And now for another post that has nothing to do with standardized testing. In pockets throughout the US, data demands keep triumphing over common sense as standardized tests and test preparation pre-empt instructional time. (Yada, yada, yada.) I’ll keep writing the occasional test post, until I get some indication that those classroom instructional hours are being returned to students — many of whom desperately need them.

But this is another post, meant for both parents and teachers. For a quick breakdown of ADHD facts, see Common Characteristics of ADHD – Santa Monica College (smc.edu). Santa Monica’s list is incomplete, but an excellent start in breaking down this topic. This post is not exactly about ADHD and accommodations either, though, despite the fact I’m overdue at spending more time on this increasingly important topic.

I just want to share a shower thought with readers: As an ADHD person myself, I believe I understand an important fact that often gets skipped in social media posts and other articles about ADHD management: The trial-and-error process of medicating children with ADHD is not nearly the “to-medicate-or-not-to-medicate choice” parents and teachers sometimes seem to believe. By middle school, that choice is no longer entirely in adult hands. Here is what supervising adults are up against:

ADHD Amber or Anthony can easily self-medicate throughout much of America, probably almost all of America. How many houses stock liquor? And even before weed was legal, I guarantee my middle-school students were finding supplies. Some red eyes might have been the result of playing Fortnite all night, but others came with faint odors wafting off hoodies and hair, whiffs that explained Amber or Anthony’s mostly agreeable, if slightly blank or disruptive, classroom behavior.

“How old is the oldest tree in the world?”

“We can look that up later, Anthony. For now, we should be focusing on today’s math.”

Here’s the thing about Anthony: He may not be able to Total Recall his way to Mars, but he can for sure blunt his way to the easy chair in a friend’s basement. I tried to control my own kids’ viewing habits and I was partially successful. However, I could not control friends’ houses. And once we hand those kids their phones, all bets are off in categories across the board.

So the choice is actually between medicating, not medicating and self-medicating. The first time that child with generalized anxiety disorder — often concomitant with ADHD — inhales THC or downs a homemade cocktail, the question of medication may go sideways in mere minutes. Gloriously unafraid, having fun with friends, friends who are having fun themselves watching nervous Amber relax — Amber may have set both feet firmly on a path of substance abuse.

I don’t want to oversimplify this issue. I believe genetic components, personal ambitions, family dynamics and background, actual physical location, degree of anxiety or depression, and other factors weigh heavily in what happens next. I also believe that starting set points can sometimes be critical. How is Anthony doing in school? Does Amber have friends, family or a therapist to help her process her feelings?

Eduhonesty: My thought in the shower was a simple one. Those unmedicated kids who are not managing to navigate daily life somewhat comfortably will frequently medicate themselves. It’s so easy to find those “medications,” so easy to take that edge off, at least once out of elementary school.

Teachers are sometimes accused of pushing for medication in order to make classroom control easier. Parents are sometimes attacked for choosing medication, told they “just need good, firm discipline.” (Or spanking, or no red dyes, or less screen time, or the right vitamins etc.) Too often, outsiders don’t understand that those screens HAVE been limited in houses where nutrition is being carefully monitored and books on child-rearing are piling up on shelves.

All families are unique. Decisions like medication require the voices of trained medical professionals who are receiving robust information from families and schools.

Parents: If your school has suggested that Amber or Anthony might require medication, please listen. Teachers can recognize those kids who are outliers, the kids whose inability to sit and listen is interfering with learning. Falling behind is never trivial; somewhere up the line, a student can reach a point of no return — the point where no math tutor can fill in enough gaps to make success in high school algebra possible, at least on the first try. Academic failures eat away at self-confidence, no matter how many positive messages and participation trophies a child receives.

Parents and schools can control nutrition and medication in elementary-age children. At the doorway to adolescence, though, that control slips away. Middle school kids toss their healthy school lunches in the trash and share a friend’s bag of bright red Takis instead. They stash their bong at a friend’s house, the house with the comfy basement and parent(s) who work the swing shift. They perfect strategies not to be caught. Quote from a high school boy of my acquaintance: “The man who invented Visine should have got a Nobel Prize.”

I wrote this post simply to lay out a truth that can get lost: A too-scared, too-scattered kid is more likely to self-medicate than live out middle school and high school in confusion and fear.

P.S. I’ve done fine in life and so has my ADHD child. I hope this post doesn’t come across as ominous because ADHD has many positive aspects. Hyper people can be amazingly productive once they get to work on their personal passions. And many kids will avoid intoxicants even when they are anxious. Still, what I wrote above deserves consideration. I got all “A”s in my French, Latin and Spanish classes in my senior year of high school, but, damn, I was higher than that proverbial kite some days. The smoke must have been wafting off of me. My very Latinesque teachers just smiled and let me slide by. The world forgives “A” students easily and I think no one wanted to cause me trouble. I honestly don’t know why so many people let me pass, but they did, and it turns out I am not an addictive personality. The problem is: you don’t know if you can slough the monkey off your back until you try. Not everyone is lucky.

