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Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of September 14
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
I was infected with coronavirus in March, six months on I’m still unwell
The American Federation of Teachers released a survey of parents' and teachers' opinions (PDF) about COVID-related issues regarding education in the United States.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in it, but I thought it worth noting that it identifies that 86% of teachers have bought PPE for themselves, and 11% have bought it for their students. For anyone that's been following my posts here about teaching, hopefully this is some reinforcement that I'm not just being overdramatic about all of this.
If anyone's interested, my personal expenditure for school-related COVID preparedness is well into the hundreds of dollars at this point and it includes KN95 masks, hand sanitizer, wipes, goggles, painter's tape, box fans, and extension cords. Our district has incredibly old HVAC systems that do next to nothing, but district leadership is refusing to consider any infrastructural upgrades or even just buying us box fans like we've asked, so we are all doing it ourselves, like we always do and like they know we will. Teaching as a profession selects for empathetic people by design, and that gets used against us all the time. Withholding anything from teachers means withholding it from kids, which puts us in the painful position of watching them do without or making up the difference ourselves. Guess which one usually happens? And guess why teachers burn out?
Another teacher at my school figured out how to remove some parts of the window apparatus in order to get them to open more to allow for more airflow, and thus he and I and a few other teachers have been going through rooms doing that for coworkers that request it from us. We're not officially "allowed" to do it, so it's got a bit of a black market, hush-hush quality to it. Our school nurse saw one of my colleague's windows fully opened and asked him how he did it. When he explained, she asked if he would come do the same thing for the windows in the school clinic.
Please let that sink in: our school nurse asked another teacher to come jerryrig the windows in her office so that she can reduce her chances of getting COVID. This is our solution to protect the most important healthcare worker in our building. This is how we are fighting a global pandemic with an airborne vector in its seventh month in this country: by manually reconfiguring windows on the sly so the fans we bought with our own money can get a bit more air out of our rooms.
That only gets us so far, mind you, as we are also living under a stark truth: winter is coming. Soon, ventilating my classroom will no longer viable due to the cold, so once that happens I'll be taping MERV 13 filters to my box fans because that's literally the best I can do.
For a while I saw the refusal to address ventilation or filtration as neglect, but I've now come to believe my district leadership is quietly showing their hand: they don't believe we'll be in the buildings come winter. They think we'll end up falling back to remote. Or, at least, that's what I tell myself so I don't have to live with the idea that our district leadership still seems to have no long-term plan in place despite plenty of time to prepare and near constant messaging about these exact issues. It's easier to see them as pessimists than as sociopaths.
They did ban nuts though. Everybody in the district got a message about how airborne particles from nuts can cause severe health consequences for students and could potentially be fatal. It was darkly comical -- not because some people have fatal nut allergies, which is awful -- but because the district is hardlining on an airborne threat to our students and staff by refusing to allow it in the building in the first place. Hmmm. Interesting concept they have there. I wonder if there's anything else it could apply to right now?
I don't like being sarcastic because it makes me sound like the exact kind of person people often try to paint teachers as, so let me be serious again and express this to you directly: I am in a wealthy district. We have the means; we just don't have the leadership. They are punting and passing the buck and demonstrating outright disdain for the idea of safety, making us look like we're a bunch of entitled, prissy nags demanding the moon, when all we want is to be able to breathe air that hasn't been marinating in virus for six hours straight.
Is this too much to ask? Yes, apparently. And here's the saddest part: I am not alone in this. This is happening all over the country (check out r/teachers for many more stories like mine, and here's a reminder that nearly half of HVAC systems in American schools are deficient for general purpose use, much less pandemic mitigation). I actually consider myself lucky, because as much as I complain about my district leadership, I have stellar building administrators who are doing the absolute best with the shitty hands they've been dealt. I'm also in an area that has relatively low community spread at the moment, which is actually powerfully reassuring for me. I've also yet to see kids in person. We opened remotely to start, for which I'm incredibly grateful, but we are soon transitioning to in-person, for which I'm mortified.
The sad reality isn't that my situation is bad; it's that my situation is genuinely better than many, if not most. That's how low the bar is.
