If It Can't Possibly be Both, then Either Give us Masks OR Accommodations

If masks are a choice, then shouldn't being protected from a virus also be a choice?? The freedom to go maskless is butting up against the freedom from getting infected, in the worst way.

AVOIDING INFECTION IN UNIVERSITIES

Earlier this year, I raised some concerns with Covid as we removed mask mandates in my Master's program, randomly, in February. The response was very clear: If you can't make it to class due to health concerns (including trying to avoid catching a debilitating disease), you will have to withdraw from the program. There's no allowance for just listening to lectures after the fact or watching them live online. Although some professors set up their class for that possibility, the expectation is that every student is actually attending in person regardless any potential disability or condition that could cost them their lives for attending.  

And I really don't understand why. 

I love participating, but that can be done very easily with a live feed. Alternatively, a message board can be set up for additional post-class conversation. I did that over ten years ago when Facebook Groups first came out. There's never enough time to take every raised hand in class, so I created a place students could continue to discuss and debate. It also enabled quieter kids to participate. And it was super easy to do!

Is demanding in-person attendance just to ensure we're using the real estate that they've paid for? Because, at this point in our technological advances, I can't think of a single pedagogical reason that university courses must be received in a physical room. They say it's to do with CRPO guidelines, but there's a near-identical program at Yorkville that is entirely online. Unfortunately it's four times the price!! That wasn't the biggest stopper for me, though; it's that they'll only transfer over three of the seven courses I've taken so far, so I'd be pretty much starting over.

When I mention my concerns to friends now, they still insist I should be getting some kind of accommodations (so cute!), despite that not being a reality in any institution as far as I'm aware. If you can't physically come in to learn, then it sucks to be you! I can't wait to take the required course on Intersectionality (if I'm still in the program) and see them explain why those lessons on breaking down barriers don't mean we should be trying to actually dismantle disability barriers here, though.

One prof at York says, 

"Every university classroom that hasn't been updated for hybrid learning is a testament to this anti-social 'you do you' mindset." 

Absolutely.

Some universities have actually thrown out all their purifiers, so convinced that Covid is over - or so convinced to make sure every single students catches it, one or the other. 

 

Curious. 

AVOIDING INFECTIONS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Just over a year ago, in March 2022, we had masks in all schools and bent over backwards to help kids who couldn't make it to class. What provoked this full 180° flip that has us removing masks everywhere and removing accommodations? If there are no masks in class, then we have to teach differently, acknowledging all the illnesses and effects on the brain caused by Covid, and attendance in the room shouldn't be the top priority. 

Here's a good question from Missing the Mark: "If you were struggling with overwhelm at work, would attendance reminders help you? So why is it seemed okay for children in school?

This week online, I commented on this after seeing post after post of people at schools with missing teachers or completely unqualified substitute teachers or half their kids sick or rotating illnesses or recordings of all the coughing going on in the classroom because kids are being encouraged to come regardless of being sick since some schools are badgering families with letters home about the vital importance of attendance and making "absenteeism" a priority, more concerned with documentation of illness than academic supports!! Here's what I said,

"Pre-Covid, if a student was ill and expected to be off for more than a day or two, teachers had to create a package of work covering the time, to go home by the end of the day. Then we all learned how to teach remotely. Suddenly, students have to be in the room to learn. Why? Pre-Covid, I've successfully taught kids with GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) who could rarely come in. Since we're doing little to stop the spread of Covid, then we need to redesign education to account for multiple ongoing illnesses and for brain damage. THIS is learning to live with Covid."

It was mainly a sarcastic mini-rant about how we're doing bugger-all to prevent infection so we have to manage illness and brain damage instead, but people took it at face value, so I went along with that interpretation. The two-tweet thread took off in many different directions (about two million hits), and one was to pounce all over me for adding more to teacher workload, so I added this: 

"If we're not going to protect against this virus, we need to completely rethink education - not just add to the teacher's workload, which was done in the past." 

Then here's the gist of the rest of the discussion (sorry it's way too complicated to link to each individual comment, and most are amalgamations of comments. I wasn't expecting it to take off, and it really got away from me!):

Of course there was a whole thread of people insisting that Covid ended long ago and was no different than a mild flu or the common cold. And others that insisted I was calling for another lockdown. I ignored all of those and blocked the more aggressive of them.

And there were a few who said sick kids shouldn't be expected to do anything but get better all snuggled in bed. Absolutely! But we're focusing on the kids that are being sent to school despite being sick or contagious because of some weird, frantic worry about in-person attendance. 

