Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I can understand all that. Zoom stuff has been hard for any activity. I might have assumed for actual class it might be more but not surprising. My kids have done a few of their activities via Zoom and there has been more than one where it was them and one more kid.

 

This is also understandable.

 

You're right. The teacher can't just knock off in the middle of the day and go to the grocery store. Or start Happy Hour at 2 p.m. Or just plop Karen and Kyle in front of the TV for a couple hours. Or send Karen and Kyle outside to play in their pool.

Yeah, this crisis is proving teaching's an easy-money breeze, just like you said.

Just wondering, do you think the teachers in those segregated evangelical Christian schools have it just as easy as the public-school teachers you diminish and revile? Of course, they do have it a little easier, since there are no science classes, but are they generally lazy and overpaid too?

 

you know me, my friend, I'm a doomerist.

of course, we're stacking corpses in the parking lots here, but that's no excuse to be so glum

 

Hat guy is pissy because his dermatologist won't risk his life and those of his staff to look at his moles.

 

Or you have to drive 120 miles round trip to get to a wet county.

 

Oh fuck off. Go play your semantic games with someone else.

 

For middle and high schools, one class period is 45 minutes to an hour depending on the grade and school

 

Or, if you are like me, you lie your ass off to the kids so they think this is affecting their grades. The only time I was honest with a kid about this not actually affecting grades was because she was stressing out really hard about it.

For equity reasons—because largely we have kids with extremes in terms of home lives and ability to actually sit and do work (and because the only thing we had to motivate kids to not flunk classes was the threat of not letting them take part in a promotion ceremony)—my district opted to just make everything nongraded. The entire second semester will not have grades issued for my school (and I think district wide as well). My school is not the shinning example of how to problem solve (My district shit the bed in getting prepared for this when it became obvious we were heading for a possible shutdown) but that's what we're doing anyway.

Of course we are doing a couple of things to mitigate this: 1) we do offer "points" for completing assignments, so the kids can see this actually counting toward something ... granted each assignment is 1 point 2) anyone who is not doing any work is having our school counselor or social worker reach out to them to see what the issue is. At the end of the day, grades really only matter for high school because it affects college placements. We (in Cali) really don't hold kids back before high school and some of them know that. Even before all this happened, I had kids telling me they weren't going to bother doing anything until they got to high school. Not saying that stopped us from trying to get the students engaged anyway we could, but it is an example of what the mindset of some of these kids can be.

 

I’m for public schools. They’re vital. But millions of children are not realizing the advantages and purpose of them right now.

I have no issue with teachers. I also don’t think what’s happening in the homes of millions of parents right now has anything to do with teaching. It has to do, in the most basic way, with trying to get through a month without the kids getting fat off junk food and/or melting down with mom and dad.

 

Yeah. Those damned teachers and their unions. They get three months off and have a 9-5 job in which they only really work 40 minutes. Never have to work at home at night. Never have to spend their own money on supplies. And they’re elites. They have advanced degrees. So evil.

 

Oh, having never attended school I was unaware of this. If you have a kid, seventh-grade or older, who isn’t special needs but needs constant supervision, I’d question your parenting.