Is anyone in your class Godzilla? I disturbed a Zoom Chat recently. I had entered late and accidentally hit the button for no video. My back-up shot of a fire-breathing Godzilla popped up instead of me. Oops. I could see from their expressions that the presenters of the autism session were a bit spooked.
I was a present version of that absent 5th grade student who had posted a picture of himself on the screen and gone off to play video games. Virtual humans can look awfully real. Unless they are Godzilla, of course.
What does this mean for teachers? Openers that must be turned in. Exit tickets that must be turned in. And addressing Fred or someone near him during the class session with a question — not a gotcha question, possibly not even a critical thinking question – but a quick query that shows Fred actually saw the last slide or two on the screen. If we are interactive enough, we can make sure our “classroom” is filled with real people who are listening. This requires switching in and out of presentations potentially — a skill that must be practiced by some. Is there a bored grandparent or another adult you can use for practice sessions? During the first few weeks of school, I suggest practicing on people who can give you tips. You might even ask adolescents of your acquaintance how to hold on to their audience.
This is new. We are all still learning. Even taking attendance can pose challenges. Social media platforms are definitely your friends, right now reader.
Eduhonesty: Frustrated by your technology? I hate to make suggestions that cost money but… You might benefit from an extra monitor to extend your Zoom or Google view of the class and your material. Ask friends at school or online for help making this work. Donations might rescue you. A surprising number of people have extra monitors sitting around in their attics or basement.
Right now, I know many teachers who are finding their laptops inadequate or problematic. Some are thinking of going shopping. For those who are thinking about buying new technology because current, district tech is not working — and let’s be honest, your district’s tech may not be the best tool for the job — I want to make a strong recommendation. GO BIG! A big screen and big processing power will cost more, but I have never regretted buying more. I have regretted buying less. You may be teaching remotely all year, or off and on throughout the year. There will be enough frustration without having to look at pictures that are tinier than they have to be. You definitely don’t want processing delays. We all know how quickly kids stray off task.
Yes, this may seem like a VERYEXPENSIVE version of buying your own markers, pencil sharpeners, staplers, paper and tape. I’m sorry about that. But these are the minutes of your life. If ever there was a time to treat yourself, I’d say the 2020-2021 school qualifies. Just focus on the fact that this new toy will be in your house or empty classroom. This is not a pencil sharpener to be worn out within the year. This machine is a present you are giving yourself.
If you do decide to buy the technology you want, I have a recommendation: When communicating with the salesperson, tell that person you are looking for a machine that will enable you to play any game on the planet. That move can be counted on to result in scary prices, but we are not talking about a short-term purchase. You may notch your expectations down from the first few suggestions, but I’d start at the top and work down.
You may discover a whole new love of gaming that you never had.
Hugs and good luck to all the short-term and long-term virtual teachers!
P.S. I expect I am preaching to a fully informed choir, teacher readers, but don’t believe anyone who tells you they are planning to open… in a few weeks, in October, or when the numbers come down in the next month or two. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. That aggravating district laptop might be doing virtual duty for awhile.
Voices are already rising, speaking up to warn us that virtual learning will widen the U.S. achievement gap. In a fractured year, beset by learning losses, the risks from online instruction must not be slighted. Our property-tax-based funding system has long ensured that wealthier students have more access to academic resources than less lucky counterparts. When those differences were merely battered versus new textbooks, and occasional shortages of markers or #2 pencils, funding differences could be (mostly) ignored. Teachers in poor schools simply spent much more of their own money on markers and pencils, among many other supplies. But students everywhere (mostly) had the tools for learning.
Online-learning is a game changer though. We can’t let COVID-19 distract us from the technology gap. As distance learning becomes the norm in some areas, we must put our gaps — both technology and achievement — into the spotlight.
Remote learning won’t be easy. The technological piece has been a hidden flaw in our property-tax-based funding system ever since the first school computer labs arrived. Socioeconomically advantaged areas are heading into 2020 with ridiculously more ammunition in their learning arsenals. After I retired, I subbed in wealthy and economically-disadvantaged areas — working where I lived and where I had once taught. Technological ironies did not escape me. In neighborhoods where each child already has an iPad or MacBook at home, schools issued 1:1 devices to take home. In areas where the only internet connection may be on phones, schools passed out devices from computer carts and then collected them at the end of the school day.
Schools are working frantically to get those devices into homes now in areas where education has left the building. But all those years of growing up with technology in the home still leave groups of students at a technological advantage. Even typing speed matters. Students who have been keyboarding since youth can get a great deal more work done sometimes simply because, in a fixed amount of time, 60 words per minute produces a great deal more output than 20 words per minute.
We must shine the spotlight on the achievement gap this year — as often as possible. The fight to keep COVID from widening that gap will be a real one — and let’s hope for funding help sooner rather than later. No child should have to go online on a phone in a parking lot to find out that day’s assignments.
Many children with no internet connection at home have been doing their homework in fast food restaurants and coffee shops. In too much of the country, though, that option is no longer available right now. Restaurants are closed or family members don’t want children sitting for hours in public locations. Those students may in fact be working in parking lots.
Eduhonesty: I view this as a COVID-19 opportunity. In parts of the country, school is appropriately being offered online. Let’s get the information out there now: Does your school have adequate technology for 1:1 learning, the tech power to send home a functional device so every student can access the internet? Do students have internet connections? How many students are out of luck because their Chromebook or device is broken? Or because something has gone wrong with a charger? How much technical support is available to students?
Due to differences in school funding, the tech gap has been taken as a given, a strange version of “we will always have the poor among us.” But that technology gap will factor hugely in the achievement gap over the next year or two. “Maria” in the house with computers in her mom’s office, her dad’s office and her own bedroom can pretty much ignore technology. Some desktop, laptop, or iPad will deliver the information her teacher provided in her virtual classroom. But what about “Ramon,” who has been relying on mom’s phone and who now needs to figure out this new hunk of metal that he has been issued? How will we keep Ramon in the game?
