Morning Thoughts: A Hard School Year

It's been a hard year for teachers and students alike, and I think the reasons boil down to this: expectations. My principal summed up one side of it the other day when he said that he'd expected to be able to be back to business as usual this year after the gauntlet of combined in-person and online teaching we all navigated last year, but that expectation has been shattered by a number of tough realities. First, as everyone has said, there are some significant gaps in student learning that many of us feel compelled to go back and fill, to get kids up to standard and back on grade level. This isn't a post on the significant changes needed in public education, so I won't go any further on that point. 

Second, we're all tired. Even after the summer, we started the school year still worn out from everything that came before.  The energy that we expect to help usher in a new school year just wasn't there, at least for me and many of the teachers I know. 

Third, a significant number of teachers and students are still in mourning over lost loved ones and other losses. The emotional needs of everyone at school this year are much greater than usual. 

Fourth, at least in Utah, we lack the tools to ensure a safe environment, which has created greater anxiety. What I mean by that is that the legislature robbed us of our ability to enforce health protocols. This year, we're barely allowed to approach the topic of masking, except to reinforce tolerance for people's individual choices, and those who last year would have been quarantined for exposure are now empowered to simply shrug and go back to breathing on everyone in class. Yay, freedom. 

On top of that, I've noticed a greater number than usual of my coworkers seeming physically injured or unwell this year. About once a week I see someone else with a cast, a cane, a brace, or some other medical device that they're relying on to get through their work day. I don't know what it is, but we all seem a little more broken than usual. 

Of course, the students don't have it easy either. There are still Covid anxieties, but now there's pressure to sweep that under the rug. Despite our best efforts to be understanding and kind, there's a pervasive sense of impatience with the delay in getting back to normal. Many of us had hoped for some much needed shifts in the definition of "normal," but that doesn't appear to be happening. No, much like the business sector's almost comical befuddlement with the unwillingness of workers to go back to pre-pandemic norms, there's an institutional inertia in education that is slowly quashing all our hopes for change, and silencing all the voices that had been raised over the past year about the systemic problems the pandemic revealed, even if it didn't cause them. 

So on the one hand, students and schools want to feel and act like things are normal. On the other hand—and I can't emphasize this enough—THINGS ARE NOT NORMAL, AND NORMAL WASN'T THAT GOOD ANYWAY.

The dissonance between expectation and reality has never been more stark, but we're all still trying to pretend things are working. I don't know how well we can survive this conflict. 

That's what I've been thinking about this morning.