This post is for the parents on social media who are demanding teachers return to the classroom: “You chose to be teacher,” they say. Well, yes, but no one in those past education classes foresaw 2020. No one foresaw a pandemic.
This post is for the teachers on social media who reply when parents insist they cannot manage online learning in their homes: “You chose to be parents.” The parents of today’s young children lived in a certain world when they made their parenting choice, and that world does not look anything like today.
Let’s try to be as kind as we can. Parents, there’s an excellent chance that your teacher is scared. He or she has been buying classroom supplies for school every year, laying in hand sanitizer before hand sanitizer was cool because, in some schools, those bathrooms always seem to run out of soap. In an educational system where teachers in poor districts have been buying their own paper and spring ink cartridges for years, parents please understand that some teachers have spent their working lives short of supplies. They don’t trust the “authorities” to keep them safe if we all re-enter the classroom. After all, those authorities have been doing a bang up job so far, yes? Where was the soap? Where are the N-95 masks and germicidal wipes? Even in districts that can afford all the basic supplies, the purchasing process can take weeks or even months. That assumes those supplies exist, too.
And teachers? Not many households can get by on one income today. In many regions, the cheapest, smallest lodging still costs over four figures. Vehicles must be run and maintained in a time when people are afraid of mass transit. Mass transit’s not an option anyway in much of the country. Grocery budgets, health care costs, clothes, shoes, supplies for school, party supplies, presents for birthday parties, baseball bats, phones, light bulbs, cleaning products, flowers in spring, batteries, burgers and fries — in big chunks, and little dribs and drabs, the money gets sucked away.
Schools provide childcare when parents must work. That single-mother nurse may not have anyone else to reliably watch her children all day while she earns the money her kids and she use to survive. While it’s not too tough to find someone to cover for an hour or two in the afternoon, all day is an entirely different and much less affordable option. Yes, she chose to have kids. She could not have foreseen this future, however. Maybe she did not realize just how much trouble “Bob’s” heavy drinking might become. Or she did not realize her folks would move to Florida. She almost certainly did not plan for a pandemic.
Eduhonesty: Readers, do what you can to support the scared teachers and worried parents right now. Support each other. Teachers, please keep in mind that the demanding parent who insists we open schools may be afraid for his or her livelihood and simultaneously afraid of going to work. Parents, please understand that your teachers may be worried about themselves and your children for good reason. Visualize passing periods during your school years. How wide were those hallways? How many kids did you accidentally bump when changing classes? In many areas, schools should be closed.
Sometimes NO good solution to a problem exists. We can’t make the world the way we want it. We can’t go back in time and put the microbe back in the box.,
We can make our own world kinder, however. We can use virtual and real classrooms to share information, support each other, and provide pep talks and supplies, doing our best to make this school year work. Let’s give each other virtual hugs and let any pent up animosity go.
Instead of sniping at each other — I suggest we snipe at whoever we decide is responsible for the appalling surge of COVID in the recent past.
As I predicted, the decisions have been made and unmade, as schools have opened, closed, planned new openings, backtracked, planned virtual instruction, at first for a few weeks and then for the semester. Many teachers and parents are getting psychological whiplash from managing rapid changes.
Cases in children are exploding. Children now make up at least 1 in 11 of reported U.S. coronavirus cases. (NPR: Children now make up at least 1 in 11 of all reported U.S. coronavirus cases.) That nonsense about how children didn’t get COVID-19 and didn’t spread it? Over one million children have tested positive by now. And my now-sick vet is home with his sick teen-age children and wife, the virus having travelled home with an elementary school child. Of course, sick kids spread the virus. Sick kids give us colds, pink-eye, the flu, strep throat, and even the occasional parasite. In what universe did the idea that COVID-19 would not be spread by children somehow arise? That level of craziness crosses the bridge from wishful thinking straight into delusional psychopathy.
People are getting sick from our open schools. People’s family and then sometimes extended family, neighbors and coworkers are getting sick. The unluckiest people are dying. See https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/educators-weve-lost-to-the-coronavirus.html. Viruses exist to cross from one person to another, and every high school and middle school passing period is a potential superspreader event. Elementary schools may be more manageable, but parent-readers will remember the many hygiene struggles from those times. French fry that fell in the dog’s water anyone? Why not? Teacher-readers have cleaned the boogers off from inside and under those desks.
This disease does not always pass in a few days or even weeks. Many long haulers had mild cases, too, and were never hospitalized or, in some cases, even tested. These people are still struggling as much as eight months after their illness. Extreme fatigue is common, along with breathlessness, memory problems and unusual heartbeats. Autoimmune, kidney and blood sugar problems are also seen. COVID-19 has disabled many long haulers. It has made many who recovered sicker than they have ever been in their lives.
Yet somehow a significant portion of the population is still debating masks. Who are these people? Research by medical experts suggests masks are helpful. There’s NO reputable research to the contrary. For advice on masks: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover-guidance.html is one place to start. The CDC recommends that everyone in public should wear a mask. The WHO now suggests the same.
Mask confusion is understandable. In the beginning, the U.S. government, the CDC and the WHO did not immediately tell the public to put on masks. It’s necessary to understand that we had a potentially lethal shortage of masks at that time. As the toilet paper, sanitary wipes and other daily essential products flew off the shelves, these groups were afraid of a run on masks that could leave health care workers without essential supplies. In a number of regions, those fears came true. Masks were being rationed, worn long past established safe times, and sprayed with germ-killing chemicals. We did run out of masks. The WHO only advised masks for all in early June. But the research is in now — and it supports putting a barrier over our mouths and noses.
Masks are not leg shackles. They are not 50 pound backpacks. They should never have become political statements. They are face coverings made of cloth, a melt-blown polymer such as polypropylene, or other synthetic plastic fibers. They often contain additional filter materials. If the first mask doesn’t work, there’s another, better mask out there, I promise any anti-mask readers.
