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General News    H4'ed 6/1/21

Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Living in Pandemic Purgatory, Up Close and Personal

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The energy, problem solving, and logistics involved in creating a "solution" to our individual childcare problems in the midst of a pandemic will undoubtedly be familiar to many parents. The disastrous spread of Covid-19 forced families to repeatedly engineer solutions to seemingly impossible, ever-evolving problems. It stretched families, especially women, to our breaking points.

It's no wonder, then, that the push to restore the only support most of us rely on for free, consistent, and dependable childcare and resources - the public school - remains one of the most urgent and divisive issues of this period. However, the toxic dialogue that developed around in-person versus online learning created a false dichotomy and unnecessary rancor between parents and teachers. The idea that somehow there was a conflict between what teachers (like me, often parents, too) and non-teaching parents desired functionally obfuscated the true situation we all faced. Parents didn't want their children to suffer and they needed the resources and childcare support schools provide. Teachers wanted a safe school environment for our students and us - and not one more person to die, ourselves included.

If nothing else, the pandemic served as a stark reminder of at least two things: that the nuclear family is not enough and that schools can't be its sole safety net. The ethos of toxic individualism that permeates this society can't sustain families in such crises (or even, often enough, out of them). It's a shoddy stand-in for a more communal and federally subsidized version of such support.

Since March 2020, we've suffered as our children suffered because we've had to do so much without significant help. And yet teachers like me endured our jobs through those terrible months at enormous personal cost, even as we were repeatedly punished on the national stage for doing so. We were called selfish, accused of being lazy, and told to toughen up and shut up, even as the most unfortunate among us lost their lives. What's been missing in this conversation is the obvious but often overlooked reality that many teachers are also parents. Almost half of all teachers have school-aged children at home and, let me just add, 76% of all public school teachers are women.

What Students Actually Learned This Year

By the time my aunt, who contracted Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, died of sudden and inexplicable heart failure in October, I was no longer able to pretend that my personal life was separate from my professional persona. Isolated from my larger family, I found myself grieving the loss of a beloved relative without the normal rituals or sort of support I would have had under other circumstances. On the morning of her death, I logged on as usual and taught each of my classes, digging deep to make it through the day. I then cooked, cleaned the house, answered emails, and negotiated my own sadness. There just wasn't the space or time to stop and grieve.

Despite waking with a heavy heart morning after morning, I would still log on and try to connect with my students. I had to ask myself: if I was feeling this exhausted, worn-down, grief-stricken, and anxious, how were they feeling? I had the benefit of financial security, experience, and years of therapy, and I was still really struggling. My students were coping with the loss of their autonomy, routines, and social worlds. Some had lost family members to the virus, a few had even contracted it themselves. Others were taking care of younger siblings or working jobs as well to support desperate families. Some were simply depressed. It was a wonder that any of them showed up at all.

I decided I would have to shift my thinking about what learning should look like in that strange pandemic season. If my students owed me nothing and their time was a gift, then I would have to approach teaching with a kindness, openness, and willingness to listen unmatched in my 20 years in the profession. I showed up because I knew that, even if students were silent and didn't turn their cameras on, most of them were actually there and were, in fact, taking in far more than they were being given credit for.

Extraordinary learning has taken place in this school year. It's just not the learning we expected. All the hand-wringing and fears of students' "falling behind," not taking in specific material in the timelines we've adopted for them, reflect the setting of goalposts that are completely arbitrary. That way of thinking is rooted in viewing certain kinds of students as eternally deficient and their struggles as individual failings rather than indications of historically inequitable systemic design and deprivation, or extraordinary circumstances like those we faced together this year.

The skills and the knowledge we promote as most valuable are tied to workforce demands - not to what should count as actual life learning or growth. When you narrow achievement to what's quantifiable, you miss so much. You fail to see just how infinitely resourceful and resilient kids can actually be. You ignore skills and learning that haven't historically been considered valuable, because it can't be quantified. We've become accustomed to looking for skills that can be neatly measured and distributed like any other commodity. We've adopted standardized benchmarks, standardized modes of assessment, standardized testing, and standardized curriculum, but the truth of the matter is that knowledge is rarely neat and tidy, or immediately measurable.

This year our children figured out how to navigate complex technologies and online platforms, and many did so, despite considerable disadvantages. They had to learn how to self-regulate, how to deal with complex time management, often under genuinely difficult circumstances at home. Older students sometimes had to sort out not just how to manage their own schooling, but that of younger siblings. Some of my students demonstrated extraordinary emotional growth. Sometimes, they would even talk with me about how the pandemic had shifted their understanding of themselves and their relationships. They learned the beauty of slowing down and the preciousness of family and friends. They have a far clearer sense now of what's most worth valuing in life as they step back into a world radically altered by Covid-19.

As it happens, much of their learning has taken place outside school walls, so they've developed a deeper understanding of the forces that shape and control their world. Students in Oregon watched climate crises unfold in the form of catastrophic wildfires in the fall and terrible ice storms in the winter. Together, we all had a real-time civics lesson in the fragility of our democracy. They watched - and a number participated in - a civil-rights uprising. They experienced their families and their communities being torn apart by political divisions, conspiracy theorizing, and a deadly virus. They suffered as the holes in what passed for America's social safety net were exposed.

And yet most of them continued to show up for school day after day, still trying. And it's a goddamn miracle that they did!

One More Layer

When it was announced that we would be returning to our school buildings in late April, I realized I had finally hit my own personal wall. My daughter, who attends school in a different district from the one where I teach, was to be in-person at school for only 2 hours and online for the remainder of the day. I, on the other hand, would be required to be in my building full-time, four days a week (with Wednesdays still remote). I had no options for outside childcare and no extended family or friends who could help me cobble together a plan.

Logistically, my husband and I were at an impasse. Personally, I was a mess. I'd lost four more loved ones and our cat had been eaten by a coyote. My husband, struggling to remain sober without the support of his recovery community, relapsed. My daughter had become increasingly anxious and fearful. When I tried to problem-solve an answer to our childcare predicament, my mind simply shut down.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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