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I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have ki

I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers. There aren’t enough subs to cover for the teachers. We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks. It’s a perfect time to pivot to remote to lower the strain our on failing healthcare system. Heck even if you have enough teachers the people who make things happen like bus drivers, aides, helpers, food prep are going to be knocked out too. My district had two hundred cases of covid in staff alone this week. That’s 10% of the staff. And we were remote.

in_cahoots 5y ago
People are afraid that if districts go remote it’ll be a repeat of 2020, where there was no consensus of when it was safe to go back to in-person schooling. There is distrust on both sides (the teachers and the school district/parents) and I can’t see them agreeing on a rubric at this point in time. Yet another way Covid is exposing the divisions in our society.
- mbg721 5y ago
  It not so much a lack of consensus; school officials burnt every scrap of goodwill they had by forcing parents to scramble and do multiple things at once, and they don't yet realize they're overplaying their hand. You're right that it reveals divisions, but one of those is that anybody who can opt out by homeschooling or using private/religious schools that aren't closing their doors is doing that.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. I agree that this would be a great time for temporary remote schooling. I think the problem is that months and months of unnecessary school closures have broken parents (and kids), as well as burned a lot of trust that this will be handled with a modicum of competence or compassion. I don't personally have kids, but the parents I know are very reasonably at their breaking points over how poorly-managed and dogmatic school closures have been. That excludes those whose kids attend or started to attend private schools, whose immunity to the cacophony of Discourse means that they've handled the risk of Covid sanely and compassionately. I'm as annoyed as anyone at Covid denialists, but in my urban coastal context, the neurotic hysterics of restrictionist fanatics has been a lot more salient. There's been a faction of the conversation that insists that making any space to discuss the costs of restrictions is denialism, and the excess restrictions driven by those people are exactly why there's zero capacity left for NPIs like lockdown or school closures during a period where they would actually be helpful.
- watwut 5y ago
  Afaik, Amerika had super strong opposition to any lockdowns or measure from the start. There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. It is not backslash to any real policy, it is people who are against those having exact same opinions as they had the whole time.
  - bnralt 5y ago
    Schools here were completely remote for 10 months (mid-March 2020 until the end of January 2021), then part time for the next few months, only going back to full time this past fall. Now they seem intent on being full time, even though cases now are much higher than when they had kept the schools closed or part time (hospitalizations are also close to the highest they've been).
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    > There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. "America" is 300 million people and 50 separate states in a federal system. The reflexive urge to treat it as a single entity is central to the problem I'm discussing. On the more functional side, the lack of border controls between states in a federal system made tamping cases down to minimal levels a big challenge. The entire world settled into an equilibrium of calibrating restrictions (both via policy and individual behavior) based on case numbers. In the US, national numbers drove much of this conversation, treating a continent-spanning nation as if it was epidemiologically equivalent to Belgium. > There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. just a couple of examples that I'm personally familiar with: - California was under a statewide stay-at-home order from March 2020 to January 2021 (by contrast, France lifted their lockdown from May to October) - San Francisco public schools were closed for over a year, and much of the US has been extreme about school closures. UK schools have never entirely shut down, and across Europe schools have been dramatically more open than across the US. You're not wrong that American restrictions have generally been lighter, but this elides the many individual pockets with unnecessary NPIs based on case rates in irrelevant parts of the country. Schools are the most dramatic example of this, but things like spring 2020 lockdowns based on a pandemic that was limited to the Northeast at the time set us up for the heavy resistance to restrictions we saw in many states when they were actually hit in the summer (helped along by El Presidente's abuse of the bully pulpit).
bertil 5y ago
Remote can be difficult if you have more members of the family than computers and rooms. That can seem absurd to you and me (I have five computers plus three smartphones and probably a tablet somewhere, for two people) but in many families, ressources are more scarce than that. Having my partner (medical doctor, so working out of the home most of the time) take a call during one of my meeting is frustrating, but it happens once a month. Eight hours a day can’t go smoothly. There are more issues with younger kids who need supervision on this side of the screen, might fight with their siblings, etc. My sister has three boys (8, 10 and 12 y.o.) and she just can’t cope with the cabin fever. The lack of structured exercise seems a problem too. Finally, in some cases, school offers free meals to families who need it. I feel like that could be substituted with a more universal service, but no one knows who can do that (has the time, budget, PPE, etc.).