Let’s totally forget the research for a moment. We can bypass that research. Here are stats from the world coronavirus cases and death totals. Yes, these totals will not be entirely accurate – just as more than 150,000,000 votes cannot be cast without occasional pockmarks and errors. Let’s assume the totals are reasonably accurate, while not flawless. We can still take in the big picture.
Let’s compare the United States to Japan. The United States has 254,413 deaths to Japans 1,930. That’s no typo. Yes the U.S. is bigger, so let’s factor that in: The total U.S. population is 331,648,064. The current population of Japan is 126,327,379. Japan’s total population then is 38% of the population of the United States – Japan has slightly more than 1/3 the people that the U.S. does. So let’s say Japan should have only 38% of the death total that the U.S. has, since it has 38% of the people. What is 38% of the U.S. death total? That would be a total of 96,908 deaths — not remotely in the same league as that 1,903. Except that number of fatalities is just silly because the caseloads are so different. Forget deaths. Let’s look at cases: 11,910,858 for the U.S. versus 128,285 for Japan. The number of Japanese CASES is 1% of the number of U.S. cases — when, if all factors were equal, we would assume that number would be nearly 40% of the U.S. cases. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. cases would be 4,526,126. That’ so far from the actual 128,285 cases that the mind boggles. Either we did something gruesomely wrong, they did something spectacularly right, or some combination of the two.
It’s not like Tokyo doesn’t have international flights. It’s not like Japan lacks population density. On the contrary, one glance at Japan’s tiny landmass and its total population tells us that population density — a risk factor for COVID-19 — is much higher in Japan than in the United States.
So how has Japan ducked this many bullets?
When news of COVID started to trickle out, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China and Taiwan masked up immediately. Fortunately for these areas, the custom of wearing a mask while ill and going out in a public has a long history. ”That’s because Asians, especially in Japan, China and Taiwan, have worn masks for a host of cultural and environmental reasons, including non-medical ones, since at least the 1950s.” (https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/not-just-coronavirus-asians-have-worn-face-masks-decades) My father visited Japan in the seventies and one memory he carries still was the masked faces on the bullet trains and streets of Tokyo.
The Japanese consider it rude to be sneezing and exposing others to contagions. They also understand the science that explains why masks protect others, They don’t seem to suffer from widespread science denial. Most importantly, Japanese culture doesn’t exalt the idea that one individual’s feelings supersede the rights of just about everyone else around them.
This pandemic never had to be such a debacle. My phone blasted me and the rest of Illinois a couple of days ago to tell us that state activities had been restricted further. That sudden text was a bit wild, but perfectly understandable. Friends all across the country report similar new restrictions. Some areas are even beginning to report toilet paper shortages again.
Unsurprisingly, schools are closing all over the place. Or delaying openings. Or at least shutting down sports.
Because the hospitals are sending out warnings and the tracking numbers don’t look good. North Dakota is now at 100% of hospital capacity and the North Dakota government has issued an order allowing nurses who have tested positive for the virus to continue working as long as they appear asymptomatic. One week ago Friday, there were only nine staffed intensive care beds and 160 staffed inpatient beds available in the entire state. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum finally issued a mask mandate that Friday. In November.
Republican Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa just instituted a mask mandate in her state as well, finally responding to overflowing case numbers and limited hospital beds. The article begins, “’I don’t want to do this,’ Gov. Kim Reynolds said, joining a wave of Republican governors issuing new mask orders as her state faces a spiraling hospital crisis.” But she bellied up to the plate, some nine months after the coronavirus began hitting the news, ten or eleven months after it first arrived in the United States — in November.
See: “How Iowa’s Governor Went From Dismissing Mask Mandates to Ordering One Herself” at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/us/coronavirus-mask-mandate-iowa-reynolds.html.
With all due respect to Governors Reynolds and Burgum, this horse is not only out of the barn in Iowa and North Dakota, it has trotted all the way across the country and back again by now. That horse has circumnavigated the globe while those governors and others stood up for the right of people not to take precautions to protect others. But criminally late is better than never, I suppose. I try very hard not to think about all those grandpas, grandmas and other people who accidentally stepped into that horse’s path.
Eduhonesty: We have lost control of the coronavirus across growing swaths of this country. For those who would say nothing could have been done, I point to Japan and my chart above. I don’t believe we could have entirely avoided this latest wave — viruses spread and multiply. That’s what they do. But whether or not a person infects 1 other person, 2 other people or 5 other people — that matters, especially since the 5 then go out to create the next group of new cases. That’s the detail the anti-mask people ignored.
The coronavirus map has become a sea of red covering most of the country now with no near end in sight: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map. So what’s to be done?
WEAR MASKS. Masks don’t protect anyone 100% — but they do provide protection along with other precautions such as social distancing and hand washing. The CDC makes it clear that masks do not substitute for social distancing. I suggest we keep reading the latest official recommendations. And I hate to add this next recommendation, but…
The Mazziotta article observes that at least 103 children died from COVID-19 during that time — a tiny, so tiny percentage of the total, but all of them somebody’s baby, all of them children, grandchildren, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, and playmates of grieving people.
I am excruciatingly aware of the educational costs involved in closing schools and going online, but I reason it this way: Charles can 100% recover from not learning his Common Core math on schedule, especially if educational leaders adapt the schedule to account for gaps in learning caused by this crisis. He may never recover from the death of his grandfather — especially if he believes he caused his grandfather’s death.
