Post-Pandemic Education
Schools’ misguided efforts are teaching disability and incompetence
A new acquaintance asked me recently, “So how’s teaching going now that kids are back in the classroom? How has the whole pandemic thing affected them?”
Poor fellow. Big mistake.
I managed to keep my response to a tepid 3 minutes of general comments. But I haven’t always been able to do that lately, and it’s time I stop ranting at friends, family and colleagues. Time to speak to a wider audience.
Time to be a voice for my profession, for my students, for the future.
Because we are ruining it.
I’m not talking about the environment, or the climate. Nope, not the political landscape either.
I’m talking about education.
I am someone who plays the long game, so I’m not here to wring my hands over the missed classroom time due to the Pandemic. Kids are plastic. They are designed to learn, and learn fast when necessary. Furthermore, learning is developmental — remember how some kinds of math were super hard when you were seven, and by the time you were twelve they were child’s play? That’s development at work, friends.
Our kids can and will catch up, with relatively little effort on our parts. That is not the problem.
It’s culture that’s the problem.
Specifically the culture of personal responsibility. Because what little there was of that prior to the pandemic has nearly vanished now.
I know teachers complain about how the kids today don’t work like their counterparts did 30 years ago. But I’m talking about a sea-change visible in the last 48 months. It’s dramatic. I’ve been in the classroom since 1993, and I’d say up to 2019 kids were mostly the same throughout my career.
Not any more. This is big, and it is real.
I teach both regular and honors level high school English. Prior to the pandemic I could assign homework to both and expect nearly all the honors kids to do the homework, and at least half, maybe more of the regular kids to do it.
Now? None of the regular kids do it, and almost none of the honors kids. So if I don’t want to completely lose my students, I have to design my teaching so that all work can be done in class.
Completely hobbling any effort I make to hold my students accountable, post-pandemic grading policies have entirely shifted to a “save them from themselves” approach, in which we have to accept any late work, even months late, and engineer our classes so that no kid will flunk.
Did they do zero work? Well, give them 50% F’s, instead of 0% F’s, so if they do ANYTHING you can give them credit. Then they can get a D- and pass the class with 59.5% at the last second.
Excuse me?
Funding is attached to graduation numbers. If our numbers fall, our funding goes away; then we lose teachers, while our student body grows (due to retention), and it becomes a vicious cycle. I get it. It’s one of the big problems with public education.
With this system, we are releasing young people who have no idea what it means to not get their way, to have to do something or suffer for not doing it. They don’t know what it means to fail, because they can’t.
But it’s not just the administrative and funding side that’s causing a problem.
Too many parents are fostering this “no failure” agenda from home as well.
The stories our students and their families are telling themselves, and us, to justify this softening of any expectation, this suspension of any accountability, are tantamount to psychological/emotional hypochondria.
“My daughter has extreme social anxiety, so she shouldn’t have to participate in the graded discussion about the novel.”
“My son is too self-conscious about speaking in front of others due to his ADHD and fears that he might say something off-base, and so to avoid his being stigmatized, could you please never call on him in class?”
“My daughter is depressed and can’t concentrate. Could you make sure she doesn’t have to do any reading, so she doesn’t accidentally get distracted by her inability to concentrate, and then feel bad about herself and get more depressed?”
All of these are real requests I’ve had in the past 48 months. They are just the tip of the iceberg.
Look: every human I’ve ever known, from age 5 through age 18 (and probably beyond), is anxious about talking in a group discussion, making a presentation in front of peers, even just saying “here” when roll is taken or walking across the room to get the pass to go to the bathroom. This is not anxiety we should be coddling, cosseting, shielding. This is the kind of anxiety every person has to figure out how to cope with and overcome for themselves.
We all wrestle with self-doubt and shades of depression throughout adolescence. The way to overcome it and gain confidence and self-esteem is not to avoid doing difficult things. It’s to do them. Fail. Learn from the failure. Try again. Find our strengths. Learn to use them. Figure out our weaknesses. Learn how to shore them up. Push on through.
That’s what we need our future adults to be able to do if they’re going to fix our plumbing, add up our grocery bill, patrol our streets, treat our medical issues, build our houses, run our government.
But we’re not teaching them that.
Neither parents nor administrators ever ask us teachers anything along the lines of, “Hey, the kids are really struggling with concentration when trying to read this challenging novel you’ve assigned, and their phones are getting in the way. Could you design a unit to teach them self-awareness of technology use and screen time, strategies to get control over it and put it in its proper place so they can do other things? Could you teach study strategies that help them learn concentration and attention techniques? Ways to break down a text and understand it when it’s dense & difficult?”
Nope.
Instead of helping them with the problems, we’re asked to remove the problems so they just don’t have to deal with them.
This is a recipe for disaster.
It’s one reason why so many teachers are getting out of education. Because it is maddening and demoralizing. Why work to create lessons when you keep finding, again and again, that your best work is considered unimportant by families and administrators? Why keep banging your head against the brick wall of trying to get your students to do work, only to be thrown under the bus for doing so?
Who’d choose to stay in that kind of work environment? (Especially when you’re not paid enough to support your family single-handedly or send your kids to college…but that’s another issue.)
Let’s circle back to that “kids are more depressed these days” issue.
Of course they are.
