Parenting in the Time of Covid

He was on his way out the door, to walk around with a new friend outside. 

Me: Rapid test, masks, or walking 6' apart? Which are you doing?

Him: It bothers me that you ask. I shouldn't have to live with your anxieties. You just ask because you're anxious about it, and your anxieties shouldn't have an effect on my life.

Me: You're going to hang out with someone and then come back into the house with other people who are vulnerable. Omicron is far more contagious, so being outside isn't enough. There is a very real risk that you could catch and spread the virus walking outside next to someone if you're both unmasked. You have to choose one of the three. Either she tests before you go, or you both wear masks, or you walk far apart. 

Him: But that fact that you ask means you don't trust me. I know what I'm doing. I read the research.

Me: I read the research too, which says that we need to start masking outside. I trust that you'll follow your own risk assessment. But I think we have different risk levels that we're comfortable with. I accept far less risk because your sister is way past needing a booster. Once she gets it - if that ever happens - I might be less inclined to check that your risk levels are in line with mine. Right now, I want some reassurance that your plan is in line with my lower level of risk comfort. 

I'm at the "My house - my rules!" point in the pandemic. It makes it very difficult to live with adult children - for everybody. He said he'd be gone an hour; he was out for five hours. I'm happy he's meeting people and getting out there, but I'm also really glad that I pushed him to wear a mask! Here's hoping that he actually kept it on!

ETA:Turns out, she was on it. She insisted on rapid testing first and wearing a mask outside. Thank god for small favours!

On "Fixing" ASD

I watched a course-load of videos by Dr. Alok Kanojia (@HealthyGamerGG) this past summer. He's a therapist specializing in addiction in his day job and focused on gaming addictions online, but he has broadened his videos to encompass many other issues. He doesn't do therapy online but "coaches" people instead. And typically right there I'd be out. Coaching?? It all sounds a little goofy and new-agey. But I got hooked when I first saw his video with Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) the previous October because of his openness to really listen to her experiences and learn from them before asking the precisely right questions necessary to get her to understand herself at further depth. And then they meditated. It's a mix of Freud and a mountain top guru; at the very least I'm learning lots of Sanskrit words in the process.

I appreciate how he let Natalie explain her experience as a trans person, BUT then I saw a more recent video with a streamer, DesMephisto, taking about being autistic. Dr. K focused on fixing their ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). He often uses an addiction analogy to explain that, generally, first we need to understand and accept who we are, like we have to accept being an addict, but we don't stop at acceptance; the next task it to change ourselves so we can better live in the world. And then he asked Des what many consider an offensive question: "If I gave you a pill that would make you no longer autistic, would you take it?" 

Yikes. 

If that doesn't seem offensive, then imagine if he had asked Natalie that same question about being trans. It doesn't even make sense. 

Chomsky's Lessons from 2021

Yanis Varoufakis spoke to Noam Chomsky, at DiEM25, about what 2021 has taught us. In a nutshell: the wealthy puts profits over people to their own detriment (e.g. patent rights over vaccines, which provoked mutations) and will only help with climate change if they can profit without taking risks. We have climate policies that could help, but we need more protesting to force this change. The U.S. citizens have been convinced of lies around climate change and world politics. Europe needs to stand up to lead instead of following the US, and we need to negotiate better with China or we'll end up in a terminal war. We must focus on what we might actually influence - i.e. our own country's acts of atrocity. Don't seek protection from ideas you don't like, but meet them head on with intellectual rigour (abridged quotations below).

On Trying to Find Peace with Prem Rawat

Since falling into a pandemic funk, I've tried a variety of books and videos to try to get a little inner stillness in order to continue to function. Omicron and our region's rising numbers aren't helping matters! I'm crap at meditating, but Healthy Gamer's course (my notes) came the closest to getting me on board. The modules walk you through the background of breathing exercises, and how they work in the body, and I stayed with the lessons largely because the work to do is all thinking and learning instead of doing. When the course came to a close, and I tried the doing part, it quickly fell apart. I keep trying again from time to time, but I'm still looking for something that will help it all stick for me. A colleague loaned me Hear Yourself by Prem Rawat, which is all about calming that inner dialogue. 

