Every summer feels a little too short. I have been a teacher for seventeen years and I do not remember any summer seeming long, let alone too long. There are a lot of things about a career in teaching that are not great, not least of which is the abysmally low salaries that many teachers around the country are offered. There are also many things about a career in teaching that are great, not least of which is summer! I am not ashamed to admit that summer for teachers is amazing! Yes I lesson plan, do research, and prep for the coming school year, but the truth is that the vast majority of the summer is spent relaxing and spending time with my kids. Between the endless beach days, the trips to Fenway Park, the mini-vacations to Santa’s Village and Story Land, and the late night movie nights, I, like pretty much all of my students, never want the summer to end. This is not to say that I do not love my job, because I do, and with the exception of a career in Major League Baseball, a prospect which seems more and more unlikely with each passing year, I cannot imagine doing any other work. (But, I still do not want summer to end!)
Especially this summer.
The anxiety builds each year as the calendar marches relentlessly through August. I always feel unprepared, always feel like I am not ready or not capable of flipping the switch from summer-guy to teacher-guy. And somehow, those first few student-less teacher orientation and professional development days always seem to sneak up on me. And then, suddenly, there is a classroom full of students who, like me, were not quite ready for summer to end. Yet, here we all are. This year that same anxiety is there and tomorrow is the first student-less professional development day and I am not ready to let summer go. Normally, though I do not want to bid farewell to summer, there is always an underlayer of excitement as well; the promise of a new school year, meeting new students, building new relationships, and talking about history, philosophy and politics is not a bad way to earn a living. Somehow, all of that is secondary to the overwhelming anxieties of the Pandemic and the arrival of the delta variant.
I fear for the health of my students and the health of my own children who are both too young to be vaccinated. I, like all parents, have to rely on school officials and other teachers to do their best to keep my kids safe from something they cannot see. I have to trust other parents not to send their symptomatic kids to school, and trust that kids and the adults working in the schools will keep their masks on. I am forced to trust all of this knowing that angry anti-maskers are going to make all of this more difficult than it needs to be (certain teachers included). These people who argue that because transmission can still happen in masked settings it is not worth masking at all. I have stopped arguing with people professing this kind of stupidity just as I have stopped arguing with antivaxxers. People, like Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves who said recently people in his state do not fear Covid because they believe in eternal life, are beyond reasoning with and beyond rational debate. His faith in the afterlife is now justification for endangering everyone? And somehow, this lunacy is brandished as “freedom.”
Then in the background you have all the nonsense surrounding “Critical Race Theory” - something not being taught in any public K-12 classroom, anywhere. Under the umbrella term “Critical Race Theory” people are arguing that the teaching of history, which is really uncomfortable sometimes, should be molded into something produced by Disney. Just look Disney’s Pocahontas and them pick up a book (you remember those things right?) - the Disney version is what lots of folks would like us to teach. The version in the book, the true version, is what we will teach, no matter how much you yell “Critical Race Theory.” Based on what I have read from some folks, history teachers should not place fault on white Europeans for modern slavery and should not blame Nazis for the Holocaust because they fear it will make their children feel bad about being white. It is nonsense, and it is designed to hurt public schools by tying the districts up in meaningless litigation and drowning them in public records requests - all of which costs time and money and takes that time and money away from their Covid responses, curriculum building, maintenance repairs, professional development for teachers, technology upgrades, and everything else in schools requiring time and money. These people know what they are doing. They do not fear “Critical Race Theory” rather they create an environment in which YOU fear it so they can go about their business of destroying public schools.
So yeah, there is not much about the coming school year I am looking forward to. But perhaps this is just the end of summer blues getting to me.