Equity Theatre, Safety Theatre, COVID19 Theatre: The Appearance of Caring

Wired had an insightful piece on diversity theatre in a recent issue that exposes the organizational lie behind equity programs trotted out by management to give the appearance of caring about current social issues.  

"Diversity theater creates a sense of dissonance: Workers have to represent the company publicly while feeling victimized by it privately; they must identify shortcomings but are punished for acting on them."

The frustation felt by people of colour who take on equity management roles only to discover that they aren't allowed to be critical of anything their employer does casts a harsh light on the game of appearing to care as a marketing promotion.  Actually caring and the systemic change it would prompt is something most organizations are unable or unwilling to do because most organizations exist as a result of some very one sided history, and no one is willing to hand back their systemic privalege.

This isn't just as private company gambit, public services are in the same boat.  Governments formed on the back of economic imperialism aren't willing to move from that position of privalege and dominance.  The primarily white, heteronomative, neurotypicals who roost in organizational management positions are more than happy to spend a pitance on theatrical appearances but would never risk their privaleged positions by pushing for true institutional change.

One of the thrills (for me at least though many others don't seem to be feeling it) in teaching is helping a student in less than ideal circumstances rise above their socio-economic station and get onto a pathway that best reflects their potential.  In the past year I've seen the public educaiton system in Ontario, already under attack from a hostile government, convulse under the weight of a mismanaged health emergency.  The people to blame for this exist at the highest levels of government and, in this particular government's case, have been ushered in to office by a misled electorate who have given them the power to deconstruct the few remaining equity processes in our public education system.  When they couldn't force the system to throw its least privaleged students under the bus, they simply leveraged a pandemic to do it for them; and the political organizations standing against them in public education capitulated in a panic.

I'm not so sure that it did any more.  COVID has been the hammer Ford wished for - everyone else in education has been outsmarted by the virus but Ford seems to be leveraging it.

Theatre is a great way to hammer home inequity while appearing to care.  COVID theatre is the current weapon of choice.  I just learned that we are doing quadmesters again in the fall.  It won't matter that all staff and most students will be vaccinated by then, it's easier to look like you care by throwing a radically inequitable schedule at students and staff and then sitting back to watch it mulch them, all the time saying that it shows how much you care about their safety.

We're facing an unprecidented number of failures in school this year.  I have strong students who have simply given up and fallen silent, and my heart is broken for them.  I'm willing to bet these students in particular are in the middle of family economic crises with parents laid off due to the pandemic, and/or the loss of family members, and/or depression from the lack of genuine social contact for over a year now.  Even with all that happening, I'm hearing from even the strongest students that they are being run into the ground by twelve plus hours a day of maths work as teachers desperately try to jam 110 hours of complex instruction through the key-hole of emergency remote learning in wildly inequitable situations.  STEM is for the rich and privaleged who have the time and space to keep up with the workload.

Many parents of students with IEPs have told me of the crisis their children are experiencing at the hands of a system determined to play the COVID-theatre of business-as-usual in education.  Watching (usually young, energetic teachers looking for contract sections) pipe up about how there are real advantages to quadmestered teaching is laughable, but one of the best ways to get into a system is to help it support its myths.  This slight of hand is heartbreaking and deeply personal because I'm a parent of a student with special needs.  When your child's IEP specifically states they need extra time to work on material and you see teacher after teacher running them off the treadmill of quadmestered/reduced time/accelerated learning, you have to wonder where everyone's heads are at.  Compassion should lie at the heart of equity but it seems that compassion is in short supply over a year into this pandemic.

Last spring we magically passed everyone even though the system lurched into fully remote emergency learning completely unprepared.  After being run through face to face learning only to be pulled out again and again this year when school driven pandemic spread was proven to be the engine driving our provincial disaster, the validity of 'credits' in the 2020/21 school year is, at best, questionable.

Even when we were face to face (in masks, distanced) students were still expected to spend half of their course learning remotely.  The other half had them in barely functioning face to face cohorts where they were being taught in madly restricted classrooms by exhausted teachers trying to be in two places at once.  In the insane year I'm just staggering to the end of I never once had a covering teacher, either online or in person, who was qualified to teach my subject.  I never once even had a technology teacher covering me in live classes so that students could keep using tools and equipment in what little face to face instructional time they did have.

Quadmestered face to face teaching meant two 2.5 hour continuous instructional periods everyday where, if I had to duck out to use the washroom, I was putting my students at risk leaving them with a teacher (sometimes they weren't even teachers) who were unqualified to monitor safety in the room.  Safety-theatre is another one of these smoke and mirror games organizations like to play where (as long as it doesn't mean any extra work for them) they'll put you in a position where you'll do extra to keep things working to the point of hurting yourself, like I did this year.  Had anyone been injured you can bet I'd have had contract specifics being quoted at me as blame was leveled, regardless of the arbitrary nature of all the safety theatre.

Each of those 2.5 hour face to face instructional periods without qualified relief wasn't the only ball I was juggling.  Simultaneously I was also setting up remote learning and monitoring that, because every teacher I was partnered with was unqualified to teach my subject area and usually took that opportunity to fade away and leave me trying to be in two places at once.  Students in my current remote class don't know who our elearning support teacher is because they've never seen her.  Multiple calls to my union were met with silence and I've since stepped back from the position of CBC rep because I'm not sure I actually have a union anymore.

Theatre runs thick in our union too.  This spring at AMPA, the yearly provinical gathering of regional representatives, members of colour were kicked out of the online event for having virtual avatars on their accounts that upset the always-white provinical management.  White supremacy, as described on those avatars, wasn't an over the top suggestion but it hurt the feelings of the delicate white people in charge and so they banned those members of colour.  We've since had it explained to us (multiple times by old white people in charge) that those members broke the parlimentary rules everyone agreed to abide by and that's why they were removed.  They then voted in another white president, though it is a woman and we've only had two of those in a century, so little steps.  The woman of colour who could lead us into a more equitable future was convulsed out of contention as this old Canadian organization does what old Canadian organizations do best: cling to colonial prejudices when it best suits the people running them.

