Social media posts are peppered with teachers’ comments about disengaged students this past year. We frequently blame remote learning and COVID protocols, two obvious targets, but I must observe that frustrated posts about student apathy predate COVID. COVID makes an easy answer; that does not make COVID a correct or complete answer.

I’d like to put out an alternative for consideration: SEARCH ENGINES. Cell phones are ubiquitous in high school and are becoming so in middle schools. Fears of school violence contribute to the proliferation of phones. Parents are afraid to be out of contact.

But what is the effect of having Alexa or Siri always at your fingertips? The phones obligingly answer any and all questions. I can find out in seconds when Queen Victoria reigned in England. I can find out the size of the Philadelphia police department and get a list of all Spike Lee movies. An obliging source will tell me most cats have between 6 and 8 nipples, and it’s uncommon for cats to have more. I can find the chemical formula for formaldehyde, shown in pictures if I choose.

When I was young, students often memorized facts, filing away “truths” from various disciplines. Having no Google, we engaged with new material in real-time. The price of ignoring teachers’ explanations was high. A unit test was certainly coming, and we didn’t have a back-up learning option other than reading a textbook, going to the library, or finding a teacher who would repeat what we had missed. Back-up options were untrustworthy, too. Sometimes that test was based almost entirely on lecture that barely touched the content of the book.

Here’s a rough description of today’s problem: Xavier tunes out the day’s discussion on the Industrial Revolution because he wants to text Laura. Or he has any of a number of alternative interests that have nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution. Xavier knows he can catch up later. If he doesn’t, it’s likely his school requires his teacher to give him a retake when he fails the upcoming test. Depending on the topic, he may be certain a good Wikipedia article or two is all he will require to stay afloat.

Experienced teachers know that we always had those kids who tuned out the teacher; I’m sure those kids were once sitting in one-room schoolhouses on the prairie. In my school days, these were the kids who blew off their lessons and then crammed the night before the test, burning through textbook pages and friends’ notes. “Can I borrow your notes?” they asked, sometimes before suggesting a study date.

Cramming has simply gotten light years easier. “Hey, Siri. Tell me when Richard Nixon was President?” “Hey, Siri, get me information on Stephen Hawking.” “Hey, Siri…”

Here’s where the scenario goes sideways for the whole classroom. In the past, Xavier might have listened with a sense that listening now could make for the most efficient use of his time later. And when Xavier actively listened, he became curious. He became engaged. He wanted to fill in the holes in his understanding. He asked questions. When he asked questions, he inspired others to raise their hands. Sarah might add a new question to the discussion, and soon questions would be popping out all over the room, becoming part of the automatic flow of that classroom. That’s maybe the greatest fun of teaching: Inspiring and answering student questions — inspiring the fun of learning.

But cramming itself has gotten so much easier that I believe we are sometimes witnessing what happens when students decide to put off learning new content today because they are certain they can pick up that content tomorrow. They don’t engage in real-time. (Or maybe they never intend to engage at all, but that’s another issue.) They only half-listen in class, doing the school equivalent of distracted driving. They are present enough to notice red lights and make turns in proper places, but mostly… they are drifting. Maybe it seems more important to learn when Laura’s parents will be home than to understand the Industrial Revolution.

Eduhonesty: What happens when there’s never a sense of urgency about learning because Siri or Alexa is always there? That’s a topic I might choose to research if I were selecting a research area today. The ultimate study buddy may be no buddy — nobody — at all.

But Siri is so convenient. How do we manage this problem? I honestly have no answer yet; I wanted to write this post, however, to identify and put a face to the problem. Our distracted drivers are driving off the road all over this country, leaving their classrooms behind. We have to help them find their way back to the engagement and enthusiasm they lost.

P.S. Whether for academics or distractions, research into use of search engines also must take into account that we are talking about children and adolescents. Kids are not little adults. Some typical middle school questions: How do I become one of the richest gamers in the world? How can I make millions in cryptocurrency? What is a cryptocurrency? Can you mate a horse with an elephant? Is it dangerous to drop your TV in the bathtub? Here’s a favorite: If I eat myself, will I get twice as big or disappear completely? If you put this last question into a search engine you will get pages of answers, most of them sarcastic or crazy, but a number with a genuine scientific bent. I don’t know the origin of the question, but it honestly sounds like something one of my students might ask. The what-if-I-eat-myself question was even posed on Quora.

