No matter how I cut it, I just end up super furious at the Senate for abdicating their responsibility so utterly.
I think some universities will be able to stay open. Mostly ones with a relatively isolated setting and a student population that isn't working off campus.
Iowa State allowing fans at the football home game in the current environment there is probably going to fail really, really fast. Maybe outside air is protection, but not that much protection.
Even before the pandemic, quite a few colleges were on the brink. I expect we'll see a significant die off. Especially because so many have adopted "We'll just take more and more foreign students!" as their business model, and it doesn't look like that will be viable for at least a few years.
I think the vastness of the number of k12 districts and the number of colleges is going to make this hard to get a handle on, statistically. Five or ten districts a day could have COVID explosions and dominate the news and by the end of the school year that would only be 10% of the total.
It's also hard to know what the denominator is: how many of the colleges and k-12 districts are attempting to open up right now, vs how many are just strictly online?
And on a case by case basis: The local land grant university has 8-9K students attending F2F classes, and the rest of the 40K are entirely online. When there's 200 cases on a campus, what's the number of students who are actually on campus?
I was told there would be no set theory.
In my town they have changed their minds about half a dozen times: f2f, online, hybrid, hybrid-by-grade, etc. School is opening in a bit over a week. I'm glad my kids are grown, and my sympathy for those in HB's situation is great.
Our university of 20,000 students just went online (with a few exceptions) after 5 days of classes and 500+ cases. Students in dorms have until the 7th to leave or get an exception. The economic fallout is not yet clear.
And it does seem like part of the reason we seem to be doing so badly compared to other institutions in the state is that we reported all known student cases (those done through the university, and those done elsewhere and reported to the university by the student) while most universities are only reporting the on-campus tests. So much better guidelines on reporting might help avoid the murky middle. Also money would help.
And it does seem like part of the reason we seem to be doing so badly compared to other institutions in the state is that we reported all known student cases (those done through the university, and those done elsewhere and reported to the university by the student) while most universities are only reporting the on-campus tests. So much better guidelines on reporting might help avoid the murky middle. Also money would help.
|| I've just been reading the CDC eviction moratorium order. IMO, this is a huge deal. I wonder if it survives judicial review . . . |>
Which I guess is sort of on topic because the recitations in the CDC order aren't really consistent with the idea that we can have school in person.
As folks may recall, the moratorium in the CARES act only applied to rental housing with a federal nexus. This is every rental property. The statute they're acting under lets the Surgeon General order measures he thinks necessary to curtail the spread of infectious disease. This order was issued by the acting chief of staff of the CDC. The lawyers clearly worked the language to avoid an APA issue, so I suppose there's a memo in the file that they can actually do this.
I have some confidence that our local State U is doing a good job. A few of the kids tested before arriving on campus have had cases, and there was one case in off-campus housing. But they do seem to be on top of it and are taking a hard line about wearing masks. At this point there have been enough examples of other schools having to shut down that it puts the fear of God in people.
It helps that we are in one of the lowest-covid areas of the country, although that could change with the onset of cold weather and people spending time indoors again.
We won't shut down because we're not testing, so our method of knowing if it's spreading on campus is asking students to self-report and waiting for faculty and/or staff to get sick. Given the lag times in contact tracing, it's unlikely that we'd be doing anything proactive.
My son is back at school next week.
So far, where we live in London seems to be holding at moderate levels of COVID. London has an average of around 11 positive tests per 100,000 of population at the moment, and where I am has ~9 per 100,000. The UK is definitely seeing numbers creep up, although deaths are holding low.
11 positive tests per 100,000 of population at the moment
Is that total, or 7 day moving average of new cases? The 7 day average in our county is hovering around 2 daily new cases per 100,000. When that number gets to 10, the schools will shut down.
I have seen murmurings of the (paranoid? maybe) idea that the CDC order is set up to be knocked down and take a bunch of regulatory authority down with it.
re: 20
Moving average, I think. It peaked at around 500+ per 100K at one point.
Oh, looks like our state just put together a sweet dashboard focused on school data. Gosh, what an appropriate level of transparency!
This (the NYT for UK data?) seems to imply that those numbers are "per 7 days". So 2/100k/day as Spike mentions is worse. MA is deliniating risk level by town by whether the cases/100k/day is (the NYT for UK data?) seems to imply that those numbers are "per 7 days". So 2/100k/day as Spike mentions is worse. MA is deliniating risk level by town by whether the cases/100k/day is
Our school district starts tomorrow. It was decided long ago that it would be remote teaching. Today, the day before school starts, the district and the teachers' union are at an impasse over the amount of screen time. They sent out a schedule for tomorrow and Friday, with the announcement that they'd be revising it for, you know, next week.
Actually, looking at the dashboard, it looks like the rate of 9 per 100K is the rolling average of the total for the 7 day period, rather than the average daily number of test cases.