This is a message for teachers wondering how to manage their angry students. How are you doing? Are you struggling with an unusual number of behavioral issues on top of technology and COVID issues? Maybe you have gotten parent emails with that classic “he’s not like this at home!” Or worse, parents are asking you how YOU created the problem of their child’s regular, angry outbursts. Or perhaps parents are not responding at all. Maybe you are writing referrals that seem to be vanishing into cyberspace or wastepaper baskets. COVID has too many administrators running around like the proverbial headless chickens, and headless chickens hardly ever manage small details well. Or big details. Or much of anything else.
Too many people are operating on overload at the moment.
Eduhonesty: Here’s an observation that may help you a little as you try to calm the angry voices in your classroom. You are a safe place. Why does “Martin” blow up in your class? At least sometimes, it’s because Martin thinks that he will be able to vent without the sky falling down on top of him if he does. You are a safe place.
Those venting students may be taken as a sign of poor classroom management — and if they interfere much with daily learning then work on management is possibly indicated — but a truth too often ignored is that Martin feels secure enough to express his stress in your classroom. Martin may desperately need to be heard. He is trusting you enough to give you the chance to be the one who hears him.
The stress on many kids right now breaches extraordinary. That stress permeates even the smallest details of life. Holidays are coming up and maybe Martin is not going to see grandma this winter for the first time ever in his life. He may be terrified grandma will get sick — or worse. All across America, those 246,526 souls who passed away (as of this morning), leave behind their own Martins, their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, children and grandchildren, lost and mourning as they maybe sit in isolated houses.
We don’t know exactly what kind of a year any of our Martins are having. But this post is a shout-out to the many teachers who are helping and listening as kids unburden themselves. It’s a shout-out to the men and women who are trying to manage rages that are perfectly natural in children who feel helpless, unheard and out-of-control. Teachers are approaching these children with love and support despite the effect of emotional melt-downs on already edgy classes. Sometimes the only calm and safe place our children have is their classroom, and this has never been more true than in 2020.
In dark moments, the greatest gift we offer may be the gift of acknowledgement, the act of making a child feel able to cry out and be heard.
I’ve never held it together well when I cut sleep. Crash! I am staring down at hundreds of shards of glass that were once a plate I was trying to wash. Owww! A few choice expletives later, I sit down to look at the little toe I just rammed into the chair. Is it broken? Bump! I leap out of the car to pick up my big green plastic garbage can and stare in dismay at the coffee grounds on the driveway. Then I pick up the big items before driving over the coffee grounds because I have to get to work. The grounds will be easier to sweep up if I let them dry anyway. I pay careful attention to the road because I sense how tired I am, understanding that if the stoplights are with me, I should whip into that drive-thru line at McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts for more coffee.
Feeling exhausted right now is not a good plan. Ducking haphazard attacks by a new microbe requires alertness. Your goal should be to feel rested. This is no grandiose goal, not a New Year’s resolution to lose 50 pounds and run a marathon. Just make sure to get your rest. Take brain breaks. Eat when you are hungry. Most importantly, stop when you are tired.
If you are not done preparing the dinosaur webquest or the latest spreadsheet for Dr. X, put the world down anyway. Try to make a reasonable bedtime stick. When the phone alarm goes off, put the work away and go brush and floss. Sleep defogs the brain.
Every champion spends a lot of time in the bedroom.
What people do when they are zonked can make all the difference to their health and emotional equilibrium. Some absolutely crazy demands are falling on teachers right now, as misguided administrators and frantic parents try to emulate school years of the past. This year is in its own category, but not everyone can accept that fact. If others can’t let go, though, teacher reader, you MUST. Driving while exhausted is acknowledged to be dangerous. Right now, living while exhausted can be dangerous.
Drowsy people make mistakes. Teachers are already at risk of catching COVID-19 simply by going to work. Evidence now suggests droplets can linger, suspended in the air, and may travel beyond that six feet set as the “safe” distance. Poor ventilation increases the risk of transmission and while many districts have worked fiercely on the problem of ventilation, not all classrooms are well-vented yet. See https://www.eduhonesty.com/safety-before-political-expediency/ for more on ventilation. And if you can open classroom windows, keep those windows open as much as possible.
The usual instructions for managing risk are well-known by now. For teachers, those instructions are often much more easily said than done:
Wash your hands regularly with soap and water for 20 seconds or more, or clean them with alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Mostly the sanitizer supply is holding up. Getting kids to use it — and not waste it or play with it — is not exactly a slam dunk though.
Cover your mouth and nose with a mask when in public settings or around others. Yes, eating complicates this greatly in some set-ups.
Maintain at least six feet distance between you and people coughing or sneezing. Ummm… we are talking about classrooms. Mostly the only teachers who can count on doing this are virtual or hybrid and at home.
Avoid touching your face.
Stay home if you feel unwell.
The CDC or someone should probably add this one for teachers: Make people clean the snot off their own faces.
Those instructions demand alertness, but little details slip when fatigue takes over. Hand washing or sanitizer may be neglected. Teachers are often nonstop busy going from student to student. And it’s so natural to bring your hands up to your face to brush back strands of hair, adjust slipping glasses, shift a mask, or just scratch an itch. Maybe you forgot your personal hand sanitizer and your hand travels to your face while driving home after pumping gas. Or you let social distancing go a little while shopping because it doesn’t seem worth the time to wait for an aisle to clear, and after all, it’s not for long and only once.
Eduhonesty: Planet Earth is a wild and crazy place right now, and many of us are tiptoeing on cliff edges. Today’s advice: If you can’t decide if you need a hug, one of those monster cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee, 6 shots of vodka or 2 weeks of sleep — pick sleep.Hugs to my readers.
Teachers and other adults must explain the 2020 election without making kids from Trump families feel attacked. Neither children nor adults are likely to listen if they feel attacked. Those children from Biden families deserve to understand that the more than 72,000,000 Trump votes do not represent a repudiation of their skin color or sexual orientation by almost half this country’s voting population — not that racism and other prejudices did not enter into the vote. There’s a soft smell of sulfur underlying some of that vote, something ugly that has crept into recent American rhetoric.
