Appreciation for Reporters

This post is going to be short because I think I can express this relatively quickly.  

I am incredibly grateful for the American media.  

Yes, the media.  I know it is easy to criticize whichever side of the spectrum you don't like.  I know it is easy to go online and talk about how you think "they" lie all of the time.  I know it is easy to think of them as the enemy of whichever politician you like and too friendly to the ones you don't like.  

But as the situation in Ukraine unfolds, I am so grateful to the men and women who are willing to put themselves on the ground in harm's way in order to bring us the story would could not otherwise know.  They are meeting and interviewing refugees so that we can understand more than their numbers, but hear their stories and motivations.  They are seeing things they will never be able to unsee.  And, it isn't just the "famous faces" we see on TV.  For each of them, there is a camera operator and likely a producer.  All of them are in danger of shelling and missile strikes as they do their jobs (and some have been killed already).

The people who criticize can do so from the safety of their laptops as they blog (yes, I get the irony).  They can scream about people they have never met into a podcast microphone from the inside of a secure, soundproof room.  They can write their script from their own thoughts without having the truth of their opinions challenged by seeing what is actually happening.  The journalists that are on the ground are seeing things that the podcaster/blogger doesn't have to traumatize himself with.

It's okay that you think the media is too . . . fill in whichever side of the spectrum you don't like.  As Putin has made it a crime for the Russian media to say the words "war" and "invasion" or really to say anything he doesn't like, be glad that the American media is allowed to say things you don't like.  Celebrate that when you celebrate the first amendment.  I am in awe of the woman who had the courage to hold a sign up on Russian state media to inform people that they were being lied to.  I'm sure there are many in Russia who think she was too . . . something as well.  Last week, she did an interview with American media, and each time she does, she puts her life at risk.    

It's okay for you to disagree with members of the media.  But just remember, the next time you are criticizing them, that they are willing to do something you aren't.  Appreciate that.  Celebrate that.

Pandemic Years - a Reflection

All week, I have been seeing and posting "on this day, two years ago" memories.  Considering it was the biggest transition in any of our lifetimes, it seems appropriate to use my blog to reflect on the past two years.  I'm not going in with any particular point in mind, so this will likely be long and rambling and will likely not reach a conclusion.  I'm just pondering.
-----------------------------

"What's the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic?" was the first Covid related question I got from a student.  Over the next several weeks, I got a lot more questions, most of which I had no answer for.  When one of them asked if I thought schools would be closed, I laughed out loud.  "Schools don't close," I said. "They're schools."  A few days later, I was sitting in a meeting in which our principal said that we were going to start making plans in case school needed to move into a virtual environment.  We made plans that we couldn't believe would be needed, but Italy was being absolutely ravaged by Covid19, and no one wanted to be caught off guard.

On Saturday, March 13, the email went out from our head of school.  We were going virtual.  We had two teacher workdays for planning because not one of us had ever taught a virtual lesson.  Our IT department worked round the clock to create events for each and every class with lists of students in Google Hangout because they wanted everyone to just click on the calendar time without the worry of being in the wrong class.  Teachers collaborated on ideas and spent our last time together, much of it crying.  

One of the things I remember was how we observed each other's coping mechanisms.  Planners made list after list.  Feelers checked on each other.  One of our teachers sent a million memes.  We were all exerting whatever control we felt we could because the situation was completely outside of our control.  While we were focused on school, other closings began happening as well.  Governors were closing bars and restaurants (and eventually nearly everything); politicians on the other side of those governors publically criticized those decisions.  For them, there were two sides, safety or the economy, but we know it is much more complicated than that.  

On March 18 and 19, I taught my first virtual lessons.  I did it from my classroom because they allowed us to do that for the first few days in case we needed help with tech issues.  That's not why I did it, though.  I did it because I live alone, and I wanted to keep seeing people for as long as I could.  I know enough about the brain to know that four weeks (which was the plan at the time) of being completely isolated isn't good for my brain.  Even when I did start teaching from home, I made my bed, continued dressing as if I were at school, and kept a pretty tight schedule.  If I hadn't done those things, I'm not sure where my brain would be today.  I am still recovering from the effects of oxytocin deprivation even with those things, so I can't imagine where I would be if I hadn't done those brain-healthy activities.

