Are you getting ready for the next school year, reader? In my daughter’s schools, teachers are already coming back. Other teachers have only weeks before the year begins. Parents are out school shopping and I realize I ought to have written this post sooner.

COMFORT should be the key word when back to school shopping. Many children have sensory processing issues, even those who have not been and may never be recognized as having a “problem.” A definition of sorts will help here, although definitions vary and sensory issues fall into a gray area filled with hazy examples more than concrete science. But sensory processing challenges are very real and clothing does not get enough attention.

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From Sensory Processing Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment (webmd.com):

“Sensory processing disorder is a condition in which the brain has trouble receiving and responding to information that comes in through the senses. Some people with sensory processing disorder are oversensitive to things in their environment. Common sounds may be painful or overwhelming. The light touch of a shirt may chafe the skin.”

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A tag in the back of a shirt can distract a kid ALL day and, as strange as this may sound, that kid may not say anything for days, months or forever. Some kids will immediately pipe up, “Mom, I hate that white thing! It itches!” But others will simply keep scratching their neck. They will pull the fabric from their shorts or pants away from their skin. They will fiddle with their shirt, maybe pulling it away from their skin. They will do little scooching moves in their desks, shifting their position, one inch in one direction and then another inch to the side. Maybe they will scooch nonstop as the school day goes by. They may often be pulling or pushing waistbands, or simply putting their hands inside those bands to get the band away from their skin. (An act which has definitely gotten a few kids in trouble!) And despite all these subtle and not-so-subtle signs of discomfort, certain children never think to complain. That’s just how clothes work in their minds.

Sensory issues may be far less obvious at home where there are more immediate distractions and less need to stay in one position. Distractions help to distract us from our distractions. Plus students who wear uniforms to school can change out of that uniform, and other children can come home and pull out favorite baseball shirts or other changes of clothing that seem perfectly natural.

A few school shopping suggestions:

Smell the masks! I recently returned a batch to Amazon because the odor was … off. Not enough to make me immediately take off the mask, but enough so that I decided after awhile that I could not identify that faint smell and I was not comfortable using those masks. A child might keep wearing a mask with a faint, unfamiliar smell. I’d take the new box of masks and put one on myself for awhile before I started handing them to my kids.

Watch shoes. Some kids can get attached to shoes that no longer fit. They won’t say anything when their feet start bothering them because they don’t want their favorite shoes replaced. Some kids don’t bother to say anything when their toes are getting pinched because pinched toes don’t much bother them. And feet sometimes grow in leaps and bounds.

You are looking for softness. It helps to shut your eyes and feel the fabric. As the Jedi Masters say: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.”

Take the kids if possible. Have them feel possible future school clothes. Ask them, “Do you like how it feels?” Teaching children to put comfort high on their list for clothing choices will help them for life. While shopping as a family can understandably seem too daunting, shopping together helps with the mystery of sizes. One store’s size six can be another store’s size eight. Seven-year-olds do not run true to size.

That’s the major problem with haunting the end-of-season sales. Yes, that size eight outfit may be a great price and size eight ought to be next year’s size. But some kids just rocket through the size chart. Boys especially can easily go up two or three sizes in one year.

If I had the kids with me, I’d try to get them to sit down in any pants they tried on. Many pairs of pants feel great when upright but are much less comfortable while seated at a desk. Where does the fabric bunch? If trying on multiple pairs of pants, I’d ask, “Which ones are most comfortable?” Kids will resist trying on clothes sometimes. I’d be prepared to say, “I know it’s a pain but I want you to be comfortable all day. I am doing this for you because I love you.”

The internet can be hugely helpful. Just type “sensory friendly” into your Amazon or other clothing search. You might try “soft cotton” and other similar searches, too. Sometimes guessing and maybe returning is much easier than a trip to Target, that’s for sure!

Eduhonesty: Parents whose children have pronounced sensory issues likely don’t need any shopping tips. They are already seeking sensory friendly clothing, even when they have not yet tumbled onto that specific description for what they are seeking. Anecdotally, though, I believe mild sensory processing concerns in children are often overlooked. Even teachers may simply get used to watching the scooching. Because some children will scooch nonstop regardless of what they are wearing — clothed or naked, the average kid is not meant to sit still in any one place for a long period of time.

Here’s a quote for the day: “Once you are comfortable in your own skin, you will become unstoppable.”
― Christine E. Szymanski

I don’t know that Christine is right about that unstoppable part 🙂 but I do know Itching can short circuit thinking. Discomfort is distracting. Discomfort can block learning. Here’s a thought-provoking read that lays out some sensory processing issues and provides a good overview: Understanding Sensory Processing Disorder | Understood – For learning and thinking differences

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And now for something completely different! This blog used to write about many topics that had nothing to do with the evils of excessive standardized testing. I’ll be back to that testing soon because I believe excess testing has become a vicious contributor to the achievement gap. But sometimes we all need a break. Thanks to all my readers! Jocelyn Turner

P.S. Using unscented, hypoallergenic detergent always helped my kids, while fabric softeners and dryer sheets were problematic for us.

Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune by Karen Ann Culotta, Jun 22, 2021 at 5:36 PM*

In my last posts, I barely touched on the larger question of “Barney’s” morale and self-esteem. What does it mean emotionally to have fallen below grade level — perhaps even years below grade level? Silence on this issue ignores one extremely potent argument against increased testing: Too often, we leave behind a trail of emotional devastation with these nonstop tests, depending on the resilience and obliviousness of kids who may be neither resilient nor oblivious.

Let me pull a few paragraphs from the Chicago Tribune link at the top.

“’During springtime, our units with children and adolescents would fill to capacity during testing season,” said (Katie) Osgood, recalling the years she was a teacher at a Chicago hospital’s psychiatric unit.

“We would see children arriving by ambulance directly from testing sessions with things like self-harm … banging their heads on desks, pulling out all of their eyelashes … panic attacks, and we’d see suicidal ideation,” Osgood said.”

I recall a student who carved a word in his arm after one of these tests — a self-criticism that landed him a psychiatric hospital stay. I knew that boy, a hard-working child who was straddling the categories of bilingual and special education. He was trying so hard, but he could not answer the questions in front of him. He had no chance. That test was pitched years above the academic level where he was actually functioning. Special education and bilingual teachers especially know these kids.

I have seen students break into tears during these tests. I have seen quiet acts of defiance, students who put their heads down on their desks and simply refused to start testing. I watched as a student went from trying to answer questions to writing pure gobbledygook on one form, extended response free-association that made almost no sense.

We break some of these kids.

Eduhonesty: I have said what I wanted to say today. I will repeat: We break some of these kids. The percentage may be tiny, but that percentage is spread across all fifty states of this nation.

We have made these standardized tests the focus of instruction and the only barometers of success. What if a kid can’t do what the test demands? We have millions of failing children across the country. We know this. All we have to do is look at standardized test scores across our schools and our states. Or we can simply look at some of the daily work teachers are receiving.

This yellow unit test page is from the year when I was regularly required to give seventh grade Common Core problems to ALL my students so that teachers had comparable data to use to plan instruction. The problem asked students to determine the probability that a family will create a pizza with pepperoni and black olives if the given meat choices are hamburger, sausage and pepperoni and the vegetable choices are mushrooms, black olives and onions. My picture shows a student’s entire answer. The “common instructional plan” that led to this test was not so much a plan as a massacre for the boy or girl who wrote the answers below.

We keeping looking at the gasping fish at the bottom of the tree and throwing salt on them, as far as I am concerned.

*Reader, if you have not read the recent post about “Fred” and “Barney,” please see Let’s “Math” this problem: Why our Overzealous Testing Disproportionately Discriminates Against the Kids Who Have Already Fallen Over the Cliff | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com), in which I detailed reasons why increased testing hurts Barney more than Fred.

** Apparently Albert Einstein is not the source of this quote. No one seems to be able to track it back to its source.

The Question Too Many Legislators and Educational Bureaucrats Neglect to Answer: What if You Are Not Hermione Granger?

I want to go sideways today to make a sobering observation, one I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. The people who rise to high office are usually good or even excellent test takers. That man or woman with decision-making power within a government hierarchy? The trauma of test taking may be utterly foreign to that person. While not always true, the ability to do well on standardized tests helps predict a person’s chances of getting into the best colleges, and the best colleges have always made pathways to success shorter and easier. The following example illustrates this fact.

From How many American Congressmen have attended Ivy League schools? – Answers:

“…In the present 112th US Congressional session, there are 27 Senators with at least one Ivy League degree–either undergraduate, graduate or both. More interestingly there are 44 US Senators with at least one degree from an Ivy League school or other comparable elite institution of higher learning. This includes top law schools like New York University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and University of Texas. Also included are the top three liberal arts colleges in the nation–Amherst, Swarthmore and Williams –and prestigious institutions like Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics in the UK, and Georgetown (which is heavily represented), Duke, Stanford and other highly regarded non-Ivy universities. Couple this with most Senators being millionaires, and you start realizing how unrepresentative Congress–or at least the Senate–really is.”

Eduhonesty: How do you get into those schools? Especially in the past, ACT, SAT and other standardized test scores were often deciding factors. My point is simple. No doubt we can find exceptions but, overall, the people deciding to test and add more tests cannot viscerally understand the impact of their choices. They may even have enjoyed test days. Back before test score emphasis felt so frantic — back when most of these legislators and top educational bureaucrats were young — that test was an annual feather in their caps, another 90% or higher in most or all categories that resulted in a guidance counselor pointing them toward Stanford, Williams, Cornell or the best their region had to offer.

These leaders do not and cannot understand the impact of their choices to increase testing. Too many of them were the Hermione Grangers, or at least Ron Weasleys, of their student body.

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From my next post: Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune by Karen Ann Culotta, Jun 22, 2021 at 5:36 PM*

“During springtime, our units with children and adolescents would fill to capacity during testing season,” said (Katie) Osgood, recalling the years she was a teacher at a Chicago hospital’s psychiatric unit.

I’d like to invent some hypothetical math that makes a simple point: The plan by the Illinois State Board of Education to triple the number of annual standardized assessments for students will most hurt the students who are already behind. I can prove this.

Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune

To start, I am going to invent two students. I will call them Fred and Barney.

Fred is a bit above grade level. In order to be ready for the next year, he requires 150 days of instruction. Yes, I just invented Fred, but there are many Freds in the system. These students tend to test decently.

