Teaching in the Time Of Coronavirus

Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress. — Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

When people discover that I am an English teacher, the conversation politely, and invariably starts with something like, “Oh, you’re an English teacher, what books do you teach?” I only have a couple of seconds to gauge an appropriate reply. If it seems like the intent of the conversation is the exchange of banal platitudes, I usually just lamely say Lord of the Flies, or Of Mice and Men. If I am feeling antagonistic, I say that I still make kids read Romeo and Juliet out loud so all the other students can laugh at bad readings of Shakespeare. And if I am feeling really ambitious, I tell them that I don’t really make kids read books anymore. Hopefully, this somewhat inaccurate assertion is enough to make someone inquisitive.

The reason why I hope to engage people on this level is to challenge the classic notions of how students learn. It is also to highlight the complexities of literacy as our society moves ever increasingly into dystopic online realities. If they take the bait, I usually try to explain that most of my kids aren’t really literate in the traditional sense anymore. This kind of dialogue requires an intensive and nuanced deconstruction of how drastically our world has changed since the creation of AOL chat, My Space, and dial-up by the minute internet, and it is why I am reluctant to be honest about what — and how — I teach. We are moving rapidly into a different textual space. Language has evolved so rapidly that it is hard to track the changes from the printed word even 30 years ago. The acceleration has occurred so rapidly that we have yet to determine the impact of this new textual landscape and how it may impact our relationships with each other.

Getting students to read is challenge enough. It is certainly made harder when a student is asked to choose between reading 30 pages of Hamlet or watching The Tiger King. The difference is that one is challenging and textually complex, the other is passive, escapist, and well, terrible. Part of my actual curriculum is directed towards getting kids to think about how they receive text (like The Tiger King), and how they begin to amalgamate the stories of our collective human experiences. I spend a bit of time in particular getting them to consider the implications of how we might as humans develop intimate and complex relationships with one another through such a medium as the internet, where our empathy is challenged by the very distortion of space and time that the internet creates.

I give them an apt example: It’s easier to break up with someone online than in person. Most everyone agrees and this is where kids begin to get it. When we create physical distance from each other, it’s easier to care less about each other. We lose the power of empathy, and we are actually more inclined to disengage with people, seeing them as characters, something to twitter about. Unfortunately, we are not characters, and the much-celebrated internet trainwreck that was The Tiger King, actually included the tragic, violent, and horrific death of someone, on camera. I submit these sorts of carnival atrocities as evidence of our growing disconnect between what is real, and what we begin to perceive as fictional. There is a very real human cost that surreptitiously finds its way into our intimate relationships with other human beings. We become profoundly detached.

On Tuesday August 11th of this year, I was reminded of that very lesson at a remote school board meeting. Despite hours of impassioned, intelligent, and careful public comment, our Missoula County School District Board of Trustees approved a motion on a 7–2 vote, based upon the recommendation of our superintendent, that we return to in-person learning. The participants in the Zoom chat, those who still had their cameras on, were speechless. The comments started rolling in: “You will have blood on your hands.” “Look forward to the civil suits.” “How dare you.”

Without skipping a beat, the board moved on to their next item of business. I wondered, how would this have been different if all these people had been in that room giving comment, standing at a podium, body and voice shaking? Would the meeting have continued? I imagine a different scenario where the trustees and district administration are shouted down and cannot continue, or maybe, so moved by the pleas of their fellow human beings, they vote to keep school online until it is safe to return. But instead, in our new world of social distancing, and community meetings online, there was just the incessant but silent scrolling of the chat thread as people vented their rage and grief. The voices eventually went silent. Instead of a physical show of collective disappointment, people resigned themselves to simply logging off, facing the coming weeks alone, isolated, maybe relegated to typing their frustrations into Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.

I thought about how it’s easier to lose empathy for people when we don’t have to look them in the eye. I thought about all of those human stories wrapped up in literature, the “walk a mile in my shoes” type narratives that we asked students to consider, the delicacy of human experiences in the poetics and highly nuanced stories of all cultures. The ubiquitous nature of human suffering has never gone away, it has never disappeared from our stories. The textual experience within the pages of book. It has just become an oddity distilled down to our highly visual memetic screen lives, something we can examine at arm’s length through the distal spaces of our opaque internet experience. This sort of internet isolation has only been exacerbated since the realization of a global pandemic and we are now rapidly attempting to convert ever more of our human lives into the confines of our browsers and bandwidths.

So. To be sure, I am acutely aware of the complications that arise as we attempt to cultivate spaces for academic and emotional growth online and I understand just how important physical proximity is to developing lasting and meaningful relationships with students. With that being said, I also have serious concerns about returning to schools in the midst of a pandemic where in some cases, teachers and students will be asked to be in close contact with one another for hours a day. The contradictions are everywhere and immediate. We are jarred continually by this cognitive dissonance. There is no choice, only the illusion of choice.

I will be clear, I have loved my teaching life. And just like every teacher I know, I want to go back. But it has to be safe for everyone and as it stands currently, our current plan is not good and it stands to put many at risk.

It isn’t probable that everyone visits a school and understands the complications of going back. There are too many logistical complications to innumerate but I will try and highlight a few.

Some recommendations for a safe return to school that have been communicated by entities such as the CDC, WHO, and the Missoula County Health Department:

Teachers will be expected to identify potentially symptomatic students.

