Mr. Hand. Mr. Keating. Mr. Kimble. Mr. Holland. Dumbledore. Mr. Finn. Mr. Jurel. Mr. Thackeray.
Let us start by having you think of all your school emergency drills, especially those when you were very young. Most of them were fire drills, I expect. Get everybody out. Get reorganized in a different spot. Go back to work at the all-clear signal.
There are regional drills, such as tornado drills in Illinois. Get everybody to shelter. Go back to work when the danger passes.
Is duck and cover a national thing? When I was growing up, duck and cover was the response for the Soviet Union nuking the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Now schools use it in the same part of the country to respond to an earthquake. Get under your desk and cover up. Protect your eyes.
Duck and cover has always been about giving legitimacy to the idea of curling up into the fetal position on the floor when things are really crazy and scary.
We have had an earthquake. Aftershocks are coming.
This was about a foot away from my classroom door. I reinforced the chalk with washable paint but I did not take a picture of it. Maybe someday I will see it again.
Where are we now, teachers, as a profession that cannot do what it is used to doing?
An earthquake happened. Nothing much fell down but it is obvious that the school building is not safe. Everybody got out. Everybody is scattered. They do not know where to go. The place where, theoretically, they could go was not ready, not yet. There have been people working with technology but there had not been enough time- read that as not enough funding and support- to get the job done. Online learning was going to connect child, parent, and teacher in a new way (really, the boosters made this promise). It had not even had field trials. People were experimenting with it. Some people spread highly useful tools, such as Google Classroom. Educators, not teachers, claimed that adoption of such-and-such technology would change the way teachers taught. The process had begun.
Some of us resisted these changes. We adopted technology into our classrooms to help us teach better or more efficiently, but not differently.
Nevertheless, the teaching profession was not ready for online teaching. Most of us were learning what we found useful in the classroom setting. I had my eighth graders recite and record what they wrote. Students self-edited what they wrote when they realized that they would actually have to say what they thought out-loud. The assignment was to turn in that recording. Students would record themselves when they could, which some might call “homework.” I made the point that everyone had a best time to get this done.
Google Classroom let me know when students turned in these assignments. My telephone had messages; so-and-so turned in their Hamilton essay. The scatter of time when assignment arrived in Google Classroom was a revelation about the rhythms of my students’ lives. I should say, “our students.” I think I have some valid observations:
There are students who turn in assignments exactly on the hour. I recognize what is happening; they are finishing their time with homework and, I assume, it is on to something else as far as that student is concerned. Is some point total or grade letter enough acknowledgment for those students? How do you say, “Thanks for being mature?” How do you compliment following the conventional path?
There are students who turn in work on Sunday evenings. These students are conditioned to start each week by being up to date. How do you praise that sense of responsibility? How do you support them?
There are students who turn in assignments very late at night. Is that the only quiet, alone time they have?
I think some students turned in assignments late as a way to get my attention.
That is as far as I reached into the home. However, remember, anything I tried was about the classroom. I could use my physical presence there to support what I was trying to do. I knew how to express my passion in my classroom.
The earthquake took away the classroom. The building is unusable. Everything teaching skill I have developed, practiced, and polished into effective classroom use is not possible, now.
However, that is not what matters right now. Teachers, we are in the first minutes of reaction time. The earthquake happened. There will be aftershocks. The emergency signal is still going off. It is now annoying because we are trying to think.
We need to rally the students. We need to provide them with basic care. They need to see organization and support.
There are people who are trying to bring order. Some people are trying to take action immediately. Some people are gathering people together to create a united effort to bring order to chaos. Some people are looking for leadership about what they, specifically, should do next.
All of these people- we, the teachers- had something really awful happen to them. All are aware of the grave dangers that surround us. All of these people are acting on professional instinct. No one had emergency drills for this. Some of these people have children they need to care for. Some care for older or at-risk adults. Some are singles and they are just realizing what that is going to mean over the next days, weeks, and probably more. All of these people have lives that are different from what they were mere moments ago.
Teachers, parents, and students, and society, we are trying to bring order out of chaos. On paper, we are in the first fifteen minutes of the disaster response. Many of us are grasping that this situation is not an immediate problem that must be solved. This is something that will be long-term. There are Facebook pages for teachers where professionals like us are practically begging for assistance to provide curriculum to students. Obviously, they feel this is the appropriate next action. Other people talk about the connections they are making with students. That is an equally valid response.
We are creating an entirely new system of education on the fly. Some of us are ready to care for immediate student needs. Go for it. Others are trying to organize for the next couple of months. That is a good thing to do. Some of us are already thinking about next fall. How does one start a kinder to grade twelve school year completely online? Somebody has to figure that out because it is going to take an extraordinary amount of communication, cooperation, and coordination.
Did you like that alliteration? I learned that in school or at least the word for it.
Our students need us now. They will need us in the future. Technology will not replace us. An open school with highly trained education specialists hired to prepare young people to be adults is a sign of a functioning society. Handle your immediate needs. Do what you can. This is our profession. This is what we do.
By the way, is it not surprising how incapable our students are with technology? The description I have heard of this is, “The students are technology-dependent. They are not technology-savvy.” Remember, it was only a few days ago that we scolded kids for texting or using their earphones during class time. Technology was not under control in or out of the classroom. For heaven’s sake, we have only begun making what was science fiction into something normal. Think about that when you look at your telephone, I pad, or laptop computer. Then go binge-watch the original Star Trek series.
Allow me to finish with two quotations from the book Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman, a masterpiece about teaching that is now out of print:
“And that’s it; that’s why I want to teach; that’s the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.”
“This is just the first day; you’ll get used to it. The rewards will come later, from the kids themselves–and from the unlikeliest ones.”
