Dear Commons Community,

Not matter what news outlet you follow, today the headlines will reference Bob Woodward’s book, Rage, in which Donald Trump admits knowing the dangers of coronavirus back in February but decided to lie and mislead the American people.  A conversation about this revelation between Trump and Woodward is on tape and cannot be refuted as he said-she said.  The death toll of the coronavirus is approaching 200,000 and before the end of the year will likely be close to 400,000.  Millions, diagnosed with the disease, have suffered horribly.  Over 40 million people have lost their jobs. Much of this calamity could have been avoided if Trump had acted like a president rather than worried about his reelection and promoting bleach as a cure.  The New York Times editorial below reviews this sad situation.

Tony

—————————————————————————————————-

New York Times

Mr. Trump Knew It Was Deadly and Airborne

By The Editorial Board

Sept. 9, 2020

On Feb. 7, during a taped interview with Bob Woodward, President Trump acknowledged that the coronavirus could be transmitted through the air, that it was very dangerous and that it would be difficult to contain. “This is deadly stuff,” he told the investigative journalist.

“You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed,” the president warned.

Despite his apparent understanding of the severity of the disease and its method of transmission, over the next month, in five cities around the country, Mr. Trump held large indoor rallies, which were attended by thousands of his supporters.

Mr. Trump spent weeks insisting in public that the coronavirus was no worse than a seasonal flu. It would “disappear” when the seasons changed, he promised in late February. “We’re doing a great job,” he said in early March.

Why lie to the American people? Why — as the administration accuses the Chinese government of doing — lie to the world about the severity of what was declared a pandemic only days later?

“I wanted to always play it down,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Mr. Trump and a great many of his supporters and political allies did play down the severity of the coronavirus and did criticize the public health measures deployed to prevent its spread. As a result, the coronavirus spread faster and sickened or killed more people in the United States than in any of its peer nations. If the United States had the same coronavirus fatality rate as Canada, more than 100,000 Americans could still be alive today.

Much of the responsibility for the fatal mishandling of the pandemic lies with the president. But with every public lie out of Mr. Trump’s mouth, or on his Twitter feed, how many members of his administration who knew better stayed silent?

The president has repeatedly tried to muzzle and sideline scientists and health officials who disagree with his sunny assessments, often replacing them with less qualified people willing to sing his praises.

So it was that the president’s coronavirus task force revised guidelines on testing for asymptomatic people, while the task force’s leading infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, was having surgery. So it is that, in the pandemic’s seventh month, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious disease outbreaks, is arguing that it’s not the government’s job to stamp out the coronavirus, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remain silent.

Mr. Trump’s lack of leadership almost certainly made the nation’s suffering greater, its death toll higher and its economic costs more severe in the long term. When the president dithered on testing and contact tracing, when he failed to make or execute a clear and effective plan for securing personal protective equipment, when he repeatedly belittled and dismissed mask mandates and other social distancing edicts, Mr. Trump knew the virus was deadly and airborne. He knew that millions of people could get sick, and many would die.

Furthermore, Mr. Woodward’s tapes make clear that members of the Trump administration failed to act — even behind the scenes — based on what they knew at the time.

Nearly 200,000 people in the United States have already died, and hundreds of thousands more have suffered grave illness — often followed by a slow, hard recovery and, in some cases, permanent disability. Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs, and millions are on the cusp of losing their homes. School systems and elder care networks are struggling to function. The economy is in tatters.

Imagine what this picture could look like today if the president had been honest with the American public on Feb. 7, calmly taken charge of the nation’s response to the pandemic and did his best to protect them.

Dear Commons Community,

More than 500,000 children in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported on Tuesday, and the rate of new cases among kids continues to rise.

From Aug. 20 to Sept. 3, there were 70,630 cases reported among children — an increase of 16 percent — bringing the national total to 513,415. The largest increases were reported in six states: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

As many as 103 children have died, according to the report.

“These numbers are a chilling reminder of why we need to take this virus seriously,” Dr. Sara Goza, president of the academy, said in a statement.

The half a million pediatric cases represent 9.8 percent of the more than 6 million cases overall in the country.

The report is a collaboration between the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, and relies on data collected by each state.

Severe outcomes and complications of the coronavirus appear to be rare among children. Among a subset of 23 states and New York City, kids accounted for anywhere between 0.7 percent and 3.7 percent of patients sick enough to be hospitalized.

While children may be largely spared the worst outcomes, experts say they can spread the virus to more vulnerable family members.

