Nurses don’t want to strike. But going to the hospital and being cared for by an overworked, underpaid, unsupported nurse is not going to improve your health.
Railway workers would certainly rather get on with their jobs than contend with the bosses or Congress. But having no paid sick leave and a lack of adequate pay will not help move goods across the country any better, either.
Instead, we are at the mercy of employers to step up and do so. And when it comes to the poorest but most important workers – the ones without which our country would grind to a stop – employers are often extremely reluctant to do so.
Roughly a quarter of the private workforce — more than 33 million people — have no paid sick days so they can take care of themselves if they get ill. Even worse, more than 80 percent of private sector workers have no access to paid leave so they can care for a family member.
And it’s indisputably a racial and class phenomenon.
Higher-paid, professional workers almost universally have paid sick and family leave. But, of course, most of these workers don’t just lack pigment on their collars, they lack it on their faces, too. Among the lowest-paid quarter of the workforce, the majority of whom are Black and Latinx workers, only half of them have any paid sick days, and just 7 percent have paid family leave.
So workers of color, the poor, and disproportionately women are much more likely to lack sick and family leave than those who are paid more, have white skin and are male.
And before you explode with indignation, let it be known that this could be rectified any day our government sees fit.
Our representatives could stop holding water for groups like the railway companies that pulled in $20 billion in profits last year alone. Our government could represent us, the people, instead of businesses that could afford to do better but don’t because we aren’t holding them accountable and our Congress and the President refuse to stop them or even let us force them to do right by subjecting them to a strike.
It is past time for our government to begin respecting the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain for better treatment.
We just suffered through a pandemic where these so-called essential workers had to put themselves in the most danger just to keep society running while the rest of us stayed home and were unequally protected.
If these workers are truly essential, they at least deserve sick and family leave. Otherwise, it is all too obvious how bogus the term is.
The U.S. can no longer run on the unrespected work of an underclass of the poor and people of color.
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The choice for Pennsylvania Governor could not be more clear in November.
On the one hand, we have Josh Shapiro – an Attorney General who fought for Commonwealth citizens’ rights for six years.
On the other, we have Doug Mastriano, a former US Army Colonel and 3-year state representative who supported a literal coup against the United States government.
In any sane world, that would be all you’d need to know.
If Mastriano somehow wins the governors race, he will be in a position to basically call off Democratic rule in the state. As governor, he would choose the secretary of state — the official in charge of administering the 2024 presidential election. This would effectively allow him to pick the winner, himself.
This is not just conjecture. Mastriano has gone on record that as governor he would decertify voting machines in some precincts – making it hard to count votes there. He has even alluded to the independent state legislature doctrine, which holds that state legislatures can name whoever they want as the recipient of a state’s electoral votes, regardless of who voters select.
This is not conservatism. It is not protecting American values or law and order. It is the opposite.
By contrast, Shapiro, the Democrat in the race, is a model of exactly those qualities usually associated with sobriety and efficiency.
The way I see it, this is a simple – if terrifying – election.
Shapiro is not perfect, but if elected, he would function similarly to current Governor Tom Wolf. He would be a guardian against the overreach and bad decisions of the gerrymandered Republican legislature.
One can hope voters throughout the Commonwealth would take back their individual voting districts from the extremists, but given the still uncompetitive lines of these districts, this seems unlikely.
So we need a Wolf, we need a Shapiro, standing on the battlements stopping the goons like Mastriano from taking advantage of the majority of us.
Shapiro would certainly do that. He might even go farther and fight to find ways to get real change through the legislature. But even if he can’t do that, voting for him is essential.
That would make a huge difference both nationally and throughout the state.
It would set us up with a firm foundation and at least keep people safe from the worst.
I know it is depressing to be put in this situation constantly. Every election cycle seems to be the most important because the country is falling apart. Maybe we can find a way to turn things back and reach some level of sanity. But we can’t do anything unless we elect Shapiro, Davis and Fetterman.
We need the guardians against the goons.
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I got three doses of the Moderna vaccine last winter and summer, and this week I still caught COVID-19.
Now I sit here in self-imposed exile in a room in my own house trying not to infect my family.
I suppose I’m lucky in a way. My symptoms pretty much went away because I took an anti-viral medication. But my medical history is such that I’m extra sensitive to this disease.