I was too young for the war of the sixties and seventies, and also too female, but not too young to understand what was happening. I knew older boyfriends and brothers were slogging through jungles while I did my French and Spanish homework. After a few years, I would know people who had seen the Tet Offensive and Operation Rolling Thunder. I spent a year with a boyfriend who had stories of Vietnam from back behind the front lines, a guy who had been in “intelligence.” Intelligence duties apparently included trying to figure out how to file — or lose — the report from soldiers who had placed an explosive rocket up a water buffalo’s rectum, blowing the poor creature into random chunks.

In December of 1969, the US government instituted a lottery system for drafting men into the army, the first such lottery held since World War II. Three-hundred-sixty-six balls* were placed in a large lotto-like, glass container, each ball labeled with a birthdate, to determine the order in which men between 18 and 26 years old would be called into active military service. This system still exists, waiting to be put back into practice: (See Lottery | Selective Service System : Selective Service System (sss.gov) for details.)

The lottery system sounds “fair,” in the sense that it’s based on luck. But the Viet Nam draft was never fair. During my high school years, my school’s high poverty rate and low college enrollment rate made my male classmates prime draft targets. College offered a student deferment, but many boys in then south Tacoma did not come from college families. They had never had college in their plans — though some changed those plans to include further schooling, while others fled to Canada. Draft discussions ate up time in hallways, lunchrooms, and afterhours gatherings. Draft, draft, draft and the luck of an early or late birthdate dominated conversations during key periods of the war.

Eduhonesty: Flip to 2022. The discussions are just beginning, a low drone so far. Young men in high school are googling draft information. Young women are reassured that women are not included in any possible draft — though some are aware that a law intended to add them to the draft only recently failed to be passed. The courts have also suggested a gender-based draft may no longer pass muster. (Can women be drafted for war? (the-sun.com))

It’s early yet, but as we keep moving to support Ukraine, this topic is likely to gain momentum. I don’t recommend bringing it up. That will legitimize a still nascent fear that most likely will come to nothing. And our kids are so worried. The last few years have ensured a high level of anxiety in already-jittery students.

But I would prepare my “this is why you should not be worried” speech, my “we are a long way from boots on the ground” and “the current army should be able to meet any military needs without instituting another draft” speech. Because the topic has been edging into timeliness for weeks now. In these convoluted times, we owe our kids the benefit of a reassuring adult perspective. These kids grew up with Lone Survivor, Fury, JoJo Rabbit, Dunkirk, and Hacksaw Ridge, after all, not to mention decades of older war movies.

I do suggest we wait for them to bring that topic out into the open. We can create the very fear we are trying to assuage. I don’t believe atomic bomb duck and cover drills of the fifties and sixties made students safer, but they certainly made them much more frightened of nuclear annihilation. As we cowered below our desks with our heads on our knees, waiting for the roof to fall, at least some of us believed that roof might actually fall.

I suggest the draft as one topic we ought to hash out in our minds before it enters our classrooms. Hugs from the Blue Room, Ms. J

*February 29th is the reason why the year does not match the number of balls.

Let me start by saying a “20-minute lunch” is not a real thing. Millions of US students experience that so-called 20-minute lunch daily but calling their experience “lunch” is like calling the January 6th incursion into the capitol building “confusion over opening time.” A lunch of 20 minutes — the CDC calls for this — can be expected to be less than 20 minutes. Yes, many schools allocate a full half-hour, but books must get to lockers, students must get across schools, many people have to go to the bathroom all at once, and then everyone has to navigate that long, snaky line.

See Why Teens Are So Miserable (& How We Can Help) (zdoggmd.com). Zubin Damania is a hospitalist, known on YouTube as ZDoggMD. Aside from his negativity on masks in schools, he nails a number of issues squarely on the head in this video, addressing rising levels of teen sadness, anxiety, and mental health. Our children are becoming more alone, though often more alone with a phone, he observes. Where are the in-person social connections?

Eduhonesty: I’d like to flag something. That 20-minute mastication period does NOT qualify as an in-person social opportunity. Once recess has disappeared, our middle school and high school students lose their venues for social interaction, unless they seize that opportunity in class — as a regrettable but understandable number do. In elementary schools, those recess times keep shrinking too.

Having shared my lunch period with students, I know that bolting down a piece of pizza and and a mug of coffee doesn’t leave time for any real conversation. I still have to throw away my green beans,* after all, and probably take something to the main office. And my kids still have to throw away their milk cartons and green beans, and then go to lockers to retrieve afternoon class materials, fitting in a bathroom break along the way. Not all kids can get out of that bathroom in two minutes, especially girls.

I am writing this post to suggest we share with parents and others a truth escaping many people: Lunch sounds like a break, a chance to talk with friends. However, depending on the school and even the location of a kid’s locker or number of bathroom stalls, that “break” may be PURE FICTION. Like a daily planning period that keeps getting pre-empted for meetings, only some of which result in planning, lunch for many of America’s students does not offer the oasis of friendship its name implies.

To liberally paraphrase an old quote from the 1988 Dan Quayle vice-presidential debate: I knew lunch. Lunch was a friend of mine. Reader, these are not lunches. 

