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[Reelya]

... 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. 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.

I never said that. 15:1 is the teaching staff to total student ratio. That, and the average size class, and the total number of students in all the classes a specific teacher teaches in a day aren't the same thing. The reason class sizes are higher than the teacher:student ratio is precisely because not all teachers are teaching all the time.  And remember the context of why I brought that up in the first place. It was to point out how much of the student costs were in wages. Merely dividing the teacher's wages by whatever the class size is misses the fact that you need more teachers than that to cover you since teachers aren't actually teaching constantly.

But each of those students you mentioned, they're the shared responsibility of at least 4 different teachers, so saying a teacher needs to deal with 60 students a day isn't the whole story either. If you have 4 teachers and the class size was 15, and each class gets a class with each of the teachers per day, then each teacher is in fact interacting with 60 students per day. But that's astronomically different to say, a 1 teacher school with 60 students, so just saying that's how many students they interact with in a day doesn't actually tell you anything.

Shrinking the class size but keeping the teacher ratio the same would actually be harder on the teachers, not easier. Now, instead of a class of size 24, and each teacher averaging 4 classes per day, and getting 2 hours for prep, they'd be doing 6 classes per day of 16 students, and have to do extra prep on their lunch break. But the average number of students they interact with wouldn't have changed at all, and the "class size" metric that people prize so much would actually look better, but only on paper.

[Starver]

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,

"...'closing' an ideologically-compatible border..."
They didn't by any means stop travel from China, though it seems they didn't get too unlucky from the large amount of travellers they didn't stop from coming from there.

They didn't stop travel from Europe in time to stop the China->Europe->US transmission from happening (into cities most world-wide travellers would like to arrive in, and then most home-grown ones would return to - whether by accident or design those being mostly Blue-hued places).

They have long spoken of closing the Mexico border, but it seems Mexico closed to the US much quicker (reminded of The Day After Tomorrow, or I think it was...). And Canada seems to have done the same up top.

The sole 'success' seems to have been not letting that cruise-ship land its passengers (ill and not-yet-ill) onto the shore, where they could have been bussed to perhaps some army camp (called something 'patriotic' like "Fort Pickett" - no, just checked, that exists - so, "Camp Stonewall"?) where they could be better cared for; kill, cure or proven dodged the bullet. And that was as futile a gesture as it was inhumane.

Or maybe I'm just cynical.

[Frumple]

(called something 'patriotic' like "Fort Pickett" - no, just checked, that exists - so, "Camp Stonewall"?)

Already taken, though not an army camp.

[Starver]

It's not half, because the average class size in American schools is about 23.

I think we'd have killed for that class-size. If we, as pupils knew enough at the time to care. And of course knew enough to kill fellow pupils to achieve that aim. (Some would have killed teachers, self-defeatingly. Probably because we didn't have enough teachers to teach them maths correctly.)

[Starver]

(called something 'patriotic' like "Fort Pickett" - no, just checked, that exists - so, "Camp Stonewall"?)

Already taken, though not an army camp.

I double checked Jackson's 'legacy' for any signs of one (as I had with Pickett) before posting, but obviously that flew under its/my radar.

Never mind, I still like the name, even if the 'real thing' isn't what I was imagining it might be. (Actually, I was veering over into visions of the original Stonewall Drag Queens being drilled in all sorts of Urban Warfare, etc, perhaps with a heavy influence of this... )

[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.

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.

And yet in spite of it Florida still exists, which is the real disaster. 

Right well I underestimated Harvey a bit and I'll retract "major hurricane" but let me reemphasize: I said crisis, and in the grand scheme of things hurricanes are not really a crisis in terms of what an administration actually does unless it's a very unusual incident. Most of it is handled by the "automatic" sections of government, i.e. FEMA. The President, and the White House as a whole, is by-and-large not required for their decision-making capacities during those events. How well organized the federal response is, how well-funded, how thorough; these are things that flow almost exclusively from systemic (i.e. funding, leadership, the training and administrative skill of the organization) factors, and while the administration has a huge impact on those, it's only a crisis if there is some sort of unusual failure there (i.e. Katrina, or in fact Beirut's explosion).

If it's just "this is a horrible ongoing thing and many people have been hurt and killed and"... well that's just everything nowadays isn't it? Opioid epidemic, infrastructure failing, etc. etc. etc. Crises, as I'm defining them, are something unusual, long-lasting enough that political decisions have visible effect or lack thereof (yet, sharp enough that it seemed to come all at once). From the OPEC embargo, to the financial crisis: the distinguishing factor is high-level decision-making. Which, most of the time isn't really all that important as all the other more boring stuff like the secretaries, the legislation, the departments, etc. But sometimes it matters.

[Reelya]

It's not half, because the average class size in American schools is about 23.

I think we'd have killed for that class-size. If we, as pupils knew enough at the time to care. And of course knew enough to kill fellow pupils to achieve that aim. (Some would have killed teachers, self-defeatingly. Probably because we didn't have enough teachers to teach them maths correctly.)

Class sizes were 30 here when I was growing up too, but if you google USA class sizes all the sources seem to agree it's just below 25-ish now.

