Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Delaying the peak reduces it as well. With it in all 50 states I don't think you can delay the peak without reducing it.

And even if you could delay the peak without reducing it, delaying it gives you time to increase hospital capacity. NYC has more hospital beds than it did last week. Ohio is building out capacity now. That will help because the analysis has two parts: peak numbers and capacity. Places with higher capacity can handle higher peaks without getting overrun.

Question for all the educators here. What is your sense about next academic year? Any substantive difference between k-12 and post-secondary?

I am having a hard time imagining 500 seat Calc 1 lectures come August or the packed hallways in your typical HS.

I'm a private high school STEM guy in CA. We haven't even begun to discuss next academic year. We're still barely functioning with the new distance earning model.

Here in Illinois we are going week by week with schools. The original closure ran through April 6th, including our Spring Break this week. Then the governor issued a statewide shelter in place order that we to run through the 8th. Our superintendent just called the week of the 6th an e-learning week, with Good Friday on the 10th. Chicago Public Schools has closed schools until April 20th.

I don't reasonably see us going back to school until around Mother's Day, if at all. Next school year seems like a decade away at this point. If we open on time great, I'll be ready. If we are still at home great, I've been building a digital library of resources for years.

Forgot lecture halls. What about classrooms with 32 kids? There is no way in hell there is 6 feet between each of my students.

Appropriate typo for a private school ApolloAndy. 🤣

I certainly get that, I just want answers now! Lol. Both my boys are STEM focused and the one that is working really well is a 3 period software development class, the others are just so so and they are not being assigned enough work IMO.

Looks like Disney is paying parks employees through 4/18. After that, still unknown.

Given the recent passage of the FFCRA, I would expect Disney to follow along with those guidelines

I think it's important to temper expectations on e-learning in this situation. Expectations from the state and local school board are very much in flux. As an example our state board of education has said that teachers should not be entering grades during these e-learning days. However if teachers feel compelled to they can only enter grades provided it doesn't hurt a student's grade. So in theory if a kid never does the work there is no penalty. This directly contradicts what we were initially told that teachers should enter grades in every day, from our local administration not the state board.

Schools in Illinois were given the option this year to substitute snow days for e-learning days. So instead of making up the days at the end of the year you could call a snow day and have e-learning opportunities ready for kids. Our local superintendent and board of education were adamant that we would not be doing e-learning as it cannot replace face to face instruction for high school kids. That changed on March 12th when we were told teachers will need to produce five days of e-learning opportunities within the next 24 hours, with more to follow. We are now up to 13 days with likely a lot more to follow.

My teachers have done a fantastic job of reinventing themselves as educators in an incredibly condensed timeline. But I think it's unrealistic to expect that most kids can get as much out of e-learning as physically being in school. Many of our students are struggling with the lack of interaction with their peers.

Cargo Shorts said:

Question for all the educators here. What is your sense about next academic year? Any substantive difference between k-12 and post-secondary?

The only thing we have decided as a faculty is that we are not using ACT/SAT scores as an admittance factor due to all the chaos.

As a whole, I'm pretty damn proud of my colleagues, some of whom who have never used any learning-management-system, much less taught anything online. There have actually been some positives, one of the greatest being that, to a person, the myth that online teaching and/or learning is somehow easier has been forever busted at our institution. The other is that I have been forced to re-think and re-imagine my current courses and assignments.

There have been zero discussions about the next academic year, and I may eat these words, but I would be surprised if we aren't able to go by then. Granted we are a small institution (my biggest lecture has about 30 students in it) in a state with things under "relative" control (Ohio). I might have a very different opinion if I was currently teaching in New York City.

Sigh, while I certainly understand there has been some disruption to ACT/SAT and we don’t know for sure when they will resume, the March 14 SAT went off with only one Ohio location fully cancelling I believe. My own personal circumstances but this is very concerning to me, we were counting on those scores to help my 14yo into OSU CCP for math and CS classes. I sure hope they don’t toss them in the circular filing cabinet. 780 Math 1st try, proud pappa here. 🥳

My grades were mediocre at best, but I placed in the top 2% the year I took the ACT. Admissions officer: "So, looks like you were a little bored with high school?" I needed that test. Got a solid grant because of it.

On the plus side, state standardized testing looks like it pretty much ended nationwide, for now. That's welcome in my house, because the anxiety it caused my kid was ridiculous.

