Most teachers don’t struggle to get their laundry done. In the following link, the New York Times discusses a strategy becoming more common in New York and other areas, especially more poverty-stricken areas — washers and dryers to help students who don’t have easy access to laundry facilities. Homelessness and poverty have thrust schools into expanding roles that even include helping students clean their clothes so they can dress for school.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/schools-laundry-rooms.html. Since clean clothes can make all the difference in preventing bullying and boosting student attendance, it’s no surprise some schools have begun doubling as laundromats, providing fresh outfits and other sundries for students, such as tampons and pads.
What are those students doing now? How are they managing laundry and food?
Eduhonesty: An idea for districts that are remote right now — can you allow carefully scheduled, socially-distanced laundry for students? I assume you are already passing out the food the kids would have gotten had they been in school. Maybe offer to throw in feminine sundries as well? Some students may not have an easy way to get to the laundromat, and all those quarters may be a challenge too.
Reader, if your anxiety is ratcheting up because of fears of learning losses. I am going to make today’s helpful suggestion: let yourself off the hook. A wise friend of mine brought this home to me in my teens. If you can’t fix it… If you can’t change it… Let it go. I am not saying toss up your hands. Lessons must be planned. Kids have to be led online, yours and the ones in your classroom. The dog has to be walked. But whatever your particular best effort is — that effort has to be enough, and it doesn’t have to be as good as your next-door neighbor’s effort, either. If Suzy Superteacher seems to have all of her students engaged and working while she tweets about how much she loves online learning… Well, that’s Suzy. We will always have Suzies among us. You’re entitled to have a few Invisible Young Men and Women in your classes, occasional crashes and even some spam. If you are in the classroom, don’t let Suzy’s mastery of spacing masked kids in perfectly aligned, quiet rows throw you off your game.
A tip for that absentee problem: I am sure you are contacting parents or guardians. You might try contacting friends, too. If Jamie and Christopher are friends, tell Christopher how much you miss Jamie. Ask him if he knows what’s going on with his friend. Can he think of any way you might help?
But don’t lose sleep. Don’t skip meals. Don’t spend all your waking hours trying to fix just one more thing. Turn on the TV and watch Lucifer or Supernatural. Carve pumpkins. Make bread pudding. Go for a drive to look at the fall leaves. Build a board game you can use at home and in classes. Brush up on your French.
Not a Marvel or DC superhero? Neither am I. Superheroes are thin on the ground right now and I think we are better off leaving them to battle giant robots. After all, the way this year has been going, I wouldn’t exactly rule out the arrival of giant Venusian robots — or even a resurrected Thanos. But YOU can’t fix those problems.
What can you do? Let it go. Do your best. Then go ladle out bowls of bread pudding while finding the remote. For parents trying to hold together online learning, I’d work on reading especially. Everything depends on reading. If reading skills improve, other holes in this year’s learning can be attacked later. Or not attacked. Freddy can always use his phone to find out who won the Battle of Shiloh. Teachers, shared lesson plans are probably your best friend right now. Buy lesson plans when those minutes simply are not there. Teacherspayteachers.com anyone?
Parents, teachers, and other readers, oodles of virtual hugs to all of you. We will get through this together.
Readers, once again I share lyrics from “Just Dropped In” by Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal, and others.* Originally intended to be a warning about LSD, those lyrics just fit this year too well. “Just Dropped In” makes me think of school openings, as we step carefully into the abyss — because national attempts to open schools have become surreal in many locations.
We are living in a time of jagged sky. And as we drop in to see what condition our condition is in, I’d like to share with readers: “Children of all ages now make up 10% of all U.S cases, up from 2% in April,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yes, children fare better when they get this disease, with “only” 109 recorded deaths in school-age kids as of September 30, according to “COVID-19 Cases Rising Among U.S. Children as Schools Reopen” in Education Week (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/09/30/covid-19-cases-rising-among-us-children_ap.html). Searching for this information is surprisingly difficult, I should note. Sources contradict each other. Information that ought to be readily available is simply… not.
Most cases are among kids aged 12 to 17. As is true for older COVID victims, black and Hispanic children do not do as well as white children. According to the CDC: More than 75% of children dying from COVID-19 are minorities. (https://www.fox5dc.com/news/cdc-more-than-75-of-children-dying-from-covid-19-are-minorities) Still, children overall are least likely to suffer serious complications. If this were only a disease of children, few people except for medical researchers would even be concerned.
But children go home. Many children go home to multigenerational households, especially now that COVID has eaten up so many jobs, leaving people and families without money for the rent or mortgage. Some children go home to shelters. One reason for the strong push to open New York City schools has been a profound concern for homeless students: From https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/student-homelessness-nyc.html: “By day, New York’s 114,085 homeless students live in plain sight: They study on the subway and sprint through playgrounds. At night, these children sometimes sleep in squalid, unsafe rooms, often for just a few months until they move again. School is the only stable place they know.”
