A Modest Plan For 100% Reliable Remote Schooling

Fortuna CA

Description

Recently, The Lost Coast Outhouse [re]published an article, Why the Majority of California Schools Might Not Reopen Anytime Soon (see https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2021/jan/29/why-the-majority-of-california-schools-might-not-r/ for the full article). A few choice snippets: The governor’s proposal aimed to incentivize school districts to reopen their campuses by paying out grants of $450 to $700 per student to schools that developed safety plans for in-person instruction by Monday and opened doors to the state’s youngest students by Feb. 16. [snip] “If we’re in distance learning at the end of this school year, what does it mean for next school year, and that is a very big fear and concern that we have,” Holmes said. [snip] “If everybody has to be vaccinated, we might as well just tell people the truth: there will be no in-person instruction in the state of California,” Newsom told the superintendents. [snip] The governor remains unders immense pressure to act on schools. Parents frustrated with how the state and local districts have handled reopenings throughout the pandemic have begun grassroots organizing, and the issue could fuel a long-shot recall effort. [snip] “It’s infuriating. Parents are fed up,” said Jonathan Zachreson, a Roseville parent of three attending schools in the elementary and high school districts. “It looks like these politicians are incentivizing reopening schools, but in reality the plans they come up with do the exact opposite.” Here's my proposed solution. TL;DR: automate lessons and pay children to complete them AND pass a test, to proceed to the next module. Put that $450 to $700 directly into the child's life. Give them an allowance, and a motivation to go to school, and a motivation to pass tests, and a motivation to remember, and a motivation to excel. Pit them against the machine instead of pitting them against each other. Simple, eh? The technology for presenting written material and including hyperlinks to multimedia such as audio and video recording is well established and forms the infrastructure for the entire Internet. Web pages can actually be composed of simple HTML which is universally acceptable to every web browser known to humanity. Methods for making these pages interactive are well established - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_(HTML) for more information on HTML forms. I want to emphasize that this is all ancient technology, all of it over two decades old and well established. This is not cutting edge! It's as stable as the hills. You can build products that are based upon it with the confidence that you will not need to do it all over every time a new version of some proprietary computer language is released. It's possible that someone has already put this all together and all you need to do is copy it, edit it, and fine-tune it. Shucks, I recall helping a coworker's sister put together a timed language acquisition test that flashed up images for a few seconds and then replaced them with a questionnaire; it was part of her graduating project, I think, and this was in, like, 1998. The main thing you need to worry about is keeping your web server up to date, properly configured and patched against security vulnerablities - which is where detail-oriented, pedantic people like myself add value. I watch KEET presenting these dull math lessons to some audience of children somewhere and I cannot help but feel sorry for those children. Can't we do any better? How old are those basic math videos KEET is playing? 40 years old? As old as Bob Ross, the painter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ross)? Here's how. Step #1: assemble a team of college teachers and students to teach teachers HTML. Step #2: teach teachers how to add markup tags to their existing written curriculum Step #3: for each page of curriculum, compose a corresponding test page that tests comprehension Step #4: build a database to collect all this information, process it, and generate reports and generate trouble tickets Step #5: build another database to manage trouble tickets - everything from absences to failures to technical issues - and queues for managing individual tickets by individual specialists in different areas, IE, IT personnel, teachers and social workers Step #6: build a third database to manage the student accounts and disburse funds to children Step #7: (optional) Develop a local currency, the S'Cool-Buck or the HumBuck or whatever, and pay kids in that local currency, and make buyback arrangements with local stores to honor the monetary unit. Maybe connect it to the CalFresh Double Up program. Let the recipients select the way they want their funds provided to them; cash or whatever. Why? So that people can learn that money is just a symbol that we trust, and that you don't need to be a Federal Reserve to issue monetary notes - just, technologically adept, reliable, diligent, and honest. Speaking of honest; instead of serial numbers, mark each monetary unit with a barcode; that way, if someone starts counterfeiting the monetary unit, you know just whom to talk to, to start your investigation. Give your children, and yourselves, the gift of basic economic theory - and render them invulnerable to Washington hucksters. (Pretty cool, huh? The future is here, today, now, staring you in the face. You just need to quit following dinosaurs and looking to dinosaurs for cues on what to do. They're dinosaurs! They don't know, either. But you have a better chance of figuring it out, than they do - if you'll just quit looking to the dinosaurs for leadership. We monkeys learn by playing with things. So, let's play with monetary theory.) Teachers remain employed and in the loop, monitoring students' progress remotely and perhaps meeting with them individually or, better yet, in very small groups, to work on comprehension and pass tests and help put money in kids' pockets. Teachers are NOT directly involved in dispensing money. Perhaps some of this money is disbursed to their parents as well as an offset to the cost of the home Internet. Or maybe we can invest in a county-wide Internet, IE, running fiber up and down every county road and installing wireless access points on utility poles and street lights and running fiber into the MPOE (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_point) of every private and public building that wants it, within city limits and within reason. The cost of ownership for a citywide or countywide intranet is, basically, the cost of trenches, fiber, networking equipment, installation, and ongoing maintenance - with over 100,000 people in the county, each paying $50 a month for connectivity, we could deliver the same service for maybe $1 to $10 per month, per person, for the whole county. We know there is an enormous potential for problems when kids are at home without parents and so perhaps some arrangement can be made for kids to go to school at friends' homes, where there is a parent present, or for kids to come to school, but to work in a mostly empty classroom, where remote learning is now the norm. There is also the potential for monitoring kids' proximity to their school computers; keyboard activity, for instance - with an understanding that no activity for 30 minutes results in an attempt to contact the child, and failure to contact the child results in the issue being escalated to the parent, in case there is an emergency, so they can call 911. This would only be in effect during school hours, of course. My point is that if we step back and say, What is the problem?, and then ask ourselves, What are the solutions?, that we might have an entirely new perspective upon the fundamental problem of raising and educating our children that would ALSO be a step forward in the science of pedagogy (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy) and ALSO help fight COVID-19 and ALSO position us so that the next time something like COVID hits our shores, we are not so ridiculously vulnerable. But, what about those poor children without Internet?, you ask. As it so happens, the Northern California Blood Bank's apheresis bloodmobile was out of service for a month or so, recently, and I suggested to some blood bank personnel I was discussing the problem with, that they should consider retrofitting a school bus to be a bloodmobile, because the current bloodmobile, a retrofitted recreation vehicle, was really not suited for the back roads and environmental stresses of Humboldt County. Researching the matter, and perusing school bus resellers, I came upon a page from one reseller who suggested that you should buy some of their school buses, equipped with the latest wireless technologies, and park them in areas where there are students who have no Internet access, and invite the students to come and use the buses' Internet. And so I am going to shamelessly steal their idea, file the serial numbers off it, and claim it as my own. Why don't you use some of your school buses, equipped with wifi, to provide internet access to your students? Remove some seats, install some desks, install workstations, create separated work spaces, and employ someone to operate it? I just thought of it! So, there you go, Humboldt. Build an infrastructure. Drag your teachers, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Pay your kids to go to school remotely. Motivate them and reward them with small and regular increments of money. Make this their 'job', until they turn 18 or, if they want, they can just study, and pass all the tests ahead of time, and start going to college at the age of 16, the way I did. You say they can't do it. But I say, you hold them back, and so they never get a chance to try. Maybe it's time for a change! Maybe Humboldt County should be EMPLOYING people like me, instead of trying to kidnap my children - I refer, of course, to JV160250, JV160275, the incredible Disappearing Evidence, and my ol' buddy, Christopher 'Belt? What Belt?' Wilson. Food for thought.