Jeeze... and you still have to fork-over for your own supplies. Is it at least tax-deductible?
That's one thing I could never wrap my head around: teacher's buying their own supplies. When I learned that was the case as a grade-school student I was flabbergasted. I grew up and eventually worked in the K-12 school system for ~8 years and still couldn't understand it.
I'd wager it's something closer to complacence + incompetence. Well, in my experience the higher-ups never really had a good idea of what was actually happening in the schools under their jurisdiction. But, they'd occasionally drop by with a manufactured smile and shiny veneer.
Tax-deductible, up to $250
I've always found it both interesting and disheartening that the idea that teachers pay for their own supplies out of pocket is so endemic that it's codified directly into our tax law.
The situation seems so insanely unacceptable and dangerous to me... so, honest question; why don't you all go on strike? Why isn't there currently a massive, nationwide teacher's strike the likes of which the US has never seen before happening right now? I don't understand why the collective response of teachers has been to just willingly take on the responsibility (even financially) of addressing theses pandemic related issues in the classrooms yourselves, rather than striking to force your government administrations to finally step up.
There's a complicated answer to this question that I don't think I could do justice, but the simple answer is that it wouldn't get off the ground. It would be nearly impossible to organize and ultimately sustain because so much of educational policy is handled by states, so it's really a lot of different battles to be fought rather than one singular one, despite the fact that the issues are so similar nationwide. Also, keep in mind that teacher strikes are flat out illegal in many states, and teachers risk not only legal penalties but could also lose pensions and certifications. It's not that they would just miss out on temporary income in a strike; it's they would be wagering their entire careers and livelihoods, decades of work, on that. Also striking during a pandemic, while healthcare is tied to employment, is tough to stomach. It's an astoundingly difficult sell all around.
Also, strikes, especially public sector strikes, need public support, which we don't have. Teachers are not widely respected in the US and we've been subject to a sort of widespread institutional character assassination. The most trusted and esteemed name in education isn't any local teacher helping her students out of the goodness of her heart but Pearson, a multi-billion-dollar for-profit testing and curriculum behemoth. The politics surrounding education in the past few decades have positioned the testing, accountability, and expertise of that company as the savior of education, using data to GET YOU YOUR MONEY'S WORTH!, while framing little Ms. Local as the enemy -- a demanding, lazy do-nothing who is WASTING YOUR TAX DOLLARS! 84% of teachers bought PPE for themselves because we know if we ask for it we look like whiners, and we know we won't get it anyway, and if we do actually get it it'll be the absolute cheapest shit available that's one tiny step above "useless".
People complain about "Karens" (hate that term, by the way) in retail, but let me tell you this: educational entitlement from (some) parents is THROUGH. THE. ROOF. One of the parents I called before the start of this school year, to kindly introduce myself and answer questions about the admittedly confusing schedule and requirements, gave me what I would describe as a lawyerly deposition conducted with all the kindness of a high class aristocrat who believes they have the God-given right to abuse subservient waitstaff. This was during my introduction to them -- I hadn't yet met them or their student. It should have been a simple, perfunctory phone call. I can't tell you how many times that kind of thing happens. A few years ago, one of the teachers I work with got an angry call from a parent on the first day of classes for putting their child "on the spot" by "calling their name out in front of the whole class". Sounds bad, right? We definitely shouldn't be singling out students and publicly shaming them. Only, it turns out, that's not what happened at all: the teacher was merely taking attendance. They called out everyone's name to the class, as is customary on the first day. This was enough to prompt direct outrage. If that's our first-day interaction, what does that say about the rest of the year? And what does it say about those parents' assumptions of our roles, competence, and values, embedded in their beliefs before they've even met us?
We would not be widely supported if we struck because we aren't even supported under regular circumstances, but it would be acutely bad right now, with so many out of work. I am grateful to still have a job right now, and I don't want to undervalue that. There are many who are not so fortunate, and striking atop their hardship is socially and politically a non-starter. One of the things I'm sensitive to right now, as I'm doing remote teaching, is that I am likely being broadcast in the same room as parents who have been laid off or fired from their jobs. To then walk out on their kids to strike is a double slap in the face to them. I understand that America's lack of a social safety net is not my fault, but I got into teaching to be a part of a social safety net, and I acknowledge that right now I am genuinely needed. I want to do my part in this and help my community -- I just want to know I'm safe doing it!