It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around a number like “114,085” when talking about homeless children in one location. That’s more than twice the average number of people who visited Disneyworld each day — back when people visited Disneyworld. Those students are holding onto the edge of a harsh reality by their fingertips, and any honest person must admit teachers are sometimes the only rescuers those children will find.
Teachers are mandated reporters for a reason. A mandated reporter is a person legally required to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to relevant authorities. Teachers see the bruises, they find the lice, they hear the stories. Sometimes they grapple with the drug paraphernalia that comes to show and tell.
Online schooling has opened up its own ruthless realism — and teachers are left to decide what to do about the gun spied on a home desk or the obvious hoarding that has piles of trash climbing the wall. No one wants to call family services without excellent reason, but when enough discarded food and other refuse comes into view, questions of health, sanitation, possible insect and rodent infestation, and fire safety necessarily follow. Simply, what does the teacher do when Ben sets up his laptop in the kitchen and she sees all the dead flies floating on top of the scum in the water in the sink?
On the coast, teachers have been fleeing fires while simultaneously trying to begin online instruction. Those teachers especially are trying to crawl out of some pretty dark holes. So are their students, especially any students with asthma or breathing challenges. Even if no one has to evacuate, that air may be gray with ash. Does it seem those fires are over? Forest Fires have mostly fallen out of the news, but according to the California Statewide Fire Summary for October 11, 2020. “More than 13,400 firefighters continue to work towards containment on 21 major wildfires across the state.” (https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/).
We are careening from one monster piece of news to the next right now. Except there’s seldom time to put news in context before the next cataclysmic event starts being twittered. News fatigue results, as teachers, parents and almost any adult who is not a news junkie begins to duck potentially useful outside information.
Teachers, we have to fight the almost inevitable burn-out that can results from this endless stream of bad news, weird news, and unavailable news.
Eduhonesty: Hugs, teachers, parents and anyone else who has stumbled on this blog. The issues I have raised here cannot be addressed in sound bites. I would just like to continue to plead — please be KIND to each other, readers. Teachers, we cannot know how complicated our students’ home lives are. We may need mom to keep Freddy online — but mom may not have the option to stay home from work. If Freddy’s sister is in charge, and she is managing erratically, please don’t get upset with mom or dad. If Freddy keeps popping in and out of class like Casper the Friendly Ghost, remind yourself that many of our supervising adults and babysitters are far less familiar with technology than the average classroom teacher. And mom or dad, please, please don’t get mad at the teacher. She didn’t create the crazy hybrid schedule. There’s a good chance she had no voice in this year’s in-person, online or hybrid schedule at all. That online platform you hate? There’s a good chance she had no voice in that selection. She may hate it too, even as she frantically tries to become proficient so she can do the best teaching job possible in impossible times.
P.S. Incidentally, about that barrage of news: don’t drop the $421 million in personal debt that the POTUS owes some unknown parties. That’s the piece from the last few weeks that should not slip away. That’s a great deal of leverage possessed by an as-yet-unknown party. Don’t let POST-COVID POTUS become too big a distraction.
P.S.S. Many teachers and districts might as well be “eight miles out of Memphis without a spare, eight miles straight up downtown somewhere.” The situations today’s teachers are confronting can be impossible. You can’t regularly work 12-plus hours a day to make the online and in-person lessons while setting up the tech to include various lost and challenged students still struggling to log on — and also take care of your family, get your own kids into their online classes, keep your kids in those classes, somehow get yourself and other family members fed, the dog walked, and the laundry done, while also helping students and family members with homework and classwork. You can’t.
So don’t try too hard. Do your job as educator as fiercely as possibly during the school day. Then give yourself a break and make bread pudding. Take the kids to the park. Find a way to relax. https://www.eduhonesty.com/there-are-no-venusian-robots-calming-down-in-fraught-times/
*If you are younger and somehow missed the song “I Just Dropped In,” I strongly recommend giving it a listen. It’s emblematic of an earlier, and I think kinder time.
Credit to “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)” by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal and others
The line in the title resonates with me. They fooled you, many of you readers out in non-union or non-collective bargaining states. They told you new laws would not matter to you. They even vilified teachers in the process, some deliberately and some simply because they caught a wave whose true dimensions they did not understand. Those latter writers understood only that “bad teacher” stories were selling for some reason. How do you destroy a union? You paint its members as lazy neer-do-wells and even pedophiles hiding out in secret rooms in New York where they send the bad teachers they cannot fire. Why can’t you fire them? The evil union, of course. Although New York mostly survived those gratuitous attacks, other teachers in other states did not — but then New York is a heavily Democratic state. I will return to this point later.
