For the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
—John 1:5

It happened.  It finally happened.

I will remember Monday April 19, 2021 for the rest of my life.

For the first time in the 227 days since the start of school (and in my case, 22 months and 18 days), I taught a class totally live.  No Zoom.  No virtual.  Eleven bodies in the class; eleven bodies in the room.

Then it happened again, with another class.  And yet again, with yet another class!

I have seldom felt more gloriously and totally alive as an educator.

Of course, none of it lasted.  I was back to virtual and zooming at least one or two students into hybrid by the very next class, and in the case of my two senior courses, it was only a week before they left for their month-long work projects.  But for a total of 180 minutes the last two weeks of April, I had the chance once more to be truly authentically engaged as an educator and not have to compromise nearly everything I know about good teaching.

And that has been my greatest challenge this school year: the soul-searing compromise.  Having spent the better part of a year on sabbatical reflecting, researching, and writing about the qualities of good teaching and learning, only to find myself in a situation where it is simply not possible to practice nearly any of it…the emotional cost of my necessitated and deliberate hypocrisy has been severe.  It has made getting up each morning to enter the classroom taxing and wearing, and for the first time since very early in my career, when I was striving—not always successfully—to master my craft, I am eager for a school year to come to an end.

Nor am I alone in my feelings.  I have already written about the hiring crisis facing education today (made only worse by the pandemic).  But a year of “zoom zombies” and the exhausting concessions that hybrid teaching demands has only inflamed this crisis even further, and while my sample size is limited, I have heard quite a few colleagues declare that they simply will not return if learning is not back to in-person again this coming fall.  They won’t do it to themselves; they won’t do it to the kids.

And children everywhere have paid a price.  Just here in Maryland, failure rates among high school students have doubled in 11 of the 24 school districts in English and have doubled in 13 of them in math.  In fact, 61% of all students throughout the state are failing at least one course, and many students who were once earning “A’s” and “B’s” are now earning “C’s” and “D’s.”  Daily attendance has plummeted, with levels as low as 56% among those who were already disadvantaged even before the pandemic, and from Las Vegas, Nevada to Broward County, Florida “experts say it could take years to make up the ground that has been lost” (Bowie)—assuming it can be made up at all (see The Tally So Far).

Yet lest the doom and gloom get too dark (and my readers question my sanity, wondering how my recent joy in the classroom could cause me to appear to go there so quickly in the first place), I want to suggest that my brief return to authentic engagement with my students and my inability to be so engaged for most of this academic year is one of those both-and paradoxes that points to a larger truth that is critical not only for those of us who teach but for everyone everywhere: that life is messy.  Sometimes, like now, it is messier than at others.  But there is always something—some obstacle, some task, some relationship, some event, some natural law—something! that forces us to adapt to it and not the other way around.  Something requiring our attention that we find inconvenient or unpleasant or undesirable and that there is nothing we can do about it except deal with it because we have no control over the reality of its presence in our lives.  Life is just messy.

However, we live in a society that doesn’t like to acknowledge this fundamental truth.  Nor do we like to acknowledge its corollary:  that damage happens to all of us.  It is simply not possible to walk this journey we call life and remain undamaged.  We all bear and live with scars, and the situation with the pandemic is not going to be any different.  As a natural disaster, it is going to leave damage in its wake, and some of that damage will be irreparable.  Lives have been lost; lives have been upended; lives have been changed forever; and we are all going to have to live with that going forward.

But that’s the point.  Seeing all my students together for the first time reminded me of all the resilience, fortitude, and perseverance it has taken them and me to make it through our educational journey this past school year.  They reminded me that because life is messy and we walk through it carrying the scars from that mess with us, it is how we walk that matters.  For some, the messiness and damage of life are overwhelming, and they walk defeated and despaired.  For others, the messiness and damage of life are simply part of its challenge, and they walk effective and engaged.  My students being completely in-person reminded me that I’m trying to be part of this latter group.

What, though, causes some individuals to walk confounded by life’s messiness and damage while others don’t? It turns out that the group I aspire to be a member of possess a set of properties that psychologists now often refer to collectively as “grit,” and what is interesting to me as an educator is that we now know that grit can be taught.  Through a proper combination of deliberately induced stress (see Chapter 3) and nurtured growth-mindset (see Chapter 6), individuals can learn both to navigate and to manage the truth that life is messy and that no one lives undamaged and to do so quite effectively.  Indeed, developing grit in students has been shown to help them thrive even in the face of life’s darker realities.

Of course, the challenge for schools is that this proper combination has to involve intentional moments of failure, and because we insist as a society on grading people to rank them, such failure doesn’t sit too well with the larger community—in spite of the mountains of data that show that possession of grit is the key identifier in a child for future success.  In addition, as I have laid out in more detail in Parts One and Two of “The Unprepared Generation,” we have created a digital cultural in today’s world that actually undermines peoples’ capacity to learn grit.  Hence, we have not exactly been doing a good job in education when it comes to grit—which together with our failure to achieve science literacy in this country probably explains a lot about how badly we have coped with the virus.

Yet, if there is possibly a positive outcome from this pandemic, it may be the fact that it has forced all of us to nurture the resilience, perseverance, forbearance, delayed-gratification, etc. that are the very heart of grit. My chance to authentically engage with students again—even for only a few hours—allowed me to see the change that tells me that they have all gotten a little “grittier” these past 14 months and that they have learned how to shine their inner light a little brighter against life’s messiness and damage.  Moving forward, that can only be a good thing for everyone. 

I just wish I could have been a better teacher for them along the journey.

• 

• 

• 

Coda

Or maybe I was a better teacher for them than I thought.  While writing this posting for this project, something utterly unexpected happened that I am still processing, and it involves my current seniors. 

For one of my sections, their last class of high school on their last day of high school was with me, and as I have done now for over twenty years, I closed class by thanking them for allowing me to be their teacher (it’s an elective after all) and to share my appreciation for all the hard work they had done.  I was preparing to say goodbye when the entire class abruptly sat up very straight, and one of my students who had clearly been designated the spokesperson declared “We have something for you, Mr. Brock.”  She proceeded to give me card they had all signed and gave a short speech about how grateful they were to have had me as their teacher and how positive an impact I had had on all of them, and then the entire class called out in agreement.

I was dumbfounded.  Still am.  For those who recall my story of “The Class from Hell,” well, this has been the year from hell. And much as I did while teaching that class, I have spent the past eight months feeling utterly inadequate as an educator.  It has been like revisiting those first few years of teaching where—as one fellow educator once said—“you just want to go back and apologize to all of them for the job you did.”

But those who do recall the story of “The Class from Hell” will also recall my student, John, and his evaluation letter at the end of that year in which he shared with me that I had impacted his life for the better.  I remember at the time thinking that what he was writing could not possibly be true, and I have that exact same feeling again right now about the gratitude of my current students:  it simply does not seem possible that my subpar performance as an educator under the conditions at school this past year could have made a difference for good in their lives.

Apparently, though, it did—at least to some degree—and that, I think, is the ultimate lesson my seniors have to teach all adults and why I share this final story:  as grownups, we must never forget that we are always having an impact on the children in our lives; hence, we must always remember to strive to make it as positive a one as possible. They are paying attention, and we never know when they may be watching. So we owe them our best—even when that best may feel to us like only “good enough.”

References

Bowie, L. (April 25, 2021) The Big Cost of Learning Online: The Number of Maryland Students Who Are Failing Has Soared During the Pandemic.  The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-prem-ed-grades-failing-double-20210422-bgncuh2glna6perfw6y4ya22su-story.html.

Dweck, C. (2016) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  New York:  Ballantine Books.

Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed. Boston:  Mariner Books.

Warner, J. (April 13, 2021) Parents, Stop Talking About the “Lost” Year. The New York Times. https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/parents-stop-talking-about-the-lost-year/article_fca787d3-42bb-5bac-b063-aad59fda5a30.html.

Whitman, G. & Kelleher, I. (2016) Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education.  New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

You may say I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.
—John Lennon

Dear Members of the Class of 2021,

Where to begin? It has been a year without precedent in our collective lifespans, and as this chapter in your educational journey draws to a close, who could have imagined that you would be approaching this milestone having lived your entire senior year enduring one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of civilization? The world you grew up in has ceased to exist entirely, and the world you will help co-create in the next phase of your life is not yet here.  The intervening months of limbo have been an eternity of endless hours on screens, a litany of lost moments and opportunities, and a crushing isolation bereft of hugs and other human contact.  It has been a time of great mourning.

Yet as you graduate, it is also a time of great celebration, and age and maturation will lead you to discover that this paradox of simultaneous grief and joy is the very heart of all moments of significant transition:  as the old saying goes, the monarch is dead; long live the monarch.  It is why we have so many ceremonies for these moments.  Weddings, funerals, commencements, retirements…they are our public opportunities to take stock of both what needs to be mourned and what needs to be celebrated, and we fill them with speeches and speakers about the stock-taking not because anyone is actually going to remember any of the words spoken but because the act itself of saying them is the punctuation mark to remind us:  this is what is important to our lives; this is what is significant; do not forget this about ourselves.

And so, in that spirit, here is my own punctuation mark for all of you.

First, I have to start by acknowledging that the world which I and the rest of your elders are handing to you is seriously broken and filled with its fair share of what my nephew (who graduates this year as well!) would call “stupid people.”  The pandemic has stripped bare the racial and economic inequities of our society, revealed the incredible lengths to which White people will go to defend and protect their privilege, and demolished any remaining cultural delusion of exceptionalism as we have allowed more people per capita to die of this plague than almost any other nation on earth.  Our elected officials who cater to their anti-intellectual constituents as well as corporate greed have failed so badly to slow the rate of human-induced climate change that what were once 500-year weather events have become annual affairs, and our over-consumption of resources as a species has initiated the first great mass extinction event on this planet since the asteroid took out nearly 100% of the dinosaurs and 75% of all other life at the time.

And what’s scary is that I could continue with this litany of brokenness for page after page.  Indeed, entire books have already been written about just how much damage and harm our species has done over the centuries—to each other as well as to the planet—and both the archeological and paleontological record are clear: this is not a uniquely Western, European Civilization thing or an Industrial Revolution thing.  Humans have been permanently altering every environment they have inhabited since we started moving out of Africa.  As environmental educator, Jennifer Klos, notes: it is perhaps we who are the ultimate invasive species.

However, I did not set out to write this letter to fill all of you with despair and a sense of despondency.  No, I open with this acknowledgement of our broken world you are inheriting because like columnist, Thomas Friedman, I want to suggest that the capacity for fixing it already lies within each and every one of you:  what Friedman calls “Mars thinking versus Texas thinking.”

