Tuesday: T. back at school

The teacher offered T. the option of doing his zoom inclusion from in person school, so he is back at school to try another day. If all goes well, he’ll still be home Wednesday (because we are still hybrid and Wednesday is an all remote day), but the rest of the week he’ll be back at school. He is _very_ happy about being back at school. He was doing fine at home, but even with all the masks and distancing, in person is still better for him. I’m glad I started that conversation on Saturday.

It’s slowly warming up again. I plan on going for a walk with M. a little later today, after a phone conversation with J.

I’m working on the Medieval Blacksmith lego kit.

I got an email back from the refinisher; R. will bring the table over later this afternoon.

Flipped Classrooms and Work Time Expectations

I’ve been thinking about flipped classrooms a lot lately. Our district’s choices during the pandemic have emphasized family choice within a context set in part by state mandates that have, at times, changed abruptly. I think that is broadly true, altho the details of the state mandates are obviously pretty variable, and budgetary constraints, as well as existing facility constraints also play a major role.

No matter the district, however, a lot of movement along the trend line of tech adoption has occurred more rapidly than was happening in the Before Times. Bloomberg had someone from McGraw-Hill on yesterday talking about what that company was expecting as children across the country return to in person schooling at all / more hours / more days of the week. He does not expect things to return to the Before Times, and then he started talking about interactive curricular materials, and how he believes they will be a big part of future schooling in that the software can help instructors identify what a student is struggling with and use in person time to focus on those particular areas of difficulty. And that’s why I’ve been thinking about flipped classrooms.

A major point of conflict within families with students and between families with students and educational systems is homework. Flipped classrooms replace exercises / writing assignments / etc. with consumption of curriculum normally presented in a classroom, and then use classroom time to do exercises with the teacher and potentially others available with difficulties. This is particularly useful for students who lack support in the home environment for working through difficulties with exercises, whether due to parents with work schedules that conflict, language barriers, students who have already surpassed the academic abilities of the other available people but still need help, etc. Flipped classrooms, during and shortly after the transition from “regular” instructional strategies also embed some time expectations. For example, it would not be reasonable for a teacher who has a 50 minute instructional period to assign curricular materials that would take more than 50 minutes to view, and which is to be completed in a single night. They’ve left their lane, and in an obvious way. Also, a teacher can rapidly get feedback about how long it takes to complete a certain number of exercises of a certain type — the bell rings at 50 minutes and that’s all the time there is. They can’t tell the kids to finish it at home; it will be done in the next session or not at all.

A lot of conflict within families revolves around, did the kid do the homework, does the parent know the kid is supposed to do the homework, once it is done, is it turned in. All that is fixed with the flip, albeit replaced by the curriculum to be consumed by reading or watching or whatever. However, the _time required_ is no longer in doubt. It _cannot be more_ than the 50 minutes that the teacher could have used to present the material or ask it to be read in a classroom bell schedule.

Finally, the total time volume of work now becomes visible. In a hypothetical 6 class, 50 minutes per class schedule, you can have up to 5 hours of work assigned, either to be done in the class or to be done at home. Teachers _routinely_ and not always intentionally, assign far more than this amount of work to be done at home, and that becomes a point of conflict (within families or between families and the teachers). Adding together the total volume of work in a school day, and if the maximum amount of curricular consumption time is added together, is on the order of 10 hours.

I mean, duh, that’s obviously too much.

So moving to a flipped classroom will set in motion some other changes. First, teachers will actually have a much better sense of what their students are struggling with and how long it takes to complete work. Second, it will rapidly become apparent how many hours are being devoted to school both in and out of school, and a discussion will ensue about whether that is the right number of hours. Previously, this debate was stymied by broad disagreement about the volume of time being spent. With the ability to measure the amount of curricular material assigned for home consumption (number of minutes to view or listen, number of pages to be read, etc.), and with the amount of time spent on exercises tightly constrained by the bell schedule, there will no longer be any doubt about how much time is being assigned. While some parents will always opt for more, and other parents will always opt for less, the location of the midpoint once known will _definitely_ be capped (and likely at less than 10 hours per day) and debate will likely move to attempting to ascertain an appropriate minimum. Whether or not project work can be assigned to be worked on outside of class session time will become an acute and ongoing debate; equity considerations will almost certainly win the day in public schools, and a large component of scandals will result from people who are pushing for outside work on projects turning out to be doing the projects for their kids.

I’m sure this is all wrong, however, it also was very fun to think about.

WFH = National job Market

My walking partner’s brother was apparently experiencing pressure to return to the office a few months ago, and responded by finding a different job that would not do that to him. I’m not sure how long that process took, but not that long, really.

There’s been a fair amount of debate about whether people would ever return to the office or not. A lot of people already have, everywhere when needed, and in some regions because of local norms. But some jobs really don’t need to ever be done in person. My friend R., for example, saw her local office be permanently closed because her company realized that was an expense they didn’t need to be paying ever again. Unless she gets a different job, she’ll never go back to the office, and odds are good that many of the customer service jobs she is likely to ever work will similarly be exclusively WFH.

Goldman Sachs is experiencing a particularly Today’s World form of this push and pushback, with DJ Sol apparently trying to get people back in, and in turn, experiencing a bunch of people being willing to tell all kinds of stories about him that maybe don’t look so good. I expect more work dynamics to experience the attempt to exert power by management being blocked by workers going to social media to get management to have to go put out PR fires instead. Or be replaced by people who are considerably more socially adept.

There was discussion about pay scales early on, when many tech companies sent most (all?) of their workers home and told them to expect to be there for months / ever. The workers moved back to where they used to live before coastal city job opportunities beckoned, and where grandparents could help out with child care, or the hiking opportunities were more plentiful, and the houses were both larger and cheaper with bigger backyards. Sometimes, they moved to places where the schools reopened in person months sooner than the coastal city they still nominally WFH to? In? Of? Prepositions have failed me.