Teachers are not medically trained nor can anyone discern between the common cold, the flu, and coronavirus. People also prefer to mask the worst of symptoms with palliatives. Who doesn’t enjoy a little reprieve from a bad cold or flu but what happens in the middle of the day when the Advil or Tylenol wears off? Not only will it prove fruitless to identify potentially symptomatic students, it will also create an atmosphere of shame, where students who have no other choice but to go to school, may be asked to go to a “sick room” for the rest of the day until their parents can pick them up.

All students will be expected to wear masks, every day, in every classroom, during every passing period.

If you have ever watched high school students in their “natural environment,” you know that most mandates are met with resistance. Just try getting a teenager to put away their cellphone much less wear protective personal equipment in a consistent and safe manner. What happens when kids leave the classroom? What happens when they go to lunch?

As of this writing, the school district is still allowing all juniors and seniors to be released for lunch and will be able to go off campus. There will be no oversight when 13 kids are crammed into a station wagon for lunch.

Additionally, recent studies suggest that not all masks have the same ability to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. A Duke University study showed, visually, that medical grade surgical masks were best at minimizing particulate matter where neck gators and bandannas were the worst.

Will teachers and administrators then be asked to make determinations about the efficacy of individual personal protective equipment?

Students, should they meet criteria, may not be required to wear a mask due to a preexisting medical condition. In some cases, privacy laws do not allow for those conditions to be made available to teachers or other students. How will we know if a student isn’t wearing a mask out of medical necessity or if they just “don’t believe coronavirus is a thing”?

Students will be limited to small cohorts in order to minimize close contacts in the event that contact tracing is needed for a potentially positive case.

On the surface, the notion of limiting contacts is practical but the intent is quickly called into question when we examine the rest of a student’s school day. As of today, there has been little change for students wishing to pursue extracurricular activities. As a representation of the population, fall activities can make up close to a quarter of students in any given high school. These students will be traveling in buses to other communities in Montana, in extended close contact. They will travel to Bozeman and Billings where the cases are much higher than Missoula. Extracurricular activities will essentially cross-pollinate coronavirus across the state and back into our community quite effectively.

I cannot imagine the logistical impossibilities of tracking close contacts should a player test positive. Those same students, competing across Montana, will return to the classroom, sometimes the very next day.

And remember, anywhere from 20–40% of adolescents are asymptomatic. The potential for spreading the virus will be remarkable.

For the purpose of limiting class sizes, while still maintaining academic rigor, high school students will be in two different classes for 2.5 hours a day. They will spend 11 days in person, and 11 days online. This will be the extent of their exposure to any content area for each semester.

From a pedagogical perspective, this will be remarkably ineffective. No teacher can possibly be expected to deliver a semester’s worth of curriculum in 40–60 hours of total contact time. Furthermore, not even adults have the capacity to digest that amount of information in one sitting. Teachers are also now being asked to relinquish precious preparation time in order to serve as stand-ins for teachers who are telecommuting.

So yeah, I get it, it is easy to highlight the problems. It’s easy to complain. The problem is immensely complex. Many students need the many supports available at school but it has to be safe. So how should we be examining this massive problem? What are workable solutions?

It might be best to start with asking questions about the essential nature of education as part of a functioning society. How does modern education come to terms with more classical notions of knowledge and citizenry? For some time, in the distant and antiquated world, education was nothing more than the acquisition of knowledge — sometimes as an intrinsic need and sometimes as a way to inform our understanding of our fellow human beings. It has only been in our recent industrialized societies that the intent of education is to create “products” for consumption. Each student a product to be consumed, some with varying degrees of value and quality.

If we seek knowledge under the assumption that it leads towards a collective and common good, then we should find this useful when trying to understand the impediments of trying to “make kids learn” under such extraordinary circumstances such as, oh let me see, a pandemic.

Here are a couple of thoughts:

1. Shed our outdated notions about learning. Expect that students will no achieve “standardized benchmarks.” Drastically reduce the expectations for grade-level content while still providing enriching opportunities. If we deviate from unrealistic national and state standards, then teachers are free to explore, and create individual student plans of action that are realistic in scope, encourage agency, and provide for fruitful, and collaborative co-inquiries for students and teachers.

2. We have already seen the University of California system waive the requirement for ACT and SAT and we know that standardized tests are a form of gatekeeping and that wealth all but guarantees higher standardized test scores. We only limit ourselves with such reductive notions as grade levels and grading systems.

3. Identify the students who really need to be in school, not for academic achievement, but because they need a safe place. Let them come to school to sleep, to exercise, to read or play games in the library.

4. Give teachers who feel safe being at school hazard pay. This should be normalized not just for teachers but for all workers deemed as essential.

5. If teachers are at higher risk, or are caretakers for family who are immune compromised, let them teach online but make sure that it isn’t confined to large Google meeting or Zoom classes. One to one instruction, even if it is through an online platform, isn’t a perfect replacement for in-person learning, but we will have to make do.

Public education has become an integral part of our society. The reasons for returning should not be based on the rhetorical language of politics. The argument about students being left behind would be way more plausible if our country hadn’t spent the last 30 years reducing funding for public education.

If there really is true concern about the millions of students who may potentially be left behind, then maybe we should be looking more closely at the larger systemic inequities that serve to marginalize millions of students every year like pervasive poverty and institutionalized racism, not just saying how important it is to “get kids back to school.” The raging national debate is a red herring. It only serves to create a greater rift between groups of people who are fundamentally not in disagreement.