Contrary to my own public activism and advocacy, I propose that we move the nation’s largest public school system into a completely online endeavor forever and a day. I know this may come as a shock to everyone who’s been following me for years, but I might have developed outright envy for some of my most fervent detractors. I’m jealous of the way they speak, walk, and work as if they’ve got their theory of online schooling fully figured out. Instead of having to fight them amongst the various contrarians in this little line of mine, I’m now squarely in agreement with them.
That is to say, rather than my favorite sweaters and slacks, I’ll teach in sandals and pajamas from home. With no exceptions.
At first, I thought it a ludicrous idea. Before the pandemic, I couldn’t have imagined that tens of thousands of working adults could convert 1.1 million students from full human beings with all their complexities into digits and images shifting about our monitors, but I was wrong. In a week and a day, we not only beat the number of school closures that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former mayor Rahm Emanuel, and former chancellor Michelle Rhee shut down combined, we moved school operations into multi-color calculators no larger than the length of a shoebox.
I too am impressed by the efficiency.
I marvel at the notion that corporations like Microsoft, Zoom, and Google knelt down to offer free services to help educators surveil their students and monitor their interactions with their platforms. I relish the notion that billion-dollar entities would so willingly enhance platforms they usually offer for thousands of dollars to Fortune 500 companies for children as young as five years old. It was already admirable when they, along with dozens of tech companies, found space and time in their own hearts to pepper our inboxes with e-mails about achievement gaps and “pandemic learning loss” during this disaster. When everything and everyone was called a disaster by disaster capitalists, I thought my colleagues and I were already working as hard as we could. Now that we’re in the middle of a worldwide epidemic, the constant e-mails asking us to measure grit and rigor have really lit a fire under me to work harder than hard.
As a teacher with 120 students that I don’t get to see in person, I’m so thankful for the opportunity to push that negative energy back onto students who can now opt out of that level of engagement. Problem solved.
What’s more, all the people who were once writing blogs and garnering tens of thousands of dollars for workshops where they taught entire districts about keyboard shortcuts now look like the Profets of the new age. Their YouTube views, Instagram likes, and other social media metrics must be off the charts. They started to slip conveniently into conversations about equity where they might have to deal with those Black and brown kids they don’t see as full people, but COVID-19 broke that tension so well, and shouldn’t we be thankful? We have more time to dedicate to reading their well-written books, buying their well-constructed materials from the off-hand teacher market that doesn’t check the sources of materials, and the pastel-colored website with everyone’s favorite bland pop star playing in the background.
They’ve been saying for years that it’s not about the platform, but the teacher – and how they set up their students’ camera angles – that ultimately determines success. I’m with that.
Really, with all the rigid and gratuitous generalizations about lazy teachers and their powerful unions, we can lean into the stereotype and teach from our pajamas. Gone are the days of standing in line for hours at local supply shops for classroom aesthetics and materials. Gone are the days of microwavable lunches and used cars to save money for loans and expenses. Gone are the days of worrying whether students might show up to class because now educators just have to monitor whether a student logged in and little more. We won’t even need to mettle in emotions and bonds because the only relationship we need is between ourselves and Wi-Fi access, no matter how unevenly distributed. Without schedules and standardized testing regulations, progressive educators – whatever that means – can say they too got a win from this shift. There’s no such thing as labor rights and dastardly unions if we’re just checking notifications all day. Almost literally all day.
The bell no longer dictates whether we pee, talk, or finish that last cup of coffee. The phone will send us notifications when we’re needed. Or not.
We’ll have to work something out with administrators. Teachers won’t be able to tell whether the administrator is observing our classes or … observing our classes because we can’t see the clipboards. The best administrators need 15 screens open at a time for every software program that Central asks them to log into daily while the worst only need two: one for that boring district meeting where they’ve set up a fake background with their face on it and one for updating their Facebook about how hard this job is. The best administrators don’t have to worry about typing up observations because they can just take screenshots of listless faces across separate rectangles and make determinations from right there. The worst administrators … well, they’ll keep doing whatever it is they were doing and that’s that on that.
I’d definitely want a principal who can lead the school and rally their staff from their houses. Sending one good link or emoji a day is much more efficient than an assembly.
It’s even a boon for kids. Instead of deciding which class is their favorite or not, they just have to worry about seeing the word “Submitted.” There’s no need for jokes and side conversations with their teachers and fellow students, either. They have the option to not show up on the screen at all. Critics who believe themselves to be “student-centered” while earning five- to six-figure salaries can now turn their attention/blogs/columns/tweets to critiquing the people who fund them. The idea of a “good” and “bad” teacher is now a matter of who gives how many unoriginal worksheets and which teacher gives projects that ask for too much printing or not. They can turn in assignments whenever/wherever and just hope Google can give them the answers if their teacher isn’t online at the moment.
Oh, and it’s a boon for parents, too. Parents can visit our classrooms whenever they want by literally sitting next to their children, thereby avoiding the whole “parent-teacher conference” mess. Parents don’t have to worry about babysitting. They can add about six hours to whatever screen time limits they set on their devices.
Sure, I had dreams, too. Like so many of our colleagues, I too imagined a truly inclusive and publicly run system. I thought, by concentrating our efforts towards the most vulnerable across identity lines, we would actually uplift the city and the world around us. By fully funding schools, creating policy that attends to race, class, disability, and sexual orientation, shrinking class size, rethinking curriculum and pedagogy, elevating civics/social studies, and strengthening classroom and school climates, I thought we had a pathway to closing opportunity gaps in place of achievement gaps. I once envisioned teaching as a profession where we built strong academic and socioemotional lenses and we cultivated students’ and parents’ voices as part of the educational processes. I believed New York City was ready for the integration conversation, especially since disaster has only exacerbated the inequity.
But, if we take our schools fully online, we don’t even have to close gaps. We can fall right through them. And who doesn’t want that?