Teachers and others working in schools — do you feel safe? Or safe enough? Do you have enough support, both literal and figurative? Are there subs? Paraprofessionals? Do you have the supplies necessary to make classes work, including personal protective equipment? When COVID cases are identified, does your district policy protect you? Does it protect the children in your care? Is your administration listening to your concerns?

If no one seems to be listening to you, fellow teacher, if your situation genuinely feels hazardous, especially if you live in a rural area with limited healthcare options, consider quitting. Consider retiring. Consider seeking alternative employment. You won’t be the first person to quit in October. I am getting emails telling me about job fairs, job fairs for teachers in early autumn.

We are guaranteed a wild year of quarantines and closures. That wild year has become inevitable. We can’t put COVID back in the box because too many humans are now serving as disease vectors.

Eduhonesty: The short window when we might have extinguished COVID closed a long time ago. Only you, reader, can determine your risk profile and your risk tolerance. Only you can assess whether or not the stress of your daily work is causing you to crumble around the edges. Are you still having fun? Are you just holding together? How much glue, spit and bailing wire is it taking to keep you together? How much do you dread your morning drive? I am going to suggest you read the following article as you consider your personal emotional state:

Nine Ways Stress is More Dangerous Than You Think (healthline.com)

The decision to quit should factor in your retirement posture, available family and friends who might be asked for help, and any strategies which might get you through the school year. Walking away from your students should be a last resort.

But you CAN walk away. You don’t have to die on this hill. If your stomach lurches as you drive to work, if you are having panic attacks or just going on occasional drinking binges to forget the day — if you cry regularly, if you dread your email, if everything coming out of the front office feels like another five pounds added to a 75 pound backpack you are already carrying, if staff meetings are never fun now, if angry parents make you want to hide in your basement in your pajamas, watching Netflix while the world goes on without you…

The world will go on without you. That’s the big truth we teachers sometimes avoid while looking at all the good we are doing in our classrooms. Yes, if you quit, you will inconvenience and hurt people, but your administrators will replace you as quickly as possible and they may never even look back. Your students will be forced to process one more change in a stew of recent changes, but students regularly change teachers throughout their academic lives. Showing them they don’t have to put up with piles of crazy because it’s expected of them — that may be doing them a favor that will help them enormously down the line.

Despite today’s difficult conditions, I hope many readers are thinking, “Why would I ever leave teaching?” But reader, if you are taking Xanax just to get through the day or simply breaking into random tears, this post is probably for you. And happy or at least reconciled teachers? Please send a link to this post to colleagues who keep crying in the breakroom or who otherwise just don’t seem to be… making it.

Is it time to leave, reader? Why not go online and start planning an exit strategy? Stress makes people physically and mentally ill. PTSD is not only for soldiers who served in Afghanistan or other bloody global conflicts. See PTSD in Teachers: Yes, It’s Real! – The Educators Room.

How much stress is too much stress? Here’s the thing: You don’t want to find out by making yourself sick. This post is written in memory of a colleague who died on the table despite the best efforts of her surgeon. It’s written for all those teachers and ex-teachers who are discovering that PTSD is a chronic and fluctuating disorder. Every teacher who is struggling, struggling and struggling while trying to hit all the targets and simultaneously pacify all the stakeholders concerned with the classroom happy should actively read PTSD is a chronic, fluctuating disorder affecting the mental quality of life in older adults – PubMed (nih.gov).

You only have one heart. You only have one mind. Your inner child deserves your protection, as much as any other child anywhere. And if your inner child is hurting too badly, you need to carry that child to safety.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers”, anyone? The original “Halloween” follows. AMC is running Halloween movies all day until about midnight when it segues into “Fear the Walking Dead.” SyFy is cranking through various Nightmares on Elm Street. until “Chucky” at 10:00 PM which is followed by “Zombie Tidal Wave.” I have the option to watch “Zombie Tidal Wave” right now if I wish.

Channels that are not in full Hallowfest yet are saving their offerings for evening. Freeform has Hocus Pocus, a lighter offering with Bette Midler at her cult classic best. I confess I haven’t seen “Boo! A Madea Halloween.”

I love zombie movies. Dawn of the Dead captured the fundamental element of a plague perfectly: “Every Dead Body That Is Not Exterminated Becomes One Of Them. It Gets Up And Kills! The People It Kills Get Up And Kill!” Zombie movies and TV shows often capture the best and worse of humans, and may raise critical thinking questions that appeal to our kids. Are we always obliged to try to rescue innocent victims? What if fifty zombies surround Fred? At what point do we walk away from Fred, who has become trapped in his Subaru in the traffic jam on the bridge?

Eduhonesty: No one could call me unusually squeamish. I binge-watched the series “Hannibal” right before it left Netflix. I used to watch Criminal Minds with my adolescent daughters, all of us under warm blankets together on the couch until we decided the series had gotten too fond of trying to top last week’s gore and body count. I watched “Saw” movies with one kid, the same kid who also bought the DVD for “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.”

Why the details on my viewing habits? Because maybe when I push the guide button on the remote and think, “Damn, this is not good for kids,” I am right. The tradition of scary movie month was established years back, and I am all for carving pumpkins, eating candy and taking in a scary movie or two. Or three. I’m just not sure exactly where to draw the line on the October frightfest. I am sure a line is needed, however.

