"...Alea iacta est (The die is cast)."
-- Quote attributed to Julius Caesar, January 49 BCE, while leading his armies across the Rubicon River (at that time a northern boundary of Italy), an act considered by the Roman government to be treasonous, eventually leading to the Roman Civil War
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When I was younger, my teachers knew everything, or so I always thought when I was their student. It's not that I don't think that way now about them--there is a part of me (a nostalgic part) that would still like to hold on to their inhuman infallibility. There's a part of me that still stubbornly clings to this idea. But I'm older now, and a teacher myself, and as such I know these days how much my teachers were more than likely winging it day by day, faking it, making it up as they went along, and just trying to make it through to the dismissal bell at 3:00 p.m.
And I certainly don't mean this as a negative critique. I mean this as an observation of reality.
I'm not going to get treacly with this piece. I'm not going to waste your time or mine, beleaguering you with the old tropes about teachers being noble and teaching being a noble profession. Nor am I going to give much validity to the tired critical misconceptions about teachers and the teaching profession.
Teaching is just like anything else, finally: It's a job. And teachers are just like everyone else. There is a misguided picture, in some circles, that we're stuffy and snobbish, standing around puffing on a pipe and always discussing weighty matters of the world. There is an equally misguided picture of us that teachers are dumb, lazy, under-performing, unambitious, and spoiled. The truth of who teachers are and of what teaching is, though, has always fallen somewhere in Aristotle's beloved middle ground.
Some teachers are good, while others are not. Some teachers are hard-working and dedicated professionals, and others are simply putting in their time until they can retire with a somewhat decent pension.
[Aside: And in so saying, I have just described practically everyone in the world who works, and who holds a job, and who is a member of a particular profession.]
I'm not going to preach or pretend or patronize with this writing. Teaching is a hard job. Of course there are some days when we all feel like coasting a bit, and if you've been doing the job long enough you learn the "tricks of the trade" on how to do that while still doing something productive in the classroom. (You learn how to "teach the kids to teach themselves," at times. That's not a joke. That is a real thing.) But always, in the background--particularly in our modern times--teaching is a job that requires you to be alert and to be responsive and to be "on your game" as much as possible. So it's not easy, but it gets easier as you go along over the years, in some ways--as most jobs do. But teaching is constantly also in a state of flux, continually changing and evolving, becoming more and more bureaucratized and business-model oriented. It's no longer just about "teaching." In fact, ironically, most of the job of being a teacher these days really isn't about "teaching" at all, which is an interesting and disturbing paradox. Most of today's "teaching" involves things like standardized-testing, and reams of data, and evaluations, and one-to-one technology, and remote-learning, and cold, clinical imagery derived from the industrial world of assembly-line mentality:
RAW MATERIAL IN =====> REFINED PRODUCT OUT
And while the emotional, romanticized, Mr. Keating-notion of "teaching" in an inspirational, interpersonal way (the kind that makes students want to stand on their desks in loving salute) was maybe never real--now, then, or ever--such an image of a teacher teaching today is as far from the day-to-day real picture as can be imagined.
And all of that, as just described, is in the best, most sane, most "normal" of conditions. But let's scrub-swipe to the current day and to the approaching 2020-21 school year.
I have been teaching off-and-on [Aside: mostly on, except for a time when I stepped away from the career for a while to try my hand in the "real" world--which I didn't like so much and therefore came back to working with students] for the better part of 25 years. And it is safe for me to say--with unequivocal certainty in my voice--that I've never stared down a "beginning-of-the-year" start to a new school year like the 2020-21 school year lying just ahead.
I'm nervous. It has me rattled. It has me unsure of myself, and of my profession, and of the state of our country and our world in ways that I haven't felt in a while. If ever. And I don't know what to do about it or how to feel about it. It is the stereotypical fear of the unknown that I'm experiencing, I suppose, and I don't like it.