Hugs, to my readers. A small blog post that’s a drop of water in a larger, toxic ocean that is sweeping our kids to lonely places, lost in a crowd, often with phones to isolate them further.

*Feel free to look up the sodium target 2 in schools — (USDA’s Final Rule on Milk, Whole Grains, and Sodium in School Meals – EveryCRSReport.com) I don’t want my post to spiral off-topic so I will keep this short. You can get away with barely — or not — salting beans when they are fresh, but after beans have cooked nonstop for hours, only butter or at least salt will rescue them.

Changing standards should never be taken lightly. New standards always require a deluge of meetings and professional developments downstream, meetings and PDs that are followed by the added time sucks of new lesson plans, new lesson sequences, and often new books and software. Those lessons and materials only sometimes mesh well with previous learning. The careful sequences that curriculum committees put together for student transitions from year to year? Any appreciable change in standards risks blowing up all that previous curricular work, leaving numerous fragments of dead and disconnected lessons all over the field.

But who is counting? That’s the real problem in this scenario. Who is tracking the mandatory costs from government and district demands — let alone the fuzzier, sometimes-optional instructional costs that come with professional development, new materials and rewritten lesson plans? Accountants will track new books and software within the district, along with costs for professional development and related speakers, but not all expenses can be laid out cleanly in a spreadsheet. Opportunity costs end up ignored in particular.

A term from economics, opportunity cost refers to the value of whatever you cannot do because you chose to do something else. It’s the cost of the road not taken, and like that road, its outlines are hazy, offering no more than a glimpse into what-might-have-been. What is the cost of not doing something? If a district commits to using its available time and money to build a new extension onto the lunchroom, it probably cannot add a weight room onto the gym. Our districts have a finite amount of time, money and other resources available. Once the addition to the lunchroom is chosen, the district has implicitly given up the weight room. The opportunity cost is the value the weight room might have provided, a cost that cannot easily be determined.

Choices are often mutually exclusive. Every time we force teachers to dedicate chunks of their daytime hours to new brainstorms, those teachers must reallocate their time, and something has to give to make room for Brainstorm #23,489. Those somethings are our opportunity costs and they cannot be turned into hard data, so they mostly end up ignored by administrators and bureaucrats. If Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black are forced to give up morning or afternoon tutoring time to learn their new books and materials, who notices? Besides Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black, that is, who may be silently cursing as they tweak or entirely redo once functional sets of slides they prepared only the year before.

Rewriting standards and making educators drop everything to learn another set of changes…and then devise matching curricula again! …Aaghhh. Yet some states have changed standards more than once in the last decade. The standards situation resembles a remodeling run amuck, as a too-wealthy, too-bored would-be interior designer keeps changing the floors, walls, fabrics, paints and lighting until nothing works and nobody knows what to expect, even as the bills pile up and cracks appear in overloaded plaster. Teachers just start walking around bits and crumbles of plaster, trying to find the now rickety stairs. (Damn, I’m fascinated at how we keep working sometimes.)

We don’t need perfect standards as much as we need to settle on a good set of robust, adaptable standards that we can and will stick with – allowing for desperately needed continuity of instruction. The Core played hell with that continuity, incidentally. That’s a major part of the reason my students were drowning when it was first introduced.* But this post is not about the Core and it’s not about standards. It’s not exactly about opportunity costs, either.

This post is about LURCHING — lurching from one new program or idea to the next. Any teacher could tell those Secretaries of Education, district administrators and other pundits that routine and continuity are vital components of a successful classroom experience. Yes, sometimes gifted students can leap buildings in a single bound but, for the so-called average kid, staggering from one person’s great idea to the next person’s great idea without any rational bridge connecting those ideas… well, it doesn’t work well. If it works at all. Changed curricula leave holes in the learning ladder, a hole invisible to creators of new systems because they already know the curricula. And it’s harder to see a missing piece when you are already certain that piece is in the puzzle somewhere. Let’s say Sergei was expected to learn zygotes in fourth grade but zygotes just moved to third grade instead, a grade that Sergei just finished without learning anything about zygotes. Sergei’s personal curriculum just dropped zygotes entirely, but how is he to know? His teachers probably know but they are dealing with an avalanche of changes. Zygotes can easily fall through the cracks. There are no zygote emergencies, after all. This topic just becomes one more thing to pick up later. Or not.

What our brainstorms tend to ignore is that changes on a macro level throw micro levels out of whack. And micro levels are where our kids live. These abrupt changes are hard on teachers, but they are often harder on students. I said this post is not about new standards, and it’s not. It’s about the people inhabiting — the people living inside — today’s US educational system. Flexes in school routines are inevitable. New information must be incorporated as learning and technology advance. Changing demographics may require shifts in instruction, such as added English language support. Plus an unexpected coronavirus can create dizzying changes in rules and expectations virtually overnight. .

Eduhonesty: BUT WE NEED TO STOP IMPLEMENTING GRANDIOSE SOLUTIONS TO MURKILY-DEFINED, OVERSIMPLIFIED PROBLEMS.