I want to throw out a few thoughts on today’s gore fest as we count down to Halloween: 1) Both 2020 and 2021 have been rough years. Film zombies today might seem more realistic to our kids than they did in 2019, even zombies in grainy black and white. It’s much less threatening to watch scary movies when you personally feel safe and secure. 2) The fight, flight, or freeze hormones we metabolize quickly in peaceful times can take much longer to process and eliminate when stress levels are already high. If a kid starts the movie stressed, that kid may have no chance to wind down before bedtime. 3) Year by year, phone saturation increases. Many phones are functional televisions, so it’s easy for some kids to sneak in a couple of extra hours of TV. 4) New content providers keep popping up and there’s always YouTube. 5) Seasonal films are competing with shows designed to inspire fear. Multiple flavors of “The Walking Dead” are only a start. Midnight Mass anyone?

I’ve written before about my belief that many of today’s ADHD diagnoses are misdiagnosed anxiety disorders. ADHD and anxiety disorders also often coexist as well, and ADHD may be flagged before anxiety, behaviors being more apparent than emotional states. Regardless, the percentage of anxious children has been rising rapidly in the recent past. “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3  of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. These numbers have been rising steadily; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%.” (Anxiety in Teens is Rising: What’s Going On? – HealthyChildren.org) Anxious children in particular may struggle more during the annual scary movie marathon.

As someone who spent years of her elementary school childhood waiting for lightening to begin flashing in the corner of her room before somehow making her disappear, I’d like to post this caution: Imaginative kids believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for years. For that matter, some adults today believe government boogeymen are chipping and tracking them for unknown, experimental purposes. Anxiety pervades US society.

While I hate to make more concessions to COVID times, I’d like to make a few recommendations for readers:

1. I’d suggest capping the time spent on scary movies and shows in the next few weeks. I’d also suggest vetting films ahead of time. Here’s a site that may help: Search Page | Reel Scary
2. Search Page | Reel Scary takes input from readers. Your older kids might like this site and could add to its content. Teaching our kids to study the dangers posed by the light socket before jamming their fingers inside helps everyone.

Teachers, the scary movie topic is brimming over with social/emotional lesson content that’s useful in the classroom and life. Those teachers lucky enough to have the flexibility can teach students to step outside movies to look at social context in films, at characters and their backgrounds. Teachers can help students to recognize and discuss the the social values that allow us to predict film events. Younger students might watch Halloweentown or Paranorman.

If possible, I ‘d work this movie unit into my October lesson plans. Movies are perfect for reinforcing the elements of a plot and can be used for a variety of social science topics. But I’d also be putting together this unit with an alternative agenda that dovetails with many curricular targets: Our kids should be given time to reflect on the effect of fright night after fright night. The excitement of The Sandman followed by Chucky and Scream 4 — what exactly does that do? The answer will vary from one child to another. Our kids will benefit from separating themselves from the crowd and recognizing exactly how horror, gore, and suspense affect them personally.

Thank you for reading. Hugs, Jocelyn Turner

We could have used a clear playing field, a large expanse of green grasses for long passes and quick hand-off plays. Equity deserved to take the field openly, with discussions about racial awareness and fairness, neurodiversity, and disability access unobstructed, if fiercely debated as to their particulars. Somehow equity issues finally had shot toward the top of the educational agenda.

But here is what we came up against: Teachers, administrators and students trying to hang on while under daily assault, fighting a plague that is upending education as it sweeps like a tsunami over the pillars of daily life. That plague is in the forefront of today’s events, so much so that we are losing momentum in other areas. Remember when young people were gathered together from countries all across the globe to stage a climate strike back in 2019? (‘It’s our time to rise up’: youth climate strikes held in 100 countries | Climate crisis | The Guardian) They resumed the fight in September of 2020 and 2021 with more protests, but those protests have been muted and have fallen off many front pages. From a 2020 article Young people resume global climate strikes calling for urgent action | School climate strikes | The Guardian: “Greta Thunberg led a strike in Sweden, which was limited to 50 people by the country’s lockdown laws – “so we adapt”, she tweeted, with a picture showing strikers more than 2 metres apart.”

We adapt. The calls to limit testing become muted in response to articles that trumpet a learning catastrophe resulting from classroom closures. Educational leaders demand numbers to measure learning loss, and the loss of instructional time those tests will create gets lost despite the irony of incurring lost learning time to measure the effects of lost learning time.

Other issues have fallen off the table or been shoved to the side as well. Inequitable property-tax based funding that favors those lucky enough to live in moneyed zip codes still pops up, but toward the bottom of pages that begin with stories on how districts are offering cash to families to take their children to school because of bus driver shortages. (Why Would Anyone Drive a School Bus Right Now? | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com))

Issues of tech equity are an exception to what I have written. Remote learning threw a spotlight on that issue. Suddenly the fact that District A had been 1:1, with all their students possessing a laptop, while District B was still signing up for the computer lab twice a week became seen for the educational inequity that it had always been.

Eduhonesty: When you have 15 impossible things to do before breakfast, but only time to complete 6 of those things, part of your list must be dropped. That’s fine. That’s triage and we fell down the rabbit hole long before anyone outside the medical field had even heard of a coronavirus. We were triaging before the field filled with COVID-19 flotsam.

Still, we have to keep our voices high and loud. Hey! Over here! Where are the laptops! But also: Why were there so few laptops?