Barney has fallen a few years behind grade level. To be ready for the next year — that is, to cover the past curriculum he somehow failed to master and then reach grade level — Barney requires 320 days of instruction with supplemental evening and week-end tutoring. Barney doesn’t test well, of course. That’s how we know he is significantly behind grade level. In some Chicago public schools, many members of the student body qualify as a Barney. *

In my above example, Barney needs 320 days to “catch up” to grade level. In real life, that number might be 290 or 510 days. An exact count would be impossible to determine. The concept “grade level” is in constant motion, as is Barney. Grade level can change radically with one sweep of the standards too. Many on-target students stumbled down the stairs toward the basement with the arrival of the Common Core standards and related tests.

A lot of factors are in play and my learning curve is not actually linear. Barney may learn at an average or even faster pace and may have fallen behind due to missing school and moving frequently. Barney may be a slow learner with undiagnosed dyslexia. But whatever the source of his lower achievement, he’s behind. He will require extra instruction to catch up, extra instruction that may not exist for him, especially since we now try to pack every minute of every school day with standards-based instruction.

Now let’s look at the math. I want to show how the three-test-more-testing plan discriminates against poor Barney. My last school year, I lost over 1/5th of the year to testing, but we will assume less loss here. Let’s say days lost to standardized testing and benchmark tests only total 16 days, an optimistic choice of values. When I left off, the actual instructional days in Chicago Public Schools totaled 170 days.

Fred’s fine. He can be fully ready for next year, with the caveat that he’ll have to make up a bit of summer learning loss.

170 total school days – 16 test days = 154 days of instruction available to Fred. That’s enough for Fred, who is already above grade level and a fairly quick study academically. He only needs around 150 to stay at grade level. He will be ready to tackle next year’s subject matter. In numbers, 154 – 150 = +4

Barney may also have 154 instructional days. Sometimes our Barneys go to summer school, but that school is not always mandatory or even available. Barney is already deficit spending where schools days are concerned. In numbers, 154 – 320 = -166. No summer school can begin to fill this gap, especially since summer school often only runs four or five hours a day for four to six weeks.

Let’s charitably assume that Barney receives mandatory summer school for five hours a day for five weeks. We’ll count those days as 3/4s of a regular school day. In math terms, 25 days times 0.75 = 18.75 regular school days. So let’s give Barney 18.75 days credit to get a less onerous estimate: -166 + 18.75 = -147.25. After summer school, Barney now only requires an additional 147.25 extra days ON TOP OF A REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR to catch up to grade level. If this were a word problem, I would ask students what mathematical process we might use to express “on top of,” expecting to hear, “You add the numbers, Ms. Turner. ”

Barney requires 170 + 147.25 = 317.25 days total to catch up to grade level. That’s a mountain to climb — and currently we make almost no provision for our Barney’s when they have fallen that far behind. Where will the time come from to add that missing learning on top of the full, packed curriculum already laid out for his age?

We stole 16 days of instruction from these two students with standardized tests. We stole nearly 10% of the school year. With additional benchmark, AP, ACT and other tests, we may be stealing considerably more. But who feels the loss from those 16 days more?

“It’s only another 3 days or six days or week and a half,” our leaders will offer as justification when the increased time required for added testing hits the radar. But here’s the thing: Fred’s not falling behind. He has a margin of power around his daily academic needs. He might be a little more prepared for college calculus if he had an extra month of instruction instead of new tests during high school. Because of those tests, he might end up going for extra tutoring to help him though his first college mathematics classes. But Fred will be ready to move on to tougher material after he graduates from high school. We stole a few of Fred’s cupcakes, but Fred still has enough cupcakes to keep himself from ever going hungry.

Barney, on the other hand, is starving. He has been for a long time. That’s what phrases like “three years behind grade level” mean. He’s so academically hungry that he’s hurting unless he has decided not to care, a common response that’s sometimes the only psychic self-defense available. Barney never had any cupcakes to spare. He needs every academic week he can get — and a number he will probably never see. Every lost week leaves him more confused, and the more confused he gets, probably the more demotivated he becomes.

There’s a macabre sort of irony here: We test and test to find out where our students stand.

We keep stealing their food in order to determine how malnourished they have become.

Barney needs more time learning mathematics in math class, not more time documenting how much mathematics he does not know so that government leaders can wring their hands in public, published despair about how poor Barney is in such awful shape. It honestly makes me think of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental health problem in which a caregiver deliberately causes sickness in a child, elderly adult, or disabled person. Our Barneys are starving for learning time and are becoming hungrier all the time. Instead of feeding them, instead of teaching them, we give them weeks of extra tests and then trumpet their declining academic health.

Eduhonesty: Damn, this is crazy, and it never seems to stop. Yes, we need testing to gauge student progress, but not weeks and weeks of testing. We ought to be able to produce progress reports with one single robust benchmark test given for two days, three times a year, for a total six-day instructional loss.

We are focusing on America’s score numbers when what we ought to be focusing on is our students’ INSTRUCTIONAL TIME numbers. How much time do our students require to catch up? How can we increase the learning time they receive? We can’t improve Barney’s situation without giving him more time, yet somehow plans by government leaders and educational bureaucrats always steal time away from Barney and other struggling students instead. How hard is it to understand that testing directly steals instructional time — a commodity that the some kids can afford to lose, but others cannot?