NEW STANDARDS AND NEW TESTS WITH ADDED TEST PREP LEAD TO INCREASING LURCHING DOWN IN THE CLASSROOM. The zygotes go quietly missing, along with the analog clocks and maybe even some critical, fractional pizza slices meant to be added together. Too much is happening all at once. The fractions receive limited practice due to time constraints, and next year’s teacher may have to start almost at the beginning of again slicing up that pizza pie.

I’ll throw in a personal story: I used to be astounded at the number of middle school students I received who could not read the analog clock in the wall at the front of the classroom. “Ms. T, what time is it?” “Is it almost lunchtime, Ms. T?” “How soon is the next class? Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Class start-times were posted, but it doesn’t do a student much good to know that social studies starts at 10:59 if he or she can’t read the clock.

A spiffy digital Darth Vader desk clock solved my immediate problem, but I wondered what was going wrong. Then I had a long conversation with an elementary teacher who explained that the “clock standard” was at the end of the year, only new standards kept being inserted into her curriculum, and nobody in her school was ever reaching that clock standard before the end of the school year cut them off. That standard then disappeared into the mists. It wasn’t in the next year’s curriculum. Once it “timed out,” it wasn’t anywhere. Since it pretty much vanished from the standardized tests after its slated “year,” no one had an incentive to tack those missing clocks onto the script a year later, even if there had somehow been time, which there wasn’t.

I miss twenty years ago. Before the tests took over, I believe a kindly elementary school teacher would have stepped off the bus for long enough to teach the missing clocks. But he or she can rarely risk doing that now. Everything is too scripted. Too often, the standards have to be on the board and a teacher found stepping off the common, test-based lesson plan can even be reprimanded for not teaching from a sometimes wholly inappropriate script instead. The impact of this set-up is hardest on the kids already on the wrong side of the achievement gap, of course.

Nuff’ said. Hugs to my readers, Jocelyn Turner

*Going sideways for a minute here: The phrase “my students were drowning” sounds like hyperbole, an overstatement. But that phrase is actually an understatement. Drowning may be awful, but it’s fast. What happened to my students and many other teachers’ students was not fast. It was 180 days of being frequently lost, as they were presented with obligatory new material that did not necessarily relate to any previous year’s instruction — setting the stage for long and tougher years to come.

Thinking of Dr. Seuss here:

“ALL BALL We all play ball.

BALL WALL Up on a wall

ALL FALL Fall off the wall.”

And teachers are not only falling off that wall. Some are dive bombing. Mid-year resignations keep coming at us, even as an unfortunate few just emotionally check out of the crazy while still driving to work — ending a “long long song” that some exhausted voices have quit singing.

Eduhonesty:

And regularly changing rules doesn’t help us. Since masks made most teachers feel safer, I’d have left the masks in place. To my knowledge, not a single child has died from mask-wearing in school. Add to that, children don’t have the slightest idea that someone may be “imposing on their freedom and personal liberty” unless adults decide to share adult viewpoints that the littlest ones can’t begin to grasp. Many students don’t have the slightest idea what this mask/liberty thing is all about. They just know the rules changed again.

A little more Seuss?

“Pup up. Brown down.

Pup is down. Where is Brown?

WHERE IS BROWN?

THERE IS BROWN!

Mr. Brown is out of town.”

And so are Mrs. Brown and a lot of Mr., Ms. and Mrs. Joneses, Smiths and Fernandezes.

They quit mid-year, convinced the hiring stigma associated with not finishing a contract did not matter, because they never, ever intend to return to teaching anyway. Others are planning to finish the year but are flipping channels on the professional remote, while waiting for the bellhop to come carry their personal books out of a room they may have occupied for years or even decades.

I think we are about to discover that that Mr. Brown is NOT coming back with Mr. Black. Poor Will has gone up the hill and he is planning to stay up that hill still. Teachers were never an inexhaustible resource. The new teachers that some people expect to rescue US schools? First and second year teachers significantly underperform more experienced colleagues — and that’s in good times. All reports on student behavior from the last few years suggest the pandemic years have inspired challenging behaviors at best and, on top of everything else, resignation-provoking ones at worst.

It’s been a “long, long song,” but all songs come to an end. Many individual teaching careers are on their last notes right now and the reason is simple: “Dad is sad very very sad. He had a bad day. What a day dad had!”

I am honestly kind of astounded that we could not have left school masking in place. How many times did we have to hop on pop without once thinking about pop’s feelings? Little children have an excuse. Hopping on pop is fun. But adults will be wondering soon where all the teachers went. No doubt research will be conducted to figure out what happened. Education Week will be cranking out articles with strategies to attract and retain teachers.

Will we be able to fix the mess we are making? More autonomy, less scripting, less testing and more money would certainly help, but right now I am shaking my head in disbelief as education somehow seems to have devolved into mask wars instead of math wars.

Will we able to fix this mess? As Theodore Seuss Geisel said: “Ask me tomorrow but not today.”

I can only hope tomorrow will look better than today.

