Because we seem to be trying to turn a planet that supports life into one that does not, I’m posting a question or topic here every week to see if together we can work out some nuts and bolts of how to survive. The whole linkable list of prior questions/discussions can be found here.
Except that, once again, this week’s question was supposed to be something else, but the combo of covid and back-to-school scuttled that aspiration.
For me, the 2nd week of covid is varied and interesting, at least, and currently manifests as coughing so hard my abs and ribs ache and eating is unattractive.
Back-to-school is most immediately a set of mandatory online trainings. The Universal Precautions one was ironic in a pie-in-the-sky kind of way; good luck finding gloves at a school, let alone bleach or a bucket or a sharps disposal or anything that costs money and is consumable and requires follow-through.
The Workplace Violence training was very interesting when applied retrospectively to a bunch of past events. Does that mean it’s going to make a difference in the future? Unlikely.
The Child Abuse/Mandated Reporter training is long, soul-killing, and dated (still talking about Twitter, and hyping Instagram as if it is the go-to SM site for students). They cleverly don’t tell you how many slides there are in this one, or how far through it you are, so you keep going despite slide after slide after slide after slide of bleak details.
The three together take about 3 hours if you can slog straight through, but it’s very very hard to get through the Child Abuse training and harder still to convince yourself to resume it again if you take a break. It’s even harder when you’re coughing and sneezing every few minutes.
So this covid pause is lasting another week.
