Long tails, Delta, and disposability
Aug. 6th, 2021 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyAll this week, I've been ruminating over September.
Our All-Knowing Overlords have made several declarations about the new school year. Vaccinations will not be mandatory for staff and students. Families will be free to kill or cripple others because God forbid we should trample on anyone's deeply held beliefs (that they acquired from reading Facebook). They're instituting a bizarre timetable for high schoolers that combines the worst parts of the semester schedule—jugging four courses at a time—with the worst parts of the quadmester system—condensed time frame and extra-long classes—with alternating weeks to maximize how confused the kids can get. I bet you're confused just reading that. Add to this that teachers will be required to simultaneously teach to the virtual kids at home and the live classes, with zero instruction as to how to do this and I'm sure zero technology to assist with it, and you've got another year where students will learn nothing. Masking is mandatory, except for the 40-minute period where students will sit in underventilated rooms and expose each other and their teachers to covid over lunch. There will also be sports and wind instruments to ensure that outbreaks happen. In theory, there's an attempt at cohorting with the alternating schedule, but in practice everyone's together for lunch, recess, extracurriculars, and the bit at the end of the day when all the kids get out of class and immediately start licking each other's faces.
The emphasis continues to be on hygiene theatre and fomite transmission. Cleaning surfaces is much cheaper than reducing class sizes, but doesn't actually make much of a difference in covid transmission.
At the same time, our new provincial chief medical officer of health has issued a call to "normalize" covid in schools.
Basically, the authorities—who, I might add, haven't set foot in a high school since their own school days, and many of them were "educated" at private schools or homeschooled—have thrown their hands up and said, "let's just infect all the kids."
I've been reading a lot of about Delta, Delta+, and especially Long Covid. Long Covid can occur in up to 2% of children, whether or not these children were asymptomatic or seriously ill. It's been linked to an average 7-point drop in IQ.* It's linked to neurological problems, lung and heart issues, chronic fatigue—and no one knows if it's permanent.
This morning, I was talking to a teacher on Facebook who contracted covid in March from a student who lied on the self-screening that is also part of the hygiene theatre we were required to perform. Five months later, they remain ill with constant headaches and exhaustion. They have no idea how they will function in September. This is not an uncommon story. It is unlikely that anyone responsible—be it the school, the board, or the government—will be held accountable for deliberately giving this person a chronic disability that they may need to manage for the rest of their lives.
It boggles my mind that workers can be injured at work, entirely due to the negligence of the employer, and have to muddle on with no compensation or support. It's not just teaching, of course, and this isn't a new issue. I believe our discussions around health and safety would be very different if every time a worker was injured by employer greed, that employer was responsible for providing for them. But workers are disposable—teachers especially, since there are more teachers than jobs—and so we'll be chewed up and tossed out.
Do parents really want to risk sending their kids to school, knowing that they may come out physically or cognitively damaged? I suspect parents are just tired, more than anything else. The US has normalized the risk of school shootings, so there's definitely precedent. Apparently it's an acceptable balance of rights. Some kids will get shot so that gun hoarders can continue to hoard guns. Some kids will be permanently disabled, and a few will die, so that anti-vaxxers can continue to peddle their conspiracy theories and the province doesn't go into deficit spending.
I want to go back in person too. I loathe teaching online and I desperately want to return to normal. But I'm terrified. Unlike the people making these decisions, I know what it's like to have your life curtailed by chronic illness and disability. It's made me unkind. It's made me wish brain fog and shortness of breath and heart palpitations and chronic pain on the government that has decreed our lives and our kids' lives to be worthless, and to their accomplices in the medical field who've provided a smoke screen for the impending atrocity.
* Obligatory reminder that IQ is a eugenics-inspired bullshit measure of intelligence. That said, normally if you take two IQ tests, you should score better on the second one, because one thing IQ tests are very good at measuring is one's ability to take IQ tests. If you do worse on the second, it's an indication of cognitive decline, which is a very real thing.
