Covidiots thread

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fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
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Appeal to extremes, another logical fallacy.

I find it kind of funny that you think me asking your same question back at you is a logical fallacy. Makes you think, huh?

You're the one that specifically said that dead children was worth a better education, I just asked how many. Nobody brought up shit about cars except you.

Ironic considering we've made changes to playgrounds to specifically increase their safety.

We sure do! Perhaps relatedly, we've also undertaken a lot of steps to make in-person schooling safer! Regardless, kids die on playgrounds every year, just like some kids will die from COVID this year. How many dead kids are playgrounds worth to us? Clearly some!

Relative to peers, if all peers are in the same boat, there's no gradient. See: all of human history.

First, this would indicate that we should stop teaching people entirely, haha. After all, if we're all equally dumb what does it matter?

Second, their peers when they are adults are all other adults, many of whom didn't miss years of education!

Ahh so now it's not proof positive, it's just a strong indicator. There's far more than a strong indicator that dead children cause a dramatic negative effect on the social fabric of society, so I'll take no dead kids over 'strong indicators'.
Now you're being ridiculous. Surely you knew going in that in education like any social indicator 'proof positive' is impossible to come by.

I'm sure you will take no dead kids, you've made that abundantly clear! My point is you aren't weighing the full costs of that decision.
 

mect

Platinum Member
Jan 5, 2004
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I don't think its reasonable to try to return to 0 deaths before we get back to normal, but I do think it is important to get to where we have our ICUs back under control. While it is unfair to the vaccinated to have to continue to make accommodations because of the unvaccinated, it is even more unfair to continue to overwhelm our healthcare workers and deny resources to non-covid related medical needs.

Schools are a tricky issue. At this point it is pretty clear that in general:
1) In person school is superior to virtual school, particularly for younger kids.
2) There are a significant number of parents that either don't have the means or are unwilling to significantly support their children for virtual schooling.
3) Many parents are actively teaching their kids not to observe proper protocols needed to minimize the spread of Covid in the classroom setting.
4) Vaccine requirements are leaving schools extremely short staffed for any form of education.
5) Even returning to in person classes, we can continue to expect large disruptions from classroom outbreaks.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
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Context. Nuance. Learn them.

Amusingly enough this is exactly what I was telling you to do.

You lost my respect in one fell swoop.

You know you never really think about what you have until you lose it. When I started today I had the respect of @Justinus at forums dot anandtech dot com and now it's gone, like tears in rain. If only I could adequately convey the shame and regret I feel that it's come to this.

ATPN - don't let this loss be for nothing, please learn from my cruel fate.
 

uclaLabrat

Diamond Member
Aug 2, 2007
5,632
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I think you are RADICALLY underestimating the damage done to children, especially young children, by not going to in-person school. They will likely be damaged for life.

The flu is deadlier to children than covid from my understanding, so should we cancel in person school entirely to save those lives?
Overall I think you're grossly overestimating the societal impact, especially to children, and moreover, it's incredibly difficult to quantify, which distorts the risk/benefit analysis. Saying Billy might have a harder time making friends or learned less about the Alamo is pretty fucking arbitrary, but that perceived risk is immediate; its impacting your kids, my kids, the kids next door, the kids in East buttfuck Texas.

Kids dying from covid is a remote problem. Almost no one knows a kid who's been killed by Covid so it's easier to discount emotionally. That said, it's up in the hundreds now that school is back in session. For perspective, all pediatric cancers combined kill roughly 2000 kids per year and covid may be well on it's way to surpassing that. Certainly the imminent approval of the pfizer vaccine for school-age kids will mitigate that risk, so holding tight until those vaccination rates jump by (hopefully) the end of year should be enough of a compromise.

I dont have any data on this (and I suspect no one does) but being outside of school could have benefits that are also not being accounted for. How many kids weren't sexually abused by faculty last year? How many kids weren't bullied? How many kids were subjected to more abuse at home as a result of the increased stress? No one knows that shit.

My perspective is heavily biased (and I recognize that) in that my daughter is autistic and also was diagnosed with cancer when she was 3. My kids have spent collectively less than 3 months total in school (in person) and in my opinion, people are blowing this social aspect of homeschooling way the fuck out of the water. We're keeping our kids home until they're all vaccinated, period. Will there be a social impact? Of course. But it will be generational in the same way that the depression or Spanish flu had an impact: its systematic and everyone will deal with it.