Finally, there's the idea that there are a lot of forces in education trying to "starve the beast". What I'm complaining about is partially oversight and incompetence, but it's also partially by design: some people want education to fail so that it can be privatized. A widespread strike, especially a failed one, as I believe a national one would certainly be, could cause a seismic shift in that direction. One of my long-term concerns regarding COVID is that it fully will push open the privatization door. It's already got it part of the way open, as right now private online schools are making bank selling themselves as safe alternatives. Plus, it has drastically accelerated both teachers' attrition rates as well as killing the desire for people to enter the field in the first place. These were already bad pre-COVID and I fear they are only going to get worse, which will further degrade the image of public education, which will further lose us support, which will further position privatization as the ideal solution. We were in a downward spiral already, and I fear COVID has put its foot on the gas for us.
I'm definitely not one for preaching accelerationism... but in this case, it genuinely sounds like y'all are basically being held hostage here. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So maybe the system totally collapsing due to a massive (even if "failed") strike is exactly what needs to happen before things can actually improve. And maybe... hopefully... Biden will fix this shit when he gets to office... if he actually gets elected, or the country doesn't collapse in to civil war after the election, that is. :/
Regardless, I'm really, genuinely sorry you and your fellows have been put in this terrible situation. IMO teachers are one of a country's most valuable resources, so it's really fucked up, and utterly insane that it's been allowed to get this bad in the US.
I'm not gonna disagree with the rest of your post but isn't this mostly a partisan issue in the US like so much stuff?
Feel free to disagree as much as you want! For as much as I huff and puff and blow steam, I am only one person with one perspective. There are certainly other teachers out there who would no doubt disagree with me and whose experiences are far different from my own, and my thoughts don't negate or supersede theirs. Outside perspectives, too, are also valuable.
As for partisanship, there's not as much as you might expect. There definitely are some elements of it, which is sort of unavoidable in America at present, but educational policy and perceptions don't seem to neatly fall along those lines like a lot of other issues do. Education is also acutely local, with most people's experiences with it being limited to their schools or their kids' schools, and partisanship doesn't have as much a hold at that level than it does from a more zoomed out, national perspective.
This article was published last week, but I just got around to reading it today. I think it's a good coverage of some of the conceptual errors that have made the situation in the US so bad: America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral
Probably of interest to @kfwyre, since I know you've talked a lot about seeing some of these issues in co-workers and more.
We're not going to break out of the death spiral. We as a country are not capable of doing what it takes to get this pandemic under control and so it will continue to spread until it burns out on its own or Biden somehow both wins and takes power. We're too selfish and individualistic to help stop its spread and to alleviate our own suffering and the effects of this pandemic are going to be felt for decades in the form of worse life outcomes: poverty from medical bills or job loss, worse education for everyone in school right now which will result in worse outcomes later on, reduced lifespan and quality of life from COVID complications, etc.
Edit: the entire last paragraph is worth quoting I think
The pandemic has already been normalized. Anything is acceptable to us as long as it doesn't directly affect us. Then when it does, we're ok with suffering as long as others are suffering worse. At no point do we even think about stopping the suffering; we'd rather hurt others.
Thank you for the ping, Deimos. I probably would have missed this otherwise, and it's a really solid read. The author is measured, concise, and insightful. He was basically was able to put into words things I've tried to articulate here and have failed to adequately do.
Kenya Braced For The Worst. The Worst Didn't Happen. Why?
I'm living with roommates that are physically going to school and are at higher risk for bringing the virus to the house than me right now; they're also smoking outside in the porch every once in a while. We live in an apartment where there's also a balcony right above us with a wooden plank floor in which there's cracks I can visibly see up to at my apartment. Are they putting the people living above at risk by smoking at a place where the smoke can reach? I'd imagine if one of them was to catch the virus, that might be a way it could spread. They're usually smoking at night and I don't know if the people living there are out there much, but I'd just rather make sure.