Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Thereisalight..]

6 minutes ago, virginton said:

Not when Girvan has already got a fucking Asda to effortlessly cater for this niche choice, no.

Have you ever been in the Girvan Asda? It’s shite. They literally have two things in the chilled vegetarian section 

[RH33]

51 minutes ago, Gaz said:

It is legal just now. Shopping for essentials has always been legal. If you have a specific dietary requirement, and you can only get that from certain places, you're well within your rights to go there.

This, my daughter has multiple allergies so I’ve been going to the big Asda to get her bread as it’s only one that meets all her requirements. 

[Todd_is_God]

2 minutes ago, Thereisalight.. said:

Have you ever been in the Girvan Asda? It’s shite. They literally have two things in the chilled vegetarian section 

Buy vegetables and cook ffs

[Billy Jean King]

Wait a fucking minute [emoji38]
When you said you had a dietary requirement which meant you couldn't get what you needed locally I assumed some kind of allergy / allergies which meant you needed specialised food.
A fucking vegetarian [emoji38] Does the ASDA in Girvan not have any vegetables?

Presumably there are Veggies that can't / wont cook and thus rely on ready meals just the same as with meat eaters.

[RH33]

8 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

Hardly. I was merely qualifying that it's my opinion. Others will feel differently and are welcome to manage the perceived risk accordingly. They absolutely should do this. I perceive almost no risk to myself or my family, and see no justifiable reason why restrictions should continue indefinitely for minimal numbers of a virus we may never cure. 

Its simple common sense and a reasonable understanding of risk/reward or cost/benefit or whatever you want to call it

That’s a dietary choice not requirement.

 

[vikingTON]

9 minutes ago, Thereisalight.. said:

Have you ever been in the Girvan Asda? It’s shite. They literally have two things in the chilled vegetarian section 

Indeed I have and it seemed to have a plentiful supply of vegetables in fresh, frozen and tinned form, what with it being a fucking supermarket and all.

[vikingTON]

8 minutes ago, Billy Jean King said:

Presumably there are Veggies that can't / wont cook and thus rely on ready meals just the same as with meat eaters.

Then they've made a spectacularly poor lifestyle choice that isn't incumbent on the rest of society to alleviate.

[Wee Willie]

This makes sense.

[Todd_is_God]

4 minutes ago, Wee Willie said:

This makes sense.

Not really. Completely unsourced information which, in turn, makes it potentially dangerous if people think everyone wearing a bit of fabric over their face will reduce the chance of spread by 98.5%

Fancy graphic it may be, but that's all it is.

[Thereisalight..]

25 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

Buy vegetables and cook ffs

There’s only so many vegetables you can eat  

when I go to Ayr I normally stock up on Quorn or Tofurkey “cold meat” style things as they do for lunch on a sandwich. Fck cooking vegetables for a quick bite to eat at lunch

Edited June 23, 2020 by Thereisalight..

[bendan]

1 hour ago, craigkillie said:

A lot of this work won't necessarily be wasted effort, since they should now be better prepared if there are any problems with covid or any other pandemic in the future. Even in the best case scenarios there will be new cases here and there over the winter and individual schools may have to close temporarily, at which point these teaching models can be adopted.

There's a lot of theory to suggest that blended learning can be a useful pedagogical technique anyway, so even if they never have to use it for this reason it may have given teachers an opportunity to reflect on their practice and to provide better quality education going forward..

I agree. We need to be thinking about an educational future that blends traditional teaching with greater use of technology for self study and remote learning. I'd like to see us go to a four day school week permanently with some online work to do in place of the Friday.

[Monkey Tennis]

9 minutes ago, bendan said:

I agree. We need to be thinking about an educational future that blends traditional teaching with greater use of technology for self study and remote learning. I'd like to see us go to a four day school week permanently with some online work to do in place of the Friday.

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Monkey Tennis

[Turkmenbashi]

8 minutes ago, Thereisalight.. said:

There’s only so many vegetables you can eat  

when I go to Ayr I normally stock up on Quorn or Tofurkey “cold meat” style things as they do for lunch on a sandwich. Fck cooking vegetables for a quick bite to eat at lunch

Just fucking go to Ayr then. Honestly, no one is stopping you

[HeartsOfficialMoaner]

11 minutes ago, Thereisalight.. said:

There’s only so many vegetables you can eat  

when I go to Ayr I normally stock up on Quorn or Tofurkey “cold meat” style things as they do for lunch on a sandwich. Fck cooking vegetables for a quick bite to eat at lunch

I do. It is, for me, time consuming and interesting. It's better than watching the covid clock 24-7. 

[bendan]

11 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

Yes, it has demonstrated a lot of the problems, but from my perspective as a parent they are problems with the execution, not with the concept. Some teachers have done some really great stuff that made good use of the possibilities. Given that they were thrown into this situation without much warning, I'm sure a larger percentage could do likewise if long term planning and training was done. Hopefully there will be some serious research into what worked and what didn't, and why. 

