Too hot for learning

Outside it was 95 degrees. Inside I don’t think it made 90. I’m not sure. Maybe it did. It was dauntingly hot regardless. Only the spray bottle saved me. It’s extremely hard to learn in that sticky, oppressive heat. It’s at least that hard to teach.

Especially in poor districts, there are still many schools without air-conditioning systems.

If this keeps up for a few weeks, my meltdown may be impossible to prevent.

Eduhonesty: We are starting schools earlier and earlier in order to be ready when state testing rolls around in the spring. But in poor districts, air-conditioning may never have been installed. My district started in the middle of August, as has become common, and I’d like to declare that early start a probable waste of time.

Like farmers, teachers in these old schools are at the mercy of the weather. Early fall is blazing away in the Midwest, sun trapped by walls of windows, heat rising to second floors where fans are useless. Above the mid-eighties, fans simply don’t work. Students don’t work either. I take them to air-conditioned spaces, but I am sharing these spaces with other teachers. Lessons are presented in abbreviated form. Individual instruction time is high but group time has been gutted by the need to be considerate of colleagues’ classes.

We have lost a great deal of time in the last two weeks to soaring temperatures. We should have started after Labor Day, as schools once did.

I want my lost two weeks back.