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As tough as it is for students to get back in the swing of things, as schools open back up and classes resume after being shut down for so long, it’s even worse on the teachers.
That’s what an article appearing 11 November in USA Today tells us.
It’s so bad, we are told, that some schools that had welcomed the return to normal are shutting down again and returning to remote learning. The stresses of driverless busses and understaffed cafeterias are piling on top of burned out teachers who are taking advantage of every opportunity to take an extra day off, if not just leaving the profession altogether.
Some schools are going to 4-day weeks and extending their Thanksgiving breaks to give teachers the time they so desperately need to recharge from all the pressure they’ve been subjected to.
The strain of teaching new material, providing emotional and mental support to students, and catching up from so many lost days is proving traumatic for many teachers, causing them tears, anger, anxiety, headaches and nausea.
Even substitute teachers, now in great demand, are in short supply, even when paid up to $180 per day. One Boulder area school saw its pool of qualified substitutes fall from 900 to 300. Many subs, we are told, want limited days and want to avoid exposure to younger, unvaccinated students.
TRENDPOST: Those substitute teachers must not know that persons aged 1 to 19 yrs. have a COVID recovery rate of 99.997 percent, nor that such children are not significant spreaders of the virus; see “DRUG DEALERS: GET KIDS VACCINATED” (23 Mar 2021) and “VAX KIDS? THE COVID RISK IS ‘TINY'” (13 Jul 2021).
“We’re trying to plow through so much that people are exhausted,” said a fifth-grade teacher and president of her local teachers’ union. “We have bled our teachers dry for so long that we shouldn’t be surprised they have no more to give.”
“It’s so hard to keep going when you feel set up to fail,” she continued. “One of the superpowers teachers usually have is patience. And people don’t have that right now. All of it means it’s harder for us to take care of kids.”
Those substitute teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers are going to jobs with less COVID-19 exposure, and sometimes better pay. A Rand Corporation survey found that 25 percent of teachers were contemplating quitting at the end of the school year. Another Rand study found twice as many teachers complaining about stress as about low pay.
About one-third of the teachers who quit wound up in jobs with no retirement or health benefits, indicating how badly they wanted to leave teaching.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that the stresses of COVID-19 deaths, supply chain disruptions and inflation, plus fights over Critical Race Theory and transgender bathrooms, have all taken their toll.
TRENDPOST: Trends Journal readers may remember reading about Ms. Weingarten in “U.S. TEACHERS & PARENTS: OBEY ORDERS, FOLLOW FLAWED FACTS” (17 Nov 2020).
All these teachers’ lamentations seem to echo those heard in “TEACHERS: WE SPEW OUT CRAP, CENSOR THOSE WHO DEFY US” (12 Oct 2021), which also told of teachers “exhausted, stressed and stretched so thin it feels like we’ll crumble.”
But what really bears repeating was the TREND FORECAST that accompanied that article:
“When universities and schools began shutting down in February 2020 at the beginning of the COVID War, it signaled the upending of the industrial age education system (long overdue for a facelift) and heralded in a new, more effective approach to education: online learning; see “INDIA’S ONLINE-LEARNING AN INVESTMENT WINDFALL, SOLIDIFYING ‘INTERACTIVE U’ FORECAST IN TRENDS JOURNAL” (10 Aug 2021), “INTERACTIVE U: THE INDIA MODEL” (29 Jun 2018), and “‘INTERACTIVE U.’ IN THE U.S.A.” (11 Aug 2020).”
Gerald Celente had forecast the trend toward online learning in his 1996 book, Trends 2000: How to Prepare for and Profit from the Changes of the 21st Century. The COVID War has shown that in-person learning can be replaced.
Among the arguments for its replacement will be that, with online learning, far fewer teachers will be needed and costs related to brick-and-mortar schools will be substantially lower, thus enabling reductions in taxes. So it will be supported by a burgeoning anti-tax movement which, together with anti-vaccine movements, will give rise to new Freedom Parties.