ldoughty 5y ago
In short, everyone needs kids in schools... (Not saying this is a good thing, just thinking it through as the situation is right now, assuming no changes) Parents who are rejoining the workforce can't take 4-6 weeks of with no notice to babysit their kids again... But they also can't afford to stop working. Businesses can't afford to lose workers, it continues the strain on the system which raises wages and threatens the small (and medium) businesses going under... It's a crappy situation that society isn't willing to actually address because the political theater is in the middle of a power struggle... A business-minded politician would see that vaccination (or mandatory masks and testing) is the key to business returning to normal... but the politics of this is a huge driver of power shifts that hit a larger cross section of society than most topics... If you can't afford your kid to be home, because you need your job to pay bills... Then you don't want schools closed, and there's one political party that promises that right now.
- fnord123 5y ago
  To underline this point, the debate pretends to be about education but it's about babysitting children. Day care for older kids.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >Parents who are rejoining the workforce can't take 4-6 weeks of with no notice to babysit their kids again... Why do you need a babysitter for a school-aged child? OK, maybe if the kid is below 7, but 7 and up should be more than capable of being alone at home. Entire nations do exactly that. In Estonia 7 year olds are expected to go to school on their own and come back home. At home they will likely be alone (or with their siblings) until their parents get home from work.
  - recursive 5y ago
    All of my school aged kids are below seven. They absolutely can not handle themselves on their own. There are many like me.
michaelt 5y ago
> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. As I understand it, students can minimise their online class and play computer games or browse the web instead. And young children aren't exactly known for their self-control, even if some of us had good self-control at that age. A teacher who finds 5% of students don't respond when called upon might be able to focus on them; but if 95% of students don't respond, their powers are very limited. IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than reopening restaurants, office buildings, universities, hairdressers or gyms.
- ajross 5y ago
  > IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than Uh... schools are open. No one has closed schools in this nation. The debate here is whether or not having open schools this month, during the omicron wave, is helping or hurting. The evidence in the linked article is that schools in NYC have organizationally broken down and that no meaningful education is happening anyway. Because it's very difficult to run a school when 5-10% of the population is actively sick. (Though the silver lining here is that we're clearly getting to a true "pan" pandemic with omicron, and still not seeing evidence of significant health care overload or increased death rates. It remains possible that we've dodged a giant bullet with this variant.)
  - Kye 5y ago
    Hospitalization and death lags infection by quite a while.
    - ajross 5y ago
      Death rate peaks happen about three weeks after case load peaks. This has been very consistent through the pandemic (at least everywhere that has good test reporting), you can play with graphs at https://91-divoc.com/ https://91-divoc.com/ or elsewhere to see the effect. Certainly if omicron had the same behavior as previous variants, we'd know by now. Continued worries aren't about severity lag, but about whether or not there's something else different about omicron. It's worth being safe and cautious. But nonetheless the best evidence we have says that this is probably a very safe variant and a near-best-case outcome (i.e. everyone gets sick rapidly and we reach herd immunity rapidly with minimal severe cases, vs. everyone "eventually" getting delta with much worse outcomes).
aqme28 5y ago
It perfectly illustrates how there are two types of quarantine lockdowns-- the kind enforced by the government or policy, and the defacto kind that happens organically when too many people are sick or afraid of getting sick. There's a false belief out there in this debate that if we don't have an enforced lockdown, we won't get a defacto one.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  That's true, but we also shouldn't characterize this as a defacto one. Insane quarantine regulations basically prevent teachers from coming to school at all if they have even been in contact with anyone who later tested positive, whether or not they are sick, test negative, or have 3 shots. If we saw this same situation sans government regulations then we could conclude it was organically spawned, but that isn't the case here.
  - aqme28 5y ago
    Those “insane regulations” are not at play though, if you read OP. They hand out COVID tests and send home the kids who are positive.
pibechorro 5y ago
