone's in a pod based on necessary exposure -- like, each shift in a plant is a pod, and people they live with are in the same pod, and basic schooling is within a pod. And pods are related to each other in pairs -- and the pairs in pairs -- and the stages in and out of lockdown are "how many pod pairs can merge?". If your state is iffy but your city is good, maybe you can interact with four or eight pods at once. Outbreak in your city, back to just your pod. Outbreak in your pod, everyone in your pod isolates.
My favorite bit of this is that we could test the sewage outflow from whatever shared locality makes a pod to check for disease prevalence there at the most efficient level. My least favorite is that two-career families break it. I think I like the consequence that if rich people want service workers, their children go to school together. (Although possibly this requires more outside management than we'd have to not get dystopian. Am imagining more equitable share of resources, should check my temperature.)
Villages! Which the US doesn't do so well! Or, as my sweetie pointed out, cadres.
I've now had three conversations today with parents who are beyond stressed and overwhelmed. One colleague was in tears today describing her kids' regression and disruptive behavior (totally within the realm of normal for young people during a months-long pandemic, to be clear).
People are just pulled in every direction, and all of the ones I'm talking to feel the need to caveat by saying "I know others have it much worse..." to which I'm now saying, "It's OK for it to be hard for you too. It's legitimately very hard!" Which is what made the tears start....
It just brought home to me AGAIN how wildly unreasonable the stresses on caregivers and working caregivers are right now, and how manifestly unsuited to addressing it most of our public policy structure (never mind elected officials) is/are.
You know who would get it? ELIZABETH WARREN, that's who.
36: Yeah, I used to feel the need to denigrate my complaints by calling them First World problems, until I realized that these aren't First World problems, these are uniquely American problems. An American passport is only welcome in 28 countries at this point. And including Mexico on that list is a bit misleading because the land border is closed; if you want to go there, you have to take a plane.
Or walk. Someone don't actually build a wall.
38: When I think about Americans inclined to disregard pandemic health advisories, the ones that come to mind aren't very good at walking long distances through the desert, or anywhere outside air conditioned SUVs.
Obviously schools shouldn't reopen, but online learning for little kids is only a smidge better than death by covid. Our current plan is to straight up homeschool this year. This turns out to be laughably easy in Illinois (no forms to file, just let the school know your kid won't be there; promise to teach them certain subjects). We just could not manage being tech support during working hours, and this gives us some flexibility. Not sure what to do about socializing. They play with the neighbor kids, but the neighbor kids are a little weird.
My one reservation about officially homeschooling is that it deprives the school district of the money they get for my kids. I know they're very worried about families switching out.
40: we're doing a hybrid here. I think if we could test the kids and teachers like 3x week we could reopen semi safely.
My reservation about home schooling is that involves me schooling somebody.
36: I read her twitter feed and wish so much she were our nominee.
I could probably fob it off on my wife, but then she'd be really mad at me. Plus, I'm sure I'd get dragged into things. Also, feminism.
My reservation about home schooling is that my daughter is old enough to tell the difference between me doing my job and me playing World of Warcraft. Also, home schooling would be white flight.
Nice going, guys.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/15/covid-19-nurses-not-wearing-masks-led-to-ae-closure-inquiry-finds
Nurses not wearing face masks or staying two metres apart led to an outbreak of Covid-19 that shut an A&E unit after 70 staff at a hospital had to go into quarantine, an inquiry has found.
An investigation by Hillingdon hospital in north-west London has found that a nurse who had coronavirus unwittingly infected 16 others during a training session they all attended on 30 June, in what was described by a doctor as a "super-spreading event".
Some good news at least, the order that foreign students in the US can't remain if they're taking online classes has been rescinded.
We'll absolutely be sending xelA back to school in September.