“Hey Siri” is a marvelous shortcut when seeking new knowledge, but concerned adults have to make sure that an overarching plan — a curriculum — is at least sometimes guiding Siri’s choice of direction.

I

Twice in my teaching life, I lost it. I completely lost control. I screamed in those classes, a little woman in a towering rage. Maybe I even cursed, though I can’t remember that, but cursing was probably at the bottom of the list of student concerns at that moment. I’m sure people heard me down the hall and on the floor below. I silenced all my students.

In the first case, some students apologized to me later, but they did not owe me an apology. No one should scream at kids for lack of homework compliance. I took a sledgehammer to the wasp on the wall that day. Across the years, I will always regret that one class.

I give myself a partial pass on the second event. I was addressing a specific instance of racism that had taken me by surprise, and I suspect casual racism never again felt casual to the student responsible. Letting my students know that racism fell outside of any category of acceptable behavior — well, that’s not so bad, although my loss of control remains in my memory. I briefly hammered that kid, and that was far from my best response. I lost a huge, teachable moment.

But here’s the thing: I am actually an exceptionally patient woman. On the patience scale, I give myself at least an “8” and maybe a “9” or “10.” You can push so many of my buttons before I get angry. When I do get angry, I may raise my voice, but I won’t throw the plaster apple on my desk. I won’t overturn desks.

Reader, try a few YouTube searches on topics like “teacher throws desk” or “teacher hits student.” Those videos are out there. So are videos of students attacking teachers. Another sobering search as we discuss arming teachers: “teacher committed suicide.” Sources claim there are 3.2 million teachers in the United States. Even if only a fraction of a fraction of 1% of those teachers have the potential to throw a desk, those teachers are out there, scattered all across our country. Some are even veterans with PTSD.

And then there’s the issue of the student who steals a gun. Theft is a common category on school referral forms. I spent hours once trying to help a teacher recover the new cell phone her husband had bought her, all without success. My strongest memories from that day: 1) My administration blaming the teacher for having had her phone upon her desk; 2) Watching as students who clearly had seen what happened chose to say nothing.

Eduhonesty: We have to pull in the guns. Adding more guns can and will increase the loss of life. And we have to stop talking about mental health care as a solution.

I live in a state where one of the biggest medical networks SHUT DOWN talk therapy a few months back because there were no available therapists. I’m sure a person could bump the line by threatening to kill themselves or someone else, but the idea that increased mental health care will somehow address the problem of school shootings — that idea crosses the line from disingenuous into manipulation and pure evil. Because the politicians calling for increased mental health care are not that stupid. They KNOW that preventative care is not out there. In many locations, crisis care is barely available. They know that preventative care would not stop the shootings, even if that care were available — even if those angry loners somehow sought therapy instead of revenge on their grandmothers.

Sometimes desperate educational leaders simply go too fast. As Lily Tomlin said, “For faster relief, try slowing down.”

What happens when you are trying to fix six impossible things before breakfast, while writing standards and lesson objectives on the board, and helping students with mask anxiety while other students are blissfully throwing their masks-optional face coverings into the waste basket? What happens while you run, run, run to get everything done?

Things get lost. Big things. Little things. Long-term and short-term things. Items on the list that matter simply disappear. It’s math really. If you have 14 hours of things to do and only 5 hours available, then 9 hours will remain undone. And if every day is about the same, the negative numbers will simply pile up. Nothing else is possible.

5 School hours for active learning (which does not include lunch, gym, recess if applicable, positive behavioral interventions, and other weird, random interruptions) take away 14 hours of useful, academic things to do = -9 hours of goals accomplished.

Eduhonesty: If kids have fallen behind, picking up the pace is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do. Lost kids deserve a chance to catch up — and that requires slowing down until they understand the content they missed. In math especially, switching to hyperdrive produces black holes and flattened kids who are spewing out weird numbers to try to make their teacher happy, if they are doing any work at all. And we shouldn’t be giving first graders four-syllable or maybe even three-syllable words on spelling tests. Yes, a number of kids can spell those words. But the fact that we get away with those spelling lists sometimes does not justify those lists.

