School closures led to more sleep and better quality of life for adolescents
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Because of the schedule, my parents had me go to sleep around 9pm but I had a hard time sleeping then and tended to not fall asleep before midnight/1 am. I'd either lie in bed thinking, or use my radio alarm clock light to read books. Honestly, I think I would have been healthier and enjoyed school a lot more if school had started 90 minutes later.
That's definitely a criteria I'd look out for when choosing a school for my son.
When I first started at high school, I was a great student, for example winning multiple prizes over the first 18 months. But the tiredness really took a toll, and for most of the rest of school I was a half zombie - I still did well at school, but I'm sure I could have achieved so much more if I wasn't so incredibly tired all the time, and it for sure took a toll on my social life too.
Us two were maybe more extreme examples, but it seems to be a common problem.
I don't know what the solution is though?
let's not ignore the fact schools were designed long ago to 1/ shape future factory workers into well behaved blue collars, while 2/ making it possible for parents to go to work.
before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. Kids were out playing, stayed home safe or participated to gardening activities.
the issue with school is far more deep rooted into how our society sadly operates. it may be impossible to fix one without addressing the other.
Ah yes, the good old times where nobody could read or write and your only perspective in life was to be a farmer like your father and his father before him!
First class of the day was at 730 and what that really meant was rolling out of bed at 725 still in my clothes from last night and trudging over to the building next door where I would be marked present and immediately fall asleep in my desk. The first class was utterly worthless as far as I know and I learned not a thing. Shower and change of clothes and actually starting my day happend during breakfast break later.
Part of the problem, imo, is that quiet time in the dorm started at 1045 but was poorly enforced so often it was impossible to get to sleep till 1130 or later.
When reading the parent comment, I naturally assumed they were talking about sleeping in class, as that wasy solution to the sleep problem as well. To this day I routinely meet people that seem to file this possibility away in the "impossible" drawer of their minds or assume that "this person doesn't look like trash that sleeps during class" and conclude that there's been a misunderstanding.
Just to be clear, I am not lashing out at you (or anyone), and just wanted to make this comment more vivid to emphasize how expectations and assumptions make it all too easy to misinterpret a statement as a "typo" of a different statement altogether.
Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.
Night owls work well in the evening. Even if some of them can force themselves to operate early, is it reasonable to expect them to sacrifice their best hours?
Rant over, it's early for me after all :)
Yep, I remember my Dad telling me I was lazy - it seemed really unfair, as there was nothing I could do about it.
Every body is governed by circadian rhythm. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to be, but the majority tends to overrule the minority in this great experiment we call modern society. Unfortunately, the "majority" are not developing children, but adults in authority who are less affected by disruptions to their sleep and don't have to prioritize the health and wellbeing of their charges and so don't.
The second reason is more artificial. In the US, homework is given without any consideration for work or life schedules, let alone what other classes are assigning. I went to a "school of excellence" where I took eight classes each day, five days a week, and they all assigned roughly an hour's worth of homework each night. I had no time to work and barely any time to participate in extracurriculars without staying up each night until 11pm. Because I lived in a different city, I generally had to leave by 5:45am to make my zero period.
Can you tell me what my younger self could have done differently so they were able to be asleep by 9pm?
Can you?
Consensus has emerged in the last few years that the circadian rhythm is mostly regulated hormonally, with a strong genetic factor. So that would be akin to telling a black person to "just get whiter skin".
> Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.
Do you have a reliable way of doing so? If yes, you are sitting on a potential billion-dollar innovation. I'm surprised you haven't monetized it yet.
Citation needed. Circadian rhythm is influenced by a lot more than simply ambiant light.
> If you're tired enough to be "sleep deprived" then you're going to be perfectly capable of going to sleep at 10 instead of 1am, barring some insomniac disorder
Insomniac disorders... like delayed hormonal response causing the circadian rhythm to be out of phase?
> If you're tired, you can sleep at night.
Note that the author eventually sleeps. It's simply out of phase.
