Person making the claim needs to comeup with "the evidence" not the other way around.

So when should schools be opened according to this?

Hope this administration follows common sense.

EDIT: would love to know why anyone would downvote this. Seems uncontroversial to people who aren't anti-vax.

She isn't focusing on zoom for 15 minutes. She can barely use the track pad to unmate herself.

People who don't want to be at things ruin those things for people who do want to be there in every cross section of society.

These passive aggressive kids who try to dismantle the class need to be removed from good students. People online demand that teachers be like part superhero, part hilarious talk show host they don’t realize how exhausting it is to hold back 20-30 kids day after day for that one kid or group who hate going to school and only want to ruin the day for everyone else.

We can all admit that there are some toxic people at the office yet to suggest as much with children is heavily frowned upon. I now have a live and let live approach to these specific kids. They can waste time, zone out, even chat with their buddies but as soon as they cross the line into bothering someone else then I must intervene.

It’s really difficult to make everyone happy. It’s so wild to me how some kids will love me while others will view me as like some kind of antagonist in a Charles Dickens story no matter how much I try to win them over. They just don’t want to be there.

We decided as a society that not only is education valuable for people, it's a human right. So we, as a society, have failed if we fail to provide an education for our children.

Many children don't like going to school. Some subset of children wind up acting out in a ton of different ways, but often it is disruptive to classes and wastes a ton of time. Their actions have a direct negative impact on the children who actually want to attend classes and learn. But education is the right of everyone, even children who actively resist school, so we don't remove them.

I get the point you're trying to make, that maybe our children would benefit more from just being allowed to be children, to be rowdy and play with friends, have freedom and activity instead of hours of lessons per day sitting in a chair. I get that. I even agree with it to a point.

But it's extremely asinine to suggest that somehow this is the fault of the well behaved kids or the kids who genuinely love school.

Some kids are diligent and eager to learn, but that doesn't mean keeping them on often absurd tasks or tasks with few applications in the real world is meaningful. Spending a decade optimizing for specific exams for specific institutions whose degrees are undergoing inflation at a rapid pace doesn't seem very efficient, but at least it's a compromise between various actors with various needs (parents needing a break, a lack of resources for each child, companies needing a quick if imperfect way to evaluate candidates, young people wanting an environment with people their own age etc.) Unfortunately, this compromise is being torn asunder by systemic forces that keep parts of it in place and make other parts increasingly unworkable.

I don't have a solution in mind right now but I don't think it's as simple as just dumber kids ruining it, although it obviously is a factor in what makes schools unpleasant

I do want to add that it's not necessary "dumb" kids who are ruining it. Just kids who don't want to be there, either because they don't want to participate or because they are bored, or because they aren't capable of sitting quietly for hours and hours, or they'd rather do something else, or whatever.

I hope I'm not coming across as bitter, because I am in fact quite optimistic. We have the technological means to spread education far more easily. Bright students are faced with a more competitive world but also have the tools to make progress on just about anything. With ML, it might even be possible to offer personalized courses and the attention that every individual kid or young adult might need.

Of course educating children is important but the current method of doing so is not the only possible one, and arguably prioritises the lifestyle of so-called teachers over that of children, parents, and taxpayers in general.

What if the lesson of COVID is that MOOCs are actually better? Or homeschooling is actually better? Why should we go on paying teachers who, despite their bleating, are actually very well compensated for what they do (when they bother to show up).

Statements like these are always interesting to me. Covid has killed half a million Americans in under a year. During that year, many parents are operating at reduced productivity, and their children are likely getting less out of their public education than usual. How do you compare these two statements to clarify that one is worse than the other? Obviously a known death toll is an easily identifiable bad thing. The other half of the equation is harder to quantify.

Some benefits include children being exposed to new forms of large group virtual communication. They are likely not well-adapted to them at this point - maturity and focus and motivation are all likely lacking, especially for rushed, poorly designed virtual systems. Then again, perhaps there will be a rubber band effect of refreshed engagement as children return to physical education in the year ahead.

That being said, I don't think you're expressing yourself well, or communicating with others well. What we saw in 2020 was a lot of lightly tested theories about what would and would not work, some being encouraged only to later be found to be incorrect. And the 2020 winter has been a complete flood of community transmission. So one approach might be to take a list of available actions to reduce transmission where possible, and hopefully cumulatively make a big difference, even if each action contributes a small amount.

We also know that educators are among Phase 1b for vaccine qualification, so we should be able to imagine that having a largely vaccinated population of teachers should improve both safety of opening schools physically, as well as the optics of doing so without putting our teachers at risk.

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2775875

There's also no evidence of schools that are open (nationally it's about 70% of them that are open to some extent or another) being large vectors for spreading COVID, so clearly precautions are being taken.

I was trying to make a point that how what is going in "GOP lead states" is relevant to my school.

Until vaccination rates hit a tipping point, putting people back together now will create a spike.

I do not really get the concern? So it takes longer for Timmy or Alice to get to multiplication?

I've had to quarantine my oldest since his younger brother is at risk (asthma), and the toll it took on him was insane. We talked with him constantly over voice and video calls, he interacted with his brother over Amazon Echo's drop-in feature and online games, and we tried to do everything we could to make it as 'fun' as we could. He still has nightmares about being locked away from his brother, or that he got his brother really sick.

Why are we pushing for widely opening schools when even half-occupancy is dangerous enough to cause this kind of trauma to a child?

I'm sure I'm gonna get asked why they're in person, but the reasons venture to more personal than I care to post, but in short, they're both in Spec. Ed and weren't coping with virtual learning at all, even after many months of trying to figure it out. Combine that with two working parents and you have a recipe for virtual schooling (or zoom school as my kids call it).

I say we shouldn't open schools until we can vaccinate school staff. Preferably also students, but I realize that since most kids are in low-risk groups that's likely far off. Perhaps for high-risk students with compromised respiratory systems.