In reference to the attempts to address systemic racism in one of the biggest boards in the proivnce, a member of colour said they felt like OSSTF provincial was weaponizing our own consitution against us.  I've been seeing that side of OSSTF since 2012.  Maybe one day we'll put aside the equity theatre and actually be equitable.  Any mention of this online whips senior (white) union management into a, "you're a union basher!" stance.  I can assure you I am not, but I'm no fan of the status quo and they shouldn't be either.  Instead of weaponizing an archaic paliamentary system that keeps the status quo intact, perhaps we should be looking for ways to rejig the system so it's actually more equitable and representative of all members.  That isn't just something my union should do, it's something our not-so-representative Canadian governments should do too.

The hair-trigger decision to go with quadmestered classes in the fall even though we're not sure where we'll be by then and case numbers continue to fall even as the province opens up thanks to a vaccination system that is finally working is, at best, short-sighted.  It plays the COVID theatre game by showing how serious everyone is about safety while ignoring the gross inequities of quadmestered scheduling.  It also happens to reuse all the planning done last year but I'm sure that easy way out wasn't what prompted the decision.  Someone decided that students with special needs or the ones under durress at home can burn for another inequitable, unsustainable quadmestered school year for valid, pedagogical reasons, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, front line workers will get dunked into another year of unsustainable and inequitable work overload.  Attempting to be in two places at once (for me at least, for many teachers with smaller classes it's an easier ride) is absolutely harrowing.  COVID theatre will also demand that everyone wear masks in a one-size-fits-all organization in poorly ventilated rooms not because vaccinations don't work (they do), but because it's important to look like we're doing something.

We'll probably have a lot of well-meaning (is it well-meaning if it's theatre?) equity PD again this year even as we roll out a schedule that (once again) systemically attacks students with special needs or who lack the privalege needed to effectively leverage remote learning.  It'll once again be left to individuals on the front lines to make up for this systemic failure by trying to bridge the pedgagocial gaps we've opened up.  The theatre of cruelty isn't over yet.

It's not over - it may never be over.  That lack of hope is corrosive.  Some leadership that embraces hope would be... magical.

Academic Gatekeeping In a Pandemic

What's our job as teachers?  Curriculum police?  Guardians of the ivory towers of academia?  Throughout the pandemic I've had students telling me tales of woe around their core subjects (English, maths & science), all three of which are seem to be chasing curriculum at all costs with radically reduced resources, most especially time.  They seem intent on making up for these shortcomings by burying students in work at a time when many of them are frazzled to the point of ineffectiveness.

In a normal semester you take 75 minutes of instruction a day, have another hour of possible enrichment at lunch or before/after school, and then have time after school for homework that reviews small, 75 minute segments of new learning.  Even in those good times that homework expectation gets my back up.  Teachers who dump an hour of homework on a student each night are part of a cabal that believes that students should spend five hours a day taking in-school instruction and then another four hours a night doing homework (students take four subjects per day).  These nine hour days aren't sit-in-an-office-and-stare-out-the-window situations, they're paying focused attention while developing new knowledge and skills hours, which makes them very tiring.  Even at the best of times that homework load isn't humane, nor is it equitable.

Public education serves everyone and doing so
doesn't make it anti-excellence. A system that
selects the top students based on their socio-
economic status isn't equitable, nor is it doing
what public education is supposed to be doing.

Got a job?  Got other family commitments? The homework cabal doesn't care.  Their job is to shake the tree of dead fruit and only send the most privileged specimens on to the glorified halls of post-secondary academia.  This is in direct conflict with what I believe the function of public education to be:  to maximize the potential of every student and point them towards a more fulfilling life that makes best use of their abilities.  The fact that the socio-economic privilege that supports the homework cabal usually falls to white, hetero-normative, cis gendered, neuro-typical, male students isn't their problem; academic credibility must be maintained at all costs!

I was once one of those dead fruits.  I have no doubt that I struggled in high school with maths and science because I was also working full-time hours in order to help my parents pay their mortgage through senior high school.  Being undiagnosed as neuro-atypical didn't help either but calling a student lazy and unfocused is much easier than identifying their neuro-diversity or acknowledging socio-economic disparities.

I can recall my core subject report cards commenting on my lack of focus, but then I was working until mid-night every day before coming in to school the next morning, though that didn't stop teachers from bracketing me as a weak student and directing me out of university bound pathways (I've since earned 2 degrees).

During the pandemic our typical six month semesters have been crammed into 10 week quad-mesters, each week being a drink-from-the-firehose two and a half hour marathon in-class session followed by another two and a half hour marathon remote learning session, whether you've got the tech and circumstances at home to do it or not.  What was once a classist, inequitable system has doubled down on that approach during COVID19.  Now that we're fully remote again for the third time those inequities are further amplified.

Mountains have been moved to try and address the digital divide, but sending a Chromebook home isn't going to resolve generational socio-economic dysfunction and systemic-repression, and digital literacy has much more to it than whether or not you have access to a computer.  Our unwillingness to make digital fluency a foundational skill in our classrooms has put us in a situation where we are expecting  students to complete over half of their instruction in a course in an environment where the vast majority (teachers included) barely have a working knowledge, let alone fluency.  While fully remote it also makes wild assumptions about student and teacher home lives and what they are able to achieve through the bottle-necked, undersupported and overburdened medium of elearning.

We're currently in another wave of COVID19 prompted by a dysfunctional Ontario government and I'm coaching students in a series of virtual Skills Ontario competitions while instruction is fully remote..  Extracurriculars are nearly impossible this year with the viscous schedule and unapologetic work loads that teachers desperate to meet curriculum requirements are unloading on students.  One of my competitors just dropped out because his calculus class (in addition to virtual instruction all day) is expecting late night homework marathons every night.

If you usually give an hour of homework for a seventy-five minute class spread over six months in a normal semester, you're handing out over four hours of homework per day every day in our cramped quadmestered schedule where every day is the equivalent of 4.2 days of normal instruction.  Core subject teachers with their mandatorily loaded classes seem particularly determined to drive students through their full curriculum by depending almost entirely on overloading students with an avalanche of work.  When your subject is guaranteed to run regardless of how you approach it, that academic credibility seems to become an excuse for inequity.

