ZOOM BOOM IN THE CLASSROOM -- THE LOWDOWN ON 'DISTANCE LEARNING

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020, OR THEREAFTER

(Editors: Following is a guest column written by Simone Elias, 10-year-old granddaughter of columnist Thomas Elias. A rising fifth-grader, she is a veteran of California’s first attempt at mass distance learning, which will involve millions of kids this fall.)

By SIMONE O. ELIAS

          “ZOOM BOOM IN THE CLASSROOM -- THE LOWDOWN ON 'DISTANCE LEARNING'"

When the virus started, I was in fourth grade in a Berkeley public school. I have one sister, who is three years younger, and we both got free laptops from the school district once everyone had to stay home.

They call it distance learning, but they might as well call it laptop laziness. It’s so easy to just go to another website or watch a video.

Since this started, it’s been more fun and better learning to do my own projects without any teacher. For example, I set up Zoom calls with friends or relatives on my own, and I wrote a bunch of short essays about amazing places in the world. Lately I’ve been working on a podcast with my sister and a friend called “Street Spies,” which anyone can listen to on the internet (www.anchor.fm/simone-elias).

School was not so good, though. My teacher even told us she was not comfortable teaching on the screen. When I thought about it, that made sense because teachers are used to being there with the kids in person. There also always seemed to be problems getting the Zoom code or the sound to work. A lot of kids were constantly leaving and joining the meetings at different times, for various reasons like bad wifi. Things were even harder for my sister, who was in first grade—she says she couldn’t even see or hear the teacher some of the time.

I’ve also heard parents say kids from less privileged homes didn’t show up for the virtual classes as much.

Kids can leave the room or turn off their video—and the teacher can’t do anything about it. Students can mute themselves, and they can also mute the teacher by turning off the sound. Then they can do whatever they want—get a cookie or anything else their parents let them do (if a parent is even there). That’s not true in school where kids get sent to the principal’s office if they won’t do what the teacher says.

My teacher used a set-up for doing homework called Google Classroom. It had problems, too. The teacher puts “tasks” up and then students can just ignore them, and the teacher can’t do anything about it. This set-up also made me feel stressed because there were all these tasks with due dates lined up on the screen that I hadn’t done.

Whatever the project, you can’t really do anything social. Only one person can talk at a time on Zoom. You can’t have a separate discussion with a student, teacher or small group. Even to get to a “breakout” room—where you can do a video chat with less than all the people—you have to ask the “host” to do it for you.

          A lot of school is normally about hanging out with friends and being social, and you miss out on that, too. In person, school is longer, and it’s easier to share ideas and finish projects.

One specific area where online learning seemed harder than in-person learning involved paper workbooks. My teacher told students to scan their work and email the scanned pages to turn them in, but that was an extra step and not a lot of the students even had a scanner.

There are also some good parts of online learning, though. For one thing, there’s not as much distraction from the other kids, so you can focus on the subject and learn about it. For example, I wrote some essays about the California Gold Rush for online school last spring. Did you know that Margaret Frank made the equivalent of $400,000 in today’s money by making pies and selling them to miners?

Overall, school online is not as much fun as it would be if everyone were there in person. I guess it’s true that something is better than nothing. But distance learning definitely takes some getting used to. Everyone is still figuring it out.

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(To respond, email Simone’s granddad, longtime California columnist Thomas Elias, at tdelias@aol.com.)

BIG UTILITIES WORK TO EVADE RESPONSIBILITY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  TUESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BIG UTILITIES WORK TO EVADE RESPONSIBILITY”

Immediately after firefighters put out the nearly 9,000 separate blazes that scorched more than 1 million acres of California last fall and winter, homeowners began filing lawsuits against the state’s largest electric utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison Co. Now cities like Ventura and Santa Rosa have joined in.

          The essence of those suits is that utility equipment played a major role in starting the wildfires, as alleged arcing and sparking flew from transmission lines to brush that hadn’t been cleared adequately. The claims total about $19 billion against the two regional behemoths.

          That’s one reason stock in both companies has performed poorly over the last few months.

          But not to worry too much, shareholders. Your companies have a long history of making hay when times are bad, as when PG&E entered what some called a phony bankruptcy during the energy crunch of the early 2000s, emerging much stronger afterward.

          Right now, both companies are demonstrating precisely the same kind of gall (Yiddish word: chutzpah) they have in other previous tough situations. Just last year, at the very moment PG&E was being assessed a $14 million fine for failing to report discovery of flawed records on its gas pipelines, that company began asking for well over $1 billion in rate increases to pay for repairs to the very same pipeline system. Those were the same kind of pipelines that exploded in San Bruno in 2010, killing eight and causing large damage.

          The California Public Utilities Commission, favoring utilities over their customers as usual, eventually gave PG&E a boost of more than $100 per year from each average residential customer.

  

          The PUC also consistently gives favored treatment to Edison, as when it assessed customers well over half the cost of shuttering the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, closed in large part because of an Edison action.

          That trend continued this spring, when PUC President Michael Picker told a reporter he attributes the massive fires largely to climate change and not to utility negligence.

          His remark very likely sets up a future PUC ruling to let utilities recoup much of their wildfire losses through rate increases imposed on consumers – most of whom do not live in wildfire-prone areas, but will have to fork over anyhow just to keep their lights on. Such increases would be authorized by a bill now advancing through the Legislature.

          This is one clear utility goal as the companies work with similar chutzpah both in the courts and Sacramento.

          As an example, the state Senate’s Insurance Committee has already advanced a bill that might make it easier for homeowners to collect on their insurance policies when utilities cause fires that destroy covered homes. This would lead to less claims against utilities, which want to fob off part of their responsibility onto insurance companies.

          They are also in court seeking to avoid paying gigantic sums for firestorms allegedly spurred by their crews and equipment. California law now lets homeowners collect from insurance companies when utility equipment causes fire damage, even when the equipment is well maintained. The companies urgently want that changed.

          One thing is certain: Both in court and in the Legislature, the deep pockets of the big electric companies give them huge advantages over less well funded and staffed consumer lawyers, many of whom won’t get paid unless they win for their clients.

          And the companies figure to get continued favored treatment by the PUC, which will determine how much they get in future rate increases. Picker’s climate change remark came soon after his agency fined PG&E well over $1.6 billion for actions connected to the San Bruno disaster and its actions before and afterwards.

          Which means that the commission’s kabuki-like rate-making process will soon resume, again seeing both the commissioners and the utilities act like Japanese dancers breathlessly performing a dramatic dance – with the outcome predetermined.

          The utilities will once again ask for astronomical sums, and the commission will cut those requests down a little. But the net effect on consumers’ wallets will still be substantial.

          So it appears that no matter what errors or negligence the utilities may have committed, they’ll still do fine financially, at serious expense to their customers.

         

           

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net