It’s not a question of whether I’ll survive in the meantime, but more a matter of if it will ever truly leave me alone.
I wonder if it might not have done me some permanent damage. My heart is already scarred from heart attacks. Will this make it worse?
My intestines are impaired from Crohn’s disease. Will this exacerbate the stabbing pain I sometimes feel just trying to live?
Because of the medications I have to take to help with my many other delightful maladies, I was always more susceptible to catching this disease, but I don’t think getting it is on me.
I was extremely cautious about COVID.
Few people took this situation more seriously.
When I didn’t have to go out, I stayed home. When I did go out, I always wore a mask – ALWAYS.
The only people who have seen my whole face in the flesh in years are my immediate family – wife, daughter and father-in-law.
And one of those times was at a hospital cafeteria waiting for my father to get out of surgery.
Yet when I did unavoidably venture out to get groceries or pick up food from restaurants to eat at home, I’d rarely see the same level of caution from my friends and neighbors.
It made me wonder – where could I have caught this virus?
The most likely option is my cardiologist’s office.
After months of hemming and hawing, I finally agreed to come in and take a stress test.
As I was struggling on the treadmill hooked up to various machines that go ping, I was instructed to take down my mask if it would help me run (they called it walking) faster.
The next day I started to feel really crappy. The day after that it was so bad I called my primary care physician to see me.
I had a 100 degree temperature. My head felt like it was in a vice. I had chills and my muscles felt like I had been run over by a truck.
I took a home COVID test but it got a negative result.
I thought I was just sick or maybe had a sinus infection.
I had a close call months earlier but after several negative home and office tests, I had been diagnosed with a bacterial infection.
However, this time it was different.
Once I told the nurse my symptoms, she said the doctor wouldn’t see me. Instead he got on the phone and said he was getting bombarded by calls from people reporting the same symptoms. These were tell-tale signs of the latest COVID variant.
It probably wouldn’t show up on the test for 12-48 hours more. But since it was early, he wanted me to take Paxlovid – an anti-viral that can reduce the severity of symptoms and rid me of the disease in about a week.
So that’s where I am now – in the low security prison of my own bedroom.
My wife has to sleep in my daughter’s bed or on the couch.
Perhaps it will just add another data point for posterity. Maybe it will be part of a bar graph steadily making its way up or down.
I guess it depends on the trajectory of our collective future.
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This cluster is alive but so is cancer. So are insects. So are bacteria.
Being alive is not enough to give it rights over-and-above the person these cells are clustered inside.
Electrical impulses in these cells do not constitute a heartbeat. Nearly every cell has such electrical impulses – the brain, muscles, organs, etc. That doesn’t make them separate organisms.
Your belief that a cluster of cells is a person is not a compelling argument for anything.
Catholics can’t make Jews attend midnight mass before Christmas. Jews can’t make Baptists refrain from eating pork. Muslims can’t stop atheists from drawing cartoons of religious figures.
Doing so would be theocracy.
So using your belief as a justification to force people who do not share it to take that cluster of cells to term is a textbook example of fascism.
Obviously that right has limits – for example if you intend to use your body to hurt or kill someone else.
But we’ve already established that a fetus – a glob of cells – cannot be assumed to be someone else.
Doing otherwise would be absurd.
So someone has beliefs about what’s happening inside your body. So what?
Imagine if some cult thought your kidneys have souls and must be kept inside you at all costs. Should they be able to pass a law forbidding you from removing one if it gets infected? If you want to donate it to save another person’s life?
They’re your kidneys. And that fetus is your cluster of cells. You can do with it what you want.
This shows that most people professing this belief in the personhood of something inside your body is pure balderdash.
It’s not about that mass growing inside a woman. It’s about the woman, herself – controlling her actions, making her bend to your will, making it harder for her to exercise her autonomy and benefit from her own economic power.
It is about upholding patriarchy. It is about subjugating women – especially poor women and women of color who are more likely to be impacted.
Make no mistake.
This is fascism.
Our Supreme Court is fascist.
And whether you are likely to ever have an abortion or not is beside the point.
Every woman, every man, every person is impacted.
We must fight this kangaroo court and the political power behind it.
We must make them regret such blatant autocracy and totalitarianism.
This is everyone’s fight.
