2 month anniversary!

It has been 2 months since school at school ended.

When I was young, my family did not send (AFAIK) any of us to preschool (I am the third, so I was not around for what happened with the first two to see in person, obviously). We started kindergarten at 5, and our birthdays were in the spring (2 in May, one each in April and March), so we were not in the almost 6 category, but we were not super young 5 year olds either. Again, AFAIK, until my younger sister was assigned summer school for something I do not recall the details of, none of us did any kind of day camp or summer school or summer camp or anything like that. Summers were spent at home. And when I say at home, I mean it. When I was young, we were allowed to play on our bikes and go down the street, but by the time we were older, we were more or less confined to the lot our house was on (complicated, and, in retrospect, compelling evidence of my parents’ inability to get along with anyone for any extended period of time). In our favor, we had a really cool playhouse my dad had built (chalet style, with a loft, and electricity, altho no plumbing), a park-sized swing set, a big slide. Still, summers were really tough. It was better when we had swimming lessons, and when one of my older sisters was a lifeguard, because being a pool rat is pretty fun. The situation was further aggravated by my mother not ever being willing to get a driver’s license (unclear in my mind what the real reason was. The faux reason was, fear, because she hit a dog when learning to drive. I believed the reason was anxiety. I now suspect the reason was her undocumented status); until my oldest sister was 16, we had to walk, bike or bus, and we lived in the ‘burbs.

In some ways, I liked the long summers with not much to do. I like to read, and there was a rudimentary lego set and I looooved the swing set. OTOH, months of that is a bit much. It is clear that my various projects — teach myself touch typing using the picture of a keyboard in a used typing textbook bought at a garage sale, teach myself algebra using a used algebra textbook bought at a garage sale, teach myself logic using a logic textbook bought at a garage sale, collect foreign language dictionaries and books, etc. — grew out of immense boredom.

I have been retired for over 20 years, and thus at least home-based, as opposed to in an office or school or other settings, for many years. 2 months of stay-at-home orders is not really a big lift for me. OTOH, it kinda sucks to suddenly have to share my lovely house with three other people, not for the evenings and the weekend, but for 60+ days all in a row. It is fine.

Having the school structure has been wonderful, especially because it keeps T. largely independent. He has a big room and he only comes out of it at intervals. R. having work, and the third floor to do it in, again, means I only see him occasionally during the day. It is basically me and A., and if she is trying to focus on something, she will actively walk away from me.

It is all so much better than those long summers as a child. I cannot go swimming, or swing on a swing (but that is all complicated for me anyway), but I still have my legos, and books, and a helluva lot more TV, not to mention all the devices and games and newspapers to read and twitter and and and.

Happy 2 Month Anniversary! Perhaps for you it is more. Or less! Surely, it is different, because the details differ for everyone. I hope that you are finding joy in your life.

What Do We Want?

We all want things to be Normal Again. But what does that mean? Some of what we have now, we would rather NOT give up. The ability to work from home is something a lot of people have tried to get for a long time. Now we have it — even people who never wanted it.

There are plenty of other changes.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-addiction-medicine-reforms-future/

Accessing pharmaceutical support for opioid addiction treatment (methadone, buprenorphine, etc.) has not been easy for most people who needed it. It is a lot easier now! And a lot of people would like to keep it that way. Privacy laws that made telemedicine difficult have been suspended (?), making telemedicine possible. And payment is now occurring for telemedicine, including over the phone. Along the way, some of the privacy breaches have had good outcomes: providers learned that clients needed other services, and connected them with those services.

This Is When We Decide What School Is Like In the Fall

I am still a little unclear on WHY this is when we decide what school is like in the fall, but all the omens are pointing to this is the week. The California state university system said, Nope, to in person in the fall. Harvard said, yeah, no, we are not going to be in person. Niece (college) and nephew (high school) are both seniors and they are super bummed right now about the fall prospect of More Remote.

Anyway. I was a little startled by the Paxson piece advocating for in person (she runs Brown! RI was literally stopping people at the border!) schooling in the fall. That was just over a week ago. And she is not the only one to float a trial balloon on the topic. They went over like, well, not like the lighter than air kind, that is for sure.

