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I forgot to add the benefits of “virtual school” is that my son can go outside and play for recess, he can get his daily practice done in the morning before school and/or his spare time between lunch and recess. I can make sure he’s getting some exercise/outside time on all his breaks, and all the meals are home cooked. We’re taking a big financial hit with me at home with them but we can handle it plus there are definitely benefits to “virtual”. There are drawbacks too but with all the restrictions in-person, it’s no better in-person. The kids can’t socialize, they can’t go to the playground, share anything, can’t do anything but sit in those desks behind spit shields 6ft apart and do their work on the school iPads. It’s rough on the teachers too because they’ve got to teach 2 classes at once, basically. What a mess!

Misbelle
You were wondering if there are some that really do not leave the house: since the end of Jan, I have the house twice: both of which I considered essential with no work-around. Not fun but I consider myself mod high risk, in an area with mediocre medical care and no Covid containment policy.

It is an ugly health choice I choose to make.

That sums up the moronic nature of such protests. We also had similar protests in my county back in August, but those voices are drowned out by a much larger set of protesters who are sick and tired of the prolonged, interminable lockdown.

The district in which I live is very proactive. The last three months of the previous school year went to waste, so over the summer the teachers and administrators put together a plan to do a hybrid system, with staggered bell schedules for the different grade levels. The schools were ready for in-person instruction back in August, but the state government changed the policy (again!) and mandated that all districts must begin virtually.

We were one of the first districts to start in-person instruction in California. Other than the mandatory masking for all students (which is kind of dumb), everything is back to normal. Yay! The staggered bell schedules prevent crowding. And students are mature enough to observe social distancing and good personal hygiene. Instead of everybody eating lunch at the same time, it's broken down by grade level. This is what happens when the community comes together and does what is smart.


Or they can observe the lesson from outside the window. There's no need for the paranoid parents to enter.

AZN
You don’t recognize that there may be valid reasons for the parents to continue remote lessons: their own co-morbidities, another child who is immune compromised, grandparents in the same household. Death is not the only negative outcome from this virus. But I’m sure you knew all of that already.

They may not be ‘paranoid’ or ‘moronic’ as you like to label it but have a valid risk which you can’t see.
You can label me with another favored pejorative term ‘dumb as a doorknob’.

You agree with "Cannot teach from a coffin"! Seriously??? So, you don't think kids should ever go back to school in person?

A smart school district would allow options. Students with comorbidities should be allowed to have the Zoom option; similarly, teachers with comorbidities should be allowed to teach those Zoom classes, or be reassigned to other tasks like curriculum planning and grading. Let's be smart about this. I am witnessing some excellent solutions being played out in my school district.

BTW, I do offer Zoom lessons to all of my piano students. I don't force people to do things against their will.

I thought the discussion was private piano lessons and not public schools , but I agree that schools should have a safe alternative for students who need it.

Yes, you teach remotely but seemed to label students who still want remote as ‘Covid19 excuse’. I have just re-read your initial post at that is the description you use. The point is there may be valid reasons for continuing remote lessons which have not been discussed.

In Utah, all our covid numbers are climbing, so in person lessons are probably more risky now than they were in the spring.

Remote learning is essential until a vaccine is safely made available to all. Anyone who thinks otherwise can’t see beyond their own nose.

If I knew of a music teacher who moaned about the ‘covid-19 excuse’ I wouldn’t recommend their services to anyone. No hyper vigilance, just common sense and a matter of morality.

This thread is seriously depressing and America’s covid stats are embarrassing.

Same in Illinois; the stay-at-home order expired June 1 but the infected numbers have quadrupled since then. On the other hand, depending on which politician you listen to, some were predicting there'd be 100 million Americans infected by now.

The problem with the schools is the inconsistency. I am hearing of the schools in my neighborhood where they make the kids wear masks when they walk in in the morning and when they leave in the afternoon but for the rest of the day they don't wear them. What does that accomplish? Nothing.

I can't imagine having a dozen or so various random kids coming to my house, potentially each one of them coming from a different school each one with a different policy or level of enforcement. This is a good time to be childless.

Of course, it depends on where you live and where in the COVID bell curve you currently are. If you are in India, for example, you are right in the midst of the worst part of the bell curve.

Therefore, for a country as big as the United States, you can't slam a giant national mandate on everybody. We have places that still have ZERO cases. Locking those places down would be the dumbest thing to do.

In California, we are back to the beginning. Our numbers are back to March numbers. And yet we have all these residual restrictions from the peak in July and August, and people's mind is still stuck in panic mode.

It's hard to educate people when they are in panic mode. They won't listen to scientific facts. They won't pay attention to the evidence and statistics.

