Dutch kids all return to school

[dembethewarrior]

People saying there's plenty of time to catch up - who are we expecting them to catch up with?

I've got 2 kids in state school and my girlfriend has a kid roughly the same age in private school.

My eldest gets a reasonable amount of work each day, maybe 3-4 hours and the teachers are online for a few hours each day. There are no repercussions from the school if they don't do the work (there are from me!)

My youngest gets about 3-4 hours of work set per week and his teacher seems to spend about an hour a day actually doing stuff (while still picking up full salary presumably).

In both of their classes I think about 50% of the class regularly attend as an absolute maximum, probably considerably less, and there's a good 25% who have never attended since lockdown began.

My gf's kid is between their ages, has probably 5-6 hours of work a day and the teachers online most of the day, with 100% attendance, it still isn't as good as being there, but at least they are making a decent effort of keeping up with education.

There is no way that the 25% of kids in my kids classes who haven't had any education for months are going to catch up with kids in better schools

Not reading all that as I'm in work and it's raining... But what I said was my sister wasn't too worried about her 5 year old and does little bits but not excessive work as she's confident he will catch up. He's bloody 5 of course he will.

[CopenhagenBlue]

I think this is the 3rd or 4th time this has been pointed out.

It really is that simple.

Denmark closed everything down at least 2 weeks before the UK, which had a massive impact in reducing the infection rate from all expert opinion. If the UK had done similar, kids there would probably also be back at school now too.

[xsnaggle]

Isn't it obvious to anyone that's had kids or been around that the little ones don't have the self-discipline or concentration to not self-distance?

Shirley this means that they self distance automatically? clever buggers.

[CCFCC3PO]

Yep.

My 2-year old's nursery re-opened last week. We had a letter explaining the measures that they were taking, but the basic position was: "you can't get children to socially distance, so we won't be doing it amongst the kids. Nor are we going to wear face masks, because it will just scare them". Instead they are trying to keep the kids in mini groups which do not interact with one another. So my son has 4 or 5 kids in his mini group, and amongst themselves they pretty much carry on as before. In addition they are doing a hell of a lot of cleaning, and a focus on washing hands. (it is working - he will happily spend 5 minutes washing his hands now). They are pretty vigilant when it comes to distancing amongst the adults/parents, though.

Obviously nursery is a different beast to schools: the staff to child ratio is 3-1 in nursery, and ten times that in a school. But I did have some respect for the nursery for deciding not to even try. Which, it seems, is also the policy for every supermarket I've been to during lockdown- I've yet to go to one where staff made any discernible effort to maintain distance from each other or the customers. Although by far and away the most flagrant breaches of the social distancing rules I've seen have been hospital staff, sat in huge groups eating their lunch right at the peak of the outbreak. Even my builders made token attempts to stay 2m apart, which is really quite difficult when you are lifting a bath which is 1.8m long.

Anecdotally, but on my last trip to the supermarket, I was basically followed around by a nurse who was doing **** all to stay 2m from anyone (especially me). Very difficult to get away from her, you can't speed ahead because there's people in front of you, and you can't hold back because people get pissed off.

[delmbox]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's impossible to socially distance in any environment where there are a lot of people moving around independently of each other. I've seen it in the last 3 months at work, and I've seen it whenever I've gone to big Tesco. Little Tesco is more manageable, big Tesco is impossible.

You can control the entry points, you can control the checkout queueing but in the free for all in the middle it cannot and does not happen. And that's not a criticism of the shoppers, unless the whole endeavour is in set straight lines then they've got no chance

EDIT: Or they limit how many people are allowed to be in the store at any one time