How did children make it through other crises in history?

Yes, I agree with this. BUT it's parents saying the kids shouldn't have to go thru ANYTHING. That their kids shouldn't have to suffer thru a pandemic. Ok, well, it's no ones choice to suffer thru anything. But it's what's going on in the world right now. And like I posted further up, a learning experience. Something parents shouldn't be blaming others on, like our Governor of MN. He's doing what he feels is right for MN. Not just your kid. That's a life lesson.

I’m totally down with acknowledging people’s sadness. I’m not OK with parents who want others to put their lives at risk to prevent their kid from ever having the sadz.

ETA: and in Texas in particular, I’m not OK with the attitude that kids will die without sports, but it’s totally fine to cancel all the other extra-curriculars.

My daughter has asthma and has been playing basketball with her mask on by her choice. (It is required on the bench of all athletes.) Most of her teammates now wear one while playing to help support her health.


Having said that, though, I live in katybee's school district and my kids are in middle school. My daughter "lives for" basketball but considers herself an emo jock, lol. We are probably about to pull her from playing because the numbers are so high and God forbid do anything to try to bring numbers down like delay the start of sports for a couple of weeks or something. So we will be the asshole parents upsetting our kid, getting her in trouble with the coaches because of pulling her, and also messing with the bench because they will be down one more starting player from an already too-small team. All because people aren't doing the right thing. (school district, governor, and the bleepin' people who had to go party downtown on NYE, for example)

Meanwhile, the public health authority has recommended schools stay entirely virtual for the next 2 weeks minimum, and ALL extracurriculars be cancelled for at least that time as well. I believe he has previously recommended all spring sports be cancelled except for varsity athletes (due to the scholarship issue). It is my understanding that the central school district in the area has decided to follow these recommendations. Crazy folks, letting the health authority speak to the health issues!

By the way, that dashboard with current/new cases that katybee shared? Yeah, students aren't even back in school yet. (Teachers went back today or last Friday, I believe.) That's all just from the break.

Yes this. I have had to tell my son this so many times this last year. Way too many things have sucked snd so many reasons to be sad and not all pandemic related. I have told him so many times it’s ok to be sad or upset about things. Crying is ok. I admit I’m tired of saying when the outside is broken we will do this or that but right now we are going to do or realistically not do this or that.

I really like your comment about being strong and proud to make responsible choices to get through this.

If I've liked your sad post, it isn't because I like that your situation is awful, it's because I'm empathising with you. This is all awful. I hate that teachers are being made out to be the bad guys for doing the sensible thing. And yes, I understand that parents struggle to find alternative child-care and still hold own their jobs, but that really isn't the school's responsibility. I don't know what the answer is.

I cannot, cannot, cannot stand when a teacher tells me it’s not their job to teach social emotional health.

You can’t be serious???

Do we no longer believe it takes a village?

I think the point is that there are only so many hours in a day. We’d all love to spend less time on test prep and more on community and emotional stuff. There simply isn’t time.

I didn’t read the replies

I think the world is different than it was during wwII so one can not compare. During the war families stayed home and did nothing. You couldn’t work from home, school from home, etc. Their lockdown was a true lockdown. Kids read at home, wrote in journals, feared for their lives. Nowadays, parents work from home, kids do school on line, it’s a more complicated ‘lockdown’.

Also, I think that differing statistics around the world and false information plaguing the internet makes making decisions very difficult. For example, we are in our second surge and our schools have been open. I know that transmission at school has been linked to a handful of cases - my dh is admin for peds for province so I know the statistics - yet our news and parent Facebook groups and whatnot blow it all out of proportion and don’t know what statistics they should focus on or which ones are important. Also, our low transition rate at school makes my sister - in LA county - wonder why they have so much spread amongst kids. It’s like there is no reasonable explanation. Or is she hearing emphasized / inaccurate statistics. Why are our kids doing well yet where she is kids are spreading / catching and they aren’t in school. None of it makes sense.

I also think that people adjust to circumstances and it’s wonderful. I’ve mentioned this before - we are doing baby namings and bar mitzvahs on zoom. My ancestors performed these celebrations in hiding. We do what we have to do.

I’m sorry there is so much anger amongst the parents in your community. At times we need to roll with it and make the best decisions for our family. My kids are in school and dance class (4 days a week). I make day by day decisions. I sometimes feel that I feel more fear because I’m locking up inside. I’m glad that they are learning to navigate these activities in a safe way. But we haven’t had any cases / transmission at their activities. Which comes back to the other question - why? Our gov’t feels that organized activities (like dance and school) are safer because our kids follow safety precautions/rules and are supervised versus them meeting friends and hanging out. Who knows. I guess each community is different.

I think it's a pretty big jump to say that just because kids want to continue to play sports during a pandemic, they wouldn't be willing to make sacrifices for their country in time of war.

Army and Navy both wanted to play college football this year, although they had to completely alter their schedules and make a lot of other changes in light of covid, such as playing the Army-Navy football game at West Point in a mostly empty stadium instead of playing the game in a packed stadium at a neutral site. I bet everyone of those football players would not hesitate to put their lives on the line if a war broke out.

