[ExI] next county

Tue Aug 4 16:51:22 UTC 2020

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 9:08 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] next county

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 11:31 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

> distance learning is working for a few, generally not working well for the middle and is a total failure for the lower end students, many of whom disengaged entirely.

Unfortunately I think that's probably true, but bad as it is distance learning is not as big a failure as death is.

> If you have any ideas or suggestions for the local public school advisory board, I am all ears.

If this was January or even February I'd have some suggestions on how schools might stay open and people not die, but this is August and in the US the virus is so out of control none of those ideas would work anymore. Most European and Asian countries can safely reopen their schools in the fall, but I'm sorry to say the US can not.

John K Clark

What should be the cutoff between can and cannot?  If we eliminate or ignore small countries where a small error makes a huge difference and only focus on big countries, Belgium is the hardest hit in the world with UK close behind, if measured in deaths per capita.  Oh those outfits have high numbers, mercy.  

However… both of those places have very plausible arguments for why their numbers are so high, which has nothing to do with schools: Brussels is kinda sorta the capital of Europe (depending on how you look at it) and London is the financial capital of the world (depending on how you look at it) so those places just have a lotta international travel.  Spain, Peru, Italy, all better stay home.

Borderline cases: Sweden, Chile, USA, France, Brazil, all with borderline numbers.  I don’t know how the other nations work, but the authority on public schools in the USA is at the state level, so I think we would need to break that down by state to make sense of it.

We also should pay attention to what Belgium is saying: these numbers are not comparable because they are not being counted the same way.  I have half a mind to believe them.  The Belgians seem honest to me: some of my own ancestors are from there (if we go back to the early 1700s.)

Schools are a special case.  Patrons patronize a business by choice, but children must go to school (in some form or other (by law (in the US.)))

This brings up another interesting question.

Last year we had about 18% of the students who disengaged: either never logged on or stopped logging on.  We were required to give the students either a letter grade (if they requested that system) or give a pass/fail.  However… when it came right down to the finish line, it was unclear if the school had the right to assign a fail grade to students who did not engage.  They could argue they ran out of bandwidth or their computer didn’t work or they couldn’t hear or any number of flimsy excuses.  As far as we could tell, the school was (almost (perhaps)) legally obligated to pass them anyway, even if they never logged on.

So… we did.

What if… that happens again?  Or rather, what happens WHEN that happens again?

spike

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