Now, to understand what he means by that, I need to remind everyone that in mid-February of this year, two unrelated events happened simultaneously: the landing of NASA’s rover, Perseverance, on the surface of Mars and the extreme winter storm that utterly overwhelmed the State of Texas’ power grid.  Friedman was moderating a virtual event at the time on the impact of the wildlife trade on the likelihood of future zoonotic transfers of viruses such as COVID-19 into humans, and when the panel of experts make it abundantly clear that pandemics such as the current one could become regular events due to human encroachment into previously untouched environments, Friedman declared:  you know what the problem is? Mars thinking versus Texas thinking!

He then went on to elaborate that the kind of thinking needed to deliver Perseverance to a successful landing was the kind of creative, rational, and farsighted thinking necessary to prevent future pandemics and solve other environmental problems. Meanwhile, he argued, the kind of thinking that failed to buttress a deliberately isolated state power grid against extreme weather was the kind of shortsighted, illogical, immediate profits-driven thinking necessary to cause millions of Texans to suffer and over 100 of them to die totally preventable deaths.  We need, Friedman declared, more “Mars thinking.”

And that’s where all of you come into the picture. As Friedman suggests, we already know how to think in the ways that can fix what we have broken, and a species that can deliver a school-bus sized object 293 million miles to land on another planet can certainly come up with manufacturing processes that are nearly 100% recycled as well as socio-economic systems that are equitable for all and energy systems that do not require us consuming 40% of the photosynthesis that takes place on this planet.  Anyone and everyone is capable of “Mars thinking,” and while I’m certain none of you would have deliberately chosen to inherit the world we older generations have given you, I am equally certain that you have the capacity to choose what type of thinking you employ in your decision making to make matters aright. 

Because as individuals entering the adult world, you have the power to choose what you consume, choose whether you consume, and choose how much you consume.  You have the power to choose what resources you invest, choose whether you invest those resources, and choose how you invest them. You are even fortunate enough to live in a country where you have the power to choose whose thinking will represent you in those situations where you cannot directly involve yourselves.

Whether you decide to do all this choosing sustainably (“Mars thinking”) or unsustainably (“Texas thinking”) is up to you.

Yet as you begin to do all this choosing, there is an important reality about being human that I think Friedman misses that is critical to any of our individual and collective efforts to fix a broken world.  He presents the choice as if it were binary: “Mars thinking” OR “Texas thinking.”  But the larger truth is that we all choose BOTH “Mars thinking” AND “Texas thinking” all the time.  As the educator, Parker Palmer, reminds us, there is that of the Light and that of the Dark in each and every individual, and it is only in our owning and reconciling with our Dark selves that we can achieve the wholeness our souls need to function properly and lovingly in this world.  Or to put it another way, grace and sin are like the self’s inhaling and exhaling, and just as the body needs both to survive and potentially thrive, so too does the self to do the same.  Because as I have said in this project’s Afterward, the point of breathing is that it simply makes life possible; it is how each self then lives this life that genuinely matters.

So as you prepare to enter the larger world, always remember this fundamental truth and be graceful and forgiving at those times when you find the Dark at work in your life, recalling that exhaling also has a purpose.  But perhaps even more important, always remember that this truth of BOTH/AND applies to every other person you will ever encounter as well, and that consequently, each individual you meet throughout your entire life is their own unique story, unfolding in all its complexity.  You see the cashier at your grocery store, but do you see the harried single parent of two who is slowly earning their chemistry degree? You see the homeless person begging at the traffic light, but do you see the formerly successful doctor before an injury and opioids unraveled their life? You see the professional athlete, but do you see the successful romance novelist who writes under a pseudonym? You see the landscaper mowing a lawn, but do you see the Ph.D. who simply discovered they liked working outdoors?

My point is that none of us can ever fully know what another’s person’s management of the Light and Dark within them will lead them to do with their lives, and therefore, it behooves all of us to be as empathetic and generous of spirit with one another as possible.  The cliché about “walking a mile in another’s shoes” is a cliché precisely because of the importance of this truth, and only when we acknowledge and accept the reality of each other’s brokenness as well as our own struggle with it can we create the reconciled wholeness we will need to fix our broken world.

And again, that’s where all of you come into the picture.  As you graduate, with all the traditional joys and sorrows that go with that, it is important to take stock of who you are right now, where you are in your own “Mars thinking” AND “Texas thinking” journey, and decide what’s next for you.  Then turn to your neighbor and support them to do the same, recognizing that their efforts to fix the brokenness may not look anything at all like yours and loving them and yourself into wholeness anyhow.

To my graduates of all ages, congratulations and best of luck!

• 

• 

• 

References

Cornell Wildlife Health Center. (February 23, 2021) Emerging Disease, Wildlife Trade and Consumption: The Need for Robust Global Governance. Cornell University.  https://wildlife.cornell.edu/our-work/our-planet-our-health/special-event.

Friedman, T. (March 16, 2021) One Year Later, We Still Have No Plan to Prevent the Next Pandemic.  The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20210317&instance_id=28136&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=56989331&segment_id=53572&user_id=c704fc9ed48c3e493f8da0c67ecfb906.

Klos, J. (May 3, 2016) The Threat of Invasive Species.  TEDEd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spTWwqVP_2s.

Palmer, P. (2004) A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

In DEI work (that’s “Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion” for the uninitiated), one of the big White privilege myths that is often addressed when challenging the reality of systemic racism in this country is the notion that an equal playing field is the same as an equitable playing field.  The classic argument (even among many with well-intentioned liberal bias) is that as long as society provides equal access to the opportunities for success, then meritocracy will win out, and therefore, those willing to work hard enough will rise to whatever level of accomplishment their individual efforts and talents enable them to achieve; those unwilling to do so, will not.  Following this reasoning, if you are poor, it’s your own fault, and again, even many of those with liberal egalitarian values will argue that the real source of poverty and disadvantage that remain in our society is that we simply have not yet provided full equal access for everyone to the opportunities for success.

Of course, as the illustration below reminds us (one that I am indebted to my former DEI Director, Marlo Thomas, for introducing me to), the standard argument fails to take into account such things as the generational wealth that enables so many White Americans to “stand tall,”  with easy access to the “game.”  Nor does it recognize the reality that this wealth which most White Americans benefit from has been and continues to be acquired at the expense—the “shortening”—of those in this country who are people of color, fundamentally limiting their access to the “game.”  Indeed, how many of us who are economically well-off ever truly recognize or acknowledge that the daily costs of our lifestyles are fully supplemented by the low wages paid to those who provide the goods and services we consume?

Hence, any notion that we will somehow achieve an equitable and just society if we just provide everyone with equal “boxes” on which to access successfully the socio-economic “game” is delusional at best and injurious hogwash at worst.  Inequity is built into the very structure of our society, and until we start—as the illustration suggests—moving some of those “boxes” around and redistributing them, genuine equivalent access to the “game” will never happen.  Yet to move those “boxes,” we must be able to identify all of them, and as some recent moments in my own life as a teacher have taught me, some “boxes” are not so easy to perceive—especially when it is so easy to fall into the “equality” equals “equity” trap even for those of us fighting to remember the difference.

The challenge is that the big scale “boxes” are readily identifiable.  I have already written about the need for economic redistribution in education to achieve greater equity as well as the numerous ways in which the pandemic has only exacerbated the learning inequities already in place (see, for example, The Tally So Far or COVID-19 and the Digital Divide).  Moreover, as Kalman Hettleman of the Kirwan Commission points out, we know exactly how we should be addressing all of these various inequities to counteract their impact on the disadvantaged in our society if only we have the political will to take the necessary steps. 

Yet, what the pandemic has recently revealed to me in my own teaching is a more subtle inequity that for the first time in my own work on DEI issues has made me understand the illustration above in a deeply existential way that I never have before now.  And it involves one of teaching’s most basic tasks:  grading.

Traditionally, as I have argued previously, the whole purpose for grading has actually been to maintain the ranking of individuals in order to preserve the status quo of existing socio-economic inequalities, and as an educator, I have watched for decades now as legislation such as NCLB and state-wide testing programs such as PARC have simply reiterated and reinforced pre-existing differences in the quality of education provided in our schools.  Yet, as Joe Feldman and others contend, the mere act of assessing need not inherently serve this purpose, and there are numerous steps teachers can take to make grades reflect accurate and equitable grading of a child’s true understanding of an idea, topic, subject, or skill.

One such practice that I have now employed for the past 15 years is the process of having students correct mistakes to demonstrate improved knowledge of the material, and it is my very recent evolution in this practice that has led to my deeper insight about equality vs. equity.  However, to appreciate why it was such an “ah ha” moment for me, I need to briefly share my own journey with the idea of corrections.  It began when I was first introduced to the work of Carol Dweck in the early 2000s on the concept of “growth mindset.” Her research showing that the most successful students were those who understand mistakes as simply learning opportunities was transformative for me (see Chapter 6), and by 2007, I was offering the option of correcting any assessed work to show better understanding.  What’s more (and key to my “ah ha” moment), in wrestling with the balance between holding a child accountable for striving for their best initial effort and supporting the idea that we all “learn from our mistakes,” I settled for the compromise of allowing a student to earn back up to half-value for his, her, or their original error(s).

Starting with this current school year (influenced by the arguments of Feldman about grading for equity), I have stopped making the correction process optional and have made it a required effort for all my students. Moreover, in the face of the disparities which I have witnessed virtual learning create, I have started requiring my most challenged students—who too often are my students of color—to meet with me one-on-one to do these corrections.  Yet, precisely because these one-on-ones have been primarily with some of my Black students, I have finally been able to see one of those “boxes” that needs redistributing which I’d not seen before, leading to my “ah ha” about equality vs. equity and the motivation behind this post.

What happened is that on a recent test, there was a final question where two of my Black students simply didn’t respond at all to what was being asked and, as a consequence, failed the assessment.  Since all tests this year are take-home, open notes, with a full week to complete the assignment, my initial thought was that they simply hadn’t tried.  Thus, corrections were going to be about having them make that effort so that they would at least pass the test.  However, when I met with each of them individually, I discovered that neither had understood what the question was asking; it referenced material that was totally unfamiliar to both of them, ideas that we on the biology team had simply assumed were common knowledge to all our students.  When explained what the question was, in fact, asking, each of my students immediately—and without reference to notes of any kind—verbally provided the 100% correct answer.

To say I felt humbled is an understatement.  First, that all of us on the biology team had so clearly failed to double-check that we were being responsive to the life-experiences of all our students in the wording of our questions.  Second, that my own initial assumption had been about lack of effort and that I had unwittingly fallen into the false meritocracy argument myself (“all my students had had equal access to exactly the same test; therefore, any differences must be about individual effort”).  But, third, and most importantly, that my students clearly understand and knew the material; they simply needed a translation in order to demonstrate it.  So how was earning only half-credit back an equitable response?

