Tag: COVID-19

Masked

One of my biggest objections to returning fully in person to the classroom was the mask requirement.  I didn’t think my students could do it.  Correction: I didn’t think my students WOULD do it.  Plus, I knew I didn’t want to do it.  I didn’t want my breathing to be restricted by them.  I didn’t want to be even hotter than I already am when I teach.  Most of all, though, I didn’t want to have to be the Mask Police in my school.

That’s why I was surprised that, for the most part, our students came masked every day.  Not only did they arrive with their masks, they didn’t argue about it, at least, mine didn’t.  Maybe other teachers had a different experience (if so, please leave a comment).  I really anticipated a lot more push-back about having to wear a mask, but somehow my little ones seemed to understand that it was important and for their own safety. 

We even gave them the option of taking their masks off at recess to have a break from them for a while, as long as the students went out away from everyone else on the fenced-in school grounds.  They were even provided a clothespin and baggie that they could use to attach their mask to the chain link fence so they didn’t have to hold onto it.  However, we made it clear that they had to keep their masks on if they chose to play with their friends on the playground.  Do you know that every single one of them chose to keep their masks on and play instead?  Every single child.  Every single recess.

Our masks just became a part of us, like one more item of clothing.  It was more important to interact, to have friendships, to learn and cooperate with one another than it was to be comfortable.

It’s not that they didn’t have their drawbacks.  Masks made my job understanding what my students were saying ten times harder than normal, particularly my softer-spoken girls.  I’d have to position myself right in front of them to hear them.  Even then, I couldn’t always get it.  Often, other more outspoken students nearby would have to interpret for me what a child said.  It made me realize, to my shock, just how much I lip-read when I am listening.  Not only did the mask block the sound, it obscured the children’s mouths, so I couldn’t do that anymore. 

On occasion, when I was distanced far enough away from my students, I would have to lower my mask for a few seconds so that my students could see my mouth, particularly when we worked on phonemic awareness.  It was really difficult for them to understand whether I was saying an m or an n sound, or a th rather than an f or v.  A lot of kids have trouble distinguishing the difference even when we aren’t wearing masks.

While the students were really good about keeping their masks on, they weren’t always good about keeping them on correctly.  Many masks were ill-fitting, or expanded as they were exposed to their wearer’s warm breath throughout the day, and we got really good at figuring out ways to use rubber bands or twist the ear loops to tighten them.  However, I was constantly having to remind my students to “mask up” whenever the offending article slipped below the wearer’s nose or drooped around their chin.  The students would often forget to replace their mask after eating or taking a drink from their water bottles.  I got so sick of having to tell students those two little words, mask up, and they got really tired of hearing them.  To their credit, though, they always complied without complaint.

The odd thing is that as the school year drew to a close and the masking restrictions were being lifted out in the community, I was so grateful that the school district kept the masking mandate in place.  For one thing, my students aren’t vaccinated yet.  The vaccine has not been approved for anyone under the age of 12 at this point.  The younger children are still as vulnerable to the coronavirus as they ever were, so it would be foolhardy, in my opinion, to allow the masks to come off, but my superintendent has made a lot of foolish decisions with the blessing of the school board this year, so I wouldn’t put it past them.

I discovered, however, that I was relieved for another reason.  Much to my surprise, I find I am reluctant to let go of my mask, even though I’m fully vaccinated.  Despite the fact that I’m no longer required by my local government, I still choose to wear my mask when I’m shopping and when in a restaurant, although I’ve only just gone back to dining in twice, and that is because I was forced to do so when traveling.  The mask has become a sort of crutch, a safety net, so to speak.  I don’t feel “right” without it.  Truth be told, it has protected me, not only from COVID-19, but from every other germ the kids share with me.  This is the first year since I began teaching that I haven’t been sick, not once.

I still find the darned thing annoying.  My mask rarely coordinates with my outfit.  It is SO freaking hot with the summer heat wave.  It is making my face break out horribly.  But despite all of that, I don’t want to let the thing go.  Isn’t that strange?  Like Linus with his baby blanket, I’m not ready to put it aside.  I feel vulnerable without it.  I wonder if anyone else is experiencing the same reluctance.

Absurdities

Every day is full of absurdities for teachers, at least, it’s always been that way for me and, seemingly, for my colleagues no matter where I’ve taught. We could all start our very own versions of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” Tomorrow is a perfect case in point.