Here is the start of a story by Karen Matthews, an Associated Press Writer, updated 6/22/2009 6:05:42 PM ET: NEW YORK — “Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.” http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31494936/ns/us_news-education/t/nyc-teachers-paid-do-nothing/#.X3yD2hSSmUk
The wave of stories continued because they sold. The long-term impact of that hit job went unappreciated. The advantages of having a union and collective bargaining rights can easily go unnoticed in quieter times. Latent power is often invisible.
Now, in many areas, legislators and school boards have been working nonstop on plans to get students into school and only sometimes out of school when things go wrong. In lucky locations, teachers have the help of unions. If not for relatively strong unions, would New York City have a plan for shut-down in the face of exploding coronavirus numbers? In too many areas, no one has an exit plan because we have no unions, or unions are so gutted that they might as well be trapped in brown paper bags. We need to drop in soon — and find out what condition our unions are in. And then we need to begin reforming those unions. Or restoring those unions to positions of power.
Eduhonesty: When THIS song makes me think of the state of U.S. education, we have taken our foot off the gas for far too long. What happened to collective bargaining power? They came for our rights in the night, they came with fabricated stories or cherry-picked examples, and we just opened the door to votes that sucked away the individual worker’s voice. We let our voices go because we did not understand the implications of being muted, not well enough to rage as legislators stole away our bargaining rights.
I believe that part of the reason we did not rage is that teachers tend to be regrettably trusting — at least at first. They believe the Board has their school’s best interests at heart. They believe they and administrators are on the same team (In better schools, this is true.) and they count on the Your-State-Here State Board of Education to look out for the students in their care. This faith has been eroding, as teachers watched test-score mania and the Common Core gain momentum, but remnants of trust and goodwill remain.
Unfortunately, we were not paying enough attention to the “bad teacher” stories this last decade. They had a purpose, and only in the most naïve hands was that purpose believed to be improving education. Instead, those stories had everything to do with control. If you eliminate the right to collective bargaining and/or ban the union, then you then can’t be strong-armed into paying teachers a fair wage or providing students in poor districts with a more equitable learning landscape. You can keep things exactly as they are, no matter how unfair that may be to teachers — and students with the bad luck to be living in the wrong zip code. Or the wrong state, it seems today.
Florida is an outrage and not the only outrage.
I am not against sending children back into live learning situations, and I fully understand some of those attempts will hit COVID walls, as sick kids and staff members try to manage quarantines and shut-downs. We have no perfect solutions. Everyone is operating in perilous times, heading into an unknown future. Going to live instruction or a hybrid version of this may be the best of the bad options in many locales. But that choice should not be driven by politics — and teachers should be participants, not terrified onlookers, in the decision-making process.
Let’s focus for the moment on those legislators who negotiated away teachers’, students’, and others’ voices. Since their immediate acts took place in the then-present — our past — and the world was much quieter back then, too few people fought back. Nothing much changed in “Washington Elementary” or other schools when anti-union legislation slipped through. I am sure quieter times disguised the immediacy of the threat of that legislation. Maybe we thought we could trust the government to take care of us.
I repeat a question from my last post: Is the government taking care of us?
Yet the future eventually arrives, and the future is hitting us much harder than anyone anticipated. Now, teachers and students are not worried about having enough paper or a half-hour for lunch. They are worried about physical safety. In some locations, they are being badgered to open even when circumstances suggest opening might be unsafe. In some locations, they are even being given the choice to either enter the classroom or be fired.
That’s not true in Illinois — where schools were shut in Chicago and remain shut until they are considered safe — but then Illinois is a heavily Democratic state, like New York. So is California where many schools remain closed, depending on what condition their schools’ condition happens to be in.
Here’s why I think anyone with free time who is willing and able to take on the fight should be working for the Democratic Party right now: Democrats have historically been exponentially friendlier to unions than Republicans. Especially in these fraught times, we need to organize or reorganize in many places. We need to reclaim our voices. To do that we will have to break Republican strongholds. Those Republican governors, senators and representatives? They must go — even the ones I like, I’m afraid. I have voted for a fair number of republicans in my life — I’m registered as an independent and I always liked the designation.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. I upset some readers recently by writing that people in democratic states should not vote for third parties. But a third-party vote in a democratic state is a vote for the current administration. We can’t keep voting in republican majorities if we want to #ReclaimOurVoices and #RebuildOurUnions. We need to flip those republican legislatures — small and large. The we need to repeal a number of laws and
Those of us lucky enough to have a union? Let’s see if we can help our fellow teachers who are not as lucky.
P.S. In fairness, I should note that anti-union sentiment goes back to the very foundations of the first unions. That sentiment took on legitimacy and gained support during the time of Ronald Reagan, a snowball that has been rolling downhill since Reagan and the air traffic controllers. But teachers were a tougher target to assail — because America once thought highly of teachers. Fortunately, despite the hit job, many people still do. But for those teachers who can’t understand the negativity toward them, given all their hard work and selfless acceptance of substandard working conditions in return for a chance to help and even sometimes rescue kids — go looking for those stories about unions protecting bad teachers. Those stories have a great deal to do with the contempt teachers now sometimes encounter in dealings with administrations and parents.
