Page 17 of 22

Re: Back to school

Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2021 3:33 pm
by OffTheRock
That fits with what I’d heard. I’m beginning to think one of the advantages of working in the NHS is the ability to almost completely avoid the national system. Being CV I don’t have many contacts out of work at the moment and work would probably do any contact tracing for work colleagues. The testing system was pretty efficient when I used it too. For all it’s faults, I’m sure the NHS/PHE could run a better system than Serco.

The DfE are notoriously useless at planning anything. It’s fine to put them in the firing line. They are the sort of department that likes to send out 27 emails about workload at 5pm on the last day of term.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2021 5:50 pm
by OffTheRock

Re: Back to school

Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2021 8:34 pm
by Gfamily
I think it worth sharing that the comedian John Bishop has donated 100 laptops to his old high school.

Top man!

Re: Back to school

Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2021 3:18 pm
by jimbob
Anecdote but:

https://twitter.com/KatyMcconkey/status ... 4873751559
Katy McConkey
@KatyMcconkey
I don't know about other GPs, but recently the COVID patients I'm speaking at work are not the feverish, coughing people I saw before Christmas, who were hoping I'd tell them it was a chest infection (classic features but had not got tested, reluctant to admit it could be COVID).
10:27 PM · Jan 13, 2021·Twitter Web App
2
Retweets
1
Quote Tweet
11
Likes
Katy McConkey
@KatyMcconkey
·
Jan 13
Replying to
@KatyMcconkey
A typical patient now says the whole family tested positive after a kid got sent home from school. Then dad gets really ill & needs admission. Some had no symptoms when tested, but are really ill a few days later. So the diagnosis is up-front & they open with "I've got COVID..."
Katy McConkey
@KatyMcconkey
·
Jan 13
And sometimes the man says "my breathing is fine, I'm just tired" but his wife says "I'm scared..." and she's right because his O2 sats are in his boots.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2021 11:18 pm
by OffTheRock
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 90759.html

Wonder which of their mates they got these from.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:55 pm
by shpalman
From this interview in der Spiegel posted here by sTeamTraen:
Drosten: ... it was naïve of me to just announce in brief on Twitter the results of our study on viral load in children. Many people saw that as a provocation.

DER SPIEGEL: As a consequence of the study, you warned against reopening schools and daycare centers.

Drosten: I thought it was a piece of information that everybody needed to see: Let's redouble our efforts so we can publish as quickly as possible. It wasn't clear to me at the time that it could seem like a provocation – particularly in the heated atmosphere of the time.

DER SPIEGEL: The issue of school closures was the subject of hours of debate on Tuesday during the meeting between Merkel and the state governors. Why has it been so difficult for scientists to convince people on this issue?

Drosten: To be honest, even without our study on viral loads in children, I would not have considered it likely that children would be spared by SARS-CoV-2. From a purely biological perspective, the mucous membrane doesn't change all that much during puberty. Which means that children can also get infected – and be contagious. That so many doubts about that fact have arisen was always, and still is, confusing to me.

DER SPIEGEL: Was Germany paralyzed as a result and not prepared with clever ideas for keeping schools open throughout the winter?

Drosten: I thought, yeah, people will discuss it and then find practical solutions – like, for example, removing windowpanes and replacing them with a piece of cardboard outfitted with a fan. But then, the infectiousness of children was denied for so long, and nothing was done, no decisions were made for so many months through the summer. I found that very, very astonishing.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2021 10:32 am
by shpalman
and of course the English variant shows up in a school here

(Well, the bit of Switzerland near here)

Re: Back to school

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2021 4:02 pm
by OffTheRock
https://guernseypress.com/news/2021/01/ ... -settings/

These are figures from earlier in the week. Last I checked it was 40 linked to education settings out of a total of c. 80 cases. 107 cases now but not sure how many are linked to schools. No idea which strain though.

