So I woke up today to learn that the @A2SchoolsSuper has called a snow day. After a four-day weekend. And with tomorrow an "asynchronous" day (i.e., no real school again).

Which might sound reasonable after a storm, except -- there IS no in-person school in Ann Arbor.

In her email, @A2SchoolsSuper said that COVID-19 means "we have missed many of the simple joys that make our time together memorable."

Simple joys? You mean, like seeing friends? Actually learning in a classroom? Heck, like learning at all?
Or having your parents not be quivering messes because they haven't had their kids in school for nearly a year and are at the ends of their ropes? Or not waking up in the middle of the night worrying if the district is ALSO going to limit or suspend in-person school for the fall?
She writes: "Snow days are opportunities for children, young people, and adults to play in the snow, read books, take a break, and enjoy the winter season." You know what adults can't do that? Adults who work. And yes, this burden fall primarily on moms.
Also, we just had a four day weekend! My kids have played in the snow! They've read books! THEY'VE HAD A BREAK.

They don't need those things right now. They need school. We need school.
This email has broken me. I don't even know what to say. It's basically a big middle finger to working parents. And it's a mark of how unimportant Ann Arbor seems to regard the basic job of teaching kids.
We know that schools can be reopened safely. CDC has said they can be reopened. @GovWhitmer has begged that they be reopened.

But the schools remain closed. There is no date for reopening.
In her email, @A2SchoolsSuper can write, with apparent lack of irony, that "stress is high and wellness is more important than ever" during COVID.

Does she have any idea how that sounds to parents who are desperate to get their kids back into a classroom?
I'm angry and sad and scared about what this might mean for the fall. Will the union insist that its teachers can't go back until COVID is eradicated? Or that we've got to insist on six feet distancing even if all the teachers are vaccinated, so my kids go in twice a week?
School is not optional. It's not a luxury. It's the most important gift we can give our kids. We need to find a way to get back to school immediately. We shouldn't be looking for excuses to take what little school exists away. /fin

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OK I am going to be tackling this as surveillance/open source intel gathering exercise, because that is my background. I blew away 3 years of my life doing site acquisition/reconnaissance for a certain industry that shall remain unnamed and believe there is significant carryover.


This is NOT going to be zillow "here is how to google school districts and find walmart" we are not concerned with this malarkey, we are homeschooling and planting victory gardens and having gigantic happy families.

With that said, for my frog and frog-adjacent bros and sisters:

CHOICE SITES:

Zillow is obvious one, but there are many good sites like Billy Land, Classic Country Land, Landwatch, etc. and many of these specialize in owner financing (more on that later.) Do NOT treat these as authoritative sources - trust plat maps and parcel viewers.

TARGET IDENTIFICATION AND EVALUATION:

Okay, everyone knows how to google "raw land in x state" but there are other resources out there, including state Departments of Natural Resources, foreclosure auctions, etc. Finding the land you like is the easy part. Let's do a case study.

I'm going to target using an "off-grid but not" algorithm. This is a good piece in my book - middle of nowhere but still trekkable to civilization.

Note: visible power, power/fiber pedestal, utility corridor, nearby commercial enterprise(s), and utility pole shadows visible.
Time for some thoughts on schools given the revised SickKids document and the fact that ON decided to leave most schools closed. ON is not the only jurisdiction to do so, but important to note that many jurisdictions would not have done so -even with higher incidence rates.


As outlined in the tweet by @NishaOttawa yesterday, the situation is complex, and not a simple right or wrong https://t.co/DO0v3j9wzr. And no one needs to list all the potential risks and downsides of prolonged school closures.


On the other hand: while school closures do not directly protect our most vulnerable in long-term care at all, one cannot deny that any factor potentially increasing community transmission may have an indirect effect on the risk to these institutions, and on healthcare.

The question is: to what extend do schools contribute to transmission, and how to balance this against the risk of prolonged school closures. The leaked data from yesterday shows a mixed picture -schools are neither unicorns (ie COVID free) nor infernos.

Assuming this data is largely correct -while waiting for an official publication of the data, it shows first and foremost the known high case numbers at Thorncliff, while other schools had been doing very well -are safe- reiterating the impact of socioeconomics on the COVID risk.
Our top 15 tweets

A #prodmgmt thread 👇

https://t.co/Yv854Sd3P3


https://t.co/sXaMH1bZ9m


https://t.co/5X7bOTsS7m


https://t.co/w1y6LTtPS2
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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