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My wife’s a secondary school teacher. She’s seven months pregnant atm and, for the last few months, she and her colleagues have gone above and beyond to keep her school open. A thread.
She taught remotely throughout the first lockdown, which came with a whole host of logistical difficulties. Many of her colleagues went back to teach children of key workers. Together, across the country, teachers kept the education system going through the pandemic.
Since going back in September, she’s been having to teach with the window open, in the cold, to reduce the chance of transmission. She’s been sanitising desks herself between lessons. Then there are the added difficulties of communicating with the kids through face masks.
In a building with hundreds of people, social distancing in corridors is often very difficult in practice. At times, she’s been teaching kids isolating at home virtually and pupils in the classroom simultaneously which, as you can imagine, isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
She and her colleagues have provided extra tuition to help students catch up on what they missed from the first lockdown. They find themselves teaching a constantly changing curriculum to match changing timetables and remote learning.
They have been trying to take down more data from homework, tests, mocks et cetera in case there is further disruption to exams, hoping to avoid another grading debacle like the government caused last summer.
We have vulnerable parents and, at various times, it’s been obvious that the job is putting her – and by extension them – at increased risk. In case it needs repeating: schools are not a closed environment, kids and teachers can take coronavirus home with them and vice versa.
Teaching is a tough enough job as it is. It’s even tougher when you’re heavily pregnant. She almost never complains, because she’s a) hard as nails and b) wants to keep her school going and do the best by the kids.
Meanwhile, the government spends its time briefing to the press against teachers and their unions while failing to adequately protect them, occasionally throwing a screeching policy U-turn into the mix for good measure.
Next time you see a sycophantic newspaper attacking “left-wing teaching unions” and the teachers who form their membership, pls remember that they are covering for a government whose incompetence has exacerbated a public health disaster. That’s not teachers’ fault, it’s theirs.