I don't know about high school football, but I know that college football was played during the Spanish Flu and the stands were packed w/ fans wearing masks. When I see those pictures, I really don't think that people have changed all that much.

I'm not saying that high school sports or other extracurricular activities can be made reasonably safe during a pandemic, (I haven't really explored the issue since I don't have high school age kids). However, I don't think this generation of high school and middle school students are unpatriotic or bad people just because they want to keep doing their normal activities.

I think reasonable minds can disagree on what conduct is reasonable during a pandemic. I don't necessarily think someone is a "covid idiot" just because they think an activity is reasonably safe during a pandemic and I don't.

I feel sorry for school administrators. I know they are paid to make these tough decisions, but I can't imagine the pressures they are facing in a pandemic. I also have so much respect for teachers during this pandemic. You are literally putting your life on the line and are having to do so much extra work. I really can understand your side of the argument that forgoing sports is a small sacrifice to make to help ensure that teachers and others stay safe.

I wasn’t responding to you. I was responding to the person who said that it’s not their job as a teacher to teach social emotional health/learning/well being.

It’s our jobs as educators, doctors, dentists, sports coaches, construction workers, etc. to teach these children everything they need to know to be people. I’ve been preaching and presenting to my staff all year that our jobs go so far beyond academics. We can’t depend on parents to teach everything when they spend the majority of time with us for 180 days.

This thread hit me the wrong way on all ways. I have ELEVEN students in residential treatment facilities this year; I had one last year. These treatment facilities have no beds because they pull from the wealthiest and poorest areas; and race, wealth, etc don’t seem to matter. They wait for a child psychologist last year in my area was about 3 months. It’s over a year now. The wait for a child psychiatrist in my area last year was about 6-9 months. It’s TWO YEARS right now. We don’t even have enough people in the community for parents to turn to when they need help for their students but we want to bring them down and claim they’re not doing enough? I have issue with that. Stop focusing on the outliers when we have so many people who are trying to do the best for their child and don’t know where to go and who to turn to.

Our youth are crying out for our help and honestly, we as adults are struggling to understand so much, we’re truly at a loss as to what we can do to help.

your question remains: children died in crises before this one or they affected a limited amount of children, so we could pour every resource we had to help them.

The question really should be “how can we help our children make it through this crisis” and not calling them snowflakes who can’t cope.

Based on threads on this board, a lot of us can’t cope anyway. Most educators didn’t want to return to work, no? Because of fear and anxiety and wondering what would happen? So why would we expect our children, who look to us as models, to know wtf they’re supposed to do?

I feel for our youth right now. And I’m completely overwhelmed with the amount of needs my students have this year—as someone who also thought they were resilient and would be okay.

They. Are. Not.

I get that. More than anyone, a school psychologist gets that.

But we literally sat down and made time. I reply to you because I actually sat with the music tracher and we came up ways to naturally building SEL opportunities into her music lessons. She told me what she teaches and what her standards are; we worked to find pieces, songs, melodies, and a lot of other music terms I don’t know and used it to have natural conversations about how rhythm, pitch, melody, lyrics, and all those other fancy terms I don’t know about music can affect how you are feeling. We even presented it to the school board to highlight the need to INTEGRATE subjects into SEL instead of this idea that any of us (including me and my fifty trillion evaluations) have time for some stand alone material. Admin seems to schedule every second of every day. Nobody has time for a comprehensive program on SEL because they want the school to be accredited and blue ribbon and sped in compliance. So we had to think (way) outside the box.

We worked with the lead language arts teacher and purposely tied in reading material that lent itself to natural conversations about how characters in books were feeling or thinking based on their situations. We have a long way to go with that but we got a good start.

Our PE coaches used our PBIS to build team work and cooperation and being a good loser and even overcoming fear of failure into teaching sports skills in basketball and football.

I wish I were in your district because this would be a blast to do with you. I love music but knew very little about the ins and outs of it all. I learned so much from our music teacher (elementary) doing this project with her. I really wish we could’ve done more and presented our findings at my national conference that was cancelled...

Well said.

I want to add something to this. People keep saying "they won't die from". You are right my son will not die because they just announced the cancellation of the 4H livestock show. But is that all that matters? If I stay physically alive but am stripped of every thing that makes life worth living what's the point? People said back in Feb this would be a few weeks, then months and now we are hitting the year mark. This reminds me a bit of when someone has to decide if the side effects of cancer treatment is worth it to live a bit longer. Some folks chose to forgo treatments for a better quality of life. Now I am not completely stupid here. I know I can't decide for other people what risks they should be exposed to and that it's one thing for me to decide to accept the covid risk for myself yet I have the same responsibility not to spread it to others. SO far we've been rule followers but I understand the grieving process many are going through as things/activities are stripped away. I get the jealousy and frustration that some kids get their sports and yet another group is told their group activities are suspended.