And that’s why we hope to be able to go test optional as our regular practice moving forward. There are too many students with great potential who simply don’t test well. For as awful as this all is, at least these circumstances are opening doors to new perspectives that were previously closed due to tradition and archaic viewpoints.

Completely agree on that but I do get frustrated with the whole tons of extra-curriculars and sports some colleges seem to require. Especially as those tend to favor the privileged with the costs and transportation required. So what criteria ideally should be used? There are so many like class rank and leadership positions that just seem inherently flawed.

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/09/30/why-ive-stopped-doing-in...-for-yale/

It's basically a total crap shoot above a certain point anyway. It would be nice to just acknowledge that instead of pretending it's something else.

We've seen a (thankfully) similar wave in the church world. There's a whole lot of things that weren't "proper" or "real" or "true church" until they were necessary. The joy on my 80 year olds' faces when they finally saw their friends' faces and heard their voices when they logged into Zoom after Facebook Live worship this morning was palpable. It probably won't be our preferred method of worship or fellowship in the future, but it has certainly opened a LOT of eyes about what is possible and what could be done.

Carrie J. said:

For as awful as this all is, at least these circumstances are opening doors to new perspectives that were previously closed due to tradition and archaic viewpoints.

100% yes!

I think most of us on this board are old enough to remember a time before No Child Left Behind, circa 2001, when state wide standardized testing effectively became mandated for the sake of "accountability". I'm sure there were good intentions behind the bill but it has created a testing culture and fueled the out of control obsession with college for everybody.

I have witnessed first hand how our obsession with test scores has forced curricular decisions based on the SAT. One of my fellow math department chairs has openly questioned whether we should teach Geometry at all, since it is so light on the SAT. Personally I use Geometry far more than any other math discipline. This has turned our focus to math as a discrete set of skills to be measured. That's not what math is. It's a tool to make sense of the world and solve problems. Interpretation is way more important than computation.

Maybe this will be an opportunity to revisit Finland's model of education.

We should. I hear their students finnish strong.

U-M hasn't made any changes (that I know of) regarding admissions. That's partly because our deadline is Feb 1st, but the bulk of our class applies early-action which is Nov 1, so the hay is already in the barn. We are committed to online-only through August. I know there are active conversations about what we'll do in September, and remaining online-only in the Fall is on the table.

I suspect what happens is going to depend on how quickly we can get large-scale testing, contact tracing, and strong quarantine of infected folks in place. If that's good to go by, say, mid-July, we could probably pull off a residential experience for the Fall.

The broader conversation about testing is an interesting one, and while I have opinions about it I doubt they're all that well-informed so I'll keep them to myself.

(Edited for there/they're. I'm so embarrassed.)

There was a move to testing optional pre-virus for a lot of colleges. In many instances it was more a marketing thing than anything else. Kids with good test scores (relative to the given colleges historical scores) will continue to submit and those with lower scores won't submit. Average scores for the college increase (you footnote that its those reporting scores but the footnote often gets overlooked). You can also increase your applications. All of which helps with rankings.

There are a lot of people who do not understand when looking at 25/75 thresholds that being at or about the 25th percentile for a given school doesn't give you a good shot at admission because the bottom quartile is reserved for hooks (athletes, legacies, URMs, etc) and if you aren't hooked, you stand little/no shot. So many schools are getting a lot of applications with little/no shot of gaining admission. Make testing optional and you can increase those apps.

Any school that is at least moderately selective is rejecting some kids who would have done perfectly well there. Highly selective schools have higher numbers of such kids. Going testing optional allows you to move the deck chairs around a little bit. And ultimately even if you are requiring tests, you don't have to make them the be all, end all of the admission decision.

To me I would rather have the data point. You can determine how much weight you want to give it. Makes comparing kids across your application field easier on some type of objective (though not perfect) basis. Highly selective colleges do not look at AP test scores from what I understand. Concern is not all districts require AP exams and some districts/parents cannot afford them. But I would still want the data point. I know kids who got As in AP class who got 2-3 on the exam. That is info I would want (even if I do not get it from everyone). Little data will be perfect. But I don't view having more of it (particularly if its common across all/vast majority of applicants) as a bad thing.

I have a near genius level IQ but always tested poorly in school, mainly out of boredom. I wonder how many others were in a similar position.

I nearly pass my college admission tests because there were no challenges.

I do think how schools test kids needs to be reconsidered.

I don't understand why someone would fail something out of boredom. It was so boring you fell asleep during the test?