Helen, Literacy/Numeracy Tutor. Canterbury, NZ.
Where to start! I ticked them all, because they all affected me in some way. But Education is probably my most significant reality check! I have not copied the “official” covid enquiry. I kept that lodgement more neutral because I don't quite trust in their processes not to be designed to gather information on certain types of responses.
I tutor students who require extra assistance with literacy or numeracy. The mandates affected me when the teachers were mandated, because the stipulations were that those working in a home or private setting also could not continue working with students if unjabbed.
I said to the parents of the students I had, that I had been mandated out and could no longer take their child. Not one of them cared about the rules given by government even though they were mostly all jabbed themselves. They wanted me to continue, and that created a dilemma how to proceed, or not.
I had to think carefully if and how I could manage that, and even if I wanted to. So I put in strict protocols in place about wellness, such as if the student or someone in the family had been recently jabbed, they all needed a 2 week stand down; if anyone in the family was sick, to keep the student away; and that I would be helping the kids on a voluntary basis (as a friend) as I was no longer a certified (legal) tutor. I did stop during all lockdowns though. That was an impossible task to even consider.
I also refused that the children wear masks because part of my work was in helping children with phonics and enunciation of words. There was no way a child could progress while hiding behind a mask and not seeing a word said, or speaking properly or clearly. I have no idea how junior teachers at school could manage this.
In fact, with some of the younger students I have seen, the teachers didn't manage this at all, as I am now seeing up to Year 5 and Year 6 students who are almost illiterate with very little phonics and decoding awareness at all. These would have been the children who went through the “mandates” in the junior room with a masked teacher. I hadn't thought about this before, but I now perceive this low literacy rate as the consequences of forced mask wearing in schools, and to a lesser degree, mandates. The masks hid the important visual nuances needed for learning phonics and word development required in reading and writing.
I've been working with students like this for over 20 years, and never seen such an extensive range of reading and phonics problems in the middle school years. All literacy levels of my students in the middle primary school are often about 1-3 years behind. It's a monumental task to pull kids back from such significant delays.
What I also noticed with these students is that with some of those who had been jabbed, I could smell the chemicals in their bodies. With some I also noticed the light sparkle in their eyes go. For some, the sparkle came back, some not. A lot of them were sicker than usual, and still are. Some of the older students became a bit more mechanical – if that's the right word – less (emotionally) affective in their responses.
In some, behaviour changed. I would say it was cause and effect, or consequences, and their ability to focus, that were the worst reality checks with these students. Consequences are most often related to the development of the frontal lobe, so I do assume that the chemicals crossed the blood brain barrier and interfered with basic emotional and consequential activity. Focus could have been stress and anxiety related. Or the jabber.
The ability to listen and respond, or to even remember, seemed to be affected to some degree too, although I did often work with students with learning difficulties anyway, so it's a bit difficult to define how much worse that became, if at all. Things just seem more pronounced and harder to remediate.
Stress and anxiety accelerated. Was that due to the jab, the propaganda of the pandemic fear, or because these kids realised they were now so far behind in their learning? Probably all of the above. The consequences of what they went through were significantly identifiable in their behaviour, mannerisms and responses of all kinds.
I notice too, that the posture of these students has deteriorated significantly as well, and if the body is not in balance, then a student's brain is not in balance either. The brain needs balance for a more complete learning experience. The inherent damage to students' postures is not to be discounted when they are sitting scrunched up on the floor with a book in their laps trying to write. Their spinal system is still developing! It's not ok, ever, to devalue and devolve students to such a degree that posture and learning is being deliberately affected. I see it as deliberate negligence to undermine the inherent qualities that make a child.
Closing thoughts. I can see the preparation for the decimation of children's learning as far back as when they removed desks out of the classrooms and forced students to work on the floor in huge classblocks. This shift alone began to become visibly detrimental to the students I worked with well before the mandates and masks. It was ethically and morally degrading, especially so for girls going into puberty.
What ensued with the mandates and plandemic was like the nail in the coffin for many of these kids. It finished off so much potential for these students to learn with confidence. I see it as all part of the bigger plan, when I look back at it now; de-educate the children through the introduction of poor classroom practises, and add the plandemic fear into them all. What a disgusting protocol – and not of human design surely!
My recommendation is that all parents now strongly encourage the schools to reinstate proper seating arrangements for the students (desks and chairs), and if not for the entire class, then absolutely settle for nothing less than a desk and chair for their own child. I put this recommendation to all students' parents I work with. Mostly it is being acted upon in schools with these specific children. Also be vocal about returning class sizes to “normal”, not open plan learning. It's also not ok for a junior room teacher to be wearing a mask where children cannot get the visual nuances needed for learning sounds and phonics.
It was all by design. Now, forearmed with knowledge, parents have the power to shift their own child back into a better state of balance for learning.
