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It will be year 3 of covid and this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. There

It will be year 3 of covid and this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. There is no perfect way to open schools, that much is certain after looking at other countries. But looking at the state of things, it doesn’t even seem like people are trying. Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly. Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Uruguay opened up schools early for its most vulnerable kids. The point being, there are different ways to solve the problem, but only in America, can we be stuck with the worst way to do it.

sylens 5y ago
I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely astonished to see that most administrators took the summer of 2020 off, assuming that everybody would be back in school that fall and things would be normal. They wasted several months of time that could've been spent planning contingencies and how remote learning might work better than just pure zoom. I always thought that schools should have considered something I saw done at a SANS training course once. While there were ~20 people in attendance, there were also several people attending virtually. Those virtual attendees had a surrogate in the room, whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor - as if they were there in person. This allowed the instructor to teach the course as he normally would, using a full projection screen, white board, and other materials. This surrogate method would have allowed teachers to be in their classrooms drawing on blackboards, using charts, posters, and other instructional aids they've spent years building, instead of having to pivot completely to PowerPoint. It's a shame to see absolutely no creativity or thinking outside the box among school administrators.
- another_story 5y ago
  Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.
  - jakeinspace 5y ago
    I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.
    - redisman 5y ago
      This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?
      - jakeinspace 5y ago
        That's what I meant by the right environment. I don't think it'd work well for the typical American public school.
  - alach11 5y ago
    Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.
      - LodeOfCode 5y ago
        The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each. Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  The other thing is the FDA intentionally delayed approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds till well after the school year start. At the same time the CDC was pushing hopium that vaccines alone would solve the problem. Trying to dangle normalcy in front of people to entice the nimrods to get vaxed. Same time conservative political leaders are using the issue as a political football.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Vaccines do get pretty close to solving it, ie it doesn't appear there are any other humanly possible solutions more effective than vaccines. (It is impossible to avoid being exposed to omicron or to get rid of it. Social distancing, lockdowns, etc, won't help this one. Vaccinating yourself/N95s/Pavloxid will help exposure not /matter/ though.)
- labster 5y ago
  Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily.
  - vibrato2 5y ago
  - yarky 5y ago
    > I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily. Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!
    - LodeOfCode 5y ago
      Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.
      - yarky 5y ago
        That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/
        astrange 5y ago
        Bayesians are atheists, they just happen to believe in Roko's Basilisk, which obviously is nothing like a reinvention of the devil. Remember not to think of it since we can't prove it won't torture an infinite number of clones of you forever!
- LodeOfCode 5y ago
  >whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised hand until the messages are marked as read. Of course there are some edge cases, like temporarily ignoring a child who's repeatedly raising their hand to troll, but this still seems like it could've easily been usable by the start of fall 2020. You'd likely still need a surrogate for young children and special ed students, but you could probably eliminate ~2/3rds of them (? I'm not sure how old children need to be before they can be expected to remember they need to mark their messages & how to do so)
  - sylens 5y ago
    The idea is that the teacher doesn't have to keep their eyes on a laptop screen and can mostly move about the classroom in the normal way that they would teach a lesson.
    - LodeOfCode 5y ago
      With the LED they'd only need to go look at the screen when there's a question. Actually, if you put the laptop in the middle of the front row, set the font size large, and used a clicker to go through them, the teacher could probably read the questions from anywhere at the front of the class. It'd still be an issue if you wanted to move about the back of the class while giving a lesson; but that's a hassle anyway, since the students' desks face the front, so IME it's rarely done.
- accountofme 5y ago
  I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.
  - lumost 5y ago
    I think we can demand more of our bureaucrats, if all we expect are Bogons - all we'll get are Bogons. Increasingly, the only thing US administrators can do is spend more money on problems without delivering any improved results. This pattern is common across Academia, Private, and Public institutions.
