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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As I type this I’m sitting here watching my kids soccer coach facilitate a socially distanced soccer practice with masks and outdoor practice and all kids are staying 6 feet apart. My soccer coach is showing more resilience and creativity and commitment than my overpriced school...[/quote]

How long is soccer practice?  Is it 8 hours?  Do the kids take off their masks to eat 30 minutes of lunch next to them? Do they use any materials beyond a soccer ball? Are there other adults around to help supervise?  Do they have a large open outdoor area to spread out?  Is soccer cancelled with it is dangerous weather? Does the soccer coach teach them from 6 feel away how to hold a pencil?  This is ridiculous.[/quote]

These excuses and questions are ridiculous. excuses to get out of teaching. I used to think teachers were so special. Especially at Burgundy. Just full of excuses.[/quote]

People like you and the other jerks on this thread are why I am leaving the teaching profession as soon as this pandemic is over. I am an award-winning educator with years of experience and an advanced degree. I absolutely LOVE my job - I love curriculum, working with the students, all the parts that are actually teaching. Every teacher I know worked double time all spring to re-plan every single lesson to make them as engaging as possible. All while being given zero time to prepare and next to no resources from our school.

This summer we had professional development, but it was next to useless. The time we spent completing busy work for that PD would have been better spent preparing amazing DL lessons for the fall. But we couldn’t do that, because no one was willing to admit that DL was a possibility. Instead the admin just kept insisting that we would be in person, so all of my time this summer was spent re-designing my curriculum to fit the new schedule that we will have in the fall (specifically for in-person COVID learning), accommodate social distancing, and the million other tiny things that end up necessitating huge changes to the curriculum: attempting to prevent spread by not using paper, no more art or lab supplies, no more communal classroom supplies, additional class time needed to sanitize, being outside whenever possible... the list goes on and on.

Now, we were just told last week that we will be DL (at least at the start of the year). I can give up my entire summer to re-plan for one scenario, but there was literally not enough time to recreate two new plans for both scenarios. Teachers are in a hopeless situation. The reality is that every job you people keep bringing up is completely different from being trapped in a room with fifteen kids all day. Even with masks, they aren’t perfect. And having to constantly watch and enforce mask protocol is yet another thing that will be taking me away from teaching. Our HVAC system sucks. Grocery store workers deal with tons of people every day, but the amount of time they are exposed to each potentially infectious individual is small - that affects the likelihood of transmission in a huge way. Truck drivers and delivery people - not trapped in a room with potentially viral people all day. Office workers - last I checked, not trapped in a 30x30 foot room with 15 kids for the entire day. There aren’t many other jobs I can think of that place workers in this uniquely worrisome situation.

What I’ve seen on these threads is just heartbreaking. I am in this for the kids, but I wonder how much they’ll get out of my teaching if they overhear the awful things their parents say about their teachers. I hate knowing that so many parents think teachers are just lazy, think we deserve special treatment, think that schools just shut down because of teachers (newsflash: my school didn’t take a formal measure of what the faculty wanted even once, and I know no one talked to me. It’s not about the teachers). The things teachers are bringing up aren’t just empty excuses - they are real issues. And it is just so frustrating, because I know that the in-person experience is going to be awful compared to regular school. When kids are kept apart from each other all day, no opportunities for hands-on learning, I can’t actually get close enough to them to directly help them with anything - this is not a situation that allows for any of the progressive teaching practices that I’ve spent years learning about implementing. It’s going to suck, because it’s an impossible situation, and teachers are going to get blamed for that too. We will make it as awesome as we can, but it will never be the same as regular in-person learning (cue the parents chiming in and telling me that if I was just a better / more creative / more innovative teacher, that I’d find a way).

And, what makes this even more frustrating, is that if anyone had listened to the teachers and acknowledged at the start of the summer that DL was a very real possibility, we could have spent the summer investing our resources into DL, and making it incredible. There is so much research on online learning environments that is really exciting, but we are just turning a blind eye. I spent so much time on Zoom with my students this spring, and it was so cool getting to know them as individuals in their home environments. We could really be taking advantage of this year, but instead, we’re going to force everyone into school for a learning experience that isn’t possible right now.

Can’t wait to move on to another career after everything I’ve read here. I will deeply miss my work with the kids, but it just isn’t worth it when I know what all the parents really think of teachers. We’re just lazy, expendable, fear-mongering babies in your eyes.[/quote]

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