We can only manage home schooling at the moment because my wife lost her job, and while we can live with that for a few months, we certainly can't live on one salary indefinitely in London. I simply can't do my job and home school. I've done the odd few hours here and there, but I can't just pop him down unsupervised to "learn stuff" while I work. We were working on his essay* on Judaism yesterday. That works OK for maths, where he can largely work unsupervised, and for reading, where he's suddenly become a voracious and advanced (for 7) reader. But for science, history, and anything involving written work, he needs 100% attention, and my job also needs 100% attention. The only conceivable way of doing it would be to do home schooling all afternoon, and then work until midnight or later every night catching up on work. Again, we can do that for a bit, and for periods in lockdown, I have, but long term, that's just not sustainable. I have the luxury of working from home, but, unlike some of my friends, because I've basically always worked from home part of the time, there's an expectation that I'll actually be working, rather than fucking about all day, like some.
Once my wife goes back to work, that'll inevitably be out of the house, and involve long commutes.
* My son isn't very academic. He's not edge of the bell curve freakish relative to his peers like I was at his age or a bit older. But, he's definitely doing more advanced stuff than I was at his age. I think the goal posts have moved a lot in the past 40 years. He's been writing two and three page essays, with proper prose writing, about the Shang Dynasty, or about the difference between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Identifying fronted adverbials in descriptive prose, and the like, and labelling them as such. I did absolutely nothing like that at age 7.
I'm also generally worried about the broad division of people into two camps.
Camp 1: we all need to stay home indefinitely, until there's a vaccine. Doing basically anything that isn't being at home, or wearing a mask at 20 metre distance from all other humans, is gross irresponsibility.
Camp 2: Fuck it all, we should just open everything, go back to normal, and if people die, they die.
As per 33, and some of the other comments above, given that it's looking increasingly likely that we might not get a vaccine, or if we do it'll have limited short term effectiveness, we probably are going to have to move to some mode in which we mitigate the worst effects of the disease, but accept that it's here for the long term. That needs a lot of money and logistics spent on it. Not "Camp 2" blasé fuck it all thinking. But real thinking about how we educate our kids, get to and from work, and live our lives, in which we may have periodic waves of increasing lockdown at times, and where we need to think about contact tracing, and testing, and smaller classroom sizes, and all of the other things that go along with that.
When I think about Americans inclined to disregard pandemic health advisories, the ones that come to mind aren't very good at walking long distances through the desert,
I spent a stupidly long time wondering why Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman would be inclined to disregard pandemic advisories.
50 last. If he's doing that stuff at all competently at age 7, I'd say he was profoundly adademic.
re: 53
I'm thinking more relatively, rather than absolutely. He's definitely doing things that are more advanced than I was at the same age. However, his teachers tell us that he's sort of middle-of-the-pack C+ student for most things. Maybe a bit better than that for reading and maths, and a bit worse for writing.*
Standards and expectations seem to me to be a lot higher, though.
Which is another piece of ammunition against older people who trumpet about grade-inflation, and how "everyone must have prizes" and "things were harder on my day". As far as I can tell, the average 7 year old now, in UK schools, is far in advance of where their parents and grandparents were at the same age.
* I think he's moved on a fair bit over lockdown. Certainly his writing and reading have improved quite a lot.
re: 53
The essay writing is _not_ entirely unaided. There's support from the teaching materials, and from us. But, in terms of ambition and what they expect from the kids, it's really impressive.
He's been writing two and three page essays, with proper prose writing, about the Shang Dynasty, or about the difference between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Identifying fronted adverbials in descriptive prose, and the like, and labelling them as such.
Whoa.
Recall that Jammies was a sub for about 18 months in the district, and so surveyed a lot of math and science classes, and occasionally other classes. An extremely common practice in the middle schools and high schools is to pass out a Mad Libs style page of pre-written notes each day.
The teacher reads through the day's notes and the kids fill in the appropriate word when they get to the space. It's supposed to somehow teach note-taking, or replace note-taking, so that their inability to take notes doesn't hinder their learning. Or something.
