The Impact of masks on learning

 https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/mandatory-masking-of-school-children-is-a-bad-idea/

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372?query=recirc_mostViewed_railB_article

We have heard it said that children are resilient. That does not give us the authority to abuse them and disrespect their bodily autonomy. 

If we are going to experiment with our children, I ask you to prove that universal mask wearing in school is safe. First do no harm. Masks are harming the social-emtotion health of our children, interfering with their education, and creating greater risk for a variety of physical consequence such as headaches, rashes, cavities etc. 

You have created the proverbial rock and a hard place. Wear a dirty rag on your face or close the school. This is not the real issues. We can rely on ventilation, cohorts, cleaning surfaces, stay home if your sick, etc but this begs the question since when did we become fearful of getting sick? One doctor says we should have covid parties because we are all going to get it eventually so let's get on with it in a controlled way to boost the immunity our children have. 

Classical education and new research on how we learn. 

We know that emotions affect the ability to learn. Under fear, stress, anxiety cognitive function shuts down the emotional system blocks access to working memory and higher order thinking. Dr. Schultz calls this toxic stress. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/

1st we look at eyes 

2nd we look to the nose and mouth for effective communication-auditory signal is impaired because it absorbs frequency bands in speech. The visual signals from the lips is completely obstructed which impedes understanding speech leading to missed information or misunderstanding information. 

-facial expressions show emotions which are a big part of non verbal communication and used as social cues. Emotions play a large role in social interactions like learning. Both positive and negative emotions are difficult to interpret with masks so individuals come across as indifferent leaving the brain of the student confused. Emotions are processed in the brain and they stimulate neurons, smiling broadens cognition and increases creative thinking. Our children are being deprived of this positive reinforcement and beneficial stimulus to creative thinking. Actions do speak louder than words. Whereas criticism creates anxiety and reduces creativity. In fact, anxiety, stress, etc put up a block to learning. The mask creates psyiological situation of stress can't breathe, low oxygen intake, can't read the teachers facial expressions etc. Perhaps this is why there was a 20% increase in the number of children under 18 being prescibed antidepressants and other medications this past year. 

"A student looking at the critical face of a teacher thereby becomes less creative, and thereby less able to solve math problems, which increases the likelihood of math anxiety to develop [51]. This decreases creativity further as well as increases anxiety of not being capable doing mathematics in a vicious circle – independent of mathematical talent!"

As stated above, the face provides a universal language for communication, in particular, the communication of emotions. The mouth region on a face conveys information that is crucial for smiling, i.e., a positive emotion, which can work as social glue and facilitates positive social cognition and action [69]. Not seeing the bottom half of the face makes it particularly difficult to recognize a mask-wearer's positive emotions – pleasure, joy, happiness, amusement, sociability, and friendliness – as they are basically communicated by a smiling mouth. Therefore, face masks impair mainly our positive social interactions and our ability to understand, and empathize with, one another. 

There are two types of smiles, true smiles and dishonest smiles. A true or genuine smile, also known as a Duchenne 5 smile, involves both the mouth (the zygomatic major muscle raises the corners of the mouth) and the eyes (the orbicularis oculi muscle raises the cheeks, forms crow's feet around the eyes, and causes the eyebrows to move closer as in frowning). In contrast, dishonest smiles, which are also called “fake smiles”, “Botox smiles”, “Pan Am smiles6 ” or “non-Duchhenne smiles”, involve only the voluntary raising of the corners of the mouth in order to intentionally signal politeness. 

Given that the real smile involves the upper and the lower half of the face, with the upper half providing the distinctive “frowning” that renders a smile a true smile, there is a lot of room for misunderstanding: Face masks block the smile and allow only the frowning to be communicated – which may actually be worse than no smile at all! In general, as face masks cover the bottom half of the face, the ability to detect positive emotions and to discriminate between emotions is considerably impaired. Movements of the lips and the display of teeth are no longer perceptible by the observer, leaving only the top half of the face for detecting the mask-wearer's emotions.

I already mentioned the possibility of interpreting only partially-revealed facial expressions wrongly, i.e., misconstruing frowning and the squinting of the eyes without a visible mouth as skepticism rather than true smiling.7 In addition, emotions such as surprise or disgust that utilize the mouth may be mistaken for strongly negative emotions such anger or sadness. In sum, masks may increase the perception of negative emotions and diminish the perception of positive emotions.

In a 2017 study that looked at how basic emotions are process it was discovered that emotion recognition relied mostly on the area of the mouth and eyes. Fear and sadness could be seen in the eyes, whereas disgust and happiness were more successfully identified when subjects focused on the mouth region. 

If applied to the use of face masks in school settings, these results suggest that happiness and disgust are less likely to be recognized, whereas fear and sadness may be recognized with a higher probability. Given that disgust is an emotion only rarely displayed in school settings, the net result of face masks may well be that the covering of the mouth, i.e., the “organ of smiling”, leads to diminished perceived happiness.

In addition, the existence of a face mask may reduce the motivation of the wearer to produce facial expressions in the first place. Since such expressions serve the purpose of communication, the realization of wearing a communications-blocking device will reduce efforts to facially express emotions.

Moreover, according to the “embodied emotions hypothesis” first proposed by William James more than one hundred years ago, not physically displaying emotions reduces their experience. In their view, specific behaviors cause us to experience emotions (and not vice versa), as exemplified in the following statement: “You are not crying because you are sad, but you are sad because you are crying”. Accordingly, once you no longer produce a smile, you are less happy. And since the perceiver of your face does not perceive the emotion because of the mask, both the sender and the receiver of the emotional communicative signal will be affected by the face mask.