This academic gate-keeping seems particularly acute in the core subjects where rigorously dictated curriculums have teachers worried about students in future classes if they don't have the fundamentals down.  This year I've had students from grades 9 to 12 tell me that they can't do my course work on the week I'm teaching them because their English/maths/science teacher left them homework for their off-week.  So much for us all being in this together.

Just Hang On...

It has been another rough week of double cohort double class teaching.  Evidently I'm one of only 5 people in our school who have been waterboarded like this.  Everyone else has been teaching up to half the synchronous face to face instructional time that I have.  My employer is nowhere in sight and neither is my union in terms of providing qualified teachers to support my classes, so on I trudge alone.

While that is happening we're dealing with serious on-going health issues in my family and I managed to pull my back out so badly this week that I had trouble breathing.  I have no doubt that this is stress related, but no one will care or do anything until I'm broken, and then it will be the blame game.

On Monday we had a half day of PD that I was unaware of.  I couldn't find any details about it in email and when it rolled out over the Monday afternoon I sat there wondering what was going on.  The system has been wildly out of balance all year and PD has been desperately needed though none was forthcoming, then suddenly this.  Frankly, an afternoon not having to wear PPE three sizes too small all day again made this feel like a win.  It was nice not going home with rope burns on my face.

In a rushed one hour session a man in Alberta cut open the wounded emotional body of our staff and then left.  He was desperate to establish rapport and attempt psychic surgery on us through a one way sixty minute video chat.  He lost me when he attempted to use my lack of reproductive effectiveness as a joke (why aren't you people in Ontario pumping out more children?).  At that point I angrily started cleaning up my classroom, which is in tatters because I have been given no time to maintain it in the past year, and that's how I pulled my back out.

I'm sure that wasn't the intent of the half day invasive PD, though when you see that many superintendents and other senior admin in a meeting you have to wonder what the intent is.  Many people seemed to find it helpful, but many people aren't teaching all day every day all year like I am.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was in rough shape but continued to plan and oversee my class from home because you can't expect anyone covering to do it consistently when none of them are qualified to teach the subject, not that this matters in 2021.  I've not been given any qualified support for coverage or remote support (which is fully half of the reduced instructional time students are expected to spend in 'class' this year).  While my union throws a fit about elearning classes that would at least be taught by qualified teachers, they've been bragging about how unqualified teachers are the solution in schools all year.  It's this kind of political game playing and the inconsistencies that it produces that leave me wondering what the hell I'm a part of.

I would if I could sleep...

With my class split into morning and afternoon cohorts, one of my cohorts didn't see me on Monday.  Remote expectations have been vague and are only getting vaguer as you'd expect from a system that, if it does elearning at all, does it as poorly as it can.  At this point the remote work being done mustn't include new material, assessment or any kind of, um, teaching.  This puts even more pressure on those marathon 2.5 hour x 2 per day face to face learning sessions  The afternoon cohort ignored the instructions I left them online when our class was cancelled and I've spent the rest of the week trying to get most of them back on track; just what I needed this week.

Driving home Friday I was in tears.  Students are exhausted and even the strongest ones are just shrugging and walking away, and I don't have the energy or resources to stand against the education system while trying to make what we do appear credible.

Next week I'm supposed to culminate an entire course in four days while having ignored a key component of the course (the engineering design process) because there has simply been no time to address it in our drink-from-the-firehose quadmesters where I barely have time to cover basic concepts and skills.  I'm then doing that again the week after with the other class which is also a split section senior group so I need to arrange grade 11 and grade 12 face to face work along with simultaneous grade 11 and grade 12 remote/elearning work, and monitor it all while doing 2 things at once.  I keep telling myself I just have to get to the end of this quadmester alive.

I'm looking forward to next quadmester (where I'm teaching my sixth consecutive double cohort class) when I'm told I have to provide remote support for someone else's class that I'm not qualified to teach because that's a 'fair' distribution of work.  Fair doesn't mean anything any more.

I just have to make it to the end of my second double double (this time with an added double stacked class) quadmester... two more weeks.

Not yet...

I'm exhausted because I've been scheduled more than twice the instructional hours of other teachers in my board.  No one from union or board appears interested in addressing this wildly inequitable distribution of work.  Not one 'support' teacher has been qualified to cover my subject.  Remember that the next time OSSTF bleats on about how important it is to have qualified teachers teaching.

Trudgery: teaching in COVID at the brittle edge

 I've been struggling to reflect my way out of another double cohorted double class semester with no breaks to plan, mark or otherwise manage a radical change in time tabling.  In the face of this I'm trying to describe the situation in the hopes that verbalizing it more clearly defines it for me and helps me figure out a way to survive another quadmester of maximum COVID-classroomness.

In order to keep face to face class sizes below 21 students we are running a split day where half the class is face to face and the other half is remote, then they switch.  This exhausting system has me trying to respond to remote student questions while teaching face to face all day every day.  It has all the challenges of a face to face technology classroom with all the headaches of remote teaching.

The term for it when you have two double cohort classes in a single quadmester is a double-double (ala Tim Hortons).  It basically means you're teaching in two places at once all day every day.

All of my classes this year are double cohort classes.  I appear to be a minority in this even though I'm one of few teachers in the school who has unique qualifications that no one else has or can teach.  This means any 'online support' teacher I get has no facility with what we're teaching, leaving me with the job of managing both cohorts simultaneously.  Piling on this lack of equity in the workplace are the covering teachers we're supplied with in class.  They are supposed to free us from the classroom so we have some prep time to completely re-write the curriculum to suit this new format, but none of those teachers are tech qualified which means if I leave students should be taken off hands-on work (only tech teachers are qualified to cover tech safety requirements in class).  Further cutting hands-on work in a year where we've already cut instructional time in half is problematic.

Because that's not enough, I'm also teaching a double-double with a senior stacked class of two different grades (a double-double-double?).  I'm currently unable to sleep very well and I'm frequently up at 3am, which is when I'm doing all my planning and marking because I have no other time to do it when I'm at work.

We're not given any data on our students so I dig it all up myself.  I've started this double-double-double with a stacked to maximum capacity of 31 students in two grades (20 in the maxed out morning cohort and the other 11 in the afternoon) senior class.  This is an 'M' level senior technology class.  In other places these are capped much lower, but my hands-on technology class is capped the same as a grade 12 university bound calculus or English class even though we're hands on with live electricity, power tools and 400 degree soldering irons.  Out of those 31 students, 26% are applied level students and 10% are essential level.  52% of students in the class have an individual education plan that demands differentiation of instruction (both online and f2f - simultaneously).