Because I am an in-person teacher (now referred to as “brick and mortar” teacher, a term which I hate because it makes me sound either completely inflexible or as if I’m already dead and rigor mortis has set in), not a year-long remote teacher as I repeatedly begged to be, my district superintendent has demanded that I haul my sorry, sleepy little self into my school building for another fun-filled day (yes, that was sarcasm again) of professional development. The teachers who are teaching the year-long remote students are allowed to stay home. If you’re still waiting for the absurdity, here it is: I will have to get up an hour and a half earlier than otherwise necessary to get ready and drive into my “brick and mortar” building just to sit in my empty classroom in front of a laptop computer all day attending Zoom and Webex meetings! You know, those things that enable you to meet remotely?

To add insult to injury, they’ve announced 3 different times for the start of the first Zoom meeting. I’ve seen 7:30, 8:00, and 8:30. Let’s keep ’em guessing folks! Keep those worthless teachers on their toes. Won’t it be funny when they have to show up for the earliest time, just in case the meeting starts then, and watch them waste the next 30-60 minutes waiting for us to start? Yes, you’ve just enjoyed playing the latest round of “How Can We Waste Your Time Now?”

The main reason the elementary teachers are having to be further “developed” is because the administration has decided to adopt a new curriculum and demanded that it be implemented immediately. Yes, you heard that right. Three-fourths of the way through the school year, essentially two months before the end of the school year, one month before standardized end-of-year testing, we’re rolling out a brand new curriculum, as if THAT will fix all the problems.

In an attempt to “close the gap” between where our students should be and where they actually are because of the havoc that COVID-19 has wreaked upon our educational system, our administrators are willing to entertain an enormous amount of absurd and ridiculous ideas. Today provides another outstanding example. Wednesdays in our school district now involve an intensive intervention program of targeted instruction, specifically aimed at the most struggling students. However, does administration use the data that the classroom teachers have collected on those students? Are the teachers consulted about where the gaps and weak spots of each student lies? Are the teachers involved in deciding which students need the most support and what that support should be? NO! Why should we be asked any of these questions? We are just the teachers, you know, the ones who will be held responsible for the success/failure of these students. It’s not like we’re experts or anything. It’s not like we’ve been trained. It’s not like we’ve spent hours/days/eons in professional development after our adequate training. It’s not like we spend more of the children’s waking hours of the day with them than any other adult.

No, instead the P.E. teacher was sent into my room today to pull groups of my children out to work with them, first on their math, then later in the day on their reading. No, that isn’t a typo. No, your glasses don’t need a new prescription. No, you’re not hallucinating. I swear to God the P.E. teacher pulled my most struggling students to teach them the skills they are struggling to learn. Seriously, folks, I couldn’t make this up. It’s part of the latest initiative where they send in the “specials” teachers, to pull out the kids who need the most help in reading and math. I could see sending in the P.E. teacher to take the rest of my class off for some extra physical activity while I worked with my neediest students, but, no. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Gingerbread

Like many teachers across the country, my fellow grade-level team member and I declared the week before winter break to be “Gingerbread Week” in an effort to be festive without giving offense to anyone. Each day we read a different gingerbread story, beginning with the original folktale on Monday.

We made all sorts of scholarly applications out of our topic. We had gingerbread sorts, gingerbread CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) word blending, gingerbread math, gingerbread vocabulary syllable identification, and gingerbread alphabetical order. Just to make sure we were (that all-too-loved term by administrators) “rigorous” enough, we also made sure we used higher-order thinking activities, such as analysis and creativity, as we discussed cause and effect in our stories, made comparisons of similarities and differences between the versions, and wrote our own endings to the story.

At the end of the day, though, it just didn’t feel like enough this year. The students weren’t allowed their usual winter party because of COVID-19, and it just wasn’t the same. I had expressed that thought to my husband, and told him I wished I could at least give the kids some gingerbread as a treat to wrap up our themed week and send them off happily into their break.

Being the sweet, kind fellow that he is, he stopped off at the grocery store the next day to see what they had. Although he wasn’t able to find traditional gingerbread people, he did find some gingerbread cookies, all factory-made and prepackaged per COVID precautionary guidelines. I was thrilled! I checked the ingredients, double-checked my list of allergies, sent out a notice to the parents of what I was planning to do, and even sent an individual email to one parent just to clarify the extent of her child’s allergies. Everything was cleared and ready to go!

Before I handed out the treats I explained to my class that I thought it would be fun if we actually tried some gingerbread since we had been reading about it all week and asked if anyone had tasted gingerbread before. Only one hand went up. We washed our hands, sanitized our tables, and I distributed the packages of cookies. They opened them, lowered their masks, took their first bites, and their eyes opened wide. They loved it!