Have you considered that places remain at zero or that California is back to March numbers because of the lock down? Certainly it's logical to think that numbers will go back up with looser restrictions no?

Which scientific facts are you referencing? Evidence and statistics are often painted with subjectivity based on the point of the presenter is trying to make. How do you know that your perspective and interpretation is the objective one?

Glad you asked that. First of all, the places that have zero cases are out in the boonies where they don't have much contact with the outside world. Thus, locking those places down is stupid. It doesn't "help" in any way. You can't go lower than zero.

California sort of re-opened back in June, and the numbers shot up immediately through July and August. That is _normal_. You have to have that peak in the bell curve, where the virus takes its normal route through the population before either a vaccine is made available or herd immunity is achieved. That's it. I don't know of any scientific studies on herd immunity in California. Maybe some are underway. But the coronavirus acts like any other respiratory infections. It has to make its way through the population, and when enough people have overcome it, herd immunity is achieved.

The problem is with the prolonged, interminable lockdown for the entire population. This policy doesn't make sense. For example, why is Disneyland still closed? The re-open date keeps on getting pushed back later and later. Why?


Because I think clearly. I know exactly why this COVID thing got politicized in the United States. I get it. I have my own political leanings, but when it comes to science I am able to stand right in the middle and not let my own subjective preferences taint my view.

You might be interested in what Dr. Sunetra Gupta has to say on this topic.

Herd immunity works by slowing the spread - if there aren't enough susceptible people in a population, it's harder for the virus to hop from person to person. The percentage varies with the disease - for measles they think you need 94% immune, either by vaccination or surviving. They think with COVID the number is around 70%, but obviously nobody knows everything about a new virus. Other ways to slow the spread include social distance, quarantine, PPE, etc. A very lethal disease does the same thing in a different way.

At this point so much is unknown, it's not clear that herd immunity is possible. Or that a vaccine will work. Or whether you can get it multiple times. There are at least five distinct strains.

Eventually most viruses mutate enough that they become less lethal. Obviously killing your host is a bad survival strategy. But for this one the natural host is the bat, and infecting humans is new. Presumably over time this becomes less dangerous to humans, but also each mutation may mean neither vaccine nor previous immunity are effective. Lyme disease is no problem for the natural host, the field mouse, who are asymptomatic carriers, but a big problem when a tick carries it from mouse to human.

Most viruses mutate, some more, some less. I'm not aware that measles, polio, or smallpox, for a couple of examples, have mutated to something with less morbidity or mortality. It would be nice if viruses always mutated to something less lethal, but that's not always the case. I have read speculation that the prevalent strain in the US is more infectious than some of the other strains, but I don't think there is hard data to back that up. Sometimes viruses just disappear. Two previous coronaviruses, MERS and SARS-CoV(1) were that way.

This is going totally the wrong way, and probably did so from the beginning. I am on a forum for my profession. The debates and views have taken over almost every topic with a few die-hards participating and everyone else staying away. Nobody here is an expert on the pandemic, and even the experts aren't experts. We're from a bunch of different countries etc. What IS the same is that everyone here is involved in piano. And those in the teacher forum are teaching it, and are impacted by what's going on.

Didn't you hear? Everyone on the internet is an expert in medicine, statistics, and various other hard and soft sciences. I can always confer with my colleagues Dr Google, PhD, Dr Web, MD, and Professor W. K. Pedia.

Google is no longer reliable as a search engine, unless you are willing to sift through three pages of ads and junk info. Some schools in my area are teaching kids to use Bing. It's such a WONDERFUL alternative to Google.

And don't you know that Bill Gates now has a Ph.D. in Viral Epidemiology? He's THE expert on COVID and vaccines. Who's Mr. Fauci? Never heard of him. We should ALL submit to the tech giants. They know everything.

The point is to discuss things pertaining to piano and piano teaching, rather than trying to give medical opinions, when none of us are experts. I wrote about how the site for my profession is almost totally crippled, in every topic at this point, because of the same kind of thing as is being brought forth here. It is not about Google vs. Bing. Though I'll say, you're getting some wildly weird "information" if you're informed that a software developer has a degree in medicine. That alone makes me nervous about Bing, if it's giving you that kind of info. Not that a who's who is important in any case. I'm assuming it's still emotion talking, and therefore rhetoric.

Fun question: do you know the difference between "particle" and "particulate"? (I have a reason for asking). What does Bing give you? I've never used it and only knew it as a fun sounding name. In my profession, knowing how to research and get pertinent info fast is paramount, so this part does interest me.

I think it likely that AZN was echoing the snark in the post he quoted.

My preference is still the good old takes up two bookshelf rows- the encyclopedia.