To be honest, mask mandate last year was obnoxious. Yes, good for the kids to mask. But when the kids who talked back over it turned out to be low SES, and most of those turned out to be Latino or black (not always AA), they put the kibosh on writing up students post haste.
That meant we constantly prompted kids to mask up, and some of them just sat there, unmasked. And the halls were worse. Combined with hybrid instruction--everything had to be online so kids could do the work that night, but also we Zoomed live at the same time we had kids in class--it was untenable. Rushed to wrap up in one course what we easily got through before spring break in previous years.
It'll be interesting.
Like that there's no hybrid instruction allowed. You teach in person or you teach by video link. There is no third option. Good that it also includes *any* communicable disease. Don't know how my district's going to implement that--hire another teacher for all the math classes at school, and another for all the science classes? Egads. I guess it depends on how many quarantine.
Really don't care that they're not notifying parents every single time a student comes back with a positive COVID test. It was insane last year. For each positive student or staff, an email, a text message, and a robocall--and 1-3 students per day. Pretty much always, "A student tested positive but your student was not a close contact." 2700 students on campus last year.
We'll see how it goes. One colleague "feels disaster" in our future because of no masking and no chance at social distancing. At the same time, I don't know that it much matters--it might, it might not. I figure that the remote learning and quarantining's going to shred any kind of orderly instruction, but that can't be worse than last year. (Now, if I could just figure out how I'm teaching 7 courses in 6 class periods.)
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