Some people still farm, school boards. August is a busy season. The whole idea of summer vacation was, traditionally, to allow students to help on the family farm in the month when their help was most needed...and most enjoyable. (August is also a time to pig out on fresh raw fruit and veg.)
My feeling about school opening this year, however, is that maintaining healthy distances among students is a priority.
When I was in school, before school choice, when it was understood that any normal healthy child would prefer not to go to school whenever we had any choice, I would have preferred to give up summer vacation and gone to school, maybe one day a week, as one of five or six children in the classroom that day, rather than packed into the dreaded school bus...
The baby boom was subsiding, and my district had received funding to build big new consolidated schools, so once we got to school there were enough desks for everyone, usually with a few extra. Funding for all the bus transportation people "needed" to haul their children to those schools, however, lagged behind, so on nearly all the bus routes there would be a bus built to hold 60 to 66 primary school students, carrying 70 to 80 students of all ages through grade twelve. The last third of the people to board the bus would stand in the aisles rather than squeeze in beside the rest of us until the driver got nervous and ordered people to squeeze in, three to a seat. Then when the bus unloaded those 70 to 80 students the driver would turn around and roll out on another route to bring in 70 or 80 more. While waiting for the lucky lugs on the second route to get to school by 8:30, those of us who lived along the first route would have a half-hour, an hour, or more when most of the classroom doors were locked and we had to hang out in the schoolyard, on the frozen pavement, waiting to watch the sun peep over the hill. Or, if lucky, we might be allowed to sit in the cafeteria, smelling the delicious (urrggh!) school meals being cooked, and listening to the music (ouch!) of the school band practicing. Very few students were allowed to walk to school, although my brother and I certainly lobbied for that privilege as often as possible, insisting that we were too big enough to walk three miles. Even people who enjoyed actual classes and sports, at my school, hated waiting for school to start in the mornings, and it was no secret that the second routes were the ones that served the families of teachers and school board members.
School itself was probably not a significant reason why I was such a scrawny, sickly child, but it certainly didn't help. I would have hated elementary school much less if each of the 20 children allowed to board the bus on one day a week had had seats to ourselves. Classes might even have been interesting if, on any given day, only two or three of the six people in each classroom had been there to give the teacher a hard time, rather than twelve or fifteen of the thirty...I think the crowding was the primary cause of the interpersonal hostility. We weren't learning how to have friends; we were learning how to avoid having friends, how to maximize interpersonal space by having and being enemies. We were also swapping colds and flu and worse. Some parents wanted their children to get those perfect attendance certificates, and would make their kids report for roll call no matter how visibly ill they were. You'd sit at the far end of the classroom and wait to see whether those kids, who were "popular" because they were rich but not really easy to like, would faint or vomit and have to be sent home, even if the family chauffeur was also ill and couldn't whisk them back home right after roll call.
Of course trying to build healthy interpersonal distance into the school system, which should have been done a hundred years ago and should be continued after the Dreaded Coronavirus is forgotten, will be a big change even today, when many school districts already have room to give everyone adequate personal space. I've even found posts from teachers complaining that, when they've formed a habit of addressing a lecture hall with every one of 100 theatre-style seats filled, seeing only 20 people scattered at a healthy distance from each other among those seats makes the teachers feel rejected and as if they're wasting their time. Psychologically it does look as if four out of five of the students had decided to blow off their lectures, even if they've worked out plans to repeat one lecture to 20 students on each day of the week and have the students do the balance of the work online.
Persevere, teachers. Get used to it. Success is not lecturing to a packed hall every day. Success is having enough space to see that each student is engaged with the material, that by the end of the term all of them have learned something.
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| In this fourteenth-century illustration, though all the students are adults who have paid to be there, just being packed into the hall is...showing that some things never change! Note that, despite the grey beards, being crowded together is still motivating these students to distract each other--or doze off. Photo contributed to Wikipedia's article on "Lecture" By Laurentius de Voltolina - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160060 |
Teachers have always been excellent copers.
"But, but..." Don't start sputtering, teachers. I know. The real problem is that too many schools receive their funding according to the number of students who report for roll call every day, rather than the number who are enrolled. This always was a bad idea. It needs to change. School funding should not be compromised by the need to make schools healthier places than they've been since, in the United States, the 1930s. Schools should not lose a penny when a student chooses to observe quarantine, without warning, for two weeks (or longer, in the case of, e.g., mononucleosis). If anything, schools should gain money (for the necessary substitute teacher) when a teacher chooses to observe quarantine.
Yes. You read that right, Gentle Readers. Although this web site is fiscally conservative and recommends cutting back DoE funding if not cutting out the whole federal Department of Education, on some specific points this web site recommends liberal spending on school budgets. Freeing up money, such as the cost of sending out all those buses five days a week instead of one, for better uses, like paying (and probably training and recruiting) more substitute teachers, as well as paying regular teachers when they are public-spirited enough to observe quarantine.
