The Sixth Republic - Will we or won’t we? That is the question! #solidarity

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here only if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

In the other staffroom, there is rhubarb & ginger gin, along with tea and coffee.

Now the Southampton guy who agitates on Twitter is on. Interesting how he is slightly distancing himself form his own findings.

he is so smug...

'Risk of spreading Coronavirus between teachers and children in schools extremely low says major new study'
And how do they know? Seeing as how schools (sites) have been closed for the last 8 weeks?

This Southampton man's study is entitled 'time to open the schools' yet he is railing against 'excessive politicisation'!

He seems to be very very cross about lack of track and trace, however.

@Piggywaspushed with respect to the 9 hours is that because some schools are doing a live timetable? DS’s school is, so he logs on for registration at 8.30 and then is meant to have tutor time for 15 minutes, but tends to wander off at that point to get a snack (even though he has just had breakfast!) They then have 2 lessons and then assembly, which DS maintains he can’t log into so has a cup of tea and some more snacks (did I mention he was a teenager!). They then have another lesson. Then an hour for lunch. Then 2 further lessons after lunch and finishes about 4. He then has some homework. So he probably does about 9 hours but that includes breaks and much eating!

Piggy do your school want you back full time?

I'm in awe of 9 hours, massive struggle here to get two hours out of them. Should be a public holiday here today but I'm behind so need to crack on with some work.

I guess it does include homework, yes! At some point someone needs to speak up about screen time!

riga not a bloody clue....

CallmeAngelina

Remember that this definitive "major" study is from 18 pupils.

I've had children's surveys back with larger numbers.

I always thought they'd fiddle the science to get us back - they could say anything really!

DS’s school do try and break up the screen time, he still has worksheets and school books to work in. They then scan or take a photo of their work.

Also in the Fail -
'WHO says no link between covid and new inflammatory condition in children'
'Disadvantaged students falling behind in their learning'

Plus an article critical of a primary school who have published pictures of their school set up for strict social distancing -'poor kids cant be made to sit like that' etc.

We cannot win!

Morning. Forgotten who asked about how we upload lessons. We, the same as others link to our schools servers and systems remotely. I think the difference data protection wise is that the school has absolute control over the laptops security and what can and can’t be installed on them. We have three full time IT techs who manage the school network and security. At least once a week I’ll turn my laptop on to find a ton of updates installing. If we want to use our phones for eg our school email account we have to agree to have stuff installed on our phones and the ability for them to be remote accessed and maintained by IT which I was advised by IT is a bad idea for your phones functioning I think.

The disclaimer on that NSW study hasn't been published in the article of course.

I'm glad my school isn't expecting us to do online lessons - I'd be shit at that!

Looking at the pictures of the reception/Y1 "classrooms" made me so sad - what a horrible environment for staff and pupils.
I'm glad I'm in Scotland as, hopefully, NS will not allow us to open until August. Once the current lockdown period is over, if we were given 3 weeks to get classrooms ready, we'd only be in school for 4 days, so it makes sense. Then hopefully our classrooms won't have to look as horrible as those I've seen .

Have the government released the ‘science’ to the unions yet?

Wasn't there information a while ago that children were Super Spreaders. But it's ok for them to come from their own homes into schools and it magically won't get spread?

How can there be no link between the new Kawasaki type illness and Covid? Didn't all of the children who've had it, in all countries, either test positive for Covid or Covid antibodies??

Also, wanted to correct what I'd mentioned earlier about Lens... It's a MS Office tool, not a Google one. Derrr.

You can also scan documents and save as a pdf on an iPhone in the 'Notes' section. This has been a huge time saver since I discovered it!

Who would have thought The Mirror would be our strongest supporter! At least some of the press are not Tory bus w**kers!

Out of interest I sent out a survey to my lower sixth asking what they thought about different models of remote learning - I'm currently emailing them on the days they should have had lessons, sending out a powerpoint (sometimes with narration but mostly not needed now), setting a specific task each lesson and a homework every week.

So far I've not had loads of replies but they thought it was enough/too much work (I feel that's quite a good sign actually!), and they were strongly in favour of week-by-week work rather than lesson-by-lesson, and very strongly against any live lessons! It'll be interesting to see if the more extrovert members of the class feel the same. But good to know I'm not leaving them deeply disappointed by the lack of Zoom lessons...you'd think they were all crying themselves to sleep judging by some threads on here.

Just gad teams training apparently we will just have chat drop in sessions.

There are a couple of subjects trialling 'live' lessons this week. Our lovely head made it very clear that if this is successful we are under no obligation to follow suit in our own subjects and it's entirely a personal decision if we want to and if we think it will improve delivery of our subject.

DH's school have just announced after half term for years 7 -9 they are doing online learning on a rota for non core subjects (2 weeks of history, two weeks of geog, two weeks of RS, for example) but the full quota of lessons a fortnight for the core , all 'taught live'.

To say he is MN fuming would be an understatement..