@Allthestarsarecloser
I work at a university on the front line seeing students 1-1 (I work in student support) and have continued to see students this term at a distance & with measures in place. ALL the students I have seen have been grateful for the human contact.
I also have 2 kids in primary and secondary. I want them to stay in school as my eldest had to have counselling after the last lockdown.
Aibu to say that schools need to stay open and I say that as someone on the front line.
YABU - they should shut
YANBU- they need to stay open
To be quite fair, if you work in student support the students you see will be those who are grateful for the human contact. You're also doing 1-2-1 which is very different from facing 30 children, so it's a bit silly to say you don't mind when you're facing a very different situation. A bit like someone in the area I live in that has 7 sites where bombs fell in WWII saying that they didn't find the blitz very traumatic.
What's more, on the basis support groups are still allowed, you would be still able to support them on a face to face.
I have a student. Actually she's really enjoying the online learning. She says she can listen to the lectures at her own speed. If she doesn't understand it, she can listen again. She can go back and rewatch if she doesn't remember a bit. It's working very well for her.
She feels the least useful thing is the face to face tutorial, where they have to wear face masks and keep their distance and it's really hard to see what the tutor is doing/saying. The online tutorials, done by Microsoft teams, I think, are far more helpful.
She's in a house with 2 other students doing the same subject, and they've agreed they basically isolate except for their face to face tutorial once a week and shopping.
Thing is people are saying it's not fair on children to send them home as different schools have different competence on home learning. Well, schools have different competence anyway! That doesn't change.
But at the moment it's even more choppy than normal. Half ds' year went home just before half term. 25% of year 7 missed 2 weeks just before that. 2/3 of year 12 have also had to isolate for a fortnight. And we're in a low area.
A friend's child (year 6, different school) is on her third bout of 14 days isolation currently. (yes, all school cases) The other year 6 class hasn't missed anything.
So you could have a child who is fine all the way through, and gets all their teaching, and another, even in the same school who misses months.
How is that any fairer?
Looking at the statistics, I think the current measures will stop the rise, and possibly lower it a little, but I don't think are going to make a huge drop.
Which means that either they'll have to backtrack and pull schools anyway, or they'll have to extend lockdown, or accept that more people will die.
The number of deaths are going up approximately half as much again each week. If this continues, in 3 weeks we'll be on approximately the same as the peak deaths in the first wave. In 4 weeks we'll be looking at around 10k deaths a week.
Oh! You're saying. They're people with health conditions and elderly people. They'd have died anyway. It won't be by then, not that it always was. It'll be people like you who there's no space for because people are already occupying the beds. The current increase in patients needing hospital treatment is the 25-40yo lady. The parents of these school children who don't spread it.
Then we've got the long covid. I know someone who had covid back at the start of April. No health conditions, young, didn't expect it to be a problem. She's still breathless going upstairs. That's not running upstairs. That's walking. It's limiting her life because she genuinely can't get on with day to day activities. She can't walk her children to school without frequent stops, she can't do the shopping on her own, even things like hanging the washing out makes her breathless enough to have to stop halfway through.
We all think (hope maybe) that we won't be effected by something like this. But the truth is we don't know. You could have had it and don't realise, or you could end up being one of the statistics.