Teacher Talk
Brought to you by Nick Caraway.
The Carroways were having a lively discussion the other night about the vaccine. Ms. Carroway is one of those fake doctors that Epstein and all of the Fox News junkies were talking about. She got her doctorate in BioEngineering a little over ten years ago. I was able to call myself a doctor’s husband and we were also able to bet on whose family would be the first to ask for a prescription. Mine was first by the way when my uncle asked for the hook up.
I’m blessed to have my own health expert in the house through this whole ordeal. She’s talked about working for the CDC, but that would require a move. Left to my own devices would be disastrous. My D in freshman Biology isn’t impressing anyone. Most of us could learn a thing or two about listening to experts.
Anyway, she pointed out the breakdown in logic of teachers being near the front of the line. We don’t have to be doing in person instruction. It’s a choice the state and local districts are making. It reminded me of a scene from the movie “Soul Man” from the 1980s. The bank told the main character that loans were meant for students incapable of paying and not ones whose parents were just donkeys (deference to momma). See, his parents were rich but chose not to help him pay for school. Similarly, the state could protect us but have chosen not to.
The vaccine should go to workers that have to interact with those that are exposed or already positive. It makes perfect sense. The logic is unassailable and yet we all feel somewhat short-changed. I’ve watched our campus fly past ten positives. I’ve seen football and basketball games suddenly canceled at our daughter’s junior high. I know Joe Biden wants schools open so maybe Governor Abbott might actually come through and move teachers right behind health care workers and seniors. That seems to be what we are hearing. If it’s true all won’t be forgiven, but it will be a start.
Nick
More complicated than that. Since there is no apparatus for child care other than schools, at some point you have to vaccinate teachers and school staff in order to get parents out of the house.
OTOH, you have to vaccinate parents so it will be safe or children to home home after school.
Not possible to square that circle. The logical approach would be to vaccinate everybody in a small area and continue expanding that area, meanwhile the people outside the golden zone would take their chances.
But logic is not attractive.
1Plus, in-person school has other benefits – largely social development and other mental issues. Besides, the feedback on virtual learning seems to be that:
1) poor families are left out – no Internet, no virtual school access
2) anecdotal evidence suggests that most kids don’t do well in virtual classes. I know that I pay more attention in a live continuing education class than a virtual class, so I expect most grade school students have similar experiences.
In short, we need to give priority to reopening schools. Perhaps teachers and students get vaccinated sooner rather than later?
2I guess every kid and situation is different. My grandson is thriving with online classes. His grades have come way up from when he was in live classes. He and his mom are both really happy about that. She’s working from home too and says she wants to make it permanent. No commutes in traffic, time out in the day away from her desk for coffee breaks, lunch, and other interruptions that drag the workday out even more. She gets more done in less time and has more family time with him or for herself.
3This whole discussion leaves kids out of the equation. The vaccine is not yet approved for anybody under 16. They can give me all the vaccines they want, but I am not going in a building with a bunch of unvaccinated kids.
4Heard that Florida Gov. DeSantis is disregarding CDC guidelines to give the vaccine to the elderly first – not to front-line medical staff. It pissed me off! He didn’t care about the elderly when he reopened the state and let the virus spread! Why does he care now?
https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/regional/florida/desantis-unveils-vaccine-distribution-plan-elderly-first/67-866557da-9fc4-4fb7-a25b-775eb4e51320
5CDC can recommend. CDC can accumulate state plans and comment on them. But ultimately, the vaccines are going to states (and similar level governments) and they decide.
Priorities are tough, and every approach is going to be criticized for not doing it right.
Want to avoid deaths? Vaccinate those in congregate living for seniors and those who work there.
Want to avoid a shattered medical establishment? Vaccinate those who put hands on those with COVID — EMTs, nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists and the like.
Want to avoid state liability? Put prisoners near the head of the list.
Does the state want to broaden coverage by getting more people the first shot and delaying the second, or does it stick to the schedule?
How finely grained are priorities within general groups like “residents of long-term care facilities” or “essential workers”?
And should the government hold back a reserve of 1% or 5% of the doses to cover unexpected events, such as a plane crash or a break down in the logistics of keeping things really cold?
Choices are going to keep some at risk and protect others. And “my choice” ought to be respected, of course.
