I didn’t fall off the bleachers. I didn’t twist an ankle or slip on a patch of water. My foot simply… bruised from the inside and swelled up. They sent me home from the ER using a walker. The foot’s fine now. I had healed by late the following week, at least well enough to walk without assistive devices. But I still don’t know what happened except I was on that foot, climbing bleachers, while going back and forth and moving nonstop all day in a gym. Still, all teachers have nonstop days — now more than ever.
Eduhonesty: I used social media today to advise a teacher to try meditation, tapping or medication — whatever it would take to get her through the teaching day without ending up hurting. I read too many posts lately from teachers with headaches, teachers who are nonstop anxious, who are sick or recovering from being sick.
Does this describe you? Or someone else you know? Physical symptoms of stress should not be ignored in an effort to complete Lesson Plan #284 for the year. You only get one body and one life, one shot, as Eminem sang.
I don’t plan to go into detail about my haiku. I just want to flag that physical discomfort I kept walking on. It’s too easy to take a purple Nexium and ignore a stomach, or to down another Excedrin for the latest headache. It’s too easy to work through pain, ignoring the message underneath.
My foot gave me warnings that day. But I just kept going until I couldn’t keep going and then I borrowed crutches from a school nurse to half-hop to my car and somehow drive to the ER. One shiny, new metal walker later, I made my way home, where I then spent the week watching TV with my foot elevated, startled to discover I hadn’t gotten away with my determined effort to work through the pain.
As Madonna sang, “pain is a warning that something’s wrong.” What we may forget, especially when day-to-day pressure is too great — I have to get that spreadsheet ready before tomorrow’s meeting! — is that sometimes tornado warnings are followed by tornados. That pain? Something’s wrong.
I am writing this post to plead with educators to take care of themselves:
Before that slow, labored hop to the car.
Before kind ER nurses and doctors start attaching devices to fingers, chests, arms and ankles.
Before helpful techs start wheeling your supine body to various imaging machines.
Before maybe you do yourself damage you can’t easily or ever fix.
Remedies for physical and mental stress are superabundant today: meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, massages, exercise classes, tapping, hypnosis, music, recreational reading, walking, art, funny videos, essential oils, gardening…etc. I recommend locating and printing a list of remedies. Highlight your favorites and make a schedule. Pay for that yoga class if paying will get you to park and walk through the studio door. And if you are hurting, please see a doctor. When all else fails, medication may be required.
One last observation: If your workday REGULARLY causes you physical pain, that’s your body trying furiously to reach you. Whether you need another district, another administration, or another profession altogether, your instincts are already kicking in to push you off your chosen path. Don’t let your brain lead when your gut, head, or right foot are trying to break into your internal conversation.
After the first vaccinations, many people took a deep breath, relieved to again plan visits to their favorite pizzeria, ice cream shop, or barbecue place. Birthday parties were expected to rocket back onto the calendar. Vacations were booked for spring and summer breaks. We waited for normal.
And we waited. And waited and waited and waited. Disappointment defined 2021, casting 2022 into an ominous light. When weary people got together this year for the holidays, omicron numbers unsurprisingly exploded. As Princess Leia once told Han Solo, “It’s not over yet.” When Han replied it was over for him, well, that was an example of wishful thinking at its finest. Omicron case counts remain problematic, although fortunately we appear to be on the downward slope of this latest COVID-19 surge.
It’s easy to write a COVID-19 post that chronicles the virus’s attack on US education, but I’d like to go someplace different today: I’d like to list one win: Our students are learning an amazing amount about life, even when those lessons are unpleasant.
For example:
A virus can fuel a breakdown in services and supplies.
The supply chain’s links can break.
A hospital may not always have drugs or beds.
ER patients may be kept in a hallway for days.
Grocery shelves can be nearly empty.
Finding toilet paper may take multiple stops.
Shop hours are unreliable.
Favorite places may close all day when no one can be found to open the doors.
Sadly, those doors may even shut forever.
More importantly for students’ daily lives, we are learning:
School schedules cannot be trusted.
This week may be virtual, but maybe not.
Teachers may be absent often– and can even disappear mid-year.
Skyrocketing illness cases can shut down just about anything.
Substitute teachers cannot always be located.
Even when available, not all subs can do the day’s math, science, or your-subject-here.
Paraprofessionals, bus drivers and other staples of school life may also disappear.
Classes when suddenly combined together seldom work well.
Discipline tends to unravel with too many routine changes.
Classes without discipline or routines waste huge amounts of time.