My suggestion to teachers and others: Share. When you see your students or your child at a disadvantage technologically, when you see the tech gap interfering with learning, go online. Share that missing internet connection. Write what you see on Facebook or other platforms. Tweet what you see. Find me at
#eduhonesty@ShastathePlaid
and I will be happy to share for you. The technology gap has been pervasive, long-standing, misunderstood and underreported. Let’s seize this time to try to fix that gap.
“While more affluent districts implemented 1:1 technology long ago, low income urban districts have faced many challenges in making it happen. Funding issues and connectivity voids for families have been major hurdles to overcome, both of which have been tackled by Oklahoma City Public Schools in the time since schools closed last spring. Utilizing federal and state CARES Act funding has allowed OKCPS to purchase devices for all students, and WiFi hot spots for families without connectivity.”
“A 2017 survey of more than 400,000 K-12 students, teachers, librarians and school administrators conducted by Project Tomorrow, a California nonprofit dedicated to educational equity, found that lack of in-home internet access is an enormous problem for students in all 50 states. This has been corroborated by researchers at Pew Research who discovered that 17.5 percent of school children in grades 6 to 12 have ongoing difficulties completing school work due to a lack of internet access.”
Hugs to my fellow teachers who are sometime reeling from reading silly comments. One especially aggravating comment criticizes teachers, claiming that they have had six months off already and should get back to work. That comment is absurd. So is the comment that suggests teachers should not get paid unless they are inside a classroom teaching live students. Is the idea that America should stop paying people for working remotely? Well, I guess that’s one possible plan — a spectacularly bad one at the moment.
Those posted and tweeted complaints may be contributing to demands that teachers go into empty schools to teach online classes. Big Brother has to watch us all, I guess. But couldn’t we just leave it up to parents to tell Big Brother if “Ms. Jones” has been watching Steve Wilkos instead of teaching? I think that would work fine, while saving teachers gas, time and aggravation.
A little more faith in teachers would help teachers right now. Non-teacher readers? You have no idea how many teachers are crying every day — either because they have to go into a live classroom and they are scared, or because they don’t have that live classroom and miss their students and the starting rituals of the year.
Many people outside teaching have no idea how much work has gone into remote learning. How many times did friends of mine call their missing students in the spring? Some nights, middle school and high school teachers called their entire classes. Those nightly calls went on repeatedly while those same teachers kept trying, trying, trying to create lessons that would get students to log in. Especially bad above the elementary level, noncompliance with school expectations has been rampant. I suspect parents put at least some of these kids on the honor system, and, ummm… not all kids behaved honorably.*
Yes, remote learning may be a tremendous pain to implement. But it’s still the best of bad options in certain geographic locations. Some areas remain unsafe — and more unsafe for parents, grandparents and older siblings than kids.
Parents, do you have a few free moments? Why not email your children’s teachers to say thanks? Due to some pretty nasty online presences, combined with a seismic shift in teaching strategies and expectations, those teachers may need all the virtual hugs and words of encouragement that they can get right now.
And if you know anyone posting those inflammatory tweets and posts? Let them know how underinformed, self-entitled and simply ugly their words and sentiments appear.
*I’m sympathetic to parents who thought their children were doing their work because I’ve been there. My youngest just quit doing homework one middle-school semester and it took us awhile to dig out of that hole. Parent-reader, my spouse and I learned that year that asking, “Have you done your homework?” is not always enough. I recommend asking to see the actual work, too. Email teachers when you have questions.
“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.” ― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
The decisions are mostly made now, but circumstances are likely to unmake some of our school openings. I have never seen a version of what I wrote below and I think it’s critically important. Death is far from the only factor to reckon with in opening schools. Below: About the scariest post I have ever written, and the reason why I favor virtual learning for many geographic areas.
Update October 16, 2020: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/a-rare-covid-19-complication-was-reported-in-children-now-it-s-showing-up-in-adults/ar-BB1a5H2v?ocid=msedgntp: “We were seeing patients who admitted to the ICU with organ failure,” Dr. Hugh Cassiere of North Shore University Hospital on Long Island said. “They would test negative for Covid-19, but test positive for Covid-19 antibodies, suggesting they’d been infected previously.
“You look back, and they probably had this multi-system inflammatory syndrome,” Cassiere said. “We didn’t have all the pieces to put together.”
The multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children is well-known now. What’s becoming more clear is that this syndrome is not limited to children. Look up MIS-A.
Update September 3, 2020: Penn State’s Director of Athletic Medicine just said cardiac MRI scans revealed that approximately1/3 of Big Ten athletes who tested positive for COVID-19 appeared to have myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can be fatal. It’s a major cause of death in the young and “healthy.” (Since this article, that 1/3 has apparently been amended to 15% — but that’s still 3 out of 20, and helps emphasize how little we know.)
“In mid-March, Amy Thompson’s daughter, Amber, called her from a shift at Starbucks and told her mom she felt a tickle in her throat she couldn’t get rid of. Within hours, the college freshman had a fever and a nonstop cough. After some struggle to find a site that would take her, Amber tested positive for COVID-19…”
Amber has spent the last six months in bed. She’s still sick — too sick to work, and sick enough to be in a wheelchair some of the time due to extreme pain in her hands and feet. What happened to Amber is rare — but rare or not, Amber’s struggle is real, and she is not alone.
The long haulers are real. The inflammatory syndrome being seen in children is real. Inflammation follows this virus on little cat feet in some cases. In others, it moves in like the proverbial 400-pound gorilla. People get sick. An unknown percentage of those people stay sick. The current estimate is that there are tens of thousands of long haulers, people who have recovered from the initial virus attack but who have lingering symptoms. These people are “over” COVID and can be expected to pass their COVID test – but they are not well.