“While much remains unknown about COVID-19, we do know that the spread among children reflects what is happening in the broader communities,” Goza said. “A disproportionate number of cases are reported in Black and Hispanic children and in places where there is high poverty.”

Researchers said much of the surge in pediatric cases over the summer occurred in the South, the Midwest and the West.

“This rapid rise in positive cases occurred over the summer, and as the weather cools, we know people will spend more time indoors,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases, said in a statement.

Also Tuesday, the academy recommended every child over age 6 months should get the flu vaccine before the end of October, to help prevent a “twindemic” of influenza and the coronavirus.

“The goal is to get children back into schools for in-person learning, but in many communities, this is not possible as the virus spreads unchecked,” O’Leary said. “We must take this seriously and implement the public health measures we know can help; that includes wearing masks, avoiding large crowds, and maintaining social distance.”

This report surely helps parents understand the dangers of COVID-19 as they make decisions about sending their children to school.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Barbara Demick’s, Eat the Buddha:  Life and Death in a Tibetan Town.   It is the story of the relationship of the people of Tibet and China over the past sixty years.  I was not familiar enough with this history and welcome the insights into how the Tibetans have fared under Chinese rule. 

It is not a happy story especially for the small town of Ngaba which has seen many of its residents, mostly monks,  immolate themselves as protests against Chinese rule.  Ngaba was chosen because it was the site of Tibet’s first meeting with Chinese Communists, in the 1930s. “The people of this region have a particular wound causing excessive suffering that spans three generations,” the monk Kirti Rinpoche testified before a U.S. congressional commission in 2011. “This wound is very difficult to forget or heal.” It is unlikely that anything will change soon.

If you are at all interested in this part of the world, I highly recommend Demick’s treatment.

A New York Times Book Review is below.

Tony

New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, and Allison Sweet Grant, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, have an op-ed in today’s New York Times,  that reminds readers that even online the critical approach for teachers is to try to instill curiosity and a love for learning.  To quote: 

“Whether students are in kindergarten or college, knowledge is always attainable. Teachers can and will catch kids up on their multiplication tables and periodic tables. But in school and in life, success depends less on how much we know than on how much we want to learn. One of the highest aims of education is to cultivate and sustain the intrinsic motivation to learn…

… there are ways for teachers to nurture interest in learning — and they’re especially important in online classes. Three key principles are mystery, exploration and meaning…

… The purpose of school is not just to impart knowledge; it’s to instill a love of learning. In online schools and hybrid classrooms, that love doesn’t have to be lost.”

There are a number of insights in this op-ed (see the entire piece below).  Parents and teachers will find it a good read especially now that schools and colleges are reopening around the country.

Tony

———————————————————————————————

New York Times

Op-Ed:  Kids Can Learn to Love Learning, Even Over Zoom

by Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant

September 8, 2020

“Can independently mute and unmute himself when requested to do so.” That’s praise we never expected to see a year ago on our son’s kindergarten report card. We’re so proud.

As the new school year begins, many students are learning virtually, either by personal choice or requirement — and many parents and teachers are concerned that students will fall behind in their knowledge. But a greater risk to our students may be that they lose their curiosity.

Whether students are in kindergarten or college, knowledge is always attainable. Teachers can and will catch kids up on their multiplication tables and periodic tables. But in school and in life, success depends less on how much we know than on how much we want to learn. One of the highest aims of education is to cultivate and sustain the intrinsic motivation to learn.

A classic study found that world-class artists, athletes, musicians and scientists typically had an early coach or teacher who made learning fun and motivated them to hone their skills. An analysis of 125 studies of nearly 200,000 students found that the more the students enjoyed learning, the better they performed from elementary school all the way to college. Students with high levels of intellectual curiosity get better grades than their peers, even after controlling for their IQ and work ethic.

Unfortunately, remote learning can stifle curiosity. For students, it’s easy to zone out. Staring at a screen all day can be exhausting. For teachers, transmitting excitement into a webcam is not a simple task: it can feel like talking into a black hole. Technical difficulties mean that key points get lost and even brief communication delays can make students seem disengaged, crushing rapport and killing timing.

Still, there are ways for teachers to nurture interest in learning — and they’re especially important in online classes. Three key principles are mystery, exploration and meaning.

Curiosity begins with a mystery: a gap between what we understand and what we want to find out. Behavioral economists argue that an information gap is like an itch. We can’t resist the temptation to scratch it. Information gaps can motivate us to tear through a whodunit novel, sit glued to the TV during a quiz show or stare at a crossword puzzle for hours. Great teachers approach their classes the same way: They open with a mystery and turn their students into detectives, sending them off to gather clues.

