Couch 224: 2day, 2morrow, 4evah!

Wow, LT. That's a lot. I hope they'll be able to help the kids follow the guidance, whilst also remembering that they are kids, and letting them be kids as far as possible. I hope your session with Dr. T gives you space to unwind and process. Please be kind to yourself.

Thanks for the supportive words, Lost. Doing my best to be kind to myself...

Your daughter will be fine (as far as the safety protocols go, etc.). Most in-person students are VERY glad to be there and enjoy the interaction and "normal" school setting. While we've had a few cases of students with COVID, from all reports they have come in from outside of school (exposures in the family, etc.) not from within the school. Not sure how your district is handling things, but here, if a student tests positive, the administration comes in and checks seating distance for students who might have been near that student and puts those possibly exposed students in quarantine for a number of days for safety. It was mostly a big issue right after all those holidays when the cases soared upwards, but I haven't had a student pulled in the last several weeks. If there are only 7 in her room, they will have no problem maintaining spacing so it is unlikely she would need to be quarantined for exposure at school. The masks, desk shields, spraying, etc. are really not a big issue; it's become our normal and the learning goes on.

I realize she has other learning differences that might also create some issues as she adjusts to the changes, but hopefully she'll make that adjustment without too much of a problem.

Enjoy your ability to take care of you for a change.

Since I've been doing well, I haven't seen my therapist in several months. I'm thinking maybe I should make an appointment just to touch base. Perhaps it's just as important to isolate some of the things that contribute to a sense of well-being as it is to figure out why things are going down the tubes.

The big hooha here is that our idiot governor has so screwed up the distribution that the elementary school teachers can't get the shots. I would want all the teachers to have the shot before subjecting them to the ages of children who are still are all touchy and gooey petri dishes at the same time

sd- Many of my teacher friends are saying the same thing. They want to be fully vaccinated before returning to the classroom. In my area teachers are getting vaccinated pretty smoothly but it's not the case consistently even across our state.


LT- I hope your d's day goes well.

Thanks, Artley, that helps to read. Her special educator actually just sent us an email saying she's doing really well so far, which was nice of her to do.

I'm not sure what our school system's plans are in terms of quarantine or anything like that. We do have a county schools dashboard that shows any cases (and what schools). But I'm unclear on what sorts of reporting requirements there actually are, which concerns me some. A jurisdiction near me is offering (voluntary) testing at schools for teachers and students, but ours isn't, to my knowledge.

As far as spacing, they are only allowing enough kids back to maintain the 6 feet--I imagine this is much easier in an elementary school vs. middle or high where students are changing classrooms all day. They sent a video with photos of all the classrooms (including related arts and the cafeteria) showing the setups with the distancing. I think it helped showing D that so she knew what to expect.

And good point on taking care of me more...

That's an issue here as well--partly due to bad rollout/distribution and partly because they put teachers in the second group to get them, then opened up the third group almost immediately (which includes anyone over 65--second group was only 75+). So lots of people have been competing for a small pool of vaccines. At least now they're opening up more mass-vaccination sites.

I do know my D's special educator got her first shot a few weeks ago--and actually may have been able to get her second, as the location giving them out was using Pfizer (3 weeks in between), though she wouldn't be at the full protection yet. The system had lots of teachers apply for ADA accommodations if they had preexisting conditions, and I know, for example, that D's music teacher will be teaching from home (with a monitor in the classroom).

I wish all teachers/staff had been able to get vaccinated first and am hoping a majority have gotten at least one shot (which provides a considerable amount of protection) so far. Or at least will have done so before bigger groups of students return to schools later this month or not till mid-April for most middle and some high schoolers.

Thanks, WFS.

Texas has teachers way down the list thus far. I've had both vaccinations because I fall into the 1B group of at-risk health conditions, but most teachers will have to wait.

Texas has required all schools to have an in-person option since Labor Day, so we've been teaching this whole time without vaccines, albeit our school capacity has only been at about 50% because parents have the ability to choose a virtual option. Up until recently, when the national number of cases spiked, very few teachers were getting COVID. Our district posts statistics daily. But that number increased fairly significantly post-holidays. Whether teachers picked it up outside of school or in school is pretty impossible to determine, but it is reasonable to guess they picked it up in the community and (in a couple cases I am aware of) spread it to other teachers in the school. I suspect I got COVID from my husband who probably picked it up in a store or something, but we'll never really know.