And now for another post that has nothing to do with standardized testing. In pockets throughout the US, data demands keep triumphing over common sense as standardized tests and test preparation pre-empt instructional time. (Yada, yada, yada.) I’ll keep writing the occasional test post, until I get some indication that those classroom instructional hours are being returned to students — many of whom desperately need them.

But this is another post, meant for both parents and teachers. For a quick breakdown of ADHD facts, see Common Characteristics of ADHD – Santa Monica College (smc.edu). Santa Monica’s list is incomplete, but an excellent start in breaking down this topic. This post is not exactly about ADHD and accommodations either, though, despite the fact I’m overdue at spending more time on this increasingly important topic.

I just want to share a shower thought with readers: As an ADHD person myself, I believe I understand an important fact that often gets skipped in social media posts and other articles about ADHD management: The trial-and-error process of medicating children with ADHD is not nearly the “to-medicate-or-not-to-medicate choice” parents and teachers sometimes seem to believe. By middle school, that choice is no longer entirely in adult hands. Here is what supervising adults are up against:

ADHD Amber or Anthony can easily self-medicate throughout much of America, probably almost all of America. How many houses stock liquor? And even before weed was legal, I guarantee my middle-school students were finding supplies. Some red eyes might have been the result of playing Fortnite all night, but others came with faint odors wafting off hoodies and hair, whiffs that explained Amber or Anthony’s mostly agreeable, if slightly blank or disruptive, classroom behavior.

“How old is the oldest tree in the world?”

“We can look that up later, Anthony. For now, we should be focusing on today’s math.”

Here’s the thing about Anthony: He may not be able to Total Recall his way to Mars, but he can for sure blunt his way to the easy chair in a friend’s basement. I tried to control my own kids’ viewing habits and I was partially successful. However, I could not control friends’ houses. And once we hand those kids their phones, all bets are off in categories across the board.

So the choice is actually between medicating, not medicating and self-medicating. The first time that child with generalized anxiety disorder — often concomitant with ADHD — inhales THC or downs a homemade cocktail, the question of medication may go sideways in mere minutes. Gloriously unafraid, having fun with friends, friends who are having fun themselves watching nervous Amber relax — Amber may have set both feet firmly on a path of substance abuse.

I don’t want to oversimplify this issue. I believe genetic components, personal ambitions, family dynamics and background, actual physical location, degree of anxiety or depression, and other factors weigh heavily in what happens next. I also believe that starting set points can sometimes be critical. How is Anthony doing in school? Does Amber have friends, family or a therapist to help her process her feelings?

Eduhonesty: My thought in the shower was a simple one. Those unmedicated kids who are not managing to navigate daily life somewhat comfortably will frequently medicate themselves. It’s so easy to find those “medications,” so easy to take that edge off, at least once out of elementary school.

Teachers are sometimes accused of pushing for medication in order to make classroom control easier. Parents are sometimes attacked for choosing medication, told they “just need good, firm discipline.” (Or spanking, or no red dyes, or less screen time, or the right vitamins etc.) Too often, outsiders don’t understand that those screens HAVE been limited in houses where nutrition is being carefully monitored and books on child-rearing are piling up on shelves.

All families are unique. Decisions like medication require the voices of trained medical professionals who are receiving robust information from families and schools.

Parents: If your school has suggested that Amber or Anthony might require medication, please listen. Teachers can recognize those kids who are outliers, the kids whose inability to sit and listen is interfering with learning. Falling behind is never trivial; somewhere up the line, a student can reach a point of no return — the point where no math tutor can fill in enough gaps to make success in high school algebra possible, at least on the first try. Academic failures eat away at self-confidence, no matter how many positive messages and participation trophies a child receives.

Parents and schools can control nutrition and medication in elementary-age children. At the doorway to adolescence, though, that control slips away. Middle school kids toss their healthy school lunches in the trash and share a friend’s bag of bright red Takis instead. They stash their bong at a friend’s house, the house with the comfy basement and parent(s) who work the swing shift. They perfect strategies not to be caught. Quote from a high school boy of my acquaintance: “The man who invented Visine should have got a Nobel Prize.”