Then there was one long thread of people who completely missed the point and just insisted vehemently that there have never been requirements for teachers to provide work for student who are absent, ever. Okay, but that doesn't change the reality that it was demanded of us, at my school, for years. We also had to provide work to Credit Recovery for kids who had failed our course the previous term, which is directly against the union rules, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I argued to my admin at the time that getting a call during an afternoon class that the following two-weeks worth of work must be prepared, photocopied and in a folder by the time a parent comes to collect it at the end of the day is an unfathomable expectation, and yet there it was!! These commenters focused on the reality that teachers can't be making packages for kids all the time, especially with so many more kids now sick over and over. They're so close to getting it. I just ignored all those comments in the thread.

But it's funny that even during the officially acknowledged Covid times, in 2021, when teaching a remote online class, I had a student who didn't have internet connection. That's right. You read that correctly. He signed up for fully online courses without internet access. I was expected to make all my online resources work on paper, print them all, collate them in a binder, and present them to the home-school VP at the other end of the region. The VP actually expected me to drive the work over to him, personally, that day. I refused because I walk to work, so he offered to meet me halfway. I opted to use the intra-school mail instead. Teachers and admin have always gone outside the rules if it's in the best interest of the kids. Why did we stop?

EXPECT LEARNING LOSS FROM COVID

Thankfully, many commenters recognized the jab at the crisis being faced: 

"Anyone expecting 'normal' education without learning loss and ignoring the pandemic will be disappointed. Not mitigating = learning loss. And teachers can't keep up."

"Hearing school boards say they're going to be pushing attendance policies makes me want to scream. 'The best place for them is at school'. NO, it's NOT. Schools are not safe spaces physically, psychologically, emotionally... and kids understand that. It's a systemic issue. Mine have been relentlessly bullied and are not psychologically safe." 

"Pushing attendance won't help kids. It will just make their data look better. When will policy be led by what the kids need?" 

"I wish schools better recognized the impact that Covid has had on many children's psyche. Most of my caseload right now has anxiety around school, but a desire to learn, and schools are doing little to accommodate them."

Schools are not safe for our kids - or our staff. Everything admin is doing to get kids in the door to get more funding is making kids more sick and causing more "absenteeism," which makes admin fight harder to convince parents to send their kids or else! 

This is a totally fucked-up downward spiral that will end with more dead kids and orphaned kids from catching a fatal virus from our schools.  

Quick aside to just barf out this brief conversation: "Covid isn't deadly. Stop exaggerating! I've had Covid, and I'm still here, perfectly fine." "Sure, but I've been in a car accident once, and I'm still here, perfectly fine. That doesn't mean car accidents aren't deadly and we should all stop wearing seatbelts, right??"

Right??

We need to re-think the expectations we have of students who are often sick or who have had their flippin' neurons fused together by Covid. 

"We've always had learning loss. We have just had enough success that we ignored it. For years, people have been saying smaller classrooms with more teachers are needed. Covid made the need much more visible." 

Most of the necessary curriculum of courses can be covered in much less time than is allotted for classes. I know the ministry demands 110 hours/course, but if you're an accomplished musician in your own right, do you really need 110 hours of grade 10 Music to demonstrate you have the skills to get the credit?

Some got bogged down by the bureaucracy involved in any change, forgetting that teachers famously close the door and do their own thing. I once had a student who was away for weeks after breaking both legs and one arm in a skiing accident. I told him just to skip that unit of the course. Just like that. Always easier to beg forgiveness than permission, and nobody even noticed this little scam I pulled. The curriculum police never showed up to take me away, and the student, specifically, in this instance, was far better served by having to learn less content. As much as I extol the importance of the humanities, I also recognize the foundational aspects of maths and sciences that are significantly more affected by missed lessons. We need to look at each kid holistically to serve their needs. He doesn't need to prove he knows some sociological theories that can be googled next year while scrambling to catch up in calculus that will be necessary for his first year of uni. 

I started my career under an NDP government that had us all discussing Outcomes Based Education models. We talked about a system in which students have to demonstrate proficiency in each learning outcome to get the credit, but it's not tied to a timeline. So some kids might get through their history course in half the time, but need a few terms to get through math. I was so pumped about that. Then the NDP got voted out of office, and all our exciting new ideas got tossed, and I never joined another committee knowing that all the work is for nought. But it's possible to think outside this box we've built for ourselves.

EDUCATION 3.0

"We ALL rethought teaching and education during remote instruction. We ALL had grand ideas of what post-remote in-person would look like. All we got from upstairs was BACK TO FUCKING NORMAL and I HATE HATE HATE IT!"

Most commenters picked up on how we need a complete redux of the system and came with a variety of ideas and rebuttals:

• We need to double the number of teachers (but there already aren't enough in the system) 
• Stream the classes live or record them (but teachers for young kids need personal interaction, and parents need babysitters)
• Keep a website of daily work, which many teachers already do now, and allow signing in to the website to count for attendance to work around the stupid funding model 
• For older classes and uni, remote teaching has been the norm for years in many fields; public education is behind the times on this
• Create flipped classrooms with videos of the lesson for all to watch at home at night, then kids just come in (or otherwise connect with the teacher) when they need help. 
• Another said to follow the university model that doesn't require consistent in-person participation. 