End November 2017 Haiku

“My Leg Hurts Because My Foot Exploded”

Ms. Turner sitting

Calf and thigh high! And foot, sigh,

My foot broke itself.

I didn’t fall off the bleachers. I didn’t twist an ankle or slip on a patch of water. My foot simply… bruised from the inside and swelled up. They sent me home from the ER using a walker. The foot’s fine now. I had healed by late the following week, at least well enough to walk without assistive devices. But I still don’t know what happened except I was on that foot, climbing bleachers, while going back and forth and moving nonstop all day in a gym. Still, all teachers have nonstop days — now more than ever.

Eduhonesty: I used social media today to advise a teacher to try meditation, tapping or medication — whatever it would take to get her through the teaching day without ending up hurting. I read too many posts lately from teachers with headaches, teachers who are nonstop anxious, who are sick or recovering from being sick.

Does this describe you? Or someone else you know? Physical symptoms of stress should not be ignored in an effort to complete Lesson Plan #284 for the year. You only get one body and one life, one shot, as Eminem sang.

I don’t plan to go into detail about my haiku. I just want to flag that physical discomfort I kept walking on. It’s too easy to take a purple Nexium and ignore a stomach, or to down another Excedrin for the latest headache. It’s too easy to work through pain, ignoring the message underneath.

My foot gave me warnings that day. But I just kept going until I couldn’t keep going and then I borrowed crutches from a school nurse to half-hop to my car and somehow drive to the ER. One shiny, new metal walker later, I made my way home, where I then spent the week watching TV with my foot elevated, startled to discover I hadn’t gotten away with my determined effort to work through the pain.

As Madonna sang, “pain is a warning that something’s wrong.” What we may forget, especially when day-to-day pressure is too great — I have to get that spreadsheet ready before tomorrow’s meeting! — is that sometimes tornado warnings are followed by tornados. That pain? Something’s wrong.

I am writing this post to plead with educators to take care of themselves:

• Before that slow, labored hop to the car.
• Before kind ER nurses and doctors start attaching devices to fingers, chests, arms and ankles.
• Before helpful techs start wheeling your supine body to various imaging machines.
• Before maybe you do yourself damage you can’t easily or ever fix.

Remedies for physical and mental stress are superabundant today: meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, massages, exercise classes, tapping, hypnosis, music, recreational reading, walking, art, funny videos, essential oils, gardening…etc. I recommend locating and printing a list of remedies. Highlight your favorites and make a schedule. Pay for that yoga class if paying will get you to park and walk through the studio door. And if you are hurting, please see a doctor. When all else fails, medication may be required.

One last observation: If your workday REGULARLY causes you physical pain, that’s your body trying furiously to reach you. Whether you need another district, another administration, or another profession altogether, your instincts are already kicking in to push you off your chosen path. Don’t let your brain lead when your gut, head, or right foot are trying to break into your internal conversation.

Listen to your body.

After the first vaccinations, many people took a deep breath, relieved to again plan visits to their favorite pizzeria, ice cream shop, or barbecue place. Birthday parties were expected to rocket back onto the calendar. Vacations were booked for spring and summer breaks. We waited for normal.

And we waited. And waited and waited and waited. Disappointment defined 2021, casting 2022 into an ominous light. When weary people got together this year for the holidays, omicron numbers unsurprisingly exploded. As Princess Leia once told Han Solo, “It’s not over yet.” When Han replied it was over for him, well, that was an example of wishful thinking at its finest. Omicron case counts remain problematic, although fortunately we appear to be on the downward slope of this latest COVID-19 surge.

It’s easy to write a COVID-19 post that chronicles the virus’s attack on US education, but I’d like to go someplace different today: I’d like to list one win: Our students are learning an amazing amount about life, even when those lessons are unpleasant.

For example:

• A virus can fuel a breakdown in services and supplies.
• The supply chain’s links can break.
• A hospital may not always have drugs or beds.
• ER patients may be kept in a hallway for days.
• Grocery shelves can be nearly empty.
• Finding toilet paper may take multiple stops.
• Shop hours are unreliable.
• Favorite places may close all day when no one can be found to open the doors.
• Sadly, those doors may even shut forever.

More importantly for students’ daily lives, we are learning:

• School schedules cannot be trusted.
• This week may be virtual, but maybe not.
• Teachers may be absent often– and can even disappear mid-year.
• Skyrocketing illness cases can shut down just about anything.
• Substitute teachers cannot always be located.
• Even when available, not all subs can do the day’s math, science, or your-subject-here.
• Paraprofessionals, bus drivers and other staples of school life may also disappear.
• Classes when suddenly combined together seldom work well.
• Discipline tends to unravel with too many routine changes.
• Classes without discipline or routines waste huge amounts of time.
• Learning is complicated when repeatedly interrupted.

Long discussions about “entitlement culture” have picked up impetus while also giving way to changed discourse. Young people are growing up fearing for the future of a planet that had once seemed inexhaustible. These kids saw childhoods and young adulthoods perverted and shaped by the past two years of COVID reality.