Nowadays, I work in a different time zone and due to work and meetings, I sleep around 3am every day. I fall asleep instantly and get my full 7-8 hours of sleep every day. Having the correct rhythm changes everything. I've never been able to do that earlier in the day and I tend to have extreme difficulty adjusting and sleeping earlier if I travel and have to deal with jetlag.
You're lucky but stop assuming that everyone is the same as you and that everyone can sleep early. If you've never known the feeling of being extremely tired and sleep deprived yet not being able to sleep then, I don't see how you can make generalisations and assume that it's the case for everyone else??
At this point, there's plenty of research that shows that your basic understanding is wrong, that circadian rhythm are not only a function of ambient light.
Nowadays, I'm extremely careful to use blue light filters in the evening, I use f.lux or equivalent on any devices I own (due to my work, I cannot avoid using those devices at night) and I make sure to choose appropriate lighting for my house.
It's not insomnia because if I go to sleep at 3am, I fall asleep instantly. When I go to sleep at that time and wake up every day around 10am, 11am (which I luckily can do because as an adult, I work remotely), I can be well rested, having a regular schedule and sleep very quickly. If it were insomnia, then the issue would exist
If, however, I try to go to sleep before midnight, even if I feel tired, I do not fall asleep. I'm pretty much the textbook definition of a night owl and pretty much an extreme one at that. It's not for lack of trying, because, when I first started working, I had to wake up early, had to try to go to sleep early and was unable to. It's been a significant handicap and it's why I had to find ways to get jobs that work with my schedule to improve my quality of life.
You might be right that teens have a tendency to want to push bedtime but there's also been plenty of studies that have shown that teens have better sleep when going to sleep late and waking up late. At this point, it's well established that people have different chronotype and a small minority are "night owls" to varying degrees.
Please read the research and don't make generalisations based on your own experience. I've been told before by acquaintances and family that not going to bed early and waking up early is unhealthy, lazy, name any negative adjectives you can think of. And yes, if I try hard, I can wake up early every weekday, it's just that I'll be exhausted by the end of the week, will need the weekend to recover and will have very poor quality of life.
Ahh ok, this isn't medical research. It's the good old boomer rant that "phone bad".
I get it now.
Regardless, school in general should start later, and so should businesses. If I'm left to my own devices without external factors, I will go to sleep at 2am and get up at 10am. And that's what I did during the lockdowns. But otherwise, its punishing when I have to get up at 7am to be at work at 8 or 9.
One in particular made a huge virtue out of being super early. That one we didn't even bother assessing on other dimensions.
'Early to bed, early to rise,' said Ben Franklin. Great advice for those whose chronotypes match this attitude. Not for the other 40% though ... for them, this 'virtue' is an inescapable prison.
"In morning people, sleep drive and chronotype tend to be aligned. Their internal clocks are pretty well synchronized with their over-all energy levels. For night owls, however, things get complicated. When the sun comes up, the light resets their circadian clocks, telling them to wake up. But, because of their chronotypes, they don’t have much energy and they want to go back to sleep." - [https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/moral-morn...]
Anecdata of course but I remember much like you being extremely sleepy at school all day and sleeping a lot on weekends.
All books are gonna have errors especially in their first version. Doesn't mean it's better to just never read anything about any subject.
Just the first person to really review it, found 15 major errors and inaccuracies in the first chapter, and gave up due to the time it would take to review the rest of the book.
On top of that, the author doubles down when called out, and doesn't want to discuss any of the actual details or admit any errors or misrepresentations, like cutting data out of a graph when it would give readers a different conclusion than the text.
Some of the errors are positively dangerous, like claiming that the recommended number of hours of sleep is 8, instead of the true figure of 7-9.
"I spent more than 130 hours over the last 2 months researching and writing this essay (~5 hours to write the outline; ~60 hours to get to the first draft; ~65 hours to edit and fact-check), which constituted essentially all of my surplus free time over this time period. Continuing at the same pace, it would take me more than 3,000 hours to check the entire book. 3,000 hours is the equivalent of 75 weeks or 1.4 years of full-time work."
It's a good read but yea the guy wrote in depth into false claims , and only changed what he wrote based on pushback in a new book.
I chalk it up to more than just errors.