You can make up teaching time on the back end. We can develop programs to mitigate the isolation, improve mental health (hell we need to do that anyway), and make up for any cognitive deficits. Will it be 100% of baseline? Of course not. Will it be 99%? Who knows?

How many dead kids is that 1% worth? To me? Zero. Zero is my acceptance level.

I think (and have seen in my social circle) that a lot of parents are bitching about the isolation and taking "think of the children!" Approach that really just reflects their pandemic fatigue. And not gonna lie, I'm pretty dismissive of that. Suck it the fuck up, you're fine. I've done this for 4 years with minimal family support. No school. No daycare. My wife stays home so we have that privilege (and many dont). But much of the hubbub is just nonsense from.my perspective. You can't teach a dead child.
 
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manly

Lifer
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Socializing isn't about whether you keep in touch with someone you knew in third grade. It's about learning to interact with your peers in a healthy way.

Nor does it matter whether you remember what they told you to "rote memorize." That argument could just as easily justify no schooling at all.

Another point that is lost here is that homeschooling is not the same thing as remote learning. With home schooling, there is a parent present who is teaching the child. As I mentioned in an above post about my sister's experience, these kids were unsupervised by their parents, while she had the entire responsibility and it was nigh impossible as the kids were too distracted being at home, and she was at a disadvantage not being able to see them when they wandered off. Homeschool parents don't have those disadvantages.
I'm with you and fskimospy on this one. I don't have kids, but everybody knows that remote learning was basically a lost year for schoolchildren, particularly the youngest ones. And let's not kid ourselves, public schools are de facto day care for millions of families. Moms or dads are mostly not equipped to handle both WFH and teaching duties in the same work day. I won't get into how many lives you'd be willing to sacrifice to raise up the entire herd. But that isn't really the question. Worldwide, schools have conducted in-person learning, so the challenge for American schools is how to do so most safely in a pandemic. It's an extremely fragmented approach in the U.S., with each school district adopting its own standards. The absence of universal masking is an absolute shame.
 
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fskimospy

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Mar 10, 2006
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Overall I think you're grossly overestimating the societal impact, especially to children, and moreover, it's incredibly difficult to quantify, which distorts the risk/benefit analysis. Saying Billy might have a harder time making friends or learned less about the Alamo is pretty fucking arbitrary, but that perceived risk is immediate; its impacting your kids, my kids, the kids next door, the kids in East buttfuck Texas.

I don't think measurements of the literacy and numeracy of children are arbitrary. They are linked in this thread, so what makes you say I am overestimating them?

Kids dying from covid is a remote problem. Almost no one knows a kid who's been killed by Covid so it's easier to discount emotionally. That said, it's up in the hundreds now that school is back in session. For perspective, all pediatric cancers combined kill roughly 2000 kids per year and covid may be well on it's way to surpassing that. Certainly the imminent approval of the pfizer vaccine for school-age kids will mitigate that risk, so holding tight until those vaccination rates jump by (hopefully) the end of year should be enough of a compromise.

I think it's precisely the opposite - death is something that people fear very acutely right now and I think it's biasing their risk/reward analysis.

I think we are all going to be depressed when we see how low the vaccination rate for elementary age kids is, btw. I think the right answer is a full return to school for all kids with appropriate mitigation efforts in place.

I dont have any data on this (and I suspect no one does) but being outside of school could have benefits that are also not being accounted for. How many kids weren't sexually abused by faculty last year? How many kids weren't bullied? How many kids were subjected to more abuse at home as a result of the increased stress? No one knows that shit.

I agree it's possible there could be additional benefits from remote school but at least for vulnerable populations that are the most affected by the lost of in-person learning the school environment is often dramatically better than their home environment.

My perspective is heavily biased (and I recognize that) in that my daughter is autistic and also was diagnosed with cancer when she was 3. My kids have spent collectively less than 3 months total in school (in person) and in my opinion, people are blowing this social aspect of homeschooling way the fuck out of the water. We're keeping our kids home until they're all vaccinated, period. Will there be a social impact? Of course. But it will be generational in the same way that the depression or Spanish flu had an impact: its systematic and everyone will deal with it.

It sounds like you guys are reasonably well off and so the damaging effects of remote learning are probably not significant for your kids. Especially if your kid has autism, remote learning might be better in some ways? This is not the case for most poor black and hispanic kids though.

