PANDEMIC TEACHING

by Ruth A. Sheets

I am a teacher and have been for more than a quarter of a century.  The 2020-2021 school year has been the most difficult for me since I started teaching.  Of course, it is primarily due to the pandemic. 

We teachers have been meeting with our students by zoom for nearly a year.  That in itself is not the problem, it is that we and our supervisors are trying to pretend that this year is no different from all other years.  It is.  Nothing like this pandemic has happened to us in a bit over a century.  We were not prepared for it either as individuals or as school communities, and that is definitely evident. 

We should be using the issues of the pandemic and the challenges as teachable moments and base our reading, math, science, and social studies instruction on that.  We should take this opportunity to focus on problem-solving what the country should look like when the pandemic has been tamed.  There will be a new normal.  Having students read and respond to materials relevant to that potential new normal would help them feel as though they have a part in creating what is to come.  

We should have been using the technology available to us to help students connect with others in very positive ways and let them help each other explore the challenges of COVID-19, systemic racism, global warming, poverty, and the other issues that have been brought into full relief since the start of the pandemic.  The internet is working, so students can explore and report back.  Even young children can participate – C is for COVID, V is for virus.  I bet there is a whole alphabet for the words of this special time.  

In addition, we need to stop calling this a lost year and complaining that students have gained nothing since March 2020.  By trying to pretend teaching and learning are just the same but online is doing a great disservice to our teachers and students as well as our families.  Our children are not failures.  They are amazing young people who are learning to face some adversity and figuring out how to deal with it.  That is astonishing and we should be acknowledging them for it rather than beating them down with ridiculous expectations of learning the usual curriculum at the same pace as pre-pandemic times.  That makes no sense and can be a factor in sending our precious kids into depression and other emotional pain.  I have even heard educators state that we should not refer to the pandemic at all.  Talk about burying one’s head in the sand!

With the stress of learning to survive and eventually, perhaps to thrive in this weird world of Zoom, hybrid, whatever, educators are still expected to administer the weeks-long batteries of standardized tests, if not this spring, than definitely in the fall.  For what purpose will this be done, so the corporations that make the tests won’t lose money, so we can prove our kids didn’t master all the stuff in the curriculum while also trying to manage life in COVID Land?

This should be a time of experimentation.  We should be looking at ways to catch our students’ attention, deeply involve them in what is happening and help them develop the social-emotional intelligence that will give them the ability to function as active informed citizens.  Perhaps the books and online resources we go to should show young people (or animal characters) dealing with tough situations and making it through.  They could be encouraged to write about their experiences of this year.  I suspect their descriptions will look quite different from those of adults during this time.

Colleagues are giving out “F’s” like candy to accentuate that our kids really are failures if they don’t come to Zoom every day and don’t hand in activities they know don’t relate in any way to and ignore what they are experiencing.  This is just one more way our society demonstrates its lack of true care for and appreciation of our precious children. 

One thing I know for certain, we can do better. 

Anyone Can Teach

by Ruth A. Sheets

I must say “thank you” to the teachers of Chicago for standing for the kids and for themselves.  During the past few years, teachers and public schools have been the target of all kinds of folks who “know” about education and are sure they “know” exactly what to do about it.

According to standardized tests, our children are doing so poorly that it is amazing we are still a “first world country.”  We are in an education crisis, say those who claim to know. 

As so often happens when America faces difficult situations, we want to turn the problem over to private for-profit entities who, for a price, will make things all better.  There is a lot of money in education, and the for-profits want as big a chuck of it as they can get.

Do these folks know anything about education?  Does it matter?  Since everyone has been a student sometime in their lives, they are automatically experts on education.  That’s like saying “I’ve been a patient, therefore I know everything about medicine.”

Trained educators know that there must be some type of accountability and that there should be an effective system of evaluating teachers and how they are doing.  Subjectivity, not objectivity, however, reigns in the evaluation process.  Standardized testing is the tool of people who think that “one size fits all” in determining success.  It’s easier than actually trying to figure out how to help kids learn more effectively and teachers to teach more effectively.

So what do we do in the face of poor test scores?  We respond to anyone who comes in with the promise of making things better.  We Americans have always been vulnerable to snake oil salesmen.

“Give me a school and I’ll fix it.  Make sure you give me a lot of money too, tax-payer money that is.  We’ll make the school day longer, pay teachers less or better yet, make their pay tied to how well their kids do on tests.  Pay for the computers the students need and we need more money for trips and air conditioning for the school.  We’ll show you!

"Accountability, what’s that?  The students didn’t do well this first five years because we are trying to clean up after those awful public school teachers who ruined the kids and it will take at least another ten years to see any progress.  I know what I am doing."

The parents believe that this charter school is better than the regular public schools, so, OF COURSE, IT IS.

This nonsense is what the teachers in Chicago are fighting.  Everyone thinks they know what students need.  Everyone thinks they can teach and that when kids don’t score well, THERE must be a bad teacher INVOLVED SOMEWHERE. 

People like Mayor Emmanuel love standardized tests and are so sure that these tests tell EVERYTHING about the students tested, that they would tie a teacher’s salary to the scores.  They hand over “charter” schools to anyone who comes along promising miracles.  A few of these charter schools are doing better, but not many.

What does happen, though is union busting.  It is about trying to destroy one of the few unions with any power left in the United States TO STAND AGAINST CORPORATE GREED.  Usually, it is Republicans who run this racket, but lately, some Democrats have gotten on board.  That’s too bad because it leaves so few people out there standing for us teachers and our students.

If our nation really cared about our children and how well they do in school, we would be actively addressing the issues related to poverty.  It is no accident that the schools where children are performing poorly are in poverty-ridden areas. 

If our leaders were as well-educated as they would like us to think they are, they would have noted the connection between poor schools, poor performance, poor communities, and poor children.  Where were these leaders when their teachers were showing them how to make meaningful connections, back in the day?  They were probably daydreaming about all the money attendance at their exclusive private school would bring them.