But I must also observe that our kids are learning and being shaped by the new world — and that fact’s not all bad. They are going to produce a culture that has been informed by their experiences. They will eventually determine the world in which we live — what people read, what they watch, what they talk about, what they do and how they live. I hope they will build a kinder world. I am certain they will build a more realistic world.

Adults of the pandemic have been shocked and even derailed by events in the recent past. Today’s children are growing into that world, however, and children tend to be remarkably adaptable, at least compared to adults. As part of the natural course of childhood — because they are still world building — they can incorporate shifts into their personal paradigms that stagger adults.

Let’s take childcare. Adults were poleaxed by sudden childcare crises during the pandemic. I predict the next generation will not leave childcare as a national piecemeal, patchwork disaster-in-waiting. Our children have seen what happens when the absence of childcare comes up against urgent need for that care. They will understand that unaffordable childcare might as well be no childcare.

Eduhonesty: This next generation has the potential to be wiser than generations that came before them. Greta Thunberg and others her age have been leading efforts to pull climate change to the front of the world’s agendas. High school students have been walking out of school in support of teachers and improved school safety protocols. Adolescents navigating today’s high schools are poised to become this nation’s leaders, and they have learned invaluable lessons in the recent past. They will know that public health cannot be an afterthought, that clear communication of risks should be at the forefront of public health planning, and that schools cannot continue to deteriorate while budgets get debated.

We ran at the edge of functional, not thinking about what might happen if our barely funded schools, 95% occupied hospitals, and just-in-time* inventories might be dangerous. We took for granted the goodwill of the world, assumed that China would send us our drugs, silicon chips and finished lumber. But the mask shortage brought home a truth quickly: When demand greatly exceeded supply, those N-95 masks did not cross the ocean. Meanwhile, the price of lumber skyrocketed.

Quite a number of things have appeared to be crumbling lately, some to near their breaking points. Prices have made scary leaps. I just checked a receipt and found out I had purchased a $6.99 loaf of artisan bread. We were at least a year late purchasing our used van.

But, in “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” author Carol Dweck offers lessons that many teachers have been sharing in America’s classrooms, beginning with one critical concept: Mistakes can help us grow. Our students have observed firsthand the effects of mistake after mistake. If there’s a word that exemplifies how this pandemic went so wrong, that word is unpreparedness. Our society will not be so unprepared in the future. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience unfortunately comes from poor judgment, a truth that casts the last few years experiences into a more hopeful light.

We became careless. No one asked critical questions: What if we can’t get that medication from China? What if Taiwan stops selling us silicon chips? What if the world does not experience peace in our time?

If a learning curve can be a mountain, the COVID curve unquestionably qualifies. Yet our students are going forward, talking about racial and economic inequity, gender inequality, their own identities, and where those identities fit within their cultures. They are debating how to best manage safety during a plague: Mask or no mask? How long to quarantine?How to manage sports and clubs? Children and adolescents absorb every single day around them. They learn from what they see, and then break down and break out the meaning of their observations, often in conversation with peers.

I feel hopeful when I think about today’s students. These kids are talking together, and many are focused and urgent in their desire to improve the world. I trust our next generation to embrace the challenges revealed by the last few years. I trust them to learn and stretch themselves. I trust them to stay focused and, most importantly, to remember the perils that the adults in their lives forgot.

*Just-in-time is an inventory management method in which businesses keep as little inventory on hand as possible. That means those businesses don’t stockpile products and raw materials in case of future need—they simply reorder products to replace those already sold. This saves money storing products and a great deal of thought and energy goes into finding the magic line where a business does not run out of inventory and lose a sale, but also does not have to store or manage any significant quantity of that inventory. That’s part of why the toilet paper disappeared.

P.S. Testing has gutted social studies in some areas as schools focused on mathematics and English for the test, cutting social studies minutes and skewing curricula toward the tests. We must rein in the testing monster. Those who don’t know history ARE condemned to repeat it. Lessons from the Spanish Influenza might have made the last few years much easier.

From: (An assistant principal who always meant well)
Sent: (Before COVID)
To: (Around fifty teachers and paraprofessionals)
Subject: Referrals are in

Referrals are in, referrals are in!!!  I only order (sic) 2500 since the past two years we haven’t exceeded 2400.  They are in my office for pick up, please feel free to stop by and pick them up!

(An assistant principal who always meant well)

(Name of Title 1 school)

(Somewhere in the Midwest)

Eduhonesty: Found this while cleaning old email. I remember we ran out of referrals in the spring. I am sharing this because the number is worth a moment’s reflection. Currently, the school has closer to 600 than 500 students, but those are hardly large urban numbers. It’s a little smaller than the US average. (Table 5. – Average public school size (mean number of students per school), by instructional level and by state: Overview of Public Elementary and Secondary Schools and Districts: School Year 1999-2000 (ed.gov))

I stopped to think about this, reader. Let’s do the math: 2,400 divided by 180 = 13.33 referrals per day. Except we ran out of referrals. Let’s say the number turned out to be 14 or 15 referrals per day. Let’s also note that school policy had teachers managing many behaviors without use of referrals. Teachers were to manage lesser infractions such as the random swear word or “tardiness of less than 5 minutes” etc. That “Prior Action Taken by Teacher” on the form is all about avoiding office referrals, and I don’t want that to seem a criticism. Teachers should not be bombing the office with every kid who decides to drop an “F” bomb when he hears his ex-girlfriend may be seeing a new guy.

