I had extreme pain up to my shoulder, and loss of motion, for about a week, but not up to my neck and jaw. Also a large, hard, swollen lump in my arm that was very painful. I was pretty worried about the second shot, but it was no big deal. More like people have been describing, just a little sore and feeling achy and tired for a couple of days.

My kids' entirely independent subjects are math facts practice with xtramath, handwriting (once they are forming their letters well, not for my 1st grader yet), duolinguo practice for their foreign languages, and music practice (but not for my little guy). Also, spelling is independent for some of them except on spelling quiz days. But their grammar practice sentences and their math are semi-independent, as they attempt the grammar sentences and then I go over them with them, and with math I introduce the lesson and then they work on the problems without me until they need help. Their foreign language is entirely independent except for me making sure they are set up properly on the computer, because they do those with online tutors. My oldest is mostly independent on everything; I had to outsource her English, History, and Math to keep up with everything, and she has really gotten good about staying on top of her work during the course of this year, so she just comes to me when she has a problem and I make sure I check her assignments for her online classes each week. Science and History (except for oldest) are not a part of our morning school routine; they are afternoon subjects done as a whole group together. Subjects requiring my full attention for instruction during our morning school time are writing/grammar, the initial part of each math lesson, my youngest's phonics, and miss 4th's spelling (she's dyslexic).

You get more adept at switching back and forth between kids and subjects/levels with practice. I had 7 and then 6 students for much of this year, so lots of practice with this. My oldest(6th) can work independently, so she might be doing math upstairs and only occasionally coming down with a question. The rest I keep all in the same room for school. My kids all have checklists of what they need to get done each day, and choose what order to do them in, so they are not all doing the same subject and requiring my attention at the same time. If they need my help with something, they know they need to wait until I'm available, and do something short and independent if they can in the meantime. Math generally takes my full attention while I am getting them started, then most of them could work semi-independently with intermittent help on the questions. Usually mr. 3rd (who is gifted at math) is too impatient to wait for me, and will just read the guide and get going on his math on his own first thing in the morning. Miss 3rd had the hardest time with math, so I would have her do hers last, when my attention did not need to be as divided. I might start miss 4th on math while the others were doing things like handwriting, xtramath, duolinguo, or music practice, then get mr. 1st started on math next, cycle back to help miss 4th along, check on mr. 1st's progress, then get miss 5th started on math as mr. 3rd is finishing. I might be kept busy rotating between mr. 1st, miss 4th, and miss 5th, then as mr. 1st finishes his math, pull him and miss 3rd aside for a grammar lesson, pausing once in the middle to answer someone's math question. Next I'd get miss 3rd started on her math, then help miss 4th with her last, hardest problems, check on miss 5th, help miss 3rd again, and as miss 5th finishes math pull her, miss 4th, and mr. 3rd aside for a writing lesson, pausing in the middle to help miss 3rd again. Then I'm getting mr. 1st's phonics done and back to help miss 3rd's math again, and checking over everyone's daily checklists and work and either sending them off to play or circling things they need to fix first, and helping miss 3rd through the end of her math, and finishing up going over miss 6th's work with her At least, that was about what it was like when things were working.

Also, the church's Humanitarian Aid fund is the best I have ever found for effectiveness and actually using all donated funds to directly help people. I would give some of the funds to them, too. Again, it's run by volunteers, not employees. They are often the first ones to arrive after a natural disaster. They fund a significant portion of the Red Cross's budget. They have provided medical equipment and aid to many governments through the Covid pandemic. And besides more traditional humanitarian aid such as immediate emergency response, medical missions to poor countries, providing wells for clean water, aid to refugees, etc., I really like how they approach other needs, too. After providing initial relief for a tsunami in the Philippines, they provided tools and volunteers tradesmen to head up construction on homes. Individuals in need would work on constructing their own home under the direction of the tradesmen and on nine other homes as well, then receive the tools and a trade certification after that work--so they got a home, and a job certification, and helped provide homes for others, and filled a major need in their local economy. A few years after the earthquake in Haiti, they provided 400,000 trees that volunteers planted in areas that had been deforested by the earthquake, preventing future problems with mudslides and erosion. They were largely fruit trees, so that local people could benefit from the food source, too.

