Add It Up

 We have completed our first month in school here in Oakland. The difficulty level of the job we are doing currently has been raised from "unrealistic" to "are you kidding me?" Which has not stopped us from showing up and opening the gates each day and letting the kids in, much to the relief and appreciation of their parents. Most days I stand just to one side and herd those without masks to the nearby cart where we have two sizes of masks: small and big. The challenge being that no one really wants a small mask, since small masks are obviously "for babies" because the box from which they are dispensed comes with a teddy bear on the side. This means that we have to coach twisting all those extra bits of elastic around little ears in order to create anything that resembles a properly fitted mask. 

That's the first twenty minutes of every day. Somewhere in there we also need to make sure that the air purifiers in our rooms are on and functioning, and that we have decent ventilation in classrooms that were never designed with such a purpose in mind. And most every interaction between student and teacher is potentially repeated at least once because of the muffling effect of that cloth strip across our noses and mouths. Our office staff is no longer tasked with simple scraped knees or bloody noses. They are now actively consumed with the job of taking temperatures, checking symptoms and supporting take home tests for COVID. 

And somewhere in there, we are teaching kids to read, write, add, multiply, and how to keep their hands and feet to themselves. Which is to say that I feel lucky. I am doing my job with the support of my community and all necessary safeguards in place. 

I am not teaching in Miami-Dade County. Fifteen employees of that Florida school district died from coronavirus in ten days. Florida, where there is a mandate forbidding mask mandates, and the biological experiment known as the Delta Variant is running amuck. The question that leaps to my mind is this: How many educators have to die in order for something to be done about it? Something besides denying the existence of a disease that has killed more than forty-six thousand Floridians? As an educator, I feel compelled to ask what possible good can come from this experiment? You wouldn't send a teacher into a class to teach without curriculum, would you?

Then again, this is Florida. But it does not make it any less sad.