You can make up teaching time on the back end. We can develop programs to mitigate the isolation, improve mental health (hell we need to do that anyway), and make up for any cognitive deficits. Will it be 100% of baseline? Of course not. Will it be 99%? Who knows?

It's unlikely that we will be able to make up the learning lost here for poor and black/hispanic kids. It's probably permanent.

How many dead kids is that 1% worth? To me? Zero. Zero is my acceptance level.

Going to have to strongly disagree there, especially as lower incomes associated with learning loss decrease life expectancy. Again though, this is what I mean about the negatives being hard to see. A dead kid is dead today, if 100 people die early due to poverty down the road who is going to draw the chain of causality back here? Nobody.

I think (and have seen in my social circle) that a lot of parents are bitching about the isolation and taking "think of the children!" Approach that really just reflects their pandemic fatigue. And not gonna lie, I'm pretty dismissive of that. Suck it the fuck up, you're fine. I've done this for 4 years with minimal family support. No school. No daycare. My wife stays home so we have that privilege (and many dont). But much of the hubbub is just nonsense from.my perspective. You can't teach a dead child.
I am saying 'think of the children' and I'm someone who neither has nor wants kids. I think there is very real damage happening right now and people don't recognize it because it's slow moving. A dead kid is easy to see. Someone suffering permanent learning and income loss? Not so easy.
 
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[DHT]Osiris

Lifer
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I dont have any data on this (and I suspect no one does) but being outside of school could have benefits that are also not being accounted for. How many kids weren't sexually abused by faculty last year? How many kids weren't bullied? How many kids were subjected to more abuse at home as a result of the increased stress? No one knows that shit.
Don't forget, 2020 was the first year without a mass school shooting since '99, so we've got that going for us as well.
 
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MrSquished

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Kids should be in classrooms. Everything I've read backs that up, and it just makes sense as well. I'd say the vast majority of kids learn better in person. All the way from kindergarten through college.
 

woolfe9998

Lifer
Apr 8, 2013
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Fskimospy used the phrase "risk/reward analysis" above. I think this is a concept not being acknowledged in this thread by the "no dead kids are acceptable" crowd. The fact is, everything is a risk/reward analysis, at least if people are thinking straight.

Example. I read a study which said that if we lower the freeway speed limit by 20 mph, it would save the lives of 3000-4000 people every year. That presumably includes some children. So why don't we just do it? Indeed, if "no dead kids" is the standard, you'd think we'd just lower it to zero and outlaw cars.

But even just the 20 mph reduction, surely we should do at least that, right? Well we don't. In fact, nationwide speed limits have gone up these past 30 years. That is because when it takes too long to get from point A to point B, it is both an issue of economic efficiency (less time for work) or quality of life (less time with family/recreation.) And just plain old frustration impacting people's moods.

The fact is, we weigh and compare safety against other benefits every single day. As a society and as individuals. We take our children with us out on the freeway where there may be drunk drivers, to go to an amusement park for fun, when they'd technically be safer at home.

We weigh the probability of the bad occurrence (COVID) and how bad are the expected results (death), versus whatever is being sacrificed by the added quantum of safety. So when we talk about schools and COVID, we should be thinking about how many school children will die, but also what is the impact on the 99.999% who will not.

Regardless of how one comes out in that calculation, it's still a calculation we are all making, all the time. Which is why in the context of this discussion "no dead kids" sounds a lot like demagoguery to me.
 
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manly

Lifer
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Kids should be in classrooms. Everything I've read backs that up, and it just makes sense as well. I'd say the vast majority of kids learn better in person. All the way from kindergarten through college.
Socioeconomics plays a big role as well. Low income families often don't have broadband, and many don't have a PC capable of running videoconferencing. I'm sure remote learning worked out fine for the families in Palo Alto with teenagers. Meanwhile, in LAUSD (and most likely other urban school districts), IIRC something like half of students didn't even login for online sessions.

Fskimospy used the phrase "risk/reward analysis" above. I think this is a concept not being acknowledged in this thread by the "no dead kids are acceptable" crowd. The fact is, everything is a risk/reward analysis, at least if people are thinking straight.

Example. I read a study which said that if we lower the freeway speed limit by 20 mph, it would save the lives of 3000-4000 people every year. That presumably includes some children. So why don't we just do it? Indeed, if "no dead kids" is the standard, you'd think we'd just lower it to zero and outlaw cars.