I would probably give most of it to the Perpetual Education Fund. This program invests donated funds and uses the proceeds to provide extremely low cost loans to young people from very poor countries for higher education. It forgives portions of the loan for things like getting good grades and graduating. And then when they pay the loans back, the money is loaned out to a new student. The program is administered primarily by volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the little overhead it has is paid for out of general church funds, not donations to the PEF, so 100% of donations go to funding the student loans. This program is doing so much to lift people like the ones my dh knew and loved in rural Argentina up from abject generational poverty to having the capacity to keep their own kids in school, rather than having to choose between school and food for the next generation. It is doing so much more than just helping these students. It is saving families all over the world for generations to come.

It was awful after the first shot. I was in so much pain from my shoulder to elbow, and there was what felt like a flat, hard disc in my arm, a little larger than a silver dollar, at the injection site for over a week that was incredibly painful to the touch. Also some major fatigue and joint pain all over my body for 4-5 days. The second was so much better. Sore arm, tired out, but no big deal. I do think it is likely that I had coronavirus early on.

Some of the stresses of the demographic cliff may actually be eased by covid’s death toll. As awful as it is, in broad demographic trends, a reduction of the older and less economically productive population shortly before the demographic cliff in young workers arrives would mitigate some of the stresses.

Oh, I am not doubting that there is a place for cc as a reentry point for all kinds of students. I am approaching it from the attitude of, going forward, is using gov funds to make 2 years of cc free for everyone the most effective use of those funds to help the most students, or is there a way to make the same dollars do more to help far more people.

My husband makes a pittance for his time there, but he enjoys teaching, and he enjoys finding the students who want to get somewhere and just need help to know how. He also figures the experience will help if he wants to do some more teaching somewhere when he retires from law. He does not get benefits, but I think maybe if he were working full time hours he would.

They also have an incredibly low standard of academics at the cc. As in students regularly submitting written work below the level I would accept from my middle schooler. Dh has to spend the beginning of every term (in a second-year criminal justice class) going over such basic writing requirements as 'You must use complete sentences with punctuation'. He has been told by several of his students that he is the hardest teacher they've ever had. I think this is the main source of my skepticism of the usefulness of free cc. Yes, there are definitely students there making good use of opportunities to pursue their goals. But there are also quite a lot who simply didn't know what else to do next, so they wound up at cc. They would have been much better served with public funds providing them a satisfactory K-12 education than being used to remove costs of a couple of aimless years at cc.

They offer four three-month trimesters per year, including summer term, so $1500 per class. Five classes each term for Fall/Winter/Spring would be $22,500, or $30,000 for year-round. I don't know how much high school teachers make here.

Our local cc pays teachers $500 per month per class

I am skeptical of how helpful two years of community college will be. Will it have real, significant net value to the majority of those who receive it? My first inclination to approach this problem is to look at the causes of climbing tuition prices and tackle those, rather than providing an even greater supply of students that don’t necessarily all really need or want a college education to meet their goals. At the same time, I feel that my opinions on this are not informed enough to know whether my gut reaction is in line with the research or not.

On the American Families Plan in general, I think it has a lot of good intentions, and a lot of potential to do more harm than good in many areas with its extreme deficit spending. Our spending is already so out of control, and the long-term economic consequences of our skyrocketing debt have the potential to be so severe for the families this plan is supposed to help. I think each piece of the plan should be looked at individually with these questions in mind: Does it address a real, significant problem? Is there scientific evidence to suggest that this approach will be effective in solving this problem? Does it cover its own costs, or can we designate another area to cut in order to cover it? I don’t see a real need to supply all these free/reduced programs and money to the middle and low-upper class. Sure, it would be nice to have, and we can all find a use for more money, but that is not a reasonable standard. Use funds judiciously to help those with real need, and let people who are doing fine taking care of themselves continue to do so. I support the free preschool for the lower economic demographic, and potentially either free childcare or financial help for kids in this group younger than preschool age. I also support bringing the capital gains tax in line with the income tax, and think we should consider doing so across the board, other than retirement savings which are already tax advantaged. I think sending out monthly checks to all families but the very wealthy is pure lunacy.

I guess I wasn’t very clear in my post. I didn’t give my own examples, just rephrased the underlying argument of the prior poster to emphasize how the fallacies applied to it.

Oh, no, I didn’t think you did. You weren’t the poster who made the statements against people who are anti-abortion, out of the blue. But have I got the logic right? I have been trying to self-teach it ahead of my kids, as I never learned logic in school, and I think I am interpreting the fallacies right. But if not, I would appreciate someone explaining.