Those first few days went quite well) so much so that short-sighted people decided this should be the future of teaching as though it represented normal virtual classes).  The parents at GRACE were incredibly supportive.  I got emails and notes on a near-daily basis from them, telling them how much they loved us and were praying for us.  Culturally, teachers were being worshipped at almost the same level as nurses. Social media was filled with love for educators from parents who were trying to help their kids with remote schooling.  That lasted about a month before the inevitable whiplash of parents going online to criticize everything their child's teacher did (I am NOT talking about GRACE parents, who continued to be as supportive as they had ever been and still are).  As Easter approached, it became clear that this was going to last longer than we anticipated, and we planned for the month after spring break.  I just kept hoping to have May with my students, not for the academics, but for the closure.

That was not to be, however.  When it was finally announced that school buildings would remain closed for the rest of the spring, I went for an hour-long walk and cried.  I asked my students to make sure at least some of them had their cameras on because I couldn't bear the rest of the year teaching avatars instead of students.  Every school in America made plans for graduation.  Some were on Zoom, some drive-through diploma pick-ups, and some found it too complicated to do anything.  At GRACE, we held 57 individual graduations.  It was the most beautiful experience that I hope never to have again, and I believe our students felt valued and loved.

The summer of 2020 should have been a time to recover from what we had just experienced, but just as it was starting, Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and there was an innate need to respond, whether through attending a protest or making donations to racial justice organizations or just simple internal examination of our own hearts.  It was good and necessary to do these things, but it meant that summer was anything but a time of mental rest.

In August of 2020, many schools remained virtual, but I returned to teach in my school building.  It was overwhelming finding out how much we would have to do to make this work.  The masks and distancing of plexiglass-divided desks were the most obvious and talked about, but they are such a small part of the changes that happened.  Distancing affected EVERY practice a school has from arrival to exit.  We had walk-through temperature scanners, but the kids who got dropped off early had to come in through a different door and were manually scanned.  They had to go directly to their classrooms because our prior practice of keeping them in the cafeteria until 15 minutes before school started wasn't appropriate for distancing.  Lunch was socially distanced, which meant twice as many people had to be on duty to cover all of the areas we were putting them in.  We were operating on a hybrid model, so the first thing I did each day was to log into an iPad as well as my laptop and make sure the correct combinations of muting and microphones were operating.  I attended virtual faculty and prayer meetings as I had been doing from home in the spring.  Yearbook planning was done in pencil because, at that time, we didn't know if there would be athletics, and many of the events we have always covered were not to be.  We couldn't have chapel in any normal way because there wasn't room to distance them.  If I took my students into the lab or outside for a demonstration, I had to make a plan for the at-home students.  Even having a conference with a parent meant a virtual meeting (or one in which we sat outside to talk in person).  Every minute of the day required 100% of my brain to make decisions in which I had no experience from which to draw wisdom, and it is impossible to explain to anyone who didn't do it.  The best I can do is ask you to imagine what it would be like to do your job twice simultaneously, and it's not possible to imagine that, so it doesn't work.  

Again, we got a lot of support from our administration and parents, but a model of split-focus is never going to be the best way to educate kids, and it was emotionally difficult to know that we couldn't make it better by working harder.  When we held a socially distanced, masked, but in-person graduation, we felt so good about what we had done, and the parents applauded us on the way out the door.

We were living the high life in the summer.  As a vaccinated person, I could ditch the mask in most places.  I read a lot to try to recover my brain.  I made a lot of videos to aid my teaching this year.  We came back to a school without plexiglass and thought this year would be easy compared to last year.  And then, Delta happened.  I began the first day of the school year grieving the loss of a former student but shoving that grief down in order to get through the day.  (You can't introduce yourself to your new students as a weepy person.)  While we weren't distancing like we had been last year, we were still masked.  Unlike last year, though, when the students wore them well and without much objection, this year, masking became a constant battle.  During the Omicron wave, it felt very much like last year as we had so many quarantining that we were basically back in hybrid.  There are ways in which this winter was harder than last year.

The only good part of how transmissive Omicron was was that the wave passed quickly.  As numbers fell rapidly, we became mask optional.  That has helped us feel more normal.  I checked the numbers one day last week, and it is encouraging.  It does feel a bit like we are on the other side of this thing.  I know there will be ups and downs and new variants, but I don't live with the thought that we could shut down tomorrow anymore like I did a few times in the last two years.  This isn't over for educators.  We will spend a number of years dealing with the effects of kids being at home during their social development and re-establishing what benchmarks should be expected at each grade level.  All of that will be hard, but none of it will be as hard as the last two years have been.

Well, I told you I would not likely land at a conclusion, and I haven't.  I'm not sure there is one to draw.  Maybe, someday, when I am looking back on this as history, I'll be able to do that. 