Also they got the metric system over there, so comparisons are tough.
26. MA is reporting 50 cases/1 million/day averaged over 7 days. The daily new cases is at 51 today, which is about the same. (From 91-DIVOC)
Yesterday's screen time was approximately the whole day from 8:30-3:15 except for a fifteen minute break and lunch. Shiv intervened and told the Calabat he did not have to spend two hours doing self-directed online apps and could take a few breaks. We are not long for this program if things don't improve.
Yesterday's screen time was approximately the whole day from 8:30-3:15
Yikes, that sounds awful. We explicitly made limiting synchronous screen time to avoid burnout a part of our planning for the semester. Granted, a bit easier with students in their early 20s, but still.
The older girls (grades 7 and 8) are supposed to be synchronous/logged in to each class on time from 7:45-2:45 except on Wednesdays, when teachers have meetings and office hours and they work independently. That means Mara got up and was finished with all her work by 7:30 and Nia slept until noon. Supposedly they're both through and working on painting a graffiti mural wall in Mara's room, which I'm glad I okayed because it's taking a lot of time for them. Selah in third grade is having a hard time knowing which classes are online and which are independent since it changes from day to day. All the work this first week is only taking a few minutes, she spends a lot of her time playing Roblox on her own and I need to figure out how much to crack down on that without having to try to do my own editing work while listening to teachers tell kids to mute themselves just so that I can hear when someone tells the kids to log off and take a break for five minutes exactly what they're supposed to do when they return. I think I'm okay with mostly letting her float at this point, but of course I doubt myself a lot. (Plus Lee is working at her school as a sub, so she's there every day talking to the teachers and will hear about it if they think I'm doing a crummy job.) Ugh.
Whoa, did Lee have some major career changes?
33: Oh, lord, that's a story. She quit her job at the nice university where Mrs. Stranded in Lubbock teaches while she had one more semester to go on her term (and they almost certainly would have found a way to keep her there because they're big on superficial diversity) because she didn't like the new chair. But I'm not sure how she expected to then get good references given that she quit something like three days before the semester began, leaving them to pick up the pieces. She had already been adjuncting at a closer and less-prestigious school and thought for sure they'd hire her full-time but of course they didn't. So she adjuncted two places and picked up some corporate training job too. When none of this added up to much, she ended up subbing at the school down the street from us, which coincidentally means wandering past my house and talking to whatever kid is outside and so on, last year popping into Mara's classrooms to check that she'd brushed her teeth etc. The school thought she was better than most subs and gave her a contract to be a building sub and be accessible al the time, which turned into running more PE classes after they couldn't find an acceptable replacement for the music teacher. But she hated having to teach during non-traditional instruction and refused her contract this summer and went back on unemployment. She got turned down for a job at a community college and is waiting to hear about some HBCU teaching position that I assume is not going anywhere since their school year already began, so she agreed to come back as a sub again even though she hates and is dreading it. But she says she's tired of teaching college students even though she'd been sure that was her calling. She's not going to want to keep teaching little kids but at least for a while it was refreshing. She's also been applying for jobs over an hour away, which would probably require moving, especially now that Mara is refusing to spend time with her. I would like having her gone, but Selah does still enjoy time with her and also I don't look forward to driving to and from far-off visits every other weekend. I know her abuse findings were cleared by the state in secret hearings so she's technically allowed to teach, but I was somewhat tempted to make a fuss anyway that I shouldn't have to send my child to a school with a teacher who's had substantiated allegations of abuse and neglect against her. But I'm trying not to rock the boat, so I didn't say anything to the principal, who seems to like her.
Oh, and I forgot about the part where she thought she was getting a job with a mattress company run by a friend of hers and spent her evenings with the girls driving them around to mattress stores. She bought me a book about the importance of sleep and I think is still upset I haven't read it, but I haven't. Anyway, that never worked out because it turned out they didn't actually have funding for any new jobs.
On the original topic, I'm not sure if we're going to have to do standardized tests this year or not. It's so refreshing to have a decent governor, and this was I think supposed to be the year that districts (including ours) practiced doing the state tests online rather than on paper. The local school is a little frustrated because preliminary testing made it look like last year was going to be the year scores were high enough to get us out of the level where the state is involved, but I don't think anyone is in a hurry to make that happen this year given how weird everything is.
Holy moly.
Also: holy moly to that link about secret appeals overturning child abuse cases.
37.2: The REAL holy moly is that I'm pretty sure the reason she knew about the success rate of secret appeals is because we were still fb friends when I commented on that article, but I can't actually prove it. I am always going to be mad at myself for that.
The real, real holy moly is the friends you block along the way.
