Schools, staff under massive stress
We have highly traumatised teachers with fired-up brains and bodies filled with toxic stress. They have fought and now they want to flee, writes Jessica Wasserman
I have found myself this past month in flight mode, escaping and avoiding all news and all conversation pertaining to Covid-19, schooling and education. I have experienced more body pain and aches than normal, and my energy levels have dropped quite significantly.
In an attempt to avoid the real world, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram looking at the latest food trends and quarantine funny home videos. And every once in a while, I would scroll past something of real significance: teachers and parents protesting in the streets, holding placards and posters with the words “teachers’ lives matter”; photographs of principals and teachers whose lives had been taken by the virus, leaving behind distraught families and staff; brave schoolchildren dressed in their school uniforms, adorned in their facemasks; anxious parents looking for online schooling, jobs, food, electricity.
And then I realised: these families, these teachers, these school personnel, are all currently in “fight mode.” They are fighting to feel safe, fighting to be heard, and fighting to survive. Survive the virus that has infected 381,798 and killed 5,368 people in SA; survive the school day and the economic meltdown. All these people are tired, angry, sore, sad.
A brain in fight mode releases chemicals such as cortisol into the body, which dilates the pupils, increases heart rate, and “switches off” the digestive and immune systems. Too much cortisol is toxic to the body. It affects mood, decision-making, impulse control and relationships.
As the debate around closing schools rages on, a lot of focus has been placed on the impact on the pupils. Less is said about the teachers, yet they are a central cog to the schooling processes.
Yes, our teachers have faced fears more deadly and threatening than Covid-19. They have been exposed to the sound of gunshots outside the school gates at 8am. They have lost pupils, friends and family members to gang wars, illness and widespread violence, and they have never stopped to consider the impact that this toxic stress has on their body.
Covid-19 brought everything and everyone to a grinding halt. And it is only in stillness that our bodies and minds are able to experience its chemical toxicity and imbalance. It is in stillness that we begin to ache.
We ache physically in our bodies — headaches, body aches, muscle and joint aches; we ache emotionally with sadness, exhaustion, frustration, anger, restlessness, fear; and we ache socially with isolation, withdrawal, impulsivity. This is trauma. Left untreated, unnoticed, and unresolved, this traumatic and toxic stress can stay with us for a long time, impacting us cognitively, physically, and emotionally. Cue Covid-19. Our teachers, currently experiencing toxic posttrauma effects, are now thrown into the tumultuous world of Covid-19: the unseen, unknown, deadly virus.
Being in survival mode, the “back” part of the brain, our bodies remain in a state of hypervigilance and hyperarousal. We are overly alert and responsive to imminent danger, real or perceived. For example, due to it being in its very nature unseen, the risk of catching the virus feels extremely overwhelming, heightening feelings of threat. It is difficult feeling a sense of safety, even when the necessary precautions are taken.
Perhaps this is why the personal protective equipment (PPE), sanitisers and hourly fumigation provided by the department of basic education has not provided the sense of comfort and safety that the teachers have needed in order to stabilise and metabolise the stress chemicals in their bodies.
Safety is what everyone needs at this time as we fight the invisible enemy. Safety refers not only to a physical, external sense of safety such as burglar bars, high walls, electric fences or even PPE. The safety that is being most critically sought is a felt sense of safety. This is safety that is experienced and felt emotionally and psychologically.
A safe space is one in which someone feels heard, seen and regulated/grounded. Only then can one shift brain states, from that heightened state of arousal and hypervigilance (in the primal part of the brain), to a calm and focused state where clear decision-making and higherorder thinking can take place (in the pre-frontal cortex at the top part of the brain).
Perhaps what initially saw my brain state shift to one of flight mode was during the initial conversations about the phasing in of children back to school. Before that point I still had high hopes. I believed that we could make this work if we used sensitivity and a traumainformed approach, one which acknowledges the importance of social-emotional learning, and uses compassion as its universal language.
Compassion is recognition of the other. It is seeing the distress, the pain, the struggle of the other, and providing an empathic, non-judgmental, emotionally safe and regulated space within which the other can find grounding and selfacceptance. In hindsight I realise that what was missing from each of the premiers’, ministers’ and HODs’ speeches was compassion. No compassion for the teachers, who fight a daily battle on the ground, from the front line. There was neither empathy or acknowledgement for the work they’ve always done, nor for the additional anxiety and trauma that Covid19 has brought with it.
It is my belief that had our teachers received some compassion, even a third of what they received in PPE, we would have witnessed a very different phasing in at our schools. We would have witnessed teachers who had been provided with the emotional support to assist them in shifting from a survival brain state to a regulated and grounded one, a brain state in which they would be able to welcome their pupils into a space which they felt they could better manage and contain, a space in which they and their pupils could feel safe and in control in what I call a Covid-19 classroom.
Ideally, a trauma-sensitive Covid-19 classroom should be one that serves as a safety bubble — a safe space in which a teacher and pupil are contained for the duration of the school day.
Teachers should not be meeting in the staff room or in the kitchen; these areas should be completely out of bounds. All staff meetings should be held online or virtually. Packed lunches should be brought to school to lessen the risk of crosscontamination, and should be eaten in the classroom, or on the school field according to a scheduled timetable. Wholeschool intervals should be eliminated, along with the school bell. The siren sound of the bell heightens the body’s alarm system (i.e. amygdala) in the brain and activates the fight/ flight/ freeze response, ultimately resetting the brain to survival mode.
If teachers and pupils are able to find their rhythm in their safe space, finding acceptance, regulation and compassion for one another, a sense of safety and self-control will ensue.
Instead we have highly traumatised teachers with fired-up brains, and bodies filled with toxic stress. They have fought and now they want to flee. They want to escape the very place that has always been their calling, their home from home. They are exhausted and burnt out. Teacher unions, including the ANC-aligned Sadtu, have urged for schools to be closed again. At the time of writing basic education minister Angie Motshekga was still consulting other stakeholders to come up with what she calls consensus on the issue.
Teachers are not in the brain state to think critically and creatively about how best to provide our children with a safe, regulated space within which to be contained and educated. They themselves feel unsafe and dysregulated. They have not been provided with the compassion and empathy so deserving of their vocation.
And so, whether our schools stay open or shut their doors, the reality stays the same: until we have addressed the lack of psychosocial and emotional support being provided to our teachers, we will be left with entire communities in the throes of trauma with brains in fired up survival states, and the continuation of complex intergenerational trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder.
What a sad state of affairs.
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They want to escape the very place that has always been their calling, their home from home