Issue 1: Given that zip codes are stratified both by income and race — and that predominantly black or Hispanic zip codes overall are taking in less $$ in property taxes, sometimes far less — how can we fix school funding? I believe property-tax based funding is inherently unfair, disenfranchising the poor. (Why were there so few laptops? I blogged the following slightly meandering post in 2015 that describes the Land of Few Laptops: Internet notes and classrooms | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)) I was definitely working in the land of have-nots.

Charters and vouchers are part of this funding discussion. I’d like to say that I regard both of these “solutions” as attempts to make an end run around the problem of inequitable funding — attempts to avoid spending extra money on our most disadvantaged students.

Issue 2: Testing time went over the top years ago. The time wasted confirming what we already know is stolen directly from children. The time we spend to find out what we don’t know is poorly conceived and implemented, wasting absurd numbers of minutes.

Issue 3: We are past due at unpeeling the onion of biases, both hidden and overt, that affect our students, especially students of color and students who diverge from the neurotypical. We must not bypass this issue because the playing field has become too crowded. Too many men on field? Let’s take the penalty and return to playing our best game. Social/emotional learning has never been more important than now.

My M.D. friend’s anger spilled over as we drove back home from Chicago. Her bout of COVID left her with longer-term struggles, months of off tastes, strange and missing smells, less air and energy, and other spooky challenges. She joins many of the vaccinated in thinking that the unvaccinated are hurting us all. She’ll extend a little sympathy to young men who might weigh a possible link between rare cases of heart inflammation after vaccination against the effects of COVID-19 itself. It’s a tough choice when you feel young and healthy, given that the young often have a false sense of invulnerability. With the possible exception of young men, though, she believes anyone who has examined the evidence should have gotten that shot yesterday.

It’s October of 2021. The parade should be over. The shots should mostly all be done. My take after evaluating the evidence is that the shot is vastly less dangerous than COVID itself, so much so that I don’t even regard vaccination as a choice.

That said, though, the current Facebook scandal has me planning to take the blog sideways today, away from testing, curriculum and teaching itself. How did Facebook enter this vaccine post? Vaccination has become a social media and internet search issue at its core. Too often we don’t listen to the vaccine hesitant carefully enough. Instead, we share facts that they “know” are not true. How do they know? Friends on Facebook told them. Or an internet search took them to places that many vaccine proponents don’t even know exist.

We know about Tucker Carlson. Like the round-faced chipmunk(s) who keep uprooting the mums and pansies in my porch flowerbox, the fact of his existence is hard to deny. He’s out there and he is saying whatever will pull in ratings. If he thought it would boost his numbers enough, I’m sure he’d cover the Martian takeover of the U.S. government in 1964. Carlson himself refuses to tell people whether or not he is vaccinated.

That’s our problem at the moment. And we don’t always help ourselves when we confidently lecture to the worried well who are afraid of that needle. It’s too easy to sound as if we are talking down to anti-vaxxers or the vaccine hesitant* when we offer glib statements that don’t match the Facebook exchanges or internet searches of our listeners. Statements like “Almost nobody ever has a serious reaction” is an example.

The fact that a next door neighbor had a fever and aches for a day or two may seem serious to someone who has never experienced a monster illness. Maybe a cousin has complained of pain in a vaccination site and told the story over and over again of how she couldn’t “lift her arm for a week.” And whether we like it or not, people have definitely died from vaccinations. Millions of people have had their vaccinations now, and trying to nail down that incredibly tiny percentage of persons who passed away shortly after being vaccinated reveals the outline of our credibility problem.

A search on “how many people have died from covid vaccinations” reveals a terrifying schism in the available information out there. A hard number doesn’t truly exist, because people who die after vaccinations may die from a wide variety of causes. Sudden death events were common before COVID and will continue to be common in our lifetimes.

Tucker Carlson used his show in May to suggest that 3,362 people had died from the vaccine by that time, using numbers from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database, or VAERS. The VAERS system is open to anyone who perceives they had a reaction to the vaccine, and inputs are not verified. I could go in now and report my tongue had turned mysteriously green, although the site does warn users that federal consequences are possible if the site is misused. It also wants to know where a user sought medical help.

Data also slips away all the time in any voluntary reporting system. I had a slight fever after my booster shot. I won’t get around to reporting that. They don’t need my tiny blip of data to know the vaccine can cause a fever of 100.6 for part of one day. That report would take a chunk of my valuable time with no benefit to me. A more excitable person might have sought help and made a report. I made tea and went to bed with a good book. VAERS — as the site itself emphasizes — is not a reliable source of information. And as far as deaths go, if Joe has a heart attack the night he got his vaccination, is the vaccination the cause? What if Joe slips and falls in the bathtub? What if the vaccine itself is fine for almost everyone but Joe is allergic to the polyethylene glycol in his shot? VAERS data provides information, but not causation.

Tucker said 3,362, a number he knew to be fuzzy and essentially fictional. He knows no verifiable number exists. Other sources give much bigger numbers. Other sites claim almost 45,000 people who got the COVID-19 vaccinations died in 72 hours. Many of these links lead to “page not found.” But somebody found those pages once. Sifting through the amount of (dis)information on this topic is not merely difficult. I think it’s undoable.

