Here is a link for readers: NYC’s Success Academy staying remote for rest of school year – New York Daily News (nydailynews.com) that comes down in favor of not opening schools this year. I’ve emphasized the fact that we have been shamefully unhelpful about vaccinating teachers, with about half of the United States not prioritizing their vaccinations. I’ve emphasized the impact of illness, the fact that not all adults working in schools will survive re-openings, and that some will end up as long haulers, sick for months or longer. Please look up the long hauler posts.

But let’s forget sick. Let’s forget ventilation, transportation, and scampering students who don’t grasp the CDC protocols. Let’s just look at one practical concern, commonly called “transitions.”

A couple of years ago, a well-paying district offered me a maternity position for a bilingual kindergarten class. I would have spent the fall with a group of new students. The interviewer sunk herself with a few lines:

“You would not spend much time teaching content. When they begin school, it’s all about teaching routines so they know how to be students.”

I had taught middle school and high school students in low-income areas where gang involvement was problematic and prevalent. Not much scared me. However, the idea of a large group of five-year-olds, one or more of whom might cry long and hard each morning because they missed mommy (I had subbed longer-term in a pre-K classroom by then), a group still prone to occasional bathroom accidents… That idea felt intimidating. The crying and diapers I could handle. What stopped me from taking the job was that I recognized how vital it was to hammer home those routines. I did not want that responsibility.

Routines have always been one of my weak points. I’m ADHD and I don’t like routines. I struggle not to break down my own routines. Probably the biggest lesson I had to learn in my first few years of teaching was that my students required the structure of regular procedures, a schedule that could be turned into regular habits. They needed me to define what was expected, and then to keep those expectations in place. The time loss from doing Tuesday differently was likely to be too great to justify impulsive changes just because I wanted to try something new and fun.

It’s all about transitions. It’s always about transitions. Transitions should be smooth, the behaviors that go into them automatic. Well-engineered transitions prevent time loss, which prevents learning loss. It’s about going from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. In an ideal world, our students walk into the classroom and get directly to work because they know what to do. They take their writing journal out when they sit down. They log into their software and go straight to the opening activity that is always waiting for them. If they are in pre-K, they wash their hands, identify their name tag, and trace the first letter of their name, which they can decorate if they have time.

One huge problem with opening/closing/opening/closing, remote/in-person/remote/in-person schooling lies in those routines and the resulting transitions. The routines for in-person schooling are only vaguely similar to those for remote learning. When students go back into the building, daily routines must be taught. After a quarantine hiatus, they must be taught again, probably with changes designed to stop another quarantine.

The in-out, now-we-do-this-instead-of-that character of remote/in-person teaching will be trouble. When kids are not certain what comes next, they often turn to a friend to talk or simply sit waiting for instructions. They may go to the kitchen to see if they can get another cherry Pop-Tart.

People who have never taught may not sense how much work goes into getting the train moving and keeping the train on track. I recommend the following short read: How Long Does It Really Take to Form a Habit? 7 Things to Consider (healthline.com) which says “according to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit.” Habits are far from automatic and, for me anyway, easily short-circuited.

Without going off on this tangent, I will observe that I may only need a few days to be able to get my class of middle school students to pull out their journals when the bell rings. Other teachers taught a version of this opening activity in earlier years, so I have a past habit to build on. But if I keep changing those journal expectations, that habit will wither away, at least where my class is concerned. Once students know what to do, upending the day’s process costs valuable minutes. The cost to student peace of mind should not be ignored either. Most kids strongly prefer to know what to expect during their school day. Having a routine makes them feel safe.

Once we get our kids into a working routine, in many cases, we ought to leave them there.

Eduhonesty: Having written this, I see situations where the school doors must be flung open even if they only close again. If large numbers of students are refusing to log-in, for example, then those open-close-open-close schools may still be our best option. Students who cannot manage remote learning well, such as our lowest readers, may also require live instruction in physical classrooms.

Still… I get tired of saying this, but I’ll try again: Why don’t we ask the teachers? Why don’t we ask our teachers how online 2021 is going? Because many educators think that what they are doing is working. They believe that upending the applecart in March will do more harm than good. America’s teachers have their boots on the ground. They can see what is happening as they grade student work. They know if what they are doing has been successful.

Being hell-bent on opening schools does not take into account many factors, like those habits and transitions I just described. Yes, we desperately desire a return to “normal.” But we can’t will normal to happen. We can’t force normal. NCLB, the Common Core, RtI, Race to the Top and other mandates ought to have taught us by now: Brute force seldom improves education.

When we don’t take time to listen to teachers, though, brute force in the form of poorly-thought-out mandates can confuse America’s students quickly, and sometimes irretrievably,

P.S. I strongly suspect that one reason educational and governmental leaders are working to get those student bodies into school is because they want to be able to force students to take this year’s spring standardized tests. Those tests are detrimental to learning in many ways. See A Seldom Discussed Problem with the Common Core, the Standards Movement and Testing | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com).

Too often today, our lower readers are not getting their needs met. With tests dictating curriculum and curriculum dictating tests, students who need material from earlier years may never see it. A seventh-grade student reading at a fourth grade level will potentially spend the whole year staring at nothing but fundamentally unreadable materials — materials that student is forced to slowly decipher while other, better readers sail comfortably on ahead. Schools struggling to hit targets often don’t provide fourth-grade books for fourth grade readers because those books don’t address the content of the annual test. A book that seems unlikely to improve annual test scores has become a book destined to be stuffed in a box in a dark closet, hidden in one of those hidey-holes where past materials are stashed because they are too valuable to throw away, but too far off the test/curriculum to be used by schools scrounging for test points.

One irony that hardly ever enters our discussions: We sometimes have what our students need, even in the poorest of districts. We sometimes possess books that our lower readers could actively enjoy. Maybe they are hidden on the shelves behind the theater stage that is never used, not since drama was cancelled because drama was not providing enough testing bang for our buck. We may have software that meets the needs of our lower readers too, but, like those boxed books, simpler material that does not match an aggressively test-based curriculum is left behind as we open up much tougher units expected to match the year’s test.

Eduhonesty: Here’s what the Biden Administration and so many others have missed in the recent past. Those tests are not merely measuring instruments. The desire to measure our students’ learning makes perfect sense.

But the very learning those tests purport to measure now suffers directly because of the tests. My students did not merely lose learning because of the opportunity costs of testing — the fact that I could not teach them for days while I tested them. My students lost learning because they were lower-level readers who were never ALLOWED to use books they could actually read. Those books were too far below the level of the state test. Those books stayed in the closet while I desperately tried to get traction with the required books and software the district had purchased to match the 7th grade Common Core curriculum.

Books and software are expensive. Those newly bought books won’t disappear any time soon. Administrators have to justify their purchase. The better books may stay in their dark subbasement corners for years.

Spring standardized tests are not merely sucking up our most precious resource– TIME — but they are ensuring our lower-performing students receive subpar instruction during the rest of the year. Because my students never read those Common Core-based books; they deciphered them with my help, a group of scholars buried in a tomb of unknown symbol combinations.

I can’t blame administrators whose jobs are on the line for desperately trying to match instruction to future state test questions. Still, I wish more people inside and outside of education understood the consequences of that approach. How are kids supposed to learn if we teach to a test that is too far outside their understanding? What happens to that kid who is doing math at a fifth grade level when he is hit with nothing but daily work, quizzes and tests set at an eighth grade level? We waste unconscionable amounts of student time with this test-focused approach and, until we get a grip on testing, will continue to do so.

Teachers know this. I was so sad as I looked at some of those books behind the useless stage and down in the moldy subbasement. I wanted those books. I knew some of my students would love some of those books. But instructional coaches and others had already pretty much laid out my lessons for the year. There was no room left in the schedule for boxed books did not match the Common Core or that PARCC test that came before the IAR test.

No new (old) books for me! No readable new (old) books for my students! No help anywhere, even when my administrators agreed with my views. No one was willing to take a chance on a test-score decline, even when the rigid, test-focused approach we were taking was likely to CAUSE that decline.

It’s been the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party out here for awhile.

Will any of my former students become readers someday? With a few exceptions, I doubt it. We sure never made reading any fun.

What the Biden administration and so many others miss: These tests have ceased to be mere measuring instruments. They now drive instruction. But in districts that historically have not done well on these tests, they are often driving that instruction right over a cliff.

Now is a perfect time for the change. Let’s just stop. Let’s opt out of state testing on a national basis and shift to benchmark testing to track student progress. We can use NAEP testing to track state progress over time. If legislatures will not rein in those tests, parents should step up and keep their children home on test days. Why not bake a seven-layer cake while wearing pajamas and then binge watch a new family favorite? I suggest we create happy memories instead of forcing our children to run one more punishing, academic gauntlet.

Currently, in some districts, schools are ending up with 29 weeks or fewer of available instructional time after testing, test practice, and test preparation. That’s completely bonkers.

Let’s just stop. Because, as it stands, bit by bit, piece by piece, we are chewing up some kids — and to what end? We keep re-documenting “facts” we have already determined, facts we have known forever. In rare instances, when schools post surprises, those results often come back late or even past the end of the school year. Our happy or sad surprises tend to simply disappear in the deluge of data, never to inform instructional decisions.

Political and educational leaders keep trying to do an end run around what they know to be true: School funding should be reformed so ALL students can be given the supports they require to learn — not just those lucky kids whose parents can afford to live in moneyed zip codes.

P.S. This blog is about to make a shift in direction. I no longer believe that we can trust politicians to rein in the test monster. Even the Biden administration did not provide a respite from testing. Parents may be our last, best hope, Opting Out, family by family, may be the only way to get the message across: it’s time to stop sacrificing children to numbers we hardly ever even use.

A post about putting teeth into time management:

As you lay in bed, if you find yourself saying, “Now I have the hand-outs and the extra chalk. I finished that Google Doc and I sent the spreadsheet to Maria. I have set up tomorrow’s online activity on volcanoes and I think Renata’s mom has figured out how to find the links…” Etc. STOP!

Try online guided meditations. Visualize a favorite ocean beach. Read a book. I find books written in Spanish or French to be especially effective. I enjoy myself but the mental effort puts me to sleep fairly quickly. If necessary, to break the mood, get out of bed and make yourself some cocoa or tea.

It’s 2021, and the cost of being zonked has potentially increased by an order of magnitude, especially for the unvaccinated who are in classrooms. Feeling exhausted right now is not a good plan. Ducking haphazard attacks by a new microbe requires alertness. You need to be aware of masks, distances, hand sanitizer and trickier tells, such as flushed faces in quiet bodies.

If you are not done preparing the dinosaur WebQuest or preparing the latest spreadsheet for Dr. X, put the world down anyway. Simply put it down. Be done. Watch Netflix and defog your brain. Bake a cake with the kids. Watch the basketball game with your spouse in peace. Paint a watercolor pterodactyl. Whatever. As long as what you are doing refreshes you.

Too many teachers are living too zonked as we try to do it all. We have gotten used to hitting difficult and even irrational targets. We adapt, adapt, adapt.

“What?! I need to prepare 18 spreadsheets covering the last three years’ tests by Friday?! Dammit. I guess I’ll have to skip lunch. I can pick up Chinese for dinner on the way home.”

Then we fill the DVR with all the programs we can’t watch and start working.

Eduhonesty: Readers, for many of you, if you keep going until you are done, you will never rest — because you will never be done. Your family relationships will be strained, along with your own mental health. If you have thirty hours of work to do in your eighteen waking hours, IT’S TIME TO TRIAGE. Dump the less important items first, but don’t feel compelled to stop there. At the end of the day, you should only have to skip those movies, cakes, and basketball games for emergencies.

And your whole life should not be an emergency.

This post comes from the far side of the moon where I lived during my last year of teaching before retirement. I made a few mistakes that year. One was cutting sleep. Another was trying to fulfill a plethora of irrational demands. Can’t do it all?

Again: Set a deliberate stopping point. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall into that trap where we decide to do just one more thing, because there’s always one more thing — and then another and another and another.

P.S. Yes, sometimes genuine emergencies do arise. That comes with teaching, especially in these times. But somethings wrong when all these emergencies begin to seem normal.

The groan you hear is the creaking doors of a widening achievement gap. Districts have played tech catch-up since the ’90s. While District A ‘s been 1:1 for years, District B sent kids to the “computer lab” a few times a week. District B lost the online game before it began.

Let’s just own this thing for a change. Property-tax based school funding is inherently discriminatory. I live in a district that once asked its PTO to stop raising money because they did not know what to do with what they had. My girls had flat screen TVs to watch in their high school lounge. My students didn’t even have a lounge.

Eduhonesty: I understand why Chicago is frantic to open school doors. Friends who work in Chicago complain about students who simply are not bothering to log in. Other students are logging in but not participating. You can prepare the most brilliant lesson ever designed, but it doesn’t matter if Brent and Ginger don’t log in, or if they wander away to get a snack in the middle of that lesson,

It’s been clear for a long time that a greater percentage of kids in traditionally college-bound districts are logging in. More of them overall are completing homework. The achievement gap will continue to widen as this occurs.

THIS IS WHY ALL AREAS SHOULD FOLLOW PRESIDENT BIDEN’S LEAD. VACCINATE THE TEACHERS. Biden says teachers should move up in priority to receive Covid-19 vaccine – CNN Do we want those schools open? VACCINATE THE TEACHERS.

I have worked in those old schools. I don’t believe that all of them can be properly ventilated. I don’t trust kids to follow all the rules about distancing and masks. (Anyone who does probably never had kids.) I know how crowded halls and cafeterias are. If we put everybody back in the same school that was overcrowded for the last decade, that school will still be overcrowded.

Those teachers across the country who are fighting openings? Why don’t we try listening to them for a change? Based on what they have heard and read, many teachers are uncomfortable going into the classrooms they know. They have seen what the hallways of their schools look like. They have a pretty good idea of what to expect if schools open. Dismissing teachers’ rational concerns is likely to become one more nail in the coffin as some of America’s teachers weigh whether or not to continue teaching in the future.

Merriam Webster’s definition of first responders: a person who is among those responsible for going immediately to the scene of an accident or emergency to provide assistance. Teachers are their own version of first responders. I guarantee readers an academic emergency has been underway since last spring.

Let’s rescue the best and sometimes only people in position to step in and mitigate our learning losses. While we dig our way out of the learning hole that COVID has dug through the heart of our neighborhoods, let’s support teachers. Reader, are you in a state that has not bumped teachers into the current vaccination pool? When you have a free moment, please contact your legislative leaders to let them know you support vaccinating teachers now.

In practical terms, those shots may shut down most or all of today’s fights about opening schools.

A last observation: Please see my previous post, though, for a take on why not all children should be obliged to walk through those school doors. Privilege and School Re-openings | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)

One takeaway from a webinar yesterday on COVID-19’s effects on education: This epidemic’s face shifts from community to community. In some neighborhoods, families may not favor live instruction even though their school boards, mayors and governors are pushing hard for that instruction. COVID-19 looks scarier in poor neighborhoods, disproportionately neighborhoods of color. That’s because the illness and death rates in those areas are running higher, sometimes much higher, than state averages.

My thought: At least some mandated openings smack of presumptuousness and privilege. We are open where I live and I see the busses driving around my block. But many parents here are working from home. I documented a few numbers in a previous post showing how the ability to work from home increases with income. In this land of home ownership with three and four-bedroom houses, the snow plows come to clear driveways regularly. Whole Foods and other providers drop off food. Amazon trucks criss-cross the streets, carrying art supplies, and who knows what other items of interest. Cardboard spills out of recycle cans. In less snowy times, children are outside throwing basketballs through the hoops in their driveways. School superintendents live in this suburb.

I bet CDC officials often live in similar places.

Is it safe to open schools? Perhaps it has become safe enough, at least here in Illinois. We are vaccinating teachers as part of the second wave of shots.* But I am not sure that people who live in my suburb should be making decisions for families in poor and urban neighborhoods. However benevolently wielded, that use of power seems presumptuous.

Eduhonesty: Perceptions matter. If a kid is afraid to jump off the high dive, most responsible adults gauge that fear before trying to force that kid off the end of the board. I would encourage a nervous kid, provide more reassurance and support to a frightened counterpart — and I would let a genuinely terrified kid off the hook. High dives can always wait.

Maybe in-person instruction should wait where parents in a neighborhood do not favor that instruction. I hate to burden teachers, but I suggest we employ a model that opens schools with an option for remote learning. I also suggest we provide enough support to teachers so that the 2020/21 school year does not burn them out en masse.

No one should be forced off the high dive. At the same time, many financially struggling parents do need the childcare that school provides. No easy fixes exist for parents living in multigenerational homes who must go out to work.

Disturbingly, though, I am struck by the realization that school opening choices are being made for people based on “what’s good for them.” Who decides that? Using what criteria? Opening decisions may mean well and probably express true concern for children’s learning, but I cannot avoid a cynical fear that potential test score declines, in and of themselves, may be affecting opening decisions.

Few decision makers opening those school districts live in poor neighborhoods. Our mayors, superintendents and governors mostly have excellent insurance. Grandma may be living with them, but if any of those grandmas live near me, I have never met them. More often, grandma is living in her own home with a Life Alert button and visiting caregivers or even full-time help. She may be in an assisted living facility, one that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront for those lucky enough to secure a place.

As I listened to my webinar, I thought how parents in many neighborhoods did not WANT to send children into crowded classrooms. School openings have been slowed or stymied by students who simply did not arrive. From an article in “The New Yorker” (What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Reopening Schools | The New Yorker): “According to one recent study, only eighteen per cent of Black parents and twenty-two per cent of Latinx parents would prefer to send their children back to in-person schooling full time, compared with forty-five per cent of white parents. Over fifty per cent of Black and Latinx parents prefer to keep their children in remote learning.”

These re-openings drip privilege somehow, whether they are meant as well-intended rescues or not.

*About half of U.S. states have not prioritized teacher vaccinations, however.

The Pre-K topic mostly flitted past my radar recently. I subbed in a Pre-K classroom near my home after I retired so I do know a little about Pre-K. On-line Pre-K classes? You’d have much better luck teaching deep sea diving at home. Pre-K kids learn by doing. They learn by sitting down and tracing their letters, sometimes with a guiding hand. They learn by getting their cup of crackers and carton of milk. They learn by taking the paintbrush and building their Batman. They learn by throwing the ball, jumping on the trampoline, and riding the tricycle. They learn by singing and dancing to YouTube, hopefully with friends but the friends are somewhat optional. They learn by playing games and putting on costumes.

Can a child do some of this through online learning? Of course, and many are trying to learn online right now.

But what’s the point? Why not cut our parents loose with a simple set of requests: Teach Jay his letters and numbers, up to twenty if possible. He will benefit by knowing the names of a few shapes such as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. We can add helpful suggestions: Talk about the shapes in the bag of peas and carrots. Discuss the steps in your process as you make the cookie dough, A list of helpful YouTube videos should be provided.

Then I’d cut those parents loose with a warning about the problems that too much screen time can create. Social skills cannot be truly taught online. You have to be in a shared space competing for the same truck, building blocks or paintbrushes. Creativity can be taught online as skills develop, but at four years of age, Lego, wood blocks, crayons, paper, an easel and a paint brush will work dramatically better than pictures on a screen.

Eduhonesty: Screens are not hands-on learning when you are three or four years of age. At worst, they are close to useless. Preschoolers can’t keyboard. It’s too early for them to be taught that skill. (Yes, rudimentary keyboarding might be doable for some but they will learn the keys much faster in a few years — and they will have a much better sense of what they are doing and WHY they are doing it.)

To make Pre-K learning work online, a dedicated parent or guardian is required — otherwise known as “the person to manage the keyboard and follow the directions.” I’d call this a waste of time. It’s also a highly prejudicial situation, favoring those kids lucky enough to have someone free to manage that keyboard — plan # 23,956 to widen the achievement gap, I’d say. Can online Pre-K learning be done? Yes, without doubt.

BUT WHY MAKE LIFE SO HARD? Why not give parents a list of things you want their kids to know, like those numbers, then cut them loose with helpful websites and useful construction toys? And let them bake cakes and paint pictures in coloring books while counting the beans going into the cooking pot? All the items in that Pre-K learning curriculum? A parent or guardian can get you most or all of the way there WITHOUT having to be online at a certain time in a certain program along with everyone else.

We are adding unnecessary layers of complexity to Pre-K, burdening parents who are often already lost trying to keep up with the demands for their older elementary and middle school children. If we add to household stress, who do we honestly help? As dad, grandma or whoever is minding the house gets snappier and less patient, how does learning benefit? We are probably teaching some colorful language as confused adults try to figure out where the latest lost link went.

Risk vs. reward — realistically, what are online Pre-K’s rewards? I see few that can’t be easily accomplished WITHOUT online Pre-K. At least one huge risk glares out at me: online Pre-K helps weld children to their electronic devices harder and sooner — the exact opposite of what I would choose for America’s children today.

A post to support union efforts to open schools AFTER VACCINATION.

While waiting for a Whole Foods pick-up, I read an article about white people receiving a disproportionate number of the available COVID-19 vaccinations. Chicago has tried very hard to get those vaccines into communities of color. Other municipalities throughout the country are working on that as well; yet statistics show non-Asian people of color are getting shots at lower rates than white people. Despite best efforts, environmental racism has slipped again into the American picture.

In Los Angeles County, only 7% of Black residents age 65 and over have received their first vaccination, less than half the figure for white senior residents. “About 9% of Native American seniors and 14% of Latino seniors have received at least one dose.” (L.A. Latino, Black seniors fall behind in COVID-19 vaccine access compared with whites (msn.com) Some 17% of whites and 18% of Asian Americans have gotten at least one shot. Northern California mirrors this set-up in which blacks and Latinos have fallen noticeably behind whites and Asians in getting vaccinated.

From Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer (February 1): “An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through Jan. 25 found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below.”

Eduhonesty: Urban teachers and other teachers who work in poor areas — disproportionately areas of color — will not be surprised by these findings. I have watched the craziness associated with those shots unfolding, and I have known that the families of the kids I taught were going to get hammered by the COVID vaccination process. Nothing else was possible.

How do you get that shot?

Almost without exception, you go online. You go to the Walgreens queue, the CVS queue, or your county queue. You add sites for favorites, some with names like Service Dashboard (mhealthcheckin.com). And then you go back, over and over again until you happen to get lucky. You may post on neighborhood apps like Nextdoor to get tips. Who is getting shots? How are they doing this? You add yourself to random lists for clinics. Phone numbers exist on some of these sites but you have to get to the site to find the phone number.

My ninety-some-year-old parents took that computer offline maybe five years ago. It sits upstairs gathering dust, too complicated to manage now. My Episcopalian church has many members who have fallen out of worship services this year. They don’t do Zoom meetings. Some don’t have the technology necessary to do those meetings.

The students in my 99% poverty school did not normally have computers. Online activity happened on cell phones that only some students possessed. Parents’ phones could fill in gaps, but easy internet access simply was not there. Sometimes NO internet access existed outside of school or fast-food restaurants. And across America, many schools are empty or lightly populated, while students with school-issued technology sometimes sit in fast food parking lots. You can do the COVID shot search on a phone, but that search requires its own basket of background knowledge — one some parents may not possess if they grew up in that techno desert.

My school is 60% Hispanic, 30% Black, 5% two or more races, and 99% poor. That demographic background forms its own whammy in terms of getting vaccinated. Many parents in my district work multiple jobs, trying to get enough of a low wage to support themselves. They can’t easily haunt vaccine information sites. While Spanish language translations are generally available, not all immigrants are strong readers, especially if they come from rural areas of impoverished countries.

As to our Black families …

“’It’s frustrating and challenging,’ said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who runs Tennessee’s vaccination program, which is doubling the doses sent to some hard-hit rural counties but is meeting with deep-rooted mistrust among some Black Tennesseans.” (Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer)

The ghosts of “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” are with us still and will be with us forever. That experiment spanned forty years. People have not forgotten that untreated subjects were allowed to die.

Let’s throw in another few facts:

Poor families often have transportation challenges. How many afternoons did I stand with students in cold hallways in the Illinois winter as students tried to find some way home? They had stayed to study and did not feel up to a long walk in subzero temperatures. For liability reasons, the district did not want teachers driving students. We did not have an activity bus for stragglers. Some families remained without transportation for long periods, waiting to make enough money to fix a car that had been sitting idle for weeks or even months.

Uber and Walgreens are working together to offer free rides to vaccination sites for members of communities of color. (Walgreens and Uber team up to make sure underserved communities have access to COVID-19 vaccines – CBS News) Efforts like this can help solve the transportation crisis — and crisis it is likely to be. Unfortunately, people can’t simply drop into Walgreens for their COVID-19 vaccination. These shots are often being delivered en masse at special sites. Friends have travelled over thirty miles to get their shots. Some are even putting a 50 mile range into their searches. I can speak for the fact that Illinois has excellent public transportation between suburbs and Chicago (That transportation requires people to use trains and busses in COVID times, of course.), but moving between suburbs is much more complicated. Sometimes you have to go into Chicago to go out again, hopping from trains to busses and back again. It was 7 degrees outside when I went to get my groceries today.

Internet connections, transportation, and vaccine hesitancy all work against communities of color. Criteria for receiving shots matter as well. Many workers under 65 do not realize they might qualify for a shot due to the nature of their work. Others do not qualify. Restaurant workers and construction workers are category 1C in many areas, and do not yet qualify. For a broad update: Tracking the covid vaccine: Doses, people vaccinated by state – Washington Post

Eduhonesty: Meanwhile, an update on teachers from Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout: State by State – The New York Times (nytimes.com) shows teachers are now able to get vaccines (if they can find them!) in about half of our states. (Updated Feb 8)

This county-by-county free-for-all is going as fast as it can. I’d like to take a moment to thank those men and women who are working all day, jabbing shots into shoulders as quickly as circumstances allow. So many people have been working so hard to help us get ahead of this plague.

But I want to double back now to teacher safety and make an observation I have not seen specifically highlighted elsewhere. Chicago has been locked in a dispute with teachers about reopening classrooms. Other urban districts are fighting the same fight. One important fact about that fight out should be put out front and center:

Unvaccinated teachers with students living in multigenerational, unvaccinated households will be at highest risk — and Chicago, Detroit, New York and other areas still have many unvaccinated teachers working with these high-risk populations. The CDC observes that the rate of infection in school children is tiny, but that data cannot be trusted. We are not testing asymptomatic and sometimes even sick kids. We know that children can be asymptomatic carriers. Until we conduct robust tests for asymptomatic COVID within the school population, we will not have reliable data on student and teacher risk profiles.

Vaccinations are moving quickly now. How much will we gain academically by forcing teachers and students back into that classroom prematurely? This is especially true since many families don’t seem to WANT their children to go back. I talk to friends whose schools are open but operating at about 40% capacity or less, many of those absences not due to any district plan. Less affluent students often live in multigenerational households with parents who know that they and the kids are likely to be fine if COVID comes home from school, but grandma might be another story entirely.

One last thought: The stress level is incredible out there right now, with many teachers debating whether or not to finish out their contracts. “Should I stay or should I go?” The many social media threads say. What can get lost in reading those threads is that once that question is asked, departure will remain on the table for the future. What about next year? The year following? The subs pretty much vanished this last year, as I predicted. I expect in the next few years, many teachers will go as well. At some point, going back to school to become an ultrasound technician may seem a smart move, despite the costs of more college loans. I now follow a group specifically dedicated to helping teachers get out of teaching.

P.S. Meanwhile, readers living this modern version of the Old West, who have been lucky enough to get that shot or who are waiting for the County Sheriff to rescue you, may I ask if you can think of an elderly neighbor who might need your help? My brother managed to get appointments for my parents, but many of the elderly living on their own are simply lost right now. Do you know a friend or neighbor who can no longer navigate cyberspace?

Can you help?

What are we building? What have we built? In this time of Adderall, Concerta, Strattera (atomoxetine), Focalin XR, Guanfacine, Clonidine, Tenex, CBD oil, methylphenidate, caffeine, melatonin, Vyvanse etc., what is happening to our students? Where do they spend their time? For the most part, our kids are in school and or at home.

What have we done to school? I’ve described my last school year before retirement elsewhere, but let me boil it down fast: Testing for over 20% of the year, mandatory tests and quizzes based on Common Core standards that were sometimes a full six years above where students were testing. I was a bilingual teacher, so I had seventh grade students testing in early elementary math and English. The special education teacher across from me had to give the same tests and quizzes. She took to going over the Friday test with her students on Friday and then giving them the test on Monday. When I observed this was making me look bad, since sped was sometimes outscoring bilingual, she said, “They don’t remember it anyway.” I didn’t protest and I didn’t get mad. The whole thing was so crazy it hardly mattered. They couldn’t READ these required tests that were sucking up my entire year.

The administration told students and teachers that grades were to be based entirely on tests and quizzes, no doubt to motivate everyone. At that point, of course, my students pretty much all felt FUCKED. And they felt that way for the entire year. So did I, of course. This was a no-win scenario.

To make sure students did their best, all parties and field trips were cancelled until after the spring PARCC test, which came in two batches that year, ensuring almost no recreation ever until the end of the year. I vividly remember how nervous another bilingual teacher in my grade felt because we quickly allowed a gift exchange right before winter break. Fortunately, when the Principal popped in that day, they were all slaving over worksheets.

Adults don’t do well without an occasional break. They don’t do well when the informal team-building activities disappear, and all the birthday cupcakes and celebratory moments vanish. As to field trips — those journeys become lifetime memories for many kids. To an adult, that bus trip may be just another visit to the aquarium. To a kid, those swimming fish can be magic. We did manage one trip to the Museum of Science and Industry after the tests were all over.

But magic doesn’t help on the annual test, and breaks take time away from drilling for that test. So mostly, my kids had a dreary, dreary year, an often incomprehensible year, as people in a now-failed consulting company on the East Coast wrote tests for them.

Eduhonesty: And now I’d like to circle back to where I started. My list of drugs isn’t complete either. What are we building? Well, the pharmaceutical industry just loves us I’m sure. Look at all those quieter kids on Adderall, Concerta, Strattera (atomoxetine), Focalin XR, Guanfacine, Clonidine, Tenex, CBD oil, methylphenidate, caffeine, melatonin, Vyvanse etc. — all the more peaceful kids who are getting help. Some hapless kids are just caroming all over the classroom in their anxiety. At worst, their doctor suggested a pharmaceutical but parents could not afford the drug’s cost.

I am not against medicating children who require help. Although I will always regard medication as a last resort, I have also watched as anxiety disorders and ADHD have been skyrocketing in America’s classrooms. I know that sometimes medications work wonders for kids who cannot sit and/or concentrate, who are falling behind and whose social lives are impacted by their hither and thither moves through friend groups. Those drugs rescue many students.

ADHD often runs hand-in-hand with anxiety disorders, and I have written before about the fact that I believe some ADHD diagnoses may be anxiety instead. But a connection is natural, regardless. If you keep forgetting to put that homework in the backpack, and you know Mr. X is likely to say something snarky since you forgot the last two assignments — well, that can make any sensitive person anxious. When ADHD stuff happens often enough, anxiety may be a natural, daily occurrence.

Meanwhile the pressure on kids is as high as it has ever been, largely as a result of excessive testing.

If readers want a reason to pull in all this testing, my list of drugs should be put out on the table. When educational leaders keep telling kids that they must take standardized tests, benchmark tests, and unit tests created by outside consulting firms, on top of regular classroom quizzes and tests — while regularly including tests with portions students sometimes cannot read or understand — those leaders keep adding stress into students’ daily lives. Those leaders keep scaring those kids, at least until the kids get tired and detach from the whole enterprise. I’ve watched this happen.

Stress affects behavior, behavior leads to interventions, and voila! Another successful Adderall XR intervention. But how many of those interventions are we making necessary by creating toxic classroom environments?

I’m not saying all of these behavioral challenges are environmental. I am ADHD. Some people are simply wired to lose their keys and ignore the many alarms that try to remind them of the latest glitch in their schedule. But environment forms a huge part of how more anxious children function. Desperate administrators trying to get students to take tests seriously often emphasize the importance of those tests, telling students certain tests will affect their ENTIRE scholastic future. Then they hand those kids tests the kids mostly cannot understand.

For decade after decade, schools were getting by with one spring test, not heavily emphasized, and with tests designed by the classroom teacher. Those tests were much fairer measuring instruments since the teacher taught the material and then TESTED CHILDREN ON MATERIAL THEY HAD ACTUALLY BEEN TAUGHT. In this set-up, many more students knew they could succeed. A student could win at these tests by studying because students knew what to study. Often the exact topics for the test were conveniently laid out in a study guide, one that might include sample problems.

We desperately need to go back in time, back to the time before children became sources of exploding data. We need to stop using data as an excuse for supporting testing that steals irreplaceable classroom minutes for little or no advantage. We need to stage a full-scale retreat.

And I suggest those exploding pharmaceutical interventions in elementary school back up my case.

P.S. From an interesting article about differences between the U.S. and Great Britain: Generation meds: the US children who grow up on prescription drugs | Health | The Guardian

“According to America’s Centers for Disease Control, 11% of four- to 17-year-olds in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD, a label for those who are disruptive in class and unable to concentrate; just over 6% are taking medication.” 

That’s over one in ten with ADHD diagnoses, with over one in twenty medicated. That medication may be helpful and entirely appropriate. Nevertheless, it’s time to actively pursue an agenda of making school a kinder place — starting with reasonable targets and decreased TESTS and TESTING time.

I’m carefully picking out dry spots or clumps of snow to step on as I walk my dog. The only rule is to avoid the ice. I take off my winterwear, filled with feathers and fake fur, remove the red and gray coat from my dog. The world keeps roaring along. The snow keeps falling.

But politics has shifted. The world this week is the world of Amanda Gorman, the young African-American Harvard graduate, whose inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” spiraled into viral heights immediately after the new administration began. We should celebrate Amanda’s poem, a poem for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and all of us. We should celebrate the United States of America, which for all its flaws has occasional glorious moments. A few couplets from the poem that resonated with me: .

We have moved into a new U.S. incarnation — and many people are sleeping more peacefully. Lots of concerned citizens came furiously together to make this time happen. Now we have to build and rebuild. We must take the immigrant children out of cages forever. We are long overdue at attempting to provide a living wage and affordable health care for all. We also have to reconnect with our relatives and neighbors. Or at least calm the waters.

But it’s not healthy to just hurtle from crisis to crisis. It’s not healthy to keep going, going, going with our guts churning and our hearts hurting. Our students and children need us to help them frame their worlds right now.

Let’s celebrate free elections. Let’s celebrate an America where little girls may begin growing up believing that they can be President — not because it’s allowed for girls, but because gender, color, and sexual preferences may soon become irrelevant considerations in picking candidates for high office. Let’s celebrate a peaceful transition. Yes, soldiers were sleeping on marble floors in the capitol building, but the swearing-in of our new leaders happened without serious hitches.

Our kids need to hear: It’s a great, new day!

P.S. If you voted for the other candidate and you don’t think it’s a great, new day — can you celebrate democracy? Celebrate the fact that every two-four-six years we get a chance to make our voices heard? Kids need to hear that their voices matter and their thoughts count. That’s what elections are about.