Still Going On about Masks!!

I've never been much of a rule-follower. I'm that teacher that lets kids sneak out early and shows movies with some questionable content (with kids forewarned and allowed to leave if triggered - none ever do). I go way outside of curriculum guidelines, allowing the class to guide the direction of discussion. In teacher's college, students in my first practicum told me a dirty joke. Back in school, other practicing teachers asked what I did: Did I give them detentions or send them to the office? No, I laughed. It was at that moment I vowed to be a teacher, not a cop - imparting knowledge without policing behaviours that aren't hurtful to anyone. I've always hated when schools feel like prisons, training grounds for factories with bells that tell us what to do, when, and for how long. 

But I do follow rules that make sense. And masks make sense. I even follow more than the rules suggest because our policies don't go nearly far enough to keep us safe.

So now I'm completely demoralized by suddenly being the enforcer in the classroom. 

Srinivasan's "The Right to Sex"

"It is absurd to contend that vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers" (xiii).  ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Amia Srinivasan's book rivals Kate Manne's fantastic Down Girl in the most exciting way. It's an absolute must read for anyone hoping to improve themselves and the world as we're led incrementally through issues around sexual tensions and traumas all with an intersectional lens. This is a collection of five essays that, she explains, "represent my attempt to put into words what many women, and some men, already know. This has already been the way of feminism: women working collectively to articulate the unsaid, the formerly unsayable" (xv). I mainly focus on the first and final essays, with the others laying further evidence for the primary argument.

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST MEN

She starts by looking at the 8% of sexual assault reports that have been classified as false based on a police officer's personal judgment. 

"Police officers were inclined to consider a report false if there hadn't been a physical struggle, if no weapon had been involved, or if the accuser had had a prior relationship with the accused. [Of the suspected false reports] none resulted in wrongful conviction. . . . Nonetheless, a false rape accusation, like a plane crash, is an objectively unusual event that occupies an outsized place in the public imagination. why then does it carry its cultural charge? . . .  Many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. . . . Over half of their cases involved 'official misconduct'" (3-4).

On Burnout

Dr. Alok Kanojia is a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction treatment. His videos are fantastic for some everyday issues as well, like this one on burnout. The most impactful line from this video is that burnout tends to happen when, "people who want to do a good job are placed in situations in which doing a good job is very, very difficult." It's not because you're lazy or a bad fit with your career, but that your workplace isn't acknowledging their part in making a job unnecessarily difficult. And it tends to happen more to people who actually care about what they're doing, not people who are just putting in hours. He says,

"One of the biggest scams that's currently being perpetrated against people about burnout and mental wellness . . . that's subtle and society wide . . . people are placing the responsibility for burnout on the individual. . . . . Burnout affects the individual . . . so there's a subtle scam going on that once you label it as an individual problem . . . then you work on it as an individuals. It's a catastrophic shift of responsibility from the workplace to the individual."

Monbiot on our Current Challenge

George Monbiot wrote an article that he's calling his best bit of writing. It's largely more of the same argument that people can't seem to hear or respond to. We're ignoring the changes in the world at our peril. 

In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. . . . In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse. . . . If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. . . . vast tracts of the Cerrado have been cleared to plant crops – mostly soya to feed the world’s chickens and pigs. As the trees are felled, the air becomes drier. This means smaller plants die, ensuring that even less water is circulated. In combination with global heating, some scientists warn, this vicious cycle could – soon and suddenly – flip the entire system into desert.

The mainstream media treats it as an afterthought. Chomsky has been on about this for decades: we keep getting distracted by sports and entertainment when the world needs our attention. Even in political news, we focus on the wrong things. 

