The Year of the Plague: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Pandemic by Eli Saslow

Author:Eli Saslow [Saslow, Eli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 21st Century, science, Social Science, Disease & Health Issues
ISBN: 9780385547000
Google: QIIizgEACAAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-15T00:21:30.213523+00:00

ALLISON WEBB, teacher in Canton, Ga., on becoming afraid of her students

I’m a teacher down into my bones. I’ve always been a teacher. It’s my identity. It’s who I am. I take my Spanish and French students on field trips in the summer, and I volunteer to supervise their Homecomings and Proms because I like to be with them. I love these kids. This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, but right now the idea of walking into a classroom is giving me nightmares. It terrifies me.

Just a few days ago, I was in another Zoom meeting with our district about how we can minimize risk during the school day. President Trump says he wants all schools open for in-person learning, so our district has decided that’s what we’re going to do come hell or high water, but they still want us to limit our face-to-face exposure with students. Umm, what? How am I supposed to do that? I teach at a big public high school. I’ve got hallway duty in the morning, and that alone puts me in up-close encounters with maybe two hundred kids. None of them wear masks. None of them know how to social-distance. I’ve got thirty-four desks crammed together in my classroom for four classes a day, so let’s call that another 130 potential exposures. Then I have my homeroom, lunch duty, recess, dismissal—I could go on and on. Each day, I come within six feet of at least four hundred students. How am I supposed to minimize the risks of that?

I’ve looked for any possible way to make myself feel better about this. I’d love to step into a classroom if I could do it safely. I’m so tired of looking at my computer screen I want to scream. I’ve had two of my own children graduate from this high school, and my daughter is in her senior year. This is my last chance to share a school with my child, and that’s been special for me. I want this to work. When the district put out our reopening plan, I sat down right away and read it from cover to cover. I was excited that maybe they’d come up with some way to make it work, but no. There was no mask mandate for teachers or students. There was nothing about contact tracing, special cleaning, or reducing class sizes. It was one big whitewash. We’re trying to teach a generation of students to be thoughtful and selfless, and this is the best we can do?

I barely slept that night. I went over my school day in my head and tried to make a list of the risks. Our kids share laptops back and forth, so how do I handle that? They sit at communal tables, and we can’t do that anymore. They come up to the whiteboard and share the same markers. I’m a language teacher. We focus on pronunciation. I tell my students all the time: “Look at my mouth.

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