But it's my career. It's my profession. It's my job. It's what I do. It's how I earn a living and pay bills and manage to get by--however meagerly. But it's also how I earn a sense of self-satisfaction and self-respect, because my students generally like me as their teacher (I think), and I (most of the time) like being around them and working with them and trying to make a difference for them.
The thing about teaching, interestingly, is the same thing our President says about the current death-rate from COVID-19: "It is what it is...."
And now a new school year blinkers on the horizon.
The high school where I teach English is a relatively small-to-medium sized district in the southwest exo-suburbs of Chicago. We--like the rest of the country--went into full-lockdown mode in the middle of March, finishing the remainder of the 2019-20 school year at home, with remote-learning, and Google Classroom, and Zoom, and whatnot. The district's plan at the time, such as it was [Aside: which wasn't much of a plan at all, if I'm being brutally frank] was pretty ineffective, unimpressive, and pointless, but it got us through the remaining two months of the school year--a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, to momentarily stanch the loss of blood.
Like it or not (which none of my colleagues or students really did), it worked well enough to see us through. It did the job we needed at the time. Like it or not.
And now here we are, five months later, with COVID-19 still in our midst [Aside: despite the adamant and angry Libertarian-types across the country who insist on the absolute primacy of the nation's economy above all else, and who choose not to believe what science tells them, and who refuse to wear face-coverings of any kind, and who argue for a dystopic "herd immunity" solution...but that's another level of crazy and another topic of discussion for another time]. Believe it or not a new school year is preparing to start, in one form or another. And suddenly parents, and children, and whole communities, and school districts, and education staff--teachers included--are being faced with choices and being asked to make decisions that no one in any of the groups ever felt they would be required to make:
Parents: Do I send my child to school or keep her/him at home, where I can trust it is relatively safe?
Children: Do I want to go back to school, or do I want to stay home and try to learn in this relatively "safe" setting?
Communities: What is best and safest for the health and well-being of all community members?
School Districts: For the approaching fall semester, do we delay the start-date of the school year, or do we go full-on in-person instruction, full-on remote-learning instruction, or an invented hybrid of the two?
Education Staff/Teachers: Do I go into work? Can I take a sabbatical year off? Do I look for another job? Do I meet with my lawyer and write my will before the start of the new school year?
Unprecedented times. Unanswerable questions. Unbelievably difficult decisions.
At my school district--at the high school where I work--the decision was made to return with full-on, in-person instruction for those parents who choose to send their student. For those who opt to keep their children home and to have them learn remotely, an online digital-curriculum education platform, Apex Learning, is being offered.
At the high school, we currently have around 85% of our student-population reportedly returning for in-person, on-campus learning. Particular guidelines--as mandated by the state--are required to be in place and enforced "whenever possible," [Aside: nice governmental CYA-wording there, by the way], but no one is really too clear on how, for example, proper 6 ft. social distancing is to be enforced in a small classroom with 25 young people scheduled to be in it. Or how, for a further example, students and teachers are to wear a face-mask for a full 7 hr. day. Or what happens, for yet another example, when students do not wear a mask, or if they take it off, or if they refuse to follow the carefully outlined arrows on the floor directing one-way traffic in hallways around the building. Or how lunch periods will be organized. Or school buses. Or bathroom/hall passes. Or drinking fountains. Or sneezing. Or coughing. Or sharing pencils, turning in papers, or touching, laughing, talking. The kind of stuff that is rudimentary and fundamental and basic to the daily operations of a school and to students and to teachers.
How is this all going to work? Nobody really knows. We have ideas, or so it seems. We have tentative plans. We have carefully shadowed outlines and forms of ideas, but nothing really to take any shape or substance for the time being. We think we know how this little part might work and how it might play itself out, but then we're not sure. We'll have to wait and see. Take it as it comes. A case-by-case basis. Learn as we go.
[Aside: I've heard and memorized all the stock phrases by now already. This is how the bureaucratic game is played. The problem is, though, we're possibly dealing with some lives here this time.]