Public schools main function is subsidized day care since the vast majority of parents both work. Kids hate remote learning. Its awful looking at a screen, bored, for hours day after day. They dont perform well. Kids need other kids interactions. Many substitute teachers are not being allowed to work because they dont want the never ending vaccine regime. I know 3 who did it full time and no longer because of it. Omnicron being so weak is the perfect time to end the lockdowns and security theater. Get everyone exposed so we can develop nation wide natural immunity, which actually works, and move on with life. Its been close to two years of this madness. Teen suicide is at an all time high, enough is enough. If teachers don't want to teach, quit, there are many people who would love their position waiting in the sidelines.
Glyptodon 5y ago
It's not "acceptable" because average families can't deal with their kids being home. This pandemic has revealed that for a large swath of kids home is a toxic environment actively destroying their potential. Add to this the terrible online learning implementations that are basically "beg to show up for attendance and then hope they participate" ...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I guess this is my followup question is, would your opinion change if we replaced “remote learning” with “no school”? Remote learning largely doesn’t work, and I think the fact that it’s seen as an option is warping the conversation. Now, maybe schools really should close even if remote learning was off the table, because the situation described in the link is quite dire. But see, then I look around, and I see that indoor dining is still open, movie theaters are still open, and a significant portion of Broadway is still open. Schools seem more important than all of that stuff. Maybe we should figure out whatever it is the restaurants are doing?
- caddemon 5y ago
  Do you consider cramming 14 classes worth of students in to an auditorium for "study hall" an education?
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    No. I'm asking why the public schools are in this state while restaurants seem to be operating normally, and a lot of private schools seem to be operating normally. I can imagine some perfectly reasonable answers. If it's an unsolvable, we should close the schools, and maybe shorten next year's summer break or something. But I do think having "remote learning" as a dangling option is warping the discussion. It's not a real fix.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kmos17 5y ago
remote is fine for parents who can work from home, but what about others with young children?
freewilly1040 5y ago
> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. Because "remote learning" is a joke. I volunteered a bit in a virtual high school classroom. The teacher running it is making a frankly heroic effort to keep her students in the school system at all. But no one was engaged, cameras were off, students regularly don't show up at all or drop off in the middle of class. These are comparatively adults compared to younger grades.
- caddemon 5y ago
  Did you read the OP? What they are doing in school right now is also a joke!
  - freewilly1040 5y ago
    I did. Here's the line that stuck out to me: > One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. I suggest fixing the ludicrously miscalibrated risk assessment of omicron as a better route. How many of these legions of absent teachers even have symptoms?
    - another_story 5y ago
      The way schools are run, if even 5% of a district is absent at a single time things start to get tight. If it's 10% then you'll experience serious disruption. Teachers in the US usually have 80% of their time spent spent teaching with 20% prep and duties (lunchroom or recess). Now you get a few people out with no subs available and you have teachers combining classes or covering others, leaving no prep time or unmanageable classroom sizes. Add to that a room of kids preoccupied with covid concerns and unable to concentrate.
    - objectivetruth 5y ago
- icedchai 5y ago
  I don't think it has much to do with "learning." School is basically a babysitting / daycare service. They need the kids in school so the parents can work. At least the ones not privileged enough to "work from home" on a permanent basis, like many of us are here. Remote work is often a joke, too. Many, many people are completely checked out, burnt out after having to endure too many mentally draining and often pointless zoom meetings. I know several folks planning to drop out of the work force for a while, when (if?) we return to a semblance of normality. That'll push salaries even higher for the ones who remain.
ransom1538 5y ago
"I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable." What about kindergarten? Teaching 20+ students 5-6 years olds through zoom??? - seems like a fools errand. This could be their most important years for learning. "The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers." Everyone will get covid. Period. Just get it. You might get it once per year - but that is true for the entire human race. Give up on logistics the war is lost. "We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks." Maybe for this variant? What about the next? Just keep children on zoom?
- caddemon 5y ago
  Have you had COVID? Good luck teaching a room full of 6 year olds with active symptoms. This is what people are essentially asking for right now, at least in certain districts where 10%+ of the teaching staff are out with symptomatic COVID.
  - ransom1538 5y ago
    I had covid. My kids had covid. My parents had covid. My neighbors had covid. My cat had covid (snotting - no test). You will get covid. The war is lost. Unless, you move to northern Alaska and do no visit shops - and use the land. But that is death.
    - caddemon 5y ago
      I think you're missing my point. It's not about avoiding COVID right now. It's about the fact too many teachers have it simultaneously and do not feel well enough to teach.
      - mbg721 5y ago
        I think there's a gap in the assumption of good-faith somewhere in this chain.