I suggest reading the above articles. We may end up with hundreds of thousands of people suffering from this post-COVID condition. One intimidating fact: Many long haulers had mild cases. They were never hospitalized or, in some cases, even tested.* These people are still struggling six months after their illness. Symptoms are variable. Extreme fatigue is common. Brain fogginess and unusual heartbeats combine with breathing difficulties and other simply miserable, lingering symptoms. This condition can be disabling.
In pediatrics, doctors are seeing a “multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, which appears to occur not typically with acute infection, but following the acute infection by a short period of a few weeks… multiple systems are involved with inflammation, including skin, joints, kidneys, lungs and heart. And some of these kids can be very sick, with rare deaths.” (https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/07/08/from-lung-scarring-to-heart-damage-covid-19-may-leave-lingering-marks/) As CDC statistics indicate, these unlucky kids are unlikely to die – but death is not the only risk from COVID-19.
Risks to long-term health should not be ignored because we don’t yet have a number to pin on this phenomenon. The data is still flowing in, data corrupted by testing problems. False negatives can range from 20 – 30% according to healthline.com, and tests may also come back negative if a person tests too late into their recovery. More importantly, children often don’t get very ill and frequently end up never being tested.
In fact, in the absence of a hard numbers on long haulers and pediatric inflammation, we should be extremely careful right now. What are the long-term effects of inflamed hearts, kidneys and lungs? As of July 29, there had been a total of 570 U.S. cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), according to research published in the Aug. 7 early-release issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report — a very tiny percentage of the 338,000 kids estimated to have gotten sick. I’m sure there have been more MIS-C cases since, still representing a tiny, tiny percentage of total cases. But what about milder cases of inflammation? Milder cases of fatigue or shortness of breath that never make it into the pediatrician’s office? Or don’t get flagged because fatigue is not rare in children, and that gastrointestinal illness that was COVID never got diagnosed?
Children do tend to recover well from illness, but it’s worth taking a brief visit into the past as I write about this topic. In the early and mid-1900s, the U.S. was full of adults and children who limped or even needed wheelchairs or iron lungs (respirators) after contracting polio. Others made apparent recoveries. I hate to travel down dark alleys, but I’d like to point out that those recoveries did not always last a lifetime. My grandmother had a rough time in her fifties and sixties. She leaned on that cane often. Post-polio syndrome sometimes appeared “decades — an average of 30 to 40 years — after the initial polio illness.” (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-polio-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20355669) Grandmothers and grandfathers began experiencing pain and weakness in muscles and joints, fatigue, muscle atrophy, breathing problems, and sleep apnea, among other concerns.
Decades later, a seeming complete recovery can go sideways. What if COVID lungs that recover at sixteen years of age only make a 95% recovery? A young adult could recover well enough to function absolutely fine in everyday life – until he or she is not fine. Maybe “not fine” doesn’t arrive until the vaping catches up at 60 years of age instead of 70 years of age. Maybe “not fine” doesn’t arrive until diabetes and high blood pressure finally do enough damage on top of earlier, COVID kidney damage to start dialysis at 50 years of age instead of 70 years of age. Maybe without COVID, that dialysis would never have been required.
Eduhonesty: Those long haulers ought to be spooking us all. The word inflammation ought to be raising huge red flags where opening schools is concerned. The children won’t get “very” sick? How sick is very sick? What will the long-term consequences of post-COVID inflammation become? What will that short elementary school illness mean when they are fifty? Or sixty or older? What will it mean if they become regular drinkers or smokers?
I would bet that the vast majority of kids who get ill will be absolutely fine. Children have remarkable powers of recovery. I can’t say the same for their parents and older family members, but I know I am not talking about anything like bodies in the street here.
I also can’t provide a wealth of data to support my case. We are just discovering the long haulers now because we are reaching the half-year mark from when the pandemic took off. Doctors and others are beginning to realize that many voices are asking sobering questions: When will my energy return? Will the scar tissue in my lungs heal? When will my thinking clear up? Why does my heart race? Why does it skip beats? When will the fevers stop? We are in uncharted territory with the long haulers.
Yes, kids don’t seem to get very sick – but they get others sick. The data now fully supports the idea that – duhhh – you can catch this disease from your child. And those kids who do get sick? An extremely small percentage ends up with a vicious complication afterwards. But we still don’t know how many might end up with a milder version of that complication. How many might spend a year or two tired and achy, not so tired that they shut down, just tired enough so they come home from school and fall into bed regularly while taking Tylenol on bad days? “Mommy, my back hurts again…”
Because we don’t know exactly what we are up against, we should tread as lightly as possible. Schools should not be opened based on wishful thinking. We truly are balancing health against knowledge. Healthy people can always regain knowledge. The libraries of the world can be tapped from our phones today. But those kids forced into classrooms to gain a few extra mathematical processes, scientific facts and new vocabulary words? Will they – or more likely their parents and grandparents — be able to regain their health when our re-openings go wrong?
In regions with high infection rates, the schools should stay closed.
Coming soon: Tips for teaching remotely. Teachers are working furiously to make online learning work.
*Today’s big piece of advice: THINK YOU HAVE COVID? GET TESTED. IF YOU THINK THE LAST TEST WAS WRONG, GET TESTED AGAIN. Because if you are right and you do end up as a long hauler, a positive test will help you qualify for medical support and benefits.
“Dr. Nathalie MacDermott, a National Institute for Health Research academic clinical lecturer at King’s College London and London hospital physician, told CNN she had seen more cases of children affected by MIS-C(multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children) than acute Covid respiratory illness.
‘At the moment there’s no concrete data that’s been published in relation to children and long-term problems, but that’s because we are still fairly early on and children haven’t been so badly affected,’ MacDermott said.
‘It’s certainly possible that children may experience the kind of problems we are hearing about in adults such as long-term fatigue,’ she said.
‘From a clinical perspective we are only really seeing those children who were admitted to hospital so it’s very hard to know what’s going on in the community.’”
