Two Years In: How are Teachers Managing?

We are coming up on that milestone. I’m talking the two year milestone of Covid. It is March something something and it’s coming in hot. I saw a picture being shared on social media this weekend, with a bunch of teachers lying down in the hallway of their school (masked up of course) and a lengthy post on the exhaustion of this career. I really felt that image in my bones. I would have never dreamed that we would be two years into this and just still feel it so resolutely. After a year of teaching through it, I felt like okay thats enough. Sort of the way I feel after taking cold medicine at night and the next day you have medicine head and you are real foggy, but still, like I have a job to do.

I think this year has been ten times rockier than last year. The hardest part for me personally is that I feel like I am dangling on the edge of a cliff and about to do a zip line. At the beginning of the year, people were like okay here’s your protective gear, your helmet, some knee pads, a bunch of people to cheer you on, extra water bottles and then as the year goes on, it feels like someone came up and said hey we actually need that helmet for some else and here’s some older, shittier knee pads, and you don’t have time for a water break and I’m going to take away your cheerleaders, but instead you will have to hold up some other humans while they try to zip line and they don’t have any protective equipment either and oh yeah some of the zipliners, this is their first year and they don’t know what they are doing, but you should support them, because that’s what you do, that’s your job and keep holding on through your lunch, and no special and and and you get the picture. This may sound dramatic, but it isn’t. It really isn’t.

I was watching my second graders do the i-ready assessment last week. I don’t know if you are familiar with this assessment or not. We have done it for maybe four or five years in Gardiner. It’s not a terrible assessment. It is a window into a kid’s mind, as all assessments can be. The hard part about it with these Covid babes is that, I have seen their math struggle this year and because I am compassionate and knowledgeable and a good human I have altered their math programming so that we can back up and learn some key concepts they missed while the world was shut down. For instance, when we did telling time, we met as group and we said first we need to make sure they can count by fives, and also know what am and pm is. Let’s make sure they know it to the hour before anything else and we were real awesome and strategic about it. I think the kids felt safe in their learning and supported. It wasn’t out of their reach and each day we baby stepped a little further. Now enter the i-ready, when after five questions (if you get them correct) all of a sudden the test begins to prompt questions around division. DIVISION. I watch their faces and some of them immediately asked to go to the bathroom, others began to do the click show, a few raised their hands and said their belly hurt. The problem with this school year is that we are asking kids to catch up, teachers are trying to help them make gains, but then we throw them curve balls every week that say hey you actually need to be right here in your learning and if you aren’t I’m going to give you ten questions/problems/prompts that are going to remind you just how far behind you actually are. It is like give someone a blanket after they come in from the cold and then ripping the blanket back and saying just kidding, go back to that feeling before, where you were cold and alone and miserable. It is also like saying I know you have felt safe and supported and ready the last few weeks, but now I’m going to show you images on the screen where you need the grit, knowledge and determination of someone who hasn’t lived through a pandemic.

I also have no idea what the guidelines are anymore. I literally don’t. When I had Covid in 2020 I had to be home 20 days and not step outside my house and wave away trick-or-treaters. Now if you have Covid, you are back to work after five days , and if your vaccinated you go to this Candy Cane Lane and lick three tater tots, and watch Jurassic Park the second one two times and you good. This is all well and fine except for some of us aren’t better in five days, so we should absolutely stay home, but there is no one to fill in for you, so your classroom of cherubs will be divided into small groups and the Fedex man will be asked to step in and do a read aloud. I’m joking, but I”m also not. At the beginning of Covid, I thought at the very least, we are telling people to stay home when sick. Finally, we have a system that says beating yourself into the ground isn’t worth it anymore, and we value our employees enough to say rest is the medicine. Now we are right back to the old mentality, of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The ups and downs are terribly strange.

The largest guilt I have for myself, is that I thought I would be further in my teaching in January. I really can’t use any of my January materials I have used in the past, because they are much too difficult, but the hard part is that as soon as I start making headway, students will be out for ten plus days and miss an entire unit/concept. Then a week goes by and the other half of the class misses an entirely different unit or concept. I don’t really think people get it. Teachers can’t teach what is missing, if students aren’t there to access it, and if they can access it, sometimes they don’t have what they need to access the lesson. I recently read that someone complained about a gift card Gardiner teachers received around Christmas time. I don’t know the depths of the complaint, but I literally went upstairs in my bedroom, looked at that gift card and said someone is going to have to rip this out of my cold dead fingers. After all the ringers we have been through, I think I am allotted this massage gift card without judgement or question. If the school board allowed me to speak on this, I think they would be frightened by the Jerry McGuire moment I would deliver. I would demand a goldfish and that gift card.

After all, the general public already knew teachers were up against it. Kids have been coming in cold, tired and hungry for years now. They have experienced trauma, abuse, neglect you name it. Now enter Covid and while teachers are trying to help with the above issues, then we have kids being pulled out of school for half the time they are supposed to be receiving help, but yet let’s keep the expectations the same, because that makes so much sense.