Ontario high school classes are supposed to be 110 hours long.  I only get 52.5 hours of face to face instruction with my students in our pandemic quadmesters.  The other 52.5 hours I'm unable to support them online because I'm face to face with the other cohort of the same class.  I suggested we use the empty room next door and spread out across two classes.  My non-shop regular classroom packed with technology makes six foot separation even in cohorts of 20 impossible, but spreading out across two classrooms would allow us to maintain social distancing while also providing a qualified instructor for online learning since we'd be a single cohort class (all 31 students in but spread across two classrooms means smaller cohorts in each room than with the class cut into morning and afternoon cohorts), and I'd be supporting my own students in the afternoon online.

This seemed like a reasonable ask but I got a hard "no" from above.  Evidently what I teach is too dangerous for  me to be able to manage students in two rooms at the same time.  Not too dangerous to stuff 31 students of every skill level into a stacked class, but too dangerous to work in two rooms at the same time.

Our media arts room and even our metal shop full of lathes and other metal cutting tools that can chop your fingers off operate in two spaces walled off into two separate rooms where the teachers have to be in two places at once, but evidently I'm a special case.  My students don't warrant qualified teachers for the remote half of their class, or a safely distanced space to work in.

While I was trying to sort out a pedagogically sensible and safer solution for my senior students I'm also juggling another double cohort of grade 9s in the other week.  That class is more academically leaning than my previous two classes but still rocks a 26% applied, 9% essential mix (including one DD student who is occupying almost all our in-class and remote support).  Over a quarter of that class has IEPs as well.

I'm trying to keep the hands-on aspects of the course alive but finding parts in a pandemic isn't getting any easier as we stagger through another quadmester.  I have only a few PCs left for grade 9s to learn building on and what I do have is in rough shape.  When I'm up at 4am I'm also contacting my usual suppliers to see if I can get any more parts in.  They're moving mountains for me but I'll have to drive down to Brampton to pick them up because I'm not allowed to charge for shipping suddenly.  Not sure when I'm going to do that.

I'm still left wearing the same mask as everyone else.  The other morning I was walking down the hallway with two colleagues.  If you put both of them together I'm still bigger, but we're all handed the same mask, though I half swallow mine because it's much too small for me.  Every day I finish with a cracking sinus headache from the constant pressure.  I offered to bring in my own PPE but I'm not allowed.

While all that's all going on I also helped a science teacher get the cables she needed to run her smartboard in class, helped another with speakers so they could play things out loud in class, explained to multiple people how to get tech working online and helped yet another whose VR pc we'd previous built for them stopped working.  It had stopped working because someone had gone into the PC and taken one of the memory sticks out of it - the other one was half hanging out of the motherboard (likely in the process of being stolen when someone walked in).  So I'm helping that teacher get the RAM they need to get the machine working again.

I've also got a coop student this semester, but I can't get her out into the school doing the usual IT repairs we do because there's a pandemic.  She's actually a life saver in terms of being an extra set of hands in the classroom because we've had a number of technical issues with our DIY lab because many of the grade 9s have never used a desktop computer before and have caused many intermittent crashes that we're trying to diagnose on the fly.

I'm one of the only teachers in the school to keep extracurriculars alive as many students depend on them, and I'm still trying to chase down awards and monetary support for our poor graduates who are trying to navigate this deepening crisis at a critical point in their lives.  Even that has come back to bite me.

Last Friday I discovered that my support of female students pushing back against sexism in technology pathways was so wrong that the higher ups who said no to a more socially distanced and qualified teacher supported classroom wanted me reprimanded.  Only local administration's focus on rebuilding relationships in our school prevented that from happening.  I guess I should be happy for the little things.

Last Tuesday we had a blizzard that shut down the area and caused a number of blackouts.  We don't live in an place with public transit or timely road clearing; weather can still stop things here, but that doesn't stop the always-more treadmill we seem to be running on.  Online the message was, "All students are to shift to remote learning for the day. Staff are not to report to their workplace and are to work remotely."  Meanwhile the telephone message from school said, " school is closed and all buses are cancelled. Students and staff should not report to school, thanks and have a great day."  This mixed messaging resulted in low online engagement.

I got to spend a day I would usually be catching up on the two weeks of marking I'm behind on or trying to recreate entire courses to suit a never-before-seen timetable babysitting students with the socio-economic advantage (who are predominantly 'academic' level students because we stream as much by privilege as we do intellectual ability) online.  The kids who didn't have the tech or connectivity or home life conducive to online learning, or were just unlucky enough to live in the parts of town where infrastructure failed all got to come to school Wednesday already a day behind.  I'm going to be the hammer for that kind of inequity any more.

I keep trying to find ways to make this work but the answer always seems to involve disrespecting the ever deepening difficulties we're drowning in.  I've quit being the school CBC rep because our local OSSTF district won't reply to any questions about working conditions, even when I'm asking on behalf of other members.  It's difficult to not take this personally and I know everyone is struggling to make things work under difficult circumstances, but I'd love to know just how much of a minority I am in terms of teaching load when I'm the only one in the building qualified to teach what I teach.  I'm beginning to see why unicorns died out; it's not easy being unique.

Talking to super-students who at any other time are the epitome of initiative and drive, they tell me that they are exhausted and just don't care any more.  If the go-getters are feeling that way then I'm sure the students without that resilience and drive are in tatters.  Parents of students with IEPs are asking me why their child's grades are falling in all their classes, but saying anything about systemic inequity got me a reprimand.  I'm no longer willing to be the hammer that grinds children into paste so that a broken system can pretend everything is business as usual.

If you're a teacher and you're reading this, everyone is exhausted.  Keeping up the fiction that schools are running as usual is hurting people.  Consider rewiring your classes so that you preserve and protect the children in your care.  You can't possibly expect to cover what you normally do in courses that are half the usual face to face instructional time, especially when that half is full of COVID paperwork, muzzled, frightened faces and demoralized, socially distanced lack of collaboration.  The people who claim that kids need to be face to face in class haven't been in a COVID classroom, no one is face to face.  Getting students through this is now my focus.  It's also how I'll get myself through this without ending up in hospital.