If Boris is convinced English schools are safe, he might need to give them some tips. It appears Covid spreads quite nicely in schools elsewhere.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2021 5:47 pm
by Herainestold
In America, some school officials are saying September is too soon for schools re opening.
Matt Welch
@MattWelch
·
26 Jan
“It’s too soon” to say whether NYC public schools will open in September, says Mark Levine on CNN.
https://twitter.com/MattWelch/status/13 ... 4925367296

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:18 am
by shpalman

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 12:31 pm
by shpalman

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2021 3:58 pm
by shpalman
Unofficial website tracking outbreaks in schools in Switzerland: schulcluster.ch

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:18 am
by shpalman
A maths lecturer, novelist, and microbiology lecturer discuss homeschooling their children in maths, English, and science respectively

Maths: this is all complicated models which are supposed to make things easier but don't, and "lies to children" which only have to be unpicked later.

English: this is taking all the sense out of language for the sake of overanalyzing it.

Science: this is great we got to go and look at worms.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 6:07 pm
by OffTheRock
shpalman wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:18 am
A maths lecturer, novelist, and microbiology lecturer discuss homeschooling their children in maths, English, and science respectively

Maths: this is all complicated models which are supposed to make things easier but don't, and "lies to children" which only have to be unpicked later.

English: this is taking all the sense out of language for the sake of overanalyzing it.

Science: this is great we got to go and look at worms.
I don't think they've tried hard enough to find someone to criticise the science curriculum, there. I think the traditional approach is to complain about all the dead, white men in it.

Seriously though, it might have been better if the maths lecturer had checked the curriculum before that article. Specifically that fractions and halving are in the curriculum from early years upwards. Depending on whether his 7yr old is in yr 1 or yr 2 my guess is that the reason his 7yr old might have needed a paradigm shift is because the curriculum got suspended in the middle of the spring term last year and it's possible the fractions content never got covered.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:18 pm
by mediocrity511
I actually love the new style maths compared to how I learnt it at school. There's so much more of a focus on understanding why the processes we do work and how the answers are arrived at. You've got 5 and 6 year olds able to prove why a statement is true or false and that's pretty neat.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:27 pm
by Little waster
OffTheRock wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 6:07 pm
shpalman wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:18 am

Science: this is great we got to go and look at worms.
I don't think they've tried hard enough to find someone to criticise the science curriculum, there. I think the traditional approach is to complain about all the dead, white men in it.
My experience of teaching the new curriculum of Science at KS3 and KS4 was more like:-

Students must be able to correctly recall and spell the Latin names of 23 types of worms. The Latin names of 4 more types of worms will be provided in the exam booklet and students will be expected to use them correctly in a sentence.

Worms are no longer to be considered a type of invertebrate, students will be marked down if they refer to a worm as an invertebrate. This is for some arbitrary reason of pedantry which will add nothing to their general understanding of vermology. We understand that you may have a number of older textbooks, activities and resources referring to worms as invertebrates, these should all be sent to landfill.

Students must be able to answer a 6 mark question explaining the historical role of worms in making the British Empire the greatest and most humane organisation in human history.

Required Practical 1. Counting worms in a bucket. Students must be able to count worms in a bucket. Students may alternatively watch a video of worms in a bucket and count them.

Required Practical 2. Counting worms in a different coloured bucket. Students must be able to count worms in a different coloured bucket. Students may alternatively watch a video of students counting worms in a bucket from Required Practical 1.

Students will NOT be expected to learn or do anything of interest about worms.

Students will be expected to have all love of science drained out of them and go on to spend the rest of their lives with the vague feeling that science is just a random set of boring facts handed down by some higher authority, to be memorised and regurgitated on demand with no relevance or bearing on their lives.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:47 pm
by OffTheRock
Yeah, I think you'd have quite a job getting bar models out of primary schools now. I suspect that if you are a maths lecturer, it's quite different from teaching the entire range of maths ability to a primary or even secondary class. Some children do need those models to grasp concepts and work out what is going on.

