Today it was announced that we are teaching online next week. What will happen after that, nobody knows. I’m now somehow supposed to redo my entire course in 3 days. I have no idea how to do that because it’s not a lecture course.
It’s very upsetting. In spite of the cold, I left campus and went for a walk because I’m at the point of screaming at somebody. I need to walk it off.
Clarissa's Blog 
I feel your rage and frustration. You are in my prayers. This is all nonsense. I was on a zoom call Monday with a woman who announced to the group, “I have covid!” (she didn’t appear sick at all). She is vaxxed and when I made a comment about how it seems to be going around, etc., I said, “Well, at least people don’t get it twice.” She said, “Oh yes they do! The people who REFUSE to get vaxxed get it twice.” And it was clear she wasn’t even thinking about how she has it and is vaxxed. It seems everyone is checking their brain at the door. It is truly infuriating.
Your poor students. They are the ones who truly suffer.
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I don’t feel bad for students because they have been the biggest sheep in all of this. Not a peep of protest. Not a single attempt to stand up for themselves. They are paying for this joke of an education. Why aren’t they more upset? These are the people who had no trouble turning out in droves to badger a campus preacher and run him off campus for talking about the Bible. They bullied this guy viciously. Terrorized half the campus with loud wails through loudspeakers. That’s something that motivates them to protest. But this? Nope. They are completely quiet.
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I have been fighting against the onerous mask mandates and restrictions in our school district as they are harming my child. I wrote individual letters to the board of education members and 4 responded with a “too bad, so sad, this is life!” response. One of them went so far as to tell me my child was suffering in a mask because “he wasn’t wearing it properly.”
I found a consortium of other school district parents and we are continuing to fight. We have notified the attorney general in Missouri and he sent them a “cease and desist” letter – but they will not budge. They have an attorney and they are fighting us tooth and nail. 2 of these board members I voted for recently because they said they would resist the mask mandates. They are liars and cheats who hate children. I still can’t afford private school and I can’t homeschool because of work. The only thing that keeps me sane is that I know God is sovereign and I pray for Him to intervene on our behalf. I trust Him. Without that, I might be homicidal.
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You and your child have my sympathy. Nothing is more depressing than the total indifference of school board members and school superintendents to the suffering of children. I attended many school board meetings and attempted many times to present the truth about covid and kids and masks, to no avail. To them it was a nonissue.
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I have a positive, heartening story to share on the subject. Yesterday, the teacher on my daughter’s Christian school said, “Children, the time has come when you can wear your masks. It’s cold outside, so when we go to the playground, you are allowed to wear your mask to keep your face warm.”
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On the plus side, there are signs that kids in the UK are pushing back:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-kids-of-the-uk/comments
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“somehow supposed to redo my entire course in 3 days”
More destruction of education – make it too frustrating to try to do the job of educator to filter out those who aren’t content to engage in the sham of online ‘learning’…. a simulacrum of academia with nothing to challenge the ongoing wealth transfers.
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So true. The people who are happy are the hacks who don’t do real teaching. I’m one of those old-school losers who develop a course as a coherent whole. Everything is connected, every class day contributes to the whole. There’s an underlying philosophy to everything. The reason why students love me isn’t my distant and grumpy personality or the insane amount of reading I assign. It’s that everything I do in class makes sense. It’s all linked in a beautiful whole. No online workbooks or generic, pre-canned activities. All of my activities are original and developed from scratch. I can’t just redo them in 3 days in a completely different format.
I’m so angry.
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What would happen if you announced that the structure and content of your class is such that it cannot be taught online and offered the class at the scheduled time anyway? I’m not in academia so I genuinely don’t know the disciplinary possibilities there.
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What do they think will change in 7 days that will make it acceptable to return if it isn’t currently acceptable? One week will turn into two. Two will turn into more. People will get set in patterns. Students and faculty alike will make childcare plans based on being at home. Students with off-campus jobs, and likewise faculty with off-campus jobs, will make work and commuting plans based on the assumption that classes are happening from home.
Do that a few weeks and too many things will be set in stone to bring the whole campus back. Even if everyone were over their fear (not gonna happen, but humor me for a hypothetical) you can’t just ask thousands of people to rearrange their schedules and then do so again. At best you’ll get some fraction of the classes back to campus, eventually.
Factor in the paranoia and you’ll never get many people back. Even people who want to come back will often be afraid to speak out against the paranoids screaming “YOU’LL KILL MY UNVACCINATED 3 YEAR-OLD!!!!11!!!1!!!”
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I literally don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing “in class” next week. Talk about the weather? Tell jokes? I have nothing prepared and I can’t come up with anything. I’m paralyzed by the thought that students are paying for this crap. Getting in debt. And I have absolutely nothing to offer.
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OT: Any thoughts on Kazakhstan? I thought it was the North of Kazakhstan that Russia wanted to cleave off… but now it seems they’re going for the whole country (part of the new CCCP that so many Russians want?)
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I’m ashamed to say that I’m kind of glad because if Putin sends troops there, he’ll have fewer troops to send to Ukraine.
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“fewer troops to send to Ukraine”
Silver linings…. you take them where you can get them.
OTOH I’m wondering because… linguistically the images on film make no sense. Why would Kazakh police have shields with “POLICE” in English on them? Did they buy them and then not localize them?
Some of the romanized kazakh in images from Almaty doesn’t look like kazakh (or turkic even…) I know there’s chaos in repeated and mostly aborted plans to switch to roman from cyrillic (though cyrillic suits kazakh just fine) but I can’t make any sense of the images I see… if I didn’t know better I’d think it’s all some kind of psy op but I can’t figure out what kind (but I’m not sure I know better either….).
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OT: This made me laugh…
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Check this out, though:
https://www.lucianne.com/2022/01/07/unions_shut_record_4783_schools_across_us_this_week_despite_assurances_classrooms_are_safe_arizona_governor_offers_long-suffering_parents_up_to_7000_to_send_kids_to_private_schools_or_pay_for_tuition_76481.html
(gracious what a long URL!)
Basically, though, teachers’ unions in AZ are trying to force school closures again, so the governor is offering $7k to parents who need to put their kids in private schools, to defray tuition expenses. COVID may, weirdly, be the thing that finally makes school-choice-vouchers real!
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