Is It Over?

 

No, it isn't.  Prepare to get maytagged by quadmesters for the foreseeable future

I'm staggering to the end of this absurd quadmester. When it started I wondered if less was all we could manage, and it turns out that it is.  From administration dismissing concerns about masks that don't fit (or really matter when you can catch COVID through your eyes) and are so far beyond of Health Canada and local health unit expectations that they end up being more restrictive than needed and not at all designed for all-day use (especially while performing instruction), to a schedule that seems explicitly designed to download an abusive amount of work on classroom teachers with the highest class caps, this quadmester has been a disaster.

The lack of focus on what we're supposed to be doing (providing effective and differentiated instruction that maximizes student learning, remember?) suggests that these things never really mattered in the first place.  Got special learning needs?  Too bad, special education support is cancelled.  Find keeping up with school difficult?  Too bad, we're going to fire you through courses at record pace even though everyone is reeling from a pandemic.  Don't worry though, it doesn't really matter if you keep up or not because you're getting credits regardless.

I'm able to provide interactive, relevant online learning opportunities for my students and even I still struggled with between 20-40% disengagement in remote learning this quadmester.  I've heard of other classes that just did nothing online.  If you talk to admin about it they'd rather pretend it's happening than do anything to ensure it is with anything like quality in mind.  I had a class drop down to twenty students which means it could have become a single cohort and I could be their online instructor, but making a change for pedagogical effectiveness that would have alleviated a staff member's medically supported issues with the provided face masks wasn't something anyone had any time for.

I recently learned that students can opt out of remote learning entirely if they want.  This has resulted in kids who have attended less than fifty hours of instruction earning Ontario high school credits this quadmester (Ontario high school courses are supposed to be 110 hours of instruction).  Remote learning with a teacher unqualified or even knowledgeable about the subject (as was my case with both of my online support teachers) can't be called instructional time anyway.  'Quadmester' should be changed to 'freemester' or 'fakemester'. 

This kind of inflation is exactly what the current government has been trying to do over the past two years by pushing massive class sizes (even during a pandemic) and devaluing complex pedagogical practice in order to cheapen public education.  They couldn't stuff more students into classes, so they reduced expectations and lowered the efficacy of the system to the point of absurdity while handing out credits like candy, and the people making it happen are getting bonuses for devaluing our education system!  They must be very proud.  Fear not though, PC party backers are ready to step in with private for-profit options that are likely to perform worse and cost more.

***

As I wrap things up from my double cohort/teaching continuously all day/double class/teaching continuously every week quadmester one I'm struck with how this drink-from-the-firehose schedule that doesn't remotely meet Ontario standards not only injures already traumatized students and staff but also removes the most challenging work I do in class.

We got to the culminating projects (exams are cancelled - as is all safety paperwork because why not) and I found that my grade 9s have not had the opportunity to develop a rigorous and resilient engineering process in the way that they would in any other year, though considering the class is half as long as it should be I shouldn't be surprised.  I've been able to cover the basic material, though the speed at which that came at students was overwhelming even to the stronger ones.  Neurologically speaking, you need time to reflect and internalize new learning, but best pedagogical practices have long since been flushed down the toilet.

I keep hoping that we'll make adjustments toward making Ontario education more equitable and fair to everyone as this slow burn pandemic grinds on, but the powers that be appear to believe that they are finished and are ready to fire us through quadmester after quadmester rather than responding in a best practices-continuous evolution.  I've suggested previously that the week-on week-off is already problematic, so why not just go back to week on week off semesters?  If we did that with a Friday fully remote review day we could also give teachers and students the headspace they need to consume new learning, but the new normal is too waterboard everyone with a pedagogically bankrupt schedule that only has the appearance of credibility.

As we lurch into quadmester two with no quadmester ending in sight I'm looking forward to not being waterboarded any more, but I've still been handed another technology course with two cohorts and a teacher who has no background in my speciality 'covering' the remote part of the course, so I can expect another poorly engineered schedule designed to hand out cheap credits.  I got handed the same thing (a course I'm not qualified to teach) to provide remote support in even while I'm still providing technical support to people across the school and beyond.  There is evidently no way to differentiate teacher schedules to give them time to provide system support either.

I'll do what I can to mitigate this poor scheduling (again), but since the system has downloaded all guidance and special education expectations on me as well I'll be stretched (once again) to the breaking point trying to protect students from a schedule designed by people who don't seem to care for their personal circumstances and well being... while struggling through a pandemic with my own health concerns.

Even evidence that the system think types are evolving this in the right direction would be helpful, but communications are nearly non-existent and there is no sense of vision or even an acknowledgement that what we're doing isn't kind, let alone working.  The new normal is a cruel, undifferentiated and ultimately meaningless place.  With a complete lack of leadership from the Ministry or Minister, we're likely to see Ontario plunge in years of darkness as a result of this overwhelming and cruel schedule.

When a Virus Dictates Pedagogy

What's it like teaching in a pandemic?  Frustrating and exhausting.  My best guess is that we're running at about 60% of what we usually cover curriculum wise.  There are a number reasons for this but the underlying one is that we're letting a virus dictate our pedagogy.  SARS- CoV-2 is dictating a lot of things about being human at the moment so it isn't surprising that it's also dictating how we educate our children, but COVID19's ways are alien and harsh.  SARS-CoV2 might be even more mean spirited than the politicians we have running Ontario at the moment.  It's at least as equally short sighted, self-serving and cruel.  It's no wonder that the two get along so well together, COVID is the hammer this government has been trying to hit us with for the past two years.  They'll still be gleefully holding our heads under water for weeks after the rest of the province has shut down.

For those of us trying to ride this out in the system, COVID19 throws everything into a permanent state of panic.  The system, which has been struggling under political attacks for over two years now, has been forced into reopening without any central plan or consistent support.  The result is a calcified, wounded thing lacking in flexibility and responsiveness.  In the rush to force school re-openings a number of strange inconsistencies have shown themselves.  If students aren't in the building it's perfectly OK to stuff up to forty of them on a poorly ventilated school bus for up to an hour at a time while transporting them to and from their socially distanced classrooms.  There is minimal oversight on masking policies at that time as the only adult in the vehicle is busy operating the vehicle.  Students then disburse from their crowded buses into carefully sized cohorts of under 20 so they aren't in big groups... like the one they just sat in to get to the school.

