Missing Out on School

There are a hundred reasons students should not go back to "school-as-usual" in a few weeks, but I want to talk about the most important one:

     Human interaction. 

Kids come into my classroom not just to learn, but also to find a reprieve from the chaos of high school.  They have been known to sit in recycling boxes as a safe space, to sit in a corner with a blanket and a pillow, to sleep (because they can't sleep at home), to eat lunch and talk about their lives, to ask questions about life and love, and to share.

So when "The Man" says that we need to open schools during a pandemic, because kids needs social interaction and social skills, The Man is batshit crazy.

Most classrooms in America do NOT have the room for 6 foot distancing.  Even the hallways, lunchrooms, and bathrooms don't have that kind of space.  More importantly, if they have to stay away from each other, we will not have the same kind of human interaction that the government so boldly says they need.  Everyone will be awkward, seminars will be less informative and less interactive, and the very things which help us communicate (like facial expressions), will be mostly hidden, behind a mask.  Students with anxiety or depression will not be helped by this experiment we seem prepared to do on our children.

If books and desks and chairs and doors have to be sanitized every time someone uses them, aren't we kind of describing a hospital ward?
If kids are being sequestered, aren't we kind of describing a prison?  (By the way, look at the number of COVID cases in prisons right now ...)

And let's remember that kids are kids, so they will take the masks off, try to be funny by coughing and/or sneezing on people, refuse to follow the rules, and then have to be "disciplined".  What am I supposed to do?  Tase a kid who's being a dick?  If so, we should have had tasers a long time ago.  But I think the point of schools is to EDUCATE, not just control.  We have options.  I don't want to be even more of a babysitter, nurse, therapist, guard ...  I got into education to TEACH, not police.

Isn't it enough that we already target our children with crippling student loans and high interest credit and five-days-a-week, eight-hours-a-day confinement in school buildings?

America has the unique opportunity right now to change, adjust, amend, and improve the way in which we educate our children.  Instead, we seem hell-bent on keeping the status quo, even when the status quo has proven again and again that our model of education often makes kids hate school, EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO PANDEMIC.

I suggest that regardless of everyone's political affiliation, Americans come together and fight this pandemic, get it under control, stop paying out billions of dollars to companies for a vaccine (even when those companies have NEVER brought a viable product to market), and THEN get our kids back to schools which reflect proactive thinking and real-life knowledge, not just plowing through a curricular syllabus to check off school district boxes of "proficiency" in any given subject.

American schools have an opportunity here.  I hope we don't squander it just to prove that we are too big to fail.