On Moral Injury

I just re-read a post full of sound and fury that I wrote last year at this time, detailing my initial shock at our unsafe and unprecedentedly intense working conditions at the time. The only policy improvements since then is that students don't have to be in the building during lunch and that we flip two courses every week so we only work five days without prep instead of seven months. What's worse is that there are twice as many in the building, and kids know they can take off their masks all the time to eat or drink. Teachers are finally allowed to wear their own masks openly (I've been hiding mine the whole time) while kids are getting lax about theirs (some teachers too due to vaccine-provoked complacency), and we have no recourse to stop them - excepting being that bitch of a teacher who won't let her kids take a sip of water in class! I realized how many rules at school I've ignored over the years to students' delight, and it sucks to suddenly be seen as a hard ass. The rules still don't make sense. We still err on the side of privacy instead of saving lives by stopping the spread. We still provide businesses with free rapid tests (paid for with our taxes) and leave the $40 option for unvaccinated children. The world feels crazy in its callousness.  

Then Dr. Hishram Ziauddeen's twitter post on moral injury really hit it home for me. Here it is in full with just minor punctuation adjusted for clarity: 

Nobody's Rules

UPDATE: As of Oct. 14, teachers are allowed to wear their own quality masks, no more suspensions for that, but still have to wear board-mandated floppy masks on top because... reasons (likely to satisfy a backroom deal with suppliers). Still no access to rapid tests, and I have a class with a Covid confirmed (but officially no contact with others since having it), and several others absent because of "illness." No test = no covid spread!! I suggested the rest of the class notice the number of empty desks in the room and get a rapid test just in case.  

*****

We're becoming subject to unrest in our schools and hospitals, with anti-vax picketers yelling at cancer patients and school children alike: "Stop being sheep! Take off your mask!" It's not the fault of our government, not directly, although the province next door somehow managed to draft a bill to end the protests while ours was still on vacation. It's Nobody's fault. That's how this works. It's hard to live through it when you're on the receiving end of rules that make no sense and Nobody will answer for it. Just close your eyes and think of England.

In her shortest book, On Violence, philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt describes the problem with our bureaucratic system: 

 "The latest and perhaps most formidable form of dominion: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called rule by Nobody. If we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs, making it impossible to localize responsibility and to identify the enemy, that is among the most potent causes of the current worldwide rebellious unrest, its chaotic nature, and its dangerous tendency to get out of control" (38-9). 

Educators are witness to these effects.

The View from Here: Preventing School Spread of Covid-19

Stuck in another gruelling semester of school, it's striking how a minor schedule change can completely disrupt time and energy. I'm falling asleep as soon as I get home! But that's also from additional stressors, like all the rapid tests being repossessed by the Ford government for business use only. We need PHUs, school boards, unions, and businesses all to stand up to any governmental rules that support business at the expense of our children, despite any consequences they may incur. That's courageous leadership. We need free rapid tests in our community, HEPA filters in our classrooms (or at least a Corsi/Rosenthal box), mandatory vaccinations for staff and students over 11, and mandatory N95/KN95/KF94 masks worn in the building at all times. OR we have to acknowledge that we've decided to tolerate this virus longterm. 

It's become so painfully clear that Ford will always favour profits over people. Businesses get the perks, and children are left to their own devises. Nothing has been more demoralizing to me than knowing a team of volunteers brought rapid tests to kids to prevent the spread but then "got caught" with the contraband and were stopped from distributing them. Part of the argument for denying children access is that kids don't get as sick, so don't need them as much as adults do, BUT 1. there are adults in schools, 2. kids can spread it to parents and grandparents, and 3. many kids who get a mild case or are completely asymptomatic end up with LongCovid, which could mean a lifelong disability. Always keep in mind that creating a system that doesn't work can beautifully pave the way towards privatization of education. We have to be ever alert to that covert plan. 

On Work and Connection

 I just read this lovely essay by Esau McCaulley. In it he discusses how our new nearness to death has affected our lives:

"This pandemic has left conversations and lives cut short. And it seems to be bringing a similar clarity to people about their priorities. . . . All these changes that people are embarking on during the pandemic make me think that we weren't that happy before the pandemic. . . . The pandemic has disabused us of the illusion of time as a limitless resource and of the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers are always worth it. Before the pandemic, we knew we were going to die, but we did not believe it. . . . Exercise and a reasonable diet was the tithe we paid to our fears. We believed we had time.  