Organizing and reorganizing can improve working conditions for teachers.
Although I’ll add one last blast — If conditions are too bad, I suggest taking a chunk of time daily to try to change districts. There are some great principals and good districts out there. You CAN also QUIT! I read a post from a woman whose spouse took a position as a fast food assistant manager and now is making more money than she is. Fellow teachers, you have degrees. You are articulate. You know how to work long and hard. Maybe it’s time to get your real estate license? Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. A friend of mine who is an ER doc did a residency in occupational medicine to change into another field. It was a lot of extra work for awhile as well as extra educational fees. But she doesn’t have to get regular migraines from brutal night hours and changing shifts now. If Sunday night makes your stomach sink or even causes you to cry — think about it. You can move on.
It’s easy to get lost. Honestly, many of us feel adrift right now. One lost item that has not been receiving enough attention: EXIT PLANS for when the Entrance plan does not work. If we storm the castle and find we are outnumbered — what will we do next?
Eduhonesty: We talk all the time about opening schools. What about closing them? What are the exit plans? Where are the exit plans? I should give New York City credit here — although the state of school infrastructure remains highly questionable — because at least its version of a plan includes shutting schools when COVID positivity rates hit 3 percent. That’s a rational plan based in data. Other areas are going district by district and even school by school. That’s not any plan at all. That’s the Cherokee County School District closing Woodstock High School when COVID cases increased to a total of 14, with tests for another 15 students still pending, and hundreds of kids and adults in line to quarantine. That’s a bunch of struggling students and educators watching themselves crawlin’ out as they go a-crawlin’ in.
That’s “someone painted ‘April Fool’ in big black letters on a ‘Dead end ‘Sign,” if you remember the song, “Just Dropped In,” the countercultural song written by Micky Newbury that is inspiring my next few posts.
This is a union issue and that will be my next post. But for now, let me ask a critical question: Who is taking care of us? Is the government taking care of us? I’m afraid the post-COVID world seems to be pretty much everyone for him/her/they self. Lucky people have a good governor. In more fortunate areas, strong unions are attempting to guide school openings and closures. But other areas have neither the state governor nor the union to manage the situation — no central forces to fight on the side of good against one purely evil microbe.
Parents and teachers, on top of everything else, I am sorry to say I am going to recommend you talk with school administrators and members of your school board. It’s not too soon — in some geographic areas it’s rather late — to demand to know what happens if the COVID numbers start ramping up hard and fast. I believe we may turn the corner on this epidemic soon, but we are not there yet. What is the plan?
“We will assess that situation should it occur” is not a plan. “We will deal with things on a case-by-case basis” is not a plan. “Let’s see how the opening goes first” is for damn sure not a plan.
No plan has to be set in stone. A district can decide 3% is manageable and 3.5% is not, and a district can shift students and schools based on what is happening. Our leaders must be able to flex with changes and unexpected outcomes.
But this tripping on a cloud of hopefulness while falling from from eight miles high only ends in a crash, and potentially a crash of epic proportions. We can do better by America’s teachers and students. The old military maxim, HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY, should guide all U.S. school districts as we open for live instruction .
COVID testing is producing a nonstop stream of numbers. Let’s use them wisely to build data-driven exit strategies — because, as 2020 keeps demonstrating over and over again, life is what happens when you are making other plans.
Unions — Because Sometimes Workers Require Protection
“I’d like to note one positive aspect of teaching, as it was traditionally practiced: The union contract took into account how much education a teacher had finished and how many years he or she had worked. That determined teacher pay. Women with 2 years experience and 50 credits beyond a bachelor’s degree received exactly the same pay as men with the same credentials. You might make extra money by coaching or sponsoring a club, especially at the high school level, but overall men and women could expect to receive the same compensation. If a woman needed maternity leave, she was not crippling her career by taking two months off, either.” (From a previous post.)
I don’t think I ever hammered this point home and I should have done so. We regularly hear stories on the news about gaps in pay and benefits between men and women. The gender gap is an established fact of life in the corporate world. When I worked in the corporate world, I encountered that gap regularly — insurance adjusters and then bond analysts of the other gender made more money. I can remember the one exception who was hired with me to analyze bonds. Perhaps because we came from the same school with the same credentials at the same time, we received identical pay. But at other times, my life experience was discovering someone with less experience and education made more money because “he could project authority.” I’m sure that translated to “he was not a small woman.”
“When it comes to height, every inch counts–in fact, in the workplace, each inch above average may be worth $789 more per year, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 89, No. 3).