But even just the 20 mph reduction, surely we should do at least that, right? Well we don't. In fact, nationwide speed limits have gone up these past 30 years. That is because when it takes too long to get from point A to point B, it is both an issue of economic efficiency (less time for work) or quality of life (less time with family/recreation.) And just plain old frustration impacting people's moods.

The fact is, we weigh and compare safety against other benefits every single day. As a society and as individuals. We take our children with us out on the freeway where there may be drunk drivers, to go to an amusement park for fun, when they'd technically be safer at home.

We weigh the probability of the bad occurrence (COVID) and how bad are the expected results (death), versus whatever is being sacrificed by the added quantum of safety. So when we talk about schools and COVID, we should be thinking about how many school children will die, but also what is the impact on the 99.999% who will not.

Regardless of how one comes out in that calculation, it's still a calculation we are all making, all the time. Which is why in the context of this discussion "no dead kids" sounds a lot like demagoguery to me.
By the standard of 0 child deaths, you'd infer at least one person in this thread wants to permanently shut down public schools. :p
 

pmv

Lifer
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Fskimospy used the phrase "risk/reward analysis" above. I think this is a concept not being acknowledged in this thread by the "no dead kids are acceptable" crowd. The fact is, everything is a risk/reward analysis, at least if people are thinking straight.

Example. I read a study which said that if we lower the freeway speed limit by 20 mph, it would save the lives of 3000-4000 people every year. That presumably includes some children. So why don't we just do it? Indeed, if "no dead kids" is the standard, you'd think we'd just lower it to zero and outlaw cars.

But even just the 20 mph reduction, surely we should do at least that, right? Well we don't. In fact, nationwide speed limits have gone up these past 30 years. That is because when it takes too long to get from point A to point B, it is both an issue of economic efficiency (less time for work) or quality of life (less time with family/recreation.) And just plain old frustration impacting people's moods.

The fact is, we weigh and compare safety against other benefits every single day. As a society and as individuals. We weigh the probability of the bad occurrence (COVID) and how bad are the expected results (death), versus whatever is being sacrificed by the added quantum of safety. So when we talk about schools and COVID, we should be thinking about how many school children will die, but also what is the impact on the 99.999% who will not.


Though when we do that "weighing" it takes place in a context of unequal political power. So with the speed limit thing in particular, the wishes of those who want to drive fast get a higher weighting than the wishes of those who live in the areas they drive through and whose children they tend to kill, because the former tend to be more affluent than the latter.

We should indeed remove cars from most urban streets, confine them to a few dedicated car routes. But it doesn't happen, not because of some pure "risk/reward analysis" but because of the balance of political power doens't allow it to happen. Even when speed limits are lowered by local government, the police specifically refuse to enforce them, because they tend to side with the motorist lobby.
(Edit, also, the motor lobby has a very loud voice in the media - whenever there's the slightest suggestion of restricting when or where or how fast motorists can drive in this city, the local talk radio presenters go ballistic - they tend to sound like a heroin addict who's just heard a proposal to take their access to drugs away).

Likewise it seems a little pointless to argue over some pure utilitarian calculation regarding reopening schools, because I doubt that's how it will be decided in practice, more likely it will come down to some sort of power struggle between the different parties with conflicting vested interests.

I agree with Fskimospy that the evidence seems to be that distance-learning increases the disparity in performance between children from wealthy or poor backgrounds, but on the other hand, the only person I know who nearly died of COVID was a teacher, who contracted it after being obliged to return to face-to-face teaching, and it seems clear that schools reopening increases the infection rate in the wider community, including among the vulnerable elderly relatives of those school children and their teachers. I guess it depends how much faith one puts in the vaccines to prevent school re-opening leading to an increase in cases.
 
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woolfe9998

Lifer
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Though when we do that "weighing" it takes place in a context of unequal political power. So with the speed limit thing in particular, the wishes of those who want to drive fast get a higher weighting than the wishes of those who live in the areas they drive through and whose children they tend to kill, because the former tend to be more affluent than the latter.

We should indeed remove cars from most urban streets, confine them to a few dedicated car routes. But it doesn't happen, not because of some pure "risk/reward analysis" but because of the balance of political power doens't allow it to happen. Even when speed limits are lowered by local government, the police specifically refuse to enforce them, because they tend to side with the motorist lobby.

