Our five-pound bag no longer fits the six pounds we are packing into it. If we are not going to adjust the load, we must adjust how the load is carried. The proverbial five-pound bag does not help us to achieve the same outcomes today as it did in days past. Change the school calendar. There’s a leap! Bags. Calendar. For school people, bags and calendar are the same thing. The school calendar is how we carry our educational loads.
The “givens” of public education this school year are formidable. All children need to be educated. Schools need to be open so parents can work. Parents require choice as to whether a child will be an in-school or an at-home learner. School houses require strong mitigation protocols. Due to positive tests, staff and students are required to quarantine on notice. Children need to be socially connected with their peers. There is a fear that children will become a “lost” generation of undereducated, socially crippled people. And, this is just October. There are six-plus months to go.
Each of the above issues is important. Educate. Keep safe. School and local economies. Support for the education of every child.
Let’s parse out the equation.
Pandemic. The COVID pandemic is not abating. Human behavior is too fickle and our commitment to a course of action too short-lived to effectively mitigate family and community viral spread. We are going to be living, working and schooling under pandemic conditions until vaccines provide prophylactic protection.
Concurrent Teaching. How we educate children is an interplay of in-person and remote teaching and learning. How schools do this displays as a dizzying patchwork of independent decisions across a state. Each local school board is forced to create its own, independent scenario and rationale for how it will educate children.
Teaching in-school to children in-school. Teaching in-school to children at-home. Teaching from at-home to children in-school. Teaching from at-home to children at-home. Teachers are experiencing each of these scenarios and many others with variation. In general, the direction all these is headed toward teaching in-school to children both in-school and at-home. Concurrent teaching. Most likely, this will be the preferred scenario, when COVID testing allows, for the duration of the pandemic.
Exhaustion. We were not prepared for concurrent teaching. Teaching to and managing children in-class and at-home concurrently is like teaching the same lesson to children in two different classrooms at the same. The constant back and forth, classroom to screen to classroom, is mentally, emotionally, and physically like teaching two school days in one. Hence, the reference to six pounds into a five-pound bag. Concurrent teaching, however, will be the preferred because it answers most of the “givens”. But, not without its own price.
Fatigue. There is a new word regarding the human condition related to teaching and learning and supporting school children in the Time of COVID. Fatigue. Teachers are fatigued by the daily arguments regarding in-person and remote education. They are fatigued with worry over who the virus will touch next. They are fatigued from either working in a worrisome school with minimal mitigation or being sheltered at home without collegial contact and support. It is fatiguing to teach a lesson in three separate presentations simultaneously – in-person, on-line, and in delivered packets.
Parents are overwhelmed into fatigue. Few are prepared to be tutors for their children now at-home learners. Fewer still have an inkling about teaching, although they may have expressed personal opinions about teachers in non-pandemic times. It is hard to teach your own children. It is hard trying to remember how to do school assignments from your youth decades ago. Parent fatigue is noticed by shouts of “I quit!”.
Children are fatigued. It is one thing for a child to choose to sit for hours playing video games or engage in social media. It is quite another for a child to be tied to a computer screen for daily schooling. The former is exciting and the latter is grueling. Tech savvy children quickly know to turn off their screens saying “… my Internet is failing”. Child fatigue is noticed by their disengagement.
Overall fatigue leads to overall diminishing of teaching and learning. The educational killer in this equation is student disengagement.
School Calendar. The calendar of school days remains the same bag it has been for more than a century. The bag is approximately 180 school days spread across ten months and rolled out as consecutive weeks of teaching and learning, give or take the holidays.
Interestingly, most attempts to change the shape or composition of the school bag have met with passive to extreme resistance whenever change is raised. Days have been spliced and whittled, but the general shape of a school year for today’s children is exactly like it was for their great-grandparents.
As a swimmer, I pushed to find how many laps I could swim with one breath. The first lap was not difficult, but, nearing the completion of the second, holding my breath made my head hurt. Often, I gasped just after the second flip turn. Time for air!
Schooling needs air now and again to combat the fatigue of how we are forced to teach and learn during a pandemic. Thinking we can maintain a “head down in the water” drive for weeks and months on end more than makes our collective heads hurt. Oh, and a weekend is not enough air.
It is time for a new bag.
Consider the inconsiderable. Intersperse real breaks within the school year so that teachers, children, and parents all have a time to breathe. Intersperse a week of no schooling every four weeks. Consider what it would feel like to have a scheduled and purposeful release from teaching and learning these days when schooling is so fatiguing. How would we feel today, if for example, at the end of September, everyone had taken a one-week breath? Afterward, re-oxygenated, teachers, children and parents would have returned to the work of schooling. How would we feel today, if, four weeks later in mid-October, everyone had taken another deep breath? Now, at the end of October would we be talking about the overwhelming sense of fatigue that is diminishing teaching and learning and make parents wild-eyed? Would schooling be suffering from the same disengagement? It reminds us of Einstein’s own equation of what doing the same things over and over with an expectation of different results yields. Leave us not define our own insanity.
A four week on and one week off is a pandemic response. It may not be appropriate after the pandemic. It may not be a new, permanent school calendar. However, when the calendar we are using knowingly contradicts the facts of our conditions, the pandemic, we need to consider how we bag our commitments to teaching and learning and parental support of how we educate their children.
Consider a new bag.