  

You Were Prepared for YOUR Job

When I worked in child care, there were a lot of people who wanted to be the director.  Well, I'm not sure if they really wanted to be or if they just wanted to criticize and believe they would do it better.  Many teachers want to be in administration.  Again, I'm not sure they really do.  I think they say this when they are in disagreement with a decision that was made.  Some elementary school teachers think high school teachers have it made, and vice versa.  In almost every job, there are people who will look at another job as easy while theirs is hard.  It's a part of the "grass is greener on the other side" phenomenon.  

But the thing is that it is not true.  Those daycare workers who thought they would be a better director would have been terrible, at least in the beginning.  They would have made decisions people hated as well.  As a teacher, I have a pretty narrow focus because I know how to teach science, but I don't know how to teach any other subject, and I for sure don't know how to make decisions that affect everyone in the building.  While high school teachers are jealous of the fact that elementary teachers have assistants and elementary teachers are jealous of the high school teachers' planning periods, the fact is that if either had to do the other's job for a week, they would curl up in a corner and cry.  God wisely placed you in the job you are in and not a different one.  He spent your whole life preparing you for it.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.  I know what you are thinking because it is what people always say to me.  "Everyone wanted to be an astronaut."  Everyone did not fill out an application to the Air Force Academy in the fourth grade (I still don't know where I found that).  Everyone did not cut out pictures of the space shuttle from newspapers and tape them in their notebooks next to their pictures of Ralph Machio and Michael J. Fox.  Everyone did not babysit for 500 hours to afford a trip to Space Camp. I wanted to pilot the space shuttle.  I was about 13 when it became evident that wasn't the future God had for me, and I was sad about that, but that dream wasn't wasted.  It had prepared me to teach physics, a subject I had not yet discovered I loved.

I had great teachers in every area.  I had English teachers who taught me to communicate well and value credible sources.  I had math teachers who showed math to be more than finding an answer, revealing the world of fractals and polling and teaching me to solve problems.  I even had two history teachers who showed its value (which I wasn't inclined to believe at the time).  While I had great teachers in every area, there is no question that the most influential teachers I had were science teachers.  They were all teaching me to view the world in a way that prepared me to teach science.  I learned more than content.  I learned methods and styles of teaching that inform my own practice and philosophy.  Even my 6th-grade teacher's silly nicknames and teasing helped give me the personality necessary to teach middle school.

God prepares you for the future he has for you from early on.  My dad traveled for work.  He was out of town most of the time.  This meant my brother and I were at home with our mom most nights, so I was never taught to think of being home without a man in the house as dangerous, which is good since God was preparing for singleness (a thought I would have hated at that time).  Many women I know will not stay in their house if their husband isn't home.  They spend the night with friends.  It's a good thing I don't have that mindset, or I couldn't live the life God has for me.  

Next time you think you would prefer someone else's job (or life), keep in mind that God didn't build those particular muscles in you.  He didn't give you the skills, attitudes, or personality that would be needed for you to do that job.  He prepared you for yours, which is a good thing because that job is something the world needs.  It's almost like He knows what He is doing.

Courage of Everyday People

Like everyone, my mind has been occupied with serious events this week.  Our school went mask optional, which was great, but did leave me thinking about some "what ifs."  Tuesday was the third anniversary of the death of one of my students, and since she would have been a junior, it affected many of our students.  A school we are closely associated with suffered a similar loss this week.  I have a couple of students and co-workers going through terribly difficult situations.  And, of course, Russia invaded Ukraine late this week.  It has been difficult for teachers and students alike to maintain focus, but time moves forward.  

One of the pearls of wisdom attributed to the late Mr. Rogers is that when times are difficult, we should "look for the helpers."  It helps to know there are people trying to make things better.  I have also read (though I cannot remember where to credit the source) that resilience can be fostered vicariously through pondering stories of courage.  That's what I've been thinking about this weekend - the helpers and the courageous.

One of my students is adopted from Ukraine, and her mom sent us the names of people on the ground who have been helping children in Ukraine, not only in this situation, but for years (Fathers-Care.org, Marinaskids.net, and https://hebron-academy.com/about.html if you are interested in making donations). I've seen photos online of people rescuing animals as they evacuate.  Our head of school has been keeping us looped in on an email conversation he is having with a Ukrainian school teacher, and it helps to have a name to attach to our prayers.  

