It’s not about them sitting in chairs, it’s about the environment focused on the teacher, the discussions going on around them about the material, about the questions other students are raising that someone might have that might not had etc… It’s a whole environmental factor that are effective things to help kids stay focused and stay in tune that’s a significant loss for remote learning at home where they have massively more distractions and a much easier time going to them.
I have done online as well. My son did middle school over 10 years ago.
And I would say that learning environment is overrated. They can use zoom. They can have discussions on discord that would far exceed the average class. There are all sorts of tools they could use. Again, the big issue is lack of preparation, imo. I would expect online instruction this year to be terrible, but that won’t mean that online instruction itself is terrible.
I won’t claim to have read the articles, but I don’t think they address the question based on a quick skim. Your paragraph certainly doesn’t. Perhaps I’m not communicating clearly, I am pretty worked up. :)
Clearly there are tests that could easily be implemented that would help enormously. But this country has its collective head so far up its collective ass its looking out of its own collective nostrils, so are there any US schools actually looking at doing that? If one of the articles does address that, I apologize. A search on relevant terms didn’t seem to turn it up.
Education research disagrees with you pretty strenuously on that.
Sharing work is extremely difficult using current tech, unless all the students happen to have a tablet.
The kids are all fucking squares anyway. Have you seen them on TikTok, prancing around like a bunch of spastic girl’s blouses? Fuck 'em. They were never gonna amount to anything.
And anyway, whose idea was it to have a bunch of fucking kids? An earlier bunch of fucking squares, who should have known better, that’s who. Gen-X acting like Boomers, driving little brats to fencing practice and giving them ginseng supplements. I blame them for this whole mess.
The paper has only been out since the end of June, and there’s a strong push by a number of people to try and break the logjam at the FDA that requires a test to be close to the accuracy of the gold standard PCR test. The idea is that if you aren’t detecting all cases, but are testing many times (lots of independent tests), then even if you don’t catch a person who’s just been infected and is becoming more infectious (but is still below the limit of detection on day 1) you catch them on day 2.
Imagine testing everyone in the US tomorrow. You only catch 1/2 the people who are infectious, but we quaranteen them and treat appropriately. Then you test again the NEXT day and catch half again. This snowballs the way we want very quickly.
I think it’s worth the 5-10 minutes to read either the NYT article or the Time article.
Yup, I got all that. And seriously, thank you both for the articles and for the explanation, your posts are a big part of the reason I read these threads. I’ve now read the NYT article.
So right now schools wouldn’t be planning to implement it because it doesn’t pass FDA muster, despite the obvious statistical argument that with daily testing it absolutely gets the job done. So we’d need to get past that hurdle before school started AND have enough time to implement the strategy. I could be misunderstanding the time line but doesn’t that mean we’re completely fucked for the fall?
If anything, this seems like a reason to go all online until this sort of testing apparatus can be put in place.
Through this interstate compact, states are coming together to ramp up the use of rapid antigen testing to help better detect outbreaks more quickly, and expand long-term testing in congregate settings such as schools, workplaces, and nursing homes.
Rapid but lower accuracy testing was also explained well on the This Week in Virology podcast 640. It’s shocking we haven’t adopted that yet. But it took us 3-4 months longer to approve pooled testing, which is regularly done by the USDA for animals and has been used to 10x China’s daily testing throughput since April. The US needs to learn by painful error on literally every step of this pandemic…
Yup, that’s the podcast. I actually linked it in my post. And yeah, it seems like there’s definitely some hangups on diagnostic accuracy where a single test has to be incredibly accurate, instead of making up for individual accuracy with overwhelming numbers.
I feel like it’s worth at least trying to raise awareness that this is a possibility, and as they say “The math checks out”. We certainly aren’t going to make it where we need to be with single PCR tests.
You are definitely who I heard of TWiV from when that aired a few weeks ago. Just venting about the gap between good scientific policy suggestions and reality.
Would love to see KY hop on that train.
This is actually really hopeful, I just worry that there’s nowhere near enough time to implement it before most schools reopen.
I also just assume the anti-mask and anti-vaccine crowd will find an excuse to be anti-test, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there.
The great thing about these tests is that they are really easy to produce. If we had some competent leadership we could scale this up very quickly. Maybe the few states taking the lead ahead of schools opening will be able to lead the way.
My daughters high school is shutting down for the first quarter.
My younger kids school is going to half days to break the class size in half. Masks will be required.
My daughter is very independent and I know she will be fine with at home school. My younger kids really struggled with it at the end of last year so them being back in a class is going to be good for them education wise. Obviously not ideal in terms of exposure to the virus. Luckily it is a small school (110 students) so with the half days chance of exposure should be minimized. I would think the odds of them/us getting sick and having any major health issues because of it would hopefully be pretty small in this case.
Disenfranchising yourself to own the libs:
They offered to let the guy vote outside or in his car but he refused. He said he showed up to vote against Medicare expansion in Missouri.
Nothing of value was lost.
Oh please let that be a trend.
Let me rephrase. Of course a positive, nurturing environment is an amazing thing that would be difficult to achieve (maybe impossible) with remote learning. However, that doesn’t mean learning remotely can’t work. That environment isn’t required to learn, even though it is better. Again, these aren’t ideal times.
Half the students in my sister’s school have one device - their cellphones. Imagine writing an essay on a cellphone while probably trying to get some money to keep the family afloat since unemployment is ~20% in NYC right now. My sister’s school fortunately is so poor (no soap, they aren’t going to have money for partitions) they will remain closed this fall. They may get laid off thought.
Going to the factory, those tiny hands are very useful.
The discussions around teaching always astound me, it’s like everyone forgets their own experience and that of their colleagues, especially STEM workers. Of course, this time, it’s possible it was much more different due to being a very different country, but still, there’s no one size fits all for combinations of subject, student and teacher.