Now, for readers who don't do Twitter: This web site was run for years from public-access computer centers, mostly, but it was hard to write for clients there. The computer center that was nice and quiet and uncrowded, with state-of-the-art computers, was a 25-mile walk and I found myself actually walking it in the worst possible weather because, of course, that was when the cell phone didn't work. (And although 25 or 30 miles a day is a reasonable distance for a healthy person to walk, it is a full day's work, leaving insufficient time or energy to do much else that day.) This web site's purpose is to promote my writing job, which depends on an adequate computer. Much as I believe that people should use public-access computers for anything we do online, it's been a great deal more practical for me to use a privately owned laptop that neighbors have been willing to let me keep in a building in the business zone.
So, someone gave me the historic little Dell laptop we nicknamed The Sickly Snail, from its very best operating speed. It still works, too, though it's unlikely to work much longer, for Open Office word processing and not much else. Then our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters decided she couldn't bear to watch me spending whole days doing a lot of knitting and relatively little online business, and bequeathed to me the laptop on which she'd started but not finished one blog post (which was to have gone on this site). It was a premium-grade HP Pavilion in 2009...of course, by 2015 various web sites were giving it static about its being "old." It worked longer than it was really built to work, but it started overheating and crashing daily last winter, and about a month ago it blew its lights out.
By that time, of course, someone had given me this thing. In fairness to a good friend with good intentions, I must say, he didn't actually give me the laptop on which I'm typing this. He doesn't believe in computers, actually, and doesn't go into computer shops, so he gave me the cash to buy a used laptop. I then found a lift to Compuworld and called ahead to make sure the shop would not be too crowded on the day I could finally pick up a used laptop, planning to be able to pick and choose from a shelf of a few dozen glossy, gently-used HP's, which the shop usually maintains. The wizard who picked up the phone said, "Since the virus panic we've sold out of used laptops." So, well, there's a newer, cheaper store on the other side of town. We were driving past them. We stopped. They had just one used laptop left. This was it: a Dell Latitude. With the dreaded Windows 10 operating system. I held my nose as I hauled it in.
And it is a POG (piece of garbage), Gentle Readers. The way I go through computer memory, working full-time? This little lightweight wasn't built to last me one month, nor do I expect it will, and if I have another laptop by the time this one dies, I'll be glad to send it in for recycling. Much as I hate the pollution and toxic waste that are involved in "recycling" anything electronic. Firmly as I believe that, if we insist on buying electronics--which we should try to avoid--we should buy them to last our lifetimes.
O POG, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. A sonnet should be forthcoming.
I still need a laptop--a decent one, with a version of Windows from before the company grew arrogant enough to alienate customers like me with constant sales pushes. (When a computer prods me to buy something for it or replace it, I'm definitely motivated to look for a different brand and browser.) My clients prefer Word documents to Open Office, although they convert almost perfectly.
And. as those who do follow me on Twitter know, an e-friend of an e-friend has been looking for a laptop--a completely different kind, with whatever it takes to run Zoom so he can teach an e-class. I've tweeted on his behalf. No conflict there. There are laptops that run Word and laptops that run Zoom. I need one. He needs (or may already have found) the other.
I suspect the HP Pavilion (or whatever they may call the equivalent newer model) could run Zoom, but if I get a good laptop, the first thing I'm doing is stripping away as much of its audiovisual capabilities as possible. AV wastes a lot of the memory I need to handle long elaborate Word documents.
The first thing a lot of people, like that teacher, would probably do is to strip away high-memory professional applications...like Word.
Twenty years ago when Earle, God rest him, was building that desktop computer for me to use in his business, computers were not a thing people had used and decided to hand down. If you didn't want to pay a thousand dollars for a Toshiba Satellite or two thousand for a similar custom-built desktop computer, you chose your own software, installed it yourself, and prayed that one application wouldn't destroy another. MS Office was a huge advance because all those different applications it had were guaranteed to be compatible. There were a lot of other word processing, data processing, image processing, and other businesslike software packages on the market, and most of them were not compatible.
Now everybody, whether they're teachers, students, or even writers, can afford some sort of laptop that comes with the applications they want already built in and checked for mutual compatibility...even if the laptops some of us want are, by definition, the ones some of us consider POG.
I think this POG was just about DOA (dead on arrival) and so, probably, would anyone looking for a laptop that could handle Zoom, but for somebody who just wanted to tweet or e-mail to a few long-distance relatives every few days, this POG might have been custom-made. It's such a tiny flimsy thing...it doesn't overheat, its battery runs even Word for more than an hour at a time, it probably adds even fewer kilowatts to the monthly bill than my computers do, although mine add remarkably little.
I need Word, Google Chrome, a few utilities like Explorer and Task Manager, and as little else as possible. I need lots of free memory.
For those who've read my pleas for a new laptop--my kind--and already replied that what you have wouldn't be my kind, this "liberal" post urges you to think liberally. If what you have is not infested with toxic virus-ware, there's somebody out there who is looking for it.
Schools--which are not really underfunded, but are funded in a sick, outdated way and have allocated that funding in even more questionable ways--are good places to find those people.
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