I wrote this post simply to lay out a truth that can get lost: A too-scared, too-scattered kid is more likely to self-medicate than live out middle school and high school in confusion and fear.

P.S. I’ve done fine in life and so has my ADHD child. I hope this post doesn’t come across as ominous because ADHD has many positive aspects. Hyper people can be amazingly productive once they get to work on their personal passions. And many kids will avoid intoxicants even when they are anxious. Still, what I wrote above deserves consideration. I got all “A”s in my French, Latin and Spanish classes in my senior year of high school, but, damn, I was higher than that proverbial kite some days. The smoke must have been wafting off of me. My very Latinesque teachers just smiled and let me slide by. The world forgives “A” students easily and I think no one wanted to cause me trouble. I honestly don’t know why so many people let me pass, but they did, and it turns out I am not an addictive personality. The problem is: you don’t know if you can slough the monkey off your back until you try. Not everyone is lucky.

I was too young for the war of the sixties and seventies, and also too female, but not too young to understand what was happening. I knew older boyfriends and brothers were slogging through jungles while I did my French and Spanish homework. After a few years, I would know people who had seen the Tet Offensive and Operation Rolling Thunder. I spent a year with a boyfriend who had stories of Vietnam from back behind the front lines, a guy who had been in “intelligence.” Intelligence duties apparently included trying to figure out how to file — or lose — the report from soldiers who had placed an explosive rocket up a water buffalo’s rectum, blowing the poor creature into random chunks.

In December of 1969, the US government instituted a lottery system for drafting men into the army, the first such lottery held since World War II. Three-hundred-sixty-six balls* were placed in a large lotto-like, glass container, each ball labeled with a birthdate, to determine the order in which men between 18 and 26 years old would be called into active military service. This system still exists, waiting to be put back into practice: (See Lottery | Selective Service System : Selective Service System (sss.gov) for details.)

The lottery system sounds “fair,” in the sense that it’s based on luck. But the Viet Nam draft was never fair. During my high school years, my school’s high poverty rate and low college enrollment rate made my male classmates prime draft targets. College offered a student deferment, but many boys in then south Tacoma did not come from college families. They had never had college in their plans — though some changed those plans to include further schooling, while others fled to Canada. Draft discussions ate up time in hallways, lunchrooms, and afterhours gatherings. Draft, draft, draft and the luck of an early or late birthdate dominated conversations during key periods of the war.

Eduhonesty: Flip to 2022. The discussions are just beginning, a low drone so far. Young men in high school are googling draft information. Young women are reassured that women are not included in any possible draft — though some are aware that a law intended to add them to the draft only recently failed to be passed. The courts have also suggested a gender-based draft may no longer pass muster. (Can women be drafted for war? (the-sun.com))

It’s early yet, but as we keep moving to support Ukraine, this topic is likely to gain momentum. I don’t recommend bringing it up. That will legitimize a still nascent fear that most likely will come to nothing. And our kids are so worried. The last few years have ensured a high level of anxiety in already-jittery students.

But I would prepare my “this is why you should not be worried” speech, my “we are a long way from boots on the ground” and “the current army should be able to meet any military needs without instituting another draft” speech. Because the topic has been edging into timeliness for weeks now. In these convoluted times, we owe our kids the benefit of a reassuring adult perspective. These kids grew up with Lone Survivor, Fury, JoJo Rabbit, Dunkirk, and Hacksaw Ridge, after all, not to mention decades of older war movies.

I do suggest we wait for them to bring that topic out into the open. We can create the very fear we are trying to assuage. I don’t believe atomic bomb duck and cover drills of the fifties and sixties made students safer, but they certainly made them much more frightened of nuclear annihilation. As we cowered below our desks with our heads on our knees, waiting for the roof to fall, at least some of us believed that roof might actually fall.

I suggest the draft as one topic we ought to hash out in our minds before it enters our classrooms. Hugs from the Blue Room, Ms. J

*February 29th is the reason why the year does not match the number of balls.