One of the best and worst things about social media is how quickly stories can spread.  Right now, it is a great thing.  We are seeing stories of people exhibiting courage on a scale we could not have predicted (certainly Putin didn't predict).  The story that has garnered the most attention is that of President Zelenskyy, and rightly so.  He could have easily justified fleeing the country as a way of continuing to lead his country; America even offered to evacuate him.  His response, "I need ammunition, not a ride" should stand in history with "I have not yet begun to fight" and "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country" as a statement of bravery, loyalty, and leadership.  He could be in a bunker or delegating orders from a comfortable place, but instead, he is out there, looking like a Jeremy Renner character in a tactical vest, fighting alongside his troops.  A MiG pilot, known as "the Ghost of Kyiv," is taking down Russian planes, and regular Ukrainian people are fighting back, throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks.  These people are not taking the invasion of their country lying down.

All of these people are acting with courage and should inspire us, but the ones who I can't stop thinking about are the Russian people who have gone into the streets to show their opposition to the actions of their President.  As Americans, we are used to this.  It seems half of our country is always protesting the actions of our President, and it is not an act that requires a high amount of courage here.  Even those who may be arrested in a protest in America know that, with notable but rare exceptions, it involves a night in jail and a slap on the wrist.  We have the luxury to take the first amendment for granted (so much so that one of the Canadian truck convoy members tried to claim it as a defense, not realizing that Canada's first amendment was not about freedom of speech).  This is not the case in Russia. The people who took to the streets in Moscow last week did so, knowing that it could mean the loss of their lives.  

 

Vladimir Putin has long been a murderer; he was the director of the KGB.  Speaking against him is the fastest way to incur his wrath. As long as they were at home, they were not in danger.  They could have stayed home and stayed safe.  They knew the likelihood was high that they would be arrested (nearly 3000 have been so far) and that it could result in the loss of their lives (Putin's history of poisoning journalists who speak against him well-known), but they wanted the world to know that they did not support the invasion of their neighbors.  

Teachers, as we help our students process their thoughts and feelings about all of the events around them, both worldwide and here at home, we must address pain and fear.  We should not, however, leave it there.  When they are feeling despair, help them look for the helpers.  When they are scared, help them see the acts of courage that normal people exhibit during difficult times.  When they are feeling helpless, help them to find ways they can help, from prayer to charitable donation to writing letters to their representatives to voice their thoughts.

Either/Or/Both/And

Last night, on Twitter, a teacher account posted the question, "Should students be allowed to use their notes on tests?"  At the time of this writing, there are 570 replies, and it has been retweeted 148 times, presumably each with their own share of replies.  As with all things on Twitter, the replies were extreme.  From one commenter who said tests were nothing more than "an anxiety-producing tool of compliance" (which I might point out isn't an answer to the question) to people who said a student should absolutely never be able to use notes "or it wasn't a test" to those who thought anything other than open notes were cruel.  It made me wonder how much stress these people live under.  I find it hard enough to manage my own classroom decisions without having to decide what every teacher in America should do in theirs.

Notably, of the over 500 responses, only two acknowledged any nuance.  Few could recognize that there might be times when an open note test is appropriate and times where it is not.  Of course, that is the truth.  It depends entirely on your goals for the test.  An earth science teacher testing whether a student can interpret a weather map might rightly allow them to use notes, while an algebra teacher testing order of operations is right not to.  

Conversations like this play out on EduTwitter every day with the same extremes of views.  Direct instruction is lambasted by some (How dare you think you are a source of knowledge?) and revered by others as though it is the only way to teach.  Again, it depends on the content (It's dangerous to have kids figure out chemistry on their own and I was an unfortunate recipient of the constructivist calculus experiment of the late 90s, but there are some topics that it makes sense to have kids discover on their own) and the goals.  

I know I constantly sing the praises of Learning and the Brain, but one of the things I most appreciate about them is their understanding of context.  When the @learningandtheb account posts research, they start with a question, and the answer rarely includes the words always or never.  The answer includes words like if and often and sometimes.  It describes the conditions of the research and boundaries of the experiment.  Several of their speakers embrace the complexity of education, notably Dr. David Daniel who used a plant analogy - Research is like raising plants in a greenhouse where you have control over the conditions.  Classroom teaching is like raising plants in your yard, where the variable are many and unpredictable.  John Almarode uses this line: "Don't adopt.  Adapt to your context."  Andrew Watson says, "Don't do this thing.  Think this way."  