As negative as this blog as, I mean it to be eye opening. I intend for it be compassionate building. What can be done to support schools? to support teachers? to support kids? The tricks and the trades that have helped me this year may seem basic, or they may not. You may have ideas and feel free to share them with me if you do! Something I do this year with my Covid Babies is read to them all the time. I read to them big concept Martin Luther King books and I read them silly fart fart joke books. I read in voices and in whispers. We sit together on the rug and I let them talk about the books, with each other, with me. I encourage politeness and respect. We work on this every day, but regardless of their ability. THEY LOVE being read too and all students can access it. Not every activity should feel hard for a kid during the day and the read aloud part does not. I see all the faces soften, the bodies relax. I make time for it where I don’t have time for it. If I am ever observed and supposed to be doing something else, I have 35 different arguments on why this time is important, more now than ever before. If you are a new teacher or experienced, do not feel guilty for stealing time to read to these babies, if they are six or sixteen, especially if they have faced multiple quarantines and especially if they have a hard time reading themselves.

Something else I like to do is mindfulness videos. We like some of them on Go Noodle and we like some on YouTube. Our favorite is the one on the red balloon. I reward them with classroom tickets when they are doing the best mindful bodies. When they do these videos, I really try to sit and be mindful with them. My therapist reminds me, that just because I can multi task, doesn’t mean I should and that I need these breaks too. Sometimes I just box breathe other times I lotion my hands, the whole time that four minute video runs.

Another trick, is that I begin each math class session with grade one math fluency facts. I know I teach second grade, but practicing those doubles, addition to ten etc. is really needed and it empowers students to feel like they can do it. One of my largest superpowers is in writing and I still have several non-readers, so often times we grab clipboards and we write together. They help with the spelling and I model what several facts on polar bears looks like in twenty minutes. They look exhausted after, but not discouraged and that seems to be the happy medium with this year.

I also play ten positive praises in my mind during each new academic time of learning. I have a hard group in terms of behavior. Not everyone has official modifications or IEP goals, but I treat every student as if they do. WE ALL GET a restate of directions, everyone gets a visual schedule, all kids get breaks as needed. You get the picture. I do let small issues go, but I still find respect to be hard to come by. I say ten to fifteen times a day, if what the adult in the room is asking you to do is safe for your mind, body and spirit then please do it. I have never had kids argue what I am asking them to do as much as the group that I have now. I try to give them grace where I can, but I also remind them that the next teacher may not be as patient and what they just said sounds rude from any angle.

Before I end, I would love to see students supported in other ways as time goes. I think food could be healthier being served at school. For several months into school, we did breakfast bags and the items were all pre-packaged sugar encased brownie treats from what I could see. Students would eat them at 8:30 and by 9:30 look slumped on their desk from a sugar crash. Recently we started warm breakfast in the cafeteria again and behaviors have subsided, students have more sustained energy. I know vaccines are important, but so are getting good, healthy foods into kids on a consistent basis. I also think kids need more time to be physical and moving and more SLEEP. They are coming to school exhausted on a daily basis. Also, and this is a big also let’s give more school training and emphasis on mental health. These kids are undergoing more mental health issues than any other population in the past and how can we support them more? How can we carve out time to make this a priority? My own son misses academic time to see his school counselor and his teacher knows that is just as valuable as a math block. I want schools to stop acting like this mental health crisis is just for a few kids in each room and start noticing that the whole classroom population can benefit from strategies like mindful breathing, recharge time etc.

How could teachers be more supported? I get dizzy in thinking of all the ways. I think we can support teachers more by hiring more ed techs. I am not knocking coaches. I think literacy and math coaches are valuable, but in the short term I think we need more staff in classrooms to help emotional and academically support these needy students with large behaviors. The next three years will be an uphill battle to wage this war against Covid that has been created in schools and I think the extra manpower in the thick of it would be the most powerful. I also think we need to give teachers permission to take care of themselves and their families first and really mean it when we do it. I don’t know exactly what can be done to help with hiring more substitute teachers, but teachers need to take time for their medical needs and those of their kids, without feeling guilt. If we say put on your own oxygen mask first, we need to mean it. We also need to allot PD time to teachers where they HAVE TIME TO PLAN in their own teams. I have been to a lot of professional development this year and it is not useful to me, because my class is so all over the map that I can’t use it with the whole group or a small group and I can’t attack the learning loss that I have in my room because I’m spending time on something that isn’t even useful to me. I wish that districts could see that giving teachers time to work together on their classroom needs is not a waste of time, but instead kids will reap the benefits because the learning will be more individually tailored to them the next week.

I would apologize for how long this blog is, but I’m working on not apologizing so I won’t. Thank you for taking the time to read it. If you read it in it’s entirety you must love this profession or the kids who are just up against it. Thank you for supporting them and supporting us. One step at a time.