  - damiankennedy 5y ago
    I think its Vogons :-) and they do write poetry even if its the 2nd worst poetry in the galaxy.
    - accountofme 5y ago
      You are exactly correct :)
- marcind 5y ago
  I'd like to offer an alternative to the surrogate method... Many of the folks on our team have kids and, like so many people worldwide, were greatly disappointed by what happened in early 2020. We watched our kids suffer as this normally human-rich interaction was replaced with powerpoints and tiny talking heads. We decided to offer a solution of our own. Our team developed https://sharetheboard.com https://sharetheboard.com - an app which digitizes handwritten content in real time. The practical application here is that any analog surface/content can be shared simultaneously online, in real time. For teachers this is valuable for a number of reasons (direct feedback from educators): - it allows them to teach "as they always have" - standing in front of a board or writing on a notebook, etc. - they don't have to learn anything new - they don't have to buy new equipment - they can simultaneously address in-person and remote students (again, without "doing anything new") - they can work (in the same way) from home, when needed You'll note that many of the above points are of interest to school administrators as well. - No hardware + no learning curve = high adoption. - Mobile/scalable = fast deployment. - Low cost = well, low cost. For students (direct feedback from students): - the biggest plus is that this is as close to "like in class" as it gets: they get to see their teacher's natural body language, maintain eye contact, see the explanations evolve on a familiar medium (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.) - they can do more than ask questions: the app facilitates direct interaction with digitized content - they can focus on the lesson: the app allows you to easily save board contents any time What was meant to be a quick response to a problem is beginning to turn into an actual product. For better or for worse, some form of remote interaction seems to be in the cards (not only in education) for quite some time. Our goal is to help make it a more real/physical experience, despite being shared remotely. Interested in feedback from teachers, parents, and students on this thread.
bryans 5y ago
> Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Sweden suffered 1,504 deaths per million, while Finland had 295. To call them "similar" is disinformative, at best.
- darth_avocado 5y ago
  Not really, you are talking about overall, while the data I was presenting was mostly specific to the topic at hand: School kids. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-schools/swedens-health-agency-says-open-schools-did-not-spur-pandemic-spread-among-children-idUSKCN24G2IS https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    COVID is an asymptomatic spreader - it's difficult to conclude that the school kids didn't end up spreading the disease to older individuals.
  - fifilura 5y ago
    Note that that article is very old, July 2020, the beginning of the pandemic. The picture since then is different than "Finland closed, Sweden open". Pretty sure most nordic countries have kept high school and below open most of the time.
  - nautilius 5y ago
    I didn't know school kids lived in a vacuum, I'd have thought most go home to their families after school, where, you may have guessed it, there are other people to be infected.
- orbifold 5y ago
  The end point matters, we can’t be sure what the final death toll per Million will be in Finnland or Sweden.
  - 5y ago
labster 5y ago
If students only come in every other day, schools will only receive 50% funding in the US. In Japan, schools are often privately funded, but a solution that cuts public funding of education by half in the US is a non-starter. It would likely take a constitutional amendment in California to change the school budget formula. But we’re not going to have a third year of COVID anyway. Nearly everyone is going to catch the omicron in the next couple months, and by April we’ll have enough herd immunity to reopen everything.
- ericcumbee 5y ago
  The way around it is students "Went" to school 5 days a week. somedays they were on campus, and some days they were remote learning. I know of several schools in my immediate area that implemented such a system.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  Dumb question and I realize it may be. I've seen that said before, "Nearly everyone is going to catch omicron within the next 2 to 6 months"; the range changes both the quote is similar. I haven't really seen a why, it just seems to be a given. I know it's more virulent, but why is everyone going to have it so soon?
  - Laforet 5y ago
    Virulence refers to the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. Omicron is not more virulent. If anything it is likely to be much less virulent as it lacks the ability to infect lung tissue. On the other hand because the infection is now concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, patients are much more likely to exhale and spread the virus. On top of that, the virus has sufficiently mutated thus existing vaccines and prior infections have very limited protection. Combined with the lack of ventilation and increased time spent indoors in winter, this translates to more infections. I don't know whether "everyone" is going to get it eventually. However I have heard anecdotes that multiple insular communities in the US that have largely avoided the previous Covid strains are now badly afflicted by omicron. That is how infectious the virus is.