Most of the discussions worked kinda like this. We pay Pat $X00,000 because Pat has to pay rent in this here expensive coastal city. Now that Pat is living in a much less expensive city further inland, we are going to pay Pat YY% of $X00,000, to reflect Pat’s reduced cost of living due to the move.

I did not feel like this made any sense. I mean, why can’t Pat shop Pat’s services to a competitor? I mean, the justification for reducing Pat’s pay was due to Pat’s changed living circumstances, not the job Pat was doing. Someone else is gonna go, hell’s to the yes, I want Pat to work for me! I’ll give Pat a raise! Hallelujah!

The long-term impact of WFH for that slice of jobs that can be done _just as well from home_ as from _in an office_ (not true of all jobs! Some jobs can be done from home, but worse, and some jobs cannot be done from home at all) is to produce a national job market. In the Before Times, the job market was highly, highly, highly local. Not only did the people who lived and worked in the PacNW have a relatively high degree of commitment to not moving to, say, the Bay Area to work (if they wanted to work in the Bay Area, they would have already left), as a general rule, it was pretty tough (at least 20 some years ago) to convince someone who had a job on the East side and who lived on the East side to take a job in Seattle proper. Crossing the bridges sucked. During my (admittedly few) years working in tech in the PacNW, I wound up on the East side repeatedly, even tho I really wanted to be in Seattle — and I kept looking for Seattle work whenever my butt was in a seat in Kirkland or Factoria or wherever.

Imagine, if you will, all the people who love living near whatever they love living near, or who have a mortgage, or don’t want to move their kid out of their high school — imagine all those people that a company in a coastal city would have LOVED to recruit, but who could not be recruited because they had some kinda job that made their life work and no amount of money was enough to blast them loose.

Imagine now, you can hire them without having to convince them to move.

Their local employer is completely, irretrievably, fucked.

If you are their local employer, you are gonna be paying national job market prices for those employees.

ETA: Oh, also — someone on Bloomberg saying that job listings are including permanent WFH as a benefit. All that, right there. So succinct, compared to me.

ETAYA: And yeah, the housing market and every other aspect of local economies that have a bunch of people in them doing WFH are going to be impacted. It’s not just exporting housing market appreciation. It’s exporting the incomes that made housing markets appreciate in the first place. Local inflation will no longer be contained by anything.

Owning the Fiscal Responsibility Fiction

We have had, for some decades, a set of tropes around political parties and their relative propensities with respect to tax, spend, and balance the budget. The tropes were: Democrats like to spend money, and will tax to pay for it when they are trying to balance the budget; Republicans like tax cuts and will cut government spending to pay for it when they are trying to balance the budget. As a practical matter, we’d gotten into a dynamic of Democrats could only spend money that they got from cutting other programs, and Republicans cut taxes and got into wars (that was a new development with jr) and spent any money that was saved by Democrats.

The tropes were never true. They’ve gotten less true over time. We’ve reached a point where the NYT was advocating for a Mitt Romney proposal to create a payment to families through the social security administration, paid for with cuts to other programs (which inevitably also benefitted families with children, thus making the whole thing a sisyphean exercise in More Paperwork for Everyone) (also, this was where I unsubscribed from NYT), which was equally loathed by Democrats and Republicans.

However, _also_ at this point, Garbarino, a Republican representative from New York (southern Long Island), was on Bloomberg being asked questions about, now that the stimulus is done, what might Republicans work with Democrats on to do infrastructure. He was trying to simultaneously communicate messages that Hey We Tried to Work With Them But They Voted Down All Our Amendments and No Way Are We Gonna Do Anything With Them, while preserving a Republicans Like Infrastructure appendix. What he did NOT say stood out in sharp contrast: he at no point suggested that Democrats should raise taxes to pay for infrastructure not did he suggest that Democrats should cut other programs to pay for it. When probed on specific tax proposals (the one on the table — unspecified but targeted at individuals and corporations making more than $400K/year — and also a rise in the gas tax), he had arguments of no interest against both.

A Republican confronted with a Democratic proposal to spend money did NOT advocate that the Democratic proposal be modified to be paid for by taxes or budget cuts elsewhere.

I think this basically means that Republicans, having gone through the last several years, are unable to marshal the traditional Fiscal Responsibility Fiction (viz. the other party should be responsible). I don’t know why. I don’t care why. I’m sort of happy to see the end of it (possibly murdered along with Romney’s idiotic proposal). I mentioned all this to a friend, and asked what he thought should be done with the now-unclaimed Fiscal Responsibility Fiction. He said Democrats should grab it. He was clear — he is not proposing that Democrats should go back to actually being fiscally responsible (that was the Romney proposal). But he does think that Democrats should assume the mantle of the Fiscal Responsibility Fiction. He thought I should email the idea to someone.

I was like, I don’t need to! It’s already happening. Democrats are talking up tax hikes on the rich and/or corporate. I’ve got my doubts about any of that actually happening (it _could_ through reconciliation — if they could get every single Democratic Senator to vote in favor of it, which seems unlikely, altho I will not list any names-as-reasons, I think a motivated reader could work that out for themselves and in this particular case, the name isn’t Manchin), and was really wondering why they were even bothering. But if a concerted effort in that direction that fails and which they can firmly pin on the Republicans helps attract voters who are into Fiscal Responsibility, well.

I’m all for that.

(Not that you care, I’d kind of love it if it succeeded, altho I have some interest in the details as I would prefer a tax increase that could be implemented over one that could not.)