His new book "new science..." This "science" was available at time of his original publishing of first version
I see you too practiced the fine arts of the tight schedule between snoozing the alarm clock and catching the bus :].
That all said, school hours were set mostly because public schools double as a daycare. I don't know many people who drive in at 7am anymore, it's definitely time to reset expectations here.
It's a whole thing.
I went to several schools and kids being driven to school has always been an exception. They mostly walked or took public transport [0]. My sister went to high-school in a more rural area (read far-away suburb) and kids from the surrounding towns used to take the school bus.
Yet, school still started very early, a little past 8:00 AM. I absolutely loathed having to get up so early in the morning (7-ish) and used to be half asleep for the first few periods.
While US issues around transportation certainly don't help, there must be something else going on with the school schedules since they seem to be roughly the same in areas where transportation is not an issue.
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[0] I know there were exceptions for kids living far away, I was one of them since we moved during high-school, but I didn't change schools. However, this is absolutely not the norm where I grew up.
I grew up in a small village in rural Scotland, and there was exactly one bus a day to/from School. If I missed it, I had a 5 mile walk to get there. I got a bike at some point, but twisty rural roads were not the safest place to be riding.
Clearly you didn’t grew in Barcelona, or Paris, or London, …
Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
I agree that transportation here has many issues and I absolutely hate it, but when I was a kid [0] I could get to school fine with the suburban train. My classmates had no issue getting there with the bus (regular, not school bus).
> Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
Sure, I can tell it from the Paris metro, too. The reason is that people tend to go away on vacation. This also explains the usual spikes in traffic jams the weekend right at the start and at the end of vacations.
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[0] I'm in my thirties, so that wasn't a long time ago
Before that, schools tend to be denser. Because I had to attend some special classes, I couldn't go to my local school and needed to go a further one. It was a 30-minute walk.
Normally, kids would go to their local schools, of which I passed one on my way. My local one was in the opposite direction, 2 minutes away from my house.
At least in Paris itself, only a third of homes have cars, and in this third, not everyone is going to bring its children to school using it.
Sure, maybe in smaller cities that’s a problem, but honestly if you’re choosing to drive round London then you’re taking a massively suboptimal method of transport.
Of course, public transport shouldn't be necessary for most city kids, which ought to have a school in walking and certainly biking[1] distance. It'd be interesting to see the distribution of distance to school in different locations and for different years. Increases in suburbanization are bound to increase the average distance to school; but rural kids even in my generation and more so in my parents and grandparents generation managed much longer commutes without a car as a matter of course.
[1] Maybe kids use the bike less since there's a perception that it's gotten more dangerous. A perception that's not totally wrong, at least in Germany: the number of bike accidents has increased from ~74k in 2000 to 87k in 2019[2], though at least the number of fatal accidents decreased in the same time.
[2] Table 1.1 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...
Yes, kids that already live in the city won’t obviously get taken to school by car, but most good schools in the periphery better have a way to handle the cars.
I wouldn't call 8:00 "very early". Elementary school started 7:25 for me, "Gymnasium" 7:20. Didn't really have a problem with it, same with my classmates. If you keep a decent sleeping schedule, don't play games on some device right before bed or laze about all day, it's a non-issue under normal circumstances.
The natural shift of the sleep cycle towards later hours during puberty is exactly the topic.
I would consider myself to be the textbook example: zombiesque in school until 10am, now, 25 years later, I naturally wake up at 6am.
Having spent many hours on the Parisian metro, there’s no chance I’d let my children anywhere near it. Even supervised.
The metro can be unsafe at night, but usually not at times where children commute.
High schoolers that need to be taken to school by their parents are definitely the exception.
Here in the UK there are parking restrictions around practically every school to stop parents clogging up the roads to drop off or collect their kids. I'd suggest that's evidence that a lot of children still get taken to school by car.
One has to know that every 10 minutes the train stops at the school as it has their own stop.
Busses also stop at school.
Nonetheless the amount of kids in their teens being driven to school by parents is staggering.
Once in a while someone comes in late. But, it is not that regular thing. Most of them in fact catch busses just fine.
