RandoEFC

School was like a prison on Tuesday. We have a designated "exercise time" where we take the kids we're supervising outside for 20 minutes of exercise so on Tuesday we just wandered around on the tennis courts like it was a prison. Today was a different matter as one of the other teachers brought a football in so I went in goal for a penalty competition. I won on account of the fact that I saved more penalties than any of the kids managed to score individually. Most fun I've had in two months and exactly why 95% of teachers in the country are dying to get back into school and do their jobs normally again no matter what you read in those vile newspapers or from ghoulish right-wing twitter mouthpieces who can't write a sentence without throwing "the left" or "marxist" or "socialist" or "communist" in there at some point.

Working from home is fucking shite.

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland you can now gather in groups of up to 6 with people from various households. Sucks to be them because it's 10 on the Isle of Man .

I'm pretty sure there were some reports from South Korea that people had tested positive twice a couple of weeks apart, then they looked into it and determined that one of the tests was a false positive. I'm pretty sure it's right as there's been quite a bit of stuff about antibodies being present in recovered patients and surely we'd have heard reports at this point if there were a bunch of people who had been reinfected. This only really became solid a few weeks ago though so I agree that without this knowledge the initial herd immunity approach was reckless.

Herd immunity has become a dirty word in the UK after how it was inherently linked to the idea of letting it burn through the population and the reported Cummings line of letting a few pensioners die. Without a vaccine, and now that we know you will achieve immunity if you catch it, I'm afraid it's becoming apparent that more people getting it, recovering and gaining immunity is the primary way to move forward. The countries that have gone for complete suppression (the Isle of Man have done so that includes me) surely can't risk opening their borders up again until there's a vaccine? Such a headache.

To get kids immune or the wider community?

This debate is honestly set to catch fire. The Sun article today about teachers "betraying" vulnerable kids by not reopening schools when schools have literally been kept the fuck open for vulnerable kids and children of key workers has caused outrage from teachers. Michael Gove, the most hated politician in the education sector, is now lying on national television about the situation. I'd fucking love nothing less than to be able to get back in front of a class on Monday rather than spending another 7 hour day sat on my laptop on my own in my bedroom waiting for kids to start submitting work off the video lessons I've spent my Sunday night putting together and trying to mark their work by typing on a word document, and feeling a misplaced sense of guilt when half of them show no engagement for another week without me being able to anything about it before people like me get accused by Brexity twatwits on social media and the Daily Mail of refusing to provide the kids with an education and that maybe the threat of a pay cut would change our mind. It's absolutely fucking disgusting. No wonder teachers in other countries look at the UK and are absolutely mystified by how professions like ours along with nurses, doctors, carers, police are regarded with such venom by the general public. I want like everyone else for my job to go back to normal but wanting something and it being the best thing to do aren't the same thing and it's yet another unsurprising embarrassment that the British public are incapable of grasping this simple fact.

I've had my say on the teachers thing enough times. The fact is that it's the union's job to protect their members and it's the government's job to convince the education sector as well as parents of these children that it is actually safe to get back to school and provide clear guidelines on how to do it safely, what you can do and what you can't. One of those institutions is doing their job and one of them isn't. Up to you to pick which one's which. As for China. It's easy to forget what sort of country China is and while I'm far from one of the xenophobes who is using this crisis as evidence that they're trying to take over the world and enslave the white people or whatever the conspiracy theory is this week, China is still a one-party, communist state which can be heavily damaged by bad publicity. In media, China is portrayed as a pretty Westernised society which it is in many ways, but really isn't in many others. Someone shared this video a couple of months back, it isn't new, but it's really unnerving and I haven't forgotten it since. I wouldn't place much faith in any news you get out of China, especially if the government is their source. Never forget the big story in January either about the bloke who tried to raise the alarm over this virus early on, was shut down by the government, and then died from it.

The Conservatives: anyone using the pandemic as an opportunity to score political points is a disgrace. Also the Conservatives:

Yeah some people have pointed that out on here but there are plenty of dummies out there who dont care about population density or the fact that their deaths are sky high compared to their geographical neighbours or the fact that Sweden still tried to impose social distancing but trusted their population to be sensible and ended up achieving vastly the same result as a lockdown or that they dont have to look after massive city hubs like London and Manchester in Sweden etc. Interesting. On the Isle of Man we had a pretty stringent lockdown that has been well observed by the public. There are countless caveats here that make it impossible to make comparisons with the UK (population under 100k, small island with easy to monitor borders, nobody making long commutes to work, sparsely populated etc) so I won't go down that route but we closed our borders and ports completely, closed schools etc, and kept the death toll down to about 25 people. 20 of those all came from an outbreak in a single care home. With Sweden I've heard a lot of conflicting reports, usually depending on the agenda of who is reporting it unfortunately, but it seems to be that they recommended all of the same measures to their population instead of telling them you have to do it and the end result hasn't been different. Perhaps being given the choice is why they're so in favour of it. I still dont think the -'common sense' approach is viable in the UK because there's far too much misinformation and conflicting 'science' knocking about, a private sector that's, let's say 'more urgent' etc. This is what I'm saying. If it's safe for kids to catch coronavirus without dying or even getting ill enough to need treatment, is it a viable strategy of sorts to allow a deliberate, controlled infection of young people so that they can develop immunity? It's a left field suggestion and to do so now would be reckless and irresponsible beyond belief because the science is far from conclusive about how safe it is and how much it would curtail the spread, but it worked for chicken pox. Just a random thought. You've got to conclude though that if one child dies from it that's one too many.

Mad that anti-lockdowners are still trying to use Sweden as an example of how the lockdown hasn't actually made any difference. Bonus points when they use "countries like Sweden" or "Sweden and other countries" then fail to provide a second example of said other countries. To be fair though, in the long run we still don't know if Sweden's approach may have some merit. Has their health system been overwhelmed? If we can't get a vaccine then the only option will be to eventually let a large enough proportion of the population to catch it and develop immunity. My Mum used to tell me stories of another infection, chicken pox, that was relatively safe to catch as a child but much more dangerous if you caught it later in life. People used to take their toddlers round to their neighbours' houses when their kids had chicken pox so that they could catch it themselves and develop immunity to it. I'm mostly joking, but could we end up doing something like that with Covid 19?

Anyone shocked that the three of them organised a coordinated smear on a rival politician, shocked that they'll get away with it, shocked that they haven't apologised or shocked that the people whose political views align with the perpetrators don't just not care but actually actively enjoy the hypocrisy and misinformation being spread against "the other side" shouldn't be. This is our politics now and it has been since 2016.

Not just taken the tweet down, fully legged it from Twitter .

Yeah it's a tricky one this. I've had some dealings with union reps, in fact theres an ongoing dispute going on over here about teachers pay. I dont want to criticise because they're doing their job in fighting the corner of their members, that's what they're there for. I do think the "refuse to engage" line was misguided and has caused a bigger fuss. What they want is not to engage with the government's plan unless it is changed significantly which is actually fair enough for the reasons I stated above but the wording is overly aggressive.

See my post above, hopefully I've answered what you're asking. I think it's time to start having the conversation but they need to stop pretending it's about the kids. Getting the kids who are nowhere near exams into school for half a term, and the least productive half-term of the school year at that, isn't really that important. It's clearly more of an attempt to free up people who can't return to work because of having to have their kids at home. And that's fine by me, honestly. I totally agree that the country needs to start functioning again. The government maintains that the steps they are taking is supported by scientific evidence. I want them to lay it out. The problem is I don't trust the UK government to do that. Thankfully my fate lies with the Manx government in this regard but I can still contribute to the debate regardless. When I'm convinced that returning to school in whatever capacity won't endanger (within reason) the students, my colleagues or risk a significant increase in the community spread again, then I'll be fully supportive of going back. I'd love to get back to a classroom instead of teaching through a bloody screen and emails for 6 hours a day. I trust that when the Manx government make that decision then I won't have to read into it much because they have no agenda other than governing properly because in a democracy without party politics you can actually do that. If Boris Johnson (a man who has been sacked twice for lying, including once from government itself) and the Education Minister Gavin Williamson (a man who was sacked less than a year ago from Theresa May's cabinet for leaks or something, I don't care enough to look it up) and say "the science supports this" without actually sharing that science with teaching unions, then I'm afraid I'm going to ask a lot more questions about it and continue to question it until actual trustworthy sources have verified it.