Eduhonesty: Yes, reader, I am guessing you believe in getting vaccinated. I believe that injection is clearly the lesser of my evils too. But I would like to ask readers to be polite to the vaccine hesitant. Listen to them.

We need to persuade the hesitant to get on the bandwagon, because herd immunity is a real thing, and if we ever get there, we won’t have to worry so much. Teachers will be able to decide whether to retire, resign or plan for their next year without factoring in likely COVID-19 exposures. Administrators will have more confidence that staff members they hired will not vanish mid-year. Parents will be able to stop wavering on possible home schooling. When dad has back pain and has to go the emergency room, with luck, he will only have to wait two hours instead of twelve. We will all be able to stop buying masks regularly.

Please, reader, prepare the relevant facts for your arguments, starting with the fact that 700,000 people in this country have died from the actual COVID-19 disease. Pictures help to make this trend clear at a glance. And herd immunity is our only chance of getting back to “normal.”

A natural question should arise here: In this scenario, why are people hesitant to go online to sign up for a shot at their local pharmacy? It’s so easy to do. Much of the world envies us our ready access to help right now.

We are dealing with something larger than fear a needles (most of the time anyway) when we talk to the vaccine hesitant. That vaccine hesitancy springs from a number of sources — one of which is lack of faith in our leaders. To persuade the hesitant, we must be ready to confront the “mask” argument because that argument has its roots in facts that deserve attention and recognition: At one point, early in the pandemic, our leaders did lie to us. (In my opinion, they did anyway.) When the CDC went on television and told people masks were not helpful because we might be more inclined to touch our faces when wearing them, I believe they knew they were sharing a falsehood. I also understand they were backed into a corner and probably thought they had no choice.

The toilet paper had flown off the shelves and cleaning product aisles were empty.

Those leaders knew the truth: If they told people to buy masks, healthcare providers would almost immediately end up without essential personal protective equipment. Even without a government mask endorsement, in many areas, the mask supply dried up within weeks. People were donating the masks they used when cleaning their cat boxes to friends who were nurses. Our utter lack of pandemic preparedness backed leaders into a corner and I forgive them.

But as we deal with the vaccine hesitant, I’d say we must remember that lie. It’s part of the current mistrust. Changes in policy that came as data was analyzed are also part of the hesitancy. Recommendations changed. Maybe they changed because scientists realized that almost all the transmission was airborne and a bleach bath after work was unnecessary. But recommendations changed, which confused people. They continue to change, too. The mask issue remains in play.

We have to listen if we are going to sway the hesitant. We have to be able to answer their concerns. My feed is not your feed is not Mark or Esme’s feed. This is a time for persuasion. Persuasion requires that we acknowledge the facts and factoids being fed into Esme’s phone and start from there.

I hear too much bashing of the unvaccinated. No one can be expected to respond positively when under verbal assault. No one listens when an argument turns ugly. “Factoids” or so-called facts are convincing people to sit on the fence. True facts have the potential to get them off the fence.

But first we have to listen, so we can figure out what we ought to say.

* The vaccine hesitant and anti-vaxxers often differ radically in their positions and views. I honestly don’t think there’s anything I can say that will persuade the 5-G crowd who fear being magnetized and tracked. They are Tucker’s audience for the Martian takeover story. But the hesitant often have worries that can be addressed with solid information and numerical comparisons, if we just take long enough to identify the exact nature of their concerns.

When the hysteria about recent math and reading scores kicks in, we must be ready to defend whole child education. We have a great deal to teach in the near future, only some of it academic in nature. Math facts and vocabulary are essential — but our emotionally buffeted students will need more from us. We have to prevent test score hysteria from preventing vital social/emotional learning.

Parents and teachers often end up discussing feelings with young children. How do you feel? Are you angry? Are you sad? Why did you throw your books on the floor? Feelings are naturally part of an early and sometimes later elementary curriculum, whether formally recognized or not. Here is a visual aid from the Gerard Aflague collection on Amazon, a poster adorning many classroom walls. Various feelings’ posters can be found to help young children link expressions to emotions to words.*

I stumbled into this post this morning, a stray thought in response to a Facebook comment. Yes, we talk about feelings with small children often. But I think it’s easy to fail to realize that sometimes kids don’t have the right emotion connected to the appropriate word when they are conversing with us. Our sad may be their lonely. Our angry may even be their sad, especially if mom says a behavior is making her sad when her face is conveying anger instead. Maybe mom is about to be late to work due to an unexpected kitchen mess, and she is verbally managing her anger but not quite keeping the exasperation out of her tone and expression. Sad can be very tricky.

Kids learn to connect the right words to matching emotions, but trial and error are part of the process. Making the right associations may take years. Kids often begin using words on the feelings poster before they have recognized and internalized true meanings. My take from this fact is simply that what a child said may not be what they mean or believe when a topic as complicated as emotions comes up.

That was my first morning thought. My second thought was that the masks will be making social/emotional learning harder. People are getting good at smiling with their eyes, creating that small crinkle that says, “I really do hope you like that latte and have a good day,” but masking up will slow emotional learning down, as kids try to associate partially-hidden expressions with feelings.

Readers of this blog know that eduhonesty.com is 100% pro-mask, with the understanding that rare exceptions must be made. Children with autism, for example, may be unable to manage a mask. Generally, though, classrooms must put student, family and employee safety first — and the most reputable research does show masks help.