The findings suggest that someone who is 6 feet tall earns, on average, nearly $166,000 more during a 30-year career than someone who is 5 feet 5 inches–even when controlling for gender, age and weight.”
“Hired by the Rutgers School of Law as an assistant professor in 1963, she was asked by the dean of the school to accept a low salary because of her husband’s well-paying job. After she became pregnant with the couple’s second child—a son, James, born in 1965—Ginsburg wore oversized clothes for fear that her contract would not be renewed. She earned tenure at Rutgers in 1969.”
I find it interesting that in 1970 Ginsburg became professionally involved in the issue of gender equality as it related to “women’s liberation,” a catch phrase often linked to bra burning back then by forces trying to block any movement toward equality. She rapidly published two law review articles on the subject and began teaching a seminar on gender discrimination. I don’t find it a great surprise that she became a leading figure in gender-discrimination litigation during the seventies — and as I read between the lines of her biographies, I understand how this passion arose.*
RBG knew all about gender discrimination. I believe she also understood the power of tenure. Once tenured, she ripped into the gender discrimination. Ruth Bader Ginsburg being the woman she was, I am sure she’d have gone to fight for gender equity regardless, job security or not. But job security provides a platform of safety that makes honesty easier.
I started this post with paychecks because equal pay for equal work tends to resonate with people. And women who are older or retired, as I am, often connect strongly on this topic. We have our stories — the boss who explained that Maury was getting more money than me because he was going to have to support a family –– although he was just out of school and wasn’t even engaged to his girlfriend at the time. And then there was the boss who let me know that my young, male counterpart in a small software company had gotten a bigger raise than I had because he had enthusiasm and he was there later than I was and I honestly don’t know what else — except I was just sunk, because I had to pick my girl up from preschool so I could not stay late. The part that blew me away: My sales were higher than his, a documented fact attributed to my probably working a more prosperous region — except he had California and the West Coast and we were selling software in the early nineties. Give me a break! I thought. Except no one gave me a break, and when my second child was born, I just quit and I was glad to go. That boss called months later to tell me how much he had appreciated my good work. Was he surprised I had walked away? Maybe he needed me to explain the idea of a “no-win scenario” to him — the scenario where you compete with a bunch of single young men while taking care of your new baby and preschooler, too.
As I say, women my age and older tend to have our stories. I don’t want that last one to seem like a sad story, either. I absolutely loved being a stay-at-home mom for over a decade, even if finances were sometimes a bit tricky. Drinking coffee with friends in parks while children played, watching Power Rangers and Captain Planet, huddling under blankets during soccer games, eating ice cream, stopping for cheese fries while juggling different softball practices, and playing Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. What’s not to love?
And then I made another career change. I went back to school when my youngest turned 13 to earn my teaching certification. Two years later, I entered teaching.
Suddenly I became part of a union. I wasn’t subject to gut-wrenching, whimsical salary scales. I was older then, too, and grateful I didn’t have to worry about the fact that I was receiving more money than younger people with less education, enthusiastic job hunters who could definitely work more cheaply than me. I knew if I did my job, my position would not vanish because some MBA had determined the district could save X dollars per year by hiring a new graduate with fewer college credits in my place. I have known too many people in their fifties who suddenly were written out of their corporate lives, shocked to discover that their thirty-plus years of service somehow didn’t count when the wrong people added the numbers up.
Fair wages, job security and excellent benefits: that was my experience of the union.
Fair wages and job security.
Fair wages and job security.
Fair wages and job security.
I can’t say it enough.
And in 2020 — a whole new issue that unions have been attacking with varying degrees of success:
JOB SAFETY!
I should observe that I also receive a pension. I have excellent health care, even now that I am retired, at reasonable cost. A large enough group of people can negotiate top-quality insurance and other benefits. My union keeps sending me mailers about deals on cars, appliances, dental insurance, etc.
That hit job that was done on unions in the not-too-distant past? It was a hit job. The truth is that inept and lazy teachers are extremely rare. The requirements of the position are too demanding, many of them unseen and not understood by people not working in schools. More importantly, kids without enough to do can be guaranteed to make a teacher miserable. Kids know if a teacher is blowing them off — and they make anyone who isn’t working completely miserable.
I should also note that tenure isn’t lifetime job security, a fiction that deserves to be explicitly addressed. Tenure just means you can’t be fired capriciously. You must be fired for cause — and there are rules and oversight in the procedure. That’s what everyone ought to have, and it’s what many people don’t have nowadays.
Eduhonesty: Support your union. Support the idea of unions, wherever you are. Fair wages and job security for hard-working employees should be regarded as a right, not a piece of luck. Union contracts protect workers. Height, weight, color, sexual orientation and other nonwork-related characteristics shouldn’t have a damn thing to do with salary. (O.K., I grant NFL linemen are their own category…) And being part of a large, powerful organization able to demand safe working conditions can be helpful or even crucial — especially now.