Missed connections are usually missed deliberately, regardless of what is said to the parents later.
Because I am and I went to school by bus beginning with 12 years, and busses here are reliable (like "by minute reliable").
Most school districts I've lived in seem designed to ensure parents drive their kids to school.
As an example, my current district won't offer a bus unless you live more than 3 miles away. 3 miles is a giant distant to walk every morning. Luckily, we live about a half mile away and she bikes to school. I wouldn't let her bike 3 miles, because it would mean crossing multiple highways.
Pretty much everyone here bikes to work at that age. Even if its 20km through wind and rain. On top of that, being dropped off by mommy and daddy does not impress your fellow students!
I had 10km from home to university. I would definitely not want to do double that amount everyday. Even as I was in shape at the time, doing it on bike everyday would be severely unappealing. It would probably also meant that biking has to be the only sport I do.
If nothing else, both take huge amount of time. If you go those 40km slowly (or environment prevents it), you are looking at very long commute. If you go them fast, then you cant claim it is not a sport.
Much as we want to give kids responsibility and as much as some kids will thrive off it, others don’t yet that the maturity to look after themselves even for short periods.
And here lies the problem. You often end up setting up social systems to support the worst cases rather than the best of even average populous.
It’s one of those things you realise once you are responsible for kids of your own (and no, pets don’t count). Much as you cringe setting the same boundaries you hated growing up, you realise you realise they exist for a reason.
Which is fine (from the point of view of the people who run these schools). Because the modern HS process is designed around passing tests, and generating positive signals for admissions to elite schools. Which sometimes overlap with the goal of learning -- but in general are orthogonal to it.
By and large, "learning" as such has come to have at best anciliary value in the modern HS experience.
Continuing to tack them on to the end of the day would not only cut into traditional family time in the evening and but you'd also run out of daylight which for things like cross-country wouldn't work.
I would have liked to have slept in too, but I wouldn't want to at the expense of killing football and drama club.
If kids were allowed to not do things they identify as find miserable and boring, practically everything in the world would be off the table and the next generatation would be totally and utterly fucked.
The theory is that it builds better character.
We certainly need the doctors and engineers of tomorrow, but they won't be very useful without healthy functioning societies in which can exercise these skills.
We also need a bunch of artisanal non-knowledge workers and laborers and should stop pretending those are inferior careers. A hard working, say, trashman is just as dignified as any other profession and if that's in someone's future, then we should make sure they can take and do the job with pride.
Organised by the school and generally carried out 3-5pm & Saturday morning.
- 100 minute long lessons - because they found that it minimises transition time between lessons - 35 minute lunch break and very short mid lesson breaks - twilight lessons - lessons both before and after school to study additional subjects (which is optional)
My (primary school age) daughter greatly benefited from a more bespoke, one-to-one approach, and came on leaps and bounds during home schooling. But my wife wasn't working, so was fully available for her, which of course was not possible for everyone.
Then suddenly we’ll be told “trade offs need to be made” and “the vaccines provide enough protection to relax restrictions”.
The fact that we’re 2 years into it and with a population that is mostly vaccine and at a much reduced risk yet the restriction seem to be the same or worse?
Ontario, Canada just cranked up restrictions.
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/public-health-measures
Quebec now has curfew, primary schools closed. All public events canceled.
https://cdn-contenu.quebec.ca/cdn-contenu/sante/documents/Pr...
Wait, how does that work?
Do people get arrested just because they are out past curfew? Random ID checks?
Fined if outside during certain hours without an approved reason.
https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coron...
I'm terribly sorry for what happened to you. It shouldn't have happened. After the first few months the data was very clear that schools were safe to open. They absolutely shouldn't be closed right now.
You are a victim of cowardly bureaucrats and powerful and wealthy elderly people who desperately want to cling to more years of their lives despite already being at the end. They don't care at all if they rob you of your future. They tell themselves little lies like "kids are resilient" to make themselves feel better.
They were wrong to tell people they couldn't go to playgrounds and ignore the early science that showed that the virus didn't spread outdoors. They've never apologized for that mistake. When you see people walking around outside wearing masks, know that they have bought into a foolish lie completely removed from any form of science.