I would love that university model. Which universities do this, and why did any of them start taking names each class? I'm far too old to have my attendance monitored. Seriously!

Lots of commenters took the opportunity to complain about remote learning. It doesn't work if teachers can't picture how it can work, but I was very successful with it, running my classes like a call-in radio show with their choice of music starting each session and the freedom to put off a lesson on the first beautiful day of spring and tell everyone to go outside for the next hour, then tell me about it afterwards. It was easily my favourite teaching experience of my career. But teachers needed (and need) serious tech support. Half my profs don't understand how to effectively use the platform they're required to use. Some don't understand it to the point that we all have to email our work. 

Back when we had a half-in-class half-at-home scenario, I set up a hybrid situation. I just turned on a meet to enable everyone in the class to be heard at home and vice versa. We could have whole class discussions regardless how many were home at the time. That really felt like the way of the future to me. 

Many said we need to pay teachers better so they stay. They're likely American. I don't know any teachers in Ontario who leave because they just make $100,000/year by their tenth year of teaching. All the teachers I know who left early, left because of horrible administrators who ran their school into the ground with constant frivolous changes and rules that make no sense and the lack of rules where they're really needed and a total inability to authentically listen to staff. Jus' sayin'. 

COLLABORATIVE VIDEO LESSONS?

Here's one idea that's really outside the box: Instead of having thousands of individual teachers teaching more or less the same content across Ontario, get the best of the best (which is not TVO modules) to film the lessons for all the rest to use. This doesn't have to play into the hands of privatization if it's a bottom up initiative that continues to be publicly accessible and students continue to be supported by classroom teachers. Some will argue that no teacher would post their lessons for free, but definitely they would!! We're a pretty arrogant, showboaty lot, and I for one would happily post all the videos I made during lockdown and remote teaching!! The problem I've discovered, when I tried to make a high-school philosophy website for all teachers to share resources and ideas when the course first started up, isn't about money, but that teachers are so arrogant, they refuse to share their spectacular resources!! It's like they don't want other teacher having classes that are as good as their classes, as if we're in competition with one another. But there will always be some that care more about kids learning the material in the best way possible than getting accolades from the masses.

And students learning and thinking and developing skills is what matters most, right? 

I already know several teachers whose post-lockdown teaching style is to post videos found online (tons to choose from already, but not always directly relevant) and have students complete a paragraph or worksheet to show that they understood the video. I looked down on that style at the time because it feels as if they've checked out of actual teaching. However, with some in-class discussion about the work and more creative assignments, it feels like the way things are already going. Sometimes it can be more work to use someone else's video than just explain it yourself, but if the video is amazing, then I could see it being worth it to curate them. But I couldn't do that, or advise doing that, without stopping the video here and there to ask questions in order to assess understanding and develop deeper engagement with the material. Videos could have questions on a still image with instructions to pause and think or discuss. My impromptu lesson on what's happening in the Gaza Strip right now is peppered with questions throughout. Hearing one another's voices is what makes learning in a class so much better than just reading a book on your own. Again, there are lots of ways to have great discussion with some kids working from home.

The problem isn't just with teaching kids who aren't in the building. It's with allowing teachers to teach kids who aren't in the building or allowing kids to miss part of the curriculum. This is where the biggest overhaul needs to happen. How did attendance policies ever help a kid engage with learning or love their school or become a good learner? If it's possible to teach them remotely when they're too sick to attend or unable or unwilling to be exposed to a disabling disease, then they should be accommodated. 

It's not a call to go back to 100% remote learning at all, though, because in-class is definitely important for a variety of reasons, but a quest for more of a fluid system where kids are able to learn from home as needed, non-punitively. How long before every Friday is fully online?? And who would be harmed by that?

"We need a serious discussion about the aim of 'education.' I don't think there's an agreed upon definition, and this is used to divide us."

Yup.

SCHOOL AS BABYSITTERS

"Parents often work two jobs. They need a secure place for kids to go."

This is the crux of it. Not pedagogy or funding, but that we need parents to be at work, so we need kids to be in school, even if they're harmed in the process. 

Many parents send their children to school when they're far too ill to be in the building because the caregiver(s) in the home can't take a day off work without risking their job. THAT's a situation we can't solve educationally. But it would help, at least, if the students had something they could access to keep them working and stay connected to their class if left at home all day, too sick for school, but well enough to watch videos in bed.  

We absolutely need sick days legislated to allow parents to be home with sick kids, but maybe there are other possibilities that could be explored, something in the community possibly, if we can't make something in the system work. Volunteer grannies?? Guaranteed basic income??

I don't know the answer to this one. But sending sick kids to school definitely isn't it.