I honestly haven't particularly feared getting it from students, even with my students being upper high school aged. We all stay masked and as socially distanced as possible. I've had a couple of students test positive but those weren't the instances where I actually ended up testing positive myself. At the time I tested positive, our positive rate was so high in our county (800 new positive cases a day on average for awhile there), that it was just seemingly everywhere, so pegging it on in school transmission was really not possible.

I do hope teachers will be a priority once we ever get beyond phase 1 of vaccines, but that could be close to the end of the school year at this rate.

I went out riding my new ebike today. I love that thing. I missed outdoor riding -general old age arthritis starting and getting whacked a few times by cars while I was on motorcycles/bicycles has messed up some of my body parts. But with the ebike I can ride and still walk the next day and get some exercise (granted it is not exactly as much as with a non-ebike -but with a non-ebike I wouldn't be riding at all so I consider it something if not a lot.)

I decided to go back to the classroom months before there was even a vaccine--so it was a bonus when all of a sudden there was a vaccine and in-classroom teachers landed in the second priority group in my state, after medical workers and with first responders and anyone over 75 or with comorbidities.

I would have come back anyway because I did not feel I was doing the best job I could teaching virtually. Even though college students, since they're adults, are far more likely to be carriers for COVID than elementary school age children (those kids carry different things).

Brown University has been tracking K-12 school cases among students and staff, and schools are amazingly safe overall (they also track with national surges and falls in cases). Likely students and teachers are in more danger at the grocery store than in an environment where people have been thinking of and enforcing safety and taking it seriously. In case you're worried about that, LT.

That was me ATAT. I absolutely needed to teach in person. I hate teaching virtually - just don't feel very good at it. I've been SO much less stressed than our teachers who have been teaching virtually.

*mutter, mutter* Abundance of caution...*mutter, mutter*

Roll on the day when I have the chance to teach in person again.

Even when the lecture hall is empty, and it's strange teaching 100 empty seats, I still feel like I'm teaching better than talking to my computer at home.

(Which admittedly I'm doing today because I have a cold and my school's daily health check advised me to stay home if possible.)

I do think it's ridiculous that I've been vaccinated so far ahead of vulnerable family members, though, including my mother.

I went all online (we had a choice) - most of my students were not coming into the building and if we used a classroom, we had to be masked.

My father was vaccinated pretty early on; he's in assisted living and the pharmacy went to them. My sister is over 65 and has finished both vaccines just in the last week. I was early mainly because I was determined to get my husband the vaccine because I knew if he got COVID, he was going to be severely ill, and I signed myself up at the same time because I also qualify with health issues. As fast as I was, I wasn't fast enough to help him. Even with one vaccine, he has now been in the hospital over a month (probably was positive when he got the first vaccine and we didn't know it).

I will say my one vaccine seems to have kept me from getting nearly as sick as my husband or my son, so I do think it made a difference for me. Even though I still got COVID between vaccinations, I was much less ill than they were, and I have health conditions that could have landed me in the hospital for a lengthy period like my husband.

Husband is now in the intermediate care unit - step between ICU and regular room. I am guessing they will move him back to the long-term acute care hospital at some point this week, but I'm okay if they take their time. I don't want him to end up in another medical crisis and have to be placed back in ICU. This has been such a nightmare of a month.

The mask is a pain. In my lecture voice mode, it slips around and I have to keep pulling it back up. It doesn't do that in normal conversation with it on, I must move my jaw more when lecturing.

I had trouble sucking the mask into my mouth when lecturing- I think I must get animated.

It's my Dad's birthday today. He is turning 69. I need to start planning something big for him next year.

I had to try quite a few different masks before I could find one that I didn't have that problem with. My masks are almost along the lines of a singer's mask so that I can project my voice without sucking in my mask. It took some definite trial and error to land upon the right one for the job.

I already have a prototype SD Action Figure. Includes flying squirrel suit. Motorcycle and smoker extra.

My uni installed huge sheets of Plexiglas in front of the lecterns; as long as I stay behind that, I don't have to wear a mask. For the first-year master's students, I required half of them to come in person one week, while the other half was on Zoom; then we'd switch the next week. But the classroom mikes were so poor, I'd have to repeat whatever a classroom student said so the online students could hear. Yuck.

The second-year students had the option of attending in-person or online. I got tired of talking to 1-4 people in person, so I moved it all online. It works fine for us. It's not ideal, but it's workable.

Don't forget the years past the best by date labeled condiments next to the smoker.
You make me sound like evel knievel.

We asked for plexiglass but because the univ leaders were pandering to the moronic mayor who was against it - the mandate is masks.