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[Iduno]

Eh, dunno. This whole thing has me pondering the question, "just what is an acceptable level of public health risk in the first place?" 

Zero is an infeasible answer, but other than that I'm still working through it all.  Education is a tender spot for me - having educators in my family, it makes me very sad that society is essentially sacrificing education for short-term changes in life expectancy. You will not be able to convince me that quality of education will be maintained with this mandatory remote learning.

Although to be fair, in the school board meeting they rightly pointed out that in-person learning would be impacted too due to the massive burden of just dealing with all the protections they would have to deal with like masks, cleaning, and the like.  My assertion is that is less an impact that forcing everyone home, but I suppose it may indeed be splitting hairs at that point.

Yeah, educators and retail/customer-service employees generally don't get treated like humans. At least educators get paid better than the others.

*shrug* DOACs are less of an issue than traditional AVKs. But of course experience of their in children is fairly limited because its not exactly common to have children with clotting disorders. Which is of course the point: if we are talking about how many children will need anticoagulation and how many teachers will end up in ICU, maybe we should rethink before reopening?

Especially when distance-learning technology is as good as it is. In elementary schools, where the children probably can't be home alone, you may need to consider in-person teaching, but not much need above that.

[Starver]

I'm still pondering at one teacher for 15 students.  Back in my youth, classes tended to be 30+ (except for the less popular options, perhaps, where were choices).

Different age, different country, different educational culture, different political masters. And of course no problem with packing classes in as tight as you needed, in order to make the limited educational budget stretch across a whole catchment of kids.

For various reasons, that should not be the case these days.

[Reelya]

I'm still pondering at one teacher for 15 students.  Back in my youth, classes tended to be 30+ (except for the less popular options, perhaps, where were choices).

Different age, different country, different educational culture, different political masters. And of course no problem with packing classes in as tight as you needed, in order to make the limited educational budget stretch across a whole catchment of kids.

For various reasons, that should not be the case these days.

Think of it this way: the average class size may be 30 students. But how many different classes did you have? Only one teacher the whole week, or did you  have different teachers for different classes?

Teachers spend some proportion of the time directly teaching students, and some other proportion of the time in training on new material, lesson preparation, grading work.

So to work out how many teachers you need, you need to take average class size, then work out what percentage of a teacher's work time is spent directly teaching classes. Then you can do the math for the rough number of teachers you need to hire per enrolled student.

Hence "average class size" isn't the same thing as teacher-student ratio, they're measuring different things.

[bloop_bleep]

Especially when distance-learning technology is as good as it is. In elementary schools, where the children probably can't be home alone, you may need to consider in-person teaching, but not much need above that.

Actually, distance learning has been rather ineffective where it had been put in place...

[JoshuaFH]

My friend espoused a conspiracy theory that I didn't really have evidence to call bullshit on, but was plausible enough to understand why he believed it: that Trump and Republicans deliberately fubar'd the Coronavirus response and allowed it to spread unchecked in the States because they thought that it would only harm large major cities where most democratic voters are, and leave rural and suburban areas, where more republican voters are, mostly unscathed.

It's outrageous to me, but he's very pessimistic, and politicians have demonstrated poor judgment over and over and over again, so that's the only criterion that gave credence to its 'plausibility'.

[Eschar]

I seem to recall a report that one of the officials in charge of the response explicitly said, in an internal communication, that was exactly the plan.

I don't remember the source, so take this with a grain of salt pour a few pounds of salt on this post.

[Reelya]

My friend espoused a conspiracy theory that I didn't really have evidence to call bullshit on, but was plausible enough to understand why he believed it: that Trump and Republicans deliberately fubar'd the Coronavirus response and allowed it to spread unchecked in the States because they thought that it would only harm large major cities where most democratic voters are, and leave rural and suburban areas, where more republican voters are, mostly unscathed.

Actually he's not quite cynical enough. It's not an infected/not-infected scenario. The thing is, if a disease kills *marginally* more of the opposing supporters than it does of your supporters, then that's a net gain. So you push everyone under the bus, but the opposing supporters got pushed under two buses. They don't actually give a shit about the "Republican base" any more than they do about "Americans" in general. They'll happily bomb a neighboring country and kill 2 million people if that furthers some greed-related goals. Do we seriously think that they're all suddenly hearts on sleeves once you have a Green Card? Daddy Trump isn't in fact all adoring of his little party foot soldiers, he probably mostly despises them.

But to be honest I think they thought that they could just wing it until the election, they were assuming this was a winter disease and closing the border and warming weather would prevent it being a problem until Trump was re-elected, and in the meantime they could prop the stock market up with big talk from Trump. The real fact is they discounted exponential growth. Remember when there were 100+ infections and they were scoffing at that, since that's nothing. 1 in a million infected. It wasn't that long ago, really. They did actually assume this would peter out and not go the way it's going.