  - 5y ago
thelock85 5y ago
K-12 education in the U.S. is a perpetual blame game between admins, teachers, unions, and parents/guardians. Take this parent comment and substitute “academic progress”, “student engagement”, “socio-emotional”, “school safety”, etc for “covid” and you’ve entered the Ed reform debate of the last 20-30 years. Overcoming COVID in schools requires a collective problem-solving approach that is incompatible with the individualist (e.g. I’m just worried about my kid), class-segregated public school system that we’ve built. Administrators are culpable but I think their role is akin to an engineer building questionable technology. Why should they buck the system that puts food on their families table, especially when there is no guarantee that doing things differently will lead to a different ultimate outcome? Anecdotally this plays out in the increase of violence and violent threats toward principals, superintendents and school boards who are trying to institute science-backed rules for dealing with the virus.
fredgrott 5y ago
Look folks, yes I know I flunked out of BS Molecular degree but.. It will be a pandemic of 5 to ten years in total. In short words like you were 5, two factors converged to make this a reality: 1. World for the most part failed to lead like China an stop it cold fast and yes places like the USA gets fair blame for that. 2. Speed of mutations. Only have one of those factors then it would be far less years of a pandemic. That is not to say that there is not hope on the near future where we take either a booster or one pill per year to contain it however. But, 30 years ago a lady wrote a very famous book called.. the Coming Plaque.. She pointed out that it was not Science failing us towards facing the next pandemic but governments putting public health on a diet. and that books is at archive org https://archive.org/details/comingplaguenew000garr https://archive.org/details/comingplaguenew000garr Public health should be a number one Military spending budget as with 9 billion or more it is no longer something that is optional
- nyolfen 5y ago
  i think it would be fair to say that science failed us if this is due to a lab leak, which appears to be the case. science made by possible by public health funding, in fact.
  - olliej 5y ago
    It's not a lab leak. Seriously shut up with this conspiracy nonsense.
    - gremlinsinc 5y ago
      Playing devil's advocate...It could be a lab leak (I've seen conflicting stories, some seemingly reputable), but I agree it doesn't matter if it is or isn't...and it leans (more into conspiracy territory than not) what matters is there's this cat, and it's out of the bag, and vaccines protect against it, Ivermectin does jack shit and other 'cures' are bullshit unless sanctioned by the broader medical community (Pfizer's new pill as an example). Just TRUST your doctors, there's not a conspiracy to make everyone baren or something crazy, the vaccines are safer than going to a bar and having a few drinks. ironically Covid itself probably has a better chance of making one sterile than the vaccine as ACE receptors are in the testes, and other reproductive organs, so it could sterilize people who get bad infections.
timr 5y ago
> Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly. Citation? I am familiar with Japan's national Covid policies, and I have heard nothing of this. In general, Japan allows the prefectures to make their own decisions, and for issues like this, prefectures issue requests, not mandates. This paper suggests that even at the outset of the pandemic, the range of NPIs imposed by Japanese schools was quite variable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8 This news story from September 2020 explicitly says the exact opposite of what you're implying -- school districts operating at maximum capacity, and interventions varying based on what (for example) the PTA decided to pay for: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-schools-back-in-session-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-schools-back-in-session-c... "Typical classrooms in Japan would seem to flunk the 3C test, however. In Ms. Katayama's classroom, desks were spaced just enough to walk between. Regulations allow up to 40 children per classroom." "Last month, a panel of scholars and education researchers in Tokyo launched a petition to urge rapid adoption of smaller classes. Class size "should be reduced to 30 right now, and quickly, to 20," the panel said." "Japan's Riken research institute, working with Kobe University, argues that even large classes can be held safely — provided ventilation is sufficient." Japan is a big country, and -- just as with masks -- there's a fair amount of "orientalism" going on in the west, in terms of overgeneralization and stereotyping of their response to the virus. My only overarching observation is that they've been much more relaxed than we are in the US.
- darth_avocado 5y ago
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-coronavirus-schools-reopen/2020/06/06/9047be8c-a645-11ea-8681-7d471bf20207_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-coro...
  - timr 5y ago
    So a link from June 2020. The CBS news link I posted post-dates it, and contradicts it. Edit: actually, it doesn't even contradict it, per se. The articles are saying the same thing, but the WaPo story just tries to generalize from a single school, without admitting it. FTA: > At Hoyonomori Gakuen, a school in Tokyo’s Shinagawa ward, the new rules, including temperature checks, are set down in a 28-point plan designed by the school to minimize risks. So, again, the schools determine their response. This is also my understanding of the situation.