At the same time, emotional mimicry and thereby emotional contagion [59] is interrupted by the mask as well, i.e., the social phenomenon that we are involuntarily copying the facial expression of other people with whom we communicate. As the emotions of the viewer also follow his expressions, his or her emotions will be blunted as a result. These reactions are typically outside of conscious awareness and occur within half a second [23].

In sum, recognition of, and response to, the outward emotional displays of one's peers’ faces is a critical and necessary component of social interaction in schools. It helps pupils and teachers to modify their behavior in order to align with social communication and behavioral norms. When these emotional displays are inhibited by face masks, our ability to communicate effectively with one another is reduced and we are primarily left with mimicking negative (frown) emotions. All of this happens primarily outside of conscious awareness, and hence, is hard to be consciously controlled or even corrected. Since emotions are a major driver of group cohesion, the decreased emotionality, and decreased positive emotionality in particular, may interfere with smooth classroom action. Given the fact that the very process of learning is facilitated by emotions (this is their main raison d´être), face masks are likely to cause some interference with pedagogy.

"In fact, the most basic form of communication between humans is by facial expressions. This is because facial expressions are a simple universal language that we instinctively understand [25]. It may be for this reason, that many people do not like the wearing masks at all in the first place.

Face masks cause headaches due to low oxygen intake recycled CO2. "Face masks may further cause perioral dermatitis with rashes and redness, i.e., an infection of the skin around the mouth because of saliva, sweat, and moist vapor between the mask and the skin. This may provide a breeding ground for bacteria. Itchy rashes may be caused by irritant dermatitis, caused by the mask and/or the attached rubber strings rubbing the skin of nose and ears [63]."

It became clear that they interfere with practicing psychiatry: The decreased emotional observability made the job harder to do. A psychotherapist wrote me an email, noting that socially complicated and challenging inpatients in psychotherapy are very difficult to treat, “as dissociative states and tensions are much harder to detect early enough so that appropriate interventions can be performed. 

Without facial detection it requires us to be more articulate with our expressions counteract the lack of facial emotion. Masks remove the emotional connection which social interactions rely on. Throughout Europe schools have stopped using masks in school. They understand that masking healthy children with almost 0 risk of getting seriously ill is bad for learning. 

The real reason we are wearing masks is to keep the illusion of a pandemic and an emergency state that has allowed unconstitutional emergency measures like the vaccine. If the emergency ended tomorrow the vaccine could no longer be used because it is emergency use only and none of them are FDA approved. 

We should balance our current situation-0 cases or just a few cases that are outside the school. Contact tracing lets people know if they came into contact with the individual so clusters do not move into outbreaks. 

• • Wearing a face mask may give a false sense of security and may make people less compliant with other infection control measures.
• • Because of problems with understanding speech (see below), people may move closer together, without intention, and thereby increase infection risk.
• • Wearing face masks may cause glasses to fog and thereby cause anything from discomfort to accidents.
• • Wearing a face mask makes the exhaled air go into the eyes. “This generates an uncomfortable feeling and an impulse to touch your eyes. If your hands are contaminated, you are infecting yourself” [44].
• • “Moreover, a fraction of carbon dioxide previously exhaled is inhaled at each respiratory cycle. Those phenomena increase breathing frequency and deepness, and they may worsen the burden of covid-19 if infected people wearing masks spread more contaminated air. This may also worsen the clinical condition of infected people if the enhanced breathing pushes the viral load down into their lungs,” the authors add.
• • When infected people re-breathe air in the mask, their virus load increases.

In other words: Whereas face masks are intended to ease the burden of the pandemic they may at the same time make it worse under certain conditions.

In addition to these problems of physical health, three more problems of using face masks have to be addressed: Impaired face recognition and identification, impaired communication, and blocked emotional signaling.

Testing and using competency based grading 

As a member of the Parents for Excellence in Education group, I would like to talk about current brain science and evaluate what I have seen as positive actions taken to meet the needs of diverse learners and where there is potential for huge gains. There is one area in particular that interests me-retaking tests and correcting tests as a means to a better grade. According to neuroscience this is ineffective in helping the student learn the material however it does get the student a better score. What is our goal? Could we have a student do a project in lieu of a test? Do we strive to meet the needs of diverse learners who are not classified as LD with IEPs or 504s? The mission statement below is as vague as my agenda item. It is a good mission but one must ask how this will be accomplished. 

I am still working through this and of course there is not a single study examining the impact of masks directly on the neurological pathways of children/teens/adults. I can anecdotally tell you that suicide rates are up, drug and alcohol use is up, and 20% more children are on anti-depressants and anxiety med

Focusing on failure reinforces incorrect neuropathways. It increases the chance that the mistake will happen again. Therefore error analysis of tests-doing test corrections do not help. Competency grading does fit into Deweck's Growth Mindset paradigm. However repeating the same material does not equate to learning the material. It must be taught in a different way or assessed differently for learning to take place. Repetition is good and necessary but there must be new information and novel methods of instruction. Novelty stimulates the feel good hormone dopamine which enhances learning through increased motivation. New and different ways to reinforce learning. When kids say it's boring they are not lying. That is a useful assessment that should be heeded to a degree.