I put numbers in this article to try to make that loss more real. This is the testing version of my last post: Them as Has Always Seems to Git More. The privileged kids in privileged districts get more — and they also lose less. Maybe both my boys lost 16 days, but the value of those days was much smaller for Fred, who did not need that instructional time to effectively stay caught up.

Meanwhile, like I said, poor Barney is starving while political leaders and educational bureaucrats keep aggressively raiding his dwindling and already inadequate supply of cupcakes.

*Incidentally, it’s extremely hard to get current information related to student academic progress right now in Illinois. The Illinois interactive state report card used to be a robust source of data. This year, however, the site blames COVID and simply does not provide many numbers. They may not have those numbers. A more sobering possibility: Perhaps those numbers came in so low that no one wants to put them up for public review.

Mostly I only sideswipe the real monster. Why is US education such a mess in some zip codes? We can pepper blogs and news articles with myriad attacks on education’s problems, but a fairly simple bottom line explains the discrepancy between zip codes: Property-tax-based funding is inherently unfair, favoring wealthier neighborhoods, and ensuring that the kids at the bottom of today’s educational pile-up will continue to stay at the bottom.

I believe No Child Left Behind, the Common Core and other “solutions” of the recent past have been attempts at end-runs around this truth: Property-tax-based funding cheats poor children and should be abolished. Looking for Superteacher is one more way to avoid addressing discriminatory funding.

Year after year, children in financially-disadvantaged areas end up in financially disadvantaged schools. Those schools don’t have the money to do many science experiments, which may be for the best if those experiments involve possible showers or eyewashes. They don’t have the money for many afterschool clubs or activities. The lunchroom may serve mystery meat or simply smaller portions of recognizable food. America’s children whose parents cannot easily buy electronics end up in the schools that cannot afford those devices without sacrificing elsewhere in their staffing, infrastructure and curricula.

The US system for funding education has been and continues to be grossly unfair.

Eduhonesty: The current system also works for legislators, almost all of whom live in comfortable districts filled with higher-valued properties that provide greater tax revenue and better-funded schools.

P.S. Charter schools are another end run around the funding problem. When schools are underperforming, the government provides funds to build alternative schools. While those schools may sometimes represent an improvement over local offerings, they also provide a way to avoid reforming funding across the nation — rather like putting pain-killing patches over nerve damage without ever investigating why the patient is in pain.

P.S.S. I am aware I am saying absolutely nothing new here. But somehow this topic seems to have been getting lost lately in discussions of tests especially. Yes, we have far too many tests. But let’s keep hammering away at property-tax-based funding. Want a scary thought to chew on? A Grim Reality of Reopening: More Mold | WIRED Being in a prosperous school district allows for reallocation of funds to fix new problems. What will happen in districts that barely have enough funds to operate? Will the mold be prioritized? CAN the mold be prioritized?

What state do you live in? That’s where you need to start, reader. In some states, as you add years into the teaching pension system, you lose years in your social security benefits. You can end up with no social security, all those payments wiped out by something innocuously labeled an “offset.”

Most states are “safe” for that mid-life change. Where teachers are tied to social security, the benefits don’t disappear because of a career change. However, teachers in 12 states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas — are not using Social Security for teacher pensions. One group of outliers also exists: I have no idea how this works, but in Georgia, Kentucky, and Rhode Island your social security coverage will differ by school district.

So what do you do if you live in the fifteen states listed above? RUN THE NUMBERS. RUN ALL THE NUMBERS AND UNDERSTAND THE NUMBERS. You will have to make some projections, but you cannot simply assume “it will all work out alright.” That’s not necessarily the case. If you have a pension from a job where you did not pay Social Security taxes, your benefit will likely be reduced by the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP). One very important point: That sheet that social security sends you regularly? It lies.

Social security is not tracking your time or benefits in the public sector. That Social Security statement does not reflect reductions in benefits from the WEP. Not until you file for your social security will the Social Security Administration do the necessary calculations to figure out how much your reduction will be if you appear to qualify for both Social Security and a non-covered pension. In the worst-case scenario, you will lose all or almost all your social security — which may not be problematic if your public pension is good enough, although given that you paid into social security, this whole situation leaves a vile taste in my mouth.

Another term readers should know: Substantial earnings. It’s not enough to have paid $$ into social security during a given year for that to count in your calculations. You have to have made “substantial earnings.” Below is a chart of the substantial earnings by year which would be required to sidestep the WEP. (Teacher’s Retirement and Social Security (2021 Update) – Social Security Intelligence.)

I should note the above-cited website makes the WEP sound like no big deal at times, despite the fact that the WEP has a large impact on some pensions. It’s true that thirty years of substantial earnings into social security and the WEP is eliminated. It starts to be phased out at 20 years. Here’s one takeaway from that fact: If you are at 25 years of substantial earnings into social security and left the private sector to go into teaching late in life, but are not happy with your position right now, it might be a smart move to leave and spend five more years in the private sector to get your full social security benefits. You have to run the numbers to check what the impact will be from returning to your private-sector career choice — but that impact might be worth the move, especially if the stress of your teaching position has been wearing you down.