Blackthorn 5y ago
> the administrators What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens. Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hell are these people even getting paid for? They're a net negative value to education and society. Other countries were able to come up with protocols and standards. Yet here we are flailing around like magikarps.
- jonnydubowsky 5y ago
  "raisin d'oatmeal" is my new favorite saying.
  - dmarlow 5y ago
    I thought it was gold when I read it too. Its use was the pièce de résistance of that paragraph.
- fineIllregister 5y ago
  That seems backwards. My perspective is that we pay them to do the most routine, absolute bare minimum.
  - k_sze 5y ago
    If they stick to the routine and bare minimum, pretty soon they’ll be replaced by robots and software.
- q845712 5y ago
  I had a spouse in public school administration (until she burned out during the pandemic) and a parent who is still a public school teacher, so I have a little extra empathy - these people are just people. Some of them have just started a new role and didn't get to learn the basics before plunging into a pandemic. Some of them were a couple years from retirement and had been hoping to coast without any big changes. Some of them are great. Some of them are miserable. It's like any other collection of people, except maybe what's hard to remember if you're in tech is that in public bureaucracies there's no high pay, inherently "interesting problems," or prestige factor attracting the bright and ambitious; just job security and pensions attracting the risk averse and allowing anyone toxic who makes it in to remain. The district my wife left had double digits percentage turnover in their senior administrative roles during the pandemic - that would be enough to keep most organizations from operating to their full potential. Additionally, they really don't get to make their own decisions - not only is there a chain of command but there's a surprising number of things that have to wait for school board approval and quite a few sets of regulations to navigate. I've been in regulated tech like medical device, and my perception is that what the school admins deal with is a whole other level. While agreeing with everyone that "raisin d'oatmeal" is genius, and while also agreeing that it's clear that the US has basically failed at running public schools, please don't claim the administrators are somehow the sole agents of this. Like many things in this country it's born of a complicated web of political power being wielded in both good and bad faith by people with varying opinions of what would be best across many decades and scales.
watersb 5y ago
Our school district (in the USA) used much the same method as you describe for Japan: alternating days, 50% capacity, etc. Then the State Borad of Education mandated all schools closed. In our community, most of the parents in town are able to work from home. But its a very strange place, and I would expect worse outcomes most other places. Even so, serious psychiatric illness is tearing the kids up. The child clinical psychologists and the one remaining psychiatrist in town are double-booked, at least. It's been its own shade of awful. I don't think that there could have been a better response from the schools here. It's been very difficult to plan for anything more than six weeks out, and the kids who have returned to school have needed more care. And who is caring for the teachers? I don't know what the dropout rate would be for high schoolers, but many of these kids are just gone. Across all economic levels (the delicate proxy that we use, money lumped in with social status or prevalent parents' level of education and stuff).
dude187 5y ago
> this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. Not at all. This is the fault of all the other societal damage done in the name of "stopping COVID", it's the fault of the "public health officials". Schools are constrained by zero covid policies still clung to by anti-science public health, which mandate widespread testing followed by far reaching preventative isolation which bars health students from school. Imagine you have a class of 20. Each kids in that class goes to 6 other classes of 20, largely different kids. Now one "tests positive". The school is then tasks by "public health" to find who sat near that kid in each and every class, and "quarantine" all of those kids. Rinse and repeat, ever. single. case. Many schools have realized this is unsustainable absurdity and rightfully stopped complying, but the more "stay safe" they are, the more they comply. Consequently, the less those schools are able to stay open and effective. The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.
- unionpivo 5y ago
  > The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling. Just curious, what would you suggest ? Because as far as I can tell there are no good solutions. I suppose the difference between our countries is that until university, you get put into class with 30 people, and do all the classes together. There are some cases when you can have different additional classes, but thats kind of limited to couple of hours a week, and would not be that hard to just leave off
Jansen312 5y ago
The problem is there is no competition for the admins jobs. This is why voucher for charters would improve these. You need somekind of feedback mechanism to exterminate bad admins from their job. Unfortunately most people people deserve these kind of admins when they constantly vote in the "wrong" rep. I moved to other states now that remote jobs are very conducive to coders.

