Posted on July 23, 2020
It’s Amazing How Well Prepared Schools Aren’t
I’ve been seeing this photo being shared by friends who aren’t teachers but who mean well, and by friends who are teachers and whose reactions range from polite no, thank yous to pretty firm Ah, hell naws.
No one has asked for my take on it, of course, but no one asked you to click on whatever link you took to find this post either, but here we are. Might as well get it over with.
First of all, nope.
Second, third, and fourth of all: on the great, big list of all the bullshit teachers have to put up with, hastily constructing makeshift PPE out of cheap plastic pipe and dollar store shower curtains ranks somewhere near the not even on it. They shouldn’t have to buy their own materials, either. They shouldn’t have to be doing any of this because we should not be opening schools yet.
I get that teachers are scared – and they should be. I know a lot of teachers. My entire family is made up of teachers, and I worked in education for years. The few friends I have left in this world who somehow manage to endure me are, by and large, teachers. So, when I tell you most teachers are very much in the at-risk group for COVID-19 due to underlying conditions, please don’t take it as hyperbole. That’s a damn fact, jack.
Sure, there are a lot of young, fresh-faced teachers out there ready for dangerous minds to lean on them so they can stand and deliver, but there are a whole lot more older teachers who’ve spent years being disillusioned by being overworked, underpaid, over-evaluated, and underappreciated. It takes a toll, both mentally and physically.
My mom battled through cancer and chemo and diabetes and hypertension as a lifelong teacher, and if she were alive today and still teaching, she wouldn’t be by the end of this school year. I firmly believe that, and it terrifies me on behalf of every single teacher I know.
We’re asking teachers and all school staff to, quite literally, risk their lives so we can all get the kids out of the house and either go back to work or spend the day doing whatever it is people who apparently don’t like their kids very much do when they’re at school. Oh, sure. There’s a whole lot of talk about how important it is for kids to get back to school, but for all the flowery rhetoric I’m hearing about how vital and important and essential public education is now, there’s a great, gaping funding hole in the nobody gives a shit of the not-too-distant then.
(*There’s one of those If You Don’t Like Me At My Defunding Our Liberal Arts Programs, You Don’t Deserve Me At My Free Daycare meme in here somewhere…)
But let’s get back to the piecemeal PPE the photo is suggesting teachers build for themselves. I really don’t think it’s a good idea.
First, it’s bound to violate some kind of fire or safety code since there’s roughly twenty bazillion of the things when it comes to public school buildings, but more importantly, who’s gonna clean the damn things?
We’re all hearing plenty of assurances from school districts about their constant cleaning and sanitizing guidelines, but not much in the way of explaining where all the money they didn’t have yesterday is coming from today to even afford the additional cleaning supplies, much less hire enough custodial staff to handle the job. I guarantee teachers will be responsible for sanitizing their own classrooms. I guarantee it.
If these things aren’t wiped down and cleaned regularly, they’re going to become clear plastic Petri dishes with who knows what growing on them, not to mention how quickly kids will figure out how much fun it is to stab holes in the things and generally destroy them in much the same way as they metaphorically chip away at their teacher’s will to go on.
Also, those desks aren’t six feet apart at all. Yeah, there’s a sheet of dollar store plastic between them, but I’m not entirely certain it’ll offer a lot of protection. I mean, I’m sure it’s been rated for sterile medical use and is not at all filled with lead and whatever else made it into whichever sweatshop hellhole it was manufactured in and all, but I buy a lot of stuff from Dollar General. There’s a reason everything there costs a dollar.
I totally get wanting to do something, though. Anything is better than nothing when the country just passed four million cumulative cases and we’re getting ready to bring the nation’s children bouncing back into overcrowded, under-funded, and under-maintained school buildings. I just don’t think this something is the right anything, and could end up doing more harm than good.
The right thing to do is delay the start of school until districts receive the funding and time necessary to make their campuses safe for everyone, teachers and staff included. (I’m not even gonna go into how bad of an idea it is to start colleges and universities back up except to point out how the “college experience” in America can be broken down into three distinct parts: Learning, Partying, and Getting Laid. When students can’t really do two-thirds of what they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for while social distancing, most just won’t bother worrying about it. Well, there’s that, and then there’s the pathogenic wonderland that is your average college dorm…)
To slow the spread, we’ve canceled concerts, closed theme parks, and shut down every local festival imaginable across the nation. But packing dozens of kids into small, confined spaces for hours at a time five days a week in a building full of hundreds of other kids doing the same thing? No problem!
What, do schools have magical covid-nullifying force fields or something? If it spreads in a church, it’ll spread in a school. If it spreads at a concert, it’ll spread in a school. If it spreads in a prison, it for damn sure will spread in a school, which is basically just prison misspelled.