Your teachers were all too happy to have the schools closed despite being in age groups where they were also not majorly at risk especially after being vaccinated.
I live in Colorado, and we are now at a point in this state where omicron is the dominant strain. Everyone here is catching it and waking up to the fact that it's a cold and very little more. Your schools are being shut for no reason other than cowardice.
Don't be afraid to call it what it is. You are surrounded by cowards. Cowards are always quick to call the brave foolish and reckless. It's how they make themselves feel better.
Look around you and learn. You are witnessing a reality that I was naive to for far too long: Most people would rather do what is popular than what is right. Education is not inoculation to groupthink. Rather, it often is paired with brainwashing and a propensity to outsource critical thinking to central authority figures.
If you add up all of the deaths from this virus under the age of 40, they make up less than 1% of the total. Your education was sacrificed to protect a population of people that are no longer working or paying taxes. In Japan when the nuclear accident at Fukushima happened, older plant workers stepped up to walk into the radiation to spare younger generations. In our society we did the opposite.
I hope you have a good home life because that would make you one of the more fortunate victims of these foolish lockdowns. I grew up in an abusive home in the rural southern United States. There were weeks where I begged for Monday morning to come as soon as possible so I could escape. School was a refuge for me. And and there are many many children with far worse homes than I had who were forced to be shut into them with abusive parents who were put into an even worse mood then they were typically in before the pandemic. The statistics on child abuse show this as well.
Like the fools in my nation who rushed us into the Iraq war on false pretenses, the people who are wrong now will never admit it. As the years go by and it becomes more clear that this was utter foolishness, many will pretend that they were opposed to the lockdowns and these other ridiculous policies. They will be lying.
I have two children of my own. My wife works as a kindergarten teacher. The children she is seeing in her classroom now are incredibly stunted. Every day she comes home with new stories about how bad it is. They have been locked in their houses for 2 years, given iPads as babysitters by lazy or tired or emotionally exhausted parents. It's an utter horror what the cowards have done to our children.
I know this comment will be downloaded to oblivion by the cowards. They are the majority of the people on this website. They're the majority in tech now. Most will never start companies. They just follow the path laid out for them, study algorithm interview books, and go get a desk at Google working on a widget in a product that nobody cares about it or will ever see. They all owe you an apology but they will never apologize or admit they were wrong.
On behalf of them I am sorry. Many of us tried to stop them but we were censored, we were ridiculed, we were mocked, we were fired. There were many who would raise questions about the lockdowns in private, but in public they would go along with the crowd like the cowards they were. Never be one of those. They are the worst of us.
The fact that you're on this website is a good sign so I'm sure you're going to be alright. But you're at a good age to recognize how foolish many of the adults around you are. I was in that place when I was your age.
Sadly, fear porn still has concerned parents forcing their kids to mask up, outdoors - even in Texas. My heart breaks for them.
Glad you made the move and it sounds like you're enjoying it.
Are you in the Austin area?
Yes, I'm in Austin. Love it. Knew I'd love it. Was just a matter of time before we got here. Yes, there's a broad political spectrum with people here, but by and large, people are kind and friendly. Glad I bought a house 1.5 years ago. Can't see things slowing down any time soon.
Thinking about a move?
My wife and I have talked about moving to Texas but we wouldn't be very close to Austin. We would probably get a big piece of land in a decidedly less hip part of the state.
I love the Hill Country, and if you haven't had a chance you should go check out San Antonio. The Riverwalk is a tourist trap that's fun for kids, but the restaurants in other parts of San Antonio phenomenal. Tejano culture/food is amazing. I really like New Braunfels too.
Colorado as a state is a pretty great place. Our governor has been very good in the pandemic and in my opinion has probably been one of the best Democratic governors. He has a pretty strong background in business and from the very beginning of the pandemic was engaging routinely with business leaders including executives at the company I was working at then. He has that perfect mix of classic liberal values with a dash of libertarianism.
