Are The Unions Being obstructive?

[Bobbisox1]

And trying to score political points by saying Teachers have no guarantee of safety to return to work June 1st?
( I know we have teachers and ex teachers on here, what do they think?)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-52650259

[Ken4155]

Brainiac; no it wasn't that. It was the piece Pixie posted. I get 2 papers per day - Express and Mirror (yeah, I know, chalk and cheese) and it must have been in one of them. Obvs i'm guessing the Mirror and most likely Brian Reade.

[Milo2]

Perhaps the Government wants schools to open so that more parents can go back to work. I find it difficult to understand why the youngest children have been chosen as they are least likely to understand the need to stay away from others.

[pixie374]

Thank you, Ken x but I think they are. I also dislike it when people post things as if from themselves, rather than being honest. I had thought it was obvious, but you were right and I will use speech marks at least, in future x

[pixie374]

And it was Facebook, I think :-)

[teacake44]

In a nutshell there's no way anyone can be assured of being safe from this virus, in work or out. What unions are trying to do is an attempt to cover as many possible ways they can in avoiding mass re- infection through ill thought out returns to work plans, and that is as much as they can do.

[woofgang]

I think though that what we (they) do have is data from the schools and childcare places that have been open, although yes, with smaller numbers of children.

[Peter Pedant]

// Isn’t it the unions job to be obtrusive?//

I fought yeah - - - there was a union leader on tee vee
who as clearly more worried about the teachers getting Covid than the welfare of the children he was being paid to look after

[Cloverjo]

I thought Pixie’s post sounded very like Deborah Ross who writes for The Times and the Mail on Sunday, and possibly more papers. I think she’s very good.

[Peter Pedant]

Pixo
I am sorry that people are picking at your very articulate piece and then saying - "din fink you wrote that!"
I agree it is obvious that you didnt - for a start the style is a house style etc etc you dona write wiv starz - often you forget a main verb
BUT cue interesting alteration and passing off stories

the prez of a council didnt like my election address and so 'made me' change it. chizz chizz - threat of disciplinary action oops
and I said with ill grace - OK what? and noted down verbatim what the old crud said and put stuffed it in with a sulky cover note
and someone noticed !
so I was able to allege undue pressure during an election !
I got elected so the case failed ( no loss )
but it DID teach people NOT to interfere in elections even if done from the purest hem hem motives and the best possible taste.

I later asked how he noticed and he said - the ten words were in a completely different style - -- wow !
This is used in court by barristers apparently to convey truth and verisimilitude

AND - 1965 Miller got bored with his English teacher telling his class how crap they were - one Dom Aelred Watkin - and so mIller copied out the storm scene from Cruel Sea Nevil Shute

Watkin busted in and said he had never had such powerful writing submitted by a child - read it out to the class and suggested it be published

Miller had difficulty in getting him to accept the polite refusal, modesty meant ... etc etc

[Peter Pedant]

yeah a lot of the time my style is my own

but someone asked me a question from medical school
and a gleematology registrar wrote - I recognise you!

[Togo]

//Are The Unions Being obstructive?//

Do bears ..........etc etc?

[fiction-factory]

They are right to be concerned about the safety issues for their members but I don't see how, with proper systems and a willingness to make it work, it can be any more risky than working in a supermarkey, being a bus driver, working in a hospital/care home, delivering post, working on a construction site, police, driving a taxi, etc
The union have a couple of other things in mind here. First, some of the officials would love to see one of the government's initiatives thwarted as there are old scores to settle (Brexit, last election, years of 'austerity', public sector pay). Second, they know their members have pretty much guaranteed jobs (no chance of redundancies) and will get paid 100% of pay whether they work or not, whereas supermarket workers etc have to work or risk job losses/furloughing/reduced hours on zero hours contracts

[Peter Pedant]

agree FF -
BA for FF
eye-batter(*) has just been on TV again, batting his eyes etc
and I agree I thought he was demanding zero risk secure in the knowledge that he had a guaranteed job and insisting he was gonna do nothing would run and run !

