–Highlights–

 

• 31,183,470 Cases World-wide (Johns Hopkins)
• THIS WEEK'S CONVERSATIONS
• Wednesday– School reopening:  Lessons learned out of China
• "For One Who is Exhausted"– a poem
• ASFM- Waiting for the Green Light- a hybrid model
• Toward "Anti-Fragile" Schools
• Tara Waudby on when Covid-19 enters your community
• COVID-19:  "Winter is Coming"
• COVID-19:  Focus on the science of aerosols and airborne infection

–QUICK LINKS FOR BUSY PEOPLE–

–Beginning the Week with a Poem to Consider–

from Dr. Kate C. McKenna,

International School Nido de Aguilas 

The International School Nido de Aguilas completed six weeks of virtual school, and on September 11th, we made it to our spring break. As a way of guiding the faculty into the holiday week, I shared this poem with our faculty, as it felt like the only way to appropriately honor the amount of work, energy, and dedication that they had put into the start of this virtual school year.  I am sharing this poem now with AAIE in hopes that other international school leaders might find that these words resonate and inspire—also hoping that other schools have a spring (or fall break) on the horizon.

–Kate McKenna   

For One Who Is Exhausted,

a Blessing

– by John O’Donohue

 

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight.

 

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before

Now become laborsome events of will.

 

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

 

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

 

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.

 

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

 

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

 

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

 

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

 

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

 

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

 

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

 

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

THIS WEEK'S LEADERSHIP CONVERSATIONS 

with International School Leaders Around the World

From Dr. Medved:

"Five out of seven members of WAB senior leadership team are women. For six months we have led the school functioning from four continents and time zones and have not yet been physically in the same place. Yet, WAB students never stopped learning, WAB teachers never stopped feeling cared for and WAB parents feeling listened too. 

Educational innovation at WAB has thrived and we would like to present what it looks like now while we are operating in a hybrid mode, with roughly 25% of students and 40% of teachers still out of China. Additional complexity of our reality is that both our students and our teachers are transitioning back to China on a daily basis and going through a very rigorous health and safety process. Therefore, our model had to be flexible enough and caring enough to adapt to that unprecedented learning and teaching dynamics and stress and anxiety levels. 

WAB elementary school, middle school and high school principals will present how this situation has liberated school leadership and teaching teams' creativity and pushed forward our strategic innovation implementation."

All international school senior leaders are welcome.  A Weekly CONVERSATION  between School Heads and Senior Leaders– #30. Our discussions continue to be contemporary, important and a time we teach each other.  The dilemmas and conundrums are ever-changing the longer we live with a global pandemic. Stay current and stay thoughtful in the company of colleagues. With thanks to Will Richardson who has facilitated our Thursday CONVERSATIONS  since the very beginning. 

The weekly Thursday CONVERSATIONS between Latin America school heads and senior leaders resumes in collaboration with Tri-Association and AASSA. All are welcome to join the discussion. Our sessions are hosted by Sonia Keller and Dereck Rhoads.   

American School Foundation-Monterrey

Waiting on the Green Light for Hybrid Learning

and Preparing the Community

An ASFM Community Appeal:  VALUES MATTER

 

Values matter, especially during a crisis. They allow individuals and institutions to orient themselves and set priorities quickly. They permit us to navigate confusion, turmoil, and emotion. They compel us to reflect on our relationships with, and obligations to, others. Most importantly, they inform our decisions and actions. ASFM is committed to supporting our students in an open minded, caring and global manner, empowering all students to continue to develop their individual potential in this ever-changing world and based on the following principles: 

• Act with fidelity to the School’s Mission, Vision and Core Values.
• Prioritize student, faculty, and staff health, safety, and wellbeing over other principles.
• Ensure hygiene- and health-related policies are research-based, clearly communicated, effectively implemented, and diligently enforced.
• Promote practices and policies to reduce risk of virus transmission and support our capacity to be responsive and agile when facing changing health circumstances.
• Shift immediately back to distance learning in the event our local community experiences a spike in COVID-19 cases and/or ASFM has a community member test positive. 

An Example of the High School Daily Schedule

Using the Hybrid Learning Hub Model:  Use of Cohorts

 

CLICK HERE or above for the Hybrid Learning Hub Table of Contents

We're Not Out of the Woods Yet: 

Answering a Key Leadership Dilemma–

When Covid-19 Enters Your School

The (Anti)fragility of our schools

by Dr. David Willows, International School of Brussels

Taleb: "The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations."

