Nothing haunts me more than seeing the light go out of children’s eyes, as they despair of ever understanding what they are asked to do, as misery washes across their faces, and they give up as they lay their faces down on the desks.
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Can you imagine a child taking a test on her iPad while participating in a Zoom meeting on her cell phone? If she even had both devices? And the bandwidth to run both simultaneously?
Many students have fallen behind, or maybe they haven’t. The teachers I know have done an outstanding job of helping students adjust to the pandemic. Students need a break—a time to breathe and be kids, to have some fun with their friends and deal with and get over this nightmare like the rest of us.
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This is an attack on education in general, and women specifically. Respect is earned. So I will proffer it to our next First Lady, not just because of her position, but because she earned that title. She put in the work. I respect that. Doctor Jill Jacobs-Biden.
Another important issue is the age of secondary students, the ones that many ed bloggers teach: middle and high, generally ages 11 to 18. Adolescents are incredibly sensitive to being viewed, including how they are dressed, how they perceive their bodies, what’s in the background, whether they have positive feelings about the people they live with or are in the ‘how embarrassing are they? Imma gonna die, amiright, amiright?’ stage.
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Mental illness in children existed before Covid-19. How many students are struggling with it during the pandemic? How did school privatization contribute to this phenomenon?
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Edtech can be a wonderful thing for students and educators, but if the point is to make large profits off data and replace teachers with digital screens, edtech becomes a great evil. Unfortunately, Bev Perdue and digiLEARN are promoting the evil brand of edtech. Let’s hope the incoming administration can successfully filter out this tainted input.
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No one who refuses to defend your right to life is your true ally. We won’t forget who spoke up and who remained silent.
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Until the danger has passed, we need quality remote learning conducted, planned and supported by educators. And we need Governors with the guts to listen to science, not B.S. economists.
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Gaslighting. You think this is normal, but it is not. Teachers are made to doubt themselves, but they should not. Parents are made to worry about how high the score will be, but they should not. It carries on by asserting that only the high upon high (hello, sixth floor!) knows. They do not.
It seems that President-elect Biden has quite a choice to make, whether to side with the teachers in this country or those with privatization plans for public schools. Shriver might seem like he is middle of the road, but his nonprofit connections say otherwise, and one is left to wonder if he is really a true advocate for teachers and democratic public schools.
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f we look closely, though, we may see an opportunity here. If we can resist those forces that will swoop in under cover of disaster capitalism and further demoralize and deprofessionalize our teachers, insist on more useless testing of our children. They imagine that a “market model” can fix things (even with Betsy DeVos on the way out, we know that these neoliberal logics, rooted in capitalist ideas of scarcity and competition, are hard for many of us to resist.
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It truly is an ugly day for Indianapolis. Already more than 60% of the publicly financed schools are either charter schools or innovation schools. In either case, the elected school board has no control over their operations. They are run by private entities. This election insured that Indianapolis will continue on the course toward ending public education.
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Teaching in a school building during this pandemic is giving me post-traumatic stress. And that may not even be the right term; we aren't even past the trauma yet. No, this is not post-traumatic stress. We are right in the middle of the trauma. Every day.
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I have spent most of my professional career fighting for public schools against every form of school privatization imaginable. But since the beginning of this school year and the incredibly reckless way many public schools have dealt with reopening and keeping students and staff safe, I feel much of that enthusiasm drying up. It’s not something I’m proud of feeling.
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Down in the weeds, districts are still conducting testing, sorting the results, teacher by teacher, and leaning on principals to do something about the teachers whose results they don’t like. What the hell is wrong with them?
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These individuals or foundations have every right to support public education. Still, it must be with the community, the families, the teachers, and the students who determine how their democratic public school system should operate.
Those from both parties are not that different when it comes to feeling connected to and wanting their schools to work. Their focus is on the needs of the students in their communities, no matter their political leanings.
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Since Biden’s wife, Jill, was an actual teacher, he has more to lose than previous chief executives if he gets this wrong. He can’t take schools for granted and he can’t appear to be doubling down on the same policies of Trump and DeVos – which to be honest were mostly the same as those of Obama and Bush but on steroids.
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Determining what’s safe for students, teachers, families, and the community when community cases are low is tedious. But when Covid-19 is surging, shouldn’t schools close? Won’t students mingling together mean that they will pass the virus into the community?
Children have a remarkable ability to make up what they missed … if they are motivated. The current school environment of standardized testing and all that entails leaves them unmotivated. But that’s a topic for another post. Once December arrives, post-Thanksgiving and all the new infections that will occur, it is doubtful that schools can remain open under any circumstances.
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