A friend of mine recently shared this article on Facebook, explaining why teaching during this pandemic is not sustainable. It was a great read, pretty brutal in its honesty. It explains what so many people who don't work in education need to know. Last spring, people were cheering the work teachers did; now, they're calling us babies. We're not babies. But we are running ourselves ragged going above and beyond. Lots of people are. It just seems to be a by-product of a pandemic -- everything we do seems exponentially harder. But teachers are getting hit hard, and when they say they think we should not be doing in person teaching, it's a clear indicator that the hell that is remote teaching is better than the hell that is teaching in a school right now.
Let me offer a couple things before I launch into my rant. I am a teacher, but I am no longer a traditional classroom teacher, so I am well aware that the amount of work I am doing is nowhere near the amount of work my colleagues are doing who have actual classes of students. I'm tired from the extra effort my job takes, and I know I have it easier than my co-workers. The district I work in a relatively small, and we are offering in person instruction with the option for families to choose remote instruction if they do not want to send their kids to school in person. I personally feel my district has done a good job with this in terms of safety protocols. I do not worry about getting sick when I am at work. But I am starting to wonder if shifting to remote instruction might be worth considering. Here's why.
It comes down to bodies: we are running out of bodies to run the classrooms.
Let me use myself as an example. On November 1, my husband told me that he had a stuffy nose. That alone was enough to exclude me from going to work the next day; I was in a home with someone who had one of the symptoms on the COVID self-certification list. My husband needed to go get tested so I could go back to work. He called his doctor Monday; he got tested Tuesday, and found out that day he tested positive. That kept me in the house for his 10 day quarantine period. We tried to keep apart from each other -- slept in separate rooms, kept 6 feet apart in other parts of the house. But when his 10 days was up, because I had been in the same house with him, I needed to start my own 14 day quarantine to see if I would develop symptoms. That took me through Thanksgiving break, and I was set to return to work on November 30. But as luck would have it, on November 28, I had some chest congestion and a low grade fever, so I went to get myself tested, and now I'm working from home still, waiting for my test results. So I've been working from home. Now, I don't have my own class of kids, so my district did not have to hire a sub to cover for me. But what if I was a regular classroom teacher?
Well, I could teach from home, provided I felt healthy enough. I could video into my classes, but I still need a sub in the room to monitor the kids. This is where the massive staffing chess game begins.
Substitute teachers are hard to come by in the best of conditions. It's not a steady job, it pays notoriously low, and too many kids see it as open season on a stranger in the room. My district has tried to anticipate the need for subs, so they hired 2 full time subs per building to cover classes when teachers had to be out. We have since had to hire more subs because the 2 per building wasn't enough. We are also trying to hire day-to-day subs as well. People who are common subs are not subbing right now -- they're often retired teachers, and they are wary of coming into schools because they may be health compromised. So in order to get bodies in rooms, subs are having to cover more than one teacher's class in a day, and teachers and instructional aides are being pulled from plan periods or support roles to cover classes.
Teachers and staff aren't necessarily gone because they're sick. But they have to be out if they've been exposed or if they even have the sniffles. And it's usually not just a day or two. It tends to be for 5 - 14 days at a time.
Some teachers in my district are teaching in person learners and remote learners at the same time. That means they're teaching 2 classes at essentially the same time. This requires two very different methods of teaching, plus a heavy reliance on technology. Inevitably, one group of kids seems to get more attention than the other. If the in person kids need help, they get the attention while the remote kids are left to find a way to be more visible or vocal to show they need help. Or the teacher gets so wrapped up in trying to help remote learners not only with the lesson but also any tech issues, the in person kids lose out. That's why in my district, we use subs and aides in as many classes as possible to assist the teacher with tech set up and monitoring and troubleshooting the remote learners. But when those subs and aides start getting pulled to be the lone adult in a class to cover a teacher who is out, things can go south quickly. Teachers are working tirelessly to keep all kids engaged however they can.
Then once the kids start having to stay home -- again, not necessarily because they're sick -- they can easily fall behind. Teachers end up fielding a flood of emails from students and parents with questions about what was covered or with tech issues they need help with. Teachers have to lesson plan for in person and remote learners, plus make sure those plans are detailed enough for a sub to follow in case the teacher has to leave abruptly -- maybe the teacher gets sick, or the teacher gets notified in the middle of the day that he or she has been identified as a close contact and will have to go home and isolate for 10 - 14 days.
Teachers are in a hamster wheel. They're spinning plates. Is your head in a fog just trying to make sense of all these moving parts? Imagine living in it every day.
I believe the vast majority of teachers love being able to teach in person with their students. I think they're worried about getting sick, but it's not a pervasive fear. I think rather most teachers are afraid of literally collapsing from exhaustion from trying to keep up with everything they need to do. If teachers talk about wanting to teach remotely, it's because they are reaching levels of desperation. Teachers all know that remote teaching isn't the best for the kids, but is it better to have a teacher in and out of a classroom, having the kids being taught by different people every day while a teacher is out quarantining? None of this is ideal. None of it. But please realize that teachers are not being babies. They're not giving up on their students. They're not being lazy. They're being the opposite of all those things. They're being complete professionals. They're desperately trying to find ways to reach all their learners. And they are working harder than they ever have in their careers.