Let’s take a moment to unpack this idea by considering three everyday objects: a china vase, a brick, and a human muscle. Each one, according to Taleb, responds differently to disorder and when subjected to stress. A china vase is fragile and easily breaks into pieces when dropped on the floor. A brick, by contrast, is robust and can withstand a considerable amount of stress and pressure. At the same time, it can hardly be said to “thrive” under pressure and will itself crumble when faced with a huge or unexpected strike. A human muscle, by contrast, is, in Taleb’s words, antifragile in that not only can it withstand a degree of stress, it actually benefits from it and becomes stronger as a result.

But what are the conditions under which we can help our schools become antifragile? Taleb’s book is intentionally non-linear, so he hasn’t exactly provided us with an off-the-shelf manual. At the same time there are clues and here are just three that I picked up along the way to get the conversation going. 

 

1.Beware the Fragilistas.

The Fragilista, Taleb explains, is someone to be avoided. Often found in meetings, they cause fragility by their naive rationalism. They are constantly writing policies and generating actions, the benefits of which are small and invisible. In doing so, they deprive “variability-loving systems of variability and error-loving systems of errors.” The Fragilisita, Taleb concludes, knows the cause and effect of everything - at least, that is what they think - but tends to create systems that crumble when an inevitable surprise comes their way.

 

Discussion question: If schools truly are “error-loving systems”, rooted in the idea than failure is a critical part of the learning process, what are things that are starving these systems of oxygen?

 

2. Avoid the tourist trap, become a flâneur.

Taleb dislikes tourists, but only for the fact that their formulaic approach to adventure is so one dimensional and blindingly goal-driven. Touristification sets in, he says, when we become prisoners of our plans and stop learning from what is right in front of our eyes or from occasionally taking a different turn. The “rational flâneur” (flâneur, someone who wanders around observing), by contrast, is someone who, unlike the tourist, is happy and confident enough to go off course and, at every step, is ready to revise and adjust his schedule based on new information. The tourist has designed the route and has a predetermined end in mind. The flâneur is simply tinkering. And tinkering, he concludes, always outperforms design.

 

Discussion question: What are the plans in place that may be stopping you from discovering other alternative routes and alternative futures? 

 

3. Don’t deny a bird the opportunity to fly.

Taleb quotes Baudelaire’s sad poem about the albatross to make the point that what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground. In the same way, he says, organizations need volatility (volare, to fly) to succeed. By insisting on locking everything down, always taking the smooth path, and leaving nothing to chance, not only do we remove that element of luck that is so critical in the process of human discovery, we make ourselves fragile and more vulnerable to future volatile events.

 

Discussion question: What is the level of risk that your school is comfortable taking and where might this be making you vulnerable to future volatile events?

 

Only a few weeks into a new school year, the final words in Taleb’s remarkable book offer us comfort: “The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations.” Modernity has tended to avoid volatility at all costs. So have many schools, making them ultimately more fragile than we had realized.

 

At the same time, if we find ourselves right now being tossed around by the turbulent waters of a pandemic, constantly adjusting our course only to survive, that may just be a sign that we are going to emerge out of this much stronger than at first we ever would have thought.

–THE NEWS of COVID-19–

31,183,470

Cases Worldwide (Johns Hopkins CSSE)

The Week That Was

It has been a devastating week for many reasons. The U.S. is expected to reach 200,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19, and experts say the actual toll is likely even higher. And last Friday, the Supreme Court lost a feminist icon in Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose death and replacement on the court could threaten progress in preserving affordable healthcare and women's reproductive rights.  (Scientific American)

 

Making the Case for Success:  Thailand as a Best Case Example

On 13 January this year, Thailand was the first country outside of China to record a case of the disease. Thailand’s experience with SARS and H5N1 – combined with a strong public health and surveillance system – gave them the “muscle memory” to respond quickly to COVID-19. Leadership across government of Thailand and public engagement supported by a million community health workers helped swiftly scale up an effective track and trace system.

 

This empowered the country to suppress the virus as citizens played their part in breaking the chains of transmission. WHO recently shared a video outlining Thailand’s response and we appreciate Thailand. Developing “muscle memory’, like Thailand did from previous outbreaks, is key to pandemic response and now we need the whole world to strengthen preparedness. From endless warnings about the world being under-prepared, all countries need to dig in together and invest to ensure a pandemic of this magnitude and severity never happens again. 

 

With the right political and financial commitment and investment now, we can prevent and mitigate future pandemics.  In a world that is heating up and where intensified human activity is shrinking wild spaces, the likelihood of spillover of a novel pathogen from animals to humans is increasing.

