Living in a False Reality

Without testing or wastewater data warning us of rising cases of viruses in our regions ahead of time, we can only look to excess deaths after the fact. Bleak times.

This is a graph of Finland's excess deaths relative to pre-pandemic levels. Pay attention to that blue line.  It's the excess deaths of children aged 5-9. The dip in 2021 is when kids all wore masks and fewer died of  RSV and the flu. The current excess death rate for kids is 2.4 times pre-pandemic levels. More than twice as many kids are dying, and we're still not acting on this. 

Schools are the number one vector of infection. If we can halt transmission there, it will make a huge difference. We could have CO2 monitors in every room that beep at 500 ppm to alert the teacher to open doors and windows. And we could have super quiet and super cool CR boxes that run on computer fans. The CO2 monitor is a one-time buy at about $200 - likely far less in bulk, and the CR boxes are under $300 fully assembled or under $200 if you make them yourself - again, far less if in bulk. Those changes would be cheap and doable today, except opening windows and having CR boxes in class will get you in trouble in my neck of the woods. If we actually wanted to spend money protecting kids - and the rest of us by extension - we could add upper room UV!!

On the Importance of Hobbies

I taught grade 10 Careers for a bit. I changed it completely from how it was typically taught, though, which was largely one Myers-Briggs-type test after another. Kids in other classes came out knowing what colour they are and what kind of job that might relate to. The biggest take-away that I heard from kids in other classes is that they can do absolutely anything they set their mind to do. My class went down a different path.

How does this help me find a job??

I did have them think a bit about who they are, their personality, goals, skills, passions, values, and lifestyle to start, but only for a couple days. Then we created the standard résumé and cover letter, but now there are templates that do the formatting, and I have no idea how teachers stretch that into more than a day or two (checklist here). Then we looked at the many, many types of jobs out there and requirements to get them with tons of guest speakers to help. But then we moved on. 

What is University For, Part 2

Does making it all easier make us lazier educators, or is neoliberal politics to blame?? 

The Quality of Teaching has been Strained: 

This is a back-in-MY-day story, but I think it's necessary to look at how far we've strayed. 

When I was in teacher's college, we had to make it through four practice teaching sessions spaced out over the year in which we took over an experienced teacher's classes while they took notes at the back of the room. Typically the first placement is sink or swim, and some bail at that point, but by the fourth one, at the very end of the year, student teachers have honed many necessary skills. It's tricky for people in History Departments because they also cover social science and humanities courses, and being proficient in one doesn't make you proficient in all. My very first placement was teaching social sciences, my teachable, but my associate also gave me an American History course to teach as well. I knew almost nothing about history at the time. He gave me the textbook, but I also spent hours in the public library night after night, scanning other books enough to give me answers to any potential questions. I worked my ass off for the weeks I was there to make sure I did the best job I could and to make sure I didn't look like a total idiot in front of the kids.

Cell Phones and Cigarettes

I have some concerns with the new rules for schools as reported by the CBC. The biggest concern is that the funding cuts came Friday, but yet another cell phone ban is the big news, and no money is left for cleaning the air. 

As a teacher, both cell phones and cigarettes being accepted without question and without boundaries is a problem. Well, students aren't officially allowed to smoke on the property, but we created a nice space for them, kids as young as 13, to smoke just on the other side of the property line out back to keep them from loitering on public property at the front of the school, which wouldn't look good. The same thing happened as a student in the 80s. It's still perfectly legal for children to smoke -- it's just illegal to give them cigarettes. That law comes from legislators unduly affected by tobacco lobbying.

What is University For - Part 1

In case you've missed it, many students on university campuses have been protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

The police have been heavy-handed -- or outright violent -- with some of the students. Yet one prof wrote about his primary concerns in the NY Times: that the constant noise disrupts his class and the protests are upsetting for Jewish students.

No Ragrets

The frustrating experiences that linger with me the longest are the times I was able to make a difference in my tiny corner of the world or have some kind of effect or even have the potential to have an effect, and then it was derailed, often by a well-meaning person whose perception of their abilities might have been  greater than the reality. 

I have a far easier time coping with my own mistakes and inane decisions than watching someone else decimate my efforts. Maybe it's because I have more faith in myself to correct my own path than I have in others who seem more willing to let things fall to the wayside. 

This is just a personal rant as I try to work on disattachment from it all. I have some regrets; when someone takes over a project, from a small task to a political portfolio, it's somehow still ours to mourn or celebrate despite not having any agency to affect it. 

On Suing Social Media Giants

A collection of school boards are suing a collection of social media sites for allegedly deliberately hurting  students. 