The numbers will not be in yet, but I don’t personally know a single teacher who does not think that behavior is worse post-pandemic than before. For one thing, we have added a whole new category of infraction: refused to mask/distance/follow COVID protocols. Changes in routines alone are throwing off even the go-along, get-along crowd, many of whom want their old schools and their old lives back.

I only want to make one observation here: Admin may be struggling but those well-meaning assistant principals and deans must step up to the plate right now. Teachers are too busy to manage afterschool and lunch detentions. They may even be covering for a colleague at lunch. Deans and others who are part of the disciplinary process may want to let the little stuff go because of the sheer volume of referrals, BUT THAT MUST NOT HAPPEN. The kid who gets away with stealing an extra hour of game time on Tuesday will try to steal two hours on Wednesday. Kids naturally take advantage of weaknesses in policy enforcement, and if a kid gets away with cursing at his or her teacher once, that behavior may even be pushed pushed pushed just to find a limit — or find out there isn’t one, not really.

I am reading all sorts of “should I quit” posts and even “I am so glad I quit” posts on social media right now. Many say things like, “the kids are awful this year, worse than I have ever seen in my (10-20-30) whatever years of teaching.” “I can’t handle this anymore.”

Depending on their location, kids may be experiencing whole new levels of stress, unlike anything in their earlier lives. Their behavioral shifts are understandable. They are suffering from rapidly changing routines and expectations, leaving many nervous, angry and confused. Some have suffered family job losses, illnesses and even tragedies. This fact leaves administrators and teachers feeling a natural compassion and desire to go easy on off-the-charts behavior.

But we cannot afford to be too understanding. Student behavior has always been a major component in how teachers view their jobs — probably the major component — and teachers’ working conditions must be prioritized. A teacher shortage is coming, a fiery comet blazing in our sky. In some areas, the comet has entered the atmosphere. Schools are tapping district office secretaries and IT support people to teach in classrooms. Palo Alto High Unified School District asked for help from parents to help keep schools open Palo Alto schools recruit parents for support as teachers, other staff call in sick amid omicron surge (mercurynews.com). I wouldn’t be surprised to find a few maintenance and lunchroom employees helping to hold the line. Staying firm on student misbehavior will help keep teachers in the classroom — and students on track academically.

I see many changes coming, including better pay for teachers eventually. Shortages push up salaries. That’s still in the future, though, and right now this country needs to support and nurture teachers. That means letting them send kids out who are disrupting the learning process. It may mean taking advantage of recent steep climbs up the remote learning curve. Suspensions can include time logged for learning from home. Yes, some kids won’t log on, but while we don’t seem to be watching a planet-killer of a comet yet, that post-impact tidal wave may not be far away. School districts are seeing educators leave profession at alarming rate (kktv.com)

Eduhonesty up: With all of our recent educational changes, figuring out where to put our energies will be tough. One major item to prioritize stands out, however: interventions to manage student behavior must be positioned front and center. Strategies for behavior management must also be created with the understanding that teachers cannot add hours to their day to manage those behaviors. Too many are already drowning as they try to juggle home, family and job requirements. Too many keep finding themselves with 36 hours of work to do in a 24 hour day.

School administrators need to step out onto the front lines to manage this problem. If next year’s curriculum meetings don’t happen because of today’s disciplinary challenges, last year’s curriculum should become the default move. Business cannot continue as usual. Teachers who feel unsupported, or even isolated, are choosing to move on. I know a fair number currently who are only hanging on to reach a critical point in their pension benefits before turning in retirement forms.

Discipline should be the central topic in those schools that are struggling with surging disciplinary infractions. If thirteen office-managed disciplinary infractions have crept up to twenty-some infractions, classroom learning has already been badly impacted by those behaviors. Teacher morale is going down rapidly, too. I absolutely guarantee this. Teacher morale is DIRECTLY tied to student learning for most teachers.

All eyes now should be watching our teacher exodus. We can recover from many forces undercutting education. We can’t recover from a widespread, permanent loss of dedicated teachers.

Antibiotics for 20 Days

Small sick one sneezes

all over wet sub papers.

I want to go home.

Not in the Gym though She’d Like to Be

Broken young humans

wear boots and casts to walk.

Humans break easy.

In Self-Contained at the End of the Hall

Dan who cannot speak

moans, waves hands that cannot grasp,

runs and talks in dreams.

Eduhonesty:

One thing about “Dan” that people may miss. Not all our Dans and younger children can tell us if they are sick. That 20 days on antibiotics was real, and I walked right into it. I’d been sitting beside “Alex,” this nonverbal little guy all morning, smiling at him as his large dark eyes watched me. It wasn’t until he took my hand when we walked to the bathroom that I realized how hot he was. Heat was baking in silent waves off that little hand.