 

We know for certain that there will be future novel viruses and another so called disease X. But we also have the tools and know that the only way confront these global threats is as a global community, united in solidarity and committed to long-term cooperation. (WHO:  Director General Commentary) 

 

Winter is Coming…

Some of the physical elements of winter weather make viruses more difficult to escape. The coronaviruses that cause the common cold reliably peak in winter months, as do influenza viruses. There is some mystery as to why. It seems partly due to the air: Viruses travel differently in air of different temperatures and humidity levels. In typical summer weather, the microscopic liquid particles that shoot out of our mouths don’t travel as efficiently as they do in dry winter air.

 

Cold weather also drives us inside, where air recirculates. “As things get colder, activities and people will start moving indoors, and unfortunately that’s going to increase transmission risk, and the risk of super-spreading events,” Tom Inglesby, the director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins, told me. The public-health directives that have allowed many businesses to reopen in recent months—by opening windows and doing as much as possible outdoors—will no longer be feasible in regions where temperatures plunge as the days grow short.

 

Winter days also wear on our body’s defense mechanisms. When people become more sedentary, our immune systems become less vigilant, and our overall resilience flags. Symptoms of depression, too, tend to run high in winter. This year these symptoms will be accompanied by restrictions on social life and concerns for health and economic security, leaving us physiologically vulnerable. “There is a growing sense of behavioral fatigue, and a real need for segments of the population to get back to work,” says Albert Ko, the chair of the department of epidemiology of microbial diseases at Yale School of Public Health. “I think the resurgence is going to be worse than what we’ve seen in the summer.”

Isolated people may feel especially compelled to travel and gather at the holidays, even though those gatherings may be perilous. They could lead to bigger spikes in COVID-19 cases than some states saw after Memorial Day and July 4, when people who insisted on gathering could generally do so outdoors. The winter holidays often involve multigenerational gatherings for prolonged periods indoors—preceded and followed by interstate travel. This is a worst-case combination during a pandemic.

“A lot of what we’re expecting about what might happen this winter comes from previous pandemics,” says Stephen Kissler, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. Flu pandemics tend to travel in waves, and often the first fall and winter waves are the worst. There are striking similarities so far between the current pandemic and the 2009 influenza pandemic, Kissler told me. “There was patchy transmission in the spring, in New York City and some other places, but then there was a unified wave that hit the entire country. It started right around now, the beginning of September.”

 

In a typical cold-and-flu season, many of us are protected—or partially protected—by antibodies to circulating viruses. But with COVID-19, the number of people with antibodies is still low. Even in the cities hardest hit by the disease, it seems that roughly 85 percent of people are still without antibodies. And if the immunity these antibodies confer is incomplete or short-lived, the number could effectively be even higher. This goes against the president’s allusions to how we might safely defeat the virus with “herd immunity.”

Winter has already hit some places in the Southern Hemisphere hard. South Africa has seen a surge in COVID-19. Melbourne has been locked down due to a winter resurgence. The U.S. fell prey to our sense of exceptionalism in the early stages of this pandemic. We watched idly as the virus spread in China and Iran, South Korea and Italy, and only after it was circulating widely among us did we begin to accept that we were not somehow immune. If we cling to that fiction, we are setting ourselves up to be unprepared once again. (New York Times)

 

 

The CDC Says Coronavirus is Airborne and Spread by Aerosols, Warns of Poorly Ventilated Spaces

(then two hours after posting, it backed away from this scientific stance)

For months, scientists and public health experts have warned of mounting evidence that the novel coronavirus is airborne, transmitted through tiny droplets called aerosols that linger in the air much longer than the larger globs that come from coughing or sneezing.

 

Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees (has since backed away from this largely held opinion and science). The CDC recently changed its official guidance to note that aerosols are “thought to be the main way the virus spreads” and to warn that poorly ventilated indoor spaces are particularly dangerous.

 

“There is growing evidence that droplets and airborne particles can remain suspended in the air and be breathed in by others, and travel distances beyond 6 feet (for example, during choir practice, in restaurants, or in fitness classes),” the agency stated. “In general, indoor environments without good ventilation increase this risk.”

The fitness industry is trying to lure gym members back — but experts say it’s using flawed data.

 

While the CDC has not called for any new action to address the airborne threat of a virus that has now killed nearly 200,000 Americans, experts said the change should help to shift policy and public behavior.