I’m not exactly ashamed. I tell myself I was busy — and I was nonstop busy, with small children, adolescent children, work, evening school to get a teaching degree, and finally classroom responsibilities loaded on top of family life. My union was merely a fee deducted from my paycheck. I came close to needing help once or twice, but the union existed mostly at the far periphery of my life. Versions of me abound in the teaching world. We buy the union like we buy insurance. Then we stick our card in the glovebox and forget about it.
But now it’s 2020. If I go to Twitter and other online sources, I find those unions speaking out for teachers. I find the voices demanding safe working conditions, many of them union voices. I also find panicked teachers, trying to avoid being forced into classrooms that don’t feel safe.
Who speaks for the teachers? The saddest part of my card-in-the-glovebox approach can be seen in areas where individual teachers are speaking for themselves in a cacophony of social media posts scattered across platforms — because no central voice exists to speak for them now, no voice with numbers behind it, no voice that brings power into a discussion that’s all about power.
We let our unions slip away. I’d venture to guess that some teachers were even relieved when the laws passed that stripped them of their collective bargaining rights. I’m sure a few who no longer had to pay dues felt happy to see the extra money for Starbucks and classroom supplies. Flood insurance is a nuisance until the flood.
That flood’s here, murky water climbing the steps and beginning to pour under the front door. The right to strike was the one real power teachers possessed in the past. Strikes remained uncommon because strikes were often avoided by negotiations. But it’s tough to negotiate if you cannot bring leverage to the table. Without an organization behind them, teachers’ words become garbled and disconnected sounds, lost right now in the sheer deluge of COVID-19 craziness.
Eduhonesty: So what next? Now I guess we just keep shouting. We keep posting pictures of unsafe conditions — except many teachers are afraid to post those pictures for fear of losing the positions that pay for the groceries and roof over their heads. In some geographic regions, teachers are left to hope that adolescents with cell phones will speak for them.
Years ago, I should have been taking a long, hard look at this map. Instead, I bought school supplies and decorated classrooms, while teachers in state after state watched as legislators stripped teachers of their limited privileges. Those politicians did not understand why people serving on the front-lines of education might need a voice in charting education’s path.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) came at us. We worked on, despite the fact that teachers in academically-struggling areas understood quickly that ensuing attempts to teach to standardized tests were leaving many students behind — the very students the program had intended to help. Response to Intervention and Race to the Top came at us. We worked harder, knowing that RtI, especially, favored wealthier districts. Poor districts ended up diverting staff from classrooms to do mandatory small group tutoring, often resulting in decreased instructional time for the overall student body. The Common Core came at us. Math teachers went off to learn how to teach a new mathematics, a math parents did not understand. Parents could no longer help with even elementary math homework unless they received tutoring themselves. Classics of literature were replaced with nonfiction how-to books. And still we worked on.
Oh, articles were published in education magazines and websites. Books were written, some sitting today on nonfiction shelves of libraries. Teachers blogged and went to school board meetings to try to explain what they saw unfolding around them.
But again, too often, without the force of an organization behind them, without the job security they had once had, teachers mostly did not speak too loudly, not in those gray areas on the map above. They had families to feed. They had school supplies to buy for their classrooms and for their own children, and a dream to hold on to — that dream of being a teacher. Brainstorms from Washington, D.C., kept descending and when teachers saw those brainstorms were hurting students, not helping them, not enough people listened as the nation’s teachers said: in disadvantaged areas especially, these plans are not working. When the country’s beleaguered teachers tried to speak up, without unions, without organization, without power — other people who had no classroom experience managed to explain their remarks away. Other people mansplained their remarks away.
The very fact that the Common Core got as far as it did should tell us one thing: Teachers, we must take back our right to organize. We must release our muted voices. How do we do this? First I suggest we vote for any and every plausible PRO-UNION candidate. I suspect those candidates will almost all be Democrats. Then we must reclaim the gray areas on the map.
How can we do this?
Pull the card out of the glovebox. FIND each other. As I said in a previous post, if the #MeToo women found each other, then the #RebuildOurUnions teachers can find each other. Obviously, August will be too chaotic to launch that rebuilding this year. Too many of us are merely hoping to survive August as #schoolmageddon2020 takes off.
But for the sake of the kids, we have to #RebuildOurUnions and #ReclaimOurVoices.
Can we put that on the calendar for the first real lull in 2020’s COVID storm?
Let’s start with the Big Now-Historical Fact: The government lied. They knew masks were helpful at controlling the spread of airborne viruses, and yet key players discouraged mask use at the beginning. At the beginning … when we might have won this thing — when contact tracing might have been possible — they told the American public that masks would lead to “face touching.”
Most people went along, although I remember a masked woman in my favorite grocery store, saying to me. “Yes, we’ll think for ourselves.” I mean, duhhh. Those hundreds of thousands of doctors haven’t just been indulging themselves in a weird face-covering fetish for decades.
But alleged authorities warned us away from masks. I understand why. In a pandemic scenario, the United States was desperately short of basic personal protective equipment (PPE). Health care workers were about to get clobbered if toilet paper was any sort of a leading indicator, and toilet paper turned out to be a great leading indicator.
Yes, we have no N-95s today. Or tomorrow. Or for the indefinite future unless you work in healthcare. Even then sometimes you have to get lucky. And just last week, CNN reported that “the United States Food and Drug Administration is loosening the requirements for surgical masks, citing shortages.” The situation appears dire in some nursing homes to judge by this title:
While not directly related to this blog’s educational mission, I think the (INSANE) problems of convalescent care facilities should not be left as page 9 news. NOBODY SHOULD BE FIGHTING TO FIND THAT PPE BY NOW!
Teachers are still out of luck. It’s August. Schools are opening. Students share pictures of packed hallways and water fountains that have been turned off. We have pictures of smiling teachers in face shields and maybe-smiling teachers with faces covered, crinkly eyes above fun masks made at home or purchased online. Paper and fabric masks of varying quality are turning up in stores and at art fairs. Social media users caution teachers to wear both the mask AND the shield.