My last thought was that students in 2021 have a great deal to process. The youngest kids may be the luckiest ones. Our kindergarten and first grade students have only known pandemic schools. Older kids are adapting to changes that mostly make their lives tougher, both intrinsically, because those COVID-19 protocols are demanding, and extrinsically, because once they socialized freely and they remember a time when germ-awareness was almost nonexistent in their lives.

So amid all the educational issues on the table right now, why post about teaching feelings? I am trying to get out front of the panic likely to come at us as educational leaders stare at their fallen test scores. As we plan remediation for COVID-related learning loss, social-emotional learning may easily get lost in the mix because of the sheer amount of catch-up to be done. I want to encourage parents and teachers to keep the spotlight on social-emotional intelligence. How do you think Woody feels? Why do you suppose Buzz did that? Is Mary Poppins really upset? What makes you think she is (or is not) upset?

The social-emotional work I am talking about is already being done by parents and teachers everywhere, but I thought I’d pull that work into the foreground right now. The tests are going to come back showing learning loss from the last two years — maybe a great deal of loss in our hardest-hit schools. I can easily see fear pushing districts to work on mathematics and English almost entirely, to the exclusion of other topics. That would be a huge mistake — another version of the same mistake we have been making since the inception of No Child Left Behind nearly twenty years ago.

Our children are children — not merely sources of data that must be prepared for an annual test. Yet year after year, we keep stealing children’s time as we replace instruction with testing and test-preparation, all while depriving children of helpful remediation because “that topic is not on the test.” See “Opting Out: Because Your Child’s Teacher May Get NO Useful Information from that Test | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)” for this blog’s recommendation on that testing.

Yes, the missing words and math facts from interrupted instruction matter a great deal. However, so do the direct and indirect emotional impacts from our broken instruction. These last two years have been the wildest, weirdest years many of us have ever seen, and ignoring that strangeness helps no one, especially children who desperately need us to help them understand and process what is happening in their lives.

Hugs and thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner

*Not all feelings posters are sufficiently diverse, I’m afraid, but I trust my readers to look out for their classrooms.

The bus drivers are falling by the wayside. They are disappearing, walking off the job, and leaving behind crazy online posts about how “teachers should drive them.” Readers, I always take the aged 2004 Acura instead of the too-voluminous Toyota Sienna van if I have to drive downtown Chicago. I sense my limits.

Bus driving requires real skill. There’s a reason that US states regulate truckers and bus drivers, requiring regular health checks. Here are a few interesting particulars about bus drivers from “Licenses, Certifications, and Registrations” at Passenger Vehicle Drivers : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov):

“All bus drivers must have a CDL (Commercial drivers license) … Qualifications vary by state but generally include passing both knowledge and driving tests.

…”All bus drivers must have a passenger (P) endorsement, and school bus drivers must also have a school bus (S) endorsement. Getting the P and S endorsements requires additional knowledge, which is assessed through passing a driving test administered by a certified examiner…

“Federal regulations require interstate bus drivers to pass a physical exam every 2 years and to submit to random drug or alcohol testing. Most states impose similar regulations.”

Driving that bus doesn’t pay well. According to Hourly wage for School Bus Driver | Salary.com, the “average hourly wage for a School Bus Driver in the United States is $17 as of August 27, 2021, but the range typically falls between $14 and $21.” Restaurant and retail places around me don’t pay much less and some pay noticeably more once tips are included.

Near me, the Chicago Public School system has been hit hard by missing drivers. (Bus Driver Shortage Throws Wrench Into Start Of School Year For CPS After 73 Drivers Quit – CBS Chicago (cbslocal.com)) The numbers been climbing, too, and is said to be around 90 absentee drivers now — which is more than 10% 0f the total number of drivers for the district. CPS is offering money to parents to drive their own children. Other districts are doing the same.

Eduhonesty: I’ll skip the impact of vaccination demands except to say that personal evaluations of job risk may include that vaccination, whether accurately assessed or not. Some drivers don’t want to vaccinate. Conversely, some don’t want to be exposed to unvaccinated or unmasked kids. Controlling kids’ mask usage — well, kids who may take an hour to get dressed in the morning can strip off a mask in a millisecond.

The far-reaching question I want to take on today only peripherally relates to vaccinations and masks, however. That question affects much more than busses. We have been feeling the effects of my question since 2019.

THE RISK/REWARD RATIO FOR EVERY JOB ON THIS PLANET CHANGED RECENTLY. This has been traumatic for millions of people. But it’s also an opportunity, as the focus has recently shifted to the need for a higher minimum wage, as well as recognition that essential workers are … well, essential.

Working in public contact jobs has become so much less desirable that restaurants around me are even sometimes randomly closing during regular business hours because they can’t find anyone to work those hours. My Nextdoor app is filled with complaints about restaurant service, along with kinder responses trying to bring uncomfortable new truths home: Management doesn’t have enough people to cover all its tables so tables will sit empty while patrons wait. A waiter who used to cover 7 tables may now be covering 12 tables, and service will naturally falter, especially when the kitchen is short-staffed.

Eduhonesty: I don’t claim to fully understand what is happening in my world, but I do know that retired friends and I discuss sub pay and then buy yeast to make bread instead. I also know the forces of economics push up pay in times of scarcity, at least eventually. (For an interesting read on this topic, see Where Did All the Nurses Go? •  Nursing, History, and Health Care • Penn Nursing (upenn.edu) I am afraid that RN shortage may be coming at us again, as COVID fatigue drives increasing resignations.)

