USA TODAY International Edition
Up against poverty and careless adults
My students won’t let COVID- 19 win
Iused to walk around while I was teaching. Sometimes my stepcounting app registered 2 miles just inside my classroom and the hallways of the school. In the dog days of the pandemic, I am grateful that I still have a job and that I can afford a new chair so that when I’m hunched over my computer to teach, my back hurts less. My home office is quiet, and when the wildfire smoke isn’t too thick, I can let a breeze come in through the window and brush my face.
My 180 high school students do not enjoy such accommodations. Most of them huddle in crowded living spaces with second- rate technology and unreliable internet, trying to learn and earn good grades amid distractions that include having to manage the online learning of their younger siblings, some with special needs.
The pandemic has thrown many of their families into economic despair. In some homes, high school seniors search the web for college scholarships while parents calculate their proximity to homelessness. Some are already there. They’re scattered across the city, the region and, in some cases, the Western United States to bunk with uncles and aunts and cousins.
One young man reports living in a van with his brother and mother. They park each morning at the edge of a parking lot so that they can sign their deactivated smart phones into my class in order to get the lesson, be in the discussion and submit assignments via McDonald’s Wi- Fi.
I am amazed at how, despite all of this, so many students have remained engaged in learning. When we have discussions and I call on them, most answer, though their answers are often cut short by weak internet signals or a loud conversation or an argument starting a few feet away from them.
We try to stay hopeful, about their future and the future of everything. But from their vantage point, I think, there must be moments that suggest there is no future. Only endless struggle and endless isolation from peers.
Unforgiving of themselves
They miss being at school. Some say they never believed it would be possible to miss being at school. They also are in no hurry to return — not until it is safe. They have parents who are frontline workers and parents with underlying health conditions. Almost all of them have seen someone in their extended family get COVID- 19. Some have lost an uncle or aunt or grandparent.
They tell me they are sorry they can’t focus enough on school right now. They have spent their lives refusing to let poverty and degradation deter them from success, and they are unforgiving of themselves for letting a virus derail them in any way.
Of course, they are the lucky ones. They know and I know that for every struggling student in my class, there might be 10 peers living on their crowded street who have given up.
My coaching colleagues talk about players who’ve lost their motivation and plan to drop out of school if there isn’t a football or basketball or soccer season this year. We hope they will listen to reason and find value in education without athletics. We hope they will believe they can be successful in a world they now know to be not only indifferent but stupid and utterly selfish.
Stupid because how hard should it be to understand how a virus spreads and how to keep it from spreading? Stupid because how hard is it to understand that you wear a mask not just for self- protection but for the sake of every other person in your community, including those who might die from the virus? And how hard is it to understand that the virus doesn’t always alert you when it’s in your body, and that its objective is to multiply and infect as many bodies as it can?
They understand too much
My students understand this. They understand the irresponsibility of socalled leaders who disdain masks and social distancing while they have access to a level of health care the rest of us will never have.
My students understand that they are having to spend what could end up being a year or more of high school stuck in their homes — and vehicles and other people’s homes — because a president didn’t want to upset a stock market or admit a mistake.
And because now, after seven months, people are tired of postponing parties. My students see the gatherings on their street and in their neighborhood. I see it in my own neighbors’ yards — 20 or 30 unmasked people eating and drinking and talking. I am not unsympathetic.
I am tired of wearing a mask whenever I leave home, and I know that many young people live in tiny apartments they never thought they would have to spend so much time in. But I have to square all that with students who have no hope of returning to school until our city and county get the virus under control.
Over the past seven months, I have often told my kids about the struggles of young people in the past. Imagine being a teenager during World War II in London. Or Berlin or Tokyo. Or here, with no bombs falling on your city but a war going on and everyone having to make sacrifices for the common good — our collective survival.
I want to tell my students that we can all get through this pandemic together by making sacrifices for the common good. I wish it weren’t such a far- fetched idea.
Larry Strauss has been a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992. He is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and the author of “Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher” and, on audio, “Now’s the Time” ( narrated by Kim Fields).