It looks like next fall will not bring the paradise regained that so many teachers and parents were hoping for. The lost Eden of pre-pandemic school--no masks, no deafening air filters, no Zooming and muting and shifting from one bad tech platform to another, just the good old-fashioned human work of people in a room together, reading and writing and talking and seeing one another's faces. If we're lucky, the Delta spike will abate, as it has already done in the UK, in time for September, and we will muddle through with our masks and our air filters. That would be fine with me. As long as I'm in the same room with my students, things should be more or less good.
That might not happen. If our Delta spike extends to Labor Day, or if some new, more devious variant of the virus arrives, we could be back to remote or hybrid schooling. I have seen some people worrying that teacher's unions will use the Delta spike "as an excuse" to keep their members from going back to the classroom, to the "enormous detriment of students." (That language comes from Joe Nocera, a journalist who is himself the son of two union teachers and should know better, but who seems to have strange ideas about teachers' unions.) I could be wrong, but what from what I've seen I think there is very little chance teacher's unions will push for remote school. Teacher's unions follow the desires of their members, and most of us teachers hated teaching online, hated seeing so many of our students fall through the cracks despite our extraordinary efforts, and would rather do almost anything than go back to the miserable, makeshift, stopgap schooling of the past year and a half.
Teachers hate online school
Since the case numbers in Massachusetts started to turn upward in late June, I have been worrying that we won't get all of our students back in person next fall. Last week, I texted some of teacher friends and asked if I should be worried that we hadn't gotten the official word that we wouldn't be hybrid or remote. Some of the people in the group chat were sanguine, because they were paying attention to state policy; nobody mentioned the union; and nobody felt anything but horror at the thought of teaching remotely again.
One friend wrote: “I will. BURN. THE. BUILDING. DOWN. If we do remote hybrid. So we are either in person or not teaching.”
Another friend wrote: "“I’m already on record with my department chair that I’m taking a year off if we’re teaching remotely again. I will literally go dig ditches somewhere—whether or not anyone pays me will be beside the point.”
Now, I was always much more eager to return to normal schooling than the average teacher at my school, and since the teachers I just quoted are friends of mine, they are not a random sample, but my sense is that almost all teachers really, really want to be back in the classroom with all of their students.
Why, then, was the union so cautious last year?
Teachers' unions came in for a lot of criticism last year. My own union, in Leafstrewn, was the subject of a long piece in a national magazine, a piece that played almost everyone, including our Union President, for comedy (she made the mistakes of wearing a Bernie Sanders T-shirt and referring to her gentrifying neighborhood, which is indeed much, much less elite than Leafstrewn, as "working class"). The writer of the piece interviewed administrators, parents, School Committee members, union officials, but only one teacher, me. What I said then still seems true: teachers reacted to a deadly and poorly understood virus in exactly the same way other demographically similar groups of Americans (i.e. educated and/or liberal): most of them wanted to stay away from other people so they wouldn't get the disease. The fact that teachers were being tough on negotiating their return to the workplace was because they were unionized, so they could be tough in their negotiations. Most low-wage workers couldn't negotiate at all; most white collar workers didn't have to, because it was relatively easy for them to work from home.
I myself was always eager to go back in person, mostly because from very early in the pandemic I thought that with masks and open windows it just wasn't very risky, but I see the trepidation of many of my colleagues as of a piece with the trepidation many other people felt. The union simply allowed that trepidation to be taken into account, and that is probably a good thing. If people are worried that their job isn't safe, the way to convince people to do it anyway is not to force them back to work even though they think it will kill them, the way to do it is to convince them that it's actually safe. The public health communications on COVID-19 has been generally terrible (the early idiocy on masks, the oddly enduring pandemic theater of sanitizing hands and surfaces when it should have been clear from the beginning that this was airborne), and blaming teachers for not wanting to go back to work when every other white collar professional was doing the same is just crazy. I have a lot of friends and family who have white-collar non-teaching jobs, and literally the only one who went in to a crowded workplace earlier than I did was my cousin who's an ER doctor. ER doctors were a special case: when you become a doctor, you are basically signing up for hazardous duty--and even so, many doctors did work from home last year.
So, yes, schools should have re-opened earlier than they did, and schools should be open this fall, but the fact that teachers unions expressed and supported the feelings of their members, feelings that were identical to the feelings of their non-teacher peers (i.e. "I'm scared to go spend my days in a crowded room in a pandemic") is fine--that is exactly what a union is supposed to do. Fortunately, with the experience of last year showing that we can return in person with very little risk, and with vaccination providing another layer of protection, we all seem to be feeling very different from the way they were a year ago, and teachers really want to be back in the classroom.
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