You might think the walk-in students in the afternoon cohort are managing better but driving home I regularly see large groups of 20+ students not wearing masks while play fighting and jumping on each other after a long afternoon of mask compliance and rigorous rules.  When COVID dictates your school's daily activities it's with an iron grip of fear and blame.  I don't remotely blame those kids for jumping on each other after a frustrating afternoon of being kept apart and muzzled, but we're kidding ourselves if we think all the rules are reducing transmission routes, the water's just running around the rock that is the school.  Meanwhile, in school, we're making classroom maps of who is sitting where so we can trace contagion in the place it's least likely to happen.  We don't trace it anywhere else because it doesn't affect system liability?  Compliance with liability issues appears to be what drives system decisions, not efficacy against this virus.

There is a reason we don't didn't do quadmesters when viruses weren't dictating our school schedule.  Human attention is a limited resource (these days it's being strip-mined too).  In education speak this is often referred to as engagement.  Some media has conflated this into a reduction in attention spans but my experience in the classroom doesn't support that.  I've watched CyberTitans and Skills Ontario competitors peak perform for hours at a time so sustained attention is something today's students are more than capable of, but it only seems to happen during genuine learning opportunities.  Overly fabricated lessons with fictional connections to the real world are where engagement fails.  Since being instructed to not refer to the pandemic we're in or use it to focus curriculum outcomes, our hands are tied by irrelevance.  Students can quickly see through that kind of fabricated doublespeak.  You might get away with inauthentic learning in a 76 minute class but in a 150 minute class you're going to run into problems because the light is on what you're trying to do for a very long time.

The quadmester fire-hose curriculum is problematic on a number of levels.  Fast moving students who are fluent in the system can adapt and even benefit from that kind of focused attention on a subject, but for the other seventy percent of the class, massive burst f2f and then remote/elearning classes are damaging their ability to learn, but we're not dictating pedagogy any more, a virus is, and the virus actually benefits from disaffected, frustrated people.  It's odd that we keep handing these kinds of people to the disease.  SARS-CoV2 isn't intelligent in the traditional sense, but it is a reflexive opportunist that will and does benefit from our ham-handed responses.

In addition to student focus, quadmesters produce a number of other issues that are especially difficult to manage during a world wide medical emergency.  I've just spent three weeks trying to order IT parts in for my second grade 9 class.  The first one took out enough of what parts we had in the lab (many of which were in rough shape because we'd been in the middle of using them before March break) that I couldn't do the IT unit with the second class.  In a normal year I'd have weeks to sort that out, in the drink-from-the-firehouse quadmester curriculum where we're covering 4+ days of material each day and almost a month a week, there is no time to wait on parts.  They take longer to source and deliver anyway because there's a pandemic happening.  I'm now trying to line up a month's worth of coding curriculum to deliver next week instead - online and f2f at the same time all day every day.

Another one of those inconsistent system responses is the withdrawal of support services within the school.  Special education support rooms are closed, guidance is closed and  libraries are closed, presumably so students aren't mixing in school.  When you're facing 16 bused in students every morning who are bringing over 500 secondary connections with them into your classroom, the idea that sending students who need support to specialists who can help them, or sending one of the many students I've had in emotional distress over the past few weeks down to guidance seems like a reasonable expectation, but evidently it's absurdly dangerous.

COVID19 seldom transmits through airborne droplets.  You'd have to be within two meters of someone when they sneezed or coughed while not wearing a mask while you're also not wearing a mask (though COVID can infect through eyes too) to even have a chance of transmission that way.  Yet we fixate on masks and ignore the most common means of transmission.  The single thing that's made SARS-CoV2 so difficult to manage is its ability to survive on surfaces.  Smaller groupings and frequent spot cleaning is what will strangle this thing, not myopic mask fixations and shell games with student grouping sizes.  Following the actual pathology of the disease, there is no reason why we can't apply effective cleaning regimes and distancing to guidance, spec-ed support and library access, but we don't because we'd rather panic and shut them down while giving the virus the frustrated people it needs to thrive.  Less is more when it comes to ignoring special needs in a pandemic.

While quadmesters are problematic in a lot of ways, the dual cohort is also an imperfect solution to a problem we're only half addressing.  The initial idea was to make every classroom teacher do twice as much prep work designing both face to face and online instruction and then being both online and face to face with alternating halves of the class all day.  In practice the splits didn't happen evenly because we're a country school and way more students get bused in than walk, so our morning/bus cohorts are often 2-3 times bigger than our afternoon cohorts (16 vs 6 last week for me).  Our union then worked out how to provide us with prep time by having covering teachers come in for 30-45 minutes in each two and a half hour marathon face to face session, but in practice I've yet to have a covering teacher qualified to teach what I teach and none of them have the faintest idea what we're doing.  From a safety perspective, if the covering teacher isn't tech qualified I'm supposed to pull students off hands-on work (which is the main focus in technology classes) and do seat work (which isn't)... with someone who has no background in the subject?  We were told to just work through our preps.  It's bandaids all the way down in 2020.

Having to produce days of remote lessons for the half of the class not face to face is another place where a bandaid was thrown on.  The teachers covering the online work?  Yep, they're not qualified to teach my subject and have no background in it either.  Furthermore they were told that they are to do no marking and make no material for the class, so they're... what?  Taking attendance?  On any typical day I'm trying to teach a face to face class while also trying to respond to online emails from students at home at the same time.  Not only is this an incredible burden to bear for classroom teachers, but it also casts the no-contact rules with people still doing support work in a stark light.  If feels like we're expected to go over the top every day into no-man's land while other staff are experiencing minimal workloads.

Overflow classes for students who need special one on one support?  That would have been a good use of teachers not in the classroom.  We could have pivoted around student need instead of ignoring it.  Emotional support spaces for students struggling with the last six months?  That would have been a good use of teachers, but thanks to an arbitrary and rather inconsistent response, support is dead while people on the front lines are being snowed under.