Eduhonesty: I kind of hate this post. I hate it because I don’t think it will work in many cases. I think Americans often have a regrettable habit of assuming everything will work out somehow when they get older. I remember a discussion I had years ago with my brother about 50-year-old coworkers of his who were suddenly entering a sort of panic mode as they realized that they might be in a world of retirement hurt and they genuinely did not have time to fix their situations. Retirement planning does not allow for last-minute rescues and quick fixes.

Fellow teacher or anybody else out there reading this post?

WHAT IS YOUR RETIREMENT SITUATION?

If you are in those fifteen states listed above, and you will not make it to your full teaching retirement, you should take this month to find out just where you are at. It’s not so simple. Here’s a quirky fact to chew on: Due to my years as a stay-home mom here in Illinois, I would normally benefit noticeably from taking 1/2 of my husband’s social security.* Except I don’t. Due to the WEP, it makes as much sense to use my own benefits because I lose all the benefit from his higher social security due to the size of the offset. I’ll get the same total amount from social security because the extra from his higher benefits gets wiped out. Another little quirk worth noting: Social security uses the time when you apply for social security benefits as the time when they determine the amount of your teaching pension for their offset calculations. That matters because my teaching pension goes up annually. Smaller teaching pension = potentially higher social security.

You have to do the numbers to see how this will play out. One way it might play out is to make retiring earlier under the social security system more attractive. All that talk about how it’s more advantageous to retire at 66 years and two months or whatever the full retirement age will be for you? That talk is for the average social security recipient. The size of your teaching pension affects your bottom-line for social security benefits and in states with annual pension increases, getting your social security sooner may make financial sense.

If all this math seems daunting, reader, who could you ask for help? I’d like to suggest any readers fuzzy about their retirements take June to find out exactly how they are doing. Check with social security once you get underway, but make sure you get the right help. I did not get the same answers from the two people I asked in social security. I trust Guy #2. It’s sobering that Guy #1 — an individual in the social security office — did not get his numbers right.

Readers on the fence about going back next year, especially if you are older and live in those fifteen states, make retirement part of your planning process. Even if you are younger, sometimes retirement should be in the picture. If I were one year from being vested in a solid system, I might postpone my departure from my district for at least one more year.

This post is rather nebulous, but individual circumstances vary so much I don’t see a way around that lack of concrete detail. Illinois has an excellent public pension system (enough so that people worry about the solvency of the state government) and being part of that system for a long enough period of time definitely beats social security, although new tiers of retirement benefits ensure that new hires don’t do as well as hires of the past. States have their own systems. How yours will work for you will take some sleuthing.

If you came to teaching late, though, that sleuthing ought to be bumped to the top of the to-do list for June. This is especially true for those who stayed home or worked part-time while the kids were small. Part-time may not have reached “substantial” earnings. How can you maximize your retirement? Can you avoid taking a deep financial haircut due to the WEP? Who can you ask for help to figure this out? Will more time in either the public or private sector help substantially? How much time? Should you take social security early retirement, given that you are not the average bear, and your pension may see an effective increase from a lower teaching pension before cost-of-living increases? This is a personal quest. No internet article can do it for you. Too many factors are in play — and you ignore those factors at your own risk.

As you do your calculations, don’t ignore health insurance, the invisible elephant that many people do not appreciate when their employer is providing that insurance. The average cost of health insurance varies widely depending on where a person lives and their age. Bridging the gap until you qualify for Medicare can be pricey. (How Much Will Health Insurance Cost in Retirement? | The Motley Fool) Here is one actual number: “For example, a 62-year-old woman living in Charlottesville, Virginia, and earning $50,000 a year (slightly over 400% of the federal poverty level) would have to pay, at a minimum, a premium of $797 per month, or nearly 20% of her income, for a bronze plan purchased through Virginia’s health insurance exchange.” (Health Insurance Solutions for 60+ Year Olds Not Ready For Medicare – PivotHealth.com) It helps to fall below the poverty line. Subsidies can help rescue a low-income person.**

Here is my eduhonesty honest truth: If I didn’t have a supportive family and I hadn’t married the finance guy, I might be living in a little trailer or a one-bedroom apartment right now. Local cost-of-living would force me to relocate. I’d probably pick a small, rural town with fishing and good thrift shops. The urban areas I can afford on my pension are simply unsafe — crime rates are running too high for a petite senior citizen. I’d be getting an occasional beer at the one small tavern in town, trying to avoid the pricey little convenience store, while waiting for the government pantry to give me my milk, cheese and other groceries on Wednesday. I’d count my teacher’s health insurance as a real piece of luck — one that not everyone out there will be able to duplicate.

I’ve heard far worse plans than that hypothetical retirement above, reader, but I strongly recommend you explore your own retirement options sooner rather than later, especially if you live in those fifteen states listed above. June is a perfect time, this June, right now — before it’s too late to make changes that might make your last maybe thirty-some years easier.

Hugs to my readers, Jocelyn Turner

*If you don’t understand what I just wrote, you have a retirement planning emergency on your hands. Please open up Google and start with something like, “how do social security benefits work,” understanding that if you are a teacher in those fifteen states they DON’T WORK LIKE THAT FOR YOU. But get started on learning how the federal and state systems operate.

