Sat, May 9, 2020
Read in 4 minutes
From the United States of America
I wasn’t a dedicated student when I was younger and that is a truth I somewhat regret – not too long ago, someone told me that their school system had failed them… she was a pretty successful young person, so I immediately thought “are you serious?” When I look back on my American school experience, I believe it was designed pretty reasonably. One could argue national bias but that is a rabbit hole this article is not meant to go down…
It was a light ascent in the first 6-8 years… topics were evenly distributed… I wouldn’t think you’d want kids to be in some specialized track at that early of an age… sounds like a wacky, communist dystopia. When I was a ‘teen ager, I really was distracted by sports, music and social happenings. I used to literally play back then… my friends and I would jump on trampolines, ride bikes and skateboards, wiffle ball… good times. I knew who the “good students” were… didn’t pity them… (capability aside) I didn’t want to be them either. If I could “turn back time” I suppose I’d do less doodling during history class.
My mother is a pre-school teacher… what a lovely occupation for a mother to have. She’s nearing retirement after a few decades worth of little tots. She was a teacher during Sandy Hook – what a deranged tragedy that was… it’s sad, that was a thought that crossed my mind when I saw her and her teacher’s aide with the children (safe at home) via telepresence. I listened and watched for a few minutes… they did “show and tell.” Each child’s face flashed on my mother’s tablet when it was their turn. Of the topics, one included showing “something about your mother”… a youngster showed an empty wine glass. I wasn’t sure what to make of that… I thought “soma” from Huxley’s Brave New World. Coffee in the morning will perk her back up… the kid delivered it as a joke; sure that’s how his mother intended it when she was consulted by the little guy.
Everyone is talking about “flattening the curve” – I have a bit of a quantitative background so I knew immediately what was meant by this expression. I like calculus and statistics – I think they are really practical fields… especially statistics. Their practicality is evidenced by the reporting that’s been done on this virus. A lot of people feared calculus and statistics when they underwent school… and when you bring it up to them now, they’ll say “aw I hated calculus.” It has become the ultimate measure of modeling this damn virus. The presence of it and new cases are “a function” of time. It’s a continuous function that modelers expect to take the form of an upward and eventual downward curve. A bell curve is a statistical image that is typically used to describe a distribution around an average. There are observational deviations to the left and deviations to the right… more and less compared to that mean value. The bell curve is meant to estimate a distribution of whatever. Well, time is time… and it’s gonna’ change accordingly. The x-axis is steadfast… what isn’t steadfast is cases of this virus. Without precautions such as social distancing, it is proposed that the function would take on a steeper “upward slope.” The precautions are meant to “flatten” that slope.
Run-On Sentence Alert (Brace Yourself): If these precautions get us closer to a post-virus state (a state in terms of terminated [or drastically reduced and controlled] new and unresolved cases (not a state in terms of social and labor structure, again not the intention of this article)) the function would shift leftward… which I suppose is what we all are praying for… if there is a divine being who has some sort of divine team of analysts… it is to them in which we pray.