sylens 5y ago

I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely astonished to see that most administrators took the summer of 2020 off, assuming that everybody would be back in school that fall and things would be normal. They wasted several months of time that could've been spent planning contingencies and how remote learning might work better than just pure zoom. I always thought that schools should have considered something I saw done at a SANS training course once. While there were ~20 people in attendance, there were also several people attending virtually. Those virtual attendees had a surrogate in the room, whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor - as if they were there in person. This allowed the instructor to teach the course as he normally would, using a full projection screen, white board, and other materials. This surrogate method would have allowed teachers to be in their classrooms drawing on blackboards, using charts, posters, and other instructional aids they've spent years building, instead of having to pivot completely to PowerPoint. It's a shame to see absolutely no creativity or thinking outside the box among school administrators.

another_story 5y ago
Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.
- jakeinspace 5y ago
  I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.
  - redisman 5y ago
    This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?
    - jakeinspace 5y ago
      That's what I meant by the right environment. I don't think it'd work well for the typical American public school.
- alach11 5y ago
  Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.
    - LodeOfCode 5y ago
      The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each. Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.
Gibbon1 5y ago
The other thing is the FDA intentionally delayed approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds till well after the school year start. At the same time the CDC was pushing hopium that vaccines alone would solve the problem. Trying to dangle normalcy in front of people to entice the nimrods to get vaxed. Same time conservative political leaders are using the issue as a political football.
- astrange 5y ago
  Vaccines do get pretty close to solving it, ie it doesn't appear there are any other humanly possible solutions more effective than vaccines. (It is impossible to avoid being exposed to omicron or to get rid of it. Social distancing, lockdowns, etc, won't help this one. Vaccinating yourself/N95s/Pavloxid will help exposure not /matter/ though.)
labster 5y ago
Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily.
- vibrato2 5y ago
- yarky 5y ago
  > I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily. Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!
  - LodeOfCode 5y ago
    Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.
    - yarky 5y ago
      That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/
      - astrange 5y ago
        Bayesians are atheists, they just happen to believe in Roko's Basilisk, which obviously is nothing like a reinvention of the devil. Remember not to think of it since we can't prove it won't torture an infinite number of clones of you forever!
LodeOfCode 5y ago
>whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised hand until the messages are marked as read. Of course there are some edge cases, like temporarily ignoring a child who's repeatedly raising their hand to troll, but this still seems like it could've easily been usable by the start of fall 2020. You'd likely still need a surrogate for young children and special ed students, but you could probably eliminate ~2/3rds of them (? I'm not sure how old children need to be before they can be expected to remember they need to mark their messages & how to do so)
- sylens 5y ago
  The idea is that the teacher doesn't have to keep their eyes on a laptop screen and can mostly move about the classroom in the normal way that they would teach a lesson.
  - LodeOfCode 5y ago
    With the LED they'd only need to go look at the screen when there's a question. Actually, if you put the laptop in the middle of the front row, set the font size large, and used a clicker to go through them, the teacher could probably read the questions from anywhere at the front of the class. It'd still be an issue if you wanted to move about the back of the class while giving a lesson; but that's a hassle anyway, since the students' desks face the front, so IME it's rarely done.
accountofme 5y ago
I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.
- lumost 5y ago
  I think we can demand more of our bureaucrats, if all we expect are Bogons - all we'll get are Bogons. Increasingly, the only thing US administrators can do is spend more money on problems without delivering any improved results. This pattern is common across Academia, Private, and Public institutions.
- damiankennedy 5y ago
  I think its Vogons :-) and they do write poetry even if its the 2nd worst poetry in the galaxy.
  - accountofme 5y ago
    You are exactly correct :)
marcind 5y ago
I'd like to offer an alternative to the surrogate method... Many of the folks on our team have kids and, like so many people worldwide, were greatly disappointed by what happened in early 2020. We watched our kids suffer as this normally human-rich interaction was replaced with powerpoints and tiny talking heads. We decided to offer a solution of our own. Our team developed https://sharetheboard.com https://sharetheboard.com - an app which digitizes handwritten content in real time. The practical application here is that any analog surface/content can be shared simultaneously online, in real time. For teachers this is valuable for a number of reasons (direct feedback from educators): - it allows them to teach "as they always have" - standing in front of a board or writing on a notebook, etc. - they don't have to learn anything new - they don't have to buy new equipment - they can simultaneously address in-person and remote students (again, without "doing anything new") - they can work (in the same way) from home, when needed You'll note that many of the above points are of interest to school administrators as well. - No hardware + no learning curve = high adoption. - Mobile/scalable = fast deployment. - Low cost = well, low cost. For students (direct feedback from students): - the biggest plus is that this is as close to "like in class" as it gets: they get to see their teacher's natural body language, maintain eye contact, see the explanations evolve on a familiar medium (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.) - they can do more than ask questions: the app facilitates direct interaction with digitized content - they can focus on the lesson: the app allows you to easily save board contents any time What was meant to be a quick response to a problem is beginning to turn into an actual product. For better or for worse, some form of remote interaction seems to be in the cards (not only in education) for quite some time. Our goal is to help make it a more real/physical experience, despite being shared remotely. Interested in feedback from teachers, parents, and students on this thread.