I have gotten pushback on this post from friends who think I let Trump off much too easy. I don’t mean to whitewash the recent past. But I do want America’s children to understand that Trump’s 72,000,000 votes do not translate to a version of “abandon hope all ye who enter here.” We are not a country filled with evil people. And so…
Some Answers to the Question: How Could the Pollsters Have Been So Wrong?
The hoped-for Blue Wave turned out to be a trickle. Red states splashed one after another across the map, leaving shaken democrats in their wake. The Senate may remain Republican. The Presidency has been declared for Joe Biden — but that race was heart-stoppingly close. Those last battleground states? As of this moment in time, Pennsylvania voted 49.7% for Biden, 49.1% for Trump. Arizona went 49.6% Biden, and 48.9% Trump. Nevada lists 49.9% for Biden, 47.9% for Trump. And Georgia’s still not official on this Saturday night, with Biden holding 49.5% of the vote to Trump’s 49.3%.
Trump clobbered Biden in a number of states. Both the popular vote and the electoral college vote have gone against him, but he swept what’s left of the Old West and rural America. Still, Idaho (63.9%) has only four electoral votes and Wyoming (70.4%) has only 3 in a contest that demands 270. In terms of the popular vote, Biden is about 5,000,000 ahead, but both men have over 70,000,000 votes.
Readers of this blog should be clear I voted for Biden. If Trump had done something about the insane number of days now spent on standardized testing and related punitive evaluations, I might have voted for Trump. If wishes were horses and if I could turn my pumpkin into a coach… Because I think we have been getting education so wrong for so long, under democrats as well as republicans. But this post is not about that. It’s about explaining those 72,000,000 votes to our students in a way that can help them understand what happened without writing off half the country in despair.
Let’s start with the fact that a surprising number of people are single issue voters. I have a Catholic friend who was informed she HAD to vote for Trump because Trump was anti-abortion. Nothing else mattered, she was told. The phrase that stayed with me: “People just have to hold their nose and pull the Trump lever.”
Ummm… I honestly don’t know what to say about that, other than I would bet many of those who took that advice are not by nature prejudiced against people of color. They may even be fine with LGBTQ rights, although obviously some will not be. Abortion opponents learn heavily toward the Christian right and many trusted Trump more than Catholic Biden.
I should note that not all antiabortion voters are Catholic or even Christian, and that many Christians are not conservatives. But President Trump gave conservative Christians two-hundred federal judges, appointed for life, who appeared to support their views — including three Supreme Court justices. Conservative Christians had every reason to vote for Trump again.
Another big single issue was the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms i.e. keep your own guns. Here’s a fact that often gets overlooked in gun discussions: The rural and small town view of gun ownership is quite different from the urban view. Guns in urban areas are virtually always trouble. Those guns make many city-dwellers nervous, enough so that they will consider legislation to reduce or eliminate gun ownership. In a city, guns mean crime.
The rural picture bears little resemblance to the urban picture. Guns in small mountain towns mostly make people feel safer. Guns are a source of comfort when the county sheriff is the better part of an hour away. In some poor, isolated areas, cops are already effectively defunded, short-staffed and unable to get to distant townships or farms quickly. Guns are also a source of recreation. Many kids in states that went heavily for Trump go to the woods or the river to shoot tin cans and targets. Some go hunting. All across America, people still kill what they eat. (One fervently hopes they eat that deer or rabbit, anyway.) Guns to those people represent winter meat in the freezer, and one more way of making ends meet.
America is not only cities and their suburbs. Our country has many small towns scattered between long stretches of emptiness. People in the mountains of Montana may live over half an hour from the expensive grocery store that is only place to buy food anywhere within a few hours drive. One of the best ways to understand how Trump took Texas might be to drive across West Texas alone — feel the emptiness, the aloneness, and watch those oil wells all by themselves in the middle of nowhere. The rural vote is part of 2020’s close contest.
Some classroom questions for discussion: Are there any reasons why urban residents might have different expectations from their government than rural residents? Why might urban residents focus more on the interdependence of people and the need for government to provide solutions for people’s problems? How would population density affect demand for and view of government services? How might police response time affect your view of gun ownership? (Note how loaded this question can be for many students who do not regard the police as a source of protection.) Why might people in rural areas object to gun control legislation?
People in many more-populated areas also supported Trump. especially those who lived in areas that have seen manufacturing, mining and other traditional blue collar jobs disappear. A full 68.7% of West Virginia went for Trump, almost identical to the 68.6% who went for him in 2016. In 2016, he had gone to West Virginia and promised to bring back coal. Newspaper reports suggest people there think he tried, but believe the forces against reviving coal are simply too strong for Trump or anyone else to control. Trump’s opponents hammer home that coal combustion releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide is implicated in global warming. On top of that, cleaner, cheaper energy sources do exist.
I am going to bypass the actual issue here, other than to say that we owe it to our children to do the best job we can to clean up the air and water — even if it’s bad for business and even if it inconveniences everyone. The party should be over, that party where we use up the Earth’s resources, heat up the planet, put out endless forest fires, clean up after the latest latest storm or hurricane, and fill the air with gunk. I am reminded of a few lines from “The Party’s Over” by Eliza Gilkyson:
We danced on the tables midnight til dawn
Til all the time was up and the good stuff gone
The house is a shambles, broken glass in the streets
Guttering candles, blood on the sheets
We burned all the kindling, passed the bottle around
Watched the last coals dwindling
And the ice melting down
We can and absolutely must do better. The fact that much of the effort to reign in recent excesses has been spearheaded by Greta Thunberg speaks volumes. What is arguably the most important issue on the table today has coalesced around a sixteen-year-old, autistic Swedish girl who has made climate change her life’s work. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, not to mention the remaining trees in Australia and the western United States, this work should go to the forefront of everything we are doing today.
But that doesn’t help West Virginia — and West Virginia needs help desperately. America’s mining and manufacturing industries are not merely hurting. In some regions, those industries have effectively been destroyed. If you are looking for a picture that brings this home, I’ll recommend the beginning of Stephen King’s The Stand. Stu is working part-time in the local calculator plant because that’s all that’s left. (This is before the superflu.) All across our nation, hard-hit regions have their versions of that calculator plant — although I wouldn’t be surprised to discover all the real “calculator” plants are gone — gone to India, China, Indonesia, and other low-cost producers.
I grew up in Tacoma, Washington in another time. When I was young in the sixties and seventies, decent, blue-collar employment could be found all around me. Friends’ parents worked as longshoremen and machinists. They could afford a comfortable house, relatively new car and often even a boat or trailer. Men and women worked in hot dog, pickle, beer, dairy and other food-producing plants, many union shops with living wages. Most of those jobs are gone now. The Heidelberg Brewery closed when I was in college. Nalley’s new owner, Pinnacle Foods, moved the pickles and various other products to Iowa, where the current minimum wage matches the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
Wages definitely figure into this election. Currently, the average hourly pay for a miner is $23.77 per hour (https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Miner/Hourly_Rate) which is a little more than three times the federal minimum wage. That’s not great, but it clobbers that $7.25 federal minimum — although the exact amount of the minimum wage doesn’t matter when no jobs can be found.
Some readers may not believe my minimum wage. States and cities have legislated higher minimums; workers in Washington state receive $13.50 per hour, for example, and higher yet in some Washington cities. Let’s look at minimums. In the absence of a law, the federal $7.25 holds. It’s worth taking a minute to study those minimums and compare the states with lower minimums to the Trump states on the election map. The majority of Trump states — all but 7 — have a $7.25 minimum wage. Of the seven that have a higher wage, Alaska comes in on top at $10.19, with Missouri second at $9.45. Three of those states have minimums under nine dollars.
I’d like to note the “tip credit” as part of the minimum wage. A tip credit allows an employer to apply tips to the minimum. So that employer in Mississippi does not have to pay $7.25 per hour. An employer can pay $2.13 per hour, with the employee filling in the rest of the day’s wages through tips earned. (https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped)
Of the seventeen states that allow employers to pay $2.13 per hour to employees, using tips to get those employees up to minimum, thirteen went for Trump, a number expected to change to fourteen. North Carolina is expected to go for Trump. As of today, Georgia has still not been officially declared with a mere 0.2% difference in the vote. Only Virginia and New Mexico have that $2.13 wage but went for Biden.
Those 72,000,000 some votes for Trump have a great deal to do with money and security. Overall, financial hardship worked for Trump. That’s no surprise.
Trump promised to bring industries back to America. He offered hope to blue-collar workers who had seen their mines and factories close or move to states that did not have unions, states where workers could be paid $7.25 per hour. What happens when the grocery chain that paid a cashier $35,000 per year suddenly shuts down? One thing that happens is a large group of people who can afford their car payment suddenly are faced with a job search likely to end in their making about half or two-thirds — if they are lucky — as much as they had been making before.
Financial desperation worked for Donald Trump in many pockets of the country — the places where the mines and factories had been shuttered. That’s not universally true. Mines and factories have been going dark for a long time, all over this country. But urban areas feel those closures less because of their broader economic bases. The union worker who once filled the ice cream cartons may be able to find a job as a city trash collector that makes the payments on the house, car and boat.
Some small municipalities and less populated regions have simply been exanguinated over the last fifty years, however, in small cuts and bigger knife swipes. The shake mill went away, the paper goods factory went, and then the pickle factory, the hot dog factory, the steel plant, the glass plant, the boat building company, and so on. See “Coal’s Decline Continues with 13 Plant Closures Announced in 2020” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coals-decline-continues-with-13-plant-closures-announced-in-2020/, an article by Benjamin Starrow, describing how coal is naturally losing to cheaper natural gas and renewable energy.
Many of those former factory workers have become Trump voters. Trump assured them he would stop the flow of jobs to areas outside the country. He promised to bring back jobs from lower-cost producers like China. He made efforts in that direction, too, although mostly unsuccessful ones. It’s incredibly tough to compete with people who will work six long days a week for a small fraction of what an American worker does. Whether Trump succeeded or not, though, he told West Virginia that he cared that their lifestyle was being swept out from under them — and that unchanging vote tally tells us that they believed him.
We do have a genuine problem. When it’s cheaper to load all the cut logs onto ships for China and then bring back the cut lumber from China, the world’s gotten tough for the Americans who used to shape those logs into lumber and cedar shakes for roofs. That little shake mill in the small town by the lake probably doesn’t have a chance. Meanwhile, the logging companies are finding ways to reduce human staff by creating robots and other machines to take over for human labor. Trump’s message “Make America Great Again” resonates with the people who remember when the logs were processed locally, because they can still see in their mind’s eye that shake mill of forty years ago next to a lake filled with floating logs. They remember an easier time when their parents or grandparents never worried about the costs of new school clothes and supplies, when the start of the school year did not create a sinking feeling as adults juggled Walmart bills and car payments.
Some of those memories of a past, better time are obviously illusory. Especially for people of color and the LGBTQ community, MAGA sounds racist and threatening. But it’s not that simple. For many of the older folks who back Trump — and the group who voted for him are older than the democratic voters on the other side — MAGA has nothing to do with race. They would be 100% fine working beside black people in that long-gone auto plant that paid three times more than what they are making now. They have no problem with their LGBTQ neighbors. They would simply like their sons and daughters to be able to find a job and buy a house without going into deep debt for student loans.