Every PERSON. Everywhere.
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“Daddy, are gay people not allowed to get married?”
My daughter was looking at me in confusion as we sat together on the couch watching an old episode of “Top Chef.”
In Season 6, episode two, the chefs were asked to cook for a bachelor party. One of the contestants, Ashley, was indignant that she had to participate in a challenge centered on marriage when she, herself, couldn’t marry another woman.
I was surprised.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the show was so old. It first aired in 2009. Was that really so long ago?
We’ve only had marriage equality in all 50 states since 2015. That’s just seven years ago.
So I explained to my daughter that gay people can marry today, but that it wasn’t always the case.
My 13-year-old thought the idea that people couldn’t marry whoever they wanted to was just too crazy to be believed. And I agreed.
Apparently, the landmark 1973 decision that expanded access to abortion nationwide is about to be overturned by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court.
Did I just sleep through a monologue by Rod Serling?
I’m still seeing things in color but they’re starting to feel very black and white.
These are issues of settled law.
Roe v. Wade is older than I am. Women have been able to terminate unwanted pregnancies for my entire life and the world hasn’t come to an end. In fact, if you read about what life was like before this decision, things have improved.
Women have freedom over their own bodies. They aren’t trapped by the Catch 22 of whether to submit to a forced birth or risk their lives with a back alley procedure.
I remember having a similar moment of cognitive dissonance as my daughter did when I was in high school.
I read the book “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser and was shocked at what life was like in the 1920s before women had such freedoms. In the book, a couple get pregnant and have to choose between an unwanted marriage while raising an unwanted child or a black market abortion and the freedom to move on. When they can’t agree, the protagonist, Clyde, murders the poor woman.
At the time, the whole situation seemed entirely quaint. It was a series of arguments, examples, and counter examples on an issue that had been decided long ago.
That anyone could think differently struck me as absurd.
In my high school public speaking class, we debated the issue. I argued in favor of reproductive rights, and a girl I had a crush on argued against them.
Let’s cut to the chase. None of this really is about stopping abortions. (If that was the concern, we’d be talking about free birth control, neonatal care and making a better world to raise children in.) Nor is it about safeguarding marriage between a man and a woman – or a white man and a white woman.
It’s about strengthening white supremacy. It’s about bolstering the patriarchy.
Democrats have a majority in both the House and the Senate and we have the Presidency.
If we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate (and we probably can’t) we can end the filibuster and pass it with 50 votes.
I hope with all my heart that we do this.
I will push and organize and protest and electioneer. But I fear it will not be enough.
Just making it to this regressive moment in time seems to indicate that our system is too broken to be fixed that way.
This is not the world I wanted for my daughter. I fear it is the world she will have to fight to overcome.
The battles of our grandparents have become our inheritance to our posterity.
They deserve a much better world.
But all we seem to have for them are reruns.
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At least I have time to grade some papers and call some parents and plan out how my next few lessons will fit into each other to form a coherent whole.
Which seems to be the norm in the physical school building these days.
You need to understand something.
Every time you take away a teacher’s planning period – whether it be to cover an IEP meeting, use a teacher as a security guard in the cafeteria, sending someone to a training or otherwise – you are reducing the quality of instruction that teacher is able to provide that day.
And if you do it for long enough, you can no longer fairly judge that teacher’s annual performance by the same expectations you would have under normal conditions.
You need to put an asterisk next to her name for the year.
Meaning this isn’t the best she could do, but this is the best she could do WITHOUT HER PLAN.
Imagine an actor going on stage without having the chance to practice the play? Imagine an athlete playing in the championship game without having the chance to warm up or watch tape. Imagine a pilot flying your plane without being able to contact the air traffic controller or plan the route from one airport to another.
In fact, if most other professionals working under these conditions were able to pull out something even passable, we’d celebrate them as prodigies.
Wow! Did you see Denzel in Hamlet? He didn’t even have a chance to practice! He just did the whole play from memory!
Oh! And when Brady threw that touchdown pass! He wasn’t even warmed up! He rushed right from his car to the field – and he wasn’t even at training camp all week!
But I know what the excuse will be: this is unavoidable.
There are just too many absences and not enough subs. And to an extent that’s true.
However, what are you doing to alleviate that situation?
