A counter perspective: > My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. According to all of my friends who are teachers and don't have

A counter perspective: > My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. According to all of my friends who are teachers and don't have a Substack, this was actually the case every winter. Anyone who was teaching would get sick for several days a year, and then either soldier on, or call in sick as a last resort. Calling in sick was shamed by most school administrations, and none of them seemed to have the health of teachers as a priority. To me as an outside, the entire focus seemed to be basically, "Can someone keep the kids occupied for today until their parents come get them?" Maybe these are the kind of conversations that the author could also be having with her students? How teaching and childcare seem to be pretty much conflated in North America, and how most schools seem to cater to the whims of paranoid helicopter parents who like to think of "learning" as just another job that they can offload to a teacher, just like they offload their groceries to Instacart. Also, for older kids, the teacher could introduce them to how tests work, and how they can in theory play just fine with their friends if everyone gets tested daily. She could also go into the governmental and financial factors that make such tests widely available in Europe, but not North America. I understand that we're likely not going to continue with the current restrictions forever, but having a healthy understanding of germ theory and epidemiology among schoolchildren doesn't seem to be a total downside to me. The optimist in me says that overall this will lead to fewer kids coming in when they are sick (or at least masking when they do), fewer kids wiping their noses and then playing with their friends without handwashing, and a reduction in the spread of various infections.