Joe Biden’s promise to get rid of fracking appeals to people concerned about the environment. WE KNOW GRETA’S RIGHT. But Joe’s promise terrifies many other folk. That’s their JOB Joe is talking about. According to ZipRecruiter, “as of Nov 1, 2020, the average annual pay for an Oil Rig Worker in the United States is $75,511 a year.” Fracking is a version of oil field work. It pays well. If a person has spent years in the industry building up the fracking skill set, what comes after fracking shuts down? Welding may transfer to a livable wage, but other skills may be so specific that no easy transfer to another high-paying job exists. Like those former grocery clerks in the chain that shut down, they are simply screwed.
The effects of pervasive unemployment can be hard for many urban residents to understand — although in parts of Chicago, Detroit and other cities that pervasive unemployment and underemployment is understood too well, and its racial component cannot be denied.
Under a system where property values heavily influence school funding..
Beyond the day-to-day of managing groceries between weekly trips to the food bank, the challenge of keeping old cars running, and the usual problems associated with poverty, too, this country must grapple with licit and illicit drugs. Opiates are ravaging areas with high unemployment. Meth remains a common escape, especially in rural communities. “The sharp rise in opioid abuse and fatal overdoses has overshadowed another mounting drug problem: Methamphetamine use is rising across the United States.” See https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/25/656192849/methamphetamine-roils-rural-towns-again-across-the-u-s: “‘Usage of methamphetamine nationally is at an all-time high,’ says Erik Smith, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Kansas City office.”
Trump’s “tough on crime” rhetoric appeals to people watching the drug epidemic’s effects on households, as grandmas step in to raise kids whose moms are too high to manage. Growing drug problems frighten many and make law and order rhetoric appealing.. See “A grandma’s new role: Raising grandkids amid the heroin epidemic” by Wayne Drash and Andrew Iden, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/28/health/grandmother-heroin-crisis-huntington-west-virginia/index.html.
Civil disorder frightens the general public. Theft and looting make them believe something in the American fabric is fraying — and Donald’s promise to send in troops actually sounds reassuring to them. I’m sure many of my readers are thinking what I think: Tone matters and the bellicose tone coming out of the White House may have set off many of those angry demonstrations. I am hopeful that the new, conciliatory tone set by Joe Biden will calm my country down. The Trump White House too obviously made Republican states into favored children in a time of crisis — and us versus them is no way to run a country, a classroom or much of anything else.
But scared people have always gravitated toward “strong” leaders. That’s the history of the 1930s. That’s the history of the world. It doesn’t always lead to fascism. Sometimes it leads to Winston Churchill when it’s clear that Neville Chamberlain has no clue what is happening around him. But it’s dangerous. In the classroom, I might ask students to tell me the upside and downside of putting the strong, tough guy in charge. What are the risks?
Trump projects a forceful, confident image. He also has a talent for sounding like an everyday guy. He doesn’t go for the long, polysyllabic word. He uses “ordinary” speech, and sounds like someone you might run into at the hardware store or the auto show. Despite his wealthy background, he often successfully manages to come across as an Average Joe. I’m sure that attracts voters. People tend to like people who talk like they do.
I’ll add one last item to this list: the word “socialism” has been bandied about repeatedly during this election, often as if it is a synonym for another word I have heard a lot — communism. But socialism is not communism — not even remotely. Socialism is not … well, it’s not a lot of things that are being thrown willy-nilly into its definition. And a universal healthcare plan would not make us a socialist country. Every other developed country IN THE WORLD with a market-based economy has had universal health coverage for decades. Some of the people in those countries are living longer than Americans do with significantly better rates of maternal mortality.
The main impetus to this talk of socialism and communism seems to have been universal healthcare, fascinatingly enough. Universal healthcare? Instead of talking about Castro’s Cuba, we could talk about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain and Canada. The alternative to universal healthcare is what we have now, a system under which one catastrophic medical event can ruin a person or family financially.
I’m going off-topic, though. This is not about my opinions, it’s about why Trump gathered over 72,000,000 votes. Again, the word socialism scares many people. Trump presented himself as the anti-socialism candidate — easy to do since the democratic party gathers our socialists to it. Bernie Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist, as does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but because Bernie was trying to become President, he had no choice except to pursue that goal as a democrat. The U.S. has a true two party system. Democratic socialists must become technical democrats to be taken seriously.
Fear of socialism is not rare in the United States, especially among older people who remember Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Those regimes are not ancient history to older voters. Many equate the term “socialism” with Soviet Russia or Mao’s China. They fear government control of the economy. As Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin is widely believed to have killed between 20 and 60 million people during his 30-year rule. Scholars will argue that body count forever. Mao Zedong’s China shares a similar brutal past. During the Great Leap Forward, famine and political purges killed … 36 million? Or 45 million? I invite readers to research this topic on the internet. In Mao’s defense, the source of most of those deaths was famine. But during the Great Leap Forward, jobs were assigned, salaries were set and people could not change locations without government permission.
Which brings this election to Cuba. Part of Trump’s Florida victory came from Cuban-Americans. In 1959, Fidel Castro took control of Cuba by force, and the Republic of Cuba became a one-party communist state, its industries and businesses nationalized. Cubans have been fleeing to the United States ever since. One of my favorite coworkers a few years back escaped by working on a cruise ship, getting off in Europe, flying to Canada, and going south to the U.S. from there. Many refugees left behind houses, family and possessions. They lost everything they had built. Some of them are voting Americans. Their children and grandchildren vote as well.
According to NBC News’ exit polls, “55 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30 percent of Puerto Ricans and 48 percent of ‘other Latinos’ backed Trump.” Trump’s Hispanic vote increased from 28% among Hispanics to 32% this time. What is this Hispanic vote? It’s partially antisocialism, but I’m sure some of the vote in this heavily Catholic constituency is antiabortion. Many Hispanics are business owners, men and women who trust Trump not to raise the minimum wage and to work to support small businesses. Some of them probably fear the democrats will shut down the economy to get control of COVID. Trump clearly had intended to prevent that shut down.