Have you reached out to local colleges to find teaching students who would relish the experience of subbing? Have you reached out to retired teachers looking for extra pay? Have you lobbied the school board and the legislature for more money to pay subs and teachers?
Have you done everything you can to support the health and well-being of your staff so that fewer need to take off? Have you cut all unnecessary tasks like formal lesson plans, stopped holding staff meetings unless an urgent need presents itself, refrained from new and unproven initiatives, cut duties where possible to increase teacher planning time?
If not, then don’t talk to me about inevitability. You have contributed to it.
The people who are left want to be in the classroom because we love teaching. However, with all the nonsense heaped on our shoulders, the job has become less-and-less about that and more preoccupied with ancillary concerns – paperwork, endless meetings where nothing gets done, useless trainings so some corporation can get paid, and outright babysitting.
When you take away our planning periods, we can’t do our best for our students. And that’s why we’re here! To give our best!
When you take that away from us, you take away a lot of the satisfaction of the job.
No one devotes their life to something to do it half-assed.
Quality of instruction is not an excuse for us. It’s not a cudgel or a catchphrase or a policy decision.
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Sometimes you can only tell by the vanishing students and teachers or the everyday need to sub for staff members mysteriously absent for days or weeks in a row.
“We have learned that two High School students, two High School staff members, three Middle School students, six Elementary students and one Elementary staff member have tested positive for COVID-19. Close contacts have been identified and notified. Thank you.”
What does it all mean?
One thing’s for sure – we aren’t taking this pandemic very seriously.
Judging by the emails in the last week and a half, alone, there have been at least 60 people in my small western Pennsylvania district who tested positive for Covid. That’s 17 in the high school (10 students and 7 staff), 22 in the middle school (17 students and 5 staff), and 21 in the elementary schools (16 students and 5 staff). And this doesn’t include close contacts.
However, with the new CDC guidelines that people who test positive only need to quarantine for 5 days, some of these people are probably back at school already. Though it is almost certain they will be replaced by more people testing positive today.
I have a student who just came back a day ago who’s coughing and sneezing in the back of the room with no mask. And there’s not a thing I can do – except spray Lysol all over his seating area once he leaves.
Don’t get me wrong. I hated teaching remotely on and off during the last few years. But safety is more important to me than being as effective as I can possibly be.
When the Titanic is sinking, you get in the life boats and don’t worry that doing so might mean you won’t dock on time.
Somewhere along the line in the past few years we’ve come to accept the unacceptable:
–We’re not in this together.
–I don’t have your back. You don’t have mine.
–When it comes to a disease like Covid – you’re on your own.
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It’s not exactly easy to fit in so many articles – 53 so far this year – between teaching full time.
And I’ve been doing it for 8 years – since July 2014.
In that time, this site has earned 2.3 million hits – 218,603 just this year.
I’m proud of the work I’ve done here.
I haven’t changed the world, but I’ve been heard. Occasionally.
As a classroom teacher, that’s really what I’m trying to do. In my everyday work, few people whose grade I’m not calculating actually listen to me. And even then it’s not always a given.
I want to believe my words have an impact – that policymakers read what I write and consider it before offering new measures and revising old ones.
But as time goes on, I wonder if any of that actually happens. These days my writing feels more like a shout in the dark than anything else.
At best, from the comments I often get on my articles (and the fact that 14,887 people have signed up to follow my work), it seems at least that I am not shouting alone.
We are all yearning to be heard.
These are the cries that most of us seemed to have in common this year:
Description: This is a postmortem on the 2020-21 school year. Here are the six policies that really weren’t working from social distancing, to cyber school, hybrid models, and more.
Fun Fact: I had hoped that laying out last year’s failures might stop them from being tried again this year or at least we might revise them into policies that worked. In some instances – like cyber school – there seems to have been an attempt to accomplish this. In others – like standardized testing – we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from repeating the same old mistakes.
Description: It seemed like a pretty easy concept when I first learned it back in civics class. Your right to freedom ends when it comes into conflict with mine. But in 2021, that’s all out the window. Certain people’s rights to comfort (i.e. being unmasked) are more important than other people’s right to life (i.e. being free from your potential Covid).
Description: Demands on teachers are out of control – everything from new scattershot initiatives to more paperwork to having to forgo our planning periods and sub for missing staff nearly every day. And the worse part is that each time it’s done, it becomes the new normal. Teaching should not be death by a million cuts.