** The Affordable Care Act is under attack right now, though, so I would not count on ACA benefits. My Twitter feed is filled at the moment with people who are worried about a SCOTUS ruling on the ACA — both because of possible cost increases and because the ACA did away with the ability of insurance companies not to cover pre-existing conditions. Those pre-existing condition clauses can return. What the government gives, the government can take away.

Or Maybe, Just Maybe, It’s Time to Go.

Reader, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski: The cure for burnout (hint: it isn’t self-care) | TED Talk

How tired is too tired? As I write this I am thinking of the many friends I know who are talking about the years remaining before they can retire. I am thinking of those sitting on that retirement fence, not sure whether to return to their districts come August.

“Just one more year?” They ask their friends and themselves.

Insights and other thoughts from the above Ted Talk, along with a few pertinent questions:

Reader, how do you feel? Does working in the classroom, parenting, fighting for social justice or just managing pandemic life leave you wanting to curl up in bed? Do you feel foggy? Detached? Can you appreciate your victories? Can you even believe in your victories?

It’s worth pausing to look at three common components of burn-out:

And understand that when we tell ourselves we have one more step…one more mile… one more year… in us, we are not always telling ourselves the truth.

Eduhonesty: I owe this blog a post, one that I am fascinated to discover I have not written. I fell over the cliff once, then got back up, left my job for a less stressful position and simply went on. But I have seen the intensive care unit. I know the relief of hospital sheets and strange machines pumping immobilized legs while finals go on… or don’t go on… without me. I honestly have no idea how grades were determined that year. I fell far enough over the cliff that no one even asked me to try to help with grades. I assume they used what I had in the system.

But, readers, I owe you that post when I can put it together. Because I learned a truth that year: Sometimes you should take the smaller pension, and walk away. Or at least change positions.

Only you can know your truth, and maybe more music and meditation will carry you past the crazy. Stress helps us achieve and motivates us to do better. Feeling stressed can be useful and even therapeutic sometimes. Many people do their best work in response to demands and deadlines.

But if you are not having fun, if you are worrying excessively, if work days seem to be nothing but ever-growing stress-stress-stress-stress-stress… If the thought of going back to work feels like navigating an asteroid field while under attack from forces you somehow never seem able to predict or control… If the thought of going back to work ties your stomach up in knots…

P.S. Well, THIS was not what I intended to write. I was going to write a cheery let-me-help-you-cope post. But I am going to publish anyway, because I think teachers (and many other workers) cope too much. Education’s demands get nuttier and nuttier while teachers keep saying, “I will work harder.” Instead, maybe we should plan our retirements or look for positions in better districts — even when changing positions unfortunately involves a pay cut. I am guessing the next few years will be an especially good time for educators, paraprofessionals and other school employees to change districts.

Hugs to all, Jocelyn Turner

Welcome to life on Planet X. We’ve had a long, lonely interlude since March of 2020. Maybe you never wanted to be an astronaut, reader, but somehow we all got shoved into the pod and shot into space. This new “normal” of masks and social distance still feels alien to many of us as we stand on the little red dots in various lines to get into places that no longer resemble their earlier selves. Getting my real ID license a few weeks back was an adventure in dissonance. No chairs except for a few for people waiting for their road test. Two people guarding the door and shepherding traffic. No lines. And, astoundingly, once I got past the gatekeepers, the whole thing took about 15 minutes.

Some things remain the same. They still wait for the worst moment to take that pic and then anything goes if your eyes happen to be open. Still, I’ve looked blanker and more confused, and my eyes (and unfortunately mouth) are somewhat open.

It’s been especially wild for teachers out here in space. These struggling professionals have kept going in and out of live learning while struggling with remote platforms and more remote students. They are working to the point of exhaustion sometimes, with varying amounts of success to show. The biggest problem with remote learning is a simple one: A kid can wander away, mentally or physically, and you don’t necessarily know the kid has left the ship.

Where is Zeke? Is he hiding in the galley, maybe eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? Has he gone to play his Xbox somewhere? Is there any chance mom might be able to get him back to work? Where is his mom? Something about being shot into space makes kids squirrelly (duh) and many “A” students would walk out of their classrooms if they could make their escape with reasonable odds of going unnoticed.

Eduhonesty: Gratitude journals help us keep our spirits up. So can guided meditations. Here’s my tip for this: Start small. You don’t need to plunge right into transcendental meditation. Almost nobody I know has time to commit hours to another self-improvement project. Finding my shoes and car keys can be enough progress on some mornings :-).

But YouTube abounds with short meditations. Fitbit has a meditation section. You can easily find source material. Want an app? 15 Best Meditation and Mindfulness Apps for 2021 (developgoodhabits.com) has a selection. Put meditation into Spotify or your music source.

Five minutes here, ten minutes there, another five minutes before dinner and you may find your stress levels have taken a dive. Some meditations are even designed to ease you into sleep. Some that are not designed for that purpose work well anyway; I love the Body Scan meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn because I am almost always asleep before we get much past my left leg. Every time, he tells me to stay awake, but my stay-awake success rate is probably less than 1%. Need to sleep? This meditation has been helping me for years.

