Nobody could have predicted what was going to happen, and nobody was prepared to deal with it. But, hypothetically, imagine the following. Imagine being confined in an online meeting for hours every day, racking your brain for ideas on how to educate hundreds of students in a global pandemic. Imagine not being paid for your hard work, much less credited. And finally, imagine that the plan you worked so hard to create was scrapped until the very last minute. Unfortunately, many of the teachers at Ithaca High School don’t have to imagine. They have experienced this situation firsthand, after all. They took on the responsibilities of the administration as underpaid labor, under the guise of “voluntary task forces.” Choice in this situation was an illusion; if the task forces didn’t make things happen, who would? And so, the teachers poured their blood, sweat, and tears into this work. The mission at hand was to create five viable models, including multiple hybrid ones. After much deliberation, they finally did, and presented it to the administration, who promptly informed them that the plans for the hybrid models, which were assigned to them, had been cancelled. Since then, the school has doubled back on its previous criticisms against a hybrid model and introduced one at the last minute. As if that wasn’t enough, the model proposed is completely different from what the teachers had worked so hard to create.
A week or two prior to the announcement of the new model, it was announced that every teacher would be forced to return in person for the coming school year, not to mention the other staff such as bus drivers and janitors that didn’t have a choice in the first place. To understand the impact of being so suddenly stripped from the choice to stay home, I will give you an anecdote. I once saw a social experiment in which a magician made a bet with members of two different groups. To the first group, he said, “I will give you $30 if you win this bet.” To the second, he said, “To participate in the bet, you must pay $20. But, if you win, I’ll give you $50 back.” Almost nobody from the second group took the offer. Seeing that they were being given the choice to stay home, the teachers invested their imaginary $20 in the school by not seeking a different job in confidence that such an important safety plan would not be changed. However, it did. The administration gave them the choice to retire or in search of a different job—once again, another illusion. By giving them a false sense of job safety and security and suddenly stripping it away, the administration itself vastly decreased the teachers’ chances of finding new employment. If the teachers had known from the beginning that they were going to be forced to remain in school, many would have begun seeking a new job months sooner. The incompetence and indecisiveness of the administration put the safety and livelihood of all teachers in jeopardy.
Now, going into the makeshift hybrid model, teachers are being forced to manage two environments at the same time. Given the rotational format of the model and the students staying online permanently to begin with, teachers must marshal inhumane levels of concentration and multitasking to convey each lesson to both the students currently in the classroom and those on the screen. It has been left up to them to deal with moving about the classroom in person and educating and engaging online all at the same time using Canvas, a program that they received minimal training for. Schedules were given out less than a week before the start of school, which had already been delayed.
Overall, the argument that such problems were inevitable is a poor one. The cracks in the foundation of the reopening plan were hidden away as some of the children of the administration were silently transferred to other districts. This warrants a cry for help, for communication, for reform. In an anonymous quote from one teacher: “I need your help. I want to teach your kids. I want to stay alive.”