Thinking of Dr. Seuss here:

“ALL BALL We all play ball.

BALL WALL Up on a wall

ALL FALL Fall off the wall.”

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

Eduhonesty:

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

A little more Seuss?

“Pup up. Brown down.

Pup is down. Where is Brown?

WHERE IS BROWN?

THERE IS BROWN!

Mr. Brown is out of town.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can only hope tomorrow will look better than today.