The New Teacher is many things -a cleaner, a sign maker, a chemical sprayer, a computer geek, a software designer and user, a measurer of social distancing, a health monitor, therapist and parent comforter, a victim of confused and unpredictable regulators, an enforcer of distance, a forbidder of hugs, a mask officer, a furniture mover and meditator, a pressured, anxious and wildly exploited figure in our sad and sorry history of this pandemic.
“They just dump mountain after mountain of shit on us,” one Denver teacher e-mailed me, “there is no one in charge.”
My friend Sue Silverstein, a teacher at Bishop Maginn High taught art and theology when I met her, she didn’t have 20 tasks beyond teaching her students.
Walk into Bishop Maginn now, and it looks like an emergency room construction site, the regulations, and alarms change daily, the teachers are madly scrambling to keep themselves and their students safe.
What an awful thing to do to educators, to run and hide from civic responsibility and leave them to somehow deal with the worst health crisis in a century.
They receive little or no financial aid, and almost no useful direction.
Sue is a saint, she puts the students ahead of anything and everything, she does the work of several people for about what a McDonald’s cashier makes.
I am proud to know here and the Bishop Maginn High School staff and teachers. They are in there every day, cutting, moving cleaning, taping things to the floor.
If there is a God, I hope he blesses them. They are the angels of our time, along with health care workers.
We are supporting Bishop Magin in every possible way as school opening looms. That includes food support, good shoes, jackets and sweaters if needed. We may need to help buy some laptops for kids who aren’t attending school in person or who get sick or quarantined.
If you wish to help, you can send a donation to me via Paypal, [email protected], or by check, Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
Thank you.
Photo: Sue Silverstein, Art and Theology Teacher, Bishop Maginn High School, putting down the social distancing tapes for her students.
Our protocols are changing constantly. Today we had to time ourselves cleaning and disinfecting our room. I’m a preschool teacher, we are supposed to disinfect all high touch areas which in my room is everything below 4 ft. It took 3x longer than normal. It’s going to be an interesting year, we will spend a great deal of time washing hands and helping the little ones keep their masks on, but in all this insanity I’m glad to be able to help my kiddos feel loved and safe. May God bless all the teachers out there as we wear a much wider variety of hats this year!
Physical opening of schools right now is just nonsense–many schools who have already done this have been forced to close immediately. It would be much better if Bishop Maginn just concentrated on giving kids a good online experience. I’m quite sure that, whether they open or not, they’ll be closed up again shortly. Until we have a vaccine, virtual education is the way to go.
I am a former teacher. “A good online experience” doesn’t cut it for real teaching and true education, and it never will, and the Sue Silversteins of the world, blessedly, know that. For the younger children in particular, it is at best a poor substitute for in-person education. My heart and support go out to all the teachers, who are heroes for making this work. The reality is that we all have to find the ways in our work to make things work, so we can keep on with the business of our country–which, at the end of the day, IS business– and raising our youth. We can’t abdicate to a screen for everything or we stand a chance to lose a great deal more than COVID alone can take from us.