Likewise it seems a little pointless to argue over some pure utilitarian calculation regarding reopening schools, because I doubt that's how it will be decided in practice, more likely it will come down to some sort of power struggle between the different parties with conflicting vested interests.

I agree with Fskimospy that the evidence seems to be that distance-learning increases the disparity in performance between children from wealthy or poor backgrounds, but on the other hand, the only person I know who nearly died of COVID was a teacher, who contracted it after being obliged to return to face-to-face teaching, and it seems clear that schools reopening increases the infection rate in the wider community, including among the vulnerable elderly relatives of those school children and their teachers. I guess it depends how much faith one puts in the vaccines to prevent school re-opening leading to an increase in cases.

No doubt the risk/reward analysis is distorted over various things such as unequal political power. But that is entirely irrelevant to my point, which was a critique of the entire notion that we can ever operate on a standard of absolute 100% safety, for children or anyone else. The fact is, we cannot. Not on a societal/policy level, or as individuals. Individuals pre-occupied with safety over all else will sit home and never do anything. Their children will become unsocialized hermits.

The problem is when people introduce "no dead kids" into the discussion, they are doing so to de-legitimize whoever they are arguing with, suggesting that anyone who tolerates any dead kids, no matter the tradeoff, is somehow morally inferior. It's hypocritical for anyone who has ever subjected their children to any risk above a statistical zero. And it's just a crock of shit.
 
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pmv

Lifer
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No doubt the risk/reward analysis is distorted over various things such as unequal political power. But that is entirely irrelevant to my point, which was a critique of the entire notion that we can ever operate on a standard of absolute 100% safety, for children or anyone else. The fact is, we cannot. Not on a societal/policy level, or as individuals. Individuals pre-occupied with safety over all else will sit home and never do anything. Their children will become unsocialized hermits.

The problem is when people introduce "no dead kids" into the discussion, they are doing so to de-legitimize whoever they are arguing with, suggesting that anyone who tolerates any dead kids, no matter the tradeoff, is somehow morally inferior. It's hypocritical for anyone who has ever subjected their children to any risk above a statistical zero. And it's just a crock of shit.


I don't disagree with that, as a general point. But the danger from re-opening schools is not so much 'dead kids' as 'dead grandparents of kids' and 'dead teachers'. As with re-opening everything else, it will lead to a general increase in cases of COVID in the wider community. Children don't tend to do 'social distancing' very well. It all comes down to whether one trusts the vaccination program to 'hold the line' when that happens, I think.

At the very least I hope they are doing all they can to, for example, improve ventilation and air-filtration in the classrooms?
 
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woolfe9998

Lifer
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I don't disagree with that, as a general point. But the danger from re-opening schools is not so much 'dead kids' as 'dead grandparents of kids' and 'dead teachers'. As with re-opening everything else, it will lead to a general increase in cases of COVID in the wider community. Children don't tend to do 'social distancing' very well. It all comes down to whether one trusts the vaccination program to 'hold the line' when that happens, I think.

At the very least I hope they are doing all they can to, for example, improve ventilation and air-filtration in the classrooms?

That argument you're making won the day for me last year, before vaccines. Not so this year. Those adults have the opportunity to be vaccinated, and with very few exceptions, there is no excuse for not doing so.

And yes, I know some very small number of people can't get the vaccine because of immune problems. I also know that some people who get the vaccine will die anyway. All this must be weighed in the risk/benefit. The presence of the vaccine changes the calculus for me. See the comments in my above posts.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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That argument you're making won the day for me last year, before vaccines. Not so this year. Those adults have the opportunity to be vaccinated, and with very few exceptions, there is no excuse for not doing so.

And yes, I know some very small number of people can't get the vaccine because of immune problems. I also know that some people who get the vaccine will die anyway. All this must be weighed in the risk/benefit. The presence of the vaccine changes the calculus for me. See the comments in my above posts.

If there were a reaction emoji short of 'like' but something like 'yeah, a valid argument even if I'm still not 100% sure I'm convinced', I'd click that. It's hard to judge apriori what the results will be of openning things up when a lot of people, but not everyone, have been vaccinated. And schools are the big one, as far as reopening things go, 'cos children are great at being disease vectors (up there with mosquitos). It's those who may suffer bad results despite being vaccinated that I'm nervous about.
 