Fun Fact: This was another in what seemed to be a series of articles about how teaching has gotten more intolerable this year. If anyone ever wonders what happened to all the teachers once we all leave, refer to this series.
Description: Teachers are leaving the profession at an unprecedented rate this year. So what do we do about it? Here are five simple things any district can do that don’t require a lot of money or political will. They just require wanting to fix the problem. These are things like eliminating unnecessary tasks and forgoing formal lesson plans while increasing planning time.
Fun Fact: Few districts seems to be doing any of this. It shows that they really don’t care.
Description: This is almost a poem. It’s just a description of many of the things I love about teaching and many of the things I don’t. It’s an attempt to show how the negatives are overwhelming the positives.
Fun Fact: This started as a Facebook post: “I love teaching. I don’t love the exhaustion, the lack of planning & grading time, the impossibly high expectations & low pay, the lack of autonomy, the gaslighting, the disrespect, being used as a political football and the death threats.”
Description: Policymakers and pundits keep saying students are suffering learning loss from last year and the interrupted and online classes required during the pandemic. It’s total nonsense. Students are suffering from a lack of social skills. They don’t know how to interact with each other and how to emotionally process what’s been going on.
Fun Fact: This idea is so obvious to anyone who’s actually in school buildings that it has gotten through somewhat to the mass media. However, the drum of bogus learning loss is still being beaten by powerful companies determined to make money off of this catastrophe.
Description: Imagine a world without teachers. You don’t have to. I’ve done it for you. This is a fictional story of two kids, DeShaun and Marco, and what their educational experience may well be like once we’ve chased away all the education professionals.
Description: How many times have teachers had to go to their administrators and school directors asking for policies that will keep them and their students safe? How many times have we been turned down? How many times can we keep repeating this cycle? It’s like something out of Kafka or Gogol.
Description: This was my first attempt to discuss how much worse 2021-2022 is starting than the previous school year. Teachers are struggling with doing their jobs and staying healthy. And no one seems to care.
Fun Fact: My own health was extremely poor when I wrote this. I was in and out of the hospital. Though I feel somewhat better now, not much has changed. This article was republished in the Washington Post, on CommonDreams.org, and discussed on Diane Ravitch’s blog.
Description: Being there for students who are traumatized by the pandemic makes teachers subject to vicarious trauma, ourselves. We are subject to verbal and physical abuse in the classroom. It is one of the major factors wearing us down, and there appears to be no help in site – nor does anyone even seem to acknowledge what is happening.
Fun Fact: This one really seemed to strike a nerve with my fellow teachers. I heard so many similar stories from educators across the country who are going through these same things.
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I see Mrs. K is still out. She was sobbing in the faculty room last week. Wonder what that was about.
Rumor has it Mr. C was rushed to the nurse to have his blood pressure taken after his face turned beet red in the middle of his last class yesterday. Not a shock that he’s missing.
My eyes pour down the names of absent teachers and present substitutes only to find the one I’m dreading – my own.
I’m expected to sub for Mrs. D’s 8th period – again.
Great.
Too many kids I barely know stuffed into a tiny room. Last time there was almost a fight. Will they even listen to me this time?
I have my own classes. I shouldn’t have to do this.
But that’s exactly what’s expected of teachers these days.
If your colleagues are absent and there aren’t enough subs, you have no choice. You have to fill in somewhere.
Normally, I wouldn’t mind all that much. After all, I AM being paid for doing the extra work. But day-after-day, week-after-week, for months on end – it’s exhausting.
It’s not my responsibility to make sure every room in the building is covered.
I never applied to fix the district’s supply and demand issues.
It makes it harder to do my own work. Beyond the increased stress of being plopped into a situation you know nothing about, subbing means losing my daily 40-minute planning period.
Grading student work, crafting lessons, reading IEPs, doing paperwork, making copies, filling out behavior sheets, contacting parents, keeping up with Google Classroom and other technologies and multi-media – one period a day is not nearly enough time for it all.
And now I don’t even get that! If I’m going to do even the most basic things to keep my head above water, I have to find the time somewhere – usually by stealing it from my own family.