[Monkey Tennis]

3 minutes ago, bendan said:

Yes, it has demonstrated a lot of the problems, but from my perspective as a parent they are problems with the execution, not with the concept. Some teachers have done some really great stuff that made good use of the possibilities. Given that they were thrown into this situation without much warning, I'm sure a larger percentage could do likewise if long term planning and training was done. Hopefully there will be some serious research into what worked and what didn't, and why. 

Remember though that a lot of kids and households are nothing like yours.

[AyrshireTon]

4 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Standard Grade represented an ideal course for an awful lot of kids, in a way that none of its replacements have managed.

Agree.

We had an SQA woman visit us on an in-service  day. She was pushed on the "no-one really recongnises N4 as a qualification but N5 is too hard for some and you can't do both" thing. She said that it may be possible to one day sit both levels, to everyone's derision that this would be the same as Standard Grade all over again.

I don't think it will happen, as that'll cost them twice as much in markers.

[Skyline Drifter]

8 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

For me, this experience has demonstrated the limitations of "self study and remote learning", more than it has their potential.

This. Though your opinion as a teacher is probably far more important anyway.

I'm pretty embarrassed by the efforts my kids have made in the last 3 months to be honest. I have particular family circumstances which have made things very difficult but I still don't think they, or I, come out of this with any pride. They have by and large spent the last three months on extended holiday, thankfully mostly in pretty decent weather which let them get into the garden (since we were shielding for the first 10 or 11 weeks of it and not allowed off the property). The school did what they could I think probably but we had real issues really achieving anything and I do feel I've failed a bit as a parent in all this. I'm not uneducated myself. I have a degree and professional qualification but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have the patience for it. The kids don't respect me as a teacher either so try as I might have in the initial week or two especially, they just pretty much refused to do stuff.

The school set them Sumdog tasks to do on a weekly basis and I got them to do those but that's pretty basic stuff and took them a couple of hours a week, and when my eldest was struggling with some of it I really wasn't good at trying to help. Teaching  is NOT my forte. We had real problems with accessing any of the IT resources. Despite an array of devices floating about we never did manage to get them working on Teams. Any device I had was either too old or the wrong operating system to run it.  Glow would partly set up on their Kindles but Teams wouldn't, I don't have parental access to set up their Huawei tablets so I've no idea if they would have worked, and whilst it would install on my youngest's phone, it never appeared to work and he never got anything through it. Eventually we just gave up trying to make it work. I'm not inventive, I didn't set them tasks of my own imagination. I asked them to do reading and they pretty much refused unless it was about Star Wars or football depending on which child I was talking to. They've spent most of the last 3 months playing games and watching videos on their tablets. In some cases while I dozed next to them having not finished work until 4am the night before.

A lot of the other software resources just wouldn't work on the Kindle Fires I had or if they did work, weren't all that practical with a touchscreen keyboard set up. Or they wouldn't install on the child profiles. An actual pc or laptop they could have used would maybe have solved it but getting them to share time on it would have been difficult too. A little frustrating when I actually live adjoining the playground of the school and could see the keyworkers kids in there every day!

By the time they go back in August they'll have effectively done almost no schooling for 5 months. As a P5 who was near the top end of his class probably when this all started I'm not massively worried about my youngest. He'll go back and make it up. My eldest going into P7 though struggles a bit and is almost certainly autistic (formal diagnosis is in the pipeline). The five months at the start of a huge year for him, his last in Primary, is vital time he may never make up.

For us remote learning just hasn't worked and I genuinely feared for their education if it had been even half of the norm for much of next year. So today's announcement from Swinney is a massive relief. Hopefully it comes to pass as he's predicting. Quite apart from their education, I also faced the very real possibility of having to give up work or at least back it down to part time if I could have arranged it for the foreseeable future to give me 2 or 3 days a week of childcare if they weren't going back to school and grandparent care wasn't going to be allowed for much longer. It was a very real worry and today lifts a weight off in that respect. It's likely the road ahead will still have some bumps though and I'm still working extremely odd hours for the time being to work round childcare and presumably will be till mid August anyway.

All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

[Monkey Tennis]

Just now, AyrshireTon said:

Agree.

We had an SQA woman visit us on an in-service  day. She was pushed on the "no-one really recongnises N4 as a qualification but N5 is too hard for some and you can't do both" thing. She said that it may be possible to one day sit both levels, to everyone's derision that this would be the same as Standard Grade all over again.

I don't think it will happen, as that'll cost them twice as much in markers.

And be difficult to deliver.  

[bendan]

4 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Remember though that a lot of kids and households are nothing like yours.

Yes, I get that, but some kids and households pose challenges to education no matter how it's delivered. I just hope that the problems don't make us think technology or online learning has little to offer. As I said, I'd like to see a four day week with a wee bit of online work set for the three days off. I think that's worth trying. Some subjects seem much better suited to online learning than others, and some of them are areas with teacher recruitment problems, so it would be good to see resources put into this.