However before anyone gets excited that may have something to do with how much extra bullshit they have to deal with such as No Child Left Behind and similar stuff they need to do to ensure they keep federal funding. I'm sure the amount of stupid testing they do now makes up for them getting sightly smaller class sizes, to actually end up worse for everyone.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/class-size-what-research-says-and-what-it-means-for-state-policy/

This article seems to sum up the research on the topic pretty well. It was found in some studies that smaller class sizes improved academic achievement

In this study, students and teachers were randomly assigned to a small class, with an average of 15 students, or a regular class, with an average of 22 students.  This large reduction in class size (students, or 32 percent) was found to increase student achievement by an amount equivalent to about 3 additional months of schooling four years later.

However:

When school finances are limited, the cost-benefit test any educational policy must pass is not “Does this policy have any positive effect?” but rather “Is this policy the most productive use of these educational dollars?” Assuming even the largest class-size effects, such as the STAR results, class-size mandates must still be considered in the context of alternative uses of tax dollars for education.  There is no research from the U.S. that directly compares CSR to specific alternative investments, but one careful analysis of several educational interventions found CSR to be the least cost effective of those studied.

So it's not that cut and dried. An option doesn't just have to be a good option, it needs to be the best option at the current point. States are looking to backtrack on small class laws/regulations because this is restricting their use of resources for other programs that have shown even more promise per dollar spent. They also point out that some people benefit from small classes a lot more than others. So why not have variable sized classes instead of maximum class size laws enacted uniformly? They'd keep almost all the benefits while saving a lot of money that could be invested into those other promising interventions I mentioned.

[Frumple]

And yet in spite of it Florida still exists, which is the real disaster. 

Right well I underestimated Harvey a bit and I'll retract "major hurricane" but let me reemphasize: I said crisis, and in the grand scheme of things hurricanes are not really a crisis in terms of what an administration actually does unless it's a very unusual incident.

Like, just to reiterate, but Michael was the highest category hurricane to hit the florida panhandle since we've been tracking hurricane strength. It was a literally historic storm for this region, fema et al didn't manage nearly enough, and the high level decision making did, in fact, get involved and was handled pretty shit.

I didn't have power outside a generator for a month straight. My area is still fixing shit from the damage. More than one of the hurricanes we've had over the course of this administration have, in fact, been bloody unusual.

This administration has been so goddamn clownshoes its consistently extremely shit response to disasters maybe doesn't register well in the grand scheme of things, I guess, and maybe the unceasing cavalcade of horseshit or the unending time malaise of 2020 has made it harder to recall the earlier fuckups, but while covid is undoubtedly the widest scale non-self-inflicted crisis trump and co have dropped the ball on it damn sure ain't the only or the first. S'all I'm sayin'.

[Dostoevsky]

There's also the fact that Puerto Rico has been pretty well wiped clean by multiple major hurricanes over the course of this administration and received very little help in recovering, but I guess since they're not a real state it doesn't count.

(Yeah I'm being cheeky, but more towards the administration than anybody here. There's some bad evidence out there about the administration not giving two sheets about PR's recovery.)

Anyways, this is getting pretty Ameripol right now isn't it?

[Reelya]

Some idiots in Australia are likening the police to the Gestapo for enforcing mask-wearing in Melbourne.

And I can see where they're coming from! They give you a ticket/fine if you don't meet the dress code, how much more like the Gestapo could you get?

Seriously coddled fucks if they think there's any resemblance between what's happening and Nazi Germany.

[Starver]

Well, the Nazis did give everyone a uniform (coalminers is the one I most remember - not just workclothes for convenience, but parade-dress). Psychologically, that's got to give you a boost (so long as it's not a Huttese slave-costume, unless that is your idea of inspiring workwear).

But forcing masks onto people is hardly Evil Overlord material. It's exactly the opposite of Rule One. (Even if Rule 99 is a little dated, now, most of them still apply.)

[MrRoboto75]

Well, the Nazis did give everyone a uniform (coalminers is the one I most remember - not just workclothes for convenience, but parade-dress). Psychologically, that's got to give you a boost (so long as it's not a Huttese slave-costume, unless that is your idea of inspiring workwear).

But forcing masks onto people is hardly Evil Overlord material. It's exactly the opposite of Rule One. (Even if Rule 99 is a little dated, now, most of them still apply.)

I'm sure they mean the 'Juden' stars the Jewish had to wear.

[Eschar]

They don't seem to be considering that the, ah, point of the stars was to not put them on everyone.

Conceited shitgoblins.

[wierd]

Well, We have crow plague in the facility now.  3 residents tested positive this round. Hurrah.

Suspected vector was the physical therapist. (who, because of how the state decided physical therapists need to work a shitload extra in order to pay their bills, has been working several facilities.)

We have established an isolation wing.

Wanderers still trying to wander extra hard tonight too.

Fun times.


WEAR YOUR MOTHER FUCKING MASKS PEOPLE.

[hector13]

Stay safe dude.

No idea how you’re going to do that... presumably a great deal of PPE is used and discarded in the isolation wing?