Even under normal circumstances I routinely have to do that just to get the job done. But now I have to sacrifice even more!
I’ll be honest. I often end up just putting off the most nonessential things until I get around to them.
This month, alone, I’ve only had four days I didn’t have to sub. That’s just four planning periods to get all the groundwork done – about one period a week. Not even enough time to just email parents an update on their children’s grades. So little time that yesterday when I actually had a plan, there was so much to do I nearly fell over.
When I frantically ran to the copier and miraculously found no one using it, I breathed a sigh of relief. But it turned into a cry of pain when the thing ran out of staples and jammed almost immediately.
I didn’t have time for this.
I don’t have time for things to work out perfectly!
So like most teachers after being confronted with the call-off sheet for long enough, that, itself, becomes a reason for me to call off.
I am only human.
I figure that I might be able to do my own work today, but I’m just too beat to take on anyone else’s, too.
Some days I get home from work and I have to spend an hour or two in bed before I can even move.
I’ve had more trips to the emergency room, doctor’s visits, medical procedures and new prescriptions the beginning of this year than any other time I’ve been teaching.
It’s a problem of exploitation and normalization.
Exploitation is when you treat someone unfairly for your own benefit.
The way we mishandle call-offs is a case in point.
When so many educators are absent each day, that’s not an accident. It’s the symptom of a problem – burn out.
We’ve relied on teachers to keep the system running for so many years, it’s about to collapse. And the pandemic has only made things worse.
We piled on so many extra duties – online teaching, hybrid learning, ever changing safety precautions – these became the proverbial straw that broke educators’ backs.
And now we’re screaming in pain and frustration that we can’t go on like this anymore. That’s what the call-off sheet means. It’s a message – a cry for help. But few administrators allow themselves to see it.
They won’t even admit there is a problem.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard principals and administrators talk about the call-off sheet like it’s an act of God or a force of nature like a flood or a tornado.
No! This wasn’t unpredictable! This didn’t just happen! It’s your fault!
If there have been a high number of call-offs nearly every day for the past few weeks, it’s not a freak of nature when it happens again today! Administrators are responsible for anticipating that and finding a solution.
This is not a situation where our school leaders are helpless.
There are things they can do to alleviate this situation – reducing nonessential tasks, eliminating unnecessary paperwork, refraining from excess staff meetings, forgoing new initiatives, letting teachers work from home on professional development days – anything to give us a break and an opportunity to heal from the years of overburdening.
It’s taking a bad situation and redefining it as usual, typical and expected.
It’s like saying “This is the way things are now. This is school. This is our new baseline.”
However, it is not sustainable!
We cannot continue to apply the old model of public schooling to the problems we have today. It didn’t work before the pandemic and now it is frayed to the breaking point.
When the first wave of Covid-19 washed over us and many schools went to online learning, leaders promised we’d rebuild back better when they finally reopened.
This was the perfect chance, they said, to change, to reform the things that weren’t working and do all the positive things we’d wanted to do for years.
Even at the time I thought it was rather optimistic to the point of naivety. Time has proven me correct.
Since schools have reopened, there has been no rebuilding back better. We’ve been forced to accept things worse.
Teachers were already trickling away from the profession before Covid-19 was even discovered. Now they’re running away in droves.
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According to the American Counseling Association, this is sometimes called the “cost of caring” and can result from “hearing [people’s] trauma stories and becom[ing] witnesses to the pain, fear, and terror that trauma survivors have endured.”
The brain emits a fear response releasing cortisol and adrenaline which, in turn, increases heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration, followed by a rush of emotions.
The biological response can display itself in mental symptoms such as anger, headaches, or even physical ones like missing staff meetings, lateness to work or avoiding certain students or situations.
“Being a teacher is a stressful enough job, but teachers are now responsible for a lot more things than just providing education,” says LeAnn Keck, a manager at Trauma Smart, an organization that helps children and adults navigate trauma.
“It seems like teachers have in some ways become case workers. They get to know about their students’ lives and the needs of their families, and with that can come secondary trauma.”
This is an aspect of the job for which most teachers are unprepared.
According to a 2020 survey by the New York Life Foundation and American Federation of Teachers, only 15% of teachers felt comfortable addressing grief or trauma.