Let me start by saying a “20-minute lunch” is not a real thing. Millions of US students experience that so-called 20-minute lunch daily but calling their experience “lunch” is like calling the January 6th incursion into the capitol building “confusion over opening time.” A lunch of 20 minutes — the CDC calls for this — can be expected to be less than 20 minutes. Yes, many schools allocate a full half-hour, but books must get to lockers, students must get across schools, many people have to go to the bathroom all at once, and then everyone has to navigate that long, snaky line.

See Why Teens Are So Miserable (& How We Can Help) (zdoggmd.com). Zubin Damania is a hospitalist, known on YouTube as ZDoggMD. Aside from his negativity on masks in schools, he nails a number of issues squarely on the head in this video, addressing rising levels of teen sadness, anxiety, and mental health. Our children are becoming more alone, though often more alone with a phone, he observes. Where are the in-person social connections?

Eduhonesty: I’d like to flag something. That 20-minute mastication period does NOT qualify as an in-person social opportunity. Once recess has disappeared, our middle school and high school students lose their venues for social interaction, unless they seize that opportunity in class — as a regrettable but understandable number do. In elementary schools, those recess times keep shrinking too.

Having shared my lunch period with students, I know that bolting down a piece of pizza and and a mug of coffee doesn’t leave time for any real conversation. I still have to throw away my green beans,* after all, and probably take something to the main office. And my kids still have to throw away their milk cartons and green beans, and then go to lockers to retrieve afternoon class materials, fitting in a bathroom break along the way. Not all kids can get out of that bathroom in two minutes, especially girls.

I am writing this post to suggest we share with parents and others a truth escaping many people: Lunch sounds like a break, a chance to talk with friends. However, depending on the school and even the location of a kid’s locker or number of bathroom stalls, that “break” may be PURE FICTION. Like a daily planning period that keeps getting pre-empted for meetings, only some of which result in planning, lunch for many of America’s students does not offer the oasis of friendship its name implies.

To liberally paraphrase an old quote from the 1988 Dan Quayle vice-presidential debate: I knew lunch. Lunch was a friend of mine. Reader, these are not lunches. 

Hugs, to my readers. A small blog post that’s a drop of water in a larger, toxic ocean that is sweeping our kids to lonely places, lost in a crowd, often with phones to isolate them further.

*Feel free to look up the sodium target 2 in schools — (USDA’s Final Rule on Milk, Whole Grains, and Sodium in School Meals – EveryCRSReport.com) I don’t want my post to spiral off-topic so I will keep this short. You can get away with barely — or not — salting beans when they are fresh, but after beans have cooked nonstop for hours, only butter or at least salt will rescue them.

Changing standards should never be taken lightly. New standards always require a deluge of meetings and professional developments downstream, meetings and PDs that are followed by the added time sucks of new lesson plans, new lesson sequences, and often new books and software. Those lessons and materials only sometimes mesh well with previous learning. The careful sequences that curriculum committees put together for student transitions from year to year? Any appreciable change in standards risks blowing up all that previous curricular work, leaving numerous fragments of dead and disconnected lessons all over the field.

But who is counting? That’s the real problem in this scenario. Who is tracking the mandatory costs from government and district demands — let alone the fuzzier, sometimes-optional instructional costs that come with professional development, new materials and rewritten lesson plans? Accountants will track new books and software within the district, along with costs for professional development and related speakers, but not all expenses can be laid out cleanly in a spreadsheet. Opportunity costs end up ignored in particular.

A term from economics, opportunity cost refers to the value of whatever you cannot do because you chose to do something else. It’s the cost of the road not taken, and like that road, its outlines are hazy, offering no more than a glimpse into what-might-have-been. What is the cost of not doing something? If a district commits to using its available time and money to build a new extension onto the lunchroom, it probably cannot add a weight room onto the gym. Our districts have a finite amount of time, money and other resources available. Once the addition to the lunchroom is chosen, the district has implicitly given up the weight room. The opportunity cost is the value the weight room might have provided, a cost that cannot easily be determined.

Choices are often mutually exclusive. Every time we force teachers to dedicate chunks of their daytime hours to new brainstorms, those teachers must reallocate their time, and something has to give to make room for Brainstorm #23,489. Those somethings are our opportunity costs and they cannot be turned into hard data, so they mostly end up ignored by administrators and bureaucrats. If Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black are forced to give up morning or afternoon tutoring time to learn their new books and materials, who notices? Besides Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black, that is, who may be silently cursing as they tweak or entirely redo once functional sets of slides they prepared only the year before.

