This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Honestly, it's been hell on earth for grown-ups. Thanks largely to Donald Trump and crew, we're in the country with by far the highest Covid-19 death rate of any wealthy nation on earth. The U.S. has already left the official count of 900,000 deaths in the dust (and unofficially has surely suffered far more of them). These two pandemic years have seen a rise in isolation, depression, panic, fear, gun-buying, violence, you name it, as American adults have struggled with what they can and can't do in a world of raging illness and raging politics.
So perhaps it goes without saying but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be said that life has similarly been hell for teenagers.
I mean, their parents turned the very closing or opening of schools into a political dog fight. As the Trumpists, in particular, did their best to transform disease hell into a raging political crisis, adolescents often found themselves grimly isolated, unable to attend school in person for long periods of time, and sometimes without friends, except online. And when they did return to the classroom, the crisis only seemed to grow. Gun incidents in schools, for instance, rose precipitously, as did violence of other sorts, while teen suicide attempts multiplied. And as the New York Times reported about one Pennsylvania public school, "[E]veryone talks of an alarming crisis in student mental health" Behavioral problems have mushroomed, there have been suicides and attempted suicides, and a huge share of students seem to have become disconnected, at a loss when asked to do things as simple as gather into groups." Under the circumstances, no one should be surprised, that high school graduation rates fell for the first time in decades.
In short, American schooling has been in a chaos all its own for these last two desperate years and TomDispatch regular Belle Chesler, a public-school teacher in Oregon, has experienced it, up close and personal. Today, she offers us another look at what high school feels like in the era of pandemic hell, not just for her but for her teenaged students. It's a perspective we've seen too little of in these last two years. Tom
Crisis in the Schools
A Return to a Normal That Was Never Good Enough
It feels odd to admit this, but I miss the stillness of the first few disorienting and terrifying weeks of the pandemic, when the noise and hustle of my world quieted down. In March and April of 2020, spring somehow seemed more riotously colorful and gratuitously lush. Choruses of birds replaced the sounds of cars in my neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Gone was a traffic-filled commute and the energetically grueling weekday rituals of my past 17 years teaching at a large public high school. My house and my family became the locus and focal point of my day. Our tiny universe contracted, as we navigated the first year of the pandemic together, an island of three.
On returning to in-person school for what many hoped might be a "normal school year" in September 2021, I realized that a not-so-subtle shift had occurred in me. I was relieved to be back in the building with my colleagues and overjoyed to see my students in person instead of on Zoom, but I felt crushed by the sensory overwhelm of it all.
Being at school was both eerily familiar and strangely scary. The building itself seemed to roar and echo as voices bounced off every surface. Everywhere, bodies pushed too close. The required social distancing of that moment simply didn't exist. We careened into and away from each other in the hallways, everyone oddly awkward and unstable, wary of the potential threat of the virus and of one another. The sheer volume of shared togetherness felt terrifying. I left school each day hollowed out from speaking so many words and interacting so closely with so many students and colleagues.
The visceral challenges of being back among 1,800 other humans during a raging pandemic would, however, prove just a precursor to an avalanche of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The effects of two years of pandemic schooling, both virtual and in-person, have taken their toll on all of us: students, parents, and teachers alike.
Recently, the chaos inflicted by the Omicron variant, including growing staffing shortages that range from missing substitutes, special-education aides, and school nurses to nutrition workers and bus drivers, widespread mental illness, and political strife have left our already struggling public schools in tatters and the people running them (myself included) exhausted . While public discourse has centered around who should be blamed for school-building closures, harassing librarians and teachers in an effort to ban books from our libraries and classrooms, and arguing about critical race theory that's supposedly being taught in our high schools but isn't, educators like me have been focused on simply trying to make sure our students are safe and supported in a time of unprecedented hardship and uncertainty.
So it comes as no surprise to me that, according to a study recently done by the Oregon Education Association, 37% of educators in Beaverton, the district where I teach, are considering leaving the profession at the end of this school year. In neighboring Portland that number rises to an alarming 49%. Those numbers represent the cumulative exhaustion of a workforce drained of its energy and resources and of a system no longer able to maintain the people it relies on to keep the very school doors open.
A Return to a Normal That No Longer Exists
Zoom-learning was soul-crushingly devoid of the laughter and energy of a traditional classroom and could never serve as a replacement for hands-on learning. However, it did, at least, offer a glimpse of the possibility of running schools in a different way, one that might include a learning experience more responsive to the educational, social, and emotional needs of all students.
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