Teachers don’t get hazard pay
The private school where I taught for two decades was a building a block square and contained three contiguous di- visions — the lower, the middle and the upper school, where I taught 10th through 12th grades. When my daughter turned four, we enrolled her in pre-K there. The following December, for the first time in decades, I came down with a sinus infection that flattened me for two weeks. For the next three years, like clockwork, it was sinusitis, bronchitis or the flu, hitting me either in early December or in the spring.
The reason was obvious. All three divisions occupied the same common spaces — cafeteria, front lobby, gym, corridors — where a bug can spread. Plus, teens and children weaponize infections. It didn’t matter if you show up for work without preconditions like diabetes or obesity. So generally healthy men and women would still get sick, even the ones who got their flu shot — for the ordinary flu, not COVID-19.
If this sounds like special pleading for the instructional corps, it is, and specifically for the shock troops nobody ever really pays attention to — elementary school teachers. I was one floor above and a subdivision away from the lower school; my lower school colleagues were less lucky. Their interactions were trickier. Watch them work and you realize that primary school instruction is one of the dark arts.
There is greater physical intimacy, no top-down lectures from behind a desk, lots of hand-holding, hugs and tear-wiping. These are men and mostly women who, like me, have advanced degrees (in some cases from better schools), spend whole days with 4-year-olds, wiping noses and spills and catching whatever they bring from home. All this for lower salaries and generally limited respect.
Some wisdom-dispensers in the media and government have started to insist that teachers abandon “remote” or distance learning and head back into the classroom because teachers are also “essential workers.” How refreshing to agree with folks who most of the time seem to loathe the profession or gamely put up with it.
Yes, teachers are essential. We’ve always known just how much. Let me add that I know of no university colleague of mine who has come to love “remote teaching.” We’re pretty much convinced that what is truly remote is the chance of its ever replacing on-site, classroom teaching.
The problem is that when we used to talk about maintaining a “safe classroom,” we were not thinking of infecting whole communities, including our families. You cannot carry on classroom conversations or conference over a paper wearing a mask or a face shield (try it); few classrooms are large enough to accommodate 20-plus “socially distanced” students, which would effectively double the square footage; you can’t guarantee that the podium, the smart box, the desktop, or even the doorknob has been sanitized on entry and exit; and it’s probably a really bad idea grading quizzes and homework that was the accidental target of a sneeze or a cough.
And best of luck if you’re working with younger children, surrounded by small bodies, stewarding their attentions, shaping their energies, and sometimes just keeping them safely in their seats.
Teachers certainly are essential, but to confuse a teacher with a hospital worker is a category error, like baking an apple pie with tomatoes since they’re both technically fruit. We work with minds, not bodies. So until there is at least an effective vaccine or an administration that does more than tweet moronic insults and vacuous demands that we “open the schools,” why not keep the instructional class safe, if not alive?
I know it’s inconvenient, especially for those who see teaching as a kind of babysitting. Still, if and when the pandemic slows or is safely mitigated, it will not have been reduced to the status of an endangered species.
Barbarese is an English professor at Rutgers.