• 

I read a post from a coworker yesterday, a coworker who was “feeling furious.” She is trying to manage district on-line learning demands. She ended up starving by day’s end — no time for food — and “in tears, shaking and nauseous.” Teacher friends commiserated, sharing that they also had no time for family, food or friendly video chats.

Eduhonesty: Today’s message is simple. Until and unless school districts can provide childcare for the teachers in their district who are sheltering at home, they need to back off. Teachers should be given the time they require to take care of themselves and their own children. Newsflash for administrators: You can’t save this year. It’s lost. I’d suggest trying to hold on to the loyalty and support of your staff for next year.

Many of America’s teachers are home with their children, expected to provide home-schooling for their own children while also texting, calling, and emailing all 26 families in their classrooms. These educators are helping their own children to find and manage online classroom demands, while making meals, managing emotional trauma, helping with loneliness, playing ball, finding other games for bored kids, managing overuse of electronics inside the home, in addition to all the regular parenting tasks that suck up each day in bits and pieces: baths, laundry, kitchen, bathroom and floor cleaning, cat care, dog walks, paying bills, changing lightbulbs, checking on parents, family and friends, and finally bedtime stories. In too many cases, those educators are then skipping that post-bedtime relaxation, instead calling families whose children are not going online because mom, dad or someone has decided that online learning is interfering with COVID-19 life. Title of an Education Week news article that I just discovered on my phone: “Where are they? Students go missing in shift to remote classes.” In the absence of a 48-hour day, this set-up is a perfect recipe for a major emotional meltdown. Some administrators are forcing teachers to drive books and materials out to student’s porches. Even single or older teachers without children at home are sometimes being expected to work nonstop all day with glitchy technology to produce… what? “Rigorous common lesson plans” that perhaps almost no one will complete?

Newsflash for clueless administrators: You can’t make parents do anything they don’t want to do right now. This craziness should stop, stop, stop. I can guarantee readers that the children of the teachers in the middle of this on-line push will not say on some future career day, “I want to be a teacher.” At this rate, nobody will ever want to be a teacher again.

May I suggest a trip to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/coronavirus-home-school.html ? Dr. Jennie Weiner is an associate professor of educational leadership and she does a stellar job of explaining why she is not doing Coronavirus homeschooling — at least not the homeschooling being thrown at her as an option. Parents are always homeschooling, every day. I’d say we ought to let parents decide how they want to do their homeschooling right now. If that’s an opt-out, then teachers should be left alone to accept parents’ wishes.

And, damn, can we forget about grades? Grades are stupid this spring. What are we grading? Access to technology in many cases. It’s hard to work on a phone and a phone may be all the connection students own. We are grading competition with siblings in others. That kid with four brothers and sisters? He may not be getting a lot of screen time and his parent or parents may not have time to do the day’s packet with him. Levels of cooperation by parents will also be part of any grade. Jennie Weiner has opted out of homeschooling and I’d guess she has millions of counterparts in greater or lesser degree. Then there’s the problem of the parent who has to use the household technology to work from home… I loved this FB quote, too: “Ugh. Dear webinars, plz just make slides I can download and read? I am not an auditory learner!” Current online lessons may be more problematic for the auditory learner than the visual learner, but the fact is that many kids benefit from classroom interventions that help them access material they cannot effectively read. Those interventions may not exist in the home. The huge and manifold inequities inherent in the shift to online learning should automatically shut down any idea of spring grades.

I am not against providing schooling for children at home. Schools should make this treacherous time a period of enrichment, an early summer school creative writing class with fun reading assignments for those who will read, adding in recreational mathematics at free sites and certainly art projects and fun days. This is a perfect time to let children post pictures of themselves to virtual classrooms, showing their braids sticking up through paper plates and donuts for crazy hair day.

P.S. Fellow teachers, if your routine is bringing you to tears, I suggest letting some of the home rules go by the wayside. If administrative demands are making you feel frantic or overwhelmed, well, another episode of Power Rangers Beast Morphers honestly won’t matter in the long-run. A few hours of phone games won’t rot anyone’s brain. I suggest sitting down to watch Stranger Things with the older crowd. Let go, let go, let go. Do what you have to do to get by. Then make cocoa for everybody and ignore those emails until you feel ready for them.