The answer is that it wasn’t and isn’t, and in that moment, the image of the illustration above burst from my memory.  If I graded my students equally, I would be denying some of them potential future access to the “game;” I would be leaving some of them staring at the “fence” and, even worse, maybe believing that that was all they were capable of doing.  But if I graded them equitably, I would be showing all my students their admittance to the “game” and the right of each of them to claim their participation in it. 

It was one of the easier decisions of my career.

It was also, as I have suggested, a deeply profound one for me.  It reminded me yet again that I never will be finished unpacking my White privilege or uncovering my implicit biases.  It reminded me how deeply ingrained and subtle those unquestioned assumptions can be even when I am actively digging away every day to unearth them.  And it reminded me that seeking equity must always be an active process, deliberately moving “boxes” to achieve it, and that as educators, we must always be on the lookout for those “boxes”—wherever we may find them and no matter how small they may appear to be.

References

Dweck, C. (2016) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  New York:  Ballantine Books.

Hettleman, K. (Oct. 9, 2020) A Cure for COVID-19 Learning Loss: Tutoring. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-1011-covid-learning-loss-20201009-tk342ghe5jb4je75rwn6tc6uai-story.html.

Hettleman, K. (March 15, 2021) What Will be the Bang for Maryland’s New Education Bucks? The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0315-edr-maryland-education-funds-20210315-et5zvvzdkzey7op44wrs5262fm-story.html.

Feldman, J. (2018) Grading for Equity: What It is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms.  Thousand Oaks:  Corwin Press.

Newhouse, K. (May 11, 2020). Why Grading Policies for Equity Matter More Than Ever. Mindshift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55889/why-grading-policies-for-equity-matter-more-than-ever?fbclid=IwAR2Wz2sXs_xdS0rLh9Oxhrgrfx0NP5oHjSfz6Z4SSK7dY2e3zz248-L9ilM

O’Connor, K. (2011) A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades.  New York:  Pearson.

Give us courage to change what must be altered,
serenity to accept what cannot be helped,
and the insight to know the one from the other.
—Reinhold Niebuhr

The official statistics alone can feel overwhelming:  10.1 million Americans out of work by the end of last month, directly attributable to the pandemic, an unemployment level of 6.3%.  Yet as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently pointed out, the actual situation is much grimmer, and it is worth revisiting his precise words:

Published unemployment rates during COVID have dramatically understated the deterioration in the labor market. Most importantly, the pandemic has led to the largest 12-month decline in labor force participation since at least 1948.  Fear of the virus and the disappearance of employment opportunities in the sectors most affected by it, such as restaurants, hotels, and entertainment venues, have led many to withdraw from the workforce. At the same time, virtual schooling has forced many parents to leave the work force to provide all-day care for their children. All told, nearly 5 million people say the pandemic prevented them from looking for work in January. In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that many unemployed individuals have been misclassified as employed. Correcting this misclassification and counting those who have left the labor force since last February as unemployed would boost the unemployment rate to close to 10 percent in January.

I share all of this because at a recent all-school employee meeting, the Head of my school had to share the news that our school’s board had needed to make a tough decision.  As beneficiaries of the Paycheck Protection Program, the school as a small business had been able to cover significant amounts of the financial deficits encumbered since March of 2020 and projected through the 2021-2022 school year.  But the total amount of the PPP loan does not cover the full deficit for next year, and therefore, we were told that starting in August, the school’s contributions to the TIAA/CREF retirement funding would need to be paused to make up the difference in the school’s projected debt so that the school could remain a viable business—with an emphasis on “paused,” not permanently taken away.

Now, I need to put things in perspective before continuing.  The 7%-of-salary retirement contribution is on top of our salaries and independent of any contributions we might individually choose to make.  It is not a matching contribution; it is a salary perk which the majority of small businesses in this country—schools or otherwise—simply do not offer at all.  Therefore, what the board was effectively telling us is as follows:

• that they were not going to mess with our health care (which I know from being unemployed for the duration of my sabbatical costs nearly $9,000 annually for an individual, let alone a family!). 
• that the faculty tuition remission for faculty children would remain in effect. 
• that they were even going to be able to offer a small raise of 2% after freezing salaries the past two years. 
• AND—perhaps most importantly of all—that they were going to be able to keep every single one of us employed for at least another year. 
• All for the cost of losing this retirement contribution for a year.

Well, you would have sworn that my Head of School had just announced that we were each being asked to donate a kidney! I have seldom witnessed so many in a group get so upset so fast! And while on the one hand, I could empathize how difficult it was to hear this news after how much ridiculously harder we have all had to work as educators this year; on the other hand, knowing the impact of the pandemic on unemployment in general, I couldn’t help wondering:  you all do understand that this means we get to keep our jobs, right?? That unlike two other area private schools, IND and Wilkes, we are not being forced to close our doors forever and lay off an entire community of educators and staff?? That we get to remain getting paid to do what we love and enjoy doing—something most workers in most jobs only fantasize about??

Granted, I was (and am) coming at the entire situation from what was probably a very different perspective.  When I “retired” from my former school in response to the moral bankruptcy and general incompetency of the new administration that I was witnessing and could no longer support, I knew full well the risk I was taking.  A year-long sabbatical from the classroom without a guaranteed job waiting for me meant that I might not teach again.  At 57, someone with even my credentials is no longer as attractive a candidate for a position, and so I have simply been deeply grateful to be employed once more as an educator.  Toss in the realities of the existing job market, and I am just grateful to be employed, period!

But this personal situation made the disconnect I was witnessing feel all the stranger.  How could the awareness so many of my colleagues have expressed about the economic realities for so many in this country right now not lead to an understanding that those same realities could apply to them, too?  Which got me to wondering what the source of this disconnect might be.  No one is escaping unscathed from the current situation any more than a person can escape from the inevitable eventuality of death, and yet somehow, many of those present were behaving as if this decision by the school shouldn’t be happening to them.

Certainly, a rather large percentage of our faculty are closer to the ends of their careers than their beginnings, and the loss of the extra savings for the year will not be without consequence—myself included! But I couldn’t shake the sense that at least some of the voices I was hearing were basically saying that they were owed a certain level of economic security and that this was unfair.  There seemed to be a subtle almost unconscious sense of entitlement at work in the situation, and that caused me to ask:  like hidden biases, are their implicit entitlements? And if so, where did this particular implicit entitlement come from?

Notions of entitlement, of course, are baked into our cultural DNA.  Thomas Jefferson stated the sentiments of his fellow peers quite succinctly when he wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Hence, from our very founding, we have felt we were inherently owed something just by our very existence; something we didn’t have to earn.

However, it is critically important to remember that Jefferson and the other Enlightenment thinkers who informed him understood these words quite differently than they are often represented today.  “Endowed” for them meant “possesses rationality,” and thus, what made certain rights unalienable was the human ability to think logically and wisely about the conditions for a fair and just society.  “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” were not understood by the Founders as something the universe itself somehow owed individuals; they were understood as political entitlements that a rational government would protect.

Take just the first one, for example:  Life.  Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and the others did not believe that the universe owed individuals the right to exist in the first place.  What they believed is that properly structured government owes a person who happens to be alive protection from harm to that life.  Rights and other political entitlements were about the abridgement of power, not the proactive use of it, and indeed, the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution is basically a long list of abridgements of power, areas of life in which you are entitled to have the government not interfere.

Recognizing that this is how the start of our society understood the notion of entitlement is important because along the journey from then to now, we started as a society understanding entitlements as things we were actively owed.  For instance, the idea that children have the right to an education is a common and non-controversial one in today’s world.  But this right is not understood as “the government should abridge its power and not interfere with how children are educated;” it is understood as “the government owes every child an education” (but with the caveat that that is only to a certain level!).  We even have governmental programs today that are openly referred to as “entitlement programs” such as Social Security and Medicare because the ideas informing their creation was that people have the right to a minimal level of support and care in their old age.

However, this change in our understanding of entitlement has come at a cost that is not merely the literal ones paid for by our taxes, and of the many things the pandemic has revealed, it is this other cost that I would argue may be the most dangerous to our long-term survival as a society.  I have discussed at length already how our history of individualism and the deliberate designs of modern digital technology have contributed to the rise in the amount of narcissistic behavior in our country.  But I want to argue here that this rise in narcissism combined with the way we understand rights today has led to an implicit entitlement that operates in too many of our lives: that the world should work the way I want it to work, whenever I want it to do so. 

Somehow, those of us with privilege (and to a lesser extent even those without) have developed this hidden notion that there simply shouldn’t ever be any inconvenience in our lives and that when there is, we are owed rectification of the situation immediately.  We even get angry when inconvenience happens—as if the universe has somehow violated its contract with us.  It is what happened with my colleagues upset by the school’s decision; their long-term economic plans were going to be inconvenienced and “that just wasn’t fair.”  It is what is happening with the vaccine rollout in this country.  The laws of physics and chemistry put limits on how fast anything can be manufactured, but that’s inconvenient; we want things fixed now.  So the anger and resentment grows.

Moreover, before I am accused of polishing my halo, I am in no way immune to this implicit entitlement at work in our collective brains; no one is.  Just because this particular inconvenience was outweighed for me by the gratitude of being employed does not mean I have not had my own moments of road rage at a car I thought was going too slow when I was in a hurry or exploded at the discovery of a dripping faucet “because I just don’t have time to deal with this right now!”  Like hidden bias, today’s implicit entitlement is buried deep in our unconscious, and like such bias, it will only be by deliberately unpacking this entitlement that we will be able to resist it.

And resist it we must! As I said, the pandemic has revealed the true cost of believing that the world owes someone the inconvenience free life he, she, or they want.  Don’t like masks? Damn if I’ll wear one! Don’t like social distancing? I’ll party with whoever and how many I want! Don’t like the scientific truths about the virus and its spread? I’m entitled to listen to whatever falsehoods I wish! Don’t like the results of a fairly held and fairly counted election?….

You get the picture.  We will likely pass 600,000 dead in this country before the pandemic stage of this disease is over—a greater percentage of our population than any other country in the word!—and an entire generation of children will bear the economic cost of a lost school year for the rest of their lives.  We had to wreck our economy because to a degree, we could not trust people to work for the common good by deliberately inconveniencing themselves, and what few people seem to grasp is that the vaccine does not fix any of this; it only makes it so that the number of lives it “inconveniences” is limited to where our society can generally function again.

Yet, what the pandemic has revealed is also the opportunity to change, and if ever there was a time for Niebuhr’s famous prayer, it is now.  Now is our chance to develop resilience and empathy for the reality that life is messy and what little control we do have is illusionary at best.  It is the time to develop acceptance of our limits and the grace to acknowledge the limits of others.  It is our moment to tear down our inequities and rebuild a country where “with justice for all” truly is for all.  And most importantly, it is our reminder to care genuinely for the Other and not just the fellow members of our tribe. 