I’d like to suggest this may be a time to stand up and stand together. Bus drivers and paraprofessionals are not optional. I expect teacher shortages to boost teacher pay as well. In this time of increased risk for decreased reward — those bus drivers are likely to end up with more kids and more issues with kids than they had the year before. We should expect shortages. We should also understand that there’s power in deteriorating working conditions.

Teachers, bus drivers and others should seize this moment in time. Essential workers? The people holding up our beleaguered school districts have never been more essential. The achievement gap has grown another row of teeth; learning this year has already been deeply impacted by a sad lack of learning during the last year and the year before. That learning loss is hitting the kids hardest who had already fallen behind, too.

There’s no secret pipeline of qualified men and women waiting to step into those bus driving, aide and teaching positions, at least in most geographical locations.

There will never be a better time to seek economic fairness and justice for the workers holding up the US educational system.

In the background on the news, Arne Duncan is describing a new classroom model we could use, inspired by the pandemic. Instead of a large group of teachers with small classes, we take that “Albert Einstein” of a teacher and give that teacher 1,000-some students, taking advantage of the technology that allows us to stream lessons to huge groups. Then schools add tutorials to enforce that learning. Instead of the set-up below:

I will not say that this Einstein model cannot work. I am taking a neuroscience class right now that operates on a similar model — me, along with over 2,000 other people.

But my first thought as I listened was, “and THAT will sure widen the achievement gap.”

I’ve expressed this idea before: I can easily teach algebra to a group of 60 students who are all (or almost all) certain they intend to go to college. Those students believe they require a good grade from me for their college applications. They may even believe they need to learn algebra. In that class, behavioral problems are likely to be minimal and class participation high. Conversely, if I have a class of 22 students, 10 of whom intend to drop out, I may be in for the pedagogical ride of my life. Reader, just try to get an aspiring drop-out off his phone when he WANTS to be thrown out of class. Or try to get Tom to quit talking to Iliana when Iliana is the only reason Tom came to class in the first place.

Who we have in our classes should determine how we teach. Huge, online classes like the one described require a great deal of personal motivation. It’s easy to drift off. If a student doesn’t have to be on screen, that student can play phone games the whole hour, just drifting in for long enough to document he or she logged in, even if the closing activity shows a spectacular lack of understanding of the day’s content. The lack of any real relationship with “Albert Einstein” factors in, too. I have taught many students who did their work for ME, not for themselves. That’s not what teachers want, but I’ll take that algebra homework any way I can get it.

As to the supporting tutorials, the student who never listens to the lecture in the first place won’t have many questions. That student may even try to duck most of the tutorial to avoid revealing how little he or she absorbed from Super Lecturer’s stream of thought. First, a student has to listen. If tutorials are done remotely, lack of student engagement can ensure that students who did not listen to Round 1 manage to miss most or all of the benefits from Round 2.

As I listened to Arne, I found myself having one of those tear-my-hair-out, it’s-definitely-time-to-quit moments. So many people planning educational policy seem to start with the assumption that eager, willing students will be sitting at their laptops just waiting to be let into their virtual classroom so they can begin an exciting day of learning. So many of those planners want to “innovate,” despite the fact that NCLB, Race to the Top and the Common core worked about as well as the average concrete life jacket.

Those eager, waiting students are out there. But we have to figure out how to teach their less enthusiastic counterparts too. A less personal approach seems highly unlikely to work. I wish people generating ideas like this latest one would take a few minutes to visualize a real student. I understand something that Arne has often seemed to miss through the years: Many kids are only barely hanging on in school, often thanks to a teacher or paraprofessional in the classroom who is providing a listening, caring ear along with emotional support and praise.

If we want proof that some students don’t want to be in our Einsteinian classroom we might consider the fact that the “U.S. Department of Education says enrollment in public schools during the pandemic has dropped by more than 1.5 million students. Some have switched to private schools or at-home learning. Others have just vanished from the system.” (Public schools have seen a massive drop in enrollment since the start of the pandemic – CBS News.)

The problem with remote learning is that it is… remote. Being remote, that learning becomes avoidable. I could completely duck my neuroscience course and learn nothing if I chose. I’m sure a lot of informal, haphazard home schooling is taking place in America right now, unsupported by any overarching curriculum. All across the country, parents obviously signed off on children not signing in.

If Einstein says, “the Occipital temporal gyrus and the parahippocampal gyrus extend down into the occipital lobe, and at some point in the occipital lobe, we define a region that is a boundary between the lingual gyrus near the midline, and what remains here of the occipital temporal gyrus,” I can bail. I can decide to listen to a mystery novel or play Words with Friends instead of making my way through that sentence. Many of our students are in the same position. With 1.5 million students who simply left the US educational system, we should be asking one question: How do we get our students back?

We are going into our third pandemic school year and that year has begun with a disquieting number of closures, quarantines and reverses to remote instruction for unlucky students. We can’t afford to add any educational experiments to a mix so explosive that it has already taken a million and a half students out of the theater.

“Masks are too hard for little kids to manage.” My last post with the snorkel snark inspired more than one person to “agree” with me that masks are just too hard for the littlest ones in our schools. Oops. That’s definitely not what I intended to say.