Commentators suggest the democrats lost at least some of the Hispanic vote because they took that vote for granted. I believe that. Cubans are not Mexicans are not Guatemalans are not Venezuelans, I know some Mexican immigrants who followed established legal channels to get into this country — and don’t believe that people who skip those channels should be allowed into the country. Those voters may even have decided to vote for Trump because they preferred his position on immigration. Hispanics are too diverse to be considered a voting “BLOC.”
Eduhonesty: This post is an attempt to help people make sense of what happened. People vote their convictions. They vote their pocketbooks. Sometimes they vote both.
I hope this post can be a plea for understanding. What I think my many Biden-supporting counterparts should take away from this election is the realization that large chunks of this country have become unhappy and even intimidated by the world they live in. If not for the administration’s obvious bumbling of COVID-19, I believe Trump might have been reelected.
Biden successfully gained ground among working-class men and women in this election by making the case that Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus had harmed the United States. He also successfully argued that Trump’s tax cuts appeared to have helped rich Trump cronies more than the poor. Trump’s own support of the Proud Boys and others enabled Biden to convince many that Trump was racist. Trump’s court picks have spooked the LGBTQ community and others. In the end, some workers also realized that Trump was further damaging the union cause, even as he promised to bring industry back to America — and for many Americans, unions have provided a path into financial stability that could only have resulted from organizing workers.
Yet at the end of the day more than 72,000,000 Americans chose Trump. If we don’t want them to choose him again in 2024, or someone like him, we must step up and help those working class Americans who feel uprooted and lost. Their livelihoods went away. Whole industries are gone and do not appear to be coming back. The benefits of globalization are multifold but the price of globalization has been paid in closed factories and human lives. When a t-shirt can be made for $0.52 in Cambodia and $4.40 in the United States, that U.S. t-shirt factory can be expected to fold. What happens then to the man or woman who had been sewing those shirts for decades? In various regions across the United States, people have been losing hope for a long time. Lecturing them about the benefits of making products in countries with cheaper labor only makes them angry.
Donald Trump sold hope to people whose hope had been fading, and he sold it well.
To stay strong, the Democratic Party must be able to honestly replenish this country’s hope. As democrats do what needs to be done, they have to answer questions essential to U.S. long-term stability. How will we enable those former oil workers to find new employment? What will we do for other workers displaced by globalization? How will we provide national healthcare while not taking choices in doctors and hospitals away from our citizens? How will we deal with the nation’s drug problems? What can we do to help less prosperous regions realize they have not been forgotten? How can we restore the reputation and health of America’s unions? How can we undo the hit job that has been done on unions across this country? How will we repair the post office? I don’t think I emphasized enough how vital unions have been in providing living wages to U.S. workers.
I have skipped the elephant in the room while writing this post — white supremacy and associated racism. Those elements played into this election in scattered droplets across the nation. I don’t want to diminish their importance in any way. The intent of this post was to present America’s students and others with additional reasons for the Trump vote, to help them understand that many Trump voters are not racist — and, honestly, I’m sure some Biden voters are racist.
Economic displacement and desperation, however, are perfect fuel for the fire where racism is concerned. Trump’s attempts to limit immigration appealed to racists, but they also appealed to men and women who were afraid of losing their jobs to newcomers who would work for less money and fewer benefits. As we attempt to end racism, I believe it will be vital to understand how poverty and hopelessness contribute to racial discrimination, sexism, and xenophobia.
P.S. Let’s be clear: $7.25 is not a living wage. If it helps, 50 weeks X 40 hours/week X 7.25 = $14,500 per year, except getting that forty hours can be extremely tough. At 40 hours, employers can be forced to provide benefits. So often, the real numbers are 52 weeks (no paid vacation or vacation at all in this scenario) X 28 hours/week X 7.25 = $10,556. Those numbers explain why so many students’ parents have two or more jobs, all part-time, none with benefits.
P.S.S. Able to move and waiting tables? Washington has a minimum wage of 13.50 and NO tip credit. You will get your full wages without having to use your own tips to pay yourself.
O.K. This is officially pretty close to nuts. It’s Thursday and we don’t have a President. The oddest pronouncements are coming out of the White House and Twitter is censoring the tweets coming down from the top. Even if your kids have not said anything, teachers and parents, they are processing.
Many of you may think this is too much politics for children to handle. I have friends who are stunned by today’s circumstances. Stunned. If the kids are not talking, I suspect dumbfounded adults are also hoping to be able to keep silence awhile, at least until they can process what happened. How did it turn out this way? How can it be that close?
But our students are fully involved in 2020’s Presidential election for the most part. The passion that inspired votes on both sides has permeated U.S. households for months and, in some cases, years. Students may be feeling hopeful, waiting for the numbers to turn out right. Some will be traumatized. Biden or Trump was to supposed to SWEEP this nation.
The school of 2020 is already the weirdest thing those kids have ever experienced and hopefully will ever experience. Teachers drilled and drilled proper classroom procedures until 2020, when they drilled a whole new set of procedures. In some homes, school now takes place in a bedroom or kitchen. Suddenly our students walk through seas of masked men and women. Nobody gets to play in McDonalds, although the drive-thru lines are keeping the McNugget pipeline open.
Fortunately, kids are kids — and far more adaptable than adults. They also take their cues from adults. This may be next to impossible, but I’d like to suggest we keep as calm as possible. This is an amazing learning opportunity if we step back from the details, back from the hit our ideals have taken. This is the most fascinating Presidential election of my now-retired lifetime. And I hope it’s the last such fascinating Presidential election I ever see.