Paratus

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The problem is the risk/reward analysis is not equivalent for each persons situation.

My kids started school last year (elementary, high school & college) entirely online. It was very rough. My college age kid struggled through several classes and was allowed to retake them due to the pandemic. My elementary school kid was avoiding doing assignments so we had to move her to working next to one of us to keep her on task. My high school aged kid who’s a high performer thought she was missing out by working from home.

By the second semester last year we sent the younger two back for in person schooling. With the 100% masking policy and vaccines rolling it was an acceptable risk balance even with grandma being immune compromised.

Fast forward to this year and our governor rescinding masking and almost all COVID reporting at the start of school being voluntary which again changes the risk balance. Under 12 can’t easily get vaxxed yet and grandma is still immune compromised.

So we continued to require our kids to wear masks at school regardless of their friends and school policy. We’ve also almost completely reduced contact with the grandparents. Which is good because my eldest caught COVID despite being vaxxed and a cold went through the house which could have easily been COVID.

My youngest has also had at least weekly exposures. Our county numbers are starting to drop which caused the head of the school district to declare mission accomplished and is considering reducing what restrictions we do have in place.

In person school is definitely better than online but it also requires rational mitigations for those who cannot get vaccinated. No one in the South right now is getting rational mitigations. So that risk balance now falls on the individual parents to decide.
 

Maxima1

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Jan 15, 2013
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Who still keeps in touch with 90% of the people they socialized with? How is this bullshit worth dead children, and the ripple effect that comes from that?

I think the argument is about getting social skills. However, a lot of socializing is suppose to happen outside of school hours, too. Even for rural folks, there is generally someone you can potentially interact with. But this has been trending down pre-Covid with many students reporting less in-person socializing and no/few friends. We're not yet completely similar to countries like Japan, but the trend has been underway for years. I'm also skeptical how much in-person schooling can mitigate it when people with deficits (e.g. anxiety, autism, personality disorder, etc.) generally will interact with others with similar deficits (if at all -- there is no enforcement that you have to really socialize, even with the teachers -- similar to issues with PE, which in that case they'll more readily admit is kind of a failure).


Here's a quick one that was published last year, and this is before even more damage was inflicted by remote learning. As you can see it's a nightmare.

I'm sure you're familiar with "summer learning loss"? Just a few months of summer vacation is equivalent to a loss of more than a month in schooling for higher grade material and math/sciences. ...and students have essentially until 18 (if not held back) to learn somewhat the concepts in Algebra 2 and geometry to graduate, since schooling doesn't even require anything more advanced than geometry/algebra II and classes where even the special needs kids are expected to pass. The outcomes of those students in that article are probably the same ones pre-Covid that will be introduced to Donald Duck's Magic Math in high school. Even if they're "up to 12 months behind" in the lower grades, I can still see them getting to where they would be anyway.

It's obvious to you because you want it to be obvious. I would have benefited dramatically from remote learning in my youth, as I've benefited dramatically from remote work as an adult. Don't assume everyone has the same requirements, and never assume that everyone would be willing to accept dead kids so some others got their preferred social treatment.

Yup. I would have definitely taken up getting out of high school at 16, since I got no college credits while a lot of what I needed in college for a BS was repetition of many of the classes I had already done in high school. They've tried addressing this in recent years by adding more dual-enrollment where you actually get credit for English, world history, US history, etc. in high school, yet there is still a lot of inequality, and it illustrates how transparently self-serving a lot of the educational research is.
 

Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
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The problem is the risk/reward analysis is not equivalent for each persons situation.

The problem is that the covidiots are crippling the system in a variety of ways. If there weren't nearly so many of them this whole discussion would be moot. It's a tour de force in the dark arts of propaganda perpetrated against the American People.
 

NWRMidnight

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Jun 18, 2001
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So to be clear you are arguing that there is no significant difference in socialization between home schooling and in person schooling?

Just want to be 100% sure that's what you're saying.
Actually if you really want to get down to proper social skills, treating people with respect and properly, home school children have better social skills. I am talking about pre-pandemic home school children where the parents have chosen to take the time to home school them and do it right, as well as non school related activities. Not the pandemic level of home schooling where most parents have not clue about their responsibilities because they have passed those responsibilities onto the school to teach them., IE parents who look at school as a daycare/babysitter. (I already touched on that in my previous response) You are fooling yourself if you think in-person learning is required to obtain good social skills. Poor social skills, even during remote learning, is on the parents. not because of not having in-person learning.
 