bryans 5y ago

> Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Sweden suffered 1,504 deaths per million, while Finland had 295. To call them "similar" is disinformative, at best.

darth_avocado 5y ago
Not really, you are talking about overall, while the data I was presenting was mostly specific to the topic at hand: School kids. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-schools/swedens-health-agency-says-open-schools-did-not-spur-pandemic-spread-among-children-idUSKCN24G2IS https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...
- nemothekid 5y ago
  COVID is an asymptomatic spreader - it's difficult to conclude that the school kids didn't end up spreading the disease to older individuals.
- fifilura 5y ago
  Note that that article is very old, July 2020, the beginning of the pandemic. The picture since then is different than "Finland closed, Sweden open". Pretty sure most nordic countries have kept high school and below open most of the time.
- nautilius 5y ago
  I didn't know school kids lived in a vacuum, I'd have thought most go home to their families after school, where, you may have guessed it, there are other people to be infected.
orbifold 5y ago
The end point matters, we can’t be sure what the final death toll per Million will be in Finnland or Sweden.
- 5y ago

labster 5y ago

If students only come in every other day, schools will only receive 50% funding in the US. In Japan, schools are often privately funded, but a solution that cuts public funding of education by half in the US is a non-starter. It would likely take a constitutional amendment in California to change the school budget formula. But we’re not going to have a third year of COVID anyway. Nearly everyone is going to catch the omicron in the next couple months, and by April we’ll have enough herd immunity to reopen everything.

ericcumbee 5y ago
The way around it is students "Went" to school 5 days a week. somedays they were on campus, and some days they were remote learning. I know of several schools in my immediate area that implemented such a system.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
Dumb question and I realize it may be. I've seen that said before, "Nearly everyone is going to catch omicron within the next 2 to 6 months"; the range changes both the quote is similar. I haven't really seen a why, it just seems to be a given. I know it's more virulent, but why is everyone going to have it so soon?
- Laforet 5y ago
  Virulence refers to the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. Omicron is not more virulent. If anything it is likely to be much less virulent as it lacks the ability to infect lung tissue. On the other hand because the infection is now concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, patients are much more likely to exhale and spread the virus. On top of that, the virus has sufficiently mutated thus existing vaccines and prior infections have very limited protection. Combined with the lack of ventilation and increased time spent indoors in winter, this translates to more infections. I don't know whether "everyone" is going to get it eventually. However I have heard anecdotes that multiple insular communities in the US that have largely avoided the previous Covid strains are now badly afflicted by omicron. That is how infectious the virus is.
- 5y ago

thelock85 5y ago

K-12 education in the U.S. is a perpetual blame game between admins, teachers, unions, and parents/guardians. Take this parent comment and substitute “academic progress”, “student engagement”, “socio-emotional”, “school safety”, etc for “covid” and you’ve entered the Ed reform debate of the last 20-30 years. Overcoming COVID in schools requires a collective problem-solving approach that is incompatible with the individualist (e.g. I’m just worried about my kid), class-segregated public school system that we’ve built. Administrators are culpable but I think their role is akin to an engineer building questionable technology. Why should they buck the system that puts food on their families table, especially when there is no guarantee that doing things differently will lead to a different ultimate outcome? Anecdotally this plays out in the increase of violence and violent threats toward principals, superintendents and school boards who are trying to institute science-backed rules for dealing with the virus.