Everything in their world sends them the message: You have no control over what happens to you, you are incapable of being strong, tough, making it through difficult things. You are at the mercy of other people with more power. You have no agency in this world, and exceptions must be made for you because you are so unable to do even the most basic tasks.
Yes. Those are the messages our children are sent every time someone makes an exception for them because they are having a difficult time with something, every time a parent intervenes and demands second, third, fourth, fifth chances for getting late work turned in, every time an administrator tells the teacher, “Just do whatever it takes to get them to pass — curve the exams, give them an attendance grade, allow late work, give 50% instead of 0.”
Please. I know that the urge behind these behaviors comes from a place of love and compassion, mostly. But there is also a good deal of adult laziness mixed in — because when our children suffer, we suffer. We have to put up with the pouting, the tantrums, the sadness. We have to coach them through it all, and somehow not get sucked down into the morass of despond right along side them.
That’s why they call us the grown-ups, my friends. It’s our job to be better at that stuff than the kids we are parenting, mentoring, teaching.
But also, allow me to come back to the teaching part of this: I have begun to literally teach resilience. An eight-week unit at the end of each school year, “Resilience,” in which we read short stories, scientific papers, human interest articles, memoir pieces, all about the different ways people can develop resilience in the face of a variety of hardships and challenges.
What does this look like?
They learn about things like cognitive re-framing. Meditation and its effect on the brain. List making. The impact screen time has on our brains, and how to disengage. Movement and its essential place in daily living. The importance of humor, and physical touch (I know: thin ice, but it’s true, research supports it, and I think it’s worth the risk, and the risky conversations, this topic engenders). Music, art, and boredom.
I have them keep journals, write poetry, do as much as possible by hand, on paper. And we go outside whenever the situation allows, at least for a short walk, at most for a journal-writing session in the shade of some trees, lying on the grass.
I also teach the very basic study skills they seem to be missing: how to read for greatest comprehension, how to pace long hours of study time so that the brain doesn’t wander, strategies for retention of information, note taking.
But it’s not enough. I can’t do it alone, and without the administration and the folks at home backing me up, my efforts are futile.
Not wasted, though. I see the occasional student respond, pick up what I’m laying down with eagerness, excitement, a kind of relief: “At last, someone’s telling me how to do this, someone believes I am capable of more!” It’s rare, but for them I’ll keep it up.
I know parents have had it tough lately, and the last thing they want on top of all the stress of life in a pandemic is a whiny, mopey, depressed kid. They’ll do anything to make that stop, and typically what they have to do — in the short term — to address that particular issue is probably easier and more immediate (We’ll raise that grade! You can turn in late work for full credit! We can even ask to have you get a 504 for your social anxiety, or an IEP because you are distracted, and then they HAVE to exempt you from the hard things! And voila: look, let’s celebrate that report card with presents!). So who can blame them?
(Please don’t do that thing where you take what I’m saying as an all-out assault on people with disabilities. That’s not my point. Of course there are kids with genuine disabilities who need accommodations in order to have access to an equal education to their peers. It’s the abuse and misapplication of the system that’s been put in place for those kids that I’m calling out, not the system itself.)
It’s time we had a course adjustment. This has gone from short term coping to long term toxic practices.
We see the rippling out of this kind of coddling in colleges and elsewhere: the demand for “safe spaces” and the canceling of offending speakers, the requirement of “trigger warnings” on entertainment and even news content.
But the world is not a safe space in the sense that people mean these days. There are triggers everywhere.
Should people of all genders, colors and beliefs be safe to walk the streets and be themselves? Absolutely. Physical safety is worth pursuing, fighting for, funding. But what ever happened to “sticks and stones” living? When someone spews their ignorance or bigotry at you, shouldn’t you just hold your head high and walk along, living your life well as the best revenge?
Words are not unsafe, ideas should not be banned. No one should be allowed to physically assault you for what you say, whether on the street or on a stage. But verbal banter is not assault. Threats are another issue — do not misunderstand me. However, feeling threatened by another person’s ideas…we’ve got to stop framing that as if it’s literally danger, because it isn’t. It is in fact an excellent place to observe another thing lacking in our education system: the teaching of rhetoric and debate skills.
How do you frame an argument? How do you use counterclaims to strengthen it? How do you answer a challenging idea which is counter to your argument?
And perhaps most important: at the end of the debate you shake hands, speak politely to the other person. Maybe even go get a coffee together.
And there’s no need to worry about being triggered if you feel confident in your own internal resources to respond to any environment, whether it’s by defending your ideas or absorbing new ones, self-soothing during a challenging emotional time or martialing your strengths to push through and do something difficult — -because you’ve learned already that you can, you are able, you have grit and can take care of yourself.
Armed with practice of these skills, perhaps our young people wouldn’t feel such need for “safe spaces” on their college campuses. Perhaps they wouldn’t be so terrified of anything that might remind them of uncomfortable feelings and experiences, traversing the world in which they demand to be warned that they might be “triggered” by something. Instead, perhaps they’d be more interested in exploring strange, uncomfortable, new ideas….and eventually this would ripple out through society, and we’d all be more comfortable with each other, even knowing that we disagree about some things.
It’s a long-term solution I propose, the shake-down and re-orientation of schools’ and families’ approach to our students’ responsibility in their own education. But before you know it, today’s 3rd grader will be graduating from high school, getting a job, going to college, functioning as an independent adult in the wide world.
The sooner we start, the better.