School days, school days
Hope you don’t get covid days
Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic
Coughing and sneezing and getting sick
Build us a plastic barrier
Our teacher got sick, we buried her
And you wrote on my slate, “I’ve got covid toe.”
When we were a couple of kids
TL;DR – If teachers have to build their own PPE out of scavenged dollar store supplies like a Great Value MacGyver, we should not be reopening schools.
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Posted on July 20, 2020
The Working Poor Need Better Wages, Not Boomer Memes
I keep seeing this stupid meme pop up and it’s a nice idea and all, but really all it’s doing is calling the working poor (especially millennials) financially stupid. Again.
Look, I’m all for practical education. But this meme is just another way for baby boomers (and younger bastard lucky enough to be born to the right boomer parents) to shift the blame to younger generations for having inherited a world that won’t let them escape living in it as the working poor.
If the appeals to financial literacy don’t work, there’s always the magical thinking of whatever self-help book somebody read they really thought was swell and you should read it too, if you don’t want to be a filthy poor. People who lucked into being born at the right time and/or to the right parents truly buy that all their success is down to hard work and their own strength of character. They read (and write) books to motivate the poors by giving them revelatory advice like learn as much as you can, save whatever money you can, and don’t pee in the boss’s coffee pot. That sort of thing. It’s always painfully obvious common sense stuff all the working stiffs of the world have already been doing, but the scam is all of that advice only works in hindsight after you’re successful. It’s self-congratulatory drivel designed as benevolent advice and sage wisdom. It makes the jackasses feel like they earned their wealth and the reason you’re poor is all your fault.
Newsflash: Poor people aren’t stupid. It’s not a lack of financial education keeping them from earning a livable wage. It’s their paychecks.
It’s fine to laugh at them for renting to own a set of tires as if they aren’t fully aware of how much more expensive that is in the long run. But when you don’t make enough to save for emergencies, you do what you have to so you can still make it to work to earn the pittance you’re given.
Sure, it’s cheaper to buy in bulk at Sam’s Club or whatever, but maybe you don’t have enough money to buy the cheaper option. You’d love to spend $100 on that box of whatever at Costco, but you only have $30 in the food budget this week so you eat ramen or head to the dollar menu at Taco Bell. You know it’s unhealthy, you know it’s more expensive in the long run, but you gotta eat today before you can plan for tomorrow.
This idea that people who are working 40+ hours a week are only struggling because they don’t know how to manage their finances is ridiculous. It’s insulting and demonstrably wrong.
Poor people know payday loans are awful, but sometimes you have no other option. Poor people know they should save 20% of each paycheck, but that’s kinda hard when they’re already living on the bare essentials and still coming up short every month. Poor people know they should invest, but the baby needs formula more than Mom needs a stock portfolio.
The fact is people are struggling because wages are stagnant and, while unemployment might be down, the jobs being created are low-paying, insecure positions with no future.
The wealth in this country is being consolidated at the top at an alarming, ever-increasing rate and has been since Reagan. What scraps remain for the rest of us are spread so thin and doled our so stingily that it’s no wonder retail stores are closing left and right. The people the wealthy depend on to buy the goods and services that keep them wealthy don’t have any damn money to spend.
It’s not about financial literacy. It’s about corporate greed and fleecing the working man. Always has been, always will be.
Everything’s a scam.
But sure, tell us more about how stupid everyone who wasn’t born into a world of opportunity is. Tell us more about our bootstraps and how you worked your way through college at the soda shop when kids today have to take out $100,000+ loans to earn increasingly worthless degrees. Tell us more about your starter homes and your pension plans and every other damn thing we don’t have. Tell us how stupid we all are because we didn’t make the same choices you did because those options were never available to us in the first place.
Tell us more!
Posted on July 18, 2020
Parents, Please Keep an Eye on Your Kid’s Virtual Classroom
As school districts across the country continue their stubborn march toward opening up the Petri dishes of their classrooms this fall against all reason, many parents will choose the virtual option if they can. Virtual learning can be great, but parents need to be aware of a few things.
First, some quick background so you know I’m not totally talking out of my butt here. These days, I make my living as a writer and editor, but in a previous life, I was deeply involved in IT for public education before moving on to much more lucrative work elsewhere in the DevOps and Cybersecurity fields. I left the intense stress of that world behind a few years ago, but please understand this isn’t going to be one of those ill-informed scare pieces. I’m not trying to frighten anyone. I don’t need to get clicks, I don’t run ads on my site, and I don’t gather user data to sell anywhere. I don’t have to be sensational, just truthful.
This fall, more families will move toward allowing remote access into their homes and lives than ever before. This brings risks, not just from hackers (I’m not even going to cover that aspect here) but from the very people who are supposed to be there: teachers and faculty…and support staff…and administrative overseers…and really anyone else the powers that be at your local school district decides to give access to.
