A few days ago, I tweeted that coronahysteria has been useful for helping my daughter narrow down her list of colleges: she’s eliminating the ones that are currently closed or remote-only because it means the school is run by bed-wetting weenies who don’t actually care about educating the students.
That one got a few hundred likes and a few dozen retweets. But of course, a couple of college perfessors had to chime in to say their schools are remote-only right now – to protect the students! – and I really needed to teach my daughter to respect the science and blah-blah-blah.
Oh, dear.
One of the perfessors replied:
Sorry to lose a student to it, as it appears they could use some critical thinking skills to overcome their parents ignorance.
That’s the exact quote. Fascinating … we have a college professor who doesn’t know the singular student isn’t a plural they, and doesn’t know how to use the plural possessive case for parents ignorance. Talk about ignorance. There’s a school we’ll avoid.
The other perfessor teaches nutrition (and we all how rigorously scientific that field is), and informed me that my daughter was missing out, because she and the other perfessors have spent hundreds of hours learning new, cutting-edge teaching strategies.
Ah, well, if it’s new and cutting-edge, it simply must be better. You all remember how New Math and Whole-Language English classes led to generations of Americans highly proficient in math and able to construct grammatically correct sentences.
I replied:
I appreciate the college teachers who are chiming in to publicly claim their bed-wetter status. We can scratch their schools off the list.
Now, you’d think that would clue the nutrition perfessor that arguing it’s not safe for students to be in class would only further convince me to avoid her school. But no, she kept thinking she could persuade me. So I replied:
I appreciate you making the extra effort, but you’ve already established yourself as a bed-wetter whose school we’ll avoid. No need to keep proving the point.
That didn’t stop her. Instead, she adopted a condescending attitude I’ve found to be strangely common among nutrition perfessors. It goes something like this: I have a PhD in nutrition, and therefore I’m a real scientist, so I must educate this ignorant plebe.
That always goes over really well with me.
The perfessor kept trying to convince me that of course schools should be remote-only, because THE CASES, THE CASES, THE CASES! The CASES keep going up!
When I replied that college-age kids are at almost no risk whatsoever from COVID, the perfessor replied sure, that may be true, but if they go to classes, they’ll spread the disease! The medical system will be overwhelmed! The only safe course is keep them out of school!
I replied with a link to the latest casedemic video by Ivor Cummins. Here it is, in case you haven’t seen it:
The video is 37 minutes, but the perfessor replied in roughly two minutes, which of course means she didn’t watch it. Nonetheless, she felt qualified to dismiss it. She replied that the notion that cases are rising because of massive testing is yesterday’s smokescreen. Yes, she wrote that.
I replied:
She’s a teacher, but tries to dismiss facts and data anyone can look up with “that’s yesterday’s smokescreen.” And she wonders why I wouldn’t send my daughter to her school. Sorry, we prefer schools with teachers who are critical thinkers capable of making rational arguments.
After more back-and-forth — with her reneging on at least two promises to slow it down and make just ONE more effort to educate me on the very real threat we face because of THE CASES, THE CASES, THE CASES! — I’d finally had enough. I won’t italicize or number my thread of responses. Here it is:
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Since you don’t have the brains to stop proudly claiming your status as a bed-wetter, I’ll slow this down and explain it for you ONE last time. College kids are at near zero-risk from COVID. So you duck that with “but it’s to protect other people!”
There’s no evidence of young, healthy, asymptomatic people spreading the disease to others. There’s some speculation by professional bed-wetters, but no actual evidence. If the families of college kids feel at risk, they can dealt with it.
So based on no threat to the college kids, and no known threat to the people in their lives, you and the other bed-wetters have decided to go with remote-only teaching, depriving students of the most enjoyable aspect of college: life on campus with other students.
Is that to benefit the students? No, it’s clear to anyone with a half a brain it’s to benefit yourselves. By gosh, you LIKE not having to show up in the classroom, so you keep peddling b.s. about how this is saving lives through some mechanism not supported by any evidence.
And you keep peddling b.s. about those CUTTING-EDGE! teaching strategies to convince yourselves you’re not depriving the students. Here’s a CUTTING-EDGE! strategy that’s proved its value over the centuries: get your lazy ass into the classroom and teach face-to-face.
Laughably, schools expect parents to pay full price for their kids to receive a remote “education” that could be replaced by any online teaching service already in existence. Keep it up; you’re proving yourselves unnecessary and it will come back to bite you.
Doubly laughably, you keep trying to convince us this is all about safety, doncha know. And yet schools have remained open in many other countries with no rise in hospitalizations or deaths. The “it’s to protect people!” b.s. won’t fly, no matter how many “cases” you cite.
And yet here you are, apparently thinking if you just link to this or that bit of nonsense, you’re going to convince me that by gosh, it really IS about protecting people! … even though college kids are at no risk. You wildly overestimate your powers of persuasion.
If you were actually intelligent, you would have realized days ago that every argument you make in favor of keeping your school closed is further evidence that you’re a bed-wetter who doesn’t care about the students, and thus someone to avoid like the plague — a real plague.
So the bottom line: any teacher not elderly or otherwise in real danger who argues for remote-only learning is a selfish, lazy slob who doesn’t mind depriving students of a true college experience, as long as it’s convenient for her. That’s a “teacher” parents will avoid.
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End of the thread.
The word is slowly getting out: lockdowns didn’t do diddly … well, other than bankrupt countless businesses, vaporize countless jobs, and send the economy into a tailspin. Here are some quotes from an article in ZeroHedge:
The toll lockdowns have taken on human life and human rights has been incalculable. Increases in child abuse, suicide, and even heart attacks, all appear to be a feature of mandatory stay-at-home orders issued by politicians who now rule by decree without any legislative or democratic due process.
This was all done because some politicians and bureaucrats—who were in no danger of losing their large paychecks—decided it was a great idea to carry out a bizarre and risky experiment: forcing large swaths of the population to stay at home in the name of preventing the spread of disease.
… it’s now becoming apparent that lockdowns don’t work when actually tried. Earlier this month, for example, Donald Luskin noted in The Wall Street Journal:
Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.
In an August 1 Study, also published by The Lancet, the authors concluded “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.”
A June study published in Advance by Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner found the data “strongly suggests” the UK lockdown was both superfluous (it did not prevent an otherwise explosive behavior of the spread of the coronavirus) and ineffective (it did not slow down the death growth rate visibly).
In fact, the overall trend of infection and death appears to be remarkably similar across many jurisdictions regardless of what non -pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are taken by policymakers.
Lockdowns are causing far more harm than good. They’re not saving lives. And yet many people whose jobs aren’t currently in danger want to stay in lockdown and keep schools closed for the simple reason that they’ve gotten used to working strictly from home and think it’s awesome. So they’ll look for any reason to say the threat is still HUUUUUGE, and by gosh, we just can’t go back to normal yet.
So let’s thank the teachers who publicly insist on keeping their classrooms closed. They’ve let us know they don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s best for the students, so we know to avoid them.