Kabat-Zinn’s mountain and lake meditations bring me to a better, calmer state of mind. YouTube is a motherlode of possible sources of stress reduction and relaxation. Here’s a sample sitting meditation: Mountain Meditation Exercise, Jon Kabat Zinn – Bing video. Sitting helps greatly when you must stay awake.

Pacing is highly individual in guided meditations. Some are too fast for me. They make me effort to follow, which works against calming. Certain voices also work better for me than others. If at first your attempts at guided meditation don’t work, don’t give up.

Many five to ten minute meditations can be found in cyberspace, mostly focused on breathing. Stress is all about breathing, as breath prepares us to fight or take flight. Breath reflects our state of mind, but it also creates that state. Anxiety feeds anxious breathing which feeds anxiety. Meditation can break that cycle.

Those whose school years are almost over may read this post and say, “Why now?” The answer lies in COVID-crazy school years. The district where I live will be finishing at the start of June. I talked to a friend this morning, however, who still has FIVE WEEKS left. We are making up for lost time all over this country and teachers who customarily are nearing the end of the end game at this point are sometimes now looking at an end in July, Stress is running high in hard-hit geographic pockets, especially for teachers and others who are going to be working outside of the house when their children are released for summer vacation.

Is that you, reader? Depending on the age of your children, a 30 minute meditation may sound like about as feasible as a backyard Mars launch. Sometimes half-hour chunks simply don’t exist. But 5 to 10 minute chunks can usually be carved out, even if you have to bribe the kids to do it. All that stuff about finding a quiet, uninterrupted time and turning off the phone during meditation? Definitely optional! Occasional quick shifts to Plan B come with the territory where children are concerned.

Reader, especially if your mood and energy are sinking, PRIORITIZE YOU. Throw in five meditation minutes when you feel the stress starting to climb. If you wake up first, seize those early moments before the household awakens. If you are fighting to get to sleep, look up meditations for that purpose. And promise yourself at least five minutes before you go to sleep.

Here’s a short meditation by Deepak Chopra to start or get you back into the meditation habit: Deepak Chopra’s Go-To 3-Minute Meditation To Stay Focused – YouTube

Hugs to my readers. The light in the distance really is the end of the tunnel, and not another freight train. Jocelyn Turner

P.S. If meditation always puts you to sleep, you are not getting enough sleep.

Eduhonesty: Are you tired, reader? Maybe even anxious or depressed? Evidence suggests gratitude journals can help. Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration (berkeley.edu), Gratitude Journaling Is Good For Your Mental Health And Maybe Physical Health To : Shots – Health News : NPR

Exhausted teachers and anyone else who wants off this spaceship — I suggest you make a gratitude journal. It doesn’t have to be all gratitude. It’s YOUR journal, a one and only. Random art and self-exploration can make the day better too.

But throw in the “Today I am thankful for… stuff along the way. The improved speed and efficiency of the DMV made up for its weirdness, for example. What’s good? What worked? Did Zeke produce a few great metaphors for his latest assignment? Are the kids adapting well to in-person learning? If not enough is working, I suggest finding a recipe and making a success, like triple ginger cookies or breakfast pumpkin bars.

Gratitude journals help us frame and reframe our reality. Those journals can be easy, too. If you are too swamped to even think about cutting up paper and pulling out the paints, then a few quick lines with a pen work fine. I like physical journals but this could easily be done as a Word or even Excel document.

Hugs from the Blue Room, Jocelyn

A follower asked me to address vaccination hesitancy. Where is the proof that someone should let Walgreens or CVS loose with a needle of Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson vaccine? That’s a question that gets dismissed often by the pro-vaxxers, and I’d say we are doing a poor job of responding to people’s concerns. What should be a teachable moment has turned into a riot of finger pointing.

The questions are mostly legitimate: Can you prove vaccination is beneficial? What about the people with side effects? How can we know this is safe?

Eduhonesty: At first I thought the benefits of vaccination might be too far off-topic for this education blog but, upon reflection, I realized my questions are actually all about education. The vaccination debate has been steeped in math from the beginning. We are playing vaccination five-card draw poker and a crazy number of people are throwing away their pairs or even three of a kind to draw four cards. Why is this happening?

Teachers often start instruction by using analogies to help connect ideas. I think I will start with dogs. Can I prove that dog ownership is beneficial to human health? If we use longevity as our measure of the benefit of dog ownership, yes, I can, despite the guy who fell down the hill chasing his dachshund and broke his ankle in several places. Check out Do dog owners live longer? | American Heart Association.

To make my case, I have to spend some time looking up studies online. I have to understand that SOURCES MATTER and more sources are better. I’ll take something from the American Heart Association without much concern about its trustworthiness — although anything from the internet merits concern. On paper or from cyberspace, I should be suspicious of a source like “Puppies R Us.” When I find a Puppies R Us article about longer-lived pet owners, I should keep in mind that Puppies R Us is making its corporate profits selling puppies.

Also part of the picture:

1. Anecdotes are not evidence. In the larger scheme of things, the guy who broke his ankle rushing down a tree and bush-studded hill to rescue his dog does not count. The guy who felt sick after his shot may not count either. It all comes down to numbers. We ignore numbers at our peril.
2. Sometimes no option is perfect or even good.
3. In any choice, the weight of the factors going into the decision has to be estimated, and then later sometimes reevaluated. Life’s not simple. If it was, everyone who wanted to live longer would simply get a dog.