Unfortunately the county we live in has gone a little off the rails when it comes to public health. Although I am an atheist, my wife works at a Christian school and my kids get a big tuition discount, so I enrolled both of them in that school. The academics at the school are top-notch and it's pretty cool that my son's calculus and computer science teacher graduated from MIT a few years ago. The public high school doesn't compare. The fact that it was barely open last year is a whole separate issue. One of the first things I noticed is that the county health department has routinely harassed this school. They never have set foot on the public schools that my kids were at previously. I know some of the principals and confirmed that they have never had a single inspection from the county health department.
I have a strong suspicion but obviously can't prove, that the current county health director doesn't like Christians. I suspect that she has a lot of emotional scars since she is a lesbian and likely spent decades wanting to get married and having people who claim to represent Christianity preventing her from doing so. I don't fault her for that, but I do fault her for allowing her emotional feelings to clearly create a bias that influences her very much targeted and selective enforcement. Another aspect of her that I really dislike is the fact that she is a PhD in sports injuries, but acts as if this education is remotely related to viral epidemiology. She really doesn't appear to know what she's talking about and has aggressively complained in some leaked emails about the governor not "being strict enough because of his libertarian streak". She requires that student athletes wear masks while playing sports. This is insanity to me. The idea that cloth masks are effective pretty much became out of date once Delta hit. With omicron it's just absurd. We are talking about measles level transmissibility and it's been known for decades that cloth masks aren't effective for that kind of virus. The county requires that all of the athletes be vaccinated as well, so the mask requirement on top of that is a bit hard to swallow.
None of this foolishness is going to age well. My subjective opinion after reading the leaked emails is that she has definitely allowed the power to go to her head. The language she uses is very aggressive and indicates a big us versus them mentality when it comes to religious schools.
These kinds of local government officials have increasingly made Texas look good to us.
Have you traveled recently? It's a bit of a shock to go from a place where people are relatively unpanicked and show up on the west coast and realize that people are grossly overestimating their risk and acting out from that. They don't seem to be aware of how normal life is in most of the country. They have this picture of Florida as being a place where body bags are being piled up outside of hospitals. It must be painful for the minority of those folks who stop and look at the data and realize that most of the sacrifices they have made in their lives have been for nothing. Florida is spiking in new cases like many states, but the number per 100,000 is less than New York's is. That really must bother people in NY.
It's 19F outside right now. I wear a mask outside because it keeps my face warm. No idea why people haven't been doing this all along. That you just assume everyone wearing a mask outdoors is a rube says more about you than them. Your post isn't being downvoted by fools and cowards, it's being downvoted because it's rude and condescending.
Wearing surgical masks outdoors in normal temperatures is not based in science. It's theoretical at best, but there's never been any data to refute the fact that almost all transmission occurs within households and enclosed public places. It's just fearful people calming their anxiety with something that does as much good as a copper bracelet or a crystal amulet. It's a great way for politicians to "show action", by mandating them outside in large cities after they have imposed indoor masks mandates, but still have rising cases.
Sorry I offended you by criticizing a superstitious ritual to appease the pagan god of covid.
And yes I have no business assuming that people wearing surgical masks on hiking trails in 70° weather are doing it because of the virus. I'm sure many of them are wearing it to keep their faces warm, because that totally makes sense. /s
Regardless I'd be willing to tolerate this stupidity if the schools were kept open. A little performative superstition is a price I'm willing to pay to keep kids in school. I'll wear copper bracelet, turquoise necklaces, crucifixes, whatever it takes to keep kids in school.
Kids sitting indoors isolated from their peers in front of computer screens is not a good thing. You didn't comment on that at all.
> Kids sitting indoors isolated from their peers in front of computer screens is not a good thing. You didn't comment on that at all.
In my experience as a teacher, some of my students flourished in this setting, others did not. It's not a good thing in some ways, it's a good thing in other ways (hence this article). If you want to see more of my thoughts on this see my other post I just wrote.
I think you are not understanding that it's not a bias if I see people wearing mask outdoors in completely mild weather and assume it's for the virus. Do you really think that people need to keep their faces warm when it's 65° and sunny? If I was walking around in freezing cold temperatures complaining about this you would have some fair point although a cloth mask is a grossly inferior way to keep your face warm compared to a gator where a ski mask.