This opportunity made plain what may have been hidden. Maybe the sacrifices we make for our careers are not worth it. When we had the illusion of time, the lower pay, long commutes, high cost of living and separation from loved ones seemed a small price to pay for a successful career. But the pandemic reminded us that there are some things more important than vocational progress. Friends with children came to see that living far from family meant that they did not have a social network that could help them when school and life logistics became difficult. Covid-19 showed us that when systems break we need people. . . . Being at home helped many people realize how lonely they were before the pandemic and how few people they could really turn to in need. The pandemic has reminded us that life is more than what we do. It is about whom we spend our lives with. We cannot hug a career or laugh with a promotion. We are made for friendship, love and community."

Self-Diagnosis with Checklist Criteria: the Big Five and ASD

When I was a kid, my folks said I was a little slow to warm up to people and sometimes needed a nudge to interact. Then, in grade 11, we all had to do this really long test, filling in stacks of Scantron-type cards with our answers, which were fed into a giant computer that generated reports for each of us, which required a specialist to come in to interpret. The upshot of it all? I'm introverted, an INTP, and I should consider a career as a minister. Then twenty years later, I went to grad school and took a course in Carl Jung, including his typology. We were given a test to do, on paper, which was sent away to be carefully analyzed by a specialist. I got a 30 page typed report in return that said I'm still an INTP, and that can't predict my career goals (assuming it can is a fallacy of affirming the consequent*), but it can help me understand and accept why I need so much alone time, why I struggle to notice the mess I leave in my wake in a way that my partner (ex-partner) finds inexcusable, why I'm good at getting stuff done, and why I'm so scattered. This was a special privilege, getting this 30-paged report, offered only to us because we were taking the course. But another twenty years went by (damn, I'm old!), and now anybody can do these tests online and find out all about themselves. And it's FREE!!!  

Next Steps: Violence? Policy? Adaptation? Acceptance?

Ezra Klein wrote a compelling piece about Andreas Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. We're not doing enough to stop the trainwreck we're driving, but is violence the answer?

"Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions, or even investments. . . . 'Here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start,' Malm writes. 'Announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.' . . . Malm offers two answers for the resolute nonviolence of the climate movement. The first is “strategic pacificism,” the belief that nonviolent protest is more effective than violent resistance. . . . He has no answers for those who fear the probable political consequences: an immediate backlash that sweeps enemies of climate action into power, eliminating even the fragile hopes for policy progress. . . . Elsewhere in the book, Malm is firmly opposed to tactics that could signal contempt or hostility for the working class. But the consequence of a wave of bombings to obliterate energy infrastructure would be to raise the price on energy immediately, all across the world, and the burdens would fall heaviest on the poor. . . . . Higher energy prices are political poison, which is, according to leaked audio, why Exxon Mobil supports a carbon tax: The company knows that any politician who dares propose such a tax will do more to harm the climate movement than to help it. . . .

Wolff on Generating Allies

Whenever I read or listen to Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges talk about citizens changing the world like they did in the 30s, I get equally riled to action and then paralyzed by ignorance of how ever to begin. A recent discussion by Richard Wolff offers a bigger hint about how the New Deal was manifest, and why it's so much harder to get going now. Here's a very abridged and paraphrased summary:

In the 30s, FDR faced similar issues as Biden is facing now, but he was able to make fundamental structural changes to the economy that were bold for the time: social security at a time when the government had no money and millions were eligible, unemployment compensation, the first minimum wage laws, a government jobs program in the public sector, and he taxed corporations and the rich to pay for it. The government's job is not to make money but to help the people. The changes made the system much less unequal, and it took Republicans 80 years to get it back to the level of inequity not seen since. By contrast, Biden isn't making the spending programs that he needs, and he's afraid to tax anyone.   

MacKinnon's Call to Stop Shopping

J.B. MacKinnon co-wrote the 100-Mile Diet years ago, which was a good read. It didn't have much effect on my eating because it was a bit too extreme for even me, but it DID affect my awareness of where I get produce from. For his most recent book, he compiled stories from various people to get different perspectives of one question: What would happen if we reduced consuming by 25% immediately? It's very readable, but it circles around a bit, and he doesn't really provide a clear or persuasive argument for reducing our shopping, as I was expecting. He's mainly just pondering the notion. 

