The Pandemic’s Final Victim: Education
During almost a decade teaching in a classroom, I have been whipped with a belt, had a desk thrown at me, stopped a student from hitting the other with a fire extinguisher, had a kid punch the wall behind my head, was threatened with a gun, been told I am ugly, stupid, boring, and suck at my profession. I have been spit on, cussed out more times than I could count by parents and students, told how to do my job by people not trained in my job, had my grades changed by administration without my knowing, all while making the equivalent of 15 dollars an hour for a job that requires a master’s degree. These are just a handful of the most memorable moments. Not to mention the fact I have taught in high achieving schools in both New York City and Boston. I taught in schools with 95% graduation rate and 92% four year college placement rate.
This was just the norm, the daily life of a teacher in our modern world. I also do not want those statements to take away from the beautiful work we were still able to accomplish in our classrooms. We ran debates on marijuana, gun control, abortion rights, and freedom of speech in the classroom. We wrote beautiful poetry, creative dystopian novels, and investigated our ethnicities. We laughed, we cried and learned many of life’s toughest lessons for all our students who ranged in every socio-economic background. Life has not been easy for anyone the past two years. Never mind a teenager.
But during the past two years, as the pandemic has raged on, and I have found myself, us teachers as society’s whipping boy (along with our healthcare staff, which is a whole other story), I am at the point where I feel I must leave the classroom. I no longer want to be the minimum wage, sacrificial lamb. The juice is definitely not worth the fucking squeeze. And it breaks my heart to even murmur such a statement about a profession I once loved. A profession that gave my grandfather a great life and my mother an even better one. This pandemic has truly shown me how society views us educators, the ones responsible for the knowledge and wisdom that the future generations hold. It told us America doesn’t care.
I want to be careful here because for every self-indulgent pest of a student, there are incredibly kind, funny, hard working students. For every helicopter parent that tries to explain to me how to do my job, there is one who trusts me with the education of their child. For every administrator that tries to change my grades, my curriculum, or undermine the authority of which I try to build into my daily classroom structures, there is one that supports and builds a culture of inclusivity, kindness and a culturally relevant curriculum. There are no absolutes in anything, not all one school, one grade, one subject, one community perfect, nor totally hopeless.
But during the past two years, I have realized I am just a cog to keep the economy going.
No one cared about our well being, they said they did, but the words were lost to the ether like a fart in the wind. We went back too early, stayed as numbers spiked, putting us and our families at risk, all so people could return to work places that didn’t care about them either. Testing in schools has been a joke, transparency with numbers a complete and utter fabrication. However, I will note the legal guidelines from state to state in regards to these procedures are about as clear as the directions to put together an IKEA dresser. Even if a school had the best intentions, states have made it nearly impossible for us to follow the ever changing arbitrary rules of masks, distancing, testing, and vaccination requirements.
And on top of all of this, the value of education in our culture which was already on a steep decline plummeted into the depths of Narnia, never to be resuscitated again. I was told I couldn’t assign new work or grade work for students who were quarantined. When they returned they did not have to make anything up. Students who were present, the lowest grade they could receive was a 50. You know how hard it is to fail when you are only graded out of a 50?
Students now looked at school, not as a place to learn, but a place to be free of the pandemic and socialize. They didn’t care about their grades because the messaging from higher up was that the grades didn’t matter anymore. The slim value many had placed on education disappeared faster than CDC guidelines.
It is hard to say that all is lost in education. However, so much needs to change. What that change is, is more nuanced than I have the time or energy to lay out here. But it begins with the notion and idea that education is not an obligation, it is a privilege. For too long students have looked at us as if they were obligated to be present and we should be thankful they filled our seats. We have lost the value of education as an American society and culture. Education is a privilege people in history have fought and died for. It is a necessary one, to help us break the cycle of poverty for so many underserved communities. Education is an opportunity, but in America we have turned it into a babysitting service. One built on an archaic industrialist model where we award conformity and crush imagination and creativity. And I for one cannot sleep at night knowing I am continuing to build more cogs on the industrialist wheel of society.
I want to help build up students, create activists, protestors, agents of change in this world. I want to open their eyes to all the beauty and opportunity and not just tell them it’s a doctor, lawyer, nurse, engineer or business woman.
Our world is changing but the American education system is not and our country, our children, and our future are being left behind. It was evident before the pandemic, but the way we have abused our educators, when we should have been supporting them, has truly shown me how little our society thinks of us.
However, I am not completely hopeless, because I do know so many of the students out there today are great kids, and I hope they will prove the current generation in power that they are wrong about education. That they will not be another pawn in their game. That they will embrace creativity, imagination and make their world a better place, since the current generation has failed us all with an inability to modernize, evolve and change with our too big, yet ever shrinking world.