Do you wear your mask outdoors when it's 70°? If you saw someone wearing a mask outdoors and 70° weather wouldn't you assume it's for disease protection?
When you see people walking around outside wearing masks, know that they have bought into a foolish lie completely removed from any form of science.
it's not a bias if I see people wearing mask outdoors in completely mild weather and assume it's for the virus.
Other possible explanations people wear masks outdoors other than being gullible fools:
- they forgot to take it off. That happens to me sometimes when I'm deep in thought.
- they have a cold sore and want to hide that.
- they came from indoors and their hands are full so they can't take it off.
- they came from indoors and are going indoors into another building.
etc.
Did you ever consider any of these alternatives? Or actually, have you asked any of these people why they wear a mask outdoors?
I find it odd that you are expecting me to have a null hypothesis that the masks that have become widely worn in large cities in the midst of a pandemic are not related to the pandemic.
If it was remotely common to see people wearing face coverings 2 years ago I would understand your point. It wasn't as we all know. It became a thing as a result of the pandemic.
That being said all of the explanations you offered are reasonable although the cold sore one was rather amusing to me. I haven't had one in many years but I'm sure by the time I get my next one the masks Will be long gone and I will wish they were a thing again.
The aspect of it that does bug me is the performative nature of explicitly putting on masks in outdoor situations. President Biden came to my area yesterday due to the recent wildfires we experienced. He was outdoors the entire time wearing a mask along with his entire team. He's sitting there trying to connect with people who have lost their homes but they can't see each other's faces at all. For no reason at all based on science. The performative nature of this is rather obvious because you frequently see scenes where they are not wearing a mask of any sort until a camera shows up in which case they immediately put a mask on before posing for the picture.
My primary complaint is not people incidentally wearing a mask as they come out of a building but people who are fairly aggressive and demanding that others wear face coverings outdoors whenever they are near them. I had to go to LA for work several months ago and discovered that it is common to have people yell out their car windows at you if you were walking around on a horse trail in a suburban neighborhood (I was somewhere not too far from Brentwood on this trail) without a mask on. My coworker was laughing when I looked at him with an incredulous face. His response was "that's how it is out here."
Anyway you make a good point that I should not be so quick to judge in the case of the exceptions above. Fair. I will concede. That being said requiring people legally to wear them outdoors is stupid and nonsensical and not in line with any form of science.
It's actually quite easy - the virus is airborne. If most people stay indoors and don't meet other people, the spread is significantly stopped.
2. The adverse effects of mental and physical heath are irreversible,
3. The tanking of the economy and the debt (until 2048 for France) is irreversible,
4. You didn’t even solve Covid.
However, the question is do lockdowns help against a pandemic? I don't see how anyone can argue with that. The downsides are indeed significant and need to be taken into account, but it's just a fact that lockdowns severely limit the spread of an airborne virus like COVID-19.
We don’t have the figures yet, that’s why we think lockdowns helped. But cholesterol doesn’t kill immediately. Alcohol doesn’t kill immediately. Loneliness doesn’t kill immediately, it slowly settles as friendships got destroyed in anger during the pandemic, and new meetups didn’t arrive, and the guy becomes homeless 5 years later. It may take years, but a lot of human misery will have been triggered by choosing lockdowns. We don’t even have the figures yet.
> severely limits the spread of an airborne virus
Yes, while we’re locked, and then it just takes weeks to recirculate as normal. It took >1 year to get the vaccines, only a 1 year lockdown would have solved us, therefore it is …not a solution to anything to lock people down.
Not a secret that solitary confinement in prisons is used to destroy someone. Lockdowns made a lot of people completely crazy, particularly the people you don’t notice immediately. But who cares, we’ve solved Covid! Wait, we didn’t.
Edited to add: furthermore, in most countries deaths not related to Covid fell drastically compared to previous years, including suicides. Yes, the fallout medium-long term is still to come, but you can't deny that it did stop the immediate very dangerous impact. In countries like Italy and France military hospitals had to be deployed, and many in intensive care were transferred to neighbouring countries. You can't just dismiss this and say people stuck alone at home had it worse than those on the ventilators.
