The Public – What Teachers Really Want to Say

And the Child Will Lead Them

By pszcz | February 12, 2021

All I heard was, “Beep Beep!” and then I felt the blur of breeze as she rode by on her scooter. It was early in the morning, before school. There she was with her sister in the front lobby of the school. They were doing tricks and showing off for their friends. Each friend lined up to try her hand at the prized scooter. They were playing. They were having fun. It was great.

Wait. A scooter inside the school? What the heck? How is that great? She could have hurt someone! How can I have been so irresponsible? I just walked away thinking it was great? I have yet to mention that the scooter was actually provided by the school for exactly that purpose. There was a competition earlier in the week for students who came dressed in the best costume. The prize was the right to travel between classes on a scooter or tricycle for a week. In short, the students who won, won the right to play.

When explaining to her friend that she won the scooter, she replied with the seasoned tease of a long time friend, “You? On a scooter? Are you sure that’s a great idea? You don’t exactly have a great track record with stuff like that.”

Our student’s response? “Wow! Get hit by ONE car and all of a sudden you are labeled a hazard for life.”* Ripples of laughter moved through her assembled classmates. Some laughed so hard they wheezed and had tear stains on their masks.

Yes. They were all in their masks. Yes, there was reasonable distance between them. And they were playing. And it was beautiful. High school students were playing. But didn’t they know we are in the middle of a pandemic? But didn’t they know we are a country divided as never before? But didn’t they know about all of the fights for justice? But didn’t they know that there are people who are hurting? Of course they knew. And they played anyway. And it was beautiful. Laughing, smiling, joking are beautiful things.

Later, in class, we find other groups of students learning about immune systems. Sitting in their masks and separated by plexiglass dividers, or by computer screen, they are working together. It is a smallish class. They are focused on their tasks and getting the job done, fully engaged in the serious business of the day. They are also joking, laughing, teasing each other with an ease that only comes from long term relationships. Including students who were streaming.

Classroom Student says to At Home Student, “Hey, At Home Student! Those tik tok lights make you look like you are in a Halloween movie, pick a different color!”

At Home Student fires back with, “You’re just jealous that my classroom looks like a ‘70s disco and yours looks like a……… classroom!” All the students, at home and in person, giggled and continued to work on molecular recognition and innate immunity homework. Under the masks or behind the screens, there are smiles.

Life in the faculty room looks markedly different. Colleagues are stressed and showing it. Colleagues are sad and frightened and showing it. There is mask fatigue (by me in particular). Although admittedly, I haven’t had to wear any more make up than eyeliner since August since no one can see the majority of my face so, that’s nice.

There is general malaise from being cooped up. When Colleague mentions she went out to a restaurant, the response will either be unbridled envy of being able to eat something Door Dash didn’t bring or concerns about the potential ramifications of it all.

There is stress from not being able to run our classes the way we know is best under normal circumstances. When Colleague occasionally mentions she managed to run her lesson as planned AND it was a rousing success the response in the faculty room resembles the wide eyed wonder of when a four year old says, “Tell me the story again, Mommy!”, as if our teacher just spun a tale of unicorns and fairy dust.

Colleagues are trying their best in the grand scheme of things, trying to keep the big picture in view; curricula, benchmarks, health and safety of adults and students. My colleagues are all working very hard to keep things as normal as possible while admitting things simply aren’t normal. We are working under impossible circumstances in an ever changing whirlpool of chaos. Changes and uncertainty at work swirl around us everyday, lurking just out of sight and threatening to destroy a lesson we have already changed 942 times in order to fit the “latest guidance” and the “latest schedule” like Godzilla destroyed Tokyo. We try our best to be the anchor for our students, not an albatross. Adding to our bedlam tapestry, at home, we all have our own family worries; parents who are sick, kids who are fearful, friends who are struggling. It is a lot.

Students have a lot too. They have concerns about parents. They have concerns about sick friends or friends that have seemingly vanished over the last year. Or they may feel they will never be allowed out of their ’70s disco again. They have concerns about many of the same things we do. And they have less control over those things than even we do. They are still playing. In many cases, they have become the anchor for us. They are choosing to laugh, many of us are choosing to focus on all the stresses of life and not the little wonders of a scooter or tik tok lights.

* She’s fine.

Unusual Times Show How Much We Genuinely LOVE Our Jobs…

By pszcz | May 11, 2020

During this unprecedented time of unique challenges of everyone being all in this together but completely alone and in the same boat except that some people are in yachts and some are on the little floating door thingy that Rose from Titanic totally bogarted from Jack because we all know there was plenty of room on there for him so he ended up freezing in the Arctic waters of the storm of corona, I have learned a few things. The first is that Rose was not all that nice.

The second, and perhaps more important thing, is that I love my job. Truly, madly, deeply, as the song goes. I love my job. Over the last eight weeks I have done what many other teachers across the country have done. I have tried to figure out how best to help my students, how to continue to deliver content and not simply have them review, review, review. I have tried to figure out how hard to push them, how much to excuse, how best to keep them engaged. I have made hundreds of decisions about what my virtual class will look like. Not all of the decisions have been the right decisions. They haven’t all been wrong either. There were days where I was more complacent about what was happening in class and days when I was vigilant. There were nights when I lost sleep over one student or another and whether she was ok or not. There were days when it was so overwhelming I didn’t want to think about it at all.