At the end of class, the kids all use glue sticks and glue it onto the next page in their composition books. If they do, their notebooks start to look bloated and unmanageable as the year progresses. Otherwise they just leave the page behind. Sometimes you can re-use it for the next class!
That said, the Honors and accelerated classes are more challenging.
The school system here fails poor kids in very complicated ways. It's a mixture of No Child Left Behind plus funding tied to attendance, and it leads to bizzaro district-wide policies like, "All students are allowed to retake any test that they score below a 70% on." and "All late work must be accepted up to the last day of the grading period." But teenagers, being teenagers, do not always thrive under the mushiest, softest expectations, and it's easy for them to get into a battle of autonomy when you set standards to be this low. In my opinion, half of it is the overwhelming boredom they must feel at being handed these madlib sheets seven times a day, day after day. I'd probably refuse to pick up a pencil, too. Anyway: it leads to an extremely weak education experience for the non-accelerated classes.
I had the same experience as Matt with my kids' elementary schools. Maybe not quite as intensely, but their writing expectations were much more sophisticated, much younger, than anything I was asked to do back in the 1970s.
Ugh. New cases and new hospitalizations are both definitely trending upward in Maryland now (7 day positive rate is holding steady at 4.5%). And it looked like our reopening was going so well.
If we had are act together, contact tracing would reveal what activities/locations were contributing to the increase and we could selectively shut those back down.
40: This is why we're leaning that way. Managing homeschooling isn't too bad. Managing "OK it's 10AM Zoom time" turned out to be nearly impossible, and I don't think he got much out of the lectures, or at least nothing more than we couldn't cover in 15 minutes. Pebbles has to go to preschool at least part-time or I will lose what's left of my mind. It works now because they play together. If he has to do schoolwork and she has nothing to do, she pesters him till he explodes.
The Calabat hasn't done as much essay writing, I think, but the amount of knowledge he's getting about history via video and text is so far what I did in first grade.
51: Ditto. I had a colleague call me irresponsible and wonder what I could possibly be reading that made me think it was OK to teach a class of six people F2F in a lecture hall this fall. I'm nowhere near Camp 2, but "we're going to have to figure out a way to live with this" isn't wrong, and acting like five hours a week in a classroom is a death sentence is not going to make the Camp 2 people, some of whom endure a lot more risk in their white collar office jobs, let alone everyone in the essential worker/no autonomy/crappy conditions category, terribly sympathetic.
57: I teach at a school that gets kids after they've been acculturated to 12 years of doing nothing but filling in worksheets. Some absolutely go to pieces every fall because they haven't had to manage anything at all on their own.
Also, speaking as one with an Eng. Lang. "O" level and who has published the odd article, WTF is a fronted adverbial?
One that has been on the receiving end of the presentation of a falsified self?
51: YES. It's really hard to figure out what makes sense when some people think no plan is good enough, and others that no plan is necessary. I would think that the rate of local cases and the availability and turn-around time of tests should be relevant to decisions about schools and universities. But that doesn't seem to be part of the local discussions.
And in the minor but enraging, our university has noticed that child-care might be a problem, and is thinking about offering on-site care for UP to 3-hours a day/kid. Which, given time to get from place to place, would cover exactly 1 of my 3 classes. And this helps how?
61: Thank you so much for asking that. I thought it was some weird British usage and couldn't understand it from the context.
61: I didn't know was that was either, but I was too embarrassed to admit it even to myself.
'Fronted' adverbials are 'fronted' because they have been moved to the front of the sentence, before the verb. In other words, fronted adverbials are words or phrases at the beginning of a sentence, used to describe the action that follows.
For example:
Before the sun came up, he ate his breakfast.
https://www.theschoolrun.com/what-are-fronted-adverbials
In other exciting news, I learned today that I speak prose.
When I read about law enforcement in California refusing to follow Newsom's orders it makes me think that the liberalism of the left coast is less than what we need for this pandemic. It makes me think that the semi Northern New England States (Northern New England - Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire) and Massachusetts plus maybe Rhode Island (But probably not RI) should just secede and join Canada. Connecticut is part of the Tristate area more than it's part of New England, so they can't come.