Supernatural episode
But what an opportunity to teach how U.S. elections work! What an opportunity to discuss democracy. If we can’t find a few million teachable moments in this mess, we don’t deserve to be called teachers.
This is a tough lesson to put together, probably impossible to do entirely right. That teacher in the front of the room or running the Zoom should not be politicking at all. A best attempt at objective discussion is demanded by the material, with the understanding that there are landmines in this discussion, landmines that can’t be allowed to detonate. Children of color and LGBTQ students are especially vulnerable right now. Those students must be made to feel supported and safe.
This social studies lesson must be a lesson in civility, a lesson in how to treat people with whom we disagree. Even the faintest whiffs of rejection and bullying have to be shut down.
If I did not think I could maintain a safe discussion in my classroom, I would sadly let my civics lesson on elections go, quickly shifting to another topic. Student safety must always come first.
If you have a classroom that can manage to explore the details of the 2020 election, though, I’d prepare the long list of questions; What is the electoral college? How did we get to this place? How can you win more of the popular vote and still lose the election? I’d prepare a pretty detailed case to show that this country has no history of any serious voting fraud and I would discuss the barriers to that fraud. Run the map, the various versions of the map over time.
Ask questions. What do you know? What do you want to know? How can you use the internet to find out what you want to know? What search terms might be effective? How can you know if a source is trustworthy?
Eduhonesty: The most apolitical of our high school students are watching the news right now. Kids of all ages are asking questions. I’d wade as deep into the chaos as possible while protecting my more vulnerable students — because the kids are trapped in the chaos anyway. Just as not teaching sex education will not stop early sexual activity — not teaching the politics of this election will not stop students from drawing conclusions about the election.
There’s much too much propaganda floating around out there now. Malcolm X once said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” Many of us were not prepared enough for this election. We will be better prepared in the future. Part of that preparation requires helping America’s students to understand what’s real and what’s not real, what’s right and what’s not right. We’ve got this.
We can do it.
P.S. In response to feedback about curriculums and students being too young — Before testing ran so completely amok, once, long ago, we trusted our teachers. When they pulled out 4th grade books for 5th grade readers, no one insisted they use the scheduled 7th grade book instead. That was a delightful, if now distant, time. Again, we trusted our teachers. Who knows what’s best for the kids in Mr. T’s class? Mr. T knows. He knows his kids. Let Mr. T make the call then about any election discussion.
Because not explaining what is happening at all leaves at least some kids to fill in the details for themselves. That’s not fair. The election process doesn’t get more complicated than this.
What has been happening in education for most of the last two decades?
Let me lay out a simplified version of the problem, a chart that shows a piece of recent history starting with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2003:
Essentially, we threatened people from the top down. “Do it or else!” We’ve continued to threaten people since the inception of NCLB, having adopted test scores as THE measures of teacher competence. Yet improvements in test scores have generally been scant or even nonexistent. Here is just one example from https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2019/10/30/naep-detroit-students-improve-in-math-michigan-improves-ranking/2491631001/: “Michigan’s student scores also slightly improved in fourth-grade math and reading as well as in eighth-grade math but not in a statistically significant way. Scores in eighth-grade math declined by more than two points compared to 2017, however.”
Maybe it’s time to stop threatening people. When test scores are considered alone — without considering language barriers, special education status, socioeconomic considerations — like all those parents who CANNOT be home this year helping their kids with online education — without considering how valid, reliable and appropriate those tests are… well, it’s no wonder many teachers feel trapped. They are trapped. English language learners who cannot read the test will not pass the test. Special education students with significant reading disabilities will not pass the test. Homeless kids who have been switching from classroom to classroom throughout their lives are unlikely to pass the test.
Yet we threaten teachers when students cannot pass inappropriate tests. We put these teachers on remediation plans when they have nothing to remediate. We deny them tenure or take away their tenure because their school is adding greater numbers of homeless students.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
There’s some doubt as to whether the PRECEDING quotation comes from Albert Einstein, but whatever the source, it drips truth:
Testing hurts many kids, the kids gasping at the bottom of the tree. It hurts teachers who have to watch those gasping, lost kids. And it has been insidiously doing damage to education all across the United States as teachers finally decide they have had enough.
“The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought: The first report in ‘The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ series. By Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss, March 26, 2019.
Teachers are fleeing this profession. In social media they are regularly asking for advice on how best to do so. Blame gets old. Hard-working, dedicated, college graduates who are regularly attacked for factors outside their control cannot be expected to hang in indefinitely. When I put in the search “how do i get out of teaching” I get 1,100,000,000 results from Google.
The momentum of testing has been slowed by COVID-19. This is a perfect time for parents and teachers to try to put a stop to standardized-test-driven instruction. With luck, reader, your tests are shut down this year. Parents, if the tests are still scheduled, OPT OUT. Tell school and other leaders in your state that you do not plan to subject your child to this too often ego-battering experience. Teachers, raise the issue with people around you. You may be stuck administering that test this year, but 2020 and 2021 will be perfect times to point out the absurdity and toxicity of this set-up. Push the union to carry the torch high in a fight to reclaim instructional time and flexibility.
We are killing these kids, at least the ones who still care. We are driving others to tune out. Why play a game you feel you can never win? Detaching from school may be the best move available to some children. We are driving once excellent teachers toward real estate licenses and early retirement. NCLB is gone, but we have institutionalized a system in which the test determines the curriculum and books and materials that students use — whether those students are ready or not. That’s a perfect set-up for the creation of anxiety disorders — in students and the adults overseeing their classrooms. (Written by a retired teacher who quit a few years earlier than she intended after she lost over 20% of her last school year to required tests her bilingual students mostly could not even read.)
It’s time to shift our focus towards learning instead of test results.
