TimB

“Unvaccinated” is not a characteristic. It’s a choice. And I’ll double down on what I said last night after a few drinks, except now I’m completely sober: if Ron DeSantis helps guide your thinking on any topic, we are on two completely different wavelengths and it is impossible to find common ground.

That’s the beauty of our society. You can shop online, order curbside pickup, or go to one of a business’s many competitors.

Comparing this to segregation is extremist. Period.

Again, business owners should be allowed to make this decision on their own. Maybe the government shouldn’t mandate it (but I’m okay if they do), but the government also shouldn’t prevent individual business owners from making this choice. The Arizona one looks especially problematic in this respect. I won’t put another dime into any state’s economy that passes a bill that bars businesses from refusing service to the unvaccinated.

Not sure if there’s any argument against it, but does anything in this country, regardless of which party is in power, get done according to common sense?

To add some perspective by looking at the data, DJF was above normal at Fairbanks, and if you include November and March in there, the cold season there was slightly below normal. That said, NWS point and click for Fairbanks suggests that -32 could be challenged Saturday morning, which would be impressive. Imagine waking up to -32 degree temperatures in April.

One could argue that the mere act of defending Ron DeSantis is extremist.

I think we’ll agree to disagree, but I still have faith that good teachers have found ways to curb it. Regardless, I’m only advocating for two more months of online schooling to get through this school year, and very little further damage can be done in two months.

And it seems from at least two of those three sources that teachers have gotten wise to it and already found ways to curb it.

Can we really say that’s “the way society is” because one kid (and maybe his friends, if he wasn’t just throwing them under the bus to lessen the amount of trouble he got into) did it?

Okay, that was a little extreme language on my part. But you have implied that 1) the vast majority of kids would cheat if they didn’t think anyone was watching, and 2) most kids have little to no intrinsic motivation to succeed, and what little motivation they do have is guided by fear.

I just don’t find it likely that when kids are learning remotely, most of them develop the mentality of juvenile delinquents who don’t care about cheating or its consequences because they don’t have a teacher watching over their shoulder at all times. And what your argument seems to boil down to is every kid is a juvenile delinquent at heart, they just need the right circumstances to bring it to the surface. Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to believe that all kids are sociopaths given the right conditions.

Of course it’s significantly harder to cheat in person than it is online. I’m just also of the belief that the kids who don’t want to learn won’t do it in any setting.

I know what goes on at school and at home, kids find new and creative ways to cheat on a daily basis. It’s not going to change, regardless of setting.

Failing also = not learning, and that’s what those kids would be doing if they didn’t have the opportunity to cheat (which they would, even in a school setting).

I would argue, and I think many educators would agree, that nothing substantial occurs between mid-April and the end of the school year.

I would argue that “people are going to cheat in school when learning remotely” is below at least 1,000 other issues to be worried about during the pandemic, maybe even 10,000.

I would argue that if someone cheats to get a bachelor’s degree, it will ultimately either catch up to them when they fail professionally where cheating isn’t an option, and they’ll get what they deserved, or it won’t catch up to them and they’ll be successful in the adult world so their cheating in college would become irrelevant. But ultimately we’re talking about high school, where people have cheated since the beginning of time and there’s never been much if any student integrity, so little would change.

So every single person on this earth would throw integrity to the wayside in that situation?

Grade inflation has been going on since the Vietnam days when professors didn’t want to flunk students because they wanted to make sure they stayed in school so they didn’t get sent to Vietnam. (And probably before that)

But haven’t students been cheating since the dawn of time?

Agreed. Even if this population probably skews white/upper middle class, if that’s how a student learns best, that option should be available through the public school system and kids shouldn’t be forced to go to a charter school or something for it.

Another day, another 80 degree reading. First time it’s happened on back to back days this early in the season since 3/22-23/2012.

That’s exactly it. The kids who are suffering from this are not kids like I was, or kids like my hypothetical, not-yet-existent kids will be. Those kids will be fine regardless of how school is conducted. But there are a lot more places where kids will fall through the cracks as a result of this pandemic, and a lot more kids will fall through the cracks than otherwise would have.

Guilty as charged, unfortunately I’m a middle class white person working from home and ordering Uber eats. Hence the reason I had to remind myself why it won’t really work out to have kids of any age going to school virtually for any real length of time.