Eduhonesty: I wrote a version of this post in late July. Nearly a month has gone by, yet those medical grade masks simply are not out there — not for teachers, anyway.
How did a country with the resources and technological know-how of the United States reach August without decent PPE — especially masks — for teachers? My new Etsy mask? I like the fact that these masks have a pocket for filters. I am using coffee filters. They also have a thin pocket for nose wires, slightly more comfortable on the nose when I bend wires to fit my face, which keeps my glasses from fogging. I love my favorite Etsy masks. But I’d never enter an operating room relying on the witches’ cauldron mask below.
I’d never enter a classroom either. I am a retired teacher. Would I substitute now if I had a supply of N-95 masks? In some districts, I just might. That statement’s entirely theoretical, though. I’m not going into those rooms depending on two layers of fabric and a coffee filter — although many other teachers are doing exactly that. Other teachers are using mask versions that involve only one piece of fabric.
Posts abound on social media asking how to avoid fogging glasses. Big indicator: If your glasses fog, your mask is not well-sealed. I’ve worn those N-95s. If the fit is right, the glasses don’t fog. Air’s not supposed to be blowing out all over the place from the top and bottom of the mask. That’s not the idea behind filtering.
But teachers are not being given much choice. Real masks? Caregivers and teachers would love to find those masks — only in many places they can’t. I’m not sure where the masks are hiding. My social media groups are spread throughout the country and the mask fight appears to be taking place on a national front.
The “donatation” is pretty funny — if you don’t think about the implications.
This is a travesty. We knew about COVID-19 in February, and some pivotal government groups appear to have known earlier. We locked down in March. It’s August.
In my view, the current administration didn’t just drop a ball.
Instead, they lobbed a cluster bomb — directly into the heart of American education.
We desperately need to come up with a less incendiary set of responses to a perfectly natural fact: Schools provide childcare. Schools have been providing childcare forever. In the early 1960s, my mom worked as a surgical nurse with the Veteran’s Administration while I was in school. My aunt covered for brief periods before and after I made the three-block walk to Jennie Reed Elementary School.
Parents and employers work around their local school schedule. “Jenna” works nights as a hospital nurse. “Dan” gets the kids up and starts breakfast while Jenna drives home. He goes to work and she finishes getting the kids ready for school, staying up until the bus arrives. Then the kids go to school and Jenna goes to bed. My friend Jenna was chronically sleep deprived for a few years, until her youngest boy could manage on his own for a few hours in the afternoon.
I read a tweet that said we were endangering teachers so rich people did not have to pay for childcare. I’m sure that’s true in some cases. But it leaves out a much larger group of people – the working poor and the working just-getting-by. I worked part-time when my first child was a toddler – 30 hours, “Director of Corporate Communications” and a chance to write and regularly share time with geeky programmers and other fun adults. But I quit when my second child was born. I ran the childcare cost numbers, realized I would be working for fast-food wages at best, and decided to stay home. I remained the classic soccer mom until my youngest was in middle school, when I entered teaching.
Childcare – never cheap and sometimes nerve-wracking, especially right now.
Schools historically have provided a safe haven for children so that people can work. Parents rely on schools for this purpose, especially since few families can now survive comfortably on one income. Employers recognize this fact and often schedule around that window of working opportunity.
SO PLEASE LET’S STOP POINTING FINGERS AT EACH OTHER.
TEACHERS, THOSE PARENTS MAY RISK LOSING THEIR HOME AND LIVELIHOOD WITHOUT CHILDCARE. MAYBE THEY GENUINELY CANNOT AFFORD TO PAY FOR CARE– ESPECIALLY IF THEIR HOURS HAVE BEEN CUT BACK OR THOSE HOURS ARE ERRATIC.
PARENTS, PLEASE, PLEASE STOP BLAMING TEACHERS FOR YOUR PREDICAMENT. THEY DON’T WANT TO GO INTO THE 2020 SCHOOL BUILDING? GO ONLINE AND LOOK AT THE PICTURES OF THOSE ROWS IN THE ROOMS WHERE ALL THE FUN, FUZZY PLACES HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED DUE TO CDC GUIDELINES. THE SCHOOL YOU WANT IS NOT THE SCHOOL YOUR CHILDREN WILL GET — NOT THIS YEAR ANYWAY. YOUR CHILDREN WILL NOT BE CLUSTERING ON THE LITTLE RUG IN FRONT OF THE ROOM OR HUGGING IN THE HALLWAYS. PARENTS OF OLDER CHILDREN, GO BACK IN YOUR MEMORIES AND VISUALIZE THOSE HALLWAYS AND BATHROOMS — EIGHT PASSING PERIODS FILLED WITH A CRUSH OF BODIES EVERY SINGLE DAY. DO YOU REMEMBER BATHROOMS? DID YOU ALWAYS WAIT FOR THE SOAP DISPENSER? DID IT ALWAYS HAVE SOAP?
Please, let’s be kind to each other. Let’s understand that parents and teachers both have their backs up against the wall. Nothing good comes of pointing fingers at each other. In fact, this finger-pointing does genuine harm. The parent-teacher relationship ends up damaged, a relationship often pivotal to academic success. Teachers feel unsupported, while parents feel that teachers don’t understand the problems closed school buildings create – and the two groups waste their energies.
We should point our fingers at the government and other leaders who led us to this place, who underfunded schools for so long that those schools are difficult or impossible to ventilate and clean correctly.We should point our fingers at the decision makers who brought us to the point where we have over one-quarter of the world’s COVID-19 cases yet only 4% of the world’s population. All this scientific and technological know-how and the better part of a year to prepare and…. What did we get? A spectacular mess.
America’s teachers are not responsible for the mess. Parents obviously are not responsible either. To my readers who want to write an angry tweet, letter, blog post or meme: Who do you believe made the decisions that brought us here? If you are not sure, you might do your neighbors a favor by finding out and posting your findings on a local, neighborhood app. Point your angry tweets at the responsible parties.