Rewriting standards and making educators drop everything to learn another set of changes…and then devise matching curricula again! …Aaghhh. Yet some states have changed standards more than once in the last decade. The standards situation resembles a remodeling run amuck, as a too-wealthy, too-bored would-be interior designer keeps changing the floors, walls, fabrics, paints and lighting until nothing works and nobody knows what to expect, even as the bills pile up and cracks appear in overloaded plaster. Teachers just start walking around bits and crumbles of plaster, trying to find the now rickety stairs. (Damn, I’m fascinated at how we keep working sometimes.)

We don’t need perfect standards as much as we need to settle on a good set of robust, adaptable standards that we can and will stick with – allowing for desperately needed continuity of instruction. The Core played hell with that continuity, incidentally. That’s a major part of the reason my students were drowning when it was first introduced.* But this post is not about the Core and it’s not about standards. It’s not exactly about opportunity costs, either.

This post is about LURCHING — lurching from one new program or idea to the next. Any teacher could tell those Secretaries of Education, district administrators and other pundits that routine and continuity are vital components of a successful classroom experience. Yes, sometimes gifted students can leap buildings in a single bound but, for the so-called average kid, staggering from one person’s great idea to the next person’s great idea without any rational bridge connecting those ideas… well, it doesn’t work well. If it works at all. Changed curricula leave holes in the learning ladder, a hole invisible to creators of new systems because they already know the curricula. And it’s harder to see a missing piece when you are already certain that piece is in the puzzle somewhere. Let’s say Sergei was expected to learn zygotes in fourth grade but zygotes just moved to third grade instead, a grade that Sergei just finished without learning anything about zygotes. Sergei’s personal curriculum just dropped zygotes entirely, but how is he to know? His teachers probably know but they are dealing with an avalanche of changes. Zygotes can easily fall through the cracks. There are no zygote emergencies, after all. This topic just becomes one more thing to pick up later. Or not.

What our brainstorms tend to ignore is that changes on a macro level throw micro levels out of whack. And micro levels are where our kids live. These abrupt changes are hard on teachers, but they are often harder on students. I said this post is not about new standards, and it’s not. It’s about the people inhabiting — the people living inside — today’s US educational system. Flexes in school routines are inevitable. New information must be incorporated as learning and technology advance. Changing demographics may require shifts in instruction, such as added English language support. Plus an unexpected coronavirus can create dizzying changes in rules and expectations virtually overnight. .

Eduhonesty: BUT WE NEED TO STOP IMPLEMENTING GRANDIOSE SOLUTIONS TO MURKILY-DEFINED, OVERSIMPLIFIED PROBLEMS.

NEW STANDARDS AND NEW TESTS WITH ADDED TEST PREP LEAD TO INCREASING LURCHING DOWN IN THE CLASSROOM. The zygotes go quietly missing, along with the analog clocks and maybe even some critical, fractional pizza slices meant to be added together. Too much is happening all at once. The fractions receive limited practice due to time constraints, and next year’s teacher may have to start almost at the beginning of again slicing up that pizza pie.

I’ll throw in a personal story: I used to be astounded at the number of middle school students I received who could not read the analog clock in the wall at the front of the classroom. “Ms. T, what time is it?” “Is it almost lunchtime, Ms. T?” “How soon is the next class? Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Class start-times were posted, but it doesn’t do a student much good to know that social studies starts at 10:59 if he or she can’t read the clock.

A spiffy digital Darth Vader desk clock solved my immediate problem, but I wondered what was going wrong. Then I had a long conversation with an elementary teacher who explained that the “clock standard” was at the end of the year, only new standards kept being inserted into her curriculum, and nobody in her school was ever reaching that clock standard before the end of the school year cut them off. That standard then disappeared into the mists. It wasn’t in the next year’s curriculum. Once it “timed out,” it wasn’t anywhere. Since it pretty much vanished from the standardized tests after its slated “year,” no one had an incentive to tack those missing clocks onto the script a year later, even if there had somehow been time, which there wasn’t.