That's from the Toronto Star headline, but deliberate harm?? I'm not sure what the lawsuit actually says, and I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that a charge of deliberate harm means they'd have to prove that the companies want to negatively affect students, instead of their motive being to make as much money as possible with harm to kids just a possible side-effect. 

But let's keep reading. 

The lawsuit from Toronto, Peel, and Ottawa school boards is asking for $4.5 billion because Snapchat, TikTok, and Meta platforms are "designed for compulsive use and have rewired the way children think, behave, and learn." 

The Motivating Annoyance of Willful Ignorance

I've been thinking about my old students today as I read the news. 

I taught about the Israeli occupation in Palestine for a good 20 years, under the media bias and propaganda curriculum section of my course. I had been reading about genocidal types of activity since my professor told us about East Timor back in the 80s and introduced us to Chomsky. At the time it woke something in me, an outrage that a whole group of people were attacked and killed without anybody I knew, outside of class, ever having even heard of their country. Dumbfounded at the mechanisms that enables a genocide to happen without it hitting the news, I started reading everything by Chomsky, then Timothy Snyder and Chris Hedges, and Naomi Klein when the US invaded Iraq, and Linda McQuaig on privatization, all informed by prior reading of Hannah Arendt on bureaucracy being led by nobody.  

Teaching with Covid in Class

Is there a better way to do school during an ongoing, quite possibly never-ending pandemic AND with climate crisis coming home to roost? 

Christina Virgil, on TikTok discussed the problem with schools making attendance their highest priority, and highlighted the sentiments of Jim the Hermit:

"Thing is, education does matter, but then so does staying healthy and alive. So this is another reason why 'let Covid rip' can't work as a strategy. We're producing a generation that will be either poorly educated because they didn't go to school or disabled because they did."

Except, of course, for those wealthy enough to be able to use private schools that enlist all possible mitigations or keep their children home with a private tutor. That generational line will be just fine.

It seems likely that we'll have ongoing waves of new variants for some time. Demanding that kids go to school sick seems like the rock bottom worst option. Absolutely we have to stop transmission in schools. 100 million percent! I wrote about that a couple months ago: "Give all the kids and staff N95s and clean the air so everyone is safer in the building and then just watch the "absenteeism" plummet!" 

Compare teacher absences to other fields. It's not just kids getting sick!!

But just in case we don't do that - or don't do it well, and kids keep getting sick with a disease that can cause lifelong disability, maybe we need to re-design teaching to openly acknowledge that we're living during a pandemic and climate change. 

The Daycare Years

Many of our ideas of virus transmission haven't changed in decades, for better and worse.  

Almost 30 years ago, I ran a daycare out of my home for a little over three years. I wanted to have more time with my kids while they were small, but I also financially needed to stay home since the cost of daycare for two kids was almost my entire take-home salary ($300 vs $400/week) even though I'm a teacher, assumed to be rolling in piles and piles of money. I'm so pleased we have subsidized daycare now. 

The Questionable Wisdom of Institutions of Higher Learning

Trying to convince universities to allow remote learning in maskless in-person classes and maybe to allow mini-HEPAs on the desk during exams appears to be futile despite the current risk level. Higher learning, my eye!

Why Universities Should Lead the Way

Last July, two grad students from the University of Waterloo wrote an article explaining how "Universities can lead the clean indoor air revolution."

Click the image to read the article, but I'll highlight a few pieces:

Improving Air Quality for Children Act

Our children are mandated to be in school. It should also be mandated that the building have clean air for children to breathe!

Chandra Pasma, MPP for Ottawa-West and Nepean, David Fisman, UofT epidemiology professor, Joey Fox, engineer, and Heather Hanwell and Mary Jo Nabuurs from Ontario School Safety (OSS), introduced a provincial private member's bill requiring air monitors in all classrooms and congregate spaces in schools and requiring experts to convene to establish an air quality threshold plan and guaranteeing action will be taken to improve and maintain air quality above ASHRAE standards. 

Here's the video in full, just 21 minutes, and there's a two minute part near the beginning that's a French repetition of Pasma's intro. (It's also on Facebook).

If It Can't Possibly be Both, then Either Give us Masks OR Accommodations

If masks are a choice, then shouldn't being protected from a virus also be a choice?? The freedom to go maskless is butting up against the freedom from getting infected, in the worst way.

AVOIDING INFECTION IN UNIVERSITIES

Earlier this year, I raised some concerns with Covid as we removed mask mandates in my Master's program, randomly, in February. The response was very clear: If you can't make it to class due to health concerns (including trying to avoid catching a debilitating disease), you will have to withdraw from the program. There's no allowance for just listening to lectures after the fact or watching them live online. Although some professors set up their class for that possibility, the expectation is that every student is actually attending in person regardless any potential disability or condition that could cost them their lives for attending.  