Learning is complicated when repeatedly interrupted.
Long discussions about “entitlement culture” have picked up impetus while also giving way to changed discourse. Young people are growing up fearing for the future of a planet that had once seemed inexhaustible. These kids saw childhoods and young adulthoods perverted and shaped by the past two years of COVID reality.
But I must also observe that our kids are learning and being shaped by the new world — and that fact’s not all bad. They are going to produce a culture that has been informed by their experiences. They will eventually determine the world in which we live — what people read, what they watch, what they talk about, what they do and how they live. I hope they will build a kinder world. I am certain they will build a more realistic world.
Adults of the pandemic have been shocked and even derailed by events in the recent past. Today’s children are growing into that world, however, and children tend to be remarkably adaptable, at least compared to adults. As part of the natural course of childhood — because they are still world building — they can incorporate shifts into their personal paradigms that stagger adults.
Let’s take childcare. Adults were poleaxed by sudden childcare crises during the pandemic. I predict the next generation will not leave childcare as a national piecemeal, patchwork disaster-in-waiting. Our children have seen what happens when the absence of childcare comes up against urgent need for that care. They will understand that unaffordable childcare might as well be no childcare.
Eduhonesty: This next generation has the potential to be wiser than generations that came before them. Greta Thunberg and others her age have been leading efforts to pull climate change to the front of the world’s agendas. High school students have been walking out of school in support of teachers and improved school safety protocols. Adolescents navigating today’s high schools are poised to become this nation’s leaders, and they have learned invaluable lessons in the recent past. They will know that public health cannot be an afterthought, that clear communication of risks should be at the forefront of public health planning, and that schools cannot continue to deteriorate while budgets get debated.
We ran at the edge of functional, not thinking about what might happen if our barely funded schools, 95% occupied hospitals, and just-in-time* inventories might be dangerous. We took for granted the goodwill of the world, assumed that China would send us our drugs, silicon chips and finished lumber. But the mask shortage brought home a truth quickly: When demand greatly exceeded supply, those N-95 masks did not cross the ocean. Meanwhile, the price of lumber skyrocketed.
When all the links come together, the price of housing and home repairs necessarily rises, and not in small nibbles of cash.
Quite a number of things have appeared to be crumbling lately, some to near their breaking points. Prices have made scary leaps. I just checked a receipt and found out I had purchased a $6.99 loaf of artisan bread. We were at least a year late purchasing our used van.
But, in “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” author Carol Dweck offers lessons that many teachers have been sharing in America’s classrooms, beginning with one critical concept: Mistakes can help us grow. Our students have observed firsthand the effects of mistake after mistake. If there’s a word that exemplifies how this pandemic went so wrong, that word is unpreparedness. Our society will not be so unprepared in the future. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience unfortunately comes from poor judgment, a truth that casts the last few years experiences into a more hopeful light.
We became careless. No one asked critical questions: What if we can’t get that medication from China? What if Taiwan stops selling us silicon chips? What if the world does not experience peace in our time?
If a learning curve can be a mountain, the COVID curve unquestionably qualifies. Yet our students are going forward, talking about racial and economic inequity, gender inequality, their own identities, and where those identities fit within their cultures. They are debating how to best manage safety during a plague: Mask or no mask? How long to quarantine?How to manage sports and clubs? Children and adolescents absorb every single day around them. They learn from what they see, and then break down and break out the meaning of their observations, often in conversation with peers.
I feel hopeful when I think about today’s students. These kids are talking together, and many are focused and urgent in their desire to improve the world. I trust our next generation to embrace the challenges revealed by the last few years. I trust them to learn and stretch themselves. I trust them to stay focused and, most importantly, to remember the perils that the adults in their lives forgot.
Taking a moment here to do my own version of looking on the brighter side of life.
*Just-in-time is an inventory management method in which businesses keep as little inventory on hand as possible. That means those businesses don’t stockpile products and raw materials in case of future need—they simply reorder products to replace those already sold. This saves money storing products and a great deal of thought and energy goes into finding the magic line where a business does not run out of inventory and lose a sale, but also does not have to store or manage any significant quantity of that inventory. That’s part of why the toilet paper disappeared.
P.S. Testing has gutted social studies in some areas as schools focused on mathematics and English for the test, cutting social studies minutes and skewing curricula toward the tests. We must rein in the testing monster. Those who don’t know history ARE condemned to repeat it. Lessons from the Spanish Influenza might have made the last few years much easier.