Small children often struggle with masks. They also struggle with pants, shirts, backpacks, hats, coats and gloves. In early elementary grades, winter gloves can come at teachers in a tiny foretaste of the zombie apocalypse, a nightmarish agglomeration of confused, waving, tiny fingers. Then, while the classroom teacher holds the glove out, those children stick two or more fingers in one hole and she has to pull the glove away and start all over again.

My first winter subbing day in a kindergarten classroom, I ended up alone with 20-some kids at day’s end. A number struggled into their own coats and a few even managed gloves. But the majority expected me to get them ready for the snowy winter in Illinois. I had not left close to enough time. Hands, hands everywhere, a sea of hands, gloves, hats, boots and zippers galore! The crowd was a little loose on the concept of taking turns, too.

I’ll frankly confess I ended up with a small pile of random winter clothing that I simply left on the regular teacher’s desk. I looked at the clock, looked at my group, realized they all had their coats on at least, and clapped my hands to get everyone’s attention. Little arms froze in the air.

“Quick!” I said. “You have to get to the busses. We can’t do any more gloves or hats now. C’mon. We have to get out of here!” And I practically ran those guys to their bus locations.

I’ll give myself a D- in “First Day as a Kindergarten Sub in Winter.” Yes, the busses should wait. That’s too many busses to trust, though. Plus I didn’t want to be the sub who slowed down the whole end of the school day.

Trying to shove forty or fifty small hands into tiny tubes that only sometimes match the fingers takes more time than I had left that day. I trusted the kids to identify their belongings. I left the teacher a note to help her sort through the mysterious pile on her desk upon her return.

She let me teach that class again. The second time, I got the timing for those gloves … well, better anyway. As time went by, the kids were getting more adept at handling their own gloves, hats and coats too. They also listened when I told them, “I need you to help me and do as much as you can on your own.” After that first performance, I am sure they had identified me as someone who needed a little extra help.

We can handle masks. Our kids can handle masks; teaching is all about reinforcing desirable behaviors, and masking has become simply another metaphorical hill to climb in classrooms. Teachers learn. Kids learn from their teachers, from parents, from each other and from their own experience. As the meme goes,

Masks are no problem unless we make them a problem. If we purchase the right masks, masks are much easier than winter gloves and zippers. And if everyone is wearing masks, kids won’t mind wearing masks unless adults influence them otherwise. From a very early age, children somehow grasp that they should dress like their peers — even if that leads to tantrums because plain brown backpacks are much less fashionable than Paw Patrol, Spiderman or Disney princess equivalents.

Eduhonesty: Spiderman wears a mask. Captain America wears a mask. Ironman is trussed up in full body armor. I truly don’t get the fuss over masking. Kids can do this. If it makes some or most people feel safer to be masked, the cost is so small and the benefit a genuine kindness to the worried well. Besides which — the research overall says masking is safer, an imperfect method of controlling viral spread which is better than just blasting germs freely out into the air.

Please share this with anyone who might need a nudge to get behind masking. I acknowledge that as children enter adolescence the picture becomes more complicated, but at all ages we can stand up for the idea of kindness toward all.

Hugs to all my readers and anyone who stumbled into this post! Jocelyn Turner

Talk about the efficacy of face masks is reverberating throughout the country right now, mostly talk about how well various materials filter out viral particles.

I’d like to offer a different argument for face masks, one not used nearly often enough in official conversations: Masks keep hands away from noses, lips, and mouths. I was out with a nurse friend in a bakery awhile back* when she pointed out to me that I was using my hands as I talked and putting them on or near my face.

“Don’t do that!” she said fiercely. “Not now. Not with COVID.”

I frequently do “that,” however — and so do many other teachers I know. Teachers often talk with their hands. Those flourishes in front of the whiteboard come naturally after awhile. A more vivacious, animated teacher has an easier time holding her classes’ attention. I point. I wave my arms. And I also crook my index finger and rub my lips while I think. Sometimes I stroke my chin while making a decision.

What I have realized and want to share is that I stop those unsafe behaviors when my mask is on. When my face is covered, my hands don’t go near my face. With my mouth and nose inaccessible, my hands find other things to do.

This change in a lifetime of natural behavior strikes me as an argument for finding the most comfortable, effective mask(s) possible and keeping them on throughout the day. I would suggest any readers who are face-touchers especially should stay inside their masks until they leave work, except for lunch and other necessary breaks. Even if the class has gone to gym or art, germs are still in the air and may be on surfaces. While you are working alone, it’s worth thinking about air flow in small, converted closet spaces. So many schools have converted closets and storage rooms into active work areas. Copy machines and laminators turn up in the strangest of places. Any ventilation and maybe cleaning in repurposed spaces will likely be haphazard at best.

Comfort is key here. Comfort is also extremely individual, while masks are unfortunately mass-produced. Because of the lack of careful sizing, we can expect to see many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip in our masks.

That’s part of our problem in classrooms. A mask that fits an adolescent doesn’t fit a kindergartener. Even with mask mandates, certain adults and children are running around in face coverings that are more theoretical than real.

Below is an example of a tip I got from an MD friend. She staples her masks to make them shorter along the side. This prevents gapping for shorter-faced persons. This mask has a wire so I can fit it to my nose. It covers my whole lower face and chin easily. Longer face persons may need to discard or share a few masks within the family, those masks that simply don’t cover enough face.