For example, if you’ve ever watched dolphins closely, you might have noticed that they’re awake for remarkable stretches of time. A typical dolphin can stay alert and active 24 hours a day for 15 days straight. How do they do it?

Given all the challenges of going online, it’s natural for teachers to focus on just getting through the material. But remote learning is perfectly suited to mystery — teachers need to find the right puzzles for students to solve.

If gaps in knowledge are the seeds of curiosity, exploration is the sunlight. Hundreds of studies with thousands of students have shown that when science, technology and math courses include active learning, students are less likely to fail and more likely to excel. A key feature of active learning is interaction. But too many online classes have students listening to one-way monologues instead of having two-way dialogues. Too many students are sitting in front of a screen when they could be exploring out in the world.

Leaving a desk isn’t just fun; it can promote a lasting desire to learn. In one experiment, researchers randomly assigned thousands of students to take a museum field trip. Three weeks later, when the students wrote essays analyzing pieces of art, those who had visited the museum scored higher in critical thinking than those who did not make the trip. The museum-goers made richer observations and more creative associations. They were also more curious about views that differed from their own. And the benefits were even more pronounced for students from rural areas and high-poverty schools.

When field trips aren’t possible, teachers can still take students on virtual tours and send them off to do hands-on learning projects. In the past few months, our kids have been lucky to learn from social studies teachers who challenged them to survey people about their stereotypes of the elderly, computer science teachers who invited them to design their own amusement parks, and drama teachers who had them film their own documentaries.

Meaning is the final piece of the motivation puzzle. Not every lesson will be riveting; not every class discussion will be electrifying. However, when students see the real-world consequences of what they are studying, they’re more likely to stay engaged.

Psychologists find that when college students have a purpose for learning beyond the self, they spend more time on tedious math problems and less time playing video games and watching viral videos. And high schoolers get better grades in STEM courses after being randomly assigned to reflect on how the material would help them help others. That’s a question every teacher can ask and answer, even over Zoom: Why does this content matter? When the answer to this question is clear, students are less likely to doze through class with one eye open.

Or, in the case of dolphins, with one side of their brains open. They can put one hemisphere of their brains to sleep and leave the other alert. That’s how they stay active for two weeks straight.

The purpose of school is not just to impart knowledge; it’s to instill a love of learning. In online schools and hybrid classrooms, that love doesn’t have to be lost.

One good thing about virtual school is that children are building skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. Although learning how to mute and unmute himself is not something we ever thought our kindergartner would need to know, it’s one of many new skills from online classes that will continue to come in handy. And for those adults who are still having trouble with that particular skill (you know who you are), he’s available for online instruction.

Dear Commons Community,

The book, Our Bathtub Wasn’t in the Kitchen Anymore, won a best book award in the category of urban fiction.  As one reviewer has commented, Gerade DeMichele has crafted a highly immersive and heartfelt novel that clearly comes from a true place deep in the author’s heart.  See the full review below.

If you are at all interested in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, Our Bathtub Wasn’t in the Kitchen Anymore will surely bring it to life for you.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) President Irene Mulvey has a Labor Day message for all her members offering hope and direction during these difficult times.  Her entire message is below.

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Dear Anthony,

We are heading into a new academic year in turbulent times. The coronavirus global pandemic has drastically altered our lives, our jobs, and the lives of our students and our staff colleagues, with no end in sight. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others, and now Jacob Blake fighting for his life in Wisconsin, have put systemic institutionalized racism in the United States into stark relief.

In the past few weeks, we have seen a number of colleges and universities move ahead with reopening in person for the fall semester. Rather than relying on scientific expertise regarding the pandemic and the likelihood of transmission in a residential campus environment and its surrounding community, administrations and boards of trustees have engaged in magical thinking. Few institutions appear to be doing enough testing, and, somehow, they expect all students to follow strict rules at all times. Reopening decisions are being driven by the bottom line instead of the health and safety of students, faculty, staff, and all campus workers.

The outcomes from these decisions and the lack of planning behind these decisions was predictable: a spike in cases on campus; the difficulty in feeding and housing students who must quarantine; the deficiency in mitigating risks for others due to a lack of testing and robust contact tracing; and a hasty retreat to remote learning, sending potentially infected students back to their families and communities. For most administrations and boards, the top priority is the bottom line. They continue to embrace the corporate model and to further a decades-long assault on higher education as a common good.

