My first two will both come in around 30. First one had lots of dual enrollment; the second will only have a few DE classes, but I'll give him more music credits (oldest we mostly counted music as an EC, but music is a much bigger part of second kid's life and school day) so it will come out about the same in the end.

I think a lot of things are getting conflated here. Yes, absolutely, trades should be considered a viable option for ANY students and shouldn't be looked down on. But where someone went to high school shouldn't be the determining factor. If high schools in poorer areas aren't preparing their students (who want to go to college) for college (and no, they're often not), then THAT'S the bigger problem than society not valuing trade school. I also take issue with some of the "but what about the trades?!" rhetoric that's popular these days, because I think it romanticizes things too far in the other direction. My Dad is pushing 70, not in terrific health, and still working a very physically demanding job with no end in sight, because, at least in my part of the country, the "trades" generally don't involve the kind of union jobs with good retirement that were widespread (at least for white men) in my grandfather's day. It worked great for my grandfather; he worked for GM until he retired while he was still in his 50s, I believe, and had a very comfortable retirement and lived until he was in his 90s. It's not like that for his son, and it's not like that for most people anymore.

I'm still traumatized by the application process with my oldest two years ago. In retrospect, he did fine, but it was agonizing while it was going on. I don't know what the answer is; for him taking a zillion APs and DE classes and getting the test scores was not the stressful part; trying to figure out what these schools wanted and market himself very much was. The opposite is going to be true for a lot of kids, though. I don't know that I buy holistic admissions as a way to help out poor kids at most schools, though; it really doesn't follow given that so few schools both meet financial need and are need blind. There's no reason to be "need aware" if you're having a problem finding enough poor kids to admit (and even at supposedly need blind schools, there are a million tells on a holistically reviewed application about a kid's financial situation). I guess we're kind of niche-y, but for us the fact that there are tons of schools out there that have high admission rates wasn't especially helpful, because it's the overwhelmingly the very selective schools that meet financial need. With one exception, the less selective schools he applied to couldn't compete with the more selective ones with financial aid, even for my high stats kid. I'm both terrified and relieved about how the next kid will have most everything riding on a single 15 minute audition for music schools. Of course he still has to jump through all the the other hoops, too--it just won't matter if he's not good enough at clarinet. Sigh.

Maybe the CDC guessed right: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/health/vaccination-interest-cdc-mask-guidance/index.html They're basing it on traffic to vaccines.gov right after the updated guidance and saying that the decline in vaccine numbers that had been happening reversed somewhat after the announcement (but it's unclear whether that had more to do with the announcement or with eligibility expanding to 12-15 year olds). Of course, in the meantime, my awesome governor says he's going to ban schools from mandating masks going forward (I wrote a headline, if any news people need it: "Georgia bans schools from following public health guidelines"), so things better keep moving in the right direction or fall could be a mess.

We did a shakespeare based year for 10th and 8th grade last year; it was a lot of fun 🙂

Yeah, DH has worn a mask (or two!) all day every day for 9 months now. It's not exactly fun, but it's not a big deal. All of his students, too. I just asked if he's felt like he's had any health effects from wearing a mask all the time and he scoffed and said, "yeah, I haven't had a sore throat all year. That kind of health effect?" I won't say the other things he said about that sort of question, because they're not very polite. From my perspective, the most important health effect is how he hasn't gotten covid despite teaching in full classrooms all year and multiple times with covid positive students.

He says it says something about how they're always thinking of the health of customers, etc, blah, blah....at this point, customers, employees, etc. who are fully vaccinated do not need to mask. I asked if it said anything about unvaccinated people still needing to mask, but he doesn't really remember. I'll have to go myself to get the full story 😉 But, yeah, I'm not surprised. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my county's schools used this as an opportunity to announce that masks will be optional but recommended as of June 1 for everyone. And blamed the CDC announcement for it, even though it very clearly goes against what the CDC actually said.

Just because I'm interested to see how this is playing out around the US....I said right after the announcement that most people were still masking in my local area. A couple of weeks later DH is just back from Lowes and Kroger and reports very few masks and that Kroger is making announcements over the loudspeaker saying that vaccinated people don't have to mask. That said, I do live in an area that I would imagine has a pretty high vaccination rate (although I'm not sure--last I checked, I could only see numbers for where people had gotten vaccinated, as opposed to where they live, so I don't know of any way to actually check). We'll see what numbers do--both covid numbers and vaccination rates--so far neither seems to be reacting much, but it's early days. And I will cross my fingers that it doesn't make for a miserable summer for/with my 8 year old.

Yes. I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing in any substantive way. I think I just didn’t want to go clean 😂

Sure. That's why I was interested to hear how they're coming up with 1 in 3-6 thousand. But I haven't seen that anywhere other than on this thread, so I dunno.

BTW (I should be cleaning my house), I found you a study with a control group, @Not_a_Number: https://discover.vumc.org/2021/01/covid-19-related-myocarditis-in-athletes/ Small study, but they've got 3% of college athletes. Frustratingly, I've looked two different places and I don't see them saying how many cases in the control group? Which seems weird if you're going to brag about how you're the first study with a control group.

They found 62 cases of myocarditis out of more than 5 million vaccinated. The fact that it's more likely to happen in younger men doesn't mean that the total number of cases they found isn't 62 out of 5 million. Maybe this is just semantics at this point. I mean, sure, you could say it's x out of x number of males aged 16-35 (or whatever), and it would be a different but still tiny percentage. But we can't say that because we don't know those numbers. We just know that there have been 62 cases out of over 5 million vaccinated and that some unstated majority of those have been in younger men. ETA: I mean, it's clearly not ALL men under 30, because of the people who died was a 35 year old man and the other was a woman. So you could also say that 0% of the deaths have been in men under 30.