[Zangi]

Wouldn’t put it past people to allow fellow Americans to die in order for the ‘right team’ to win.  People have been feeding the ‘other team of murricans are traitors and commies’ line brazingly the last few years.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Trump's behavior during the pandemic has been a continuation of his standard behavior - take every position, deny everything, say crazy shit on TV, and then laugh at the libs. Because Democrats are just worthless at politics, this usually works. However, covid has proven less susceptible to bad faith arguments than your average Democrat...

[Frumple]

Yeah, educators and retail/customer-service employees generally don't get treated like humans. At least educators get paid better than the others.

That's damning with extremely faint praise. Educators, especially front line public school ones, generally aren't paid worth shit in the US. Especially relative to the education requirements and general workload.

Though re: the urban/rural impact thing, the crow plague is hitting rural areas plenty hard and largely continuing to get worse, too. We're not immune out here and the lifestyles of most rural folks don't, at all, actually meaningfully inhibit spread. It's just taking longer to get to people, because there's fewer of us out here and we're somewhat more spread out.

It's possible the shitgibbon in chief and the GOP in general thought that was something worth trying, but if it was it was a self-own of historic proportions. It'd be hard to tell that sort of malice from their actual staggering incompetence and shithattery, tho', so the world may never know.

[scriver]

In Sweden for example they went for the herd immunity response however their economy is still faltering because how many people knowingly expose themselves to a widespread plague. Just ignore the plague and keep working and shopping and partying and playing like normal. It didn't work.

This is straight up wrong, Reelya. Herd immunity was never part of Sweden's strategy, the idea that it was was completely invented by media. Sweden's authorities have been explicitely clear from the start, and repeated over and over again, that the only goal of the Swedish strategy is to keep the amount of patients needing hospital care below the hospital limits, and that herd immunity would at most be coincidental to this and not something they aimed for or counted on.

The idea that we just went on as normal is also wrong. We just didn't close the country down. We are still doing social distancing and aren't allowed to meet at all in groups larger than... I believe it is at 50.

[misko27]

To be honest barring a few hurricanes (none of which were major; in spite of my northeastern origins I feel qualified to discuss what a major hurricane is), the coronavirus was the very first crisis the administration faced that was not of its own making. That it treated it essentially like everything else is not surprising. It's not surprising they didn't take it seriously; they didn't take it seriously when they crossed other lines that people said "ok hang on this is serious you can't do that." And until this, they hadn't envisioned a scenario where this would not occur.

And so they ended up in the scenario of playing Chicken with a cliff and, convinced the other side would swerve first, confidently strode directly off the edge.

[Starver]

Think of it this way: the average class size may be 30 students. But how many different classes did you have? Only one teacher the whole week, or did you  have different teachers for different classes?

Spoiler: In Long (click to show/hide)

Primary Education: Same teacher, whole year-group[1], same classroom, all day.

I cannot say for sure, but (with possible exception of the footnote) I think we were heading solidly towards "1 teacher per 30 students", perhaps over. From what I recall of parent complaints.  Before/after/between classes ('playtimes' were synchronised across all years, as was dinnertime with either school meal or popping off home for those close enough to a willing-and-able home) teachers could be found in a Common Room, the ?non-teaching? Headteacher had an office, in later years... Not sure if they were just as non-teaching before that office was built on (brick extension to the Victorian stone main building).

Secondary Education, 'lower school' (years 1-3, as then named): A 'form' that convened in a Form Room for morning (and evening) registration, one among several ( such forms for the whole year of intake (from ~8 Primary 'feeders'? But newly regrouped and maintained as those new groupings). The form, as a block, then generally moved to the same designated Maths/Science/English/whatever class, and resident subject-'specialist'[2] teacher, whatever the schedule dictated, for each single- or double-blocked lesson, doing an endless Musical Chairs with each of the other same-year Forms (and all other years) for most classes[3]. By the 3rd year, IIRC, there was an 'option' system for Science. Previously ?3? forms split across three science labs with general use, but then we were asked to "choose two" and (according to the numbers who had chosen every combination) reshuffled to use specifically a Chemistry lab, a Biology Lab, a Physics lab, as appropriate, demolishing the 'Form boundaries' for the given slots alone.

I am quite definite that the Form was ~30 students during all 'normal' classes. What schedules the semi-static teachers adhered to, whilst the various units of peripatetic student body shuttled around, I do not know, but most actual classes were packed to 30:1 sort of levels, however many teachers/administrators/etc were rattling around sans students or prepping for their next influx.

