I know quite a few 3x vaxxed people abroad who got asymptomatic COVID back in January whose allergies nearly killed them come spring. What was formerly an annual stuffed up nose turned into a stuffed up nose + excruciating pain in the lungs or brain fog like they’d never had before. Others are college athletes who can’t walk up one flight of stairs without needing to stop and catch a breather now. It’s not just about getting vaccinated. It’s about deciding how much viral load you want to expose yourself to, so that, if you end up with long COVID, you’re not screwing up your body so badly.
It’s not just children not seeing other people’s faces, but also adult’s not recognizing what’s going on in the children, especially in the kindergarten. How do teachers adjust their approach without seeing the nuances in facial expression? Whenever I go to pick up our boy from the kindergarten, I have no idea if he’s happy, sad, indifferent, tired, distressed, etc. just looking at his eyes and the way he moves. Good education is so much about observing children’s behavior and facial expressions.
4 Likes
Child abuse…it should be illegal.
1 Like
Recently, I’ve become aware of another aspect of masking on children in a certain instance of a student my friend is teaching having a particularly harder time academically than in the past. As my friend was explaining the situation, it occurred to me that he is suffering from APD (Auditory processing disfunction), which means the ears hear fine as any student, but the brain has difficulty processing through the auditory route. Such students often use visual cues, such as lip-reading or hand gestures to help fill in the gaps. (It becomes apparent that such a student is suffering from this disorder when they’re on the phone and must rely on auditory input, they become completely flustered and overwhelmed with lack of visual cues.
So it occurred to me in a classroom setting, when teachers are wearing masks, not only is the sound less clear, which is absolutely requisite for these students, but they can’t even read lips.
And for those who must do online classes, I can’t help think that electronic sound, albeit good quality, isn’t quite the same as hearing voices in the present. And I’ve had some personal experience noticing this teaching online.
And I think there are many children who, even if they don’t exactly match the conditions to be considered APD, they are at different scales of ability to ingest auditory information and may be somewhere on the edge, and the mask thing might just be the thing to cause them to struggle.
Most children are probably auditory learners and as we get older and adept at reading most of our information, we tend to become visual learners. But some children who struggle with auditory and haven’t found a visual solution yet, and teachers/parents are unaware of the situation, (which I’m certain happens a lot in Taiwan) they’re just simply going to be left behind.
2 Likes