Do I have the fallacies wrong? Ad hominem=attacking the person instead of their position. (Those people are hypocrites, they don't really care!) Check. Red Herring=diverts attention from the original question. (Redirects from whether aborting a human fetus is moral to whether certain individuals are sincere in their motives.) Check. Is there a better label I've missed? Exactly. This is precisely why this tactic has become so common. It works. It is much easier to direct onlookers into suspecting the motives of a group or an individual than to ask fundamental questions about the worth of human life. It's highly effective, and it seems to be more and more common lately to see people throw out this fallacious attack on public media, even when it has little or nothing to do with the topic under discussion.

It's a red herring and ad hominem that has become the go-to attack on the anti-abortion stance. Guess that's easier than discussing the issue directly.

Yeah, when I was pregnant with my second and working part-time at Kindercare in the baby room, I often was asked by the parents why I didn't have my dd there with me. It was somewhat embarrassing to explain that we couldn't afford it; my income from the job was nowhere near the cost of her attending part-time would have been.

Yeah, this is the concern with the "child tax credit" monthly cash payments to all parents, and no longer tied to actually paying any taxes. I don't think that there is any way to tie it in more for its intended purposes without major government overreach. But this does indeed happen. When my foster girls' bio dad received a big stimulus check in the mail (for kids he hadn't lived with for over a year, and hadn't cared for then) he sent his kids a few fancy toys, quit his part-time job at McDonald's, and blew the rest at the pot store. I think that if you want to help poor children in bad situations, there's a lot more potential for good in expanding targeted programs like Head Start and Title 8 Housing and the EITC than there is in sending out a check every month to all but the most wealthy of families.

Yes, preschool makes a huge difference for kids from homes like these. There's tons of evidence of how much it benefits the lowest financial demographic. So fully fund Head Start and Early Intervention, maybe enact Biden's plan for funding childcare for even younger kids from this situation--but where does it follow that we should pay for free preschool and cheap daycare for all the other kids who don't need it? That's a ton of money to hand out for something that isn't necessary and doesn't have the same clear benefits.

Hey, I could get behind a plan that cut government spending by trillions of dollars in other areas before spending it on this.

Other than public education, none come to mind. This is the problem. This is what keeps driving us toward the cliff. They don’t need to pay for themselves, but the difference needs to be what can be covered by our country’s income. We have a huge income, but our spending is already so far beyond that. The wealthiest of men can still drive himself to bankruptcy if he chooses.

This is correct, good debt exists. But no where have I seen anyone in support of this plan propose that it would bring in anything close to what it will spend, at any length of time for return, not even in the most wildly optimistic estimates.

When a country cannot make the payments on it’s debt anymore, its sources of funding will not loan it any more money. Having lost on their bad investment, individual bond holders will stop buying bonds, countries will decline to give any more loans. They may not be able to get their original investment back from the “big guy”, but they sure as heck won’t be giving him any more! And then the defaults cascade, as more and more debts come due without the USA being able to pay. We have Argentina, Greece, Venezuela—a country that simply does not have the dollars to run all those government programs, and we have shortfalls all over the system where people don’t get funds they are entitled to because they simple don’t exist. Where the shortfalls will hit—social security, Medicare, schools?—who knows? And these blows come to a population that has grown used to, indeed built their lives around expecting, artificially cheap childcare, free preschool, and a check in the mail every month just for having kids. The sudden removal of these things, just as the economy tanks, would be devastating to families. People may have enough faith in the “big guy’s” strength to believe he’ll be able to make good and keep lending longer, but eventually the ever-expanding debt is so huge it’s no longer possible to borrow enough to keep up with the payments. Being the big guy just gives us longer to keep digging our hole before it all catches up to us. It doesn’t mean that the world economy will keep coming up with ever larger sources of new debt for us to cover our old debt forever. Or alternatively, the government decides it has a mint, it will just print money to pay its obligations instead of defaulting. We don’t technically default on our loans, but the sudden dramatic increase in dollars drops the scarcity of money that drives its value, and we get Hungary and the Weimar Republic—hyperinflation that wipes out the value of the dollar. Now suddenly our lenders’ returns are nearly worthless, as each dollar they see return on their investment can buy what cost only cents when they lent the money, and the US is no longer a good investment, because your money plus interest earned is worth less than your original investment was when you made it. Individuals and countries are no longer willing to lend us money to cover our debt payments, and the same cascade happens as above. The rules of math don’t cease to apply, simply because we are used to being top dog. The world economy will not sustain infinitely increasing lending to the USA forever. The money simply doesn’t exist to do that, as our national debt increases at a higher rate than the gross world product. As long as the debt keeps climbing its exponential curve, it must eventually intersect with the line of debt made available to it.