@Cismyfatarse
I agree about masks in school. They are a way of trying to show compliance and make it look as if something is being done. The reality is kids are silenced by them and I can't teach for long using my voice.
And it is another sign that children are at the bottom of the heap. Football fans are much more important. Nothing about return to 8n person teaching at universities either. But big up the football.
Schools do have limited outbreaks. But they have continued to do so. And using masks when needed is very different from the current blanket requirement in secondary schools of all staff and pupils and in all areas and all schools.
I am totally unable to chat to classes. It is very hard to conduct discussions or teach. And when you can't tell if a child is telling you something clever about "Macbeth" or they want the loo, you are not teaching effectively.
I agree with this, and really sympathize with the difficulty you have teaching with mask wearing. I have mild hearing loss which affects certain sounds in the range of speech (generally high frequency sounds like f, H, S) ... Absolutely fine most of the time when I have other cues of context, and being able to see the speaker's mouth, only occasionally needing to ask for the speaker to repeat if they are very quiet or quick, or muffled somehow. With masks, a bit of a shit show. It's a perfectly easy thing to solve and I have no need for it to be "checked out" further... probably at some point I'll need hearing aids if it gets substantially worse, but not at the moment, and the audiologist I saw pointed out that quality of life isn't automatically improved if you do get aids, which have their own issues. So add into that the tendency for teens to want to play on any "weakness" of a teacher, I can imagine it's pretty bad for a lot of people like me. Not to mention any students who are in a similar situation.
Although it's not possible to say whether the situation would be worse without masks in our particular situation in Scotland, there is another country just to the south of us that hasn't had masks in schools for a month or so now. And doesn't seem to be having uncontrolled outbreaks in schools as a result. Of course there are increases of cases across the country, including in teens, but looking at the two sets of graphs (Scotland the left, England the right) , it doesn't seem that masked classes in Scotland are faring better than unmasked classes in England. In fact, it looks like the opposite (though obviously Scotland's community transmission is higher at the moment, so can't directly compare).
Even if there is a slight protective effect, surely we are at the stage where we have to question at what stage any benefit is outweighed by the discomfort and disruption to teaching and learning? Do we need more people with one jag, two jags, children vaccinated, hospital admissions in single figures, no requirement for contacts to isolate (which seems to be the main reason we need to keep cases down in schools at the moment, rather than children and teachers being badly affected themselves)?? What will be enough to drop the need for masks?