I miss twenty years ago. Before the tests took over, I believe a kindly elementary school teacher would have stepped off the bus for long enough to teach the missing clocks. But he or she can rarely risk doing that now. Everything is too scripted. Too often, the standards have to be on the board and a teacher found stepping off the common, test-based lesson plan can even be reprimanded for not teaching from a sometimes wholly inappropriate script instead. The impact of this set-up is hardest on the kids already on the wrong side of the achievement gap, of course.

Nuff’ said. Hugs to my readers, Jocelyn Turner

*Going sideways for a minute here: The phrase “my students were drowning” sounds like hyperbole, an overstatement. But that phrase is actually an understatement. Drowning may be awful, but it’s fast. What happened to my students and many other teachers’ students was not fast. It was 180 days of being frequently lost, as they were presented with obligatory new material that did not necessarily relate to any previous year’s instruction — setting the stage for long and tougher years to come.

Thinking of Dr. Seuss here:

“ALL BALL We all play ball.

BALL WALL Up on a wall

ALL FALL Fall off the wall.”

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

Eduhonesty:

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

A little more Seuss?

“Pup up. Brown down.

Pup is down. Where is Brown?

WHERE IS BROWN?

THERE IS BROWN!

Mr. Brown is out of town.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can only hope tomorrow will look better than today.

End November 2017 Haiku

“My Leg Hurts Because My Foot Exploded”

Ms. Turner sitting

Calf and thigh high! And foot, sigh,

My foot broke itself.

I didn’t fall off the bleachers. I didn’t twist an ankle or slip on a patch of water. My foot simply… bruised from the inside and swelled up. They sent me home from the ER using a walker. The foot’s fine now. I had healed by late the following week, at least well enough to walk without assistive devices. But I still don’t know what happened except I was on that foot, climbing bleachers, while going back and forth and moving nonstop all day in a gym. Still, all teachers have nonstop days — now more than ever.

Eduhonesty: I used social media today to advise a teacher to try meditation, tapping or medication — whatever it would take to get her through the teaching day without ending up hurting. I read too many posts lately from teachers with headaches, teachers who are nonstop anxious, who are sick or recovering from being sick.

Does this describe you? Or someone else you know? Physical symptoms of stress should not be ignored in an effort to complete Lesson Plan #284 for the year. You only get one body and one life, one shot, as Eminem sang.

I don’t plan to go into detail about my haiku. I just want to flag that physical discomfort I kept walking on. It’s too easy to take a purple Nexium and ignore a stomach, or to down another Excedrin for the latest headache. It’s too easy to work through pain, ignoring the message underneath.

My foot gave me warnings that day. But I just kept going until I couldn’t keep going and then I borrowed crutches from a school nurse to half-hop to my car and somehow drive to the ER. One shiny, new metal walker later, I made my way home, where I then spent the week watching TV with my foot elevated, startled to discover I hadn’t gotten away with my determined effort to work through the pain.

As Madonna sang, “pain is a warning that something’s wrong.” What we may forget, especially when day-to-day pressure is too great — I have to get that spreadsheet ready before tomorrow’s meeting! — is that sometimes tornado warnings are followed by tornados. That pain? Something’s wrong.

I am writing this post to plead with educators to take care of themselves:

• Before that slow, labored hop to the car.
• Before kind ER nurses and doctors start attaching devices to fingers, chests, arms and ankles.
• Before helpful techs start wheeling your supine body to various imaging machines.
• Before maybe you do yourself damage you can’t easily or ever fix.

Remedies for physical and mental stress are superabundant today: meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, massages, exercise classes, tapping, hypnosis, music, recreational reading, walking, art, funny videos, essential oils, gardening…etc. I recommend locating and printing a list of remedies. Highlight your favorites and make a schedule. Pay for that yoga class if paying will get you to park and walk through the studio door. And if you are hurting, please see a doctor. When all else fails, medication may be required.

One last observation: If your workday REGULARLY causes you physical pain, that’s your body trying furiously to reach you. Whether you need another district, another administration, or another profession altogether, your instincts are already kicking in to push you off your chosen path. Don’t let your brain lead when your gut, head, or right foot are trying to break into your internal conversation.

Listen to your body.