My concern here is that, having gotten the cash they could grab by bringing in student for in person classes, and in person classes being a predictable (and predicted) Covid-19 spreading disaster, the university presidents will then try to send all those students home to spread Covid in their own hometowns.
You don't need to worry about that not happening.
Oh man, someone linked an absolutely scathing letter of how badly the U Mich president had handled the pandemic. It sounded pretty bad.
Well, they never gave me any funding either. It's been downhill since then.
41: That's what James Madison University, which I think might have more undergraduates than any other college in Virginia except Virginia Tech, is doing right now.
41: I think the loss of dorm revenue is devastating, even at reduced capacity.
I think a lot of kids are starting to bail even before the universities officially shut down.
I teach at the University of L/o/u/i/s/v/i/l/l/e and it feels like we're going to muddle through without sending the students home.* Locally, the Covid situation here isn't great but it's not nightmarish by Southern US standards, and on campus it's better than it is in the city at large. Since the semester actually started (we're finishing week 3) there haven't been any really high-profile incidents that seem like candidates for superspreading, and the admins seem to feel like people are doing well with mask-wearing and such. I think absent a really noticeable turn for the worse, we're going to keep doing what we're doing. I'm teaching all-online (a subject that feels almost uniquely ill-suited for being taught online) and I despise it, but I can get through the year like this I guess. I have friends who teach in other Southern states and I feel like I have it better than almost all of them.
*To be clear, I'm not saying that's a good thing--it seems better than some kinds of alternatives and worse than others.
50: I don't know how long you've been there but does it feel weird to be in a state where things are relatively decent for once? It is really freaking me out.
I think absent a really noticeable turn for the worse, we're going to keep doing what we're doing.
New mouseover?
51: I've been here for just over 3 years, so maybe not long enough to be truly freaked out by competent government. We've liked the city from day 1 and feel surrounded by sane people, so it's been hard to internalize just how atypical it is for the state. But when I stop and think about it, it's amazing. In the early days of Covid when Tennessee was so blatantly fucking up and Kentucky wasn't, I felt especially smug, as if it was my own good sense that landed me here instead of in Nashville or wherever. I've been feeling a little less smug since it's become clear that this city is, as someone put it recently, the capital of American racism. Still, given that I never imagined I would end up living in the South but that's the way an academic career goes, I am so glad not to be ruled over by Brian Kemp or whoever.
My former local government is all over the internet because of the Saucy Nugs guy.
||
So, Trump has sued Bullock. Says only the legislature can change the manner of elections, so the Governor's order allowing counties to decide whether to go all-mail was unlawful and must be set aside. Case got assigned to my favorite judge in the federal system. Ballots go out in less than 5 weeks, so it'll be some fast work, I think. Complaint isn't as badly done as I'd thought it would be. It'll be a total cluster if they have to make changes at the last minute. Bullock's chief legal counsel (I think that's his title) is running for AG: one of the points made in the complaint is that Bullock is on the ballot, and has chosen all-mail because he thinks it will help him.
County clerks really want to go all-mail, because they know they'll have trouble getting elderly poll staff.
|>
I'm now objectively pro-Lake Travis.
As I noted in the other thread, it's Antifa's naval commando force.
I was trying to keep the other thread more on topic.
Anyway, drunk assholes in boats has always been a bit dangerous.
Also, we're having lobster rolls and wine for the holiday celebrating "fuck off summer."
I suspect this will be edited away soon, but right now the lake's wiki page says, 1Social media mocked the dipshit Trump supporters idiotic actions by naming the event "The Battle of Lake Travis," and "Dumbkirk." '
Lobster rolls sounds like a really good idea.
It was good, but next time I want hot lobster with butter.
OT: Did this story pass without notice here at the time? For some reason, I just noticed that Nicole Cliffe was no longer off Twitter and in two minutes I find that in her feed.
The boat parade in Arizona didn't go so well either.
Actually, thats a fake. There was a boat fire in Arizona but thats not it.
The Arizona footage I saw was shot from a distance so you couldn't see the details.
Yeah, that footage is boring. The fake footage is so much better.
Pod-school 3rd grade starts Tuesday. Keeping my fingers crossed that it works out and remains legal.
OT: Apparently political correctness has gone so far off the rails that you can't even slam tennis balls into the line judge's throat without people jumping on your case.
We're two or three weeks into classes at our small university (depending on school), with about three quarters of our students taking some classes in person and about 80% of our faculty teaching at least one course in person. We've had a handful of positive tests, mostly employees, all traced to family or other external transmission. No tests of resident students have come back positive yet. Anecdotally, that seems to be generally true of the other small colleges in our region; some had a few positive tests when students first arrived, but I think none yet have any evidence of on-campus transmission. Probably helps that all these institutions are reporting very good mask compliance indoors and out, and we're in an area with low community prevalence. It also really helps not to be a huge university with off-campus Greek housing.