I think schools slowly need reopening because people can't get back to work or even work from home effectively if they're looking after their kids, but the government seems to have just asked it to be done without offering the right guidance. Some of the gaping holes are: Are we absolutely convinced that children can't spread the disease? Because my biggest issue with it isn't my own health, I'm a healthy 27 year old guy, but if I'm not convinced that I can't catch the virus off kids then I won't be visiting my family as long as I have to go into school because my Nana is in the vulnerable group and my parents have to see her all the time because she's almost blind and lives on her own. An even wider issue is just how much community spread will go through schools if they send too many kids back without taking proper precautions. The research slowly seems to be showing that the risk of that happening is low but it is far from conclusive and even the research that is out there already, you have to go looking for it. If the government is making this decision based on that research, they should be sharing it with us in a clear and confident manner. At first they want to send about half the kids back. For a normal primary school that's fine, but if your class sizes have to be 10-15 instead of 20-30, then you need to have twice as many classes from each of the year groups that are in school, and you need to have twice as many teachers to put in front of them. This is quite easily solved by pulling in the teachers that would usually have Years 3-4 and the others who aren't in yet to take half of the Year 1 and Year 6 students into the spare classrooms and teach them, but then are these teachers supposed to continue setting work online for those year groups that are still at home, while being responsible for their new students for the whole school day? You can't even get that far if you work in a junior school which covers reception, Year 1 and Year 2 because according to this guidance they're getting more than half of their students back which gives them a choice of either putting too many kids back together in each classroom or sticking to the 10-15 per class rule and not having enough teachers and classrooms to put with each class. There's a longer term issue here which people don't seem to have grasped yet which is fair enough because they aren't teachers and don't have the knowledge of the workings of a school. The government intend to get all primary students back to school before the summer. Until we go back to having full sized classes it's literally impossible to have all the kids in school at once. At all times, you'll have to have half the kids in school and half the kids at home, unless your school for some reason happens to have an entire extra school's worth of spare teachers and classrooms. The only way to get schools open again in any sort of normal way is to say you can have 30 in a class again. Most teachers are dying to get back to a classroom, myself included, but it really isn't that simple and people who are posting online or calling into radio stations thinking it's as simple as chucking all the kids from the village back in the building and getting them taught by a workforce that's already going to be at least slightly depleted by those who still need to shield themselves from contact with others have less than no idea. The worst part is, if they came across this post highlighting the actual reasons why it isn't that simple, instead of reading what I've put they'll just go "nah, there was a headline that a union told their members not to engage with the government and that's all I need to believe that ALL TEACHERS don't want to go back to work because they're enjoying the holiday too much". Silly twats. Trying to ignore them though, this thing is going to run for a long time and won't be fully resolved until it's safe to have full-sized classes again. If any of you have kids who have been learning from home, I'd expect to potentially have them continuing to do so for half of the time until there is a vaccine or treatment for this virus.

Yeah when I read back through I thought about changing arguments to debates because I didn't actually mean to imply people were arguing in anger or anything.

The fact that I cant be bothered reading all these long posts says all you need about how tired I'm getting of the arguments. The one thing I will say is that the problem with leaving too much of it down to interpretation and common sense is that in a country of millions of people it only takes a small minority who dont have any common sense to cause a significant problem for the vast majority that are perfectly capable of making their own minds up sensibly. We've seen plenty of the former over the last few weeks. It's also nice to see the primary school teachers getting victimised by the media and various gammons for not returning to work without asking questions given very little guidance by the government and mixed evidence on whether children can carry and pass on the virus with or without showing symptoms. Getting kids back to school is important but the same people crying that teachers are just enjoying a long holiday when we've actually had to completely relearn our jobs and continued to provide as many students as possible with as much of an education as possible are the same ones who in reality are just annoyed that they've had to actually look after their kids when they think it isn't their job. The vast majority that have gone through the very real struggle of having to home school their kids while working their own jobs from home are the most understanding of the need for return to school being carefully managed when they're the ones that are having the hardest time for it. This simultaneously makes no sense on the face of it yet doesn't surprise me in the slightest. The best argument I heard this morning was "maybe nurses should refuse to treat teachers' families if teachers refuse to go back to work" because the education of 5 year olds is apparently comparable to life and death hospital treatment. Really pissed me off some of the coverage this morning, but at least it's nice to see things returning to normal in one sense.

My only issue with the pre existing health conditions line is this, my Dad is in his 60s and diabetic. He'll live for 20 more years probably. If he catches Corona and it does for him though, he will be included in this "well they would have died soon anyway" statistic. Unless I'm wrong about a condition like that being included in that category but I'd imagine that it does. There was also some research last week about obesity making you more at risk of dying from the virus and we're not great on that front as a country which won't have helped.

He has nice legs.

My kind of woman.

I've become addicted to a browser based Pokemon MMO called Pokemon Planet and I'm not ashamed because it's loads of fun and it has killed loads of time for me in this lockdown.

I quick sold all my UT cards at the end of December or put them on market for minimum price, uninstalled the game and haven't been tempted once to put it back on my PS4. After long enough the repetitive nature of the gameplay is just depressing.

I have no idea I'm afraid chaps. Good luck.

The robot dog literally looks exactly like the robot dog from that episode.