The reflexive tightening of the system while under this extraordinary pressure while also two years into a provincial leadership vacuum has resulted in an inflexible response that is providing the appearance of safe, face to face schooling without actually delivering it.  I struggled early on with system leaders telling us to just provide day care and not worry about curriculum, but I didn't take years of schooling to provide day care, though, of course, I'm very cognizant of my students' mental well being.  Others have suggested that it doesn't matter if we cover curriculum as long as we just make sure the kids are OK, but that's very difficult to do when the very systems in schools that ensure child well-being are inaccessible.  Do you want to be having surgery done on you by COVID-grads who never actually completed a credible education system?  Do you want them fixing your brakes?  Building your bridges?  We ignore expertise at great cost to our society.  We have to get back to maximizing human potential because that's what society needs us to do - our students need us to do that too.  Summer should have been all about planning and organization, but it is clearly evident that the government and the ministry its mismanaging didn't plan anything.  We're watching boards scramble with no clear funding or central planning by provincial governance to try and make this work, and it really isn't.

Where to next?  Well, Ontario's second wave is breaking on us quickly.  Where is it coming on strong?  In school aged kids and the people most likely to be in contact with them.  Some have suggested that younger children aren't at risk because they're not showing a lot of high positives, but considering COVID19's strange habits, such as the fact that the vast majority of under twenties who get it show no symptoms at all, and considering that Ontario's half-assed back to school plan has had parents missing work to take their kids with colds, asthma and allergies to day-long line ups to get COVID tested, I'm not surprised.  We're good at skewing our own data.

Here's a happy thought for you:  what if students are freely spreading COVID19 on overcrowded buses and before and after school by being non-compliant with safety protocols (young people are the most likely cynical spreaders, along with conservatives, so our area is doubly blessed).  They then take it home where older siblings and parents produce the biggest spike in cases.  Give it a bit of time and it'll spread to older groups where it is much more likely to be fatal.  After a week in school, a weekend visit to grandparents might be about the nastiest thing you can do.  It took less than two weeks for me to personally know a teacher who was sent home to wait on a COVID19 test.  Don't think it can't happen to you, it's inevitable.

How to fix it?  It's self correcting.  Thousands of parents are starting to see the holes in this government's lack of planning and are pulling their children back home for fully remote learning.  As in everything else in this pandemic, people are leveraging their socioeconomic advantage and privilege to look after themselves.  Rather than creating fictions around a normalized return to school (for the kids' mental health!), we need to focus face to face schooling on the students and families that specifically need it.  Instead of using the school system as an underground transmission system for the virus, we should be using it to focus on providing equity and support for people in distress.  I've spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (when I'm not teaching face to face and online simultaneously in an accelerated curriculum all day every day) talking down students and their parents - both of whom I've seen burst into tears while venting.

We realized an important distinction early on in the emergency cancellation of classes in the spring: this isn't elearning, it's emergency remote learning, and expecting students to be open and able to learn while under that kind of stress isn't reasonable.  I knew we were going to struggle to get through curriculum in the circumstances, I just didn't expect the system to redesign itself to make it harder as well.  We've tried to reopen schools while our pedagogy is being driven by a virus rather than how people best learn.  The result is a system of delivery that is causing more problems than the virus itself.  We've lurched from video communications getting you fired to video communications being essential in a matter of one weekend, and we're still working out the social conventions around that.  But that stumbling forward into readily available technology also suggests a pathway out of this mess. I honestly believe that our reluctance to understand and explore the possibilities of digital communications has put us on our back foot over and over again in this medical emergency.  If we embraced the opportunities to be found in digital pedagogy we could not only provide a pathway around COVID limitations but also reveal enrichment opportunities that we could continue to leverage well after this pandemic has passed.

Face to face schooling has always been a series of compromises, but the pandemic has made those compromises increasingly stark while also ignoring a number of health gaps that might end up hurting people.  It's difficult starting another day of trying to be in two places at once knowing that students in crisis have no where to go.  I'm not going to leave them dangling, but there is only so much of me to go around.  All in all we're just another brick in the wall.  I always keep that song in the back of my mind when I teach so I see my students as people.  SARS-CoV2 doesn't see them as people, it sees them as a resource to be used up.  I wish the people running our education system didn't see our classrooms in the same way a virus does.  I wish we could find a way forward that leverages the technology we have so we could focus our limited face to face resources more effectively and sustainably.

For me it's another week back in the trenches being told to drag kids in distress through a sped up schedule designed by a virus.  I'm not sure how long we can all keep this up, pandemic or no pandemic.

Does education have to be about bricks in the wall? It seems to be what we're reduced to during this pandemic piled on top of two years of government abuse.  This has to end eventually, surely.

One Size Fits All, Even When It Doesn't

It's taken me until Sunday to be able to talk normally again after week one of face to face teaching in a pandemic.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: our board has done an incredible job of charting a path through this poorly planned and funded return to school during a medical emergency, but this has still been one of the worst weeks of my teaching career and not because of all the barriers to teaching.

Top of list are the mandatory medical grade face masks I'm told we have to wear (though the Ministry says, "All staff in schools must wear masks, with reasonable exceptions for medical conditions").  With a head circumference well beyond the human average, these masks are too small for me and leave me at the end of each day with marks on my face, sinuses and ears.  My head is so big we had to bring my son in for testing for encephalitis because he got my big head.  The specialist immediately said everything was ok when he saw me and realized big heads run in the family.  There is nothing worse than being atypical in a pandemic when every system contracts to only suit the average (that's a theme).