in_cahoots 5y ago

People are afraid that if districts go remote it’ll be a repeat of 2020, where there was no consensus of when it was safe to go back to in-person schooling. There is distrust on both sides (the teachers and the school district/parents) and I can’t see them agreeing on a rubric at this point in time. Yet another way Covid is exposing the divisions in our society.

mbg721 5y ago
It not so much a lack of consensus; school officials burnt every scrap of goodwill they had by forcing parents to scramble and do multiple things at once, and they don't yet realize they're overplaying their hand. You're right that it reveals divisions, but one of those is that anybody who can opt out by homeschooling or using private/religious schools that aren't closing their doors is doing that.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. I agree that this would be a great time for temporary remote schooling. I think the problem is that months and months of unnecessary school closures have broken parents (and kids), as well as burned a lot of trust that this will be handled with a modicum of competence or compassion. I don't personally have kids, but the parents I know are very reasonably at their breaking points over how poorly-managed and dogmatic school closures have been. That excludes those whose kids attend or started to attend private schools, whose immunity to the cacophony of Discourse means that they've handled the risk of Covid sanely and compassionately. I'm as annoyed as anyone at Covid denialists, but in my urban coastal context, the neurotic hysterics of restrictionist fanatics has been a lot more salient. There's been a faction of the conversation that insists that making any space to discuss the costs of restrictions is denialism, and the excess restrictions driven by those people are exactly why there's zero capacity left for NPIs like lockdown or school closures during a period where they would actually be helpful.

watwut 5y ago
Afaik, Amerika had super strong opposition to any lockdowns or measure from the start. There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. It is not backslash to any real policy, it is people who are against those having exact same opinions as they had the whole time.
- bnralt 5y ago
  Schools here were completely remote for 10 months (mid-March 2020 until the end of January 2021), then part time for the next few months, only going back to full time this past fall. Now they seem intent on being full time, even though cases now are much higher than when they had kept the schools closed or part time (hospitalizations are also close to the highest they've been).
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. "America" is 300 million people and 50 separate states in a federal system. The reflexive urge to treat it as a single entity is central to the problem I'm discussing. On the more functional side, the lack of border controls between states in a federal system made tamping cases down to minimal levels a big challenge. The entire world settled into an equilibrium of calibrating restrictions (both via policy and individual behavior) based on case numbers. In the US, national numbers drove much of this conversation, treating a continent-spanning nation as if it was epidemiologically equivalent to Belgium. > There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. just a couple of examples that I'm personally familiar with: - California was under a statewide stay-at-home order from March 2020 to January 2021 (by contrast, France lifted their lockdown from May to October) - San Francisco public schools were closed for over a year, and much of the US has been extreme about school closures. UK schools have never entirely shut down, and across Europe schools have been dramatically more open than across the US. You're not wrong that American restrictions have generally been lighter, but this elides the many individual pockets with unnecessary NPIs based on case rates in irrelevant parts of the country. Schools are the most dramatic example of this, but things like spring 2020 lockdowns based on a pandemic that was limited to the Northeast at the time set us up for the heavy resistance to restrictions we saw in many states when they were actually hit in the summer (helped along by El Presidente's abuse of the bully pulpit).

bertil 5y ago

Remote can be difficult if you have more members of the family than computers and rooms. That can seem absurd to you and me (I have five computers plus three smartphones and probably a tablet somewhere, for two people) but in many families, ressources are more scarce than that. Having my partner (medical doctor, so working out of the home most of the time) take a call during one of my meeting is frustrating, but it happens once a month. Eight hours a day can’t go smoothly. There are more issues with younger kids who need supervision on this side of the screen, might fight with their siblings, etc. My sister has three boys (8, 10 and 12 y.o.) and she just can’t cope with the cabin fever. The lack of structured exercise seems a problem too. Finally, in some cases, school offers free meals to families who need it. I feel like that could be substituted with a more universal service, but no one knows who can do that (has the time, budget, PPE, etc.).

