This is will be more anecdotal than my usual posts, but future predictions must sometimes be made from the tea leaves of daily life, rather than elaborate, data-filled spreadsheets.

A friend and I were driving together in her car this week, Hooray for vaccinations! The windows were open but we shared a car and ate lunch outside at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Slowly, the world is returning to “normal.” Almost. On the way home, we had a sobering conversation. She was talking about a friend of hers who was angry about teacher vaccinations.

“Why should they be prioritized over other people?” The friend had asked in a hostile tone. “The data says teaching is safe.”

I’m not sure what data that is. Safe? Mortality rates are low, but not close to 0. The data does suggest teaching remains safer than many alternatives. According to the article, Covid: Teachers ‘not at higher risk’ of death than average – BBC News, the figures suggest teachers “do not have an elevated risk of the magnitude faced by health and care staff and by lower-paid manual and service workers.” Here are some numbers out of England:

“Among teachers, there were 18 deaths per 100,000 among men and 10 per 100,000 among women.” Secondary school teachers have a higher risk at 39 deaths per 100,000 people in men and 21 per 100,000 in women. For comparison, the article notes that per 100,000 men, 119 restaurant and catering staff died. Other dangerous professions today: 110 care workers, 101 taxi drivers and 79 nurses. Women do significantly better overall. For example, mortality rates per 100,000 women show death rates of 47 for care workers, 27 for sales or retail assistants, and 25 for nurses.

I want to focus on that ANGER today, though, rather than any stats. In those US states that have decided to prioritize teachers, teachers have been on the receiving end of outbursts of anger over their status in the vaccination line. That anger spills out in Twitter, Facebook, Nextdoor, and other social media sites. It crops up in conversations across the country. That anger is a much greater problem than any viewpoint that maybe the grocery clerks, restaurant workers and taxi drivers should go first.

We are all entitled to our personal plans for how we would have managed vaccinations. If my husband was a taxi driver, I’d naturally want him toward the front of the line. I don’t want to in any way slight the many nonteachers at elevated risk.

But teachers already feel dumped upon. They have been feeling dumped upon for years. Ever since No Child Left Behind, many have felt they were being held responsible for factors outside their control. When a teacher gets criticized and maybe even reprimanded because a student is sleeping in class — after a night spent fighting for rest in a crowded van and a rushed breakfast of a school granola bar and milk — it’s hard to describe that teacher’s likely feelings of helplessness and sometimes even rage. Blaming teachers for student behavior and student test results while ignoring the socioeconomic factors in the mix has been a fact of teaching life for too many years now. Unhappy, even miserable, teachers have come to believe the system is rigged to make their lives harder rather than easier.

Today’s miasma of anger has spilled out onto teachers– who are blamed for getting earlier vaccinations, for CDC protocols in schools, for forced online learning, for chosen online learning platforms, for limits on social opportunities at school, and for their reluctance to step into poorly ventilated rooms in schools that honestly cannot meet CDC guidelines. That anger has been popping out all over and shares one thing in common with the sleeping student mentioned above: Teachers cannot and do not control any of these factors. They didn’t come up with the guidelines, choose the platform, or decide never to fix their schools’ failing ventilation. They didn’t get to pick anybody’s vaccination schedules. But teachers are still feeling the anger directed against them.

And, oh, readers, are some of these men and women TIRED. I’ll use myself as an example. I can accept being blamed for my poor choices — they were my choices, after all, and if I do not own them, who will? — but I retired from teaching because I was TIRED of being blamed for factors outside my control. That girl who could not explain what we were doing in math class? Her English was testing at a first grade level and she was extremely shy to boot. When my tall and rather scary Assistant Principal decided to give ME hell for her “inability to explain the day’s lesson” to him, I only just managed to keep my silence for the sake of my students. I left my resignation letter in my glovebox and kept on teaching. I knew I was done, though. I was simply sick of being held responsible for test scores on a test pitched four or more years above the previously-tested learning levels of my students. Not to mention all the other problems I was expected to fix, like introversion, lack of background knowledge, and the effects of losing sleep because the whole group home had to pick up a new member in the middle of the night due to lack of staffing.

Some women and men are quitting today. This year has seen far more mid-year resignations than I can ever remember. Those resignations were once rare because they almost ensured a teacher would not be able to find another teaching position. They are not rare this year. Those teachers who decide to quit before year’s end are leaving the profession, so next year’s postings don’t matter to them.

Other teachers are planning to quit at the end of the year, despite the fact that schools are running on fumes right now because the subs have already quit. Yes, not all the subs are gone. Some future or newly minted teachers are still subbing to get their feet in the right doors. But those retired teachers? In big numbers, they ducked this year. The 2020-2021 sub crisis has been real, if eclipsed by other more immediate perils.

Eduhonesty: Readers, none of us can control COVID or the CDC. This last year has been extremely rough for everyone. Teachers nonetheless kept fixing the plane while flying it, and many of them have been doing heroic jobs while also caring for their own displaced kids.

I want to highlight just ONE big issue in this post:

Teachers are feeling blamed — yet again — for circumstances entirely outside of their control. That kind of blame gets old fast. When a person cannot fix a problem, but ends up being criticized and held accountable — well, Smart Move No, 1 may be going back to school to become an ultrasound technician. Or staying home with the kids if the $$ numbers work.

Every angry remark, every angry post, every disparagement of a working teacher becomes one more reason to walk away. The men and women in supportive districts who are in the middle of their careers are likely to wade through this latest set of troubles. Some teachers with a strong calling to teach will stay regardless of circumstances. Those teachers would keep preparing lessons in Aleppo, Syria, as the bombs fell. But especially teachers nearing retirement or just starting out may decide they are done. It’s not so hard to write off a mistake in direction in your twenties, not with decades still ahead to pursue alternative interests elsewhere. Sometimes three more years to a thirty-year retirement pension may not seem worth the risk or the money. Even with vaccinations, 2021 teaching remains insanely stressful in some locales.

I predict an ugly teacher shortage coming at us like chunks of a broken asteroid from space, one that will hit our low-achieving districts first and hardest. The reasons will be complex. No one simple factor will be responsible. Today’s ANGER may seriously feed that teaching exodus, though.

Articles are already being written:

“The coronavirus is vastly exacerbating that shortfall (of full-time, licensed teachers), experts say, by prompting many teachers to leave the profession or take early retirement.” (Pandemic Teacher Shortages Imperil In-Person Schooling – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Readers, if you are not a teacher, please take time regularly to thank your children’s teachers if possible. No kids? Can you thank the teacher down the block? I’d also like to ask everyone to work to shut down those ugly comments on social media. Young people as well as teachers read those comments. How will they view the idea of teaching after they read those hurtful posts? To parents who don’t want their children to enter the teaching profession, I’d like to pose two questions: Who will teach the next generation? Who will teach our grandchildren? Teacher bashing has to stop.

Teachers didn’t cause this year. But this year may cause many to leave the classroom, and I don’t hold it against a single one of them who pulled that resignation letter out of the glovebox. Too much is too much, But this year’s “too much” has often been a series of tiny nicks and cuts, a slow bleed that did not have to happen.

We can do better. We can do more supportive and more understanding. We can do kinder.

A quote for spring, 2021:  “Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think and twice as beautiful as you’ve ever imagined.” – Dr. Seuss

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner