Yes, it’s been difficult.
There is learning loss.
There are social-emotional challenges.
In some cases, there is sickness, economic hardship, or trauma.
But students are extremely resilient.https://t.co/K8y7JZvDzU
— NEA (@NEAToday) December 18, 2020
Learning loss?
In Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Cleveland, Fairfax, everywhere.
Remote learning was a fucking failure. The number of failures are “off the rails.”
Our kids have fallen more than a year behind.
Our kids are regressing. It’s driving teenagers to record rates of suicide.
I don’t think kids killing themselves or going back to diapers are resilient. Kids don’t just bounce back from forgetting how to read or use the toilet.
But as long as the unionized teachers are safe and only having to work remotely for one hour a day three days a week at full pay, I guess the platitude is enough to soothe their souls.
Every teacher that refuses to go back into a classroom full time come the start of the new semester in January needs to be passed through the wood chipper to make room for people who will serve the students.
Union officers and administrators can get tossed into a vat of acid. The wood chipper is too quick for them.
The best teachers I’ve ever had were my parents. Dad taught me math far above my grade and my mom taught me to read above grade too.
Second best teachers were the ones who were ruthless in critiquing work so you’d do better on your own (all 2 of them).
All the rest were babysitters on a power Trip. Pretty bad ratio if I’m being honest.
Myself, I disagree with the woodchipper/acid bath options. Since, of course, because of SCIENCE!(TM), it’s way, way way too dangerous for teachers to teach in person, were I King Of the World, I’d be my typical kind self, and offer them a choice: teach in person, like you are being paid for, OR become voluntarily unemployed, OR take some nice, cozy, safe job. Like big city medic. Or big city firefighter. Or big city cop. Or, corrections officer. Or ED/ICU nurse. (DiveMedic, feel free to weigh in here. Or your son.). Or, my personal favorite, “job coach” for an IED disposal team in Nowhereistan.
Already worked as a teacher, a medic and a firefighter. I agree. Been there, done that, have the t shirt. No one can accuse me of being a coward, nor can they claim that I haven’t done my share. With all of that:
Teachers should teach. Look, I bought into the hype back in March and April, back when they were trying to convince us that COVID was dangerous. I was on board with the “15 days to flatten the curve.” I was conned into agreeing to the lockdown. For 99% of us, it just isn’t dangerous. I have been at work every day since July, and I will continue.
Now, I have coworkers who DO have preexisting conditions that make it too dangerous to go to work. My brother, who is immunocompromised is one of them. Several teachers I know are the same. They are the exception, not the rule. No one expects them to die for their job.
I feel for people with preexisting conditions. But remember that teacher in her 30s screaming at anti-lockdown protesters after having gone to some big box retailer?
The healthy young teachers need to be at work.
Funny … the local private schools have figured out how to get it done safely and effectively. Or so our neighbors (with 3 kids ranging from early to late grade school) tell us.
But then, those private schools, they will be out of work if they can’t teach in a way that the parents who send their kids there, find safe and effective. So, there’s that.
Weird how choice has an impact, isn’t it?
Private and charter schools have an advantage that public schools do not: Selective enrollment. Parents who are willing to go through the effort and expense of getting their kids enrolled are invested in their child’s education. Not so with public school.
Even if a lazy or troubled child winds up in the school, they simply kick out the students who underperform. Public school systems can’t do that. They can’t even expel students any more. The most they can do is send the student to an “alternative school,” and even then the assignment is only for the rest of that school year, with the student returning to their regular school the next school year.
I have students in my class with FELONY convictions. Aggravated battery, armed robbery, burglary, sexual assault. All because SCOTUS says that every child has the Constitutional right to a “free and appropriate education at public expense.”
Simple really.
All teachers need to teach the remote classes from the classrooms. If the kids are at home, what is dangerous about it?
What do they do, six classes a day? Five? No more doing it from home, must be done from the classroom. Bet a lot of teachers would actually… Oh, I do not know, actually pay attention to the students?
Or, am I just being overly optomistic?
I think you’re missing the social factor.
Yes, kids can easily learn stuff at home. A lot of useful life lessons can be taught simply by being around adults as they work. But socializing is different. Kids need to be around kids to do that. The lockdowns eliminate that and we’re seeing bizarre windfalls in only a year’s time of stunted socializing with peers.
Remember, a year to a ten year old is a tenth of their life, where to us we can forget that a year’s even gone by.
As for teachers who just want to be in charge at all costs, see my above comment. Knew too many like that, so I never grew a general respect for the profession.
It isn’t that teachers aren’t paying attention. Sure, I disagree with the union that school should be closed, but the failures of online school are not 100% on the teachers. There is blame enough for everyone. Let me tell you how the online version of school went:
– Johnny doesn’t show up for class. Simply doesn’t log in. He gets an F, and the parents complain to the school, claiming that it is unfair that he gat a bad grade, because he had to go to work and the online classes don’t fit into his work schedule.
– Susan shows up, but refuses to turn on her camera. You call her name, she doesn’t answer. Odds are, she isn’t even in the room. She gets an F for not participating. Mom calls the school and says that this is a racist policy which embarrasses her child because they are poor and don’t want the teacher seeing how ugly their house is.
– Steve DOES show up and has their camera on, but it is on the dashboard of their car as they are driving to work.
In each case, and these were actual students I had while online, I was told to “be kind” and find solutions, meaning give them free grades.
After all of that, I had students who didn’t check in and didn’t do a single minute of coursework. I didn’t hear from them for the entire 9 weeks of the school shutdown, so they got an F. A week after I turned in my students’ grades, the school district went behind me and granted every one of them a passing grade.
That really does wonders for your job satisfaction.
If school and education going forward is going to be like this, then can I get a break on my school taxes? Where is the money going? The buildings are empty and kids are using Zoom on their parents computers to interact with brave teachers. Hardly seems like collecting so much money is relevant anymore.
My biggest take away from all of the techers i know is there is some fear of teaching in person sand the constant exposure to different Brooke, that definitley is there but that fear varies from person to person and locale to locale just like with anyone else. Most of the probpems seem to stem from incompent or ill prepared administration who dont know how to respond, cant give straight answers or have consitent policies, constant flipping of home/classroom teaching, and poor information flow such as when someone is exposed. The administration if creating an environment far more stressful and tenuous than the virus itself. Thats
My wife is a teacher and belongs to the NEA for one reason, she has health issues that require long recovery times. Bed rest when she was carrying our twins. Three knee replacements and so forth. Yes, three.
The union provided her with access to the sick day bank. Thus is where others could give their sick days to the bank and she could use them. Interestingly, by contact, with three different school system, only the union could do this transfer of sick days.
My wife figured out the game after years when I had her ask her union rep “when was the last time the union endorsed a Republican, and who were they?”
My wife asked at a union meeting and the union rep stopped interacting with my wife except for required professional reason.
If they couldn’t find anybody from the Republican party to endorse, were they anything other than an arm of the Democratic party?
Divemedic,
You are absolutely correct. It is a two way street. Look at Chicago which had thousands of the issued tablets/laptops end up ‘lost’, broken, or in pawn shops.
On the other hand, I’ve seen w/ my kids a teacher (known for being difficult) that put out an announcement she wouldn’t respond to emails and would only correspond by phone during a certain few hours. I responded by emailing her and CC’ing the principle.
Had one being marked absent for ‘PE’ (such a joke) repeatedly. Turns out he was on the wrong class list. Took weeks to get it corrected and another few weeks to get the absences removed.
Along w/ the other usuals, teachers not showing up for scheduled times, just having the kids watch endless videos, horrid software, etc.
And the unions aren’t helping.
Tantiv: I can’t speak for other states, but in Florida state law REQUIRES teachers to take attendance. That wasn’t waived with the lockdown. Call this a side effect of the law of unintended consequences. I had a kid who was killed in a car accident during the lockdown. I began marking him absent, because I don’t ever want to lie on attendance, with it being a legal document and all.
After a week, I was contacted by the vice-principal, who told me to stop marking him absent, because marking a child absent results in the computerized attendance system robo-dialing the parent to notify them that their child isn’t in school.
While I understand the pain that this was putting the mother through, the easy answer to that is to either disenroll the student, turn off the automatic notification system, or simply remove the mother’s phone number from the system. Instead, I received all of the hate and bad feelings because I was “being insensitive.”
The great thing about being a pro-2A teacher is that even my own people hate me simply because of my most recent/current profession. Sure, the NEA is evil, but there’s no need to tar us all with that brush.
We have done EIGHT days virtually this year (1 board mandated, 1 because of icy weather (think snow day, but we didn’t close school), and 6 because we did not have enough staff who weren’t sick or quarantined to run the school. (Five of these were this week.) If you want the school opened, sign up to sub.
Everything else was in-person, and we are required to teach from classrooms on virtual days unless quarantined.
It sure would be nice if “don’t be a dick” was a two-way street around here.
@Jeremiah: I feel your pain. The entire conservative world seems to hate teachers. It isn’t just here on this blog. The Crowder show frequently does their two minutes of hate on teachers.
Yes, there are teachers who are out of bounds. There are also many teachers trying to fight the good fight.
At my school, there are 90 teachers. 11 of us are military veterans, 2 retired cops, one retired firemedic (me), and a retired MMA fighter who owns WAY more guns than I do. I would say that about a third of the staff and teachers are gun owners. Close to half of the teachers and staff are Conservative leaning, if not downright Republican.
Yes, some of them are union members. I was until recently. The reason for that is there are rights that you can only get by being in the union.
In a lot of cases, Republicans make their own enemies. I think that teachers are one of those cases. Teachers who are even on their side wind up being attacked. I have often wondered why that is. Perhaps it is because everyone remembers that one teacher they had back in school who was a jerk, so they project that on to the rest of them.
We have to eat out own first to get big and strong enough to eat everyone else after!
Divemedic: great points. Nice mirror you and Jeremiah are holding up, for the rest of to admire our metaphorical reflections in.
Thanks for the humility refresher.
(Seriously, no snark) (*Is* there even a “not snark” font?)
The thing is, teachers are a lot like cops or clergymen- it doesn’t take many bad ones to soil the reputation of the rest of the group. All of those professions have been granted high levels of trust by society, and sad to say, a few members of those groups have betrayed that trust.
Even sadder is the general impression that the various unions and governing bodies come across as more interested in protecting guilty members from punishment over keeping them to a professional standard, and thus the trust is betrayed.
And for teachers, there’s also the not entirely groundless impression that the profession is interested in indoctrinating students with a particular Leftist worldview. And while many individual teachers work hard to actually teach, the truth still is that the unions and the academicians are pushing that worldview.