Teachers and parents — we are the workers, cobbling together our children’s educations. As the school year begins to unfold, I hope we can take it easy on each other. The outside world seems to be doing a good enough job of making us miserable without any extra help.
Another use for neighborhood apps: Making childcare arrangements that work during uncertain times. Can you trade time? What can you trade in return for time? If the infrastructure is not holding up to demands, what can we build to replace it?
Teachers have been talking about the funding crisis, even as legislature after legislature made it harder for them to act. No unions allowed. No strikes allowed. No voices for the teachers allowed — the teachers, who are honestly the only adults in any real numbers who can speak up for underprivileged children in schools. Frequently now, you can lose your license and even retirement for striking. So we simply march forward into classrooms.
And the unseen remains unseen. The people who might stand up for America’s least-fortunate children have become versions of corporate employees, forced to say the politically expedient thing — because speaking up today in many states can cost you your position. They go to work without much voice in the larger world, without the supplies they require, for the sake of their students.
Stop-gap measures provide just enough supplemental funding to shut the protests up in poor, property-tax based districts. Myths of lazy teachers were used to shut down the unions, the principal power that poor school districts could bring into any funding discussion. Myths of self-indulgent teachers are being used now to ignore what teachers are saying about school safety. It takes a fifteen-year-old girl in Georgia with a cell phone to somehow break through the hubris that led to opening all these schools in viral hotspots. Check out the following if you missed this story:
And the years keep going by. In a property-tax based funding system, I bought my own paper, my own ink cartridges and endless writing and art supplies for students. Hell, I bought my own furniture. That tall stool I needed? Only $10 at the Goodwill, a real find. Before computers became widely available — only the last few years, and even then not available to take home except in the high school — I worked in a district that once even toyed with declaring bankruptcy. I expected to buy supplies. I haunted second-hand stores and garage sales. I remember the Walworth County Fair used book sale, where I once got a wonderful set of children’s encyclopedias.
My spouse earned enough so that I could accept my salary. I managed to make everyday life work. That unlockable door? My active shooter plan where we all fled out the middle school’s windows, meeting together some blocks away at a familiar elementary school got my door fixed and a lock installed. I had one or two students who looked like they might not fit easily through those windows, but I was fully prepared to break windows in any shooting scenario. You can find the safest and most effective ways to break windows online, by the way.
Eduhonesty: Those high school hallways in Georgia? Remember your own high school hallways, reader? They all look like the Georgia hallways, except in rare areas with steep enrollment declines. Hallways automatically fill up with wall-to-wall bodies between classes. There’s no way to avoid that glut that does not lose significant class time. Administrators could stagger passing periods but then a 50 minute science period becomes a 30 minute science period — and there are still a bunch of students remaining in the hallway while the bathrooms fill up. I should note, too, that if you create an effective 12 minute passing period, certain students will turn that into a 12 minute bathroom break.
(True story: I worked in a high school with a three-minute passing period. The administration got tired of dealing with referrals for tardiness and instituted a policy that no referrals were to be made until students were at least 10 minutes late. I had a student who kept turning up maybe eight minutes late, day after day. In exasperation, I wrote a referral. He said, “What? No! I get ten minutes!”)
Can’t strike? Most of America’s teachers cannot. Can’t protest? In many places, teachers risk losing their positions if they do. So who is going to advocate for our kids? Fifteen-year-old girls with cell phones?It seems so. We should be extremely glad our kids have cell phones.
Strikes were never simply about teacher salaries, although anti-union voices tried to paint them that way. They were about broken copiers; missing textbooks or software; lack of technology; shortages of supplies; inadequate health insurance; shortages of school nurses for the ill; shortages of paraprofessionals to help special education and bilingual students; lack of equipment for those school nurses and paraprofessionals; student lunches that started at 10:30 AM and ran all day due to lack of space in the cafeteria and the ovens; and work orders that took months to fill or were never filled at all.
Why are some teachers so frantic right now? I want to answer that question: Schools in poorer areas are often held together with string, spit and bailing wire. This situation has been progressively worsening, as we shut down the unions and muzzled the teachers. Those CDC recommendations? I am certain many teachers feel — know — that their district has never had the resources to start a fully-supplied regular year. Those CDC demands?
PIPE DREAMS.
When I had forty students in my class and only 33 desks, we walked down the hall and borrowed from a teacher who had a planning period — for nearly a month. Tall, helpful young men banged desks against door moldings as I gently chided them to be careful. Then we had to get everyone seated and off the radiators.
I am a master of working around broken copiers and computers. But that effort sometimes involves passing out supplies and collecting papers. My colleagues don’t want to collect papers from that kid who coughed all over his work — not right now. I have already taken myself out of the picture. I’m a retired teacher who was substitute teaching until this year. (See https://www.eduhonesty.com/prediction-subs-will-become-an-endangered-species)
Teachers in my last district are lucky. They can actually open windows. In many places, no matter how many students are sniffing and coughing, rooms may have no windows or windows that cannot be opened. Air circulation can be iffy. In unlucky rooms, body odor and perfume combine with subtle smells that sometimes trigger mold allergies.
Some of the problems I list can be avoided in COVID-19 times. No one would stuff 40 students in one room now, right? Reader, I’m not sure. Many schools have been overcrowded for years, adding modules outside and staggering schedules. One year, I worked in an interior converted, concrete storage closet. That room had no ventilation. But at a certain level of crowding, can that converted closet be left empty? Will it be left empty?
Those people saying children must be in school should spend one day in a middle school or high school. They should use a student bathroom, before sitting at a table in the cafeteria. They should take a trip back in time and participate in one of the seven to ten or so passing periods, a number that depends on how much time is spent in each class. That Georgia passing period? That crush of bodies happens over and over again, all day long, every single day.
