Items

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  2020-04-28

  Teaching Without a License

  With schools being closed down I have had to take up the job of teaching my younger brother. It all started with praying for a miracle that he would complete his school work. The miracle did not come quick enough for my mom and I had to step in and be the mediator. I felt like I was a counselor trying to persuade the both of them to talk out their feelings. Well, he is in his preadolescent years, so that ended in a failure. Finally, I presented my family with the miracle my mom had been asking for. The miracle was in a form of being rewarded with not taking his PlayStation away. Worried he would fail his P.E. class, my parents bought a trampoline. He used it for a few days... Next, was math. After some very low grades on math quizzes it was time to put my teaching classes into action. First, I had to convince him to start organizing his problems. That took a week and another low math score to convince him. Next, I had to persuade him to start writing his formulas with every problem. How was he going to score higher without knowing his formulas? He seems to have learned more, but this is much more difficult than expected. I am not looking forward to the final month of the school year. #REL101
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  2020-04-12

  Planning is everything

  Although at one time we had the mechanisms in place to deal with a pandemic, those resources were disbanded for short sighted financial and political reasons. So, we were woefully unprepared for this pandemic. Lack of leadership worsened the situation and even exasperated the problem with negligence and outright misinformation. The long term consequences will be catastrophic. Personally I am frustrated every day as the death toll rises and the whole planet suffers. This would have been a bad thing at best, and is being made much worse by the lack of credible leadership.
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  2020-04-11

  Journal of the Plague Year entry 2

  The retirement home/health center that I work at just just had their first COVID-19 case this week, and naturally every single employee freaked out. The retirement home I work at is home to some very wealthy people, and the facility is considered one of the best assisted living places in the United States. Yet, the we still seemed unprepared for something like this to happen at the facility. For the past few weeks due to lack of face masks in the facility, most employees are given bandanas to cover their mouths and noses that to me aren't very effective, and we are having people take temperatures upon arrival that have no idea how to take temperatures. I have consistently came to work with a temperature, according to the person taking it, between 90 and 95 degrees which doesn't seem right at all. For the sake of our residents, I really hope that we can continue to do more to protect them and ourselves from this invisible enemy.
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  2020-03-23

  Letter from neighbors asking for donations of masks and gloves to local hospitals

  Everyone on our block received this note asking us to donate any PPE (personal protective equipment, an abbreviation I did not know before the epidemic) to local hospitals. The note exemplifies the shocking failure of national preparation in the US and the way that medical professionals are looking anywhere and everywhere for standard equipment. They are doing this in advance of the horrible days that we know are coming. Our community has had only a few cases, but that won’t last. That the richest nation in the world has no masks, is scrambling for hospital beds, and will soon see deaths of not only older and medically vulnerable but also masses of poor people because of our refusal to provide health care, housing and living wages to all is just horrific, embarrassing, and sickening. My husband makes beautiful hand made tables and chairs. He found a box of gloves and 4 masks. We’ll ask friends to hunt too. This is not how we prepare for a pandemic.
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  2020-03-27

  College Student Challenges

  As a student I have suffered a lack of motivation and a difficulty focusing. Receiving a flood of emails from both professors and school administration was overwhelming. Having started online learning for classes that I had originally had in person I have lost hope in effectively learning and now I'm just hoping to pass my classes. All of my classes have reorganized and changed their assignments putting leaving me unprepared for these new tasks. The office I intern at also closed so as of now I'm also out of work. The combination of not being at work and being schooled at home leave me with many distractions that make it difficult to focus on anything really.
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  03/25/2020

  Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

  “The NSC devised the guide — officially called the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents, but known colloquially as “the pandemic playbook” — across 2016. The project was driven by career civil servants as well as political appointees, aware that global leaders had initially fumbled their response to the 2014-2015 spread of Ebola and wanting to be sure that the next response to an epidemic was better handled.”