Eduhonesty: This post was inspired by my habit of stripping off that mask as soon as I am out of a crowd or store, along with a family habit of automatically putting hands on faces throughout the day. Especially before Delta took off, many of us were becoming casual about masks. I wasn’t paying enough attention while eating my croissant at that bakery table. It’s easy to fall back into old habits while in conversation or contemplation. So I thought I’d share this cautionary note about keeping masks on until the school day has actually ended.

*My RN friend won’t sit inside that bakery now. The Delta strain has pushed her back to taking outdoor walks and using double masks.

Your face, your choice! Except when trapped in a classroom or a closed space with others.

Feeling shaky about taking off that mask, reader? While I seriously hope the Delta variant does not undo our newfound freedom, the fact is America has been masking up again after a brief period of exposed faces. The WHO has come out to say that students and teachers can go unmasked if everyone has been vaccinated, but now Delta is rewriting rules in the middle of this game and, more crucially, do you trust everyone around you to be vaccinated?

“Everyone” is the key word in the above sentence.

I easily find a number of solid arguments for masking up. Yes, the classrooms are often underventilated and social distancing in those rooms can be impossible. Kids are also haphazard about personal hygiene — they wipe snot on their masks and sleeves all the time. A look under desks can reveal whole booger cities. Meanwhile many more kids appear to be getting sick lately.

But here’s the main reason why I am wearing my mask in closed spaces: I won’t take people’s word for their vaccination status. I wish I could but…

From a study by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, The Truth About Lying | Psychology Today: “Lying might be considered endemic in our culture nowadays. Both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one.”

People lie frequently — not always and not invariably, but often enough. People rewrite inconvenient truths to make their lives easier. I remain slightly shaken that my very likeable and competent massage therapist lied to me about his vaccination status. He told me he was vaccinated. A few months later, apparently having forgotten his original statement, he shared the experience of his just-accomplished first vaccination.

Eduhonesty: Mask up, teacher reader, and everyone else out there who has to be in groups and crowds. It’s just a mask. But that and the vaccination are the main tools in the toolbox for ducking COVID right now.

In particular, trusting vaccination promises made by people who don’t want to wear masks is like believing the “I never got the email” line. Maybe that piece of email did actually get lost in the spam folder, but I remember an earlier time when “the check is in the mail” filled the same function — getting out of trouble. “Car trouble” and “my alarm didn’t go off” made frequent appearances as well.

Who is behind the maskless face? We all wear masks, covered faces or no.

Humans lie to make their lives simpler. Why do people lie? 12 main motives for deception (ideapod.com) lists a number of reasons why people lie. The following motives apply to lies about vaccination status:

1) To steer clear of consequences; this one’s the biggest reason for the Lie, I suspect. Liars don’t have to wear a mask indoors. No one will demand they take regular COVID tests as a condition of their employment. Plus massage clients will keep booking hours with them. Etc.

2) To avoid feeling awkward; they don’t have to explain why they have not gotten that shot. The vaccinated will take their masks off, thinking the liars are unlikely to be a source of contagion, whether that’s true or not. Liars in this category may not plan to get anyone sick, but they obviously are not greatly concerned one way or another.

3) To fit in with the crowd; if everyone in the English department except Joe has gotten their shot, Joe gets to avoid explaining his position and can join in the group camaraderie without questions.

4) To get ahead; Joe can also look like a team player even if he is not.

5) The lies get caught in a web and feel out of control. Once liars first tell people they are vaccinated, they can’t say anything else without risking being caught.

6) Lying gives liars a sense of control over you or their situation. This is the “They can’t make me!” argument. It’s the, “she’s just a sheeple but I need her to sign my paperwork” argument.

Obviously, these reasons for lying overlap often. Avoiding consequences may be all about fitting in and getting ahead for one person, for example. Exact numbers will vary from study to study, depending on participants, how we define lying and other factors. But it’s not a big leap from Joe saying, “I love your Google Slides” (not true) or “Great haircut!” (SO not true) to Joe saying, “Oh, yeah. I got jabbed last March.” It’s not a big leap. Not for many of today’s Joes anyway.

Mask up. Because you can trust most people to do the right thing, but all it takes is one COVIDIOT to shut down the whole kindergarten because they decided to send their sick kid to school — one COVIDIOT to get family after family sick when they lie about their kid’s headache and fever. And all it takes is one Joe to compromise the whole teacher’s lounge.

Parents and teachers should reflect on that sad truth as we go about day-to-day business during the upcoming school year. I offer this as one more solid reason to keep the masks on, I hope for not much longer. ________________________________________________________________________

A snapshot of our ripped political quilt: Fortunately, many locations are demanding proof of vaccination from teachers and/or students but this is still the COVID Wild West in terms of who is running the show. See: Some states move to block Covid-19 vaccine requirements in public schools – CNN Teachers and parents in California are safer than their counterparts in Alabama, for example.

Readers, please share with friends and others. I have seen many mask articles, but none that tackles this single issue: In today’s emotionally-loaded time, the easiest answer to “Have you been vaccinated?” may be “Yes!” Any parent or teacher knows from experience that the easiest answer doesn’t have to be the true answer. Answering “yes” to the vaccination question has become extremely convenient and as convenience goes up, I fully expect truth-telling will go down.

Hugs to my readers! Jocelyn Turner