This states the numbers in Israel a little more clearly than the other article, I think. It is 62 identified cases out of more than 5 million vaccinated--not just teens: https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/pfizer-vaccine-heart-inflammation-myocarditis

My thinking is that the main advantage of pfizer is fewer side effects (though none of us in my family had significant side effects from either); the main advantage of moderna is that it's the Dolly Parton shot.

I think the Times of Israel article was saying 60 for all age groups--actually, looking at it again, it's 60 who were treated and released and then 2 who died: a 22 yo and a 35 yo. so while it mentions teens at the beginning, it seems to be giving the total number of people reporting myocarditis.

yeah, I would need to know more about the 1 in 3000 to 1 in 6000 estimate and where that comes from. In the Times of Israel article linked to, I'm seeing 60 cases...and that's out of over 5 million fully vaccinated.

There were a couple of others that cited rates "under 1%" too....it would have to be an awful lot under 1% to be as low as 1 out of 3000. You said they're estimating a rate of 1 in 3000 to 6000 in Israel--not that that's the rate they're finding based on testing people with symptoms (I don't know how they're estimating it--I didn't see anything about the 1 in 3000 to 6000 in the link you posted, but I might have missed it). I'm all for investigating all possible side effects of the vaccine; I'm just saying that it sounds like it's likely quite a bit lower as a side effect of the vaccine than as a side effect of covid, and I'm noting that if 1 in 3000 to 6000 is indeed higher than the background rate and cause for concern, then it would seem to be overstating things to say that the cases we're seeing after covid AREN'T a cause for concern, even if they were overstated at first. One of the other studies said 21 out of 3000, which would be 10 to 20 times higher than the what you say they're estimating in Israel. ETA: if the 1 in 3000 is, in fact, what they're finding by testing people who present with symptoms, then, yes, that would be very different from a study where they test a large group of people who had had covid.

If 1 in 3000-6000 is higher than the background rate, then wouldn't the 1ish% post covid that the studies cited in the myocarditis myth link you posted be WAY higher than the background rate?

My second senior! So far we've got: DE Statistics AP US Government (at home) Economics (something light at home 1/2 credit) AP English lit (at home) Science: as detailed in another thread on here, still figuring this out, but perhaps some kind of physics of music class at home (maybe with an in person co-op class as part of it) AP Human Geography (maybe. at home) And I think that's it for academic stuff...we deliberately did his 3rd and 4th Spanish credits DE this year so he'd have some flexibility next year for college visits and auditions (music major) For music he'll do clarinet and piano lessons, and then a youth symphony and clarinet chamber group and another youth wind symphony

Just saw this and thought of this thread. It's going to be a busy, busy year at a lot of National Parks: https://billingsgazette.com/lifestyles/recreation/yellowstone-grand-teton-set-records-[…]isitation/article_08a3afea-75f6-506f-9689-0ad0fb2c43b7.html#tncms-source=login

Yeah, another CDC report focused on a small school district near me where everyone was masked...except for the exceptions like when all the elementary kids ate lunch togther in their full capacity classrooms. It's actually even more impressive how much of a reduction they saw with just masked teachers given all that. I'd REALLY like to see high school numbers w/students masked vs. not (I've seen my OWN numbers, and they show a very substantial reduction when students are masked), but I'd also like to see numbers when there are and aren't those kind of exceptions (masked vs. not for indoor sports. Lunches are trickier. I know some schools have done half days to avoid the lunch issue, but is there much else that can be done? At least in areas where it's too cold for eating outside much of the year? I mean, too late to figure it out now since the school year's almost over and one hopes it will be a non-issue or at least much, much less of one by fall....)

They do have them now, though, right? https://www.cvs.com/shop/home-health-care/home-tests/home-covid-test I first heard that these were available maybe a month ago? And I've been surprised we don't hear more about them, but I guess they just came along too late to be a game changer, since vaccines came first?

I think that matters a lot more if we don't get vaccination rates high enough to hit herd immunity (or if some places don't). In a population where almost everyone is vaccinated with a very effective vaccine, those few people would be pretty well protected anyway. If vaccination rates don't improve in a lot of areas, there's a lot more risk to those people and it makes sense to try to identify them and maybe do additional doses (if that would work). This is why my husband who takes an immunosuppressant had his antibodies tested post vaccine. He had them, but if he hadn't, I don't know that he could have done anything at this point other than continue to take precautions like pre-vaccination.

I'm not kbutton, but I think what she was asking is if we know WHY that's true...for the people who have breakthrough infections, is it because they didn't develop antibodies (the vaccine didn't work for them for whatever reason) or is it something about the exposure they had and maybe they wouldn't have gotten it had they been exposed under different circumstances. It's not something the trials (or any real world data) would show....but is it something that immunologists know about vaccines in general (or this particular vaccine)? ETA: or it may be that I misinterpreted and that's not what she was asking at all, but it's what I wonder anyway 🙂

Nate Silver asked this same question on twitter awhile back, which was the first time it occurred to me that's a really good question that I'm surprised no one seems to really know the answer to. Or maybe a lot of people know it, but I've yet to see an answer from someone who seems to actually know what they're talking about. I would guess it's a mix of both: there are some people who will have more trouble producing antibodies for various reasons (immune problems, medications, age, etc) but then maybe also what viral load you're exposed to has something to do with it? But I don't know.