School planning chicken

Many schools are now announcing that they will be 100% remote in August/September when they begin, replacing their previous hybrid/fancy rotating schedule/other half-measure plans.

The patient impression:

School administrators are trying to make the best decision they can, for safety, education, financial, and legal reasons. The information available to them keeps changing, so they keep updating their plans. This is a challenging task and they are doing the best they can with limited information and no control over many external factors that keep changing.

The skeptic's impression:

Schools initially panicked, followed by a period of prolonged scramble, and are adjusting their plan to balance exactly on the knife's edge of [safe enough that the employees will not riot] and [still normal enough that the students and parents will not riot]. They'll continue to make new announcements to maintain this balance, so the announcements are interesting mostly to (1) to teachers, students, and their households, and (2) as way of tracking which riot has more potentiality.

The pessimist's impression:

Schools are inadequately-adjusted. Why do they keep announcing plans which are wildly optimistic and have dependencies on local/state/federal guidelines or international vaccine development? The institutional lock-in to a rigid schooling system means that even the most clear-eyed administrator is not allowed to make reasonable decisions or announcements, as the Overton Window in March did not really allow (for example) a superintendent to announce that public school was going to be 100% at home for the next two years. Or announce that all school was cancelled. Or any of the other things that I can imagine, in future-retrospect, as having happened (or as being equivalent to what will have happened).

So here's where we are, in a repeated game of chicken. It's asymmetrical, and maybe chicken isn't the right game-theory model to use, since we know which strategy to pick in order to lose, but not which strategy to pick to win. And also it's not mutually-assured destruction. And viruses aren't considered sentient, and have never been observed to drive cars around steep one-lane mountain roads...

This post's theme word is palmary (adj), "of supreme importance; outstanding; praiseworthy." A palmary plan is educationally elusive.

Cobwebs

I went outside and discovered a spider had built an extensive web across the rear entrance of my house, spanning the door, deck, and stairs. This is some sort of arachnoid commentary on human self-quarantine and it struck me as both sticky and humorous. (Zeugma!)

This venture into the horrible humidity was made in order to chip away at emptying my office, which I'm not-really-using, for sabbatical so that someone else can not-really-use it. (Everything is wonderful, the world is totally fine, don't look too closely.) My two most neglected plants stubbornly hang on in what is surely the most arid, frigid, inhospitable summer that southern Pennsylvania can artificially offer to indoor plant life. An enterprising indoor spider, hoping in vain to capture prey in the abandoned, sealed, locked building, had constructed a foolishly hopeful web from the ceiling down to the desk chair, completely blocking off the shelves and the keyboard. This struck me as sticky and a silly emerging theme.

Are spiders everywhere just constantly walling in everything, and only the entropy of weather and large fauna keeps pathways clear?

Given the prevalence of webs, the visible black cloud of mosquitos that chased me from my car back into my house seemed incongruous. YES, I had to pass through a partially-reconstructed deck-spanning web to reenter the house. NO, it did not appear to dissuade the accursed vampiric horrors. Please, can we get some mosquito-eating bats to colonize my block?

This post's theme word is durance (n), "confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment." In this grimdark modern fairytale, the protagonist is self-quarantined at home and entirely encased in cobwebs and loneliness so thick that the quarantine becomes permanent; "Dream Durance" is rated NC-17 for psychic damage inflicted on readers and anyone attempting to engage in concurrent political discourse.