In fact, one boy, who is very difficult to please and who often proclaims himself “bored,” muttered to himself as he gobbled away, “So this is gingerbread, huh? Why haven’t I had this before? This is GOOD! I gotta get me some more of this stuff!”

Teachers, by this point in the year, are feeling the same way about rest and relaxation, and while we’ve experienced it before, it’s been a long, long time since we’ve actually had any, particularly this year. So for all the teachers out there (and anyone else who needs a break – like our diligent, even harder-working health care professionals), may you have some time over the holidays for peace and release and rest, because it’s GOOD, and we gotta get ourselves some more of it!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Actions Speak Louder than Words

Back in late October when our school board was deliberating whether or not to switch from all-remote learning to a hybrid model, we were just beginning to get the hang of remote. The rough bumps in the road early in our journey were beginning to smooth out, and students and teachers alike were settling in. Not everyone had jumped aboard the remote learning platform, but most families had embraced it, and we teachers were doing everything we could to support them and help them be successful with their education, as well as encourage the ones who hadn’t tried it yet to climb aboard.

Then everything changed. Despite the numbers of COVID-19 continuing to rise in our community, despite the reports from Dr. Fauci, all of a sudden the rhetoric from our school district superintendent changed. I’m not sure why. I’ll probably never know what was really behind it, but for some reason, our superintendent became hell-bent on us returning to the classroom. His school board members were dubious, despite the threats they’d been receiving from a minority of less-civilized parents. His staff was overwhelmingly against it and made very compelling, well-supported arguments against it. Even a vast percentage of his parents had elected, through his many surveys, to keep their children remote, even if the district opened up a hybrid option. He chose to ignore all of us and campaign for us to return. Every sentence out of his mouth was slanted in that direction. He produced the district’s HVAC engineer to testify endlessly at the board meeting that the air quality in our classrooms would continue to be healthy upon the students’ and teachers’ return. The board meetings lasted for hours, far past midnight, arguing the prudence of their decision.

I knew any hope was lost when, during one of his follow-up videos in which our superintendent tried to explain himself to the public, he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “Can I guarantee that none of our teachers will get COVID? Of course not.” It was the nonchalant shrug of the shoulders that got me. I knew in that moment I did not matter. I was expendable. My life and my well-being were of so little consequence to this man that he was willing to gamble with them to get what he wanted. He faced the possibility of harming me and my family as disinterestedly as a general analyzing the collateral damage of his latest offensive.

After that, no matter how many times he says that the health and safety of his staff and his students are of utmost importance, it falls on my deaf ears. Actions speak louder than words, Mr. Superintendent, and your actions speak volumes (both in quantity and decibel-level).

He was right about one thing, he couldn’t guarantee that his staff wouldn’t get it. Within just a couple of weeks of each other, our Title I teacher (after spending 30-minute sessions with several of my students), our Parent Involvement Facilitator (after overseeing lunch duty in my room for 30 minutes the day before), and our Media Center Specialist (after teaching for 45 minutes in my room the day before), have all tested positive.

Please pray for their full recovery and for protection for the rest of us. Our superintendent’s latest rhetoric states that children ages 0 -9 are unlikely to get COVID or to be carriers, contrary to what the CDC has published on its website. Our state school board and our local school board have just adopted measures that have completely changed the “gating” criteria, which govern how the community health is rated by color zones. Using our former criteria, the county would now be back in red, but they’ve redefined the zoning so that we’re only in yellow. Additionally, they’ve altered how our school district reacts to a change in zone color. Now, it doesn’t matter how bad the pandemic becomes, all elementary schools have been ordered to stay in hybrid mode, even if the health code turns red.

What a Waste!

Looking back at some of my most recent posts, it sounds like saner heads were prevailing, but alas, the sanity was short-lived. From the moment we headed back to school this fall, the push to send us back into the classrooms turned up the pressure exponentially. What surprised me was the direction from which the push came: administration.

I had hopes, at first, when the COVID-19 numbers began to rise last August and our board members voted to delay the start of school and then start remotely when we did begin. Whoever was in charge of the district calendar did an excellent job in reworking it so that all of our PD (professional development) days were moved to the three weeks during which school was postponed. It gave the teachers days to “prepare” (if only they would actually leave us alone and let us do exactly that instead of tying up our time in meetings) and kept our school year from having to be lengthened. It was brilliant.