In addition to not fitting my big head, these masks are very restrictive in terms of breathing, especially if you're working in a poorly ventilated south facing classroom that hits thirty plus degrees celsius on even a cool day when it has 30 or so computers and twenty people in it.  Being a tech shop I'm also moving equipment around.  In setting up the lab I moved over two thousand pounds of computer parts into place.  Being required to wear a mask that's too small and restrictive while doing physical work in a hot room had me seeing stars multiple times this week.  The Ministry states that reasonable exceptions are allowed but everywhere I turned this week (union, admin, online) told me to just wear the damned mask.  My biggest anxiety is returning to another week of feeling like I'm being waterboarded by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

I have a history of sinus issues.  My sinuses are so atypical the specialist who did my deviated septum surgery two years ago (so much blood!) had never seen anything like them and was forwarding them on to researchers.  I can breath much better after the surgery, but wearing a high filtration medical quality mask like that for six hours a day means I resort to mouth breathing almost constantly while wearing it, so I leave school every day with a sore throat and inflamed sinuses.  When I expressed this I was told to just wear the mask like everyone else.  My wife is severely immune compromised and I come home every day to immediately put my clothes in the washer and take a scalding shower.  The last thing I want to do is contract this but not being able to breath properly while having to talk more loudly through a mask is destroying me.  There are sports filtration masks I'd be willing to purchase myself but all I keep getting told is to shut up and wear the mask.

Being the only person wearing a medical grade mask in a room of 16 grade nines wearing everything from homemade cloth masks to bandanas, I'm left wondering at the veracity of this demanding compliance.  A number of other staff are also struggling with this one size fits all zero flexibility approach.  They've told me that they (variously) pull the mask off to get fresh air if they're short of breath and/or fold the bottom of the mask up or fit it poorly so it lets air in and out, which is like not wearing a mask at all.  If the only solution is to wear this thing so poorly that it doesn't do anything then I think we need to rethink our one-size-fits-all policy.

Beyond the mandatory waterboarding mask, the week went well but mainly because I'm making unsustainable catches at the wall all day every day.  All of the IT tech we had in the lab was in the middle of being used when we were shut down at March Break and it was in much worse shape than I realized.  I spent most of the week triaging and rapidly repairing broken computers so that grade 9s could use them, which isn't sustainable.  A diving catch is a spectacular thing but if that's all you're doing all game you won't be playing the next week.

I got a really good piece of advice from our spec-ed instructor when I was at Nipissing University for teacher's college: "your first job is to be ready to come in to work again tomorrow."  This often gets forgotten in the teacher martyr complex and I see people (myself included) throwing themselves into unsustainable situations that end up preventing them from working effectively the next day.  This whole week felt like that.  Every time I looked for support it wasn't there and the weight I was carrying got that bit more impossible.

Tuesday was the worst day.  After spending all morning trying to get broken tech working (for my classroom and half a dozen other classrooms in the school), and then struggling to get all the grade 9s through safety training because at least two of them are functionally illiterate (which raises interesting questions around the legalities of dragging them through purely text based online safety training) the teacher who was supposed to come in and provide relief saw how busy I was and said, "if you don't need me I'll go" instead of showing some initiative while watching me try to be in three places at once.

This is another example of the system checking a box rather than providing actual support.  Our union has argued for us to get relieved during our nearly three hour marathon face to face sessions (two times a day, thank-you) and I appreciate that effort, but the teacher coming in isn't qualified or knowledgeable in my field of study and is little more than a babysitter who can't even legally oversee hands-on shop work.  The week before we were told by admin to just skip our prep/relief and keep working if that's what we wanted to do, but that is neither sustainable nor compliant with the contract we've agreed to.  Being asked if they can just leave and take a 45 minute break from giving people breaks while I'm obviously struggling both physically, mentally and emotionally was... (how can I put this professionally?)... aggravating.

Under normal circumstances I'd have sent the two functionally illiterate kids down to resource who would have walked them through the training one on one.  I can't do one on one when I have twenty other grade nines all needing my attention at once and while I'm responsible for safe hands on work with live electricity and tools in a technology class.  I can't send them to resource though because our resource room has been closed and all our spec-ed specialists are now teaching regular classes online.  You don't want to have an IEP or learning challenges during a pandemic, all the spec-ed support has evaporated.

Anytime I've asked for someone to assist me with something they've reflected it back on me to do.  If a student needs special supports it's entirely on me to do that.  If a student doesn't have digital access at home it's entirely on me to do that.  Towards the end of the week I had board purchasing asking questions about things from last year that I had neither the bandwidth nor knowledge to answer so I just ignored the emails.  When you're drowning you don't go looking for more water.

If you're operating an engine it will have an operating range.  You work in that range as a balance of efficiency, longevity and performance.  There are moments when you might push past the 100% mark in order to get a burst of power, but doing so means you've just shortened the life of that engine.  The diving catch made by a baseball player is one of those 120% moments where you do something unsustainable to make the catch, but you can't keep doing that all day every day, it'll break you.

Even with all the barriers to teaching thrown up by this pandemic and this particular government I had a good week instructionally.  I was able to differentiate to different students and pretty much everyone in the class was able to do something they'd never done before by the end of the week (build their own PC).  That one on one work with students learning their strengths and developing skills is what I love about my work, and I'm good at it.

I'm unable to do IT again next week with a new class because we don't have any working tech left, so I'm doing backflips this weekend trying to work out how to teach electronics in two places in two different ways at once.  Our two cohort system means I'm teaching remotely to one cohort while I'm teaching face to face with the other all day every day (they flip).  It's twice as much prep but as you've read above we don't really have any prep time.  They gave me a teacher who isn't qualified and doesn't have any background in my subject to cover the online learning, but that's just more people I have to direct.  I asked if we could just collapse my class into a single morning cohort then I could be the afternoon online teacher.  The class is only 22 so it wouldn't be huge and it means I'm not buried alive and trying to be in two places at once.  You can guess the answer: it wouldn't look good.  They don't want any pictures of full classes out there.  It makes sense pedagogically and in terms of staff work load, and with appropriate safety precautions there would be minimum risk of pandemic transmission, but if you don't have optics on your side in a pandemic you have nothing.  I'm not the only teacher who asked for that.

In addition to trying to generate a week of prep every day both remotely and face to face, I'm also trying to get more IT tech in so I can do that unit with my second class.  Getting parts in a pandemic is challenging.  I'm hoping I can work it out and RCTO has been fantastic in getting back to me and making it happen, but that's just another of those unsustainable balls I'm juggling that's up in the air somewhere.

I can manage the avalanche of prep, but doing it while in physical distress all day because of an inflexible mask policy means I'm not going to finish this semester on my feet.  I have to find a way to engineer a solution to this because no one around me will.  The most frustrating part is that the solution is obvious but in a pandemic flexibility and individual needs are the first thing we burn.