The needs of different classrooms are different.  The age of your kids matters (older students can handle more direct instruction than younger ones).  Their background matters (if they come from a place where collaboration is not valued, it may take a while to teach them to do it well).  The subject you teach matters (you will obviously need to use more visuals in geometry and art than in other disciplines).  The personality of the teacher matters (some of us are comfortable with controlled chaos while others are not).  Your goals matter.  The climate of your school and your community matters.  That's a lot of variables to include in any decision, so let's stop going on Twitter and acting like what works for one works for all.

I love the West Wing, and there are often lines from it that play in my head.  While they were written about politics, I find that many lines apply well to other situations.  I will leave you with one of them.  "Every once in a while, there is a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts.  Other than that, there aren't very many un-nuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."  

Education Is Not Static

Something happened in Indiana this week, and while I don't have a wide audience, I hope others will write about it too because it should not have happened, and it should not happen elsewhere (There are ten other states considering similar proposals).  The Indiana house passed Bill 1134, which would require teachers to publish their lesson plans for the entire year by June 30 of the preceding year.  If you are not in education, you might not know how crazy that is, so let me help.

First, let's address why this happened because it didn't come out left field.  When Glenn Younkin and Terri McAuliffe were running against each other, a discussion was sparked about how much control parents should have in what public schools teach.  I know this is shocking, but both sides went to the extreme, with McAulliffe saying parents should have no say, and Younkin promising that certain things would never be taught under his administration.  Yes, this is basically about fear of CRT.  In spite of the fact that CRT has never been taught in a K-12 school, some parents are terrified that their first grader will soon have their brains molded to its shape.  Neither the parents nor most of the lawmakers could recognize actual CRT because it is only taught in law schools and philosophy classes (It's like being worried that your elementary school student will learn Torte reform), so they label any book, movie, or lesson that even mentions race as CRT.  Because social media and politics cause us to fear "the other side," many assume that every classroom teacher entered it with a political agenda and the only way to protect their child is to scrutinize everything.  They do not trust the very people to whom they send their children every day.  They trust teachers to keep their children physically safe, even marching to demand that they return to the classroom during a pandemic, but they don't trust them to teach English, Math, or History. (Remember the spring of 2020 when they realized how hard teaching was and expressed nothing but love for teachers?  Good times.)

Nothing campaigns as well as fear, so politicians jump on board, fomenting that fear into votes and then into bills.  Did they consult classroom teachers when writing this law?  Based on the wording, I'm going to assume they did not.  If they had discussed their thoughts with educators, they might have learned the difference between curriculum and lesson plans.  I could easily give you a broad overview for next year.  It would let you know that we would be discussing atomic structure in early September and the properties of acids near the beginning of December.  Most school systems have their curriculum posted for public viewing, but again, that is pretty broad.  It's a list of objectives and major resources.  Lesson plans are an entirely different thing.  When I am very much on my game, I write my lesson plans for a week on Monday and Tuesday of the previous week.  Even then, things will likely change a bit by Friday.  I might have an idea over the weekend that requires editing them.  

What the lawmakers (and I assume the parents who are supporting the law) don't understand is that lesson plans are active.  Curriculum is relatively static (or at least slower-changing), but the daily practice of teaching is not.  When I first started teaching, I couldn't predict how long it would take to reach an objective.  I'd plan a lesson, thinking it would take a class period, and it might take 20 minutes or 3 days.  I simply hadn't been teaching long enough to estimate it.  After 23 years of teaching, I now have the tools to adapt to that, keeping my left eye on the clock and expanding or contracting as needed, but there is no way to expect that of all teachers.  I have had days where I taught my 6th-period class differently from my 3rd-period class.  I taught them the same thing and achieved the same objective, but I did it differently because it wasn't working that well or because my 6th-period class had more students with special needs.  I've had to change lesson plans based on the weather.  If you are a parent, ask yourself if you want a teacher who is animated or animatronic.  Do you want them to have a creative idea for how to help your child and then realize they cannot implement it until next year because they didn't have it on the plan last summer?  

Many teachers are not even hired by the end of June, so unless the Indiana legislature has a plan for early hiring in a time when teachers are in short supply, they are in for a surprise on June 30.  Laws like this are not going to help with the impending teacher shortage.  Teachers are hard workers by nature and are driven by the idea that our work is meaningful, but we resent being asked to do meaningless work.  We know that whatever is posted in response to this law is meaningless because it will change after we meet our students and find out what their needs are because that is what education is about.