Disturbing instances of blatant police violence against and harassment of Black people, including on our campuses, continues. Just within the last few weeks, a Black faculty member at Santa Clara University reported that campus police knocked on her door and demanded proof that she lives in her own house, after harassing her brother as he worked on a laptop outside.

The problems we face are serious and will not be easily resolved. Some good news is that faculty are mobilizing across ranks and with other academic workers and students to forward antiracist activism and to ensure that hastily implemented austerity measures do not become the new normal. Here are just a few examples of faculty activism that are making me optimistic this Labor Day:

• After a long, intensive campaign by a broad coalition of faculty, students, staff, and alumni at Portland State University, the administration has agreed to disarm campus police.
• The national AAUP has convened a working group to draft a report on the role of police on campus, including whether it is appropriate for institutions of higher education to have their own police forces; how systemic racism affects campus policing; changes needed to ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming for diverse peoples, especially Black, indigenous and other peoples of color; and how AAUP chapters and members can best work in solidarity with student groups, community social justice organizations, and unions on this issue.
• Our faculty union at Rutgers University has been working closely with a coalition of other campus unions to center racial justice and to ensure health and safety and to negotiate with the administration on proposed cuts. “This is not something that naturally occurred,” one chapter leader told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “It’s a big investment and big strategic change to decide to build power together.”
• The George Mason University AAUP chapter brought to light the fact that several Virginia universities entered into no-bid contracts with a company to provide students with COVID-19 tests that are not approved for that use.
• New memberships in the AAUP are up this summer, signaling a new wave of campus activism. At our August meeting, the AAUP Council authorized charters for twenty-five new or reactivated AAUP chapters.

This Labor Day, I ask you to join me and other AAUP members in recommitting to doing the hard work of ensuring that higher education is a public good available to all in this country. You can share our Labor Day graphic to help spread the message that solidarity will see us through.

In solidarity,

Irene Mulvey
AAUP President

Dear Commons Community,

Labor Day 2020 is definitely an ironic moment: The federal government is having a holiday to celebrate working Americans at a time when record numbers of people are unemployed. Be that as it may, working Americans still deserve a day of praise now more than ever. They’re the ones whose contributions are helping us get through this terrible coronavirus pandemic and who will put the economy back on the road to recovery.

We salute and thank them all!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joe Biden (see video above) condemned Donald Trump for comments made about American war dead being “losers” and “suckers.”  He states Trump is “not fit to be commander-in-chief.” 

Many American are agreeing with Biden.  We all should!

Tony

Credit Ben Wiseman

Dear Commons Communiyt,

This morning, New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, looks at the affects of the coronavirus on college admissions.  His conclusion is that many of the rules such as taking SAT exams will come into question.  Furthermore:

“For epidemiological and economic reasons, students will forgo all the campus tours and all the assessments of how comfy the dormitories seem, how tasty the food is, how high the spires rise and how lushly the trees grow. They’ll perhaps look more closely at the course catalog, the roster of professors.

Jeffrey Selingo noted that many colleges based a big part of their sales pitch on their physical setting and even on lifestyle and social perks that are less relevant than ever, given pandemic-related restrictions. “That’s forcing parents and students to ask, ‘What are we really paying for?,’” he said.

The answer is, or should be, an education, and students may come to realize that excellent ones can be obtained at colleges that are less expensive than others in their sights and closer to home. The lure of going far away to college may diminish.

What I suspect will happen, at least in the short term, is that students’ thinking about colleges will be less emotional and more practical. The pandemic has soured the romance.”

I agree with Bruni and Selingo.  Students and parents will be re-evaluating whether they want to spend “big bucks” for the on-campus, residential four-year experience.

Below is the entire column.

Tony

—————————————————————————————–

The Coronavirus May Change College Admissions Forever

A pandemic returns the focus to what matters: education.

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

Sept. 5, 2020

In the context of a pandemic that has killed about 190,000 Americans and economically devastated many millions more, getting into the college of your dreams is a boutique concern. But for many teenagers who have organized their school years around that goal, it’s everything.

And it’s going to be different this admission season. It may well be different forevermore.

That was what I concluded after a recent series of conversations with Jeffrey Selingo, whose widely anticipated new book, “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” will be published on Sept. 15.

Selingo was given extraordinary access to the selection process and the selectors at Emory University, Davidson College and the University of Washington. He uses it in his book to present one of the most nuanced, coolheaded examinations of the admission process that I’ve read. He explodes certain myths — for example, that SAT and ACT scores are absolutely pivotal — and confirms other suspicions, such as the ridiculous advantage conferred on middling students who play arcane sports.