In COVID-19 times, unions have negotiated and are negotiating for safe working conditions for teachers. Who else will go out of their way to protect teachers? School boards? Not all of those boards. State governments? In one word: Florida. Although I could come up with a few other choice words, both states and expletives.
The ACTFL SmartBrief asks: “Can relaxing webcam requirements help students learn?” An associate professor of educational psychology observes that students viewing themselves and their classmates may become self-conscious and thus less able to focus. The brief speculates that maybe turning off the camera will help students concentrate.
They may be playing games with each other while the camera is off too!
I know what I would have done if that camera was off. I would have played endless games on my phone. I play too many now. So do a signficant percentage of U.S. students. I would have wandered off to get snacks while finding my headphones. If no one can see me, why not? I would say to myself, “I can do (insert-class-here) while listening to my music.” I would have done other assignments for other classes. Depending on the nature of the homework, I might even plan to do my homework during Ms. Jones class, knowing it had been due last night, but convinced Ms. Smith would be happy enough if I got finished by noon.
Some operational approaches to online learning make me want to tear my hair out.
The problem with writing about “that flu” is that it’s so long ago – nearly forty years now. I was 26 years old and a student in Bellingham, Washington. I lived alone in a pleasant apartment down a long hill from campus, white walls covered in black and white pictures from favorite Sherlock Holmes and other 50s and 60s films. I had two great cats, a large, orange tabby named George and the smaller, black, long-haired Minerva. The cats were always trying to attack the slightly scraggly hanging plants and their dangling, cream-colored macrame twine. I mostly sat in a favorite brown rocking chair, watching my small TV or listening to an old stereo while doing math homework. I remember that apartment vividly – probably because it was the site of the flu.
I’ve saved a few old favorites.
I sometimes think I must misremember that flu. I mean, people simply do not run a fever of 104 degrees off and on — mostly on — for ten whole days. Except I remember that number because when I checked the dates, I was so stunned. Another memory: I went to the student health center where the doctor stood plastered against the corner of the room, as far away from me as he could manage to stand. I could tell how badly he wanted out of that room. I’d never seen a doctor behave that way. I don’t remember what he did for me. Maybe he gave me antibiotics. Back then, if you got sick, everybody gave you antibiotics. I guarantee they did not work. I walked back down the hill and went to bed. And stayed in bed. Friends dropped off food. I think one or two of them even came in briefly. We were not nearly as smart about infectious disease back then, not healthy people in their twenties anyway. Nobody else got sick, not because of me, at least as far as I knew. Then I was “well.”
Except when I walked up the hill to campus, now I had to stop and rest. I had a favorite gray, stone planter I would use to rest on, near a corner curb. I can’t recall if the homeowner ever asked why I was always sitting on their planter in the morning. I would sit and study the greenery, the houses in the distance, campus buildings above me, and wait for my strength and wind to return. Then I’d tackle the hill again. Those rests went on for months. I mean, I can still remember the view I spent so much time resting on that planter.
But I was young and I had begun that year in great physical shape. I had a healthy lifestyle that involved frequent long walks. I lived in a town that encouraged hikes in the woods, kayaking and relaxing by the water. I came back from that flu. I’ll never know if I came back all the way, but by the following fall I was hiking in the woods. I recall making my favorite Scottish walking partner take an occasional short break. I also recall the paramedics when I swooned at some dance that summer. I blamed the heat then, but I was the only one at the dance who found herself looking up into the eyes of handsome, concerned paramedics.
This seems like a sideways post in a blog dedicated to education – except it’s not. Too many government leaders and school administrators continue to push to open schools for on-person learning in viral hotspots. Yes, we can’t close all the schools because of COVID-19, which will be with us for awhile. In some areas, we probably do have to roll the dice because we have no good options. Online learning is less effective for the vast majority of our kids — although, a tiny group seems to honestly be doing better online – and online learning favors certain groups more than others – a fact likely to widen the achievement gap. So schools must open where feasible.
But this, “oh, well, a few kids and teachers will get sick, but it will probably be O.K.” attitude shows a lack of understanding of what we are up against. Forty years ago, I was a version of a long hauler. I never went to a hospital. I just read, drank liquids, and slept with cats beside me, waiting for my fever to break. But it means something that I remember that year so vividly. My whole view of illness changed with that flu. I remember saying to friends, “That was one of those flus that kills babies and old people,” a truth I felt in my bones. I wouldn’t have been drinking endless tea with my cats if I had been 70 years old.
“In mid-March, Amy Thompson’s daughter, Amber, called her from a shift at Starbucks and told her mom she felt a tickle in her throat she couldn’t get rid of. Within hours, the college freshman had a fever and a nonstop cough. After some struggle to find a site that would take her, Amber tested positive for COVID-19.”