fredgrott 5y ago

Look folks, yes I know I flunked out of BS Molecular degree but.. It will be a pandemic of 5 to ten years in total. In short words like you were 5, two factors converged to make this a reality: 1. World for the most part failed to lead like China an stop it cold fast and yes places like the USA gets fair blame for that. 2. Speed of mutations. Only have one of those factors then it would be far less years of a pandemic. That is not to say that there is not hope on the near future where we take either a booster or one pill per year to contain it however. But, 30 years ago a lady wrote a very famous book called.. the Coming Plaque.. She pointed out that it was not Science failing us towards facing the next pandemic but governments putting public health on a diet. and that books is at archive org https://archive.org/details/comingplaguenew000garr https://archive.org/details/comingplaguenew000garr Public health should be a number one Military spending budget as with 9 billion or more it is no longer something that is optional

nyolfen 5y ago
i think it would be fair to say that science failed us if this is due to a lab leak, which appears to be the case. science made by possible by public health funding, in fact.
- olliej 5y ago
  It's not a lab leak. Seriously shut up with this conspiracy nonsense.
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    Playing devil's advocate...It could be a lab leak (I've seen conflicting stories, some seemingly reputable), but I agree it doesn't matter if it is or isn't...and it leans (more into conspiracy territory than not) what matters is there's this cat, and it's out of the bag, and vaccines protect against it, Ivermectin does jack shit and other 'cures' are bullshit unless sanctioned by the broader medical community (Pfizer's new pill as an example). Just TRUST your doctors, there's not a conspiracy to make everyone baren or something crazy, the vaccines are safer than going to a bar and having a few drinks. ironically Covid itself probably has a better chance of making one sterile than the vaccine as ACE receptors are in the testes, and other reproductive organs, so it could sterilize people who get bad infections.

timr 5y ago

> Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly. Citation? I am familiar with Japan's national Covid policies, and I have heard nothing of this. In general, Japan allows the prefectures to make their own decisions, and for issues like this, prefectures issue requests, not mandates. This paper suggests that even at the outset of the pandemic, the range of NPIs imposed by Japanese schools was quite variable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8 This news story from September 2020 explicitly says the exact opposite of what you're implying -- school districts operating at maximum capacity, and interventions varying based on what (for example) the PTA decided to pay for: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-schools-back-in-session-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-schools-back-in-session-c... "Typical classrooms in Japan would seem to flunk the 3C test, however. In Ms. Katayama's classroom, desks were spaced just enough to walk between. Regulations allow up to 40 children per classroom." "Last month, a panel of scholars and education researchers in Tokyo launched a petition to urge rapid adoption of smaller classes. Class size "should be reduced to 30 right now, and quickly, to 20," the panel said." "Japan's Riken research institute, working with Kobe University, argues that even large classes can be held safely — provided ventilation is sufficient." Japan is a big country, and -- just as with masks -- there's a fair amount of "orientalism" going on in the west, in terms of overgeneralization and stereotyping of their response to the virus. My only overarching observation is that they've been much more relaxed than we are in the US.

darth_avocado 5y ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-coronavirus-schools-reopen/2020/06/06/9047be8c-a645-11ea-8681-7d471bf20207_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-coro...
- timr 5y ago
  So a link from June 2020. The CBS news link I posted post-dates it, and contradicts it. Edit: actually, it doesn't even contradict it, per se. The articles are saying the same thing, but the WaPo story just tries to generalize from a single school, without admitting it. FTA: > At Hoyonomori Gakuen, a school in Tokyo’s Shinagawa ward, the new rules, including temperature checks, are set down in a 28-point plan designed by the school to minimize risks. So, again, the schools determine their response. This is also my understanding of the situation.