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NWRMidnight

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No it does not. It shows, consistent with the research, that poor and minority children benefit more from school than wealthier children do. So sure, we could solve societal inequality, but absent that if we want to help poor and minority kids we can send them back to school because public schools are one of the best tools we have at reducing inequality.

To be clear I've spend a great deal of time working in education policy and educational research so this is literally my field.


The data indicates that this loss is ongoing because, wait for it, remote school sucks for a lot of kids, particularly younger ones!

Do you know anyone with elementary age children or any elementary school teachers? Have you asked them how they manage to get a 6 year old to sit in a zoom class all day?

This is a parenting problem and has NOTHING to do with remote-learning. How do teachers get students to sit at their desks all day? (remote learning/zoom has more breaks than in-school learning).. Most Parents now days are to busy trying to be their children's friends rather than be parents and/or, are not even being responsible parents at all. Parenting comes first, friendship comes later. But this is out of the scope of what I was arguing, which is about social skills. As for actual academics, in-school learning can be better because the teacher is equipped with the skills to teach the academic subject(s) one on one, where most parents are not.
 
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MtnMan

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Jul 27, 2004
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So you seem to recognize the idea that not all CDC guidelines should be followed because they fail to account for the cost of following them. This is a start!

Now that we’ve established that some should be ignored, which ones? Are you saying all COVID related ones should be followed to the letter and not the others?
And he streeeeeeetches his silly little non sequitur comparison even further.

And no, just the important ones like wearing a fucking mask when around people that might be exposing you to a deadly virus, and not inadvertently infecting others yourself. You know the rules that stupid people, perhaps very much like you, are not following and filling the hospital ICUs to capacity.
 

MtnMan

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Jul 27, 2004
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I have plenty of friends and I enjoy football games and concerts as social events. Going to an eagles game with my wife and one of my best friends is a social even I look forward too all year, in fact!
What a shallow interaction with friends. And once a year... WOW. And where did I question the number of "friends" you have that you felt it was necessary to tell us you have 'plenty'?

Let's go drink expensive cheap beer, buy a $15 hot dog made with unknown meat product, and scream for your favorite team of millionaires, who don't give a fuck about you, to run around hitting another team of millionaires you hate, and who also don't give a fuck about you.

What conversation could one possibly have at a concert, where ear protection is probably a wise choice, or chatting away annoying other patrons if the amps aren't pulling a 1,000 amps.

Meeting friends and having a conversation over a beer or a meal is social.
 
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Lifer
May 30, 2008
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This is a parenting problem and has NOTHING to do with remote-learning. How do teachers get students to sit at their desks all day? (remote learning/zoom has more breaks than in-school learning).. Most Parents now days are to busy trying to be their children's friends rather than be parents and/or, are not even being responsible parents at all. Parenting comes first, friendship comes later. But this is out of the scope of what I was arguing, which is about social skills. As for actual academics, in-school learning can be better because the teacher is equipped with the skills to teach the academic subject(s) one on one, where most parents are not.


Nah, I agree with Fskimospy on this point. It's clear that the closure of schools has increased the disparity in academic performance between different social classes. Poorer parents are likely to have had less education themselves, so would be a in weaker position to home-school, they are likely to be under more stress and working longer hours, so less able to supervise children doing distance-learning, and they are likely to have less spacious living arrangements where children find it harder to get peace and quiet to study, and so on, before even getting into the availability of the necessary tech and even just books.

For selfish reasons though I've been annoyed at the schools re-opening, not least because it means when I've walked places (e.g. to hospital appointments) I regularly have to dodge through crowds of kids arriving or leaving local schools. Disease-ridden blighters, stay away from me!
 

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Lifer
May 30, 2008
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Damn, may have to reconsider my lifelong dislike of the band's music.

They seem to be annoyingly intelligent, whereas the artists whose music I like increasingly are coming out as a bunch of far-right nutcases (cf Billy Corgan, Morrissey, even the Velvet Underground's Mo Tucker...)

It's not just May...


Queen drummer Roger Taylor has described anti-vaxxers as “pathetic” and backed coronavirus passports for live concerts as a “great idea”.
 
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