Secondary Education, 'upper school', years 4-6 (4-5 by the time I got to 5): Reconvened 'forms' for morning/afternoon registration and administrative purposes only. As per the "Science" split in year 3, everything is 'Options'. Well, nearly. English ('Pure') and Maths were compulsary slots with no alternates. Religious Education might have been compulsory (but just one, maybe two, 'filler' single-slots per week, taught in a very secular/multicultural way by the teacher who had taught Geography in years 1-3). P.E. was still year-wide (with increased pupil-autonomy over which season-specific activity could be 'enjoyed', except for the compulsary Cross Country, for which at least one of frost, sleet, deluge or drought seemed to be always be arranged by suitable appeal to the Sports Teacher gods, every season every year), but other than that it was mix'n'match to certain logistic limits. (You could not choose both Geography and History, as they were - per year - in the same timetable slot as each other[4] and my name isn't Hermione Granger.) A good friend (outside of school, and often socialised with during breaks between classes) had been in a different Y1-3 form, was in the same Y4-5 'registration' class but in almost no (except P.E.) Option classes.

In general it was still perhaps 25-30 pupils per Option class (I don't know how much schedule-jiggling was needed for that, to make it true). English Literature (an option vs who-knows-what, perhaps Music? Separated from and additional to the compulsary Pure English - i.e. reading/'appreciation' rather than writing/composition) was a class of maybe 15 (unpopular Option?) that was taught in a small room with maybe room for 20 desks/places, but filled with 30. Which made squeezing into the chairs part of the lesson, even though we weren't at all shoulder-to-shoulder.

The average pupil:teacher ratio was offset the other way by Geography, where the teacher assigned was not my prior, inspirational Geography teacher (now seen only in R.E.) but the teacher who was Head Of Upper School who would rather stay in his Upper School office (leave us work - maybe, sometimes never appeared at all) than teach. (The Head Of Lower School, at the relevent time, had been the Music teacher. She was almost always in class for us, though admitedly we did quite a lot more 'copying into our exercise books' of rather stodgy musical theory, so she probably also retreated into her own paperwork more than she might have.)

Again, I don't intimately know (except w.r.t. the HoUS) what time staff spent away from pupils. But does that matter much when pupils are always experiencing ¹/_30th of a teacher during a lesson?

Tertiary Education: Being beyond the age of compulsary education, had it been "Year 6 (lower) and Year 6 (upper)" at the Secondary school site, we'd have been a few self-selecting (and free to continue without pressures to earn a wage) individuals, and I think the logistics of catering for our needs was the reason why that was dropped in favour of the College set up for A-Levels, apprenticeships and other Further/Continuing/Adult Education needs in the borough's main town. There, the timetable was easier to work with (though at one point I had to switch Chemistry class-slot because the original one ended up clashing with a different course I was taking) and plenty of free time (or late-start/early-leaving opportunities, at either end of the day) between the various timetabled classes, even with (at one point) five separate A-Levels on my card (one of them offset by a year, another being a 'split' subject but only half the time Pure and half the time Applied).

Classes there were much closer to 15:1, maybe lower. One may have been 20+:1, approaching 30:1, at least at the start.

Higher Education: I can't really remember much. Large lecture-theatres not 'packed' but well populated. Lab sessions (physics, computing) were split. Tutorials were a handful at a time, per assigned tutor.  Examination rooms had hundreds of us (but then, when I later did Exam Invigilation for a Secondary School, it was the same sort of thing with almost the entire year present, even if they were doing different subjects/sub-subjects in different parts of the school hall used).

On the whole, of course, you'd expect Uni to do this better, and Local Authority-controlled Primary/Secondary schools depends highly on the LA, and the pressures upon the LA from both above and below. Which might depend upon political valencies between various levels of government as well as the actual political philosophies of the various colours of those elements..

[1] Except for one year ("Year 5", as counted in Primary, IIRC, rather than whatever it would be called in K-12 notation these days) when it became half the year-group class with one teacher in one room (portacabin), the other half with a different teacher and room (again, portacabin) for their class, but still each all the time, all day, every day. Can't remember if that was a room-size limitation, temporary bulge in age-demographics or the need to intensify (last year at Primary) education to prep for moving to "Big School", but somehow we split, and I'm not sure how much that improved the pupil:teacher ratio.

[2] Or best available alternative. For two years we had a "permanent supply teacher" of general proficiency take our English classes, and French lessons were never the same teacher for any consecutive years, with at least one of those being someone technically in the Maths department (though was never our Maths teacher) but ostensibly was qualified for the language teaching as well.