But his knowledge and insights also put him in an excellent position to speculate on matters beyond the book’s bounds: specifically, the little, big, temporary and permanent ways in which the coronavirus pandemic, which dawned after his research was done, will change the way colleges evaluate students and vice versa.

“College admissions is never going to be the same,” he told me.

He was focusing on selective schools, which educate a small minority of Americans in college but loom monstrously large in the psyches of many high school students, who intricately game out how to breach these exclusive sanctums. Well, the rules of that game just changed.

Frank Bruni’s Newsletter: Get a more personal take on politics, newsmakers and more with Frank’s exclusive commentary every week.

Selingo predicts that many schools that allow “early decision” applications, with which a student sets his or her sights on one preferred institution and commits to attending it if accepted, will fill more of their slots that way than ever, meaning that these applications will have better odds of success than ones submitted later. Schools leaned extra hard on early decision in the shadow of the Great Recession, he said, and now face the same economic anxiety, the same motivation to figure out as soon as possible which new students will be arriving and how much financial aid they’ll need.

But a more broadly consequential change involves standardized tests. Because the pandemic prevented students last spring from gathering to take the SAT and ACT exams, many selective schools are not requiring them for the time being. That will force them to focus more than ever on the toughness of the high school courses that students took and the grades they got.

Which students will benefit from that? It’s complicated. On one hand, affluent students who are coached for these exams and usually take them repeatedly won’t get to flaunt their high scores. On the other hand, less privileged students from high schools whose academic rigor is a question mark in screeners’ minds won’t have impressive scores to prove their mettle.

While these exams have been blamed for perpetuating inequality, they in some cases play the opposite role. In fact, a special committee of educators in the University of California system produced an exhaustively detailed report this year that determined that the use of SAT’s in admissions had not lessened diversity and that SAT scores were useful predictors of college success. (University leaders elected to switch to test-optional admissions for a few years anyway.)

The SAT’s downgrade won’t be fleeting, Selingo said. “We’re going to have a whole admissions year with scores of places going test-optional,” he said. “Once their world doesn’t come crashing down and they still recruit a class, those colleges are not going to flock back to the test. I think it’s been knocked off the pedestal permanently.”

He makes the same guess about what he calls “application bloat,” referring to the flamboyant multiplicity of clubs, causes, hobbies and other materials that applicants assemble and showcase. The pandemic put many of those activities on hold, creating a pause in which he believes that some schools and some students will recognize the lunacy of this overkill.

“It’s going to be difficult for students to fill in 10 spaces for extracurricular activities, flag down teachers for recommendations or take six A.P. courses and exams,” he said. “Admissions officers are going to have to focus on what matters. That means in the future they can pare back the application and reduce our collective anxiety about what it takes to get into college.”

Apart from the increased early-decision emphasis, which can favor in-the-know kids from in-clover families, the changes that Selingo predicts represent a back-to-basics streamlining of the process. It may have been born of terrible circumstances, but it’s also sensible and overdue.

That streamlining extends to how students will choose schools during the coming admission cycle. For epidemiological and economic reasons, many of them will forgo all the campus tours and all the assessments of how comfy the dormitories seem, how tasty the food is, how high the spires rise and how lushly the trees grow. They’ll perhaps look more closely at the course catalog, the roster of professors.

Selingo noted that many colleges based a big part of their sales pitch on their physical setting and even on lifestyle and social perks that are less relevant than ever, given pandemic-related restrictions. “That’s forcing parents and students to ask, ‘What are we really paying for?,’” he said.

The answer is, or should be, an education, and students may come to realize that excellent ones can be obtained at colleges that are less expensive than others in their sights and closer to home. The lure of going far away to college may diminish.

What I suspect will happen, at least in the short term, is that students’ thinking about colleges will be less emotional and more practical. The pandemic has soured the romance.

Colleges had previously presented themselves to students as nurturing homes away from home, then had to send those students packing when the virus spread. Colleges were endless parties, then the partying stopped. They touted the intimacies of classroom instruction, then had to defend the tuition-worthy effectiveness of remote learning. How can students not feel some skepticism in the wake of all that?

“This morning I listened to a Planet Money podcast called ‘The Old Rules Were Dumb Anyway,’” Selingo said. “It talked about the rules that went out the window because of the pandemic and which changes might be here to stay: alcohol takeout from restaurants, telemedicine, using nursing credentials across state lines.”

“It got me to thinking about the old rules that were dumb in admissions,” he added. And it got him to wondering how many were gone for good.