The only problem with this seemingly good plan was the quality of the PD. It didn’t really help us with the problems the teachers were facing, and in the end, turned out to be a huge waste of time. For example, we were told if we were going to begin the year remotely, our school needed to have a website presence on Google sites, and each teacher was supposed to develop his/her own page for students to use remotely. Almost none of us had experience with the Google sites program and how it worked, and we were given no instruction in its use. None. No joke. Instead, we were told to “go play with it.” The theory being that we would learn much more through our own exploration than by being shown. (I wonder what kind of evaluations WE would get if we just simply told our students “go play with it” and expect them to learn on their own.)

Having spent a few hours in frustration and not having those hours to spare, my grade level cohort and I went to our instructional specialist, who is our technology guru, and begged for some pointers to get us started. With just a few minutes of demonstration, I was actually excited and felt equipped now to tackle the assignment set out for us. I spent days, yes, entire days, as in a spare hour or two during the day that I wasn’t scheduled in some worthless meeting, plus evening hours and all weekend, designing and building my website. I made buttons that served as links to my Webex meeting room within a clearly-laid out schedule for my students to follow every day.

(Oh, yes, I don’t believe I’ve told you yet.) You know how there was this huge push to get the teachers to learn Zoom last spring? Not only did we have to learn how to be a participant, we had to know how to run the meetings, control our students’ behavior on it and teach them to properly use Zoom’s tools, as well as help our parents trouble-shoot. Well, just as everyone gets fairly proficient with Zoom, our school district decides to dump it and change to Webex. All of that learning was thrown out the window, and we’re all having to learn Webex, which doesn’t work like Zoom, as well as Google sites, on top of everything else.

Anyhow, I was incredibly proud of my website. I was a little uneasy because I was wondering what’s to keep someone “off the street” from entering our website and crashing our meetings. However, I just followed orders, and I was told to post my personal Webex meeting room link clearly on my site for my parents to see and use. I secretly wondered if I’m the only one who sees the irony in the fact that we dumped Zoom because of “security problems,” which were actually our own fault by publishing the links and passwords to our meetings in a public place, and now we were even more publicly sharing our Webex links. Was I the only one to see a problem with this? Apparently so. I continued to build my site incorporating all the items my administration required: a contact page with my link big and bold, a weekly newsletter, a list of tasks to be completed, and the learning objectives for the week’s lessons. It was a beautiful sight to behold, if I do say so myself. I figured out a way to create separate links for my small reading and math groups so that they wouldn’t drop in on each other’s meetings, and I had them all hidden behind labeled buttons to make things as easy as possible for my students and parents. I was the very proud parent of my baby Google site, especially since the labor to give birth to it was hard and long.

We launched our sites, spent a few days in parent-teacher conferences demonstrating our sites to our parents, and it wasn’t until that moment the our school district administration decided “Oops! This wasn’t as secure as we thought it would be. In fact, you need to take it all down right now.” Days and days of work made completely worthless in an instant, and it all could have been avoided with just a little forethought and planning.

I knew before my principal did. I read the directive in the district’s daily bulletin that morning and pulled my Webex links off immediately in order to protect them. I later even taught myself how to go into Webex and change the actual link just to be sure no one could enter my personal meeting room using the previously published link. To add insult to injury, my principal chose that morning to do an unannounced “walk-through” observation of my site and my morning meeting with my students. The only thing she could find to criticize was the fact that my Webex link wasn’t published anywhere. I informed her that I had had it there minutes before she browsed my site, and I would be happy to put it up again if that’s what she wanted, but there was this article in the daily bulletin she needed to see that said to take it down. A few minutes later a memo was sent by her to the entire school to take the Webex references down, requiring interactive sites like mine to be dismantled.

This is just one of many instances I could cite that show the lack of planning, foresight, communication, and consideration of our district’s administration.

This Is Why

I was in Target today, and I saw a mother of three young children, the oldest looked about ready to enter second grade at most. She was pushing her cart through the store, the two older boys walking nearby with the youngest, a girl, sitting in the cart. All three children dutifully had their masks on, each a different style. The oldest had a no-nonsense, disposable, nondescript mask, the middle a black cloth mask with a superhero logo, and the youngest a pink sparkly sequined mask. None of the children were fussing with their masks. They just seemed to accept them as much as they accepted the clothing they were wearing. They were simply a necessary part of their outfit when they are out in public.

