I've been literally called a grandma killer by a person I know in real life for wanting my kid to go school. I've been called a grandma killer for wanting a normal thanksgiving with my extended family.
The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.
> The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.
So in other words, 99% of the people were in the non-loony bucket, and you're focused on the 1% that yelled at you?
I could turn your statement around. As a teacher, I've been called a child abuser by a person I know in real life for wanting teachers to have a safe working environment. The people doing this may be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone.
So I really fail to see how what you're doing now in your second post is different from what you decry in your first.
It was horrible how government officials in collaboration with teacher's unions inflicted collective punishment on our children by closing schools and then imposing mask mandates. There was never any high-quality scientific evidence to justify such policies. And we clearly see in retrospect that they were unnecessary: Sweden kept schools open without mask mandates and they ended up with a lower death rate than the USA.
In most cases the actual classroom teachers that I talked with didn't even support those policies. It was the teacher's unions which did most of the damage.
Thanks for proving my point. "Inflict[ing] collective punishment" is not what anyone was trying to do. Being an actual teacher and knowing and talking to many actual teachers, I can tell you that your assertion that teachers didn't support those policies is uninformed. What teachers wanted was for the safety of students and teachers as well. The issues faced were that schools were very short staffed, and it's difficult to keep children safe and to maintain an effective learning environment when half the faculty and staff are out sick.
The "keep schools open" crowd often floated a false dichotomy where the option was between schooling as normal or closed schools. Schooling as normal was never a realistic option for many districts with missing faculty and staff. They would say "kids are not susceptible to covid, therefore schools are safe" without any concern about teachers who in fact died due to covid, as happened in my district.
Today we're facing a national teacher shortage where those who would have thought about teaching are steering clear of the field, and those currently in it are looking to get out asap. The rhetoric you're displaying here is a large part of the reason why.
You're presenting a counterfactual, that if schools were opened, everything would have been fine and it would have been business as usual. The point is that when teachers are dying and out sick, and the school is running on a skeleton crew, schooling by definition couldn't be business as usual. Who teaches the classes when teachers are out and there are no subs? Who drives the kids to school when there is a shortage of bus drivers? Who keeps them safe when there aren't enough eyes to supervise? These issues were completely sidestepped by the "open schools" advocates, as if they were just minor implementation details and not showstopping complications.
I've found that people who are not teachers and who have no idea what it's like to run a school are very quick to pass judgement when it comes to this issue. Usually digging a little deeper it's very easy to find this quickness to blame stems from various political viewpoints rather than any expertise or knowledge about the situation on the ground. Most people I've found blaming teachers like this don't even have any kids in school.
Anyway, teachers are the ones on the front line right now trying to fix the problems that children face today due to the pandemic, so please spare me your moralizing about how teachers are abusers and conspired to inflict collective punishment on children. What are you doing to fix the problems?
>You're presenting a counterfactual, that if schools were opened, everything would have been fine and it would have been business as usua
Person you replied to never said that. Could have been like my kid's school, where the kid/teacher missed a couple weeks but other than that the teachers that didn't die or whatever eventually came back and taught the kids in class in person.
>showstopping complications.
Well somehow they weren't as my county got hit worst than most and yet somehow my kid still got schooled, just through a private school. Didn't stop the show for those willing to keep the show going.
>Most people I've found blaming teachers
I definitely don't blame teachers in general. My kids teachers were great. Awesome people. The ones that gave up, and said well thinsg are challenging and I might die or whatever, well that's fine I don't blame them either. Go on and find another profession or whatever, you're not a slave. But I salute the ones who stuck around like my kid's teacher who was willing to adapt and overcome to keep things going so my child didn't get so far behind.
>abusers
The person you replied to never said teachers are "abusers."
It almost sounds like you're arguing against some other person you have beef with, rather than the person who replied to you. Either way I don't know what to tell you. My kid, and her teacher kept going on through COVID in person somehow, so I guess they proved the impossible can actually happen. We lived in our alternate reality where it is possible, and you lived in one where it was a 'showstopper.'