We are having hybrid school across the country right now. I have written a hybrid post. This post is about coronavirus safety. But it’s also a warning in a time when unions have been struggling against anti-union sentiment. Those teachers who lost their ability to strike? Who can no longer risk speaking up for fear of losing their certification and even their retirement? We need their voices desperately because they can tell the truths that remain unseen.
Unfortunately, over the last few decades, well-orchestrated forces managed to silence those voices. As I write this, I wonder how many people in my country understand what has happened. How many Americans understand the cost of the many voices that fell silent?
We are not talking about self-indulgent people who do not want to work. These are people who love children so much that they are willing to start work with six or more years of education and a masters degree for less than $40,000 per year. They are people who love children so much they will spend hundreds of dollars each year to buy supplies for the students in their classroom. Some spend over $1,000 of their own money. They are people who keep walking back into that classroom, even as the disrespect is hurled on them because — gasp! — they don’t want to step into the line of fire in hopes of a marginal academic advantage over online learning — an advantage apt to be wiped out by the closures and quarantines likely to follow the live classroom experience. Those voices know that in some parts of the country, some high school students are about to get gruesomely ill. A number will die. A greater percentage of older, working adults will die.
Teaching is not a job. It’s a calling. I regard this country as remarkably fortunate. Among other considerations, I think that if the teaching profession were not heavily female, this whole house of cards might collapse. America’s schools would never be able to staff those classrooms. But it’s not collapsing. Women are posting about their anxiety attacks, asking for advice and then going into work.
(According to a study by The World Bank, today 87 percent of American teachers are female and those numbers continue to increase annually.)
I’d like to close this post by suggesting that I understand why we are all afraid of the national strike. They can take your license and even your pension in some states, wiping out your ability to find work at the same time they steal your retirement. That’s scary as hell. Are we at the point where fear is going to rule those interactions between teachers and other stakeholders? Because we are ALL stakeholders in children’s education. Right now, I think that preparations to get back in the classroom will trump attempts to organize and communicate with each other.
When school has begun, and the crazy has quieted down, though, I’d like to suggest teachers revisit the issue of organizing themselves. The internet is a mighty resource. #MeToo women found each other. Teachers can find each other. We can start to fight back and take off these muzzles. We can speak up, understanding that we must be the voices for students in a time when many adults have no idea what the average school day looks like and feels like in underfunded areas. Soap anyone? How many of us bought hand sanitizer before COVID-19 to help those more-fastidious students who were not always lucky enough to find soap in the bathroom?
We need to tell the truths that get buried by nights of grading and week-ends of lesson preparation. We need to revitalize America’s unions so that we don’t have to fear for our jobs when we tell awkward truths that administrators would prefer not to share. They myth of the lazy teacher — they form such a tiny percentage of the field — has been used to silence voices and eliminate tenure in many areas. That’s honestly a travesty of justice.
This country is completely dependent on those 87% of women and 13% of men who are educating its children. If we found each other and worked together, we would form a fiercely powerful force for the betterment of education and worker’s rights. Teachers should not be sacrificed to a greater good tied to a political agenda — especially a political agenda concocted by the same people who brought us 26% of the world’s COVID-19 infections when we have only 4% of the world’s population.
Sad memories that cross the years: I go back to an eighth grade girl who tried to hang herself. After a few days in a hospital ICU, she finally succeeded. The family allowed doctors to turn off the machines. Grief counseling began. Our school district offered help to teachers and classmates, no questions asked. If you have to leave class, here’s your pass. Don’t cry in front of the kids and rescue kids before they break down in front of each other.
Words can’t capture the sadness that permeated that year. Fifty years from now, that girl’s friends will remember what happened. Her close friends may cry sometimes, cry for the friend who never went to college, never made it to the wedding, never saw the baby, never shared a bottle of wine with her own sweetheart — the friend who never got to launch her own life.
In the past, years like the one I describe were rare. Tragedies do happen in schools. Determined little girls with button noses finally lose their fight with cancer. Drunken, partying teenagers lose control of the car. Strong, healthy young men simply swim out too far.
But we are talking about embarking on a learning experiment that might make those tragedies commonplace rather than rare in some areas. What does it mean if 1,834 people have died so far today from Coronavirus? The trend is beginning to improve, but Texas had 8,479 new cases a couple of days ago. At coronavius.jhu.edu, the U.S. case-fatality rate is listed as 3.3%. If that rate holds, 280 Texans can be expected to die. At least a few of them may well be be teachers.
The kids are fairly safe. Currently 0.026 of deaths are occurring in persons 0 – 14 years old. But spread that 0.026 across the country and a few children do die. Mathematically of that 280 people maybe one death would fall into that category of 0 – 14 years. Obviously we cannot predict deaths exactly. Maybe no little kids would die, maybe two would die. Regardless, the number’s tiny. But let’s look at teachers 45 to 64 years of age: they form 16.7% of COVID-19 deaths. Doing the math, 47 persons in that age group will die. It’s remarkable how the death rate rises with age.
That’s 47 people in a key age range and those are the numbers for just one day. Texas reported 9,408 new cases yesterday. That’s 310 eventual deaths if that 3.3% holds, or 52 deaths in that 45 – 64 age range. And while the risk is lower for younger teachers, it’s still substantially higher than it is for the kids.
Any death is too many deaths, but we are in the middle — I hope we have reached the middle — of a pandemic. Deaths will happen. Regularly.
We broke out of our sheltering too soon. I hope we have learned a lesson: we must be careful not to return to the classroom too soon. Current U.S. deaths total 160,090. That tiny percentage of young kids who are endangered by the virus? They should be a concern in and of themselves, but the main problem is simple. Kids get sick. Then they get everybody else sick. I spent almost a month on antibiotics a couple of years ago — and quit subbing elementary schools after that. (I am a retired teacher who sometimes substitute teaches.) That second illness was particularly memorable — eighteen days of bug-killing drugs, fleeting on and off fevers and an insane number of nosebleeds. I can remember the too-hot little hand of the nonverbal special education student, an early elementary boy with large, dark eyes and dark hair. I figured out how ill he was while walking him to the bathroom, late in a long morning of exposure, and the better part of a miserable month before I quietly quit taking positions involving nonverbal and elementary students.