65 etc: Having a bizarre obsession with fronted adverbials, Michael Gove personally imposed this on schools in England when he was education secretary.
66: Is this serious or are you just trolling Megan and/or a Connecticut Unfoggetarian?
BG: This place offers 15m antigen testing for $160. Portugal requires PCR testing for entry, so that's not helpful for me, but maybe for your purposes it suffices.
(That was off-topic, sorry, but the other thread is dead.)
I don't think the actions of some counties' sheriffs, who have a weird insular culture and special political impunity (see John Oliver), say a lot about West Coast leftist political culture. It is certainly one of the many ways political left-liberalism gets institutionally thwarted even when in the majority, and I think that's just as true in New England. (I think sheriffs in MA mostly just run jails, since everything is a town? But police leadership still have their own hard-right agenda in most of the country, they just don't have as prominent leaders with the independence to run their mouths as much, except maybe union leaders.)
Any comment that favors any secession is not a troll to me. I'm just waiting for everyone to realize that we are not a coherent country and agree to break into several countries.
70 and 71: Many thanks. Also feel free to e-mail.
72: Sherrifs in MA mostly just run jails, because everything is a city or town. The actual Bay Area is quite liberal, I know, but I do think that New England - maybe because of those famous town meetings - has a bit more of a communitarian ethic, so some people are more willing to wear masks to help others. It's not universal by any means.
Our farming areas in Western MA are weirdly liberal. The South shore is more conservative, but the Central valley is so much farther from SF culturally than anything I know in MA is from Boston.
72: We had a weirdly hard-right police officer in my town who wrote a column for the union magazine about cracking down on social justice warriors in which he mocked de-escalation techniques. The town police did some kind of restorative justice community engagement discipline that got a lot of criticism.
re: 67
I didn't know that re: Gove.
When it was introduced, I could work out what it was, but it wasn't a term I was taught at school or at university. I did English grammar to masters level, so, before I forgot it all, I knew a fair bit about the intricacies of English grammar, but not usually using the sort of language that prescriptive fuddy-duddy types use.
re: 56
You can see a typical lesson where they are teaching the kids here.
https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-year/year-2/subjects/foundation
So, at the top of the page, xelA has done lessons 1 through 6, to learn about Judaism, over the past week or so. Did lesson 7, which is the first part of the essay, and will do lesson 8 tomorrow.
The teacher goes through teaching them about making some notes including little drawing and keywords for the paragraph they are about to write. Stops. Lets them have a go. Then shows them what he would have done for his notes, so they can pick up on any gaps. Then they move on and he shows them how he'd write his paragraph, rinse, repeat.
So if you want to see how they teach essay writing to 6 to 7 year olds:
https://classroom.thenational.academy/lessons/to-write-an-essay-about-judaism
There's a quiz, then a video, then another quiz.
77: I had assumed 67 was a joke, but I guess it has some basis.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/may/09/fronted-adverbials-sats-grammar-test-primary
There was an initial proposal in SPouse's district to have all support staff teach their own class in whatever additional space was available (gym, cafeteria) to try to reduce class sizes and increase distancing. She is not a classroom teacher and while she's guaranteed a job under union seniority the district can switch her from curriculum development to classroom. If they do that this year she's considering taking the year off, although now it sounds like they aren't going to go that route. Our kids, I don't know- they're almost all old enough that they could probably do fully online with minimal supervision. The building facilities for the younger ones aren't great- small classrooms, cafeteria, hallways and stairways; not much outdoor space; and there's one boys and one girls bathroom for the entire 4-story building that's on the bottom floor.
That seems like a problem even if there was no Covid. They're too young to piss in empty bottles and drop them out of the window.
Youngest kids are on the lower floors, and as you go upstairs the age goes up for just that reason. I forgot, the kindergarten rooms do have their own individual bathrooms attached to the classrooms.