Our All-Knowing Overlords have made several declarations about the new school year. Vaccinations will not be mandatory for staff and students. Families will be free to kill or cripple others because God forbid we should trample on anyone's deeply held beliefs (that they acquired from reading Facebook). They're instituting a bizarre timetable for high schoolers that combines the worst parts of the semester schedule—jugging four courses at a time—with the worst parts of the quadmester system—condensed time frame and extra-long classes—with alternating weeks to maximize how confused the kids can get. I bet you're confused just reading that. Add to this that teachers will be required to simultaneously teach to the virtual kids at home and the live classes, with zero instruction as to how to do this and I'm sure zero technology to assist with it, and you've got another year where students will learn nothing. Masking is mandatory, except for the 40-minute period where students will sit in underventilated rooms and expose each other and their teachers to covid over lunch. There will also be sports and wind instruments to ensure that outbreaks happen. In theory, there's an attempt at cohorting with the alternating schedule, but in practice everyone's together for lunch, recess, extracurriculars, and the bit at the end of the day when all the kids get out of class and immediately start licking each other's faces.
The emphasis continues to be on hygiene theatre and fomite transmission. Cleaning surfaces is much cheaper than reducing class sizes, but doesn't actually make much of a difference in covid transmission.
At the same time, our new provincial chief medical officer of health has issued a call to "normalize" covid in schools.
Basically, the authorities—who, I might add, haven't set foot in a high school since their own school days, and many of them were "educated" at private schools or homeschooled—have thrown their hands up and said, "let's just infect all the kids."
I've been reading a lot of about Delta, Delta+, and especially Long Covid. Long Covid can occur in up to 2% of children, whether or not these children were asymptomatic or seriously ill. It's been linked to an average 7-point drop in IQ.* It's linked to neurological problems, lung and heart issues, chronic fatigue—and no one knows if it's permanent.
This morning, I was talking to a teacher on Facebook who contracted covid in March from a student who lied on the self-screening that is also part of the hygiene theatre we were required to perform. Five months later, they remain ill with constant headaches and exhaustion. They have no idea how they will function in September. This is not an uncommon story. It is unlikely that anyone responsible—be it the school, the board, or the government—will be held accountable for deliberately giving this person a chronic disability that they may need to manage for the rest of their lives.
It boggles my mind that workers can be injured at work, entirely due to the negligence of the employer, and have to muddle on with no compensation or support. It's not just teaching, of course, and this isn't a new issue. I believe our discussions around health and safety would be very different if every time a worker was injured by employer greed, that employer was responsible for providing for them. But workers are disposable—teachers especially, since there are more teachers than jobs—and so we'll be chewed up and tossed out.
Do parents really want to risk sending their kids to school, knowing that they may come out physically or cognitively damaged? I suspect parents are just tired, more than anything else. The US has normalized the risk of school shootings, so there's definitely precedent. Apparently it's an acceptable balance of rights. Some kids will get shot so that gun hoarders can continue to hoard guns. Some kids will be permanently disabled, and a few will die, so that anti-vaxxers can continue to peddle their conspiracy theories and the province doesn't go into deficit spending.
I want to go back in person too. I loathe teaching online and I desperately want to return to normal. But I'm terrified. Unlike the people making these decisions, I know what it's like to have your life curtailed by chronic illness and disability. It's made me unkind. It's made me wish brain fog and shortness of breath and heart palpitations and chronic pain on the government that has decreed our lives and our kids' lives to be worthless, and to their accomplices in the medical field who've provided a smoke screen for the impending atrocity.
* Obligatory reminder that IQ is a eugenics-inspired bullshit measure of intelligence. That said, normally if you take two IQ tests, you should score better on the second one, because one thing IQ tests are very good at measuring is one's ability to take IQ tests. If you do worse on the second, it's an indication of cognitive decline, which is a very real thing.