Nailed it LittleWaster. :D Plenty of valid criticisms of the new science curriculum, so it's odd that they couldn't find anyone to criticise it. Especially since the tweet by the journalist asking for contributions to the article asked for writers and poets who were surprised/angry about what their children were learning during home learning.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:51 pm
by OffTheRock
All schools back for all pupils on March 8.

No word on any sort of mitigations to make schools safer though.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:06 am
by OffTheRock
https://mobile.twitter.com/jonlis1/stat ... 8535247874

In which the policy becomes so bizarre that they’ve had to rearrange the months of the year in order to defend it. I’m not sure where he was even trying to go with this.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:16 pm
by Little waster
OffTheRock wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:06 am
https://mobile.twitter.com/jonlis1/stat ... 8535247874

In which the policy becomes so bizarre that they’ve had to rearrange the months of the year in order to defend it. I’m not sure where he was even trying to go with this.
Naturally the journalist didn't pick him up on it, because basic competence doesn't come into it on either side of the interview.

I mean you can accept it was slip of the tongue of March for May but the logic then there would be therefore the schools don't go back till May which is manifestly not the policy. :?

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:51 pm
by jimbob
Little waster wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:16 pm
OffTheRock wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:06 am
https://mobile.twitter.com/jonlis1/stat ... 8535247874

In which the policy becomes so bizarre that they’ve had to rearrange the months of the year in order to defend it. I’m not sure where he was even trying to go with this.
Naturally the journalist didn't pick him up on it, because basic competence doesn't come into it on either side of the interview.

I mean you can accept it was slip of the tongue of March for May but the logic then there would be therefore the schools don't go back till May which is manifestly not the policy. :?
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:57 pm
by jimbob
OffTheRock wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 6:07 pm
shpalman wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:18 am
A maths lecturer, novelist, and microbiology lecturer discuss homeschooling their children in maths, English, and science respectively

Maths: this is all complicated models which are supposed to make things easier but don't, and "lies to children" which only have to be unpicked later.

English: this is taking all the sense out of language for the sake of overanalyzing it.

Science: this is great we got to go and look at worms.
I don't think they've tried hard enough to find someone to criticise the science curriculum, there. I think the traditional approach is to complain about all the dead, white men in it.

Seriously though, it might have been better if the maths lecturer had checked the curriculum before that article. Specifically that fractions and halving are in the curriculum from early years upwards. Depending on whether his 7yr old is in yr 1 or yr 2 my guess is that the reason his 7yr old might have needed a paradigm shift is because the curriculum got suspended in the middle of the spring term last year and it's possible the fractions content never got covered.
Kit Yates' observations tallied with mine when my kids were in primary school (youngest is now in 6th form). A lot of the techniques taught did only work easily on simple sums, which meant they needed lots of different methods - not helped by some of the primary-school teachers being scared of maths. Luckily my kids found the more traditional approach easier to grasp and quicker, so used that.

It seemed designed to be frustrating for more able kids.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:48 pm
by OffTheRock
jimbob wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:51 pm
Little waster wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:16 pm
OffTheRock wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:06 am
https://mobile.twitter.com/jonlis1/stat ... 8535247874

In which the policy becomes so bizarre that they’ve had to rearrange the months of the year in order to defend it. I’m not sure where he was even trying to go with this.
Naturally the journalist didn't pick him up on it, because basic competence doesn't come into it on either side of the interview.

I mean you can accept it was slip of the tongue of March for May but the logic then there would be therefore the schools don't go back till May which is manifestly not the policy. :?
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes
Especially since he made the same mistake on more than one media outlet this morning. Perhaps they are now so used to lying they thought they'd try something really obvious and see if they could get away with it.

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:19 pm
by shpalman

Re: Back to school

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:32 pm
by jimbob
Mass testing with LFTs *is* stupid as it basically reduces an individual's chance of being infectious by about 2/3 from the local prevalence. Which is fine for surveillance but not if you're trying to protect people by ensuring nobody in a large group is infectious.