Thanks to the plague and remote learning, teachers are more online than ever. Many of us are open that we’re figuring it out in real-time. I think this public reflectiveness is a strength of our profession. There’s no Teachers Going Gradeless or EduColor Movement equivalent in nursing. It may happen but I don’t see #ArchitectTwitter arguing about the merits of natural light or #DentistTwitter debating filling materials.
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve reflected on my voice as a teacher, especially now that I am abroad. I've been thinking, online and off, about how the outbreak impacts my former students in the US. I spent a decade at Lincoln, own a home in the neighborhood, and I intend to eventually return to the community. My passion for the Lincoln Family hasn’t diminished with distance. A recent highlight of my quarantine was jumping on a Zoom call and surprising 30 graduating seniors who I taught in ninth grade and would have been back in my class this year. It felt like reconnecting with family. We discussed their college decision making, my life overseas, and the uncertain fall ahead.
This fall teacher-community relations are going to be messy. Some of the strongest pushback I ever received on teacher Twitter oddly was when I suggested that publicly counting down the days until breaks was a bad look.
That tweet popped into my head this week while chatting about August and September. Parents are already tired of their kids. The additional $600 per week of unemployment benefit sunsets August 1. As “the economy opens up” [sic] I foresee exasperated parents. If schools don’t re-open, I expect to hear “I have to go back to work, why don’t they?” If schools do re-open, I expect to hear teachers who have concerns about returning to work called “selfish” or “lazy.” I expect budget cuts by state legislatures and layoffs by districts. I expect the raggedy talk show host in your local market—in Seattle/Tacoma it’s Dori Monson—to go on and on about “greed” and “they already had summer off” and the like. I expect to see the President of the United States weaponize all of this to attack teachers and their unions. I expect to see a second wave of the virus.
All of this is out of our hands, but we need to gird ourselves and at the same time be circumspect about what we communicate to the public about our work. There’s a transitive property to most teacher advocacy: things that are good for teachers are good for schools and things that are good for schools are good for students. While this is true (90% of the time), I expect to see struggling communities understandably switch into “I ain’t tryna hear that” mode. This is a time for student-centric language and advocacy. Instead of “I don’t feel safe returning to work” we need to talk about why throwing the doors open to an 1800+ student high school is likely unsafe for students. Instead of ranting about the shortcomings of online learning platforms, we need to talk publicly about how those problems impact our most vulnerable students.
Maybe you’re smarter than me and have already sorted all of this. Maybe I needed to hear this myself. But while 1000 Americans per day are dying from a pandemic, our communiques should be reflective of the immediate struggles of our students. My choice is to focus on what’s best for my most vulnerable students and their families, both here and back home. This is a hard time for us, but it is likely even harder for many of the students we teach.