And therein lies the crux of the problem.  This law is not about education.  It's not about keeping students from feeling uncomfortable (We don't mind that math or PE makes a lot of them uncomfortable).  It is about control.  It is about government control, ironically coming from the side of the aisle that most abhors government overreach.  It is about wanting the right to scrutinize and then object to what they read in the plans.  (I don't know what they think a teacher is supposed to do if parents object in opposing ways, which absolutely will happen.)  I'm not against parental involvement, but I am against control by anyone who hasn't been in the classroom.  I would not lobby for a law in which my doctor has to list what medications he intends to prescribe to me a year before my physical.  I respect judicial nominees who refuse to answer hypotheticals because they have not yet seen the details of a case.  I don't expect to control how an airline pilot reacts to turbulence.  Let me suggest that if you, as a parent, want this level of control, you should probably homeschool your child.

If you live in one of the states where laws like this are being proposed, please contact your lawmakers.  Let them know that you want your teachers engaged in the meaningful work they are trained to do.  

Support For Administrators

Teachers are tired right now.  And, we haven't been shy about saying so.  Twitter is filled with tired teachers talking about how tired they are.  There are articles and polls about how many plan to leave the profession at the end of the year.  I can relate to the exhaustion and have concerns about the imminent teacher shortages that are most certainly to follow.

What I cannot relate to is the discussion about unsupportive administrators with unrealistic expectations.  I know they are out there, but I am beyond blessed to work in a school with administrators who listen to us, love us, and protect us.  During the first two weeks after Christmas break, every school in America was dealing with too few substitutes to cover the classes whose teachers were out.  This was happening in my school as well.  Our executive leadership team covered as many classes as possible to minimize teachers subbing for each other.  While they can't take away the stress of this difficult time, they have done everything they can to hold us up through it.

A little less than a year ago, we had a department chair meeting, in which I cracked from the stress of the year.  I mean I fell apart.  I cried through the entire meeting.  Every time I tried to articulate a thought, I couldn't get it out because I was envisioning a future of hybrid learning and couldn't take the thought of it.  After the meeting, I said to a friend of mine, "I've never left a meeting less sure of how it went."  While I knew they had listened to us, I couldn't gauge what the outcome of it would be.  Several weeks later, at a different meeting, it was clear they had responded to our feedback.  I was grateful and relieved and felt like there was a light at the end of the tunnel.  

In America, there's nothing easier than complaining about the decision made by those above you.  It is easy to think they sit in their office all day and don't remember what it is like to be in your position.  It is easy to think you would make different decisions if you had their jobs.  I remind myself frequently that I would not want to be the one making those decisions.  No matter what they do, they will hear from those who disagree.  They not only have to make tough decisions; they have to defend them.  I don't like having to do that, and I can't imagine a job in which that is such a large part of what I do.  

I have rules for a lot of things in my life, and one set of criteria governs what I will speak up about in a meeting.  

1. Do I care deeply enough about this issue to desire to add to the outcome of the discussion?  
2. Do I believe I can change the outcome of the conversation by speaking up?

The answer to number 1 is yes more often than not.  I've been teaching for a long time, and I care about a lot of things.  It is important to note, however, that I don't have to have to have a firm opinion on everything.  

The answer to number 2 is yes slightly less often but only slightly less.  If our administration presents a question for input in a meeting, it is because they truly want input and will listen.  There are a few issues in which I am aware that my opinion is different from the majority, so those are the few times where the answer to number 1 might be yes and 2 might be no.  I'm not going to keep arguing something just to be ornery.  Those are in meetings where a decision has not yet been made.  Once a decision is made, I would have to answer a really emphatic yes to both questions in order to go to the administration.  I think there might even be a third question.  Would I want to defend this decision to upset students, parents, or others who object to it?  That's an awfully high bar, so it isn't going to happen very often.  

Teachers are tired, yes.  Our entire profession has been put through the wringer for the past two calendar years.  And the whiplash from the adoration we received in March 2020 to the current state of affairs (where parents in some states are pushing to ban books or demand lesson plans for the year to be posted for review so they can make sure their kids aren't being taught anything they don't like) has been jolting.  But teachers, please do keep in mind that most of what your administrators do is not front-facing.  They are not just sitting in their offices.  They are tired too.  They may not be facing students every day the way we are, but they are doing a job we wouldn't want to do.  They were given just as little preparation for the pandemic as we were, and they have been fighting through it for just as long.  They may not be having to enforce mask mandates in the room in the same way we are, but they are getting the angry emails from parents over the decision to have them.  

We are all fighting through this the best way we can.  Your human administrators need your support as much as you need theirs.