ldoughty 5y ago

In short, everyone needs kids in schools... (Not saying this is a good thing, just thinking it through as the situation is right now, assuming no changes) Parents who are rejoining the workforce can't take 4-6 weeks of with no notice to babysit their kids again... But they also can't afford to stop working. Businesses can't afford to lose workers, it continues the strain on the system which raises wages and threatens the small (and medium) businesses going under... It's a crappy situation that society isn't willing to actually address because the political theater is in the middle of a power struggle... A business-minded politician would see that vaccination (or mandatory masks and testing) is the key to business returning to normal... but the politics of this is a huge driver of power shifts that hit a larger cross section of society than most topics... If you can't afford your kid to be home, because you need your job to pay bills... Then you don't want schools closed, and there's one political party that promises that right now.

fnord123 5y ago
To underline this point, the debate pretends to be about education but it's about babysitting children. Day care for older kids.
Aerroon 5y ago
>Parents who are rejoining the workforce can't take 4-6 weeks of with no notice to babysit their kids again... Why do you need a babysitter for a school-aged child? OK, maybe if the kid is below 7, but 7 and up should be more than capable of being alone at home. Entire nations do exactly that. In Estonia 7 year olds are expected to go to school on their own and come back home. At home they will likely be alone (or with their siblings) until their parents get home from work.
- recursive 5y ago
  All of my school aged kids are below seven. They absolutely can not handle themselves on their own. There are many like me.

michaelt 5y ago

> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. As I understand it, students can minimise their online class and play computer games or browse the web instead. And young children aren't exactly known for their self-control, even if some of us had good self-control at that age. A teacher who finds 5% of students don't respond when called upon might be able to focus on them; but if 95% of students don't respond, their powers are very limited. IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than reopening restaurants, office buildings, universities, hairdressers or gyms.

ajross 5y ago
> IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than Uh... schools are open. No one has closed schools in this nation. The debate here is whether or not having open schools this month, during the omicron wave, is helping or hurting. The evidence in the linked article is that schools in NYC have organizationally broken down and that no meaningful education is happening anyway. Because it's very difficult to run a school when 5-10% of the population is actively sick. (Though the silver lining here is that we're clearly getting to a true "pan" pandemic with omicron, and still not seeing evidence of significant health care overload or increased death rates. It remains possible that we've dodged a giant bullet with this variant.)
- Kye 5y ago
  Hospitalization and death lags infection by quite a while.
  - ajross 5y ago
    Death rate peaks happen about three weeks after case load peaks. This has been very consistent through the pandemic (at least everywhere that has good test reporting), you can play with graphs at https://91-divoc.com/ https://91-divoc.com/ or elsewhere to see the effect. Certainly if omicron had the same behavior as previous variants, we'd know by now. Continued worries aren't about severity lag, but about whether or not there's something else different about omicron. It's worth being safe and cautious. But nonetheless the best evidence we have says that this is probably a very safe variant and a near-best-case outcome (i.e. everyone gets sick rapidly and we reach herd immunity rapidly with minimal severe cases, vs. everyone "eventually" getting delta with much worse outcomes).

aqme28 5y ago

It perfectly illustrates how there are two types of quarantine lockdowns-- the kind enforced by the government or policy, and the defacto kind that happens organically when too many people are sick or afraid of getting sick. There's a false belief out there in this debate that if we don't have an enforced lockdown, we won't get a defacto one.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago
That's true, but we also shouldn't characterize this as a defacto one. Insane quarantine regulations basically prevent teachers from coming to school at all if they have even been in contact with anyone who later tested positive, whether or not they are sick, test negative, or have 3 shots. If we saw this same situation sans government regulations then we could conclude it was organically spawned, but that isn't the case here.
- aqme28 5y ago
  Those “insane regulations” are not at play though, if you read OP. They hand out COVID tests and send home the kids who are positive.

pibechorro 5y ago

Public schools main function is subsidized day care since the vast majority of parents both work. Kids hate remote learning. Its awful looking at a screen, bored, for hours day after day. They dont perform well. Kids need other kids interactions. Many substitute teachers are not being allowed to work because they dont want the never ending vaccine regime. I know 3 who did it full time and no longer because of it. Omnicron being so weak is the perfect time to end the lockdowns and security theater. Get everyone exposed so we can develop nation wide natural immunity, which actually works, and move on with life. Its been close to two years of this madness. Teen suicide is at an all time high, enough is enough. If teachers don't want to teach, quit, there are many people who would love their position waiting in the sidelines.