[3] With two types of exception:
a} Physical Education was scheduled in the same slots on every schedule for everyone in the same year. All boys to the boys' changing room, all girls to the girls', whatever then happened (subsplit into activities, all in a changing room to one main gendered-activity or even the whole year to a 'combined' one) was independent of any 'form grouping' and may indeed have been intentionally shuffled-and-cut,
b) Some rare classes (e.g. Home Economics) took each form-group of ~30 and divided them into 2x~15s/3x~10s or whatever for (say) cookery education in the first term, materials (sewing, etc) in the second term for one division of the form, but sewing-term then cooking-term for the next. But effectively it was still "all, and only, this form doing HomeEc in this time-slot" but with a rare division of labour.

[4] And another subject that I forget the name of, but was some sort of "Generalised Humanities" class that those who liked neither Geography or History could choose, without much as much academic pressure. Similarly, after having just French in years 1-3, there was a choice now between French (continue what might have been learnt, either liking or tolerating the language so far learnt), Spanish (add to your portfolio, probably now knowing you were able to advance languages) or International Studies (not really a language class, for those who really dislike languages).  FYI I chose Geography (reluctantly, I really liked History too) and French (reluctantly, as I really had not excelled in French so far and had no expectation that I'd improve)

In Short: I'm mostly interested in how many teachers each pupil has class time with (or, rather, how many pupils demand the time of one teacher, simultaneously). Coming from a time well before 'teaching assistants' (so "1½ teachers per class", maybe, you might argue) it seemed fairly constant throughout statutory education years (most of my time in education) to have 30:1-ish direct experience and, even if it's hard to nail down the specifics at other times, certainly during Primary years there were no 'hidden' teachers working/idling away while their colleagues were keeping us busy learning our 12-times-table/whatever. I'm fairly sure there wasn't an entire mirror-universe that at least half our teachers inhabited whilst the other at-most-half held our classes.

(My mother was a Temporary Supply teacher, also, and by far not the only one (apart from the Permanent Supply teacher mentioned in the spoiler, we had a good half-dozen 'regularly irregular' supply-teachers at my school, with my mother working elsewhere only but often on the same site as several of them when they were similarly elsewhere) and though the not-so-good Geography teacher kept his class barely ticking over while being mostly not at his desk, you'd imagine that if there was sufficient 'shadow staff' already on the payroll then they'd be able to kludge an 'internal supply' situation, like the French-but-really-Maths teacher I also mentioned.)


What's my point? Not sure it's relevent any more. But I was just very much surprised to see 15:1 (or was it 1:15?) mentioned as a working figure, based on pre-Covid times that I coukd relate to. Though in continuing-Covid times, I would expect this, ideally (at least by taking half the 30 pupils and arranging a 'self-directed learning' group whilst the other half is attending their own class-bubble), if only as a reactionary/precautionary measure.

[Reelya]

It's not half, because the average class size in American schools is about 23. So if you assume that 2/3rds of each teacher's time is spent teaching face to face classes then 1:15 would be right.

To put rounder figures on it, say that the av. class size was 24, 6 classes per day, and each teacher teaches 4 classes per day. This is a fairly normal workload we expect from a teacher, they're not expected to do a full 6 hours of class instruction per day. So, you need an average of 1.5 teachers per class worth of students, which works out as a 1:16 ratio.

[Frumple]

To be honest barring a few hurricanes (none of which were major; in spite of my northeastern origins I feel qualified to discuss what a major hurricane is), the coronavirus was the very first crisis the administration faced that was not of its own making.

Man, I say this with as much respect as I can, but fuck off with that. A cat five fucking bumrushed the florida panhandle in 2018, and we're still picking shit up from it two years later. The scale literally doesn't get more major than that. Pretty sure Harvey hard fucked texas a year or two earlier than that, and I think I'm forgetting at least one more serious hurricane for this administration. The crow plague isn't even remotely the first crisis not of their own making the shitgibbon's faced and been found hella' wanting in relation to.

... any case, so far as the teacher thing goes, so far as I'm aware most teachers were/still are handling 50-60 students per day at a minimum. 20-ish classroom, 2-3 classes per day. Whatever the actual ratio is to employed teachers vs. students, that means roughly fuck-all for how many students any particularly teacher works with. Least from what I've seen about the only time you'd actually have one teacher handling 15-ish students is with very small areas and their special ed students. Everywhere else you'd have a teacher teaching, testing, and grading for several dozen as a baseline. The hours or some statistical asshattery might come out to 1:15, but that is not even remotely representative of what a teacher deals with in reality. Most I know would borderline kill to only be dealing with 15 students. It's literally many a teacher's dream, and damn sure not their reality.