Remind me again how most of the rest of the industrialized world managed to keep their school open with kids unmasked? I don’t ever recall seeing stacks of dead teachers…
The problem children face today aren’t because of the pandemic. They are entirely the fault of peoples reaction to Covid. Covid didn’t close schools in blue states and then force them to wear masks. Humans did.
Also, I was briefly a bus driver for a school district during COVID. I was disgusted by how the school buses were run, refusing to allow students to board without masks, requiring masks on the drivers when that affected the amount of oxygen to the brain. It was a mess.
People in my district tried to protest, including me, but the police refused to let them into school board meetings, which is illegal in my state.
If anything, what you're saying feels like you telling me to believe you and not my "lying" eyes.
I'm not presenting a counterfactual, I'm presenting my experience that we had issues finding teachers and finding methods for transporting children. I don't know anything about Sweden, but I do know that we had people screaming at us about how we were anti-American child abusers when we couldn't even find teachers to fill classrooms due to illnesses and several deaths that occurred in my district.
> Very few people died.
It takes very few deaths to throw a school and even a district into disarray. In my post history I post about 40 teachers dying in Georgia during a short period of time, whose median age was 46. What kind of effect do you think that has on other teachers, the students, and the district? Outsiders who want to argue from political positions don't want to talk about those realities. Instead they fall back to aggregate statistics like "very few died" that minimize the sheer tragedy of the situation.
How many teacher deaths are justifiable in the name of educating children? I really don't know, although as you say every death is indeed a tragedy. Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach, that teachers previously died of other communicable disease, that some died during freak workplace accidents. Many will die during their travels. 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood -- surely our children are worth at least 1/3 as much as logs of wood (although of course we don't like anyone to die doing either). And we also have to remember we don't know the marginal contribution of the profession to which of these 40 may or may not have otherwise died -- we can't simply say they all would have lived had schools been shut down.
IMO society could tolerate an extremely high number of deaths if it means putting their children on the best foot. Hell we tolerate a pretty high death rate just to put crabs on the table for people in a seafood restaurant. Our kids are definitely worth more than crabs. But teachers need to be compensated for this risk, and fully informed of the risks ahead of time so that they won't become upset later that they're getting into something they didn't bargain for. And it needs to be fully consensual, so teachers who want to walk away from the job should not be penalized for ending their contract. Lets bring in the risk takers who are willing to be there in person with our children, and like crab fisherman lets reward them handsomely for this risk. For those not up to the task, there is no shame in walking away.
> How many teacher deaths are justifiable in the name of educating children?
This is what I'm talking about when I said "false dichotomy".
Teachers were educating children during the pandemic. I was educating children. They actually did learn remotely. Sure, it wasn't the best learning environment for all students, and it certainly affected lower income students disproportionately. But students did learn, as indicated by my final exams. But to say the choice was between educating and not educating is false. It was a choice between different modes of suboptimal learning with different risk profiles for different demographics.
I can accept that society must take some risks to educate children. I cannot accept others screaming that teachers must take inflated risks beyond what they signed up for, otherwise they are child abusers.
The other part of it is the idea that learning in the classroom during the pandemic would have been fully optimal for students. This view seems to miss the point. What happens when Mrs. Jones the history teacher dies suddenly in the middle of the semester? Do you just find someone to replace her during the pandemic? Is there a competent substitute waiting to take their place (hint: there isn't)? And even if you do find one, what happens when they get sick and they need to miss 3 weeks of class? Do you have a second substitute ready to take their place? Is math teacher or the gym teacher going to have to sub in to teach history? Do they even know the curriculum? What happens when half your class gets sick and has to learn from home anyway? Does the teacher deliver two modes of instruction (when they're already worked to the max)? What do you think happens to student outcomes when their favorite teacher dies suddenly, and following her is a parade of adults of unknown competency, each who have no idea who you are as a student? Is that what we call "educating children"? And before anyone accuses me of speaking in hypotheticals or counterfactuals again, this is a real scenario that happened in our district.
> Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach
A teacher dying during the semester is a very rare thing. It's a scramble for the district to handle that scenario in the best of times. 40 teachers with a median age of 46 dying over the span of 6 months never happens. Not because of traffic, not because of freak accidents, not because of other communicable diseases. Except Covid.
> 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood
This is what I mean by people who are unfamiliar with the way things work framing their arguments in aggregate statistics. It blurs everything in with the effect of removing all meaning from the deaths, which I appreciate you note are tragic. But this kind of comparison of aggregate statistics removes the deaths from the context in which they occur, effectively sanitizing them.
Logging is regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, so that's pretty shocking that the rate of death of teachers in Georgia over 6 months was as high as 1/3 that rate. Moreover, deaths of loggers don't completely shut down the logging operation because it has no impact whatsoever on the ability of the trees to be cut down. There's no need to set up grief counseling for the trees. There's no need for the replacement logger to spend weeks getting acquainted with the trees. You're not giving a paper salesman on-the-job-training to replace the logger. Fewer loggers doesn't impact the safety of the trees.
> But teachers need to be compensated for this risk
This was never offered an as option by society writ large, who I guess don't agree with you and I that educating children is more valuable than crabs. So while I agree with you and appreciate your sentiment that educating children is an important function of society and teachers should be compensated well for their efforts, it was never on the table.
Instead, what was offered was an unending stream of abuse that continues to this day, as teachers were called Nazis, unamerican, traitors, abusers, and the worst of all groomers. Compensating teachers in proportion to the risk they were taking was never proffered as an option by the crowd who wanted to open schools. I actually appreciate you saying this. But what ended up happening was that endless abuse ensued, and so people just decided it wasn't worth it to face the abuse and a life-threatening disease. People retired early, people decided against joining the profession, people died, and it left a lot of very bad options. The worst part is that even today on this thread, those very bad options are collectively boxed up as "inflicting intentional punishment" by posters even here on this site, which is probably the most polite opinion in that genre I've heard.
So did Florida and plenty of other non-coastal states. So did most of all industrialized nations. Dunno what makes Covid so special in these blue states that they had to close schools.
Honestly I think a lot of the issue here is problem with incentives.
When these teachers signed up, many didn't sign up for the risks of COVID (however large... or small they may actually be). They didn't sign up for the psychological stress that put on them either. For that, I feel bad for them, and I'll explain why.
They were offered virtually nothing in exchange for "changing up the game." They weren't compensated for these new conditions. Some, not all, but some rather than just saying out loud "fuck you not worth it" came up with faux-philosophical reasons for why they rejected this, such as scientifically unproven conjecture that the children would be better off remote. But had they been properly incentivized, I think their reasoning (as it usually does) will chase what benefits them.
We wasted tons of money pumping it into low-interest asset accumulation and 'free' business loans. I would have spent some of that money instead DOUBLING teacher pay as a reward for 'risk' (whether it be mostly purely psychological, or not, or whatever) of enduring COVID.
I would then offer the teachers this doubled wage as compensation for this risk. Teachers that can get with the program (doing in-person, or remote, as desired by the families) would stay on. Everyone else would be fired with a 1 year severance to find a new job, and the doubled wages being used incentivize replacements.
IMO elevated adult risk, and even some elevated child risk, is justified in the name of education. We seem to intuitively understand this as many of us may engage in dangerous trades or risks to help our children, but then again a stranger should be fairly compensated for such risk. I think had we compensated these teachers in a way they were fattening their bones for staying in class we would have been flooded with (for self-serving reasons) "facts" from teachers about how great in-person learning is and how everybody should be doing it.
The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.