6I can remember getting the polio vaccine at school – why not have the school be a vaccination hub; teachers, students and parents.
7Harry Eagar: “Logical” would be everyone not yet vaccinated following all necessary restrictions: staying home, keeping a distance from people, quarantining with any sign of illness, with a government that did the right things from the beginning (hard, monitored shutdowns, mass testing, contact tracing.) That’s how some nations successfully returned to normal as early as summer. We, of course, didn’t do that. Even now, 323,000+ deaths into it, we still insist people without masks claiming it’s a hoax, we still allow state governments to decide whether or not to issue a call for more masking and social distancing, we still don’t have an enforceable national standard for diagnosis. As a result our financial burden from disease, per capita, is higher (not lower) than the countries whose policies held the spread down.
In the present state of things, nothing we do un terns if vaccine distribution choices, is going to stop this pandemic now or return us to “normal.”
RepubAnon: In-person school *can* have other benefits, though most of those could be fixed fairly simply if funds were made available. Poor families: ensure housing and food security *in the residence* and ensure internet access–plus, train schools not to change plans suddenly when students aren’t there to be told about it.
Social development: the people burbling on about social development necessary, etc, should be aware that family centered education has a good track record and low-level US schools do not. Again, it’s school failure, largely for lack of funding, but also because of lack of appropriate socialization of teachers and staff. Schools still punish the weak and reward the bullies. Teachers (some, not all) still denigrate and verbally & emotionally abuse children, and police in schools abuse them physically as well…and these adult bullies are rarely if ever corrected, let alone fired or charged with child abuse.
School is not the “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” kind of place for children, where it’s safer than home and adults are fair, even if harsh. Not anymore. Teachers now have ridiculed and shamed poor children in front of others for receiving free or cut-rate food, and some schools have punished them by feeding them less (and less quality) food than “normal” children. When poverty is considered a “sins of the fathers/mothers,” the children are punished because they’re available by law. There are school systems (let alone individual teachers) who *want* poor children to be made miserable to “teach them (and/or their parents) a lesson” and this Administration put a cruel-hearted hater of public education in charge of it.
The happiest days of my 12 years of public school were the ones I didn’t have to go to school because it was closed (or the blissful week in third grade when my mother convinced the school to let me leave a week early and I didn’t have another hour with the vicious tyrant who had made me the butt of all her animosity for 9 months. She was one of several teachers who found a fatherless girl every year to bully, knowing a widow or divorcee didn’t have the power to get the kid moved to a better class.
Were there benefits? Yes, but our schools, poor as they were, weren’t as bad as the public schools in Black areas of large cities like NYC, Neward, St. Louis, Chicago, etc. Our toilets worked; the walls and ceilings were solid, everyone had a desk and textbooks (old textbooks, the sign-in list full and overflowing, but they had all their pages). Class sizes were large, and the buildings weren’t new (the ones I was in–on the other side of town some were newer) but so much better than the schools Kozol and others have described. At least for Anglo kids. Hispanic kids had it rougher, even in the same classrooms as Anglos.
So I’m not a fan of the “Public in-person education is wonderful” without admitting where it’s failed, and the reasons behind that: racism, poverty, sexism, all intertwined. We had a great idea: we executed it poorly.
8Elizabeth Moon, wise words, will said. We have a long, long way to go.
9Elizabeth, I never went to public school but my children and grandchildren did.
I could tell many stories but will do just one. My younger children joined the high school drama group (a full-time elective not just a fall and spring production). It was a school with more ethnic groups and animosities than you have ever encountered but the drama teacher rose above all that.
There was a girl with moderate Down syndrome. So that year the teacher staged “The Miracle Worker” with that girl in the Helen Keller role.
I sat next to the girl’s grandparents in the front row. They never saw a thing, they were blubbering the whole time.
As far as I am concerned, they can burn down every private school in the country. Things like that don’t happen there.
10Watched Biden announce his nominee for Secretary of Education (man I’ll be glad when Devious Devos packs up all her special interests and gets out of our lives).
11Biden at least shared plans about reopening schools that weren’t just shallow comments that we’ve been hearing from Trumpf and other repugnantican politicians (just open schools).
Problem is, it will require a vaccine that can include all school kids (which it currently is not tested for), enough vaccine doses (which is months away), and funding from congress which if Mitch is still in power makes it all wishful thinking.