(*) union rep for teachers who knows his core job is to teach liddle children but by golly he is gonna make sure ....

[fender62]

multiple petri dishes..? or take a leap of faith and or see what happens, you may not catch it, you may already have it, virus musical chairs...we all fall down..

[fiction-factory]

So is that a YES or a NO from you, Fender?

[fender62]

fiction-factory, i dont give a monkeys, play roulette if you like.

[jno]

[i]working in a supermarket, being a bus driver, working in a hospital/care home, delivering post, working on a construction site, police, driving a taxi[i]

hell of a range there, ff. Working in a hospital is extremely dangerous, as we've seen. Working in a supermarket could be but most I've seen are well protected with masks, barriers and so on. Bus drivers are hopefully protected similarly. Construction sites I believe are practising social distancing (I haven't been past any so I can't say for sure). London cab drivers ought to be reasonably well protected, drivers of minicabs or other non-specialised vehicles less so.

I would have thought teachers would be at the riskier end of the spectrum, depending on how close they have to be to children - with young children that can involve being very close - and what protection is available for them. I wouldn't want to to rush back if I was one; too much risk of working with infected by symptomless pupils.

[fiction-factory]

Maybe furloughing on 80% of pay should be on option for teachers then. Might help decide on priorities

[Buenchico]

I'l try to look at this from a purely practical view, imagining that I'm back in my maths clasroom again:

OK, so I'm about to teach a trigonometry lesson to a Year 10 class. In order to maintain 2 metres between the kids, I'll only have about of third of my normal class there. (i.e. 8 to 10 pupils, instead of 24 to 30). Since there aren't enough maths teachers to have three classes being taught simultaneously, where there used to be just one, that means re-timetabling so that I can see each third of the class at different times. That's not impossible but it can only work (unless we're given a lot of extra staff) if we've only got just one or two year groups allowed back into school. So we've already got most of the kids still not being able to come back to school anyway. However, let's move on . . .

I do my introductory stuff (akin to university lecturing, at the front of the class) and go through a few worked examples on the board. Then it's "Over to you, kids" time, as I ask my pupils to try working through a few questions for themselves. At this point it's ESSENTIAL that I can go around the class, looking over shoulders, to check that everyone has fully grasped what I've been talking about. (If I realise that LOTS of pupils are all making the SAME mistakes, I can simply return to the board and try to improve my explanations. However if it's just an INDIVIDUAL pupil who's going wrong, I need to LEAN OVER them to amend what's in their exercise book and explain things more clearly to them). So HOW, I ask, am I meant to accomplish all the 'monitoring' and 'correcting' while remaining 2 metres away from all of my pupils?

However I've managed it, let's assume that we've now come to the end of my trigonometry lesson and reached break time: HOW, I ask, am I meant to separate the groups of teenage girls, who're all huddling around their mobile phones to show off their favourite Youtube and TikTok videos to each other, while keeping both myself and them 2 metres apart? And just HOW am I meant to break up the fight, between the two teenage boys who're laying into each other, without getting in between them to push them apart?

Ok, break's over and, because someone has decided that we'll have Year 8 pupils in school as well, I've now got to teach a lesson on probability that requires my pupils to carry out experiments (of dice tossing, drawing counters out of a box, etc) while WORKING IN GROUPS.

Again, I ask, HOW am I meant to achieve that while keeping my pupils 2 metres apart and also keeping well away from them myself when I'm meant to be CHECKING that they're carrying out the experiments, and recording their data, correctly?

I've tried to ensure that what I've written above isn't pro-union, anti-union, pro-government, anti-government or anything else. I'm simply trying to explain why I'd need someone to give me a LOT of answers to my 'How?' questions above before I could effectively teach my subject specialism again.

Comments, anyone?

[woofgang]

isn't it supposed to be reception, year 1 and year 8 (last year before secondary) going back first? followed by the exam years?