None of this is unusual. Teachers all over the country are doing the very same thing. I am not special in any of that.

To be sure, every teacher had a different experience just as every student has. The Mrs. Nerdlebaums and Mr. Titleborns of the country all have different perspectives and different issues to consider. Some have to worry about very young students who were in the process of learning to read and do basic math. Those teachers have to figure out how best to help them continue to do just that. Other teachers have to think about seniors who have literally been robbed of their senior rites of passage and are emotionally devastated by it. Somehow, they have to convince these almost adults that they should continue on with their Pre-calc lessons when it just doesn’t seem that important.

Couple those concerns with the fact that students are not, in fact, “all in this together”. Each student has his or her own problems, worries, and fears. Some have parents who have lost their jobs and for the first time ever are unsure of where the next meal is coming from. We want them to worry about handwriting. Some students have severe asthma and they are terrified to go outside. We want them to pay attention to a history lesson. Some students miss their friends so deeply that it is keeping them up at night. We want them to worry about diagraming sentences. Don’t misunderstand, they should worry about these things. Handwriting, history, proper grammar and structure are all important things. Good teachers know one more thing, though. We know they are distractions from the worries of the day. We know that when students are engaged in our lessons students are less likely to be worrying about hunger, asthma, or desperate loneliness. So how best do we continue to deliver our curricula and be the saving distraction for so many of our students? Even as teachers and students think about all of these worries, we are also now thinking about the end of the school year.

Normally at this time of year, teachers are scrambling to cram in content to finish the curriculum. We are contacting parents to make sure the end of the year details are in place. We are having conferences about where students should be placed and how best to serve them next year.

Students are thinking about the fact that the clock is actually moving BACKWARD! Summer break seems to move further away between the beginning of the day and the end. The final days and weeks stretch like the never ending chewing gum someone tries to pull off a shoe. Students worry about their final grades and begin asking for extra credit (no, you can not invent some ridiculous 4 paragraph assignment when you haven’t bothered to complete the 8 assignments still outstanding from the beginning of the semester). They have trouble keeping their thoughts on their 900th algebra problem of the week when the bright warm days of summer are so close at hand. Students think about the sun on their faces, warm breezes and afternoon ice creams, long boarding to their friends’ houses, playing in sprinklers, amusement parks and summer jobs.

Not this year. This year, all any of us can think about is what summer will actually look like. Will there even be a “summer” in any normal sense of the word? We all hope so. None of us know. What we do know is that we teachers love you, our students. This came home to me in a big way this week. When we left school in March, we all just “left”. Students and staff were directed to take home whatever they thought they would need to continue to work. All of the textbooks, iPads, chrome books, all of them went home. What did not go home were locker posters, mirrors, markers, snacks (gross) various gym bags and clothing, basically anything that can be left in a locker, is still at schools across the country. There is a certain ghost town feeling about it all. All of the belongings were seemingly abandoned in a hurry.

Normally there would be a “desk clean out day” for the little ones or a “locker clean out day” for the older students. This day is always filled with gleeful chaos as the students pull things out that they haven’t seen since the first day of school. Suzie will pull out an all but forgotten hair brush she just had to have at school. Tommy produces a calculator that has been lost since Christmas. Jenny pulls something out of her locker that used to be an apple. The now shriveled and fuzzy article will engender roars of laughter and several shrieks as she walks toward the giant trash can that only appears on these end of school days. Students then stand by their desk or locker as clipboard laden teachers walk past for inspection. Excitement builds as students return from their newly cleaned and de-grossified lockers to their classrooms. Summer is almost here! Everyone is almost free.

That’s how it should go. That is the way the good Lord intended, for sure. It is a rite of passage for every student. A clean locker at the end of the year is a symbol. It is the manifestation of 180 days of work. It means a movement to the next level. That is not what is happening this year though. This year will look like some weird Hollywood version of an old fashioned hostage transfer and ransom drop in a Western movie. Students will come through wearing masks to get the stuff which has already been cleaned out of their lockers and placed in bags for them. As they approach the adult who has control of their locker loot, masked students will extend and arm (gloved, of course) to show they have the ransom; the school’s property. The two parties will each carefully check their merchandise and then, when the transaction is complete, they will slowly back away from one another. The sound of old timey Western music plays in the background. Tumble weeds will blow by, even in climates where they don’t exist.

AND I CAN’T WAIT! I am so excited at the prospect of seeing my students that I don’t even care that I will be dressed like some bandit from a soundstage and will be gloved like a surgeon about to go to remove a pesky appendix from a middle aged Karen. I want to see the faces (ok, eyes) of my students. I want to hear the excitement in their voices as they fill us in, even briefly, on what has been happening with them. I want to hear them as they greet their friends for the first time in eight weeks, even if it is from a distance. I want to be there as some tiny little bit of normal comes back, even if it is fleeting.

Truth be told, I had no idea how much this would mean to me until the main office requested teachers to help in the ransom drop / hostage transfer that will be this day. I simply could not reply to that email fast enough. My fingers tripped over each other with excitement at the prospect of getting back to the students and the building where I belong. There can be no doubt that other teachers feel the same way. Scenes like this will play out all across this great country of ours. These scenes will no doubt be filled with laughter and love and tears of joy, hearts will fill to bursting at the prospect of this. I know this is true. I know because mine is full. I know because I am not the only teacher who loves her students and her job.