Drainville makes a mess of eclipse day
Bernard Drainville – there are times I think François Legault is actually a comedian, and has enjoyed the sheer chaos created by putting his most inept minister in charge of education – has changed up his orders for eclipse day and now says he wants kids kept inside school buildings and locked down so they can’t look at it.
But many schools have already made arrangements to close for the day so parents can decide individually how to proceed.
Update: Excellent Chapleau cartoon on the subject.
Myles 09:56 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
Are Legault and Drainville medieval peasants or something? This panic over an eclipse is the strangest thing I’ve seen in a while.
Kate 10:08 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
It’s got to be worries over legalities. They know that a teacher in charge of 30 kids isn’t going to be able to make them all use eclipse glasses throughout the entire eclipse, or stop all of them from looking directly at the sun.
Anyway, locking them down is not new. In a thread last month about the eclipse, regular commenter Nicholas says his class was locked in during the partial eclipse of 1994.
bob 10:31 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
When I was a kid long, long ago there was an eclipse one summer while I was at a day camp. Our counsellor was something of a science dude, so he used an old cardboard box and a sheet of paper to build us a camera obscura so we could watch it. All but two of us were instantly blinded for life. A girl in a different group caught fire and died.
Ian 10:34 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
Well played, bob. genuine LOL.
walkerp 10:56 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
This is like they are deliberately planning to re-enact Ray Bradbury’s painful short story “All Summer in a Day”.
Or maybe they know they are screwed for the next election so just want to go out in a full on car crash.
EmilyG 11:45 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
Keeping the kids in school later because the eclipse ends after 4 PM, is weird.
Kate 12:33 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
walkerp, exactly what I wrote in a comment in February!
Nicholas 12:45 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
Hahahahahahahahahaha only thing that would make this more perfect is if we had a province-wide curfew
GC 13:13 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
walkerp, I wish I were as confident as you that they are screwed for the next election.
jeather 13:18 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
How do they think the schools can just change their plans at the last minute? Even if the plan weren’t deranged (close the blinds and have the kids turn their desks?) a lot of parents have now made plans based on schools being closed, there are 8 school days left, including today.
Blork 17:43 on 2024-03-26 Permalink
We chuckle at how stupid people would have to be to stare at the sun during an eclipse. But have you met people? They’re friggin stupid. Almost all of them!
But seriously, it would be nice to know if this is a real threat or just an abstract theoretical one. A bit of Googling around reveals plenty of stories of people who harmed their vision during eclipses, but what kind of numbers are we looking at? Given that hundreds of millions of people have been in the path of solar eclipses over the past century, how many have been injured? A dozen? A thousand? Tens of thousands?
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that it’s frustrating to have these discussions when you don’t have any real data.
And the internet doesn’t help much. Among other things it surfaced was a National Post article lamenting all the car deaths that are caused by people driving to places where they can see an eclipse. FFS, abstract enough for ya?
CE 21:22 on 2024-03-26 Permalink
If you think the average person is stupid, remember that half the population is even dumber and there’s a 50% chance you are too.
Ian 08:17 on 2024-03-28 Permalink
You have a 50% of being smarter, too ….
Or maybe there’s a bunch of really out-there people skewing the average one way or the other …
..or maybe this is another tempest in a teapot our paternalistic overlords can’t figure out how to best mon-oncle through.