NEU calls for two week closure for secondaries and colleges following leap in infections

[noblegiraffe]

The NEU has called for a two week closure of secondary schools and colleges following a more than 9-fold increase in the infection rate in secondary school children in a month.

www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-teachers-demand-2-week-school-closures-after-cases-jump

The infection rate in Y7-11 was 0.5% last week, according to the ONS survey of random households, but this nearly doubled to 0.93% in the latest set of figures. This rise cannot be ignored or passed off as relating to university students as has happened so far.

In other, entirely unrelated news, 61% of teachers report that if a student doesn't wear a mask in a school where they are mandated in communal areas 'nothing happens'.

www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-61-staff-say-nothing-done-if-pupils-wont-wear-masks

And Teacher Tapp data from yesterday had 26% of teachers reporting that their schools were partially closed to students.

In the meantime, the testing positivity rate in 10-19 year olds is 17%, which means that this group is severely under-tested and lots of cases will be missed. The rate should be below 5%.

Yet the insistence continues that in any lockdown scenario, schools will remain open. Idiocy.

Given the ‘Boris triumphs over the evil unions and re-opens schools’ bullshit narrative of the summer, I can’t see him wanting to be seen to capitulate to them now.

There have been numerous times over the decades I've been teaching that I've put my job (and the children I deal with) over the needs of my own family. Once, memorably, when my own dd was in hospital. DH did similarly on the day of his mother's funeral.
One thing Covid has done is to reveal just how selfish most people are, and now I am older and wiser (and more cynical), I am mortified that I left dd in hospital, after sitting awake by her side in a chair all night, to go straight to work once relieved from my vigil at 8am.
I would NEVER do that now.
So, maybe there's your evidence, @WouldBeGood.

*relieved from my vigil by my adored and lovely mil.

They’re out of time. Half term has already been and gone in Scotland and in some parts of England it started on Friday.

I think they need to switch fully to blended and have 2 weeks on 2 weeks off kind of thing. Our school didn’t do entire live lessons but at the start of each lesson the teacher would have a video call to explain the task, or run a PowerPoint etc and then they’d go and do their task and then they’d regroup 5 minutes before the end. It was perfect.

"Our school didn’t do entire live lessons but at the start of each lesson the teacher would have a video call to explain the task, or run a PowerPoint etc and then they’d go and do their task and then they’d regroup 5 minutes before the end. It was perfect."

Any idea what percentage of children engaged with that? It does sound do-able.

@CallmeAngelina

There have been numerous times over the decades I've been teaching that I've put my job (and the children I deal with) over the needs of my own family. Once, memorably, when my own dd was in hospital. DH did similarly on the day of his mother's funeral. One thing Covid has done is to reveal just how selfish most people are, and now I am older and wiser (and more cynical), I am mortified that I left dd in hospital, after sitting awake by her side in a chair all night, to go straight to work once relieved from my vigil at 8am. I would NEVER do that now. So, maybe there's your evidence, *@WouldBeGood*.

I would probably agree with you, CallmeAngelina. The response to teachers over lockdown has made it very hard for me to believe that the routine sacrifices that I make for my students are 'worth it'.

Equally the total lack of care both my own school and the Government have for my own health and safety has been so shocking that I have realised how truly worthless and disposable they see me as - not something that motivates me to risk my long term health for them as much as i have in the past.....

Our school didn’t do entire live lessons but at the start of each lesson the teacher would have a video call to explain the task, or run a PowerPoint etc and then they’d go and do their task and then they’d regroup 5 minutes before the end. It was perfect.

Any idea what percentage of children engaged with that? It does sound do-able.

A very large percentage. I fully admit it’s a pretty affluent area so I wouldn’t have expected most pupils to have technology or internet issues. I know there was a handful of kids went off the radar but the majority were there. I think I’m this day and age there’s really no excuse for shit remote learning.