Furthermore, it's from October 2020, more than a year ago. We have vaccines now and they're helping, but not stopping the virus fully. Hospitals are still filling up in some places, and for that various stages of restrictions up to lockdown are the main ways stop it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-lockdowns-idUSK...
Schools could at least give the option of "early-bird" and "late-bird" like I had in elementary school.
But I see no problem with schools ending around 6 or 7. Welcome to regular business.
I always wondered if the medical professionals in our area fully understood the impact on ALL our students and not just the ones who normally flourish with in-person schooling.
The introverts never mention how they feel until directly asked and they usually like the new arrangement better
So in meetings it often creates a biased sense of everything being bad, but actual surveys of the employees paints a different picture.
It should be: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.42100
But parent post could also just have gotten dates pushed backwards or forwards a bit.
My @sshole boss plucked us all back into the office just before Xmas and I'm back where I started.
Note: if you're a boss and hate your staff being WFH, some of us hate you right back and will be looking for a new job. Factor that into your bullsh!t policies and untrustworthiness.
(Yes, I've had a bad week).
Could easily do it all again if we had to. but I doubt we will. (australia)
(https://www.svz.de/deutschland-welt/panorama/Corona-Bis-zu-5...)
Forcing the issue on teachers is proving to be very bad for morale. Already, they were overworked and underpaid, but now they are being called lazy, their profession is being reduced to "babysitting", they are being demonized as anti-American and traitors, they are being harassed by parents who claim they are teaching their children socialist propaganda and pushing liberal agendas, school boards meetings have broken out into fisticuffs... it's getting to be too much.
You can see evidence of this on the /r/teachers forum, which as of late has been a sea of negative posts in what used to be a pretty positive place. This has gotten enough attention that it was covered recently in the media [0].
Forbes notes that 48% of teachers are thinking of quitting during a time when there's already a teacher shortage [1]. I would not be surprised to see a mass exodus of teachers if things get worse. My school district was closed last week because there weren't enough substitute teachers to handle all of the students. For some districts, even a single teacher quitting would mean an entire school would have to close.
The way forward is not backward. We need a new model that embraces positive aspects of remote and in person. We have to redefine what school is and is not. School cannot be a place where parents send their kids so that they are free to work. That can't be what it is for.
I really liked an idea I saw which is probably impractical, but interesting nonetheless. The idea was to cut the work week to 4 days and turn substitute teaching into something like jury duty; once a month, you've got to go into school and teach or assist a teacher. I like this idea because it brings more community involvement into schools, which I think is missing now in our society.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/inside-rteachers-the-reddit-forum-whe...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcperna/2022/01/04/why-educa...
Like it or not, schooling was originally designed as a daycare that teaches conformity and compliance.
The idea that we can change that by improving things at the margins is IMO ludicrous.
The origin of kindergarten is daycare - for 4 years old playing in streets with literally zero adult supervision.
Modern society demands both parents working, a single parent can no longer cover even the cost of housing for an entire family. As is has become so expensive.
Let alone medical expenses, hobbies, tutition etc.
tldr; Schools turned into daycare facilites when housing became so expesive that both parents must work full time.
That is maybe 40 years ago.
Modern society itself is the problem.
Proper learning is supposed to be more active and pupil-directed. Look at the Deweyite schools in America.
If you find that to be a belittling description then I’m sorry, but that’s largely what teachers do. And it’s been critiqued for a long time by thoughtful people who care about pedagogy, so you can’t simply dismiss it as some kind of “woe be the state of education” phenomenom.
My point above is that the belittling is a major part of the problem. You want to denigrate an entire profession, sure, but it has consequences, something we're seeing as experienced teachers leave the profession.
In my experience it is not productive to have this kind of conversation with teachers since they will go back and forth between (1) general, vague praise for mass education, and then (2) vacuous, relativistic statements that says nothing about education other than “it’s relative” once they are confronted with concrete problems.
They seem to identify too strongly with their teacher identity to be up for that discussion.