He starts with a series of famous quotations, and I like this one by Ivan Illich: "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy" (from Tools for Conviviality, p. 57). Of course I got stuck there a while and had to read some Illich, so here's the context: 

"The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. Political debate must now be focused on the various ways in which unlimited production threatens human life. This political debate will be misled by those who insist on prescribing palliatives which only disguise the deep reasons why the systems of health, transport, education, housing, and even politics and law are not working. The environmental crisis, for example, is rendered superficial if it is not pointed out that antipollution devices can only be effective if the total output of production decreases. Otherwise they tend to shift garbage out of sight, push it into the future, or dump it onto the poor. The total removal of the pollution created locally by a large-scale industry requires equipment, material, and energy that can create several times the damage elsewhere. Making antipollution devices compulsory only increases the unit cost of the product. This may conserve some fresh air for all, because fewer people can afford to drive cars or sleep in air-conditioned homes or fly to a fishing ground on the weekend, but it replaces damage to the physical environment with further social disintegration. To shift from coal to atomic power replaces smog now with higher radiation levels tomorrow. To relocate refineries overseas, where pollution controls are less stringent, preserves Americans-not Venezuelans-from unpleasant odors at the cost of higher levels of world-wide poisoning." 

Timothy Snyder on the War on History

In "The War on History was a War on Democracy," Snyder compares Russian memory laws, which we're quick to recognize as propaganda, to American under Trump:  

By March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was financed by destroying traditional agrarian life. The five-year plan had brought “dekulakization,” the deportation of peasants deemed more prosperous than others, and “collectivization,” the appropriation of agrarian land by the state. A result was mass famine. . . . Mentions of the famine included an awkwardly long list of regions, downplaying the specificity of the Ukrainian tragedy. The famine was presented as a result of administrative mistakes by a neutral state apparatus. Everyone was a victim, and so no one was. In a 2008 letter to his Ukrainian counterpart, the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev flattened the event into an act of repression “against the entire Soviet people.” The next year Medvedev established the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests, a panel of politicians, military officials and state-approved historians ostensibly tasked with defending the official history of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. It did little in practice, but it did establish an important principle: that history was what served Russia’s national interests, and that all else was revisionism. . . . These Russian policies belong to a growing international body of what are called “memory laws”: government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.

The Future of the Left with Natalie and Noam

I stumbled across a video of Natalie Wynn in conversation with flippin' Noam Chomsky. They are two of my favourite thinkers, but I never, in my wildest imagination, would have expected to find them chatting together. 

Noam seems to be everywhere these days, doing one talk after another, and Natalie is an excellent guide through his version of optimism. It's a video that actually left me feeling hopeful about the world and energized to keep working for change. But the question I wanted asked throughout is, What does this type of necessary work look like, and how do we begin?? 

Paranoid or Prescient? Does it matter?

It's interesting to me when people make fun of anyone taking what they perceive as undue precautions. There are two general reasons for precautions that seem unreasonable: #1 a lack of education or understanding on the part of the viewer and #2 a means to cope with stress on the part of the actor, i.e. a superstition. You'd think that neither of those scenarios would be enough to elicit harassment, but we're not there yet. 

A great example of the former is when a neighbour was gardening in front of her house and her daughter asked to go inside. The mum had to get up to unlock the front door. So, that seems weird, right? She locks her door even when she's standing ten feet in front of it?? But she explained that, since her husband's a cop, she's acutely aware of how easily and how often people's homes are robbed, even with the owners standing right out front. This is a case of the actor having more information than the viewer. I still leave my doors unlocked when I'm in the yard, but I understand why she doesn't. 

Unpopular Opinions: On Failing Credits, Teaching Hybrid, and Grading Student Work!

Riding on my high that a post-covid education system could be different, I joined a committee. It quickly killed my buzz with a reminder that bureaucracy will only allow choices between a very narrow range of options. But I also appear to be in the minority of teachers on many ideas discussed, including this one...

Regardless, I'll state (or re-state) my case for letting kids fail, teaching hybrid, and assigning numeric grades.