I decided to poke around a little bit to better understand Why This Week (brace yourself for serious buzzkill: I have vacations planned in June, August, November and December. I do not expect to go on any of them, except maybe a driving trip to LBI in August — and I have not scheduled anything at all for 2021, even tho it is already freaking May and I usually plan a full year in advance. I basically think nothing happens “normally” until the vaccine is available, thus all my surprises will be Awesome. Anyway, having given up on planning for The Duration, I am completely mystified by the various stages of giving up on things that everyone else is going through), which lead me to Inside Higher Ed.

They consider numerous scenarios (I will come back to that in a bit), but here is the last, the fully remote one.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/learning-innovation/fall-scenario-15-fully-remote

Check out this quote:

“Should infections and hospitalizations spike in the months or weeks leading up to the start of the semester beyond what local ICUs can handle, schools may have no option but to continue with remote learning.”

That is not quoting orange guy. That is not attacking some GOP office holder for being Awful. Nope. That is straight up part of the argument for remote learning. Honestly, NOT what I would want to be caught saying in my out loud voice. How many parents and students want to attend college, thinking, gosh, if the local ICU fills up, I may have to change my plans? That would be not very many. Honestly? I would expect the faculty to sue the university for endangering them.

This is interesting, but largely academically (ha ha ha yeah, whatever) — it is not practical to contemplate if people at Inside Higher Ed cannot grasp it conceptually. I mean, we may find ourselves doing this in the decades to come (wow, would that be awesome or what?!?). But not soon.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2020/05/13/one-option-delivering-instruction-if-campuses-open-fall-hyflex

“Our bloggers Josh Kim and Eddie Maloney have laid out 15 possible scenarios for campuses this fall, including delays and such, but I'm going to focus on three:
Campuses fully open to students with few restrictions (highly unlikely);
Campuses fully virtual (possible, but for many places undesirable); or
Campuses open with significant physical distancing restrictions in place, or with meaningful numbers of students not physically on campus.”

This is a really nice simplification, that creates total clarity.

(1) Campuses fully open to students with few restrictions <— That is NOT possible until we have a vaccine. Because behaviorally, we will _never_ get to herd immunity and because the nature of the virus (airborne transmission while asymptomatic) means containment is not possible (<— I am prepared to commit to this, because even if you can stamp it out, you then have to not let anyone in from outside, which is Not Going to Happen in the USA, anyway).

So. Option 1 is impossible until we have a vaccine. Which will not happen in time for fall semester.

(3) Campuses open with significant physical distancing restrictions in place, or with meaningful numbers of students not physically on campus. <—— Super hard. It is hard to imagine. It is hard to plan. It is hard to implement.

If you have three choices, and one is super hard, and one is impossible, the remaining one is going to be the choice, as long as it is not super hard and/or impossible. Since that is the one they already did on a crash basis, we know it is do-able. Therefore, that is what we are doing.

Revisiting the super hard option is worth doing! I believe the california state system nursing programs, for example, will be doing at least some in person education, and I think some of the lab stuff will be as well for science programs. You can carve out the parts that absolutely have to be done in person, and continue those, in the existing facilities, which are now nice and empty so you can socially distance. But the idea that we would somehow have the general population of students go through some weird dance on campus of social distancing just to, I dunno, support fierce intellectual debate that is Not the Same on Zoom (LOL). The idea that we would balance that versus how full the RI ICUs are. Honestly. That is a weird set of tradeoffs ya got going on. I mean, I have participated in fierce intellectual debate in person, and I have participated in fierce intellectual debate online, and I have done it in Zoom and Have You Tried Green Eggs and Ham, wait, what, where was I? Fierce intellectual debate is fucking overrated. The people who want to engage in it will not have any trouble finding places to engage in it just because college went online. The people who dislike it will finally be able to get some sleep at night.

I have a complicated theory about Why This Week that involves decision dates and when deposits are due, and parents basically deciding that they would not pay the deposit if it committed them to sending their kid into danger, and schools with brands that attract international students realizing that travel restrictions will make it impossible to collect that sweet, sweet full cash payment from their international students, and schools with brands, but whose potential enrollees ditched them in favor of someone further up the food chain suddenly having space for them this fall . . . It is complicated. Basically, no one is happy, but NO ONE is willing to pay to commit to send their kid off in the fall. The fear was that no one would pay for a year of remote schooling, but that turned out to be the smaller problem in the end.

Who knew? But it turns out this is a cleanest dirty shirt situation.