Our children can all be Amber, the once-Starbucks-barista and former college student. I hope Amber makes it back to school soon. I hope her next seizure is her last seizure forever and I hope that wheelchair is just a memory soon. I can’t imagine how scary it is to be Amber… except, I can just vaguely remember that year when I collapsed at the dance. For that brief period, on the floor with all those faces above me, I was so scared.
Eduhonesty: People get viruses. Our leaders must understand, though, that viruses don’t just go away, not always. I am getting my second shingles shot on Thursday because chicken pox never goes away – it just waits to become some peoples attack of shingles, and then some peoples permanent post-herpetic neuralgia – otherwise known as nerve pain forever. A previous post talked more about viral infections of the past. The current thinking supports the idea that most people will clear COVID-19 from their bodies. But nobody yet understands what is happening with the long haulers. (See https://www.eduhonesty.com/better-to-be-too-scared-of-those-classrooms-than-not-scared-enough/ )
For more information an article on long haulers: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-damage-covid-19-s-lingering-problems-alarm-scientists
P.S. I have no data for this, just a sense I should put it out for consideration. A neighbor down the block has his son, daughter-in-law and grandchild with him now because his unemployed son’s lease was expiring. I know others with children who recently came home. Some have been in their childhood bedrooms since spring.
What do you do if you lose your job when a virus attacks the economy? When you can no longer pay for a Chicago apartment? At least some young adults are creating multi-generational homes, and launching their job search from familiar kitchen tables and childhood basements.
Multigenerational homes are becoming more common I believe, making the much higher rate of COVID mortality for older adults one more reason to be extremely careful about opening schools.
Here’s the complicated thing: COVID-19 smacks some people up the side of the head like a baseball hat, but others seem to spend weeks with low fevers, aches, and other odd symptoms while remaining able to go to work. Do they go to work? What if they can’t pay the mortgage if they don’t go to work? Low-fever Larry can definitely spread the disease and he may never take that COVID-19 test. He’s not that sick — and he definitely does not want to know. And kids catch this disease, even if their survival odds are excellent. Some are asymptomatic, but the evidence shows asymptomatic little ones may nonetheless be carriers. Some kids know they feel sick, I’m sure — but they are not telling dad or mom because they don’t want to get stuck at home in bed.
How many teachers have been laid low by the disease of the month that swept through this year or last year’s classroom? Awhile back, I wrote a post that included the sick kids in winter coats. The room is 75 degrees and Xavier is huddled in his thick, puffy blue coat. We know what to expect when we touch his forehead, even before we send him to the nurse.
Sick kids come to school. Sometimes parents know they are sick, but other times that fact gets lost in the bustle of everyone getting ready to go to work or school. Where is Marisol’s art project? What happened to Daniel’s gym uniform? Are we out of baggies? What can I put the carrots in? You were supposed to put the dog out!
As I write this, I remember a bank vice president. She was determinedly upwardly mobile and her daughter was in my daughter’s preschool. I got pink eye twice that year. Once might have been an accident, but the second time — that woman knew she had a meeting, and told us she had to run for that reason. She dropped her girl off so fast no one had time to register the color of her daughter’s one eye, soon to be two eyes. A few other parents and I looked at the girl. We asked the teachers to please keep little “Lauren” away from our own kids and the teachers glumly agreed. No one wanted Lauren that day, but Lauren was on the premises, her mom was unreachable, and the rest of us had to get to work. The first pink-eye epidemic might have been a mystery. The second one wasn’t.
Here’s a sad truth captured in that comment above: Some people know the right thing to do and they choose not to do it. I think certain sick kids don’t even realize they are sick, especially those with bad allergies. Others know they do not feel well, tell mom or dad they do not feel well, and get put on the bus anyway. Those parents putting their child on the bus don’t want others to fall ill — although I honestly think a number don’t give a damn — but they care about themselves first. Lauren’s mom was a pleasant, fundamentally likable woman who decided to throw everyone else under the bus for her own career advancement.
I can be sympathetic to some parents who put their feverish kid on the school bus after they decide “he’s not that sick.” No insurance, no sick leave and a job where you can easily be replaced? Parents living near the edge often go to work sick — and also work when their child is sick. Al fin y al cabo, at the end of the day, the rent must be paid. Rent and car payments may trump bed rest and liquids.
Not long back, many of us were sitting at home, wondering if we had enough food and toilet paper. Our dogs were loving all the walks. We were enjoying catching up on TV and the books by the bed. But for teachers, a lost feeling followed, a yearning to get back to that group of kids we are supposed to prepare for the next big step in their learning lives.
Eduhonesty: We have to let that yearning go for now in some areas,as best we can. Maybe your school has resumed live instruction this year. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe online learning will work for you; I fervently hope so. But we can’t go back to business as usual.