Kudos to that mom!!! She has obviously spent some time and effort training her children about the importance and necessity of wearing personal protective equipment in this COVID-19 riddled world. She made me start to question some of my strongly-held personal beliefs about the ability of my students to follow the CDC guidelines regarding social distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing. Maybe I’d been too hasty. Maybe I’d not given the children or their parents enough credit. Maybe it WOULD be possible to have a group of twenty first graders in a classroom for eight hours per day, five days a week, follow protocol and learn safely in a deadly virus-infested world.

A few minutes later, I was checking out my purchases at the register. I heard them before I could see them: a handful of unmuffled children’s voices, one taunting another and apparently successful, based on the full-throated scream that followed. Curious about the clarity of their voices, I shifted my position slightly to get a better look at the children making the ruckus.

Another masked mom was pushing her shopping cart, surrounded by her three small children, the oldest of whom was probably entering first grade, the youngest toddling next to the shopping cart with its pacifier dangling from its mouth, barely able to keep up. All three were out of control, touching everything in sight. The one thing that was no where to be seen…a mask.

In that moment, all the doubt, the recrimination, the reconsideration I had been giving to my views about the age-appropriateness of expecting my students to wear masks all day long just flew out the window. I was right. I’d been right all along. It’s too much to expect of them, too much to ask. I just happened to catch that first mom at a good point in time. I’d lay bets that even her kids, at some other point, had given her fits and refused to wear the PPE.

Does that mean that the first mom shouldn’t bother to teach her children to mask up? Of course not! I still give her kudos, and she should still continue the good work she’s been doing, because it’s the right thing to do. It’s keeping her family healthy. It’s keeping me healthy. It’s keeping you healthy. It’s helping starve the virus from devouring its next victim. It’s bringing the virus under control more quickly than it would be otherwise.

But if you’re one of those people demanding that schools reopen immediately, despite the ever-rising numbers of new COVID-19 cases being reported daily, and you’re demanding to know why they aren’t, this is why. Even if you could reasonably expect six-year-old children to keep their uncomfortable mask on all the time and to always remember to never approach their friends closer than six feet (and you can’t), you can never count on all parents teaching their children to wear their masks, even when they don’t want to, and to keep their distance from other people, and to do the right thing because it’s the right thing, especially when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable, to think of the good of other people and maybe, once in a while, even put other’s needs above their own.

Unless parents are willing to do the hard work of parenting, and it IS hard work, I know, children will NEVER learn these behaviors. Students can’t be expected to magically start to exhibit these behaviors at school if parents have not first taught them at home.

I’m Back!

It’s been a while since I have posted. I had grand plans of starting a daily journal during the COVID-19 quarantine. I thought I would have all this wonderful time that I don’t normally, since I was no longer spending an hour and a half commuting to my teaching job, not to mention the 10- to 11-hour workdays themselves.

I was wrong. The quarantine meant that instead of teaching in my classroom, I would be teaching online. Prior to this, I’d never even heard of applications like Zoom, and even though I’d heard of Seesaw, I’d never used it or seen it used. Now, I would not only have to know about them, I would have to lead my class of first graders and their parents in how to use them! No pressure! I found myself spending every waking moment on my laptop trying to teach myself three different applications simultaneously so that I could turn around and proficiently teach a class using them. Most days, my head was spinning long before I laid it on my pillow at night.

As if that weren’t enough, I didn’t have a lot of the tools I needed at home. The last time I was allowed in my classroom, it was with the understanding that we would only be shut down a couple of weeks. I never dreamed I would be teaching school virtually for the rest of the school year. I did my best to piece together resources not only for my students, but for myself as well. I got creative. I experimented. I learned a lot.

On top of all of that, the instructions and advice we were being given from our government and school district authorities changed practically on a daily basis. At first, we were supposed to have daily meetings with our class, but no more than 45 minutes total. Then I found out I was the only one doing that. So I changed my format…and my plans…again for the umpteenth time.

Then there were the meetings. Oh my, the meetings! More meetings than I’ve ever had in my life. There were the usual staff meetings, but then there were also the Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings, plus the meetings we had to have with the Title I and Special Ed teachers, plus the normal (and usually only beneficial) meetings with my grade level, plus the meetings with our cohorts at another school, plus the meeting appointments one-to-one with parents and students every single week.

I did my best. We survived. My kids learned things. I learned things. We made it to the end of the school year.

I heaved a sigh of relief, took a few weeks to recover, then decided I was ready to blog again…only to discover that for some unknown reason, my site had been deactivated at some point. There was no warning, no email notification, no nothing. It turns out that there was some technical issue that could only be cleared up by the host, so “Thank you, Bluehost,” for getting me up and running again. I’m back!