A year ago last June, I retired after 30-years of teaching high school English and Journalism in Southern California. I loved teaching and felt that I was richly rewarded in experiences and friendships, challenges and opportunities. But I also knew that it was time for me to retire. I come from a long line of teachers and of course, have many friends who are teachers and all of them told me over the years that “you’ll know,” when it’s time to walk away. For me, that time began in 2019, but I waited until the end of my 30th year in 2021–it was the right decision.
In April, 2021 the school district I worked for allowed “voluntary” returns to the classroom for both teachers and students, provided masks were worn and health checks occurred daily taking temperature and reporting the state of our health. I gladly returned, but my enthusiasm was not shared by the senior high school students I taught. They’d spent all year online and the last portion of their junior year as well and had developed different habits. They weren’t interested in returning to class. On average, I had between one and five students two or three times a week appear. The rest were online and so I was sitting at my desk (not my favorite place to be in the classroom) or at my podium with the laptop trained on me, while the “live” students were socially distanced at classroom desks and I wore a useless mask to appease the district edict. It made teaching and learning dreary and difficult and I’m fully aware that many of my students were simply turning on their computers, leaving the cameras and microphones turned off and going about their lives.
We now know that learning loss occurred at unprecedented rates during the government enforced pandemic restrictions. Among fourth graders, the National Assessment for Educational Progress reported that math scores dropped by 9 points, while reading scores dropped by five points. The NAEP said that scores this low have not been recorded for two decades.
High school students suffered further harm with research revealing that 20 percent of teens surveyed saying they had considered suicide during the lockdowns. Young people across the board, primarily in high school teens and early 20-somethings who were in college, suffered mental health distress. On a personal note, our daughter was one of those young college students and she continues in treatment for the harms she experienced during the lockdown. Someday, she’ll tell her story and will let me share it as well. For now, it is hers and ours to contend with. Is it any wonder that so many parents are expressing outrage and frustration at our public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci? He denies any lasting harm to anyone because of the lockdowns, while also continuing to lie and say that he didn’t suggest lockdowns. Before Covid, many things were already at the precipice of disaster. As educators, we were asked to encourage our students to limit screen time, read more books, and get outside more. Anxiety, depression, self-harm, isolation, drug and alcohol abuse among our youth were already enormous problems in 2019. When Covid hit, within a week, the national message to students was to stay indoors, avoid going outside, use your computer and isolate– the opposite of what we had preached for so long—and all things which we knew then would amount to real and lasting damage. We knew within two weeks who the virus was hurting primarily, and we have not done a proper Mea Culpa–nor have Dr.’s Fauci, Birx, Collins, Redfield or Walensky. We ignored the evidence and told ourselves we were doing the right thing. We were not–and now, our kids are suffering even more than they were.
I continue to write and work as a freelance journalist as well as substitute for a local school district on occasion. I still enjoy being at school. The palpable trouble is, fewer students are there. Fed up with public education systems that sought only to protect teachers and parrot the obvious falsehoods of the CDC, FDA and WHO, parents are pulling their children from public schools across the country and they’re not all Republicans, either.
Easy cures are hard to come by, now. Few doctors who followed the party line that the only thing to do for Covid is get the vaccine and stay at home to treat your symptoms, are willing to admit that they were–and continue to be–wrong. We are heading toward a national reckoning of epic proportions, not only because of our public health mismanagement, economic destruction and malfeasance and political gamesmanship, but also for what we have done to an entire generation of young Americans. They will scorn us in their remembrance of us.