In hotspots, schools must be closed. In impending hotspots, the schools must be closed. For many parts of the Midwest, that closure would be overkill, but the map looks ominous in other areas. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html This bug appears to be exceptionally easy to catch and while it’s not the Spanish Influenza of 1918, only the very elderly remember anything like what we are seeing today, those men and women who watched polio shut their towns when they were young.
This post is for the teachers, parents and others who are wondering if we have to take such extreme measures. Please keep those sick children in mind. Sick kids often don’t tell parents how they feel; they want to see their friends. I’ve had many students come to school feverish and even aching, because boyfriend, girlfriend, or bestie was there. Parents don’t always know. Kids don’t always tell. Two-hundred thousand dead and still counting.
Learning is a lifelong process. Fractions and metaphors can wait awhile. In the meantime, we have to help protect our grandmas, grandpas, family members, first responders, health care workers and community. We have to protect ourselves.
For those at a loss for what to do, I suggest preparing to join the fight for universal heath care and sick leave. It’s time to start gathering stories and sharing them. When the crisis abates, those stories need to flood cyberspace as we try to fix a healthcare system that’s been running on fumes for the poor, for those moms and dads who eventually piled into the pickup to go to the ER because they couldn’t afford to stay home with Xavier until Xavier was so sick that they truly had no choice.
“People get viruses. Our leaders must understand, though, that viruses don’t just go away, not always. I am getting my second shingles shot this Thursday because chicken pox never goes away – it just waits to become some peoples attack of shingles, and then some peoples permanent post-herpetic neuralgia – otherwise known as lifelong nerve pain. A previous post talked more about viral infections of the past. The current thinking supports the idea that most people will clear COVID-19 from their bodies. But nobody yet understands what is happening with the long haulers, those people who got sick early in the epidemic and who are still sick.” See: https://www.eduhonesty.com/better-to-be-too-scared-of-those-classrooms-than-not-scared-enough/, (amber)
In educational terms – half measures for safety are unacceptable. The ventilation in classrooms must reach osha standards. https://www.businessinsider.com/poor-indoor-air-quality-could-make-schools-coronavirus-hotspots-2020-9 lays out a few technical details: “…although there’s no simple, easy, or cheap way to measure coronavirus particles in the air, carbon dioxide can be a “canary in the coal mine,” according to Roger Silveira, an air-quality specialist and the facilities director at San Jose’s East Side Union High School District. Carbon-dioxide monitors sell for about $100.
In a building with good ventilation, CO2 levels should generally stay under 1,100 parts per million, Silveira said.”
If school rooms can’t hit these air quality targets, those rooms should remain closed. The hand sanitizer, deep cleaning, temperature checks and masks must be there. Or the rooms don’t open. A school should not open for live instruction until all safety protocols are in place and operating smoothly.
Because there are pediatric long haulers. There are adult long haulers. There are deceased teachers and school staff members – and there will be more. We can’t stop this virus yet, but we must hold illness down to the lowest level possible as we open up schools.
The Federal government has led us to a place where we have 4% of the world’s population and 21% of the world’s COVID-19 cases, an inauspicious beginning for this year’s school openings. Not long ago, we had 25% of the world’s deaths so our situation is improving — or the world’s situation is deteriorating. But in a couple of days, we will pass the 200,000 dead mark.
If safety takes additional funding, government leaders need to pony up NOW. Years and years of underfunding schools while the infrastructure of some buildings slowly decayed has caught up with us. Like our old bridges, not all our old schools can carry the weight of today’s sudden increase in demands. That does not excuse government leaders from responsibility for making those schools safe. We close unsafe bridges — most of the time — and unsafe schools must be closed as well. If the air doesn’t circulate, and the windows don’t open, that should end all discussion until repairs are completed.
A note for parents: And recent reports in the New York Post and other sources saying 86% of teachers bought their own PPE for in-person classes — reader, read between those lines. That’s how much faith the people on the front lines have in their leaders’ concern for their well-being. I’d think about that carefully before I volunteered to send my child for in-person classes. I’d visit any school before I started regularly sending my child through those big, wide front doors.
Me being me, I might take a carbon dioxide monitor with me. Ideally, I’d want to go in when students were present. If I were a teacher, I’d definitely check room gasses.
P.S. I might go on my neighborhood app to see if I could borrow the monitor. Note that this monitor is not a carbon monoxide detector. You are looking for carbon dioxide instead.
It’s conclusion? “This study reveals that children may be a potential source of contagion in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in spite of milder disease or lack of symptoms, and immune dysregulation is implicated in severe post-infectious MIS-C.” The first part of that conclusion is crystal clear — kids, even kids who don’t seem sick, appear able to spread the infection. The second part says that a severe disease process that affects some children after they get the coronavirus is believed to result from a misguided immune response that causes the children’s immune systems to attack their own tissues.
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