When I first entered the field two decades ago, I was taught how to design lessons, sequence curriculum, manage classes, calculate grades, etc. Never once did anyone mention that I would be standing between a hurting child and a world he is desperately trying to lash out against.
Most teachers aren’t taught how to help students who have experienced trauma. Nor are we taught how to handle the toll it takes on our own health and personal lives.
And unfortunately things are getting much worse.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than half of all U.S. children have experienced some kind of trauma. This includes abuse, neglect, violence, or challenging household circumstances. And 35 percent of kids have experienced more than one type of traumatic event.
In class, these traumas can manifest in many ways such as acting out. However, they can also be more subtle such as failure to make eye contact, repeated foot tapping, etc.
Childhood trauma was not unknown before the pandemic, but it was much less frequent.
The student who exploded today is a prime example.
Clearly something may have happened to him.
A few years ago he had been an A student. He was academically gifted. But when we went to on-line classes to protect against Covid-19, he disappeared.
Only to come back like this.
As a classroom teacher with two decades of experience, I know that when a student acts this way, punishing him won’t help. He needs support coping, but that’s easier said than done.
I need help coping with HIM!
These adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can impact kids well into adulthood with higher risks for alcoholism, liver disease, suicide, and other health problems.
And it affects their teachers, too.
Since schools have reopened, many kids don’t seem to know how to interact without teasing, goading or tormenting each other. We’re seeing children scream at each other in class over things as simple as finding a pencil. There are more frequent fights, vandalism, bullying, cyber bullying and even attacks against teachers.
Last week at my school, a student in the hall pushed another student into a teacher’s back. The first student was trying to fulfill the infamous TikTok challenge of hitting a teacher, but he wanted to avoid punishment by being able to claim it was an accident.
This increase in negative behaviors can be directly attributed to the pandemic.
According to the CDC, more than 140,000 children in the U.S. have lost a primary or secondary caregiver such as a live-in grandparent or another family member to the virus.
With fewer role models at home and less time in the classroom over the last year and a half, kids are suffering. And that’s not just anecdotal. The facts back it up.
Suicide attempts among 12- to 17-year-old girls increased by about 50 percent over winter 2019, according to the CDC.
And these numbers are probably under reported since these increases took place at the height of the pandemic when many people were hesitant to seek medical attention.
The increase in student trauma and the lack of additional supports is undoubtedly contributing to the speed at which teachers are leaving the profession.
We want to help our students but many of us feel ill-equipped to do so. And it’s negatively affecting our own health.
It is vital that people stop hurling stones and understand the increased burden placed on teachers’ shoulders. Not only that, but it’s well past time for people to get off the side lines and actually support educators.
We need time to talk with our colleagues about what we’re experiencing.
That’s not just gossiping or socializing. It’s necessary to function.
Educators need the ability to talk through what they’re experiencing and what they’re feeling with other teachers coping with secondary trauma, according to Micere Keels, an associate professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the TREP Project, a trauma-informed curriculum for urban teachers.
“Reducing professional isolation is critical,” said Keels. “It allows educators to see that others are struggling with the same issues, prevents the feeling that one’s struggles are due to incompetence, and makes one aware of alternative strategies for working with students exhibiting challenging behavior.”
However, this can’t be something teaches do on their own. This is an essential part of the job.
Part of our profession has become being put in harm’s way. We need the time to cope with that on the job with our colleagues.
In addition, this allows teachers to work together to develop coping strategies.
For instance, it’s never good to meet a student’s anger with yelling or fury of your own. Educators need to find ways to de-escalate and bring the tension down in the classroom.
Finally, it is essential that teachers are allowed the latitude to go home from their jobs.
By that, I don’t mean that teachers are held hostage, that any district forces their staff to stay in the building 24/7. I mean that many teachers find it difficult to go home and stop being teachers. We’re always on. We need time to turn off and tune out.
Educators often take mountains of work home, grade papers, call parents, etc. All on their own time.
Every district can accomplish some of it TOMORROW.
If we want to continue having teachers – I mean flesh-and-blood teachers with college degrees and hard won experience, not just technology, apps or a rotating cast of minders and babysitters – we have to take care of them.
They take care of our children.
It’s time we gave back what they need to get the job done.
It’s time we gave back the respect they deserve.
It’s time we gave them the opportunity to heal from the trauma of coping with our children.
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