Glyptodon 5y ago

It's not "acceptable" because average families can't deal with their kids being home. This pandemic has revealed that for a large swath of kids home is a toxic environment actively destroying their potential. Add to this the terrible online learning implementations that are basically "beg to show up for attendance and then hope they participate" ...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I guess this is my followup question is, would your opinion change if we replaced “remote learning” with “no school”? Remote learning largely doesn’t work, and I think the fact that it’s seen as an option is warping the conversation. Now, maybe schools really should close even if remote learning was off the table, because the situation described in the link is quite dire. But see, then I look around, and I see that indoor dining is still open, movie theaters are still open, and a significant portion of Broadway is still open. Schools seem more important than all of that stuff. Maybe we should figure out whatever it is the restaurants are doing?

caddemon 5y ago
Do you consider cramming 14 classes worth of students in to an auditorium for "study hall" an education?
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  No. I'm asking why the public schools are in this state while restaurants seem to be operating normally, and a lot of private schools seem to be operating normally. I can imagine some perfectly reasonable answers. If it's an unsolvable, we should close the schools, and maybe shorten next year's summer break or something. But I do think having "remote learning" as a dangling option is warping the discussion. It's not a real fix.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kmos17 5y ago

remote is fine for parents who can work from home, but what about others with young children?

freewilly1040 5y ago

> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. Because "remote learning" is a joke. I volunteered a bit in a virtual high school classroom. The teacher running it is making a frankly heroic effort to keep her students in the school system at all. But no one was engaged, cameras were off, students regularly don't show up at all or drop off in the middle of class. These are comparatively adults compared to younger grades.

caddemon 5y ago
Did you read the OP? What they are doing in school right now is also a joke!
- freewilly1040 5y ago
  I did. Here's the line that stuck out to me: > One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. I suggest fixing the ludicrously miscalibrated risk assessment of omicron as a better route. How many of these legions of absent teachers even have symptoms?
  - another_story 5y ago
    The way schools are run, if even 5% of a district is absent at a single time things start to get tight. If it's 10% then you'll experience serious disruption. Teachers in the US usually have 80% of their time spent spent teaching with 20% prep and duties (lunchroom or recess). Now you get a few people out with no subs available and you have teachers combining classes or covering others, leaving no prep time or unmanageable classroom sizes. Add to that a room of kids preoccupied with covid concerns and unable to concentrate.
  - objectivetruth 5y ago
icedchai 5y ago
I don't think it has much to do with "learning." School is basically a babysitting / daycare service. They need the kids in school so the parents can work. At least the ones not privileged enough to "work from home" on a permanent basis, like many of us are here. Remote work is often a joke, too. Many, many people are completely checked out, burnt out after having to endure too many mentally draining and often pointless zoom meetings. I know several folks planning to drop out of the work force for a while, when (if?) we return to a semblance of normality. That'll push salaries even higher for the ones who remain.

ransom1538 5y ago

"I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable." What about kindergarten? Teaching 20+ students 5-6 years olds through zoom??? - seems like a fools errand. This could be their most important years for learning. "The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers." Everyone will get covid. Period. Just get it. You might get it once per year - but that is true for the entire human race. Give up on logistics the war is lost. "We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks." Maybe for this variant? What about the next? Just keep children on zoom?

caddemon 5y ago
Have you had COVID? Good luck teaching a room full of 6 year olds with active symptoms. This is what people are essentially asking for right now, at least in certain districts where 10%+ of the teaching staff are out with symptomatic COVID.
- ransom1538 5y ago
  I had covid. My kids had covid. My parents had covid. My neighbors had covid. My cat had covid (snotting - no test). You will get covid. The war is lost. Unless, you move to northern Alaska and do no visit shops - and use the land. But that is death.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    I think you're missing my point. It's not about avoiding COVID right now. It's about the fact too many teachers have it simultaneously and do not feel well enough to teach.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      I think there's a gap in the assumption of good-faith somewhere in this chain.