Proof can admittedly be hard to nail down. That guy with the dachshund might well have been better off in the long-run if he had chosen to collect iguanas instead of sausage dogs. Yet his life is likely to include future dachshunds, more Kongs, tug toys and games of fetch. Asked about that ankle, he’ll say, “s*** happens,” while helping his short-legged dog onto the couch.

S*** happens.

The future is undiscovered country, and life involves endless choices that test our ability to measure risk against reward.

Reader, please vaccinate. Vaccinations shut down the US polio and small pox threat. True, I spent a summer unable to swim or bathe when I had an oozy, doctor-visit-worthy reaction to a smallpox vaccination. I still have vestiges of the ancient scar. And polio remains active, if rare, in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. See Smallpox – Our World in Data for information on the one disease that was entirely wiped out by vaccinations. It’s true: You can entirely or almost entirely eliminate a disease if enough people become immune to it.

It’s like playing a monster game of foosball. A piece can only move when a peg strikes it. Once you vaccinate, though, almost everybody ceases to be a peg in this game. That peg disappears off the bar and it can’t move the COVID particles ball anymore. (Notice I said “almost everybody.” Right now, COVID is everywhere and even a few of the vaccinated are kicking that germ around.) If enough pegs disappear, that game becomes lame or even unplayable.

We have to go by probabilities where public health is concerned. About those clots: Birth control pills and COVID itself have a much greater chance of causing a blood clot than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The numbers are rather ludicrous, given that 15 out of 7 million comes out to odds of 0.000002142. The odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 15,300 or 0.00006535. The odds of being killed by a venomous plant or animal are 1 in 44,459 or 0.00002249. (Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot: 13 things more likely to happen (usatoday.com)) In other words, we have a lot more to fear from lightning and bad snakes than we do from vaccines. Can I trust Kaitlyn Kanzler who wrote this article in 2019? Other sources appear to have similar numbers.

Numbers should not always be trusted because someone took time to write them down, I admit. But let’s say our 15 in 7,000,000 is actually 30 in 7,000,000 instead. Those odds only amount to a 0.000004285 chance of that clot. Those zeroes matter a lot. The odds of getting struck by lightning — still far higher than the odds of a vaccination clot. It’s worth noting that almost every person who suffered that particular side effect was female. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t break a sweat about that side effect for a nanosecond.

Currently about 44% of the United states has had at least one shot of vaccine and 31% is fully vaccinated. The test cases have been tested. The shots have been given. Most people I know had trivial reactions. A few had fevers and more serious discomfort. But they are all fine now.

That is not true for all my friends who had COVID. I just talked to a friend who had this virus about five months ago now. She hallucinated for three days. She struggled with brain fog for weeks afterward. Back then, she sounded so breathless it scared me just to talk with her on the phone. When she called a few days ago, she started by saying that she was walking, and that was why she sounded breathless. But she never sounded breathless when we used to walk the track before COVID. And she still struggles to smell or taste food. She relied on family members to taste dishes and help her prepare their family Easter dinner.

Reader, please vaccinate. I wrote this in September and I strongly recommend it to everyone on the fence about that shot: When I Could No Longer Walk Up the Hill — And Amber Is Still Sick, Six Months Later | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) You don’t want this disease ever. A few days of arm pain with or without fever is a tiny, tiny price to pay to avoid what can go wrong if you skip that shot.

The likelihood of dying from COVID has been falling, true. But try to imagine not being able to enjoy the taste of food for four months and counting. So far, the consensus is that those people who lost their sense of taste or smell last year will probably eventually recover. Most recover in a few weeks or months, but others are still waiting. Try to imagine going to rehab to regain your ability to breathe. You don’t have to get violently sick to become a long hauler. Some people with mild cases back in 2020 are still dealing with body aches, joint pain, brain fog, chills, sweats, fatigue, headaches, heart palpitations and chest pain or pressure, exercise intolerance, dizziness, plus numerous other ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties of symptoms that are not resolving. A recent poll of a long hauler group on Facebook found 98 symptoms of this disorder.

P.S. I look at my friend as she pushes herself to regain her strength and I think I’d happily let Bill Gates track me to avoid what she is going through. Except Bill Gates isn’t tracking anybody and anybody who is worried about being tracked needs to surrender their cell phone RIGHT NOW. A student once stole my phone. I stood in a police station in one town and watched my phone being transported to another town after the cops had tried to get it back for me. The cops gave up as the phone left their city limits, but the next day, I retrieved my phone from a snow drift some twenty miles from home using standard software and my husband’s tablet. I put it in a plastic container of dry rice at home and the phone came out fine.

A message for those people who are afraid of being tracked: Oh, my. No one needs to chip us, guys. All they need to do today is hand us a Samsung or iPhone. Heck, I wouldn’t be stunned to discover they can track us through the chips in our cars or even our dachshunds. And to anyone afraid that the Democrats are running porno rings and trafficking children out of pizza parlors, I apologize. Somewhere we failed to teach critical thinking skills to a lot of lost souls.