I do still have a sense of loyalty to my school as the vast majority of our parents are lovely and appreciative. So, in the main is SLT. When my dad was at the end of his life, (and various "scares" we had before that point) the Head basically told me to get myself away and down to him and not even think about school, as family is more important. I will walk on hot coals for her for that alone.

The level of vitriol on Twitter about the “Teachers want 2 week half term” headline in the Telegraph is eye watering.

@CallmeAngelina

I do still have a sense of loyalty to my school as the vast majority of our parents are lovely and appreciative. So, in the main is SLT. When my dad was at the end of his life, (and various "scares" we had before that point) the Head basically told me to get myself away and down to him and not even think about school, as family is more important. I will walk on hot coals for her for that alone.

I did too.

However the last couple of years, accelerated by lockdown and a change in leadership, has eroded that massively.

i still go WAY over and beyond for my pupils, every day. However I no longer do so quite so willingly, nor with quite such a deliberate disregard of my own needs and that of my family.

"Our school didn’t do entire live lessons but at the start of each lesson the teacher would have a video call to explain the task, or run a PowerPoint etc and then they’d go and do their task and then they’d regroup 5 minutes before the end. It was perfect."

We did something similar. Lessons were shortened by 10 minutes so that the children could have a 15 minute screen break between lessons. I tended to spend 30ish minutes feeding back on work and teaching new content, then leave them to get on with the work set. I'd stay in the meeting though, so pupils with questions could ask me directly.

I didn't call them back at the end of the lesson to go through answers, because I wanted to give them enough time to get some work done. So the marking was horrendous, submitted by 6pm and had to be marked by the following lesson. I think I had around 85-90% engagement, but we would email parents fairly quickly if students weren't turning up to lessons or submitting work.

DreamingofBrie

We moved our marking to Forms - set it as a quiz. That was really helpful in terms of marking - even longer answers can be reviewed and fed back relatively quickly.

Thanks Smile , my colleague always uses Forms and she loves it. I'm setting more on Mathswatch and Dr Frost Maths to make my life easier, but it's one of my aims over half term to get comfortable with Forms!

My KS3 students particularly love a Kahoot, but they are so noisy and excited that I end up having to close the classroom door. I'm going to start sharing Kahoots via Teams rather than on the whiteboard, so that the slower pupils have a chance of getting on the podium!

Brie, for maths you really need Desmos in your life. For live lessons it’s the dogs.

So NI, Scotland and Wales are all doing a circuit break. They must all have shares in Astra Zeneca.

Thank you noble. I'm quite wedded to Autograph, but I'll have a look at Desmos.

Why are all the devolved nations approaching things so differently? It's not even just about numbers.
And is their circuit-breaker for everywhere plus schools for ages 11 and up? How is it going to break any circuit if people are out and about, mixing, taking millions of younger kids to/from school?
Strikes me as flood-proofing your house but leaving the back door open once the water starts rising.

Desmos isn’t just a graph plotter, you can create lessons of questions and the kids sign in (they don’t need accounts) You can see their answers to questions as they write them and they can also compare their answers to others in the class to see how they are doing. They can sketch graphs and you can overlay their answers over the correct answer and present it to the class.

It’s amazing.

Do you think desmos will work for physics lessons as well?

I think it could be used for a lot of subjects but is most effective with numerical answers/graphs.

I had no idea about that on Desmos! I’ve used it to make graphs to snap for lessons but didn’t realise students could do that. Deffo investigating that thanks!

learn.desmos.com/create

Brilliant thanks. I want something for my year 10 and 11s to churn through lots of applying equations and doing calculations, plus a bit of graph skills , so could be just the job!

I normally just use worksheets, but this could be better when/if we go online

It is imperative to keep schools open. My sons school has had no cases. Other local schools one or two. The numbers of infections are low enough that describing them in terms of percentage change actually discuises the meaning g of the data. One infection more or less starts having a big effect. If keeping schools open means other restrictions have to remain so be it.