 

“It’s a major change,” Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies how aerosols spread the virus, told The Washington Post. “This is a good thing, if we can reduce transmission because more people understand how it is spreading and know what to do to stop it.”

 

The CDC shifted its guidelines on Friday, but the change was not widely noticed until a CNN report on Sunday. Where the agency previously warned that the virus mostly spreads through large drops encountered at close range, it now cites “small particles, such as those in aerosols,” as the most common vector.

 

“These particles can be inhaled into the nose, mouth, airways, and lungs and cause infection,” the guidance says. “This is thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”

Since the pandemic began, arguments have raged over how the virus travels — and how to best halt it. At first, widespread fear of contaminated surfaces led some to bleach their groceries and mail. But the CDC soon concluded that person-to-person transmission was a much more pressing threat. Instead, the agency focused its guidance on avoiding the larger droplets hacked up by sneezes and coughs, which are thought to be mostly limited to a six-foot radius.

 

But researchers long suspected that the virus could travel much farther, especially indoors and in places where people talk loudly or sing. Infamously, one infected person in March unknowingly passed the coronavirus to 52 others at a choir practice in Washington state. Similar indoor “superspreader” events added weight to the idea of an airborne threat.

 

The World Health Organization recognized the threat of aerosols in July, after hundreds of scientists urged the international body to address airborne spread. It’s not clear why the CDC finally followed; Jimenez said high-ranking CDC officials were still arguing publicly against airborne transmission as a major vector as recently as late August. (Washington Post)

 

Distressing Coming Days in the UK

Britain faces a further six months of “very difficult” lockdown restrictions, Downing Street has warned, as Boris Johnson prepares the country for fresh measures to combat the latest increase in infections. The government’s chief scientific and medical officers will tell the public today that Britain is “heading in the wrong direction” and that we are at a “critical point in the pandemic.” Mr. Johnson is expected to announce further lockdown measures in the coming days, with cabinet ministers split over how extensive these should be. (Times of London)

 

More on the UK

Britain is entering a second wave of coronavirus, Boris Johnson has said as scientists expressed fears the death toll could be as high as in the first spike without a rapid change in public behavior. The prime minister is prepared to impose sweeping nationwide measures to curb the spread of Covid-19, it is understood. About 13.5 million people in the UK – one in five – are already facing local lockdowns after the government introduced new measures in parts of the north-west, Yorkshire and the Midlands. Speaking during a visit to Oxfordshire, Johnson said: “We are now seeing a second wave coming in. We’ve seen it in France, in Spain, across Europe. It’s been absolutely inevitable, I’m afraid, that we would see it in this country.”

(The Guardian)

 

Madrid Returns as a Center for Infections

Madrid, the region of Europe with the highest rate of coronavirus infections, has ordered 850,000 people not to leave their neighborhoods as it struggles to keep pace with more than 45,000 cases over the past two weeks alone. Under new rules that take effect on midnight at Monday and will apply for an initial period of two weeks, people can only exit or enter the affected areas for work, education, health or similar reasons. The measure will apply to the parts of Madrid most afflicted by the second wave of the pandemic — 37 areas largely in the poorer south of the city that account for 13 per cent of the region’s population and 24 per cent of its coronavirus cases. (Financial Times)

 

A Third Wave in Iran

Iran appears to be in the grip of a “third wave” of the coronavirus outbreak, with the number of new infections above 3,000 a day – as high as at any point since the virus first hit in February. Iran was one of the first countries to be struck by the virus outside China. Its officials brought the disease under a form of control by early May, but then experienced an increase at the start of June that drifted down to fewer than 1,600 new cases a day in late August. (The Guardian)

 

 

Is It Possible for Pre-Existing Immunity

Do many people have pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2? With public health responses around the world predicated on the assumption that the virus entered the human population with no pre-existing immunity before the pandemic, serosurvey data are leading many to conclude that the virus has, as Mike Ryan, WHO’s head of emergencies, put it, “a long way to burn.” Yet a stream of studies that have documented SARS-CoV-2 reactive T cells in people without exposure to the virus are raising questions about just how new the pandemic virus really is, with many implications. At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus.

(The British Medical Journal)

–Tracking the Virus Around the World–

–FROM JOHNS HOPKINS CSSE–

The Cultures of Dignity Resources for Supporting

Social-Emotional Wellness 

A Final Note: The AAIE COVID-19 Briefing is provided to support your leadership for the school community you serve. We encourage you to use these resources in any way, shape or form that helps you, your communications and toward furthering close relationships across your community.  – The AAIE Board