One key reason parents will pay for a private school education is the more individualized attention teachers can pay to their child, and so for twenty-five years now, the last week of October and the first week of November have involved an annual ritual for me of writing a detailed report on every single one of my students at the end of first quarter. The expectation for these reports is that I will provide an individualized appraisal of both the academic and social-emotional progress of each child, using observable phenomena to support my evaluation; if I were still in my public high school days, it would be the equivalent of a parent-conference night where every single one of my 120 or so students’ guardians actually showed up to have a conversation with me about their child. “Grades & Comments” are a lot of work.
They provide, though, a great snapshot of the state of education at one’s school as you reflect on the insights provided by other colleagues (whether proofing comments as a grade-level dean or reading them as a student’s advisor), and from snapshots shared with colleagues across the land (and even around the world), the picture right now is a little bleak looking. The physics teachers at my school, for example, report having to spend the entire first quarter remediating their junior’s and senior’s math skills simply to get to the point where they can teach the actual physics—with all the consequent loss of 8 weeks of content that otherwise would have been covered. Colleagues from area schools who, like me, teach biology to Ninth graders have all been commiserating together that we’re on the third lab report of the year and are not seeing the growth in the mastery of experimentation skills we have observed in the past. And my friends in the humanities are struggling mightily with reading and writing skills that are at least 4 months behind where they should be.
In fact, 97% of the teachers in the U.S. alone report observing significant learning loss among their students, and if you live in the developing world, the situation is even uglier. The United Nations has identified at least 48 countries whose school systems are at extreme or high risk of total collapse, and most of these are in sub-Saharan Africa where the global inequities in access to education were already exacerbated. Thus, if you are someone like 17-year-old Mathias Okwako of Uganda—who must now mine swampy soil for gold dust using mercury, a known neurotoxin he can absorb directly through his exposed skin—then your learning loss after 77 weeks out of school may be permanent.
And it’s not just traditional knowledge learning that is being lost. Educators around the world are reporting on how immaturely so many of their students are behaving given their chronological ages, and I can certainly add my own anecdotal voice to theirs. I have been watching my seniors this year struggle with their executive brain functioning in puzzling ways that remind me regularly of Tenth graders I’ve taught, and it wasn’t until my Homer Simpson “Doh!” moment that I recalled that the last time these seniors were in normal school was about two-thirds into their sophomore year: in terms of the development of their social-emotional intelligence, my current seniors are Tenth graders, and it makes me somewhat anxious for them heading off to college next fall.
What’s worse is that none of the loss I have been describing is likely to rebound quickly given that in our country alone, tens of thousands of teachers and students have already had their school year significantly disrupted by the need to quarantine after testing positive for COVID. Compound the problem with the staffing issues confronting schools today, and we’ve got a very real potential crisis in learning world-wide that could ripple through our economies and political systems for decades to come. We are already experiencing what mere supply chain issues caused by the pandemic can do to the costs and conveniences of daily life; just imagine what would happen if there are not enough adequately educated people to create supply chains in the first place.
All of which brings me back to a point I made early on in this pandemic, and that is: we are all enduring a natural disaster, and we have got to start thinking and acting about it that way. Just this past Friday during our professional development day, we were examining data from a safety survey our students had taken at school, and I was surprised by how many of my colleagues were so shocked by the level of trauma the survey revealed our students are still feeling. How can so many very bright people not recognize that what we are all enduring right now is going to leave permanent scars on every single one of us?
I feel similarly perplexed at how many people don’t get that our economy is never going to be the same again, either. Our shopping habits, our consumption habits, our job-hunting habits, our work habits…nothing is going to return to the world of 2019, and since so many of us keep failing to understand this—viewing this pandemic as it if were the common cold where the illness only temporarily disrupts life before a quick return to normal—people keep getting upset and frustrated by the “refusal” of the pandemic to allow us to get back to our previous lives, not recognizing that what is rapidly becoming an endemic disease has disrupted and changed our lives forever—whether we like that reality or not!
Which is not to say there is no hope or that healing and wellness cannot occur. But as a society, we have got to start grappling and grasping with the new reality that what constitute hope, healing, and wellness now look different! To use an analogy from the medical field, stroke survivors can and do rebuild meaningful, fulfilling lives. But they are not the same lives, nor are they the same people afterwards, and the same must be said of all of us who have lived through this natural disaster.
That, though, brings me back to my kids and that survey. Along with the voices of pain from last year’s experiences, there were voices of joy at the return to in-person learning, and anyone who has paid any attention to the news this week has heard the excited voices of 6- and 7-year-olds as they have been interviewed about their vaccinations and what it can mean for seeing grandparents and having sleepovers again. Rebuilding is happening, and learning losses are being remediated; it is simply going to take a long time and will look nothing like before.
In the meantime, my fellow educators and I must help our students learn to how to thrive in this reality. For example, for my current seniors, the pandemic has been high school. Lockdowns, hybrid classrooms, on-line learning, masks—these are the only high school experience they will ever have (as can equally be said of the elementary and middle school experiences of children of other ages). It is therefore incumbent on any of us who work with children to help them all embrace and celebrate the person each of them is becoming during this time and to help them all begin to understand one of life’s eternal truths: that “now” is all any of us ever actually have; that each of us seldom truly controls what that “now” is like (our individualist delusions to the contrary); and that, therefore, whatever “now” we are experiencing is when we must be our truest, best, most authentic self because when else can we be?
Or to put it perhaps as starkly as possible, the German psychiatrist, Victor Frankl is reputed to have said to a fellow inmate digging a trench with him in a Nazi concentration camp: “this is where you’ve got to find your happiness—right here, in this trench, in this camp” (Monks of New Skete). Because when else will you when all there is for anyone is the right now?
References
Bowie, L. (Sept. 28, 2021) More than 4,000 Maryland Public School Students Have Tested Positive for COVID. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-quarantine-schools-20210928-6fddt6pjc5aovokstbqr5pinmq-story.html.
Holt, L. (Nov. 4, 2021) Nashville Schools Struggling Amid Pandemic Setbacks. NBC Nightly News. https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/nashville-schools-struggling-amid-pandemic-setbacks-125423685742.
Monks of New Skete (1999) In the Spirit of Happiness. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Muhumuza, R. (Nov. 3, 2021) Ugandan Kids Lose Hope Amid School Closures. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=224347a8-0363-4361-91a9-76be8c7e642f.
Light a Candle 