Tuesday, September 08, 2020

Virtual School +1

 Complete disaster. Crashed for the whole school after five (5) minutes. Kid 1's school computer has camera problems, so he can't turn in his first assignment. Science teacher did something mysterious and most of the class couldn't sign in at all. Elementary school schedules sent home are already wrong, verging on a fantasy. 

Worst of all, this small town's ISPs simply can't support an extra 500 people logging on at the same time (1/7 of the town's population!). While most of their parents also work from home. 

Tomorrow will certainly be less bad, but there is no way this is even getting to okay, and the school district still does not have ONE SINGLE METRIC for when it's okay to reopen. (There were 2 cases in the whole county last week and they were both at the same college. That's IT. I am so angry.)

8 comments:

  1. Socal dendrite2:12 AM

    Ugh, sorry but not surprised. I *am* surprised that teachers are requesting assignments be turned in on the very first day. We've been back for 2.5 weeks and only now do we have to turn anything in - the first few weeks were all about teachers getting to know the kids and trying to make it work. I hope things improve rapidly!

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    1. Well, clearly it was a BAD idea! (Today was only a little better.)

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    2. Socal Dendrite7:20 PM

      I'm cross that reopening schools is not prioritized over, say, hair salons, where I am (LA County) but at least we do have an actual case count problem. It must be suuuuuper frustrating to be dealing with this online school crap when you have had so few actual COVID cases.

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    3. So few! I mean, we only have 27,000 people, but there's also not a lot of numbers that will be smaller than TWO. Two a week. I live 500 feet from the elementary school, where teachers are bringing their own children. I'm past cross and on into furious- bars, restaurants, hair salons, the baby gift shop, libraries, banks, and 3400 students worth of college are open but not SCHOOL???

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  2. That is a disaster.

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    1. This is super not great! And for dumb reasons!

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  3. The "not enough bandwidth" problem is one that doesn't get talked about enough. All the teachers out there I see requiring computer videos to be on, and I'm like, there are times when our house simply doesn't have enough wireless, and I can either turn my camera off in a meeting or not hear a damn word because of lag (and that's independent of any of the privacy/safeguarding reasons to not require students to have their cameras on). I have a colleague who lives out in the middle of nowhere, and they don't have broadband out there. And NO ONE has been talking about upscaling infrastructure.

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    1. Oh, like everything else, the inconvenience is simply offloaded onto individual parents! Or we can go sit in the school parking lot- it is 85 degrees and 89% humidity today.

      I did get a usb to Ethernet adapter, but there are five of us (plus my mom) and only one router.

      I sent a letter to the principals in June telling them this was going to be a huge problem but of course nobody did anything.

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