Kids don’t get the same cues adults do and they don’t always understand those cues. They throw up all over their desk and the classroom floor because they don’t see it coming. Or they know they feel nauseated but they don’t know exactly what to do next. This is not a bathroom emergency for which the protocol is clear. Should they ask to see the nurse? Interrupt the teacher? Do they feel that bad? Before a kid comes up with a working strategy, breakfast may spew all over everywhere, and suddenly the custodian is doing biohazard duty while the teacher is heading off future teasing and managing excited eruptions throughout the classroom.

As to that girl missing gym, that above haiku contains another truth: Kids will go to school injured, and older kids especially will also choose to go to school sick. They don’t usually get on the bus or in the car when aching and feverish — although that happens — but humans, young and old, are masters of rationalization. “It can’t be COVID. I don’t feel that bad.” “My allergies are so bad right now.” “If I don’t go, mom won’t let me go to Erin’s party tomorrow.” “I promised Mark I’d meet him at lunch. I don’t want him to go to lunch with Marta. I know she likes him.” Children and adolescents tend to live in the present, with friends and fun trumping any other considerations.

Even parents rationalize away illnesses. Or ignore them. I got pink-eye twice from a bank vice president — or, rather, her daughter who turned up in class with eyes that shouted, “Doctor, please!”

Eduhonesty: This post is in support of teachers who are asking parents and others to understand why they don’t want to be in the classroom when children are demonstrably getting sick all over the country. I’d like to take a moment to praise those Chicago and other students who are raising flags about health and safety. No, some schools at this time are not safe. For those schools, a remote option should be available.

This is not convenience. This is health. The evidence has been piling up that not everyone who gets COVID can expect to be well in two weeks — or even two months. A close relative of mine lost her sense of taste and smell to COVID and still has not recovered those senses; it’s going on one year and two months now and counting.

Schools are not little corporations filled with adults who understand expectations and protocols. They are often old, too-airless buildings filled with kids who look like sardines while navigating passing periods. Most of those packed-in kids remain hazy on germ theory, although they know much more than they did two years ago. And, oh my, can America’s students be slimy. I have wiped so many noses in my past and watched at least as many noses get wiped on handy sleeves. Sometimes kids with bad allergies just run around with snot on their face for months. That’s kids, especially in winter.

I understand the fierce desire to open school doors. This is education, and for many children education works best inside a classroom. Opening those doors is a tough decision, one which has to be informed by numbers, but what I want to emphasize is this: NUMBERS ARE NOT ENOUGH!

The plans we make also must take into consideration KIDS — KIDS who are not now and never have been little adults. Numbers from a mostly adult population don’t truly apply to groups of children in closed spaces. Children cannot be treated as inputs into a plan that ignores childhood.

I don’t know how we got to this place, this angry place that has many parents and others demanding a return to the education of 2018. I understand fully the desire to go back in time to a simpler time. But simple plans can be too simple and bold policies can be too bold.

Let’s try to put this in a nutshell: Government leaders and school board members are creating and implementing strategies that rely on the diligence and caution of people who still believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy. In middle schools and high schools, those plans expect circumspect behavior from adolescents. “Circumspect adolescent” is a perfect oxymoron — a case of clearly misunderstood use of exact estimates which somehow end in an only choice that is no choice.

When transmission rates are too high, I believe we must shut the doors. We don’t have to shut those doors for the year or maybe even for the month. But we must be ready to shut the door until the wave passes:

1) For the sake of the grandmas and grandpas who may end up coughing and feverish, shots or no shots. My boosted mom is doing pretty well after a week with COVID, but her bedrest likely created increasing problems with a clot in her leg.

2) For the sake of other family members whose “sick leave” may have already left and whose income may not allow them to skip work. US businesses now often have a vaccine or weekly test policy, but omicron is managing to break through the vaccines. My mom is a symptomatic break-through case in a memory care facility. It’s worth taking a moment to think about places where employees are tested weekly. If Tom is tested every Wednesday, what happens when he gets sick on Thursday? The answer will only sometimes be, “Tom takes time off and goes to bed.”

3) For the sake of the kids who do not need the guilt of thinking they made their family or friends sick — or worse. For the sake of the kids who may get sick — yes, the percentage of truly ill children with COVID is extremely small, but a small percentage spread over millions of kids will result in many very sick kids regardless. And when “Dan” starts getting really sick, he will struggle to communicate that fact. Our schools are filled with vulnerable kids. At the start of the year, a teacher is given a list and there is nothing strange about finding students with diabetes, immunosuppression from medications, or chronic lung disease. (These kids should have a remote option regardless of the state of the pandemic.) Obesity is an established risk factor for children and is rampant in the US today.

Plans for outbreaks should always include well-thought-out options for closing the doors in worse case scenarios.

Christmas break anyone? It’s finally arrived. Has it felt like a super long year so far? If you are sitting reluctantly at the computer still, wishing you were “done,” this post is for you. Readers, please pass this on to coworkers who may also be hunkered down working. Let’s all stand up for our own version of nap time.