Working people between 25 and 64 years of age? That was me, holding that poor boy’s sweaty hand. A stunning 19,762 of people in the 25 – 64 age category had died from this virus by June 17th. It’s worth noting that total deaths then tallied only 103,339. Numbers have climbed rapidly. I’d guess the actual total to be higher than recorded deaths, too. Some fatalities attributed to heart disease, strokes etc. may have been coronavirus instead — it took awhile before the blood clotting aspect of the disease was understood.
Eduhonesty: If we do too much too soon, many schools will end up with inevitable losses of staff members. Yes, kids can and do spread this virus. Let me return to the end of my previous post. I want to highlight what happens when a beloved adult passes away.
Grief happens, grief that can set the stage for years of sadness and decades of nightmares.
Let me offer a scenario that might unfold soon in this country:
Ms. Jones always stood near the door, smiling every day as “her” kids walked into their classroom. Sometimes she sat in her chair at the front of the room, behind the Thor Kleenex box holder and the Avengers bobbleheads. Her pink sweater was always hanging over her chair. She gave out Dojo points for good behavior, and snacks if a kid’s stomach hurt because he or she missed breakfast rushing to meet the bus. She helped students find fun books. She talked to them about their interests, encouraging them to explore new ideas and try new activities. “You can do it! I will help you,” she would say. On a lucky day, a kid might even get to help her feed the fish in the aquarium in the corner.
Then Joshua got sick. Or maybe a few kids got sick before one of them was tested. Suddenly, everybody had to go home. And Ms. Jones never came back. For long days, maybe weeks, that pink sweater hung there. Then one day, the sweater, the bobble heads and other favorite bits of the classroom just disappeared. Counselors talked to everyone, of course.
“Ava” tried to make sense of what happened. Joshua and the other kids hadn’t been that sick. But somehow Mrs. Jones had gotten very sick, along with Megan’s grandpa and a few others. Ms. Jones had not survived. Megan’s grandpa was still in the hospital although Megan said he was going to get out soon. He was going to go to a special place to learn to walk again. How could an older person forget how to walk? Ava wondered. Could that happen to anybody? And what about Ms. Jones children, Justin and Hannah? They were in high school, she knew. She had met Hannah, who used to pick her mother up after school. Thinking about Hannah made Ava cry.
No children die in this scenario. The probabilities strongly favor those children making it through the streak of coronavirus. Maybe none of them will even get severely ill. That’s a tiny, tiny death rate for those elementary school children.
But let’s not make any mistake. The kids in Ms. Jones class just got emotionally nuked. Their whole world suddenly exploded in a shambles of ruin and pain. Especially if Ms. Jones is the same age as their parents, that world became exponentially more terrifying. Why not dad next? Why not mom? Why not anybody? Because children don’t understand percentages. They do understand gone forever — most of them anyway. The littlest ones may have trouble understanding that idea at first.
Politicians talk about this pandemic in terms of survival. The children will survive, they say. They don’t say the adults will survive because they know that’s not true, not for all adults. They emphasize cleanliness and masks instead. Hello, certain governors? Hello, those of you who have looked at charts like this and decided the children are safe?
Actually, a few of those children won’t survive. Unfortunately, 0.06% is not zero. But that’s only one risk. A huge risk is being ignored. What about mental trauma that we will be inflicting on our children? It’s been more than fifty years since my grandpa’s funeral. I still remember moments of that funeral. My grandma’s death kicked off a health anxiety which has dogged me ever since. Here’s an especially scary one: “While the jury is still out on whether trauma directly causes schizophrenia, according to research conducted by the University of Liverpool, children who experienced trauma before the age of 16 were about three times more likely to become psychotic in adulthood than those who were randomly selected.”*
We can’t put numbers on psychological risk. Everyone manages — or fails to manage — grief in their own way. But those leaders reopening schools should not ignore the psychological harm that opening schools may cause. “Ava” will never be the same after Ms. Jones fails to return to her classroom. Ava will almost undoubtedly “manage” — but what does manage mean? Scared to death is one possible definition of managing in this scenario, the one where Ava has panic attacks whenever anyone she knows enters the hospital. Maybe a low thrum of anxiety will begin to run through every single day of Ava’s life.
Children bring greater and lesser degrees of resilience into experiences that shape their lives. Some live in the present and devote only brief windows of time to past, unhappy events, while others obsess over those memories. What we must NOT do is assume children’s resilience, assume that our children will be able to handle whatever we throw at them.
It’s been the better part of a decade since that girl in my school decided to kill herself. I guarantee readers that all of her teachers remember her face, her laugh, their own personal classroom moments with her. Death marks us. Death takes us on journeys into the past that we can’t always escape.
Ava will never be the same. Maybe in a few years, the conversation won’t automatically bring tears. Kids in Ava’s class will work through what happened as best they can. Maybe Ava will sit down on a bench at recess to talk to a red-haired boy who had also been in Ms. Jones class.
“She sure loved all those Avengers movies,” she will say.
“Yeah, she sure did. I just got a fish that looks a lot like Fred. He’s got one of those long orange tails.”
“I liked those fish. I hope her kids are O.K.”
“I miss her a lot.”
“I miss her too.”
Children love so easily and so fiercely. Because of that, children can be hurt forever. And sometimes, children can even be broken.
That research study from the University of Liverpool is real. The mortality rate for children should not be the only number used to decide on school openings.
I’d like to ask readers — don’t think of schools, those faceless brick and concrete buildings, when the talk of starting school comes up in your community. Think of Ava. Think of the young children you know personally who will walk through those big double doors every day.
Is opening safe? Safe is not only measured in numbers of the living and the dead.