Our very lives depend on it.

References

Bowie, L.; Wood, P.; & Oyefusi, D. (May 5, 2020) Maryland’s Oldest Catholic Girls School, Institute of Notre Dame Announces Closing.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-institute-notre-dame-closing-20200505-iviuyq5k5zfo5ke3zqytgv3o4u-story.html.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (Feb. 5, 2021) U.S. Department of Labor.  https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.

Jefferson, T. (1776) Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.  National Archives.  https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

Kaplan, D. (June 22, 2020) Wilkes School, a Casualty of Pandemic, Will be Missed. The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/readers-respond/bs-ed-rr-wilkes-school-letter-20200622-2mfbx2hmqzel5i4nglwxef4r6u-story.html.

Keohane, N. (1980) Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Locke, J. (1980) Second Treatise of Government; ed. by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company.

Powell, J. (Feb. 10, 2021) Getting Back to a Strong Labor Market. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20210210a.htm.

Richter, M. (1977) The Political Theory of Montesquieu. New York: Cambridge University Press.

A good friend of mine happens to socialize with a number of families who have school aged children, and ever since the pandemic caused the swing to virtual learning, she has followed the fate of one child in particular with ever mounting concern about her academic progress.  There is a closer personal relationship with the family (her own now grown daughter babysat this neighbor’s child for years), and what has concerned my friend is the apparent lack of parental supervision around schooling and the consequences of that for their young teenage daughter, who is floundering on-line and failing every single one of her classes by a significant margin.

The reason I know all of this is because there was a recent confrontation between the adults involved in this situation that led to the recognition that the child in question basically has reached middle school and cannot read—a state of affairs that a lot of denial has enabled—and my friend was reaching out to me, as an educator, both to share how aghast she was that no one had been willing to acknowledge “the elephant in the living room” and to ask me how could educational systems have failed this child so badly.  “Aren’t there laws about such things?” She queried.

To which I had to reply, “yes, but…” and then I decided that the “but” needed some airing.  So for those of you not in education, here comes some proverbial “dirty laundry.”  Let’s start with the basics, both the Federal Individuals with Disabilities Education and Improvement Act as well as Maryland state law “require that all students with disabilities be provided a ‘free, appropriate public education’ [from birth to age 21] that helps them learn and prepares them for employment and daily living” (Maryland Department of Disabilities).  However, having a law on the books and having the resources to meet demand are two different things entirely, and what most non-educators don’t know is just how enormous the demand actually is. 

The statistics are sobering. One in five students in this country (20%) has a language-based learning challenge, regardless of socio-economic status or ethnicity, and of those 20%, 70-80% of them are likely to have dyslexia that would require significant educational intervention.  Indeed, 85% of children in public schools who have managed to get an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for reading difficulty are dyslexic, and 30% of all dyslexic children (diagnosed or not) suffer from ADHD on top of having difficulty with a task that requires restrained, quiet, focusing.

That is a LOT of need, and the simple truth is that almost no public-school system in this country has the resources to meet it adequately.  The law may say that every child is eligible for the psychological testing to determine if an IEP is appropriate, but unless there is an insistent and persistent parent who practically has to threaten to sue, no school district is going to volunteer the service because they simply do not have the money to cover the level of need that would be revealed without having to take funding from other programs—which would set off a different set of parents howling!

 Instead, as I suspect happened with my friend’s neighbor’s daughter, because she was well-behaved and tackled the tasks asked of her with effort and determination, enough good quality work was produced from verbal interactions for her teachers over the years to justify giving her grades that wouldn’t cause a parent to go pester the school psychologist, and the system simply moved her on up the grade levels.  In addition, as I have witnessed too often with parents of a certain socio-economic status, there was likely some denial that there was a problem because “we aren’t the kind of people who have a child with a special need!” Combine all of this together, and you have the perfect conditions for a child with a reading challenge getting all the way to 8^th grade before a pandemic uncovers the problem—because it forced nearly all learning to take place through words on a screen.

I should be clear that this habit of passing children along is not confined to public schools.  It happens regularly in private and parochial schools as well, and sometimes for far more mercenary reasons.  Tuition dollars can be hard to come by, and when there are schools that specialize in educating children with brains that work differently, there can be a lot of rationalizing about an individual student’s academic performance in those schools that do not.  My experience is that it happens less often in the independent school world because those same extra resources are regularly brought to bear in support of students with extra needs.  But social promotion is as much a part of the reality of these schools as it is of the public realm.

Which is part of what my friend finds so distressing about the young teenager who started this whole conversation:  this child has not only effectively lost this entire year of learning; she wasn’t really ready for this year of learning in the first place! Nor is she remotely alone in that fact.  Individuals with reading challenges are so prevalent in U.S. society and so underdiagnosed and undertreated that 5% of all adults are non-literate and approximately 25% of those who can read can only do so at the lowest levels.  That’s a third of adults in this country who are, at best, effectively semi-literate—all while struggling to survive in an information economy.

And of course that third is disproportionately represented by people of color.  In my efforts to help educate about White privilege, I’ve already written extensively throughout my posts about this pandemic’s learning costs and particularly those costs for BIPOC children (see the LaC Updates page).  But here is yet another example of the entrenchment of systemic racism in our society.  Dyslexia and other reading challenges truly are colorblind, affecting the exact same proportion of Black children as White.  Yet as my friend freely acknowledges, the child she is concerned about comes from enough economic and cultural privilege that the consequences of this child’s learning loss will not be as great as those for a person of color.  What’s more, if you think the White student with unmet special needs has an uphill climb to get acknowledged in a relatively wealthy school district such as Baltimore County’s, you can imagine what that battle looks like for a Black student in less affluent Baltimore City.

The bottom line is that COVID-19 has revealed yet another dysfunction of our educational system and the inequities that go with it.  Yet as epidemiologist and Baltimore City School Board commissioner, Durryle Brooks points out (and I’m paraphrasing):  the learning loss from this pandemic was already a core and foundational issue for the last 30 years, with Black students entering school 2-3 grade levels behind where they should be each year, and the notion that the past 9 months of learning loss is somehow more significant feels “anemic” (Katz & Harvie).  He points out that City teachers have known for years how to remediate learning gaps of all kinds, and that growing up as a Black child in South Baltimore, he was himself the beneficiary of these extra efforts.  Tutoring programs (such as the OASIS one my mother participates in) and other one-on-one learning situations have the power to shrink the performance gap; it simply boils down, he argues, to making the commitment to providing the necessary resources.

Ah! But there, the notion of “pie” and how many pieces there are rears its ugly head once more.  Since the Reagan Revolution, we have steadily and systematically concentrated more and more of our wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  There is a finite amount of resources (no matter how appealing the capitalist myth of perpetual growth is), and it is indeed a cliched truism that “you get what you pay for.”

So once again, I conclude with a question I have already asked many times in this project: what are we prepared to pay for the futures of all of our children? And what’s the cost if we do not?

References

Kast, Sheilah & Harvie, M. (Feb. 11, 2021) Opposition to Baltimore City Schools’ Return Plan.  On the Record. https://www.wypr.org/post/opposition-baltimore-city-schools-return-plan.

Maryland Department of Disabilities.  http://mdod.maryland.gov/education/Pages/Special-Education-Servcies.aspx.

National Center for Education Statistics (2021) https://nces.ed.gov/.

Society for Neuroscience (2004) Brain Research Success Stories. www.sfn.org.

State of Maryland (2020) Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education. http://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabMtg/CmsnInnovEduc/2019-Interim-Report-of-the-Commission.pdf#page=11.

As with almost anything in life, until we have lived an experience, we are not capable of truly understanding it (it is why I have written so often in this project about the need to learn by doing).  But while I have written frequently about the digital divide during this pandemic and its impact on education, I have done so primarily from an theoretical perspective:  I have access to the available data, know how to analyze and interpret it, and have the intellectual training to extrapolate the consequences of it for teaching and learning. 

Admittedly, I have had numerous glimpses throughout this school year of how inadequate access to the on-line realm can affect the quality of someone’s learning as I have watched the same children dropped from my class time and again or waited patiently for the screen to unfreeze so that a student and I could speak once more.  But those of been moments of mere inconvenience, and I have not possessed the deeper knowledge that comes from lived experience.

All that changed this past week.  The internet access has been a little wonky at my current school all year (hence the glimpses), but Friday morning, it went full-scale meltdown while I was attempting to teach some statistics to my seniors.  It was a fully virtual day with that class in our hybrid schedule, and I had just finished presenting the three equations we would be practicing that period and was trying to set up the breakout rooms for my students to work in when, quite abruptly, my zoom link simply stopped working. 

Initially unconcerned, I sought to reactivate it, only to have the infamous spinning symbol twirl away on my screen for nearly five minutes.  Then, when the on-line connection finally did take hold once more, I was met by a chorus of voices frantically asking questions about what they did not understand—which lasted all of 30 seconds before my zoom linked dropped me yet again.

I will spare readers the full account, but needless to say, after getting dropped six times in 30 minutes, with each reconnect leading to ever more mounting frustration from my students—some of who were now trapped in breakout rooms I couldn’t access—my lesson for the day was effectively shredded.  With 15 minutes to go, I finally accepted defeat and e-mailed them an alternative activity we would have eventually done that was decidedly low-tech and simply trusted them to use the time productively to start to construct their pedigree charts for the following week.

As I sat afterward in the silence of my classroom, I have seldom felt such anger and discouragement.  I was already struggling, as I have all year, with the gut-punching knowledge that I have been forced to use a venue that prevents me from engaging in what I know is essential to good teaching.  But in my heart and mind, I knew I was at least trying to educate as effectively as the innate limits of a virtual classroom allows, and here, even that had been taken from me. 

To make matters worse, the pleas for attention from the students in the brief moments of contact left me realizing that children had needed me, and I had failed to be there for them.  It did not matter that rationally I knew the fault was not mine; emotionally, I had failed them as their teacher, and so furious was the intensity of my feelings at that moment that I almost crushed the coffee travel mug in my hand.  It felt like I had betrayed everything I have ever practiced or preached as an educator, and as I later shared with a colleague, I had to actively resist the urge to walk out the door, never to return.

Now I suspect that many who read all of this are going to raise an eyebrow or two thinking “Uh, weren’t you over-reacting just a little?” After all, it was only one lesson in an entire year of lessons, and heaven knows, it was certainly not the first—or even remotely the worst—botched teaching moment in a career of 30+ years.  So wherefore the intensity of the response?

The answer, I think, lies in the psycho-emotional cost it takes to be in any human services field right now.  Those of us on the front lines of actively caring for our society at this exact moment in time have to bring all the usual energy it takes to attend to the emotional, physical, and mental needs of others, and then on top of that, we have to bring the energy needed to believe and act as if what we are doing right now to serve others is actually having a positive impact in their lives in the face of a pandemic that every day seems to suggest otherwise.  It is why I empathize so deeply with those in the medical field:  they are having to bring this energy to believe they are making a difference each day only to watch it regularly fail to do so as yet another patient under their care dies of COVID.  My Friday class was my metaphorical patient, and I just didn’t have any energy left to cope with its “death.”

But as I processed my reactions to my failed lesson, I realized that I had gained some valuable and potent insight and empathy into how the digital divide in education is impacting those currently enduring it.  It takes an enormous amount of energy for all children everywhere right now to get up each day, log on to a screen, and act as if what they are doing matters.  They have none of the usual energizing rewards that come from in-person interactions, and even whatever activities they are doing on a given day are, at best, the mere manipulation of a bunch of electrons.  When I dive within to recall my own 6-to-18-year-old selves and how this situation would feel to them, “this sucks!” is the polite version of what emerges; so I know how difficult it must be right now for any student to show up for a zoomed class (heck, I know how hard it is for me, and I have to behave as if I’m happy and eager to be there!).

Hence, as I place myself in my students’ collective shoes, I then take how Friday’s class felt and now place myself in the shoes of the students for whom their internet connection is a feeble public wi-fi hotspot which they access out of the passenger seat of a car in the parking lot outside their closed school or county library.  I recall how frustrated and anxious I was for only one lesson and think how it must feel to experience that for every single class, all day long, every single school day, never knowing what is being missed as the zoom link disconnects and reconnects over and over again. 

Talk about enduring a Sisyphean task! The wonder isn’t that we have children whom teachers have not seen in their virtual classes for weeks on end; the wonder is that children who live under these conditions keep showing up at all.  I already had tremendous respect for my student, “John,” who is dropped from my zoom at least once every virtual class period (with an average I have calculated at three per hour).  But now that I have a deeper awareness of how that must feel for him, I want to build a pedestal and mount a statue of him for all to marvel at his fortitude!

I also want to not have to keep grading him.  That has been the other insight which my more direct encounter with the digital divide has produced.  My regular readers already know my thoughts about grading and how much I agree with Sheldon Eakins, that “if we’re grading right now, we’re grading privilege” (Newhouse).  But I had to submit a semester grade for “John,” as well as all my other students this past week, and while I own that grading is a required part of my job description, I have seldom felt more discomfited by it than I have this current academic year.  Friday’s class only reinforced those feelings as my own failure to transmit some essential skills for understanding biological inheritance caused me to see that failure from the other side.  How can I hold any student accountable for mastering a body of knowledge when I recognize that, courtesy of faulty digital access, they may never have received the transmission of that knowledge in the first place?

Yet students at the University of Maryland, College Park, report this past fall being pressured to avoid the available pass-fail option for their on-line courses—in spite of an overall drop in the level of student performance—because of the potential profile it could present for future graduate school and career options.  And it has been the surge in failing grades among K-12 students here in Maryland that has caused public protests by parents to demand the re-opening of schools for in-person learning.  All without anyone seeming to question whether it might be inequities in the virtual learning platform and not the virtual learning itself that might be the source of the problem at all levels of education.

Granted, the virtual platform simply is an inferior educational tool, and as I wrote in my most recent post, the costs of having to employ it during this pandemic are going to be enormous.  But for those on the wrong side of the digital divide, those costs are going to be even worse, and just how much worse is a new, deeper insight I now take as an educator moving forward.  Somehow, I need to work to find better ways to bridge it; I owe it to all my “John’s.”

References

Newhouse, K. (May 11, 2020). Why Grading Policies for Equity Matter More Than Ever. Mindshift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55889/why-grading-policies-for-equity-matter-more-than-ever?fbclid=IwAR2Wz2sXs_xdS0rLh9Oxhrgrfx0NP5oHjSfz6Z4SSK7dY2e3zz248-L9ilM.

University of Maryland (Nov. 20, 2020) Fall 2020 Student Experience Survey: Undergraduate Student Initial Results. https://svp.umd.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Fall%202020%20Student%20Survey%20-%20undergraduates%20-%20initial%20results%20-%20Nov%202020.pdf.

Wood, P.; Stole, B; & Bowie, L. (Jan. 22, 2021) Maryland Gov. Hogan Calls on Schools to Bring Students Back to Classrooms by March Under Hybrid Learning Plan.  The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-hogan-salmon-covid-schools-update-20210121-5r74ewa7nnfg7bq4hjsdrwcfju-story.html

When we are certain that the human soul
is no longer at work in the world,
it’s time to make sure that ours
is visible to someone, somewhere.
—Parker Palmer

So much of our work is an act of faith.
—Michael Harris

We have met the enemy, and he is us.
—Pogo

While recently exploring the influence of digital technologies as a dominant environment currently sculpting our brains and behavior, it occurred to me that the pandemic itself has now been with us long enough for it, too, to have become a dominant environment starting to sculpt our brains and behavior. That, in turn, caused me to recall that back in mid-April, when this on-going natural disaster was relatively new, I wrote a post in response to some observations a friend had made about the abrupt switch to virtual learning in which I shared some initial thoughts about the potential ultimate costs of the pandemic for education.  All of which got me to wondering: now that we are 10 months into this pandemic, what actual long-term costs for teaching and learning have started to reveal themselves more fully?

In Notes from the Trenches and More Notes from the Trenches, I have already written about the costs I have seen firsthand as I returned to the classroom this fall after my sabbatical last year.  But some recent statistics I came across in my research has provided a “35,000 foot” view of the pandemic’s impact on the future of education in this country, and the view is not pretty.  First, it is estimated that the crash-like swing to virtual learning this past spring set student learning back anywhere from 1 to 5 months, depending on where you lived and the color of your skin.  Second, with this set-back already in place, researchers estimate that the reading skills gained during the present virtual school year will only be 63-68% of those of previous years, and the situation in math is even more dire, with an estimate that the math skills gained will be as little as 37-50% of those of previous years.  A grim picture indeed!

But the final recent statistic that caught my attention the most is the loss of 4.5 million childcare slots in this country. The reason this one struck me so deeply is because of its implications for the brain development of an entire generation of children experiencing the pandemic right now, and to understand what they are, I am going to need first to provide a short primer on the topic (for those who would like a deeper dive, see Chapter 8). 

To start, between birth and about age 5, the growing brain adds neurons and synaptic connections in its different parts in response to the environment it inhabits; the richer and more varied the environment, the more neurons and synaptic connections created and the better all the different parts of the brain will function.  It is why Head Start programs are so important for enriching the learning environments for children whose socio-economic status put them at a disadvantage and why high-quality day-care makes such a difference in long-term learning outcomes.  It is also why if you stress a particular skill during this time period, the brain will create the extra neurons and neural connections to support it; Olympic level gymnasts and figure skaters do not get started in their teens for this very reason.

Next, between roughly age 5 and ages 10-12, the brain takes the neural connections it now has from stage 1 and reinforces them, adding additional synaptic contact points to increase processing speed. It does so, again, in direct correlation and response to the environment it inhabits, and again, the richer and more varied the environment, the more of the brain’s many neural networks it reinforces.  It is why wealthier public schools make sure their elementary schools maintain their music, arts, and P.E. programs and why those wealthy enough to do so will pay the tuition dollars for the extra attention—as well as extra programs—provided in an independent lower school.  It is also why, again, stress a particular function of the brain over others and that’s the part that gets reinforced to work the fastest.

Finally (but not really; it’s just that changes after this stage are much slower and smaller), between ages 10-12 and 22-25, the brain takes everything it has constructed so far and starts systematically and permanently to prune any connections which its environment tells it are not important, dismantling some of them completely.  It is why, yet again, the richer and more varied the environment the brain encounters during these years, the less pruning that will take place, and it is, quite frankly, the biological justification for the liberal arts.  It is also why if you spend all your free time as a teenager on your smartphone texting and watching videos, your other communication skills start to suffer: your brain is literally pruning your ability to employ them.

Now, for purposes of the current discussion, what is critically important to understand about this whole process is that it is linear, unidirectional, and genetically hard-wired.  Once a child moves from the first stage to the second, no new neurons and new connections get made (except for memory centers; see Chapter 3).  Once the transition from stage two to stage three occurs, there is no more reinforcement to speed things up, and once the final transition to full adulthood occurs, there is no un-pruning.  There will be minor changes as you age, but the basic architecture of the brain is cemented in place for life by age 25.

Returning, then, to the loss of 4.5 million childcare slots (as well as the estimated losses in reading and math skills), and I suspect many readers can already see where this is going.  In a growing child, tween, or teen, a year for the brain is an enormous length of time, and what the brain fails to experience during that time leaves a permanent mark.  The 3-year old who is not learning how to work and play with others right now because daycare is closed is not growing the extra neurons in that part of his, her, or their brain.  The 8-year old who is not gaining certain reading and math skills due to the limits of virtual learning is not reinforcing those connections in the brain.  And the teenage athlete who is not getting to play as a result of COVID restrictions has a brain starting to prune the synapses associated with the specific skillset associated with his, her, or their game.

Furthermore, what the brain does experience likewise leaves its immutable mark.  As Matthew Biel, chief of the child and adolescent psychiatry division at Georgetown University School of Medicine, puts it:

The strain on kids [right now] is enormous.  Your 7-year-old wants to be recognized when they raise their hand. Oftentimes doesn’t happen on Zoom. They want to be able to make a comment, make a joke with a peer — can’t do that, no chatting allowed. Wants to be able to get up and walk around the classroom and move — can’t do that, we need to see your face on screen (Natanson & Meckler).

As a result, children of all ages “are suffering emotionally, mentally, and even physically from so many hours, often alone, in front of a computer screen (Natanson & Meckler).  All of which is impacting, depending on one’s age, either neuron growth or reinforcement or pruning in the parts of the brain responsible for these pandemic experiences.  There is a reason that PTSD is so challenging to treat.

However, I do not want to overstate what is happening either.  That theoretical 3-year old mentioned earlier still has neurons in the parts of the brain for working and playing with others; that’s part of the brain’s built in plasticity I wrote about in my last two posts.  It is simply that by being deprived of the environment that would increase the neurons and connections in those parts of the brain, said child is going to find working and playing with others more challenging and that challenge is going to last a lifetime because he, she, or they can’t get that developmental time back. Those extra neurons from that year are never going to appear.  Again, a generation of children are not losing their brain’s ability to function, but the pandemic is introducing hinderances and limitations to those functions that will last a lifetime.

And the impact on BIPOC children is going to be even worse.  Part of what makes racism in this country a systemic problem is because of the very brain development process I just described.  The majority of BIPOC children during their first 5 years live in environments that are not rich and varied, and they then attend underfunded schools that likewise do not provide rich and varied experiences.  The consequence is fewer new neurons, less reinforcement, and more pruning, resulting in levels of educational achievement that limits the level of employment opportunities such that, too often, as adults they find themselves living and raising families in the same impoverished environments that produced them in the first place, creating a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing cycle (i.e. systemic racism). 

In the current situation, though, this cycle has been made all the worse by the pandemic’s exacerbation of the digital divide’s impact on education.  In my original post on this topic, COVID-19 and the Digital Divide, the figure I had available to me from the most recent research I could find at the time (2017) was that there are 18 million households without internet access in this country—the vast majority of them home to those who would identify as BIPOC.  But in February of 2020, BroadbandNow estimated that that figure is closer to 42 million, and while some have argued that it is more of an infrastructure issue than anything else, in New York City—where broadband/wi-fi infrastructure is not an issue—nearly 1 million people (an 1/8^th of the population!) has no access simply because they cannot afford it. 

The bottom line is that the digital divide is real, and I strongly suspect that it is a major reason why that setback in reading skills from the spring which I mentioned earlier show a clear delineation.  For white children, the setback was 1-3 months; for black children, it was 3-5.  Hence, the bitter irony right now is that at a time of social awakening in this country, the impact of the pandemic on education is actually reinforcing the systemic racism our educational system already contributes to in the first place.

Nor does the bad news stop there.  It is not just K-12 where COVID-19 is setting the stage for long-term negative consequences for education.  Distaste and disaffection with on-line learning has driven undergraduate enrollments down by 3.6% overall and a full 10% at community colleges (often the gateway for first time members of less affluent families).  Given that all the research and statistics show that for each year past high school an individual does not enroll in college, the less likely it is for a person to earn an eventual degree, and we find ourselves in a situation where, as Doug Shapiro of the National Student Clearinghouse puts it, we will have “an entire generation that will enter adulthood with lower-education, lower skills, less employability, and ultimately lower productivity” (Nadworny).

And to pour gasoline onto all this fire, there may be no help to remediate the pandemic’s damage to the learning part of the educational process because there may be no one available to do the teaching part.  As Natasha Singer of the New York Times puts it, “a pandemic teacher exodus is not hypothetical,” and the statistics are sobering.  Applications for early retirement in public schools are up 30% in the state of Minnesota, up 60% in Pennsylvania, and in Indiana, a staggering 72% of the state’s schools report significant staffing problems due to abrupt changes in teachers’ retirement plans.  Moreover, it’s not just the 30-year+ veterans walking out the door.  The National Education Association says that 28% of all its members report being more likely to leave the profession now, including 20% of those who have taught 10 years or less.  Shea Martin summarizes the situation well when she says, “if we keep this up, you’re going to lose an entire generation of not only students but also teachers” (Singer).

But do we have to “keep this up?” Granted, the tally of the cost of the pandemic to education is already a grim one.  However, as I reminded the class of 2020 in my letter to them, out of ashes is the chance to build a phoenix, and right now is the time when we need to be constructing our plans for how we will rebuild education in this country moving forward….

Coda  

It was January 3 when I started writing the preceding paragraph and took a pause to allow this essay to ferment in my mind for a while before finishing to post it.  Like anyone with half-a-brain, I compose off-line before copying and pasting (since once on-line, it is forever), and I like to feel confident that I am presenting my most genuine self when sharing my thoughts with others.  In the meantime, of course, as this past week has made abundantly clear, it is not only education we must rebuild from the ashes, it is our very sense of identity as a society that must be reconstructed. 

As for the actual events of this past Wednesday, I must confess that I was neither shocked nor surprised by the uprising.  Those closest to me know that I have been predicting for more than two years that our 45^th president would not leave without a physical fight, and January 6 merely confirmed my anticipation.  I was shocked, surprised, and appalled that the pitched battle I expected was not taking place on the outside of the Capital Building since it is simply not possible that I was the only one seeing the obvious, especially given our 45^th president’s behaviors and the Right Wing internet traffic following the election:  that it took 90 minutes into the insurrection before Federal defense officials finally allowed the governor of my state to send in troops from the Maryland National Guard speaks to either willful intent or blind ineptitude—both of which are frankly equally possible with this administration.

However, regardless of how any one of us experienced this attack on our democratic institutions, I think it is critical that those acting on faith, trying to make the human soul visible in this world, take time in this moment to recognize and acknowledge that both this uprising as well as the Trump presidency that incited it are merely symptoms; they are not the actual disease that needs our help curing.  On the surface, over 74 million people, predominately white and more than 1/3 of our adult population, were simply voting for Donald Trump for president on Nov. 3 because they preferred him as their candidate.  And they did so, interestingly enough, in spite of the fact that nearly every policy of the previous four years—from tax breaks for the wealthy to climate change denial to the handling of COVID—has or will negatively impact both the short- and long-term quality of the daily lives of the vast majority of them. 

Therefore, I want to argue that these individuals were not just voting for Donald Trump; rather they were voting for the disease, the social evil, he symptomizes—their White privilege and the systemic racism that supports it.  As Isabel Wilkerson points out in her work on the American caste system, the puzzlement so many progressives and liberals have about what they perceive as the blindness of poor White Trump supporters—“how can they not see that they are actually economically worse off? That his policies only benefit the rich? That their health care is worse because of him?”—this puzzlement is due to a failure to understand that the perceived benefit these Trump supporters are voting for is their status as White people in this country.  They are voting to maintain the position of their caste and to these people, Wilkerson argues, that benefit outweighs any possible socio-economic disadvantages that might also come with such a vote.

What all this means for those of us seeking to shine light on the present darkness within our society is that the upholding of the results of the recent presidential election is only the beginning.  The disease which the insurgents this past week symptomize is fighting (literally) for its life, and it is going to take the collective will and effort of what Lincoln called, “the better angels of our nature” to cure and heal it.  We have now witnessed firsthand the alternative, and while many have dismissed the recent decisions by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other corporations to block our 45^th president’s efforts to lie in public as “too little; too late,” I would point out the following:  we have always been a reactionary society; even the so-called “Greatest Generation” had to be dragged from their intensely resistant neutrality into their “Greatness” by the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Yet once dragged, they saved the world, and now that our country today has had its own “Pearl Harbor” moment, who then will join in standing up to fight? Who will join to save tomorrow for all our children? A tomorrow that is functional, equitable, sustainable, and just? As Palmer’s epigram at the start of this post challenges, “when we are certain that the human soul is no longer at work in the world, it’s time to make sure that ours is visible to someone, somewhere” (p. 60). May each of us who desire to work for a better world seek to be more visible. It is vital that we do so now more than ever.

References

De La Rosa, S. Nov. 3, 2020 Report:  Steeper COVID slide expected in math than reading. K-12Dive. https://www.k12dive.com/news/report-steeper-covid-slide-expected-in-math-than-reading/588185/.

Fowler, G. (Dec. 28, 2020) In 2020, We Reached Peak Internet.  Here’s What Worked—and What Flopped.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/topics/road-to-recovery/2020/12/28/covid-19-tech/?no_nav=true.

Kashen, J.; Glynn, S.J., & Novello, A. (Oct. 30, 2020) How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward: Congress’ $64.5 Billion Mistake.  Center for American Progress.  https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/10/30/492582/covid-19-sent-womens-workforce-progress-backward/#:~:text=This%20report%20estimates%20that%20if,to%20%2464.5%20billion%20per%20year.

Nadworny, E. (Dec. 17, 2020) ‘Losing a Generation:’ Fall College Enrollment Plummets for 1^st-Year Students.  NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/925831720/losing-a-generation-fall-college-enrollment-plummets-for-first-year-students.

Natanson, H. & Meckler, L. (Nov. 26, 2020) Remote School is Leaving Children Sad and Angry. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/11/27/remote-learning-emotional-toll/?arc404=true&itid=lk_inline_manual_44.

Palmer, P. (2018) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old.  Oakland, CA: Brett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Singer, N. (Dec. 3, 2020) Teaching in the Pandemic: ‘This Is Not Sustainable.’  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/us/teachers-remote-learning-burnout.html.

Stole, B. & Knezevich, A. (Jan. 7, 2021) Maryland Gov. Hogan: ‘America Would Be Better Off’ If Trump Resigns Or Is Removed From Office.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-pol-hogan-capitol-20210107-7gjx3ksoqrhmrixhqr7zz2byom-story.html.

Wilkerson, I. (2020) Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House.

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world,
do we begin to find ourselves, and realize
where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
—Henry David Thoreau

There’s this idea that keeps getting whispered through history…
the idea that we aren’t lonely because we are alone;
we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude.
—Michael Harris

The unexamined life is a threat to others.
—Parker Palmer

A Failure in Solitude

Today’s youngest generations—those twenty- and thirty-somethings that got my mother musing in Part I of this post—those generations have never had to be lost.  They have never had to be literally lost because they carry every direction to everywhere in their palms, available at the simple touch of a screen or voice command.  They have never had to be metaphorically lost because there is no need to endure an absence when you hold your entire social network at all times in your hand.  Indeed, FOMO due to this level of connectivity has actually made solitude or absence quite frightening and anxiety producing for many young people, and I suspect a lot of them would find the idea that there could be value to being lost hopelessly anachronistic.

And it’s not just “lost” that has been absent from their lives.  In a world of Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Tinder, the need for delayed gratification has also gone missing as well.  Want some material good? It can arrive tomorrow (and once the drones are inevitably introduced, today).  Bored? You can watch anything, anywhere, anytime on your device of choice.  In need of some temporary physical companionship that’s disposable? It’s only a swipe of the screen away. In the meantime, there is plenty of multitasking to keep the dopamine hits coming because after all, just:

look at the multitasker in action.  He or she appears to be a whir of productivity, not some slave to mindless responses.  Phone (and cappuccino) held aloft while crossing the intersection—barely avoiding a collision with that cyclist (also on the phone)—the multitasker is in the enviable position of getting shit done (Harris, p. 120; original emphasis).

Yet so often, all that is truly being accomplished is avoiding the solitude that comes from momentarily finding one’s self temporarily lost.  Time is killed merely managing rather than creating, spending “most of our lives pushing electronic nothings around while staring at a glowing rectangle” (Harris, p. 9), and while everyone so engaged looks productive, the value of the world it has produced is highly questionable:  ever increasing consumption for consumption’s sake, with all the ecological degradation that goes with it that I have written about in It Could (Will?) Be Worse.

We have, then, a significant number of people that have never been lost or asked to delay their want, and again, enter stage left a deadly, highly contagious virus.  Suddenly, society is demanding a level of isolation and personal deprivation (both materially and socially) never experienced before, and because so many in our younger generations were ill-prepared to handle it, I would suggest that —to paraphrase Michael Harris—they have failed in their sudden solitude and that the resulting level of unmet want and true loneliness is part of what is driving the reckless behaviors that are causing the current surge in positivity rates in these age groups.

However, I think there is more to the current situation (and more to the answer to my mother’s questions) than simply a failure in solitude.  Never experiencing being temporarily lost also means never having to ask for directions, and because there are good sources for directions and bad sources for directions, learning how to tell the difference is a critical life skill that I think a lot of individuals in our society have never felt any compelling need to develop. What’s more, in today’s world, if you don’t actually know how to ask for directions (or direction!), others are there, eager to fill the void for you:

Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you’d personally find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe.  In 2013, Google announced that Google Maps would do the same, making it easier to find things Google thinks you’d like and harder to find things you haven’t encountered before.  Facebook follows suite, presenting a curated view of your “friends’ ” activities in your feed.  Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences.  And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution.  Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning (Harris, p. 91; my emphasis).

The only thing I would change about Harris’ final statement is that it IS deadly to real learning, and it is so because here, once again, we bump up against one of those inconvenient limits of the human brain. It turns out that the more the brain is exposed to a body of information, the more the brain considers it reliable—basically, the more it thinks the information is true.  This had tremendous survival value at one time because hearing over and over again that a leopard is dangerous kept you on the alert for leopards; repeatedly hearing that a certain type of tree produced fruit each year kept you on the hunt for a reliable food source.  But as Emily Dreyfuss of the Harvard Shorensten Center points out, while this hard-wired feature of our brains was once invaluable to our survival, “in a disinformation ecosystem [such as the one we currently inhabit], it really is dangerous” as conflicting so-called “truths” simply get reinforced by the bubble described above (Garcia-Navarro).  Like I said, deadly to real learning.

Also, as the pandemic is illustrating all too well, it can be literally deadly as well.  Uncertainty is a form of being lost, with expertise a good source for directions.  Yet in a disinformation ecosystem, “where everyone’s version of the facts is equally valid, and opinions of specialists become marginalized, corporate and politicized interests are potentially empowered” to keep people from finding their way to the truth (Harris, p. 75).  As a result, you get super-spreader events such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota and nurses reporting COVID-19 patients denying they have the disease even as they draw their last breaths.  You get over a million people a day over the past week flying to visit family, having rationalized that the plea to stay home by health officials doesn’t apply to them, and you get a mounting death toll that, as of 12/30/2020, is 18% of the world’s total dead in a country that represents only 4% of the world’s population.  All because—as Thoreau might have put it—too many people have failed to lose the world and thereby know “the infinite extent of our relations.”

The New Tribalism

If the only thing a collective failure in solitude were doing is simply making the pandemic worse in this country, one might argue let evolution take its course, grant the necessary Darwin Awards to the idiots who ignore public health policy, mask up, and keep social distancing—because like any disease, this one will run its course.  But the failure in solitude is merely the consequence of the larger digital silos our uses of technology have created, leading to the growing tribalism in our society, and because this is the environment the plasticity of our brains now inhabits on a daily basis, this tribalism reinforces our digital bubble habits that feed the failure in solitude in the first place.

I fear we may be in a vicious cycle of positive feedback wherein our uses of technology sculpt a brain to think first and foremost only with the values of one’s tribe which simply reinforces those uses of the technology that lead to such a brain in the first place.  And I am not alone in thinking so.  Political scientist, Greg Weiner, argues that it is not the amount of disinformation that is the problem; it is people’s craving for consuming it.  As he puts it, “there is a difference between being uncertain of what is true and being uninterested in finding out,” and what both he and I are concerned about is whether we can get this interest back under the current conditions in this country.  When one of the brightest of my current students shares during the recent election that he only gets his news off his Instagram social media feed, I fear for our future.

The challenge is that we need the very solitude the Internet of Everything denies us to develop the insight needed to care once more about the truth, and as Michael Harris sums the situation nicely, “we cannot afford to count on accidental absence any more than we can count on accidental veggies at dinner” (p. 39).  Where, then, do the absences come from and along with them, the will to fight today’s digital tribalism and its consequent damaging and dangerous social and political tribalism? How do we generate the necessary appreciation for solitude again? “True contemplation is always a two-part act:  we go out into the world for a time, see what they’ve got, and then find some isolated chamber where all that experience can be digested” (Harris, p. 133).  But right now, too many in our society are missing those “chambers,” and we have got to find a way and the will to change that fact—especially among our so-called digital natives.

Moreover, we cannot put the burden for doing so exclusively on them.  I first thought of titling this two-part post, “The Not-So-Greatest Generation.”  But then I realized that I cannot judge them for having brains with the properties of the very world in which we allowed them to grow up.  That’s simply how the brain’s plasticity works.  It is we digital immigrants who laid the foundations for today’s digital age (Jobs and Gates are my age-peers), and so it is we who in no small part bear the responsibility for the quality and properties of the minds at work in our country and during this pandemic.

Thus, my challenge to all of us is: how can we as educators, as parents, as adults in our society begin to create a different environment for brains to start rewiring for less tribal, less digitally siloed structure and function? I don’t have an immediate answer.  But I do know that Parker Palmer is correct that “if I want to help heal the world, I must heal myself” (p. 147).  Therefore, I and others must start by deliberately getting out of our own bubbles and consciously generate moments of isolation to examine our own lives, seeking the wisdom that might answer this paragraph’s opening question.  Because until we do, not only is Socrates correct that our individual unexamined lives are not worth living; Palmer is equally so that such lives very much remain the threat to others that our collective behavior as a country during this pandemic has shown they can be.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/.

Garcia-Navarro, L. (Dec. 13, 2020) How Disinformation Spreads, And Why It’s So Hard to Combat. NPR Weekend Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2020/12/13/945989935/how-disinformation-spreads-and-why-its-so-hard-to-combat.

Glenn, H. & Inskeep, St. (Nov. 18, 2020) A Nurse’s Pleas: ‘I Wish That I Could Get People To See COVID Through My Eyes.’ NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936096303/nurses-are-under-pressure-as-hospitals-strain-to-meet-pandemic-demands.

Harris, M. (2015) The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.  New York: Current.

Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/.

Palmer, P. (2018) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old.  Oakland, CA: Brett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Weiner, G. (Dec. 14, 2020) How Do We Get Herd Immunity for Fake News? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/opinion/trump-voter-fraud-education.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201215&instance_id=25048&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=56989331&segment_id=46964&user_id=c704fc9ed48c3e493f8da0c67ecfb906.

You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.
—Mathew 13:14-15

They will be hearers of many things
and will have learned nothing.
They will appear to be omniscient
and will generally know nothing.
—Plato’s Phaedrus

When I finished writing Chapter 9 of this project nearly a year ago, I had no idea that the concerns I raised in it might prove potentially prophetic.  But a recent conversation with my mother got me revisiting the impact of digital technology on teaching and learning, and I began to see that some of the themes from that chapter might help explain some of the social phenomena we are observing right now in this country in our collective response to the pandemic.

The concern my mother raised was why so many people in our society—particularly those in the 18-35 age bracket—seem so incapable of a united response to this pandemic.  She even mused rhetorically, “Why is the highest positivity rate nationwide among those in their 20s and 30s? Why can’t they seem to take the necessary steps to protect themselves and others? Why was the Greatest Generation able to rise to the deprivations and extreme challenges of World War II for nearly four years, and today we can’t even seem to get everyone to do something as simple as wear a mask in public?”

My initial response in my head was:  A. FDR, one of the most astute, intelligent, and caring presidents our nation has ever known was in charge at that time; while Donald Trump, a publicly diagnosed malignant narcissist, has been in charge this time.  B. Back then, the age bracket in question was either actively fighting the war or working in the factories to make the fighting possible; while today, many between 18 and 35 are either underemployed or unemployed during this crisis, with all the extra isolation that can bring with it.  And C. The nature of the threat was different; you could see what you were struggling against and see directly how your actions affected that struggle.

But as we rapidly approach a death toll from the pandemic in this country that will exceed in less than 12 months the number of soldiers killed during the 4 years of WWII, I have started to think more deeply about my mother’s concern and to wonder what has changed in the last 75 years? There are obviously numerous demographic, economic, and sociological answers, but as an educator, I began to wonder:  have we somehow fundamentally rewired our brains in ways that make a collective civility more difficult?

The short answer, I think, is a probable “yes.” But the long answer is more complicated and requires some unpacking, an unpacking that begins with a better understanding of the brain and its plasticity.  I have already written extensively in Chapter 3 about the malleable features of the right hemisphere versus the conserving features of the left hemisphere, but that is only one understanding of the brain’s plasticity.  There is a larger understanding in neuroscience that recognizes that “plasticity” can also refer to the ever-evolving structural changes—and the consequent functional changes—that occur throughout an individual’s life.  The science shows that no matter a person’s age, the structure and function of said person’s brain is always at least a little different from one day to the next, simply from all the brain’s interactions with the environment and the resulting changes in neural pathways and synaptic connections.  Just as no two brains are the same, a single brain is also never the same as every datum it processes subtly alters it. 

Granted, most of these permanent changes are minute, which is why we maintain a sense of self, a sense of identity.  But over long periods of time—as well as critical developmental growth periods—the impact of all this change can add up, and therefore, people who live in fundamentally different environments will perceive and interact with the world around them in fundamentally different ways.  It is why there is some biological truth to the notion of a “generation gap.”  Growing up in historically different eras produces brains that will quite literally think somewhat differently because of how they have had to interact with different experiences.  What’s more, the manner with which the brain encounters these experiences will itself alter the brain.  As Michael Harris nicely summarizes it, “what you use to interact with the world changes the way you see the world.  Every lens is a tainted lens” (p. 35).

Which got me to asking myself:  what is the fundamental lens now at work on our brains today and how is that lens tainted? The answer to the first question is clearly the nearly ubiquitous smartphone and its attendant technologies.  But the answer to the second question, the one about the taint, is not so clear, and it caused me to go on a bit of a historical quest and return to the beginning:  Steve Jobs’ launch in 2007 of the original iPhone.  Fortunately, due to digital technology, I was able to watch the entire thing on YouTube, and by so doing, I was able to discern four deliberate design decisions that I want to suggest are the smartphone’s taint.

The first design decision was about the voicemail feature.  Anyone with experience with an old fashion telephone answering machine knows that you cannot cherry-pick which messages you pay attention to; even if simply to delete them, each recording—in the order received—requires your attention.  So Jobs and his team designed the new voicemail feature on the iPhone to allow the user control over how the user interacts with voicemails, and in fact the person in charge of this feature, Stan Sigman, bragged about how the iPhone’s voicemail “let’s you look at the voice message you want to hear and when you want to hear it.”

The second design decision, to quote Jobs, was to have “the internet in your pocket.”  The new iPhone had its own html browser with full access to e-mail and all the other on-line features and abilities associated with a tablet or desktop computer.  This feature was intended as an expansion of the iPod’s abilities, and with it, Jobs bragged that everyone could now have access to any music they wanted anywhere, anytime, anyhow.  Interestingly, the other implications of this feature were not given much attention during the launch.

The third design decision was to include a digital camera with video capacity.  The pitch for this feature was that you would no longer have to carry multiple devices, never have to accidentally miss capturing that special moment because you didn’t have your camera with you, and that you could more easily share photos with family and friends.  Indeed, the photo sharing ability plays a central role in the launch presentation.

The fourth design decision was to make the texting feature operate on a continuous feed.  There would be no equivalent of voicemail that would automatically route an incoming text to a storage area for later examination.  All incoming texts would be brought to the user’s immediate attention that one had arrived, regardless of what else the user was doing on the iPhone at the time.  Here, too, you can watch Jobs himself bragging how you will never miss a time-sensitive piece of information ever again.

In and of themselves, these four deliberate design decisions appear pretty innocuous.  But Jobs opens the launch of the iPhone in 2007 with an intentional reminder to the audience of how the iPod fundamentally altered the entire music industry (some would say laid waste to it), and it is part of the law of unintentional consequences that any new technology will bring the bad with the good.  For instance, a voicemail I can cherry-pick means I have the power to dismiss and ignore you without a second thought; the internet in my pocket means I can upload any crazy thought that pops into my mind at any given moment for permanent immortalization and consumption; the ability to film anything at any moment means I can be filmed doing everything everywhere; and a continuous feed of texts means I am always on-call, forever distracted by the rest of the world’s demands.

This last issue is worth a brief neuroscience digression because there is not the same degree of willful decision making involved as with the other three instances.  As I have reminded often, our brains did not evolve in today’s environment.  On the open savannah, a slight change in shadow and light in our visual field or a new sound in our ears could mean the presence of a hungry predator.  Therefore, our brains evolved a feature psychologists call “orienting response,” and what it means is that even the slightest change in our sensory input causes the brain to immediately switch its entire attention (“orient”) toward the new input.  Thus, every time a text alert arrives on a smartphone, the brain stops everything it is focusing on to attend to that alert.  It cannot prevent itself from doing so, and no amount of training can overcome this limitation.  “So now, just as the once useful craving for sugar and fat has turned against us in an environment of plenty, our once useful orienting responses may be doing as much damage as they do good” (Harris, p. 121).

Yet, while the tainted lens of texting isn’t something we can control, the simple truth is that we are not collectively making the necessary decisions to overcome the tainted lenses of the other three deliberate iPhone design decisions that became the standards for the industry.  As to why not, I would like to suggest that for 13 years now, our brains have lived in a world where the smartphone has become our dominate method for interaction with our environment.  Indeed, for many—and especially younger so-called digital natives—the smartphone has become their environment, and as a consequence, a device that enables dismissive, ego-driven, instantly gratified behavior has become the dominant force for altering the structure and function of brains in a society in which rabid individualism is the norm also at work on those brains.  Is it any wonder that by 2013, only 6 years after the introduction of the iPhone, a study at San Diego University found decreased levels of empathy and increased levels of narcissism in young people in this country?

Furthermore, the neuroscience has shown that “the Internet fundamentally works on our plastic minds to make them more capable of ‘shallow’ thinking and less capable of ‘deep’ thinking” (Harris, p. 38).  We are simply not as reflective and thoughtful when we are digitally engaged—even our reading patterns change as we scroll, jumping from word to word down the screen rather than steadily from left to right—and when we combine this fact with a device that makes the internet available to the brain 24/7, along with an orienting response over which we have no control, and we are left with brains structured to spend their days attempting the myth of multitasking, rapidly refocusing our attention from one action to the next, doing a subpar job on all of them (and no, the irony of my use of the internet to share this state of affairs is not lost on me).

To summarize, then, we have a world of brains alive today where the presence of the internet has had two generations and the smartphone one generation to impact their structure and function in the ways I have described.  In addition, we live in a country where the inherently self-centered character of individualism has also shaped our brains.  Enter stage left a deadly, highly contagious virus, and suddenly, I think we may have an answer to my mother’s question.  A significant chunk of our population has been raised with no need for a sense of the collective or one’s individual impact on it, able to live in their own digital bubble.  An even larger portion have been shaped by a device that invites ignorance and poor-quality decision making.  Toss in some privilege and sense of entitlement, and how, then, could so many people with brains sculpted by such an environment not struggle to do what is right for the greater good?

Especially when it entails potential isolation and self-deprivation? But more on that next time.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/.

Glenn, H. & Inskeep, St. (Nov. 18, 2020) A Nurse’s Pleas: ‘I Wish That I Could Get People To See COVID Through My Eyes.’ NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936096303/nurses-are-under-pressure-as-hospitals-strain-to-meet-pandemic-demands

Harris, M. (2015) The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.  New York: Current.

Jobs, S. (2007) iPhone 1 – Steve Jobs MacWorld Keynote in 2007 – Full Presentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg.

Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/.

Palmer, P. (2018) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old.  Oakland, CA: Brett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Simon, S. (Dec. 12, 2020) Why San Mateo County Is Not Under A Stay-At-Home Order.  NPR’s Weekend Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/12/945788722/why-san-mateo-county-is-not-under-a-stay-at-home-order.

Unfit (2020) #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump. https://unfitfilm.com/.

It was the best of White privilege, it was the worst of White privilege, it was the power of White privilege, it was the blindness of White privilege, it was the age of White privilege, it was the age of anti-White privilege….

I open this post with this pastiche of Dickens’ immortal words because it has been an interesting couple of weeks in education here in my adopted home town of Baltimore.  One public district had students and teachers alike frozen out of their virtual schools by a ransomware attack.  The City Schools have insisted on reopening even as the state reports a record-shattering rise in COVID-19 cases (3,792) and the positive rate state-wide climbs ever closer to 8%.  The Archdiocesan schools, meanwhile, continue to remain fully open as they have since the start of the school year, and many of the area independent schools keeping pivoting back and forth between virtual and hybrid like a weathervane in a hurricane.

It is an incidence of this latter that leads me to write the current post because it has led to an unseen battle of White privilege (almost my title for this!) that has left me a little more bemused and disillusioned than usual by how totally un-self-aware and clueless so many people can be who otherwise appear intelligent and well educated.  I have written elsewhere about the dangers of ignorance and our society’s almost narcissitic individualism, and as my regular readers know, I have been hammering away at the issue of white privilege for some time now.

But recently, I have witnessed a battle between factions of White privilege, where both sides don’t even seem to recognize that it is their own respective White privilege that is causing the fight, and it just has me shaking my head.  What has happened is that my school has made the decision to return to hybrid learning starting Monday for the two weeks leading up to the winter break—in spite of the fact that we only returned to virtual about three weeks ago because the pandemic numbers had started to rise (and were actually not as bad as today) and in spite of the inevitable impact of the Thanksgiving holiday on the spread of the disease.  This decision has led to the predictable blowback from the faculty about the safety of virtual over hybrid and accusations about the administration failing to acknowledge their decision’s potential impact on the health of the community.

What has inflamed the argument the most, though, has been the potential impact the return to hybrid might have on our children of color.  Of our families that have chosen to remain virtual even when we are in hybrid mode, a disproportionate number of them are our families of color, and having experienced hybrid mode, I will be the first to acknowledge how challenging it has been to incorporate any of my students remaining virtual into the in-person classroom.  The human brain is hardwired to pay attention to the people directly in front of the visual cortex and remembering the child over there on the screen is difficult.  But it is not impossible, and because of the incredibly positive impact in-person has had for my children of color who have chosen to come to school—especially the ones whose wi-fi situation at home makes attempts at virtual learning immensely problematic at best—I find myself questioning the cogency of this particular argument on the part of my fellow faculty.

The bottom line is that I think they are legitimately concerned about the risks of in-person teaching under the current circumstances, but they want to use their own White privilege of being able to work remotely from the safety of their homes to remain in virtual mode for their classes.  It is essentially the exact same argument that their unionized public school colleagues have made since the start of the school year, and the sad irony is that this insistence by teachers to work remotely from the safety of their homes has only exacerbated the negative impacts of the digital divide our students of color were already experiencing when it comes to education (see Maybe It’s Pie After All and COVID-19 and the Digital Divide).  Talk about White privilege! The consequences of the digital divide for the disadvantaged children in our community is precisely why superintendent Dr. Sonja Santelises has insisted on opening at least certain Baltimore City schools in the face of surging COVID-19 cases, and it is why I have I have written recently about my own belief that if I’m going to ask the clerk I know at my local grocery store to put on a mask to risk serving me, then I damn well better be prepared to put on a mask to risk teaching my clerk’s—or anyone else’s—children.

And it is why I will go into school on Monday and back to hybrid mode.  I made the decision a long time ago to work in the private sector of education in this country, knowing full well that I would be working for White privilege incarnate, and I made that deliberate choice following my many years in public education for two reasons:  one was that all children need caring adults in their lives, and the other was that the most effective way to dismantle a system is from within it.  I have been chipping away at my students’ ignorance, hidden bias, and general cluelessness now for over two decades, and while I have in no way single-handedly changed society, I do know that I have opened a mind or two because I have seen the results in their adult lives and choices.  Hence, I will keep chipping.

Which brings me to my last head-shaking thought from this recent battle.  I think it is disheartening enough that many of my colleagues seem blind to the reality that simply because they teach at a relatively socially progress private school does not mean they do not teach at a private school, with all the White privilege that that is going to entail by definition.  But to push so vehemently back against our school’s use of that White privilege to go back to hybrid by employing their own White privilege and to not see that that is precisely what they are doing….

I shake my head because all that energy could have been put to more productive use, including, ironically, my colleagues’ own health.  The immune system requires a tremendous amount of energy to function properly, and we’re all about to return to a situation potentially requiring a very functional immune system: all that angry energy spent over whose White privilege should have priority might come in handy during the next two weeks.

References

Bowie, L. (Nov. 10, 2020) Baltimore City School Will Scale Back Reopening of Schools in Face of Rising Coronavirus Cases. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-coronavirus-city-schools-reopening-20201111-sgyf33l5ybdzposcidskfbns7u-story.html.

Leonard, B. (Dec. 5, 2020).  State Shatters Record for Daily COVID-19 Cases.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-covid-daily-numbers-dec-4-deaths-cases-maryland-20201204-duqp3wykg5bp5kk33feydqv2ly-story.html.