Blackthorn 5y ago

> the administrators What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens. Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hell are these people even getting paid for? They're a net negative value to education and society. Other countries were able to come up with protocols and standards. Yet here we are flailing around like magikarps.

jonnydubowsky 5y ago
"raisin d'oatmeal" is my new favorite saying.
- dmarlow 5y ago
  I thought it was gold when I read it too. Its use was the pièce de résistance of that paragraph.
fineIllregister 5y ago
That seems backwards. My perspective is that we pay them to do the most routine, absolute bare minimum.
- k_sze 5y ago
  If they stick to the routine and bare minimum, pretty soon they’ll be replaced by robots and software.
q845712 5y ago
I had a spouse in public school administration (until she burned out during the pandemic) and a parent who is still a public school teacher, so I have a little extra empathy - these people are just people. Some of them have just started a new role and didn't get to learn the basics before plunging into a pandemic. Some of them were a couple years from retirement and had been hoping to coast without any big changes. Some of them are great. Some of them are miserable. It's like any other collection of people, except maybe what's hard to remember if you're in tech is that in public bureaucracies there's no high pay, inherently "interesting problems," or prestige factor attracting the bright and ambitious; just job security and pensions attracting the risk averse and allowing anyone toxic who makes it in to remain. The district my wife left had double digits percentage turnover in their senior administrative roles during the pandemic - that would be enough to keep most organizations from operating to their full potential. Additionally, they really don't get to make their own decisions - not only is there a chain of command but there's a surprising number of things that have to wait for school board approval and quite a few sets of regulations to navigate. I've been in regulated tech like medical device, and my perception is that what the school admins deal with is a whole other level. While agreeing with everyone that "raisin d'oatmeal" is genius, and while also agreeing that it's clear that the US has basically failed at running public schools, please don't claim the administrators are somehow the sole agents of this. Like many things in this country it's born of a complicated web of political power being wielded in both good and bad faith by people with varying opinions of what would be best across many decades and scales.

watersb 5y ago

Our school district (in the USA) used much the same method as you describe for Japan: alternating days, 50% capacity, etc. Then the State Borad of Education mandated all schools closed. In our community, most of the parents in town are able to work from home. But its a very strange place, and I would expect worse outcomes most other places. Even so, serious psychiatric illness is tearing the kids up. The child clinical psychologists and the one remaining psychiatrist in town are double-booked, at least. It's been its own shade of awful. I don't think that there could have been a better response from the schools here. It's been very difficult to plan for anything more than six weeks out, and the kids who have returned to school have needed more care. And who is caring for the teachers? I don't know what the dropout rate would be for high schoolers, but many of these kids are just gone. Across all economic levels (the delicate proxy that we use, money lumped in with social status or prevalent parents' level of education and stuff).

dude187 5y ago

> this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. Not at all. This is the fault of all the other societal damage done in the name of "stopping COVID", it's the fault of the "public health officials". Schools are constrained by zero covid policies still clung to by anti-science public health, which mandate widespread testing followed by far reaching preventative isolation which bars health students from school. Imagine you have a class of 20. Each kids in that class goes to 6 other classes of 20, largely different kids. Now one "tests positive". The school is then tasks by "public health" to find who sat near that kid in each and every class, and "quarantine" all of those kids. Rinse and repeat, ever. single. case. Many schools have realized this is unsustainable absurdity and rightfully stopped complying, but the more "stay safe" they are, the more they comply. Consequently, the less those schools are able to stay open and effective. The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.

unionpivo 5y ago
> The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling. Just curious, what would you suggest ? Because as far as I can tell there are no good solutions. I suppose the difference between our countries is that until university, you get put into class with 30 people, and do all the classes together. There are some cases when you can have different additional classes, but thats kind of limited to couple of hours a week, and would not be that hard to just leave off

Jansen312 5y ago

The problem is there is no competition for the admins jobs. This is why voucher for charters would improve these. You need somekind of feedback mechanism to exterminate bad admins from their job. Unfortunately most people people deserve these kind of admins when they constantly vote in the "wrong" rep. I moved to other states now that remote jobs are very conducive to coders.