Again, I’m not trying to scare anyone, but teachers talking to kids in their bedrooms brings a whole new level of intimacy with adults into their lives than anything we’ve seen before, at least on a fully sanctioned and parent-approved level.
Statistically, some of any group of people, including educators, aren’t going to be good people, so it’s probably best to keep the school computer out of your kid’s bedroom, for starters – and not just for the creepy, turning-on-their-webcams-and-watching-your-kids-get-dressed aspect. Realistically, that’s probably not going to happen, as that type of functionality isn’t likely to even be part of the virtual learning software they’ll be using. (Although there has been at least one case where a school district turned student webcams into remote spycams, so the whole webcam issue isn’t totally outside the realm of possibility.)
However, there have been multiple cases of kids getting themselves in trouble when their schools begin to monitor their online activity, your agreement to which is probably buried somewhere on page 547 of the user agreement nobody reads. That’s something to keep in mind, especially if you’re turning the family computer into the school computer.
Which is probably an extraordinarily bad idea, by the way. Unless, of course, you don’t mind your search history or the contents of your hard drive being available to Rick in IT down at the admin building. -I’m mostly kidding here, as that’d be granting an unusually high level of access to educational software, but since it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility (especially if you need online support), I figured I’d at least mention it.
If you’re using a school-supplied computer, then tell your kids – and everyone else in the family – to only use it for school-related purposes because I guarantee it will be chock-full of surveillance tools. They aren’t there for nefarious purposes, but are part of the legal CYA school districts do so they can have a paper trail of what the computer has been used for if and when they need it.
It’s also just good practice to keep your webcam physically covered when not in use. Seriously. Just get a strip of electrical tape of a light binder clip and snap it over the top of the laptop whenever you’re not actively using the webcam. It’s good advice because there are a million ways nefarious people can gain access to it. Some laptops come equipped with a little privacy cover or you can even buy covers specially made for keeping webcams private. It’s a thing. Keep it covered.
While there’s not a high realistic probability of a teacher or any other school staff member inappropriately coming at your kids through official school software, the very nature of distance learning tends to encourage follow-up emails and chat windows, which can easily lead to outside channels of communication which, for the vast, overwhelming majority of educators would be still be used appropriately, but for some, it won’t be.
Keep an eye on your kids.
Moving on from security issues, let’s talk quality of education. The public education system isn’t designed for virtual learning, so it’s having to work very fast to get up to speed. We all are. Things aren’t going to be anywhere close to perfect for a long while, so what’s going to happen is what always happens. More well-off parents will supplement their kids’ education in the areas they need more help with by hiring private, remote tutors while other parents will be forced to just keep sitting at the kitchen table every night, struggling to understand what the hell a number sentence is or why Susie would ever need to figure out how evenly divide 47 tambourines among four people.
Even with the more egalitarian, one-size-fits-all structure that most school districts will adopt when it comes to virtual learning (by way of using third-party courseware, especially for the upper grades), thereby minimizing the zip code variable when it comes to how well-funded any particular school is, the more money parents have, the better the education their kids will still receive. It shouldn’t be that way, but whatever. I can’t solve all of America’s many systemic flaws in a simple essay.
What I can do is talk about private tutors. I’ve personally offered to help anyone’s kid with English or any writing-related work they’re struggling with free of charge to try and bridge that income/education quality gap in whatever little way I can (hit me up on Twitter), but my offer comes with a few very important caveats.
First, my help is limited to remote assistance and subject to my availability. Second, I will only work directly with a student through video or any other chat feature with a parent present on the chat. And finally, any and all emails and other communications sent between me and the student will always either go directly through a parent or at least have the parent copied on the conversation.
I recommend any parent seeking outside help demand the same from any tutor they hire. Is it a foolproof way to keep your kids safe? Nope. If they want to, kids can find a way around anything. So can determined adults. However, it does put any potential predators on alert that you’re an aware and informed parent who will be paying close attention, which might be enough to scare anyone with bad intentions away, but again, nothing is foolproof.
Keep an eye on your kids.
Personally, I’d rather have students physically back on campus – but my own kid is going with the online-only option this year because we’re simply opening schools too soon. We’re repeating the same mistake of having moved too quickly through phased openings we’re now paying for with a second wave, except now we’re going to open schools back up prematurely only to have to close them back down again, thereby extending the total amount of time we spend in shutdown mode we could’ve avoided if we’d just not been in such a rush to open everything back up so soon in the first place.
Why we can’t delay the start of school until this latest wave dies down? It’d at least give the schools more time (and funding) to enact real, effective preventative measures so six feet apart could actually mean six feet apart instead of “the best we can do” being the best they can do. I dunno. Like I said, I can’t solve all of America’s systemic problems in one essay.
Just keep an eye on your kids, okay?
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