And I really don't understand why. 

I love participating, but that can be done very easily with a live feed. Alternatively, a message board can be set up for additional post-class conversation. I did that over ten years ago when Facebook Groups first came out. There's never enough time to take every raised hand in class, so I created a place students could continue to discuss and debate. It also enabled quieter kids to participate. And it was super easy to do!

Is demanding in-person attendance just to ensure we're using the real estate that they've paid for? Because, at this point in our technological advances, I can't think of a single pedagogical reason that university courses must be received in a physical room. They say it's to do with CRPO guidelines, but there's a near-identical program at Yorkville that is entirely online. Unfortunately it's four times the price!! That wasn't the biggest stopper for me, though; it's that they'll only transfer over three of the seven courses I've taken so far, so I'd be pretty much starting over.

When I mention my concerns to friends now, they still insist I should be getting some kind of accommodations (so cute!), despite that not being a reality in any institution as far as I'm aware. If you can't physically come in to learn, then it sucks to be you! I can't wait to take the required course on Intersectionality (if I'm still in the program) and see them explain why those lessons on breaking down barriers don't mean we should be trying to actually dismantle disability barriers here, though.

One prof at York says, 

"Every university classroom that hasn't been updated for hybrid learning is a testament to this anti-social 'you do you' mindset." 

Absolutely.

Faulty Wiring

We're hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere longterm.

Short-Term Wiring

For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to enact change. I taught about how media provokes consumerism and how to counter that, and why to counter that, in our daily lives for the sake of the planet, the people, and our own well being. I often stepped outside of the social sciences to draw on thousands of years of philosophies and religions that have understood that happiness isn't the result of an accumulation of things. 

I practice what I preach for the most part. Curiously, though, by about mid-July each year, I'd forget everything I had been teaching and end up on a shopping spree until I'd come to my senses. Ten years ago I wrote about how much I need government policies to restrain my habits - that we all do - or else we'll literally shop 'til we drop, as a species, which is happening before our eyes.

Barring that reality, and knowing this would be an ongoing, lifelong issue, I got a tattoo on my Visa-paying forearm to remind myself that my actions affect the entire world. I borrowed Matisse's Dance and have the characters circling a re-forming pangea. We need to come together on this, collectively, to reduce ongoing suffering: 

On Helping Professions

Should mental health professionals be more concerned about the spread of a brain-invasive virus that affects mental health by doing a number on the brain??

Amanda Hu wrote 

"I feel like therapists and counselors as an entire profession (save a few individuals) not understanding how serious Covid is, thinking it's over and being part of the minimization of the pandemic is actually a crisis. We need the people who are supposed to guide us through grief and trauma to not be in denial of reality themselves. I've heard a lot of stories about avoiding Covid, or physical symptoms being pathologized even when the person has physical and medical proof of the damage Covid infection did to their body! I had a therapist I saw when I had a lot of climate grief a few years ago. I don't really see how she would have been able to help me if she didn't think climate change was real." 

And Dr. Mike Hoerger, a licensed psychologist, responded, 

"We need more psychologists who take the ongoing pandemic seriously. This means masking, using right-sized HEPA, contextualizing life struggles in terms of discrimination, exclusion, suffering, and loss, and empowering people to fight for safety." 

Children Risk More Illnesses after Covid

What every pediatrician in the world needs to read - from tern: 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really bad thing, isn't it?

I wonder what the percentage is after the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 12th infection?

Here's a really really interesting point in the study: Only a tiny proportion of the kids have a constellation of problems.  The new issues are spread out across all the body's systems: 

"Only 2% of children had two disorders at the same time."

Do you understand the significance of that?

Fraud Fest in Waterloo Region

Catherine Fife and Debbie Chapman speaking to protesters.

It feels like we turned a dark corner in Ontario. In my hometown in particular. 

Doug Ford came to K-W to be greeted by tons of protesters including overt representation from ETFO, OSSTF, OECTA, CUPE, OBSCU, Liberals, Greens, and, of course, the NDP, which is very strong in the region. Faculty from UW, Laurier, and Conestoga College were all there, along with tons of educators. The Ontario Health Coalition the Waterloo Region Labour Council and the Environmental Defence all played a part in organizing it or advertising it. Tons of healthcare professionals were there and environmental groups and housing groups and ODSP advocates. 

Premier Ford had this exchange (0:55-1:28) with educator Ramzi Abdi,

Ford: I look at all the supporters in here. I don't worry about people being bussed in all over the place to demonstrate. [as if his opposition doesn't come from the region]

Abdi: All Ontarians too.

Ford: Absolutely, and I'll take care of them. [vaguely threatening?]

Abdi: You should do a better job of taking care of Ontarians.