In the mean time, sending kids back to school will have unintended consequences when outbreaks can be traced back to students. Example- schools would face closing down again. Then, exposed kids would no longer be able to get care from grandparents (as would be the case in my family) or others leading to their parents having to make work choices.
My opinion is things need to be really buttoned down before schools reopen broadly.
Need a recipe for Lex Luthor, Superman’s nemesis?
Put a really smart kid in public school.
They will usually get bullied and harassed for “being smart”.
Desocialized smart people. Just what we need.
I should know.
Education is not the cure for what ails democracy.
I think democracy has a shelf life.
I think it’s due for the garbage can.
12Elizabeth, I’m not going to disagree with anything you said. Most of the people I’ve worked with have been kind and honest, but I’ve certainly known more than a few who weren’t. My family has been in the school business for at least four generations. There’s a school near Dallas named after my great great aunt. My grandmother taught in a one room schoolhouse. Both my parents and my sister are in or have been.
That being said, that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the issues. Our entire campus gets free breakfast and lunch but I could see issues happening in different places. I could go on and might in a different post.
13OK, here’s another one. During the Depression my great aunt was principal of a school on the wrong side of the tracks. Some of her pupils were truant because they had no clothes. Literally, nothing to wear.
She got a wagon and worked up one side of Main Street and down the other extorting clothes and shoes for her kids from the businesses. (It helped that her brother had a haberdashery there.)
I’ll wait while someone comes up with an example of a private school doing that. I’ve got lots of time.
14Harry, we all know no private school is going to do that. Thank you for reminding us.
15Thank you Harry.
Retired teacher, daughter and granddaughter of teachers, mother and grandmother to current teachers here.
Over the years, I was blessed to travel a bit throughout the country and to visit classrooms across the nation. I continue to have friends in both public and private schools here in the US and abroad. So I’ve been to urban schools where the roof leaks, the toilets don’t run and heating was considered optional as well as to rural areas that pay their teachers so poorly that they automatically enrolled them in what we once referred to as the food stamp program. I mention this to both explain that my perspective is based on personal experience and to explain that inequities can and do occur.
Are there bad teachers? Obviously, just as there are bad doctors, lawyers, and police officers. Should they still be in classrooms? No. But the vast majority of teachers I’ve met do an astounding job with what they are given to work with. The thing is everyone is an expert on education because virtually everyone has experienced 12 or more years engaging in it. And everyone almost certainly encounters, if not a bad teacher then certainly a teacher whose instructional style doesn’t mesh with theirs – it’s a given.
But when all is said and done, public schools are the last great egalitarian institution in America. There is a reason that Republicans persist in attacking and defunding them.
Here’s the bottom line, if you want schools to be open you have to vaccinate school personnel (this includes: custodial, secretarial, transportation and food service personnel).
My son teaches in Kansas, three of my grandkids go to school there. The family has had to isolate 4 times since the start of school. My former colleagues here in Missouri, in one of the most demographically diverse urban schools in the nation, are at the breaking point, constantly getting asked to teach in person & online, and continually being exposed to the virus. What we are doing now isn’t sustainable. There are no substitutes left and there isn’t money for them even if there were. Teachers no longer have planning periods, they are covering other, sick or quarantined teachers classrooms. The buildings are so old that good ventilation isn’t possible!
I’m a cancer patient, my husband has 3 risk factors we could go first, we aren’t pressing for this, we are staying home. People like Nick and my son, and grandson need it.
I pray Biden will, at the very least do what Germany & New Zealand have done, actually make education important and prove it by upgrading air quality in public buildings like the educational institutions.
Blessings to all, stay home, wear a mask if you have to go out, and know that schools need all the help and support they can get!
16I went to Catholic schools for 14 years. It was during the period when Catholic schools were beginning to hire lay teachers (one of them my mom).
I never got a lay teacher. “You are so lucky to have had nuns all the way,” people would say.
I didn’t feel that way. 60 years later I am still unlearning some of the crap they pushed. But that was institutional, the fault of the bishops.
Those women were devoted. They lived in genuine poverty; at one point while I was in high school, the nuns actually were missing meals because they didn’t have money for food. (That school went broke and closed.)
Here in Carroll County, the Republicans (we don’t have any Democrats) are insulting the teachers, saying they just want to collect a check without working.
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