But how could something like this happen? How could we get to such a point in our society where education (in general) and schools (in particular) are forced to make such difficult decisions that affect countless numbers? How could we get to this point?
Let's play a hypothetical thought-experiment for a moment and imagine the following scenario of a made-up school district, which could be many school districts anywhere in the country:
Imagine, if you will, over this past summer the staff of this hypothetical district conducting their own survey which asked fellow employees a variety of questions regarding their comfort-level regarding the idea of returning to campus and to in-person learning in the midst of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine the majority of staff members at this district indicating concern and being "somewhat uncomfortable" with the idea of returning to campus in the fall. Imagine that the majority of this staff also voted to start the new school year with a hybrid of in-person learning and remote-learning, to ease into the school year with a soft step, to first assess the situation, to gauge it carefully, to respond with a plan, and then to modify the plan as needed.
Now imagine none of this survey mattering in the end. If this imaginary district's administration and school board--who were presumably privy to the survey along with its findings--looked at the survey's results at all, imagine if both entities collectively ignored it and opted instead to go with their own survey--a survey of the community, with a simple online questionnaire to local parents, basically consisting of a single choice:
In the fall, would you:
1.) prefer to send your student to school for in-person instruction, or
2.) keep him/her at home and rely again on remote-learning?
Needless to say--in a community largely made up, let's say, of middle-class, conservative, blue-collar Americans concerned (understandably) about their jobs, and the nation's economy, and what to do with their children during the workday--the results of that survey would be obvious before anyone would even need to be asked to count the numbers.
Regardless of the feelings of the experienced professional staff and despite the inherent risks that the medical community could echo, such a district would be going back to full-on, in-person instruction in the fall, based (on the surface anyway) on a decision made largely by the community's parents. And what's even worse, imagine the state's largest education union being little or no help in supporting its members. At this point--as with everything--the larger union would be taking the bureaucratic, political approach with its "wait-and-see" response, and it would offer minimal guidance or support to its smaller local associations across the state when they needed it most over the summer and in the approaching fall.
Imagine such a scenario. Just think of the veritable house of cards waiting for a gust of breeze. That's how it could happen, perhaps.
[Aside: Alea iacta est....]
I've never faced a school year like this one before. None of my colleagues have either. I hope to never be asked to deal with something like this again. But realistically this novel coronavirus disease is here to stay (despite what the mountaintop-stronghold Libertarian-types among us have to say about it), at least until a safe vaccine can be developed, and tested, and approved, and marketed. Until then this is our new way of living for now, and it's still going to be our way of life for the unforeseeable future. Will schools that are opening in the fall--like my district--be open for long? Will schools make it for a week? Two weeks? To Labor Day? For a whole semester? The whole year? Will we make it through, "learning as we go," until crossing the finish line next May? Or could it be, in fact, that nothing will go wrong? Nothing bad will happen? This is all just an elaborate hoax? Or will someone get sick sometime during the school year? What if it's a student? A staff member? Will it be more than one?
Will it be me?
And the fact that I have to ask a question like that--or that any educator does this year--is staggering in its implications. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what this school year will bring. Of course I never do; no teacher ever really does. And yet we do. If we've been doing it for a while, teaching is teaching, and school years--though each unique--are also uniquely alike in particular ways. Except for this year. This year is different. This year is dark. It's shadowy. Indistinct. Hard to see. Hard to read. And to know.
It's in the not knowing--the world of the unknown--that most of our fears reside and have always resided. In such a world it requires that decisions be made (maybe sometimes against our better judgment), and actions be taken, and boundaries be breached, and points-of-no-return be crossed, or re-crossed, with only the most casual of worried glances behind us over our heavily burdened shoulder, and remembering, at such a time, some of the few lines from Eliot that we learned in senior English class in high school from Mrs. Bell--lines that manage to come to mind today:
"....This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