Ford: We're doing a good job

Abdi: You're not doing a good job, my friend. Our schools are underfunded. Our hospitals are underfunded. You need to do a better job.

Ford: Guess what, we do, my friend. 

Abdi: I understand you think you're trying to do your best, but I know there are people in Ontario who are suffering. There are students in Ontario who are suffering.

Ford: There are people that need homes, and that's what I'm going to do. I'm building homes.

Strike While the Fire's Hot

Happy Labour Day!

I'm sitting at a comfortable distance from Ontario school contract negotiations this time out, and I don't know all the ins and outs of the various union positions, but even if I were in the building, I think I'd still lean towards turning down the arbitration option in contract negotiations.

I just don't trust Lecce. 

He's slimy, but he's also a smooth talker. I'm not sure who the arbitrator would end up being, and of course they'd be a professional with a reputation at risk if they can't clearly defend the decision they make, but way too much rides on whether they can see through his persona. This government is so overtly corrupt that we also have to ensure the arbitrator has the integrity to refuse a barrel of money or gifted cottage or any other form of bribery. Even the best of us might bend if the offer is right. I don't trust anything about this government. The Mr. X scandal might reduce the likelihood of further shenanigans - right? - because they'll be so scrutinized. Or will it just be a further distraction?

OSSTF is recommending members to vote in favour of arbitration. If the majority of the 60,000 members vote in favour, then, if they can't settle contracts by October 27, it goes to an outside arbitrator to make a final decision, and it's done. If members vote down the arbitration option, however, then next up is a strike vote for OSSTF to assess their position when continuing negotiations. 

I completely understand the desire for a done deal. It's been a year without a contract. Strikes are horrible and disruptive for everyone. They don't just affect teachers and students, but all their families as well. But that's what makes them an incredibly powerful tool. It's only under the potential collective action of all workers joining forces to refuse an unfair contract that workers can ever ensure they're not being exploited. 

Success with CR Boxes and CO2 Monitors in Classrooms!

About a year and a half ago, I presented to the local school board about the benefits of masks to filter air before it hits our lungs and of using Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to clean the air in classrooms: They're cheaper and much quieter than HEPAs, and we can make them ourselves! Nobody commented or suggested it be taken to staff for a response or anything. I stopped talking; they thanked me and moved on (my discussion of it here). Then as a trustee, I had access to all the big guns, but was still shot down at every attempt to get these simple, quiet, and efficient units in schools. Advocacy is clearly not my forte.

But Liesl McConchie did it!! 

She made a 50 minute video about her journey, and starts out by talking about all the barriers she faced: having CO2 monitors taken from her kids, schools refusing her donation of high quality HEPAs for every classroom in her school, being yelled at by school admin and blacklisted. Now she has CR boxes in every single classroom in her school in San Diego, California. She outlines the careful steps she took to get there cautioning that you can't just "vomit information" on people. 

Yup. I did that info-vomiting thing. 

I was only allowed to speak for ten minutes. I started with info on local lack of vaccinations and myths about herd immunity. I showed wastewater stats to show how prevalent it still is in our specific area. I pointed out that some other boards that have gone above and beyond. And I discussed the potential for Long Covid and how it affects the brain. Then I let them know the good news: it's not inevitable! We can fight it with masks and filtration. I compared clean air to clean water. I said that ventilation is additive. I showed that CR boxes are more effective than HEPA units as well as being cheaper and quieter and use about a quarter of the energy. And I questioned their continued refusal to use them for fire-hazard reasons despite the reality that an unattended coffee maker is more of a fire hazard than a CR box. 

To be fair, I tried her other steps first, but was unsuccessful, so just skipped them. I'm a step-skipper!

Here's her five step plan to get this to work: 

On Parental Rights

It's not a thing.

Well, legally it's not. There are no "parental rights" section of the charter to defend. It's a thing as in it's a dogwhistle to see how many are on board with discrimination and preventing kids from growing up to be who they are, in a method just shy of conversion camps. Parents don't actually have the right to override their child's choice of pronouns or name, as is well explained by Cyril Cinder:

@cyrilcinder

uuuugggghhhhh... Really? the day after Capital Pride?

♬ original sound - Cyril Cinder

So far Lecce has just stated his belief that parents should be involved in any change of name or pronoun. I believe that's ideal as well. But it's not a parents right. Parents can't demand to override the rights of their children, which include the rights to privacy. 

Parents can, however, kick their kids out of the house, emotionally abuse them, hit them if they're under 18 (still no anti-spanking laws on the books), and otherwise make their lives miserable if somehow the parents have come to value the views of the new conservative cult over their own child's happiness and well-being. 

So if teachers start outing trans kids to their parents, that's what the result could be.