First Teachers Were Sacrificial Lambs, Now We're Scapegoats

Dear Prime Minister,

On Wednesday, you pleaded with teachers to return to our classrooms so that our students can return to school, and so their parents are not “forced to choose between putting food on the table through their employment, to support their kids and their kids’ education".

You emotively talked about our most vulnerable kids and their families and the situations they may be facing.

Mr Morrison, we know them. We know their names and we know their hearts. We see them and teach them and love them every day. We have been calling them and their families from the first day they didn’t attend school. We have lent them devices, made up hard copy learning packs, delivered them food and necessities, called to give them one-on-one help with their studies and to check on their wellbeing.

Please don’t talk to us as if we don’t know.

Also, please do not refer to what teachers have been doing over the past few weeks as “child minding”.

Qualified teachers and early childhood educators are not “child minders”. We are highly trained and skilled professionals working our guts out under extremely stressful conditions to make sure we are providing the very best education and care we can for our students.

I have watched established and experienced teachers upend their entire practice to learn how to digitise their resources, create videos for their students, use online video-conferencing and digital platforms to mark and give feedback on student work and then guide their students in using this same technology.

I’ve seen staff collaborate to create specialised support groups for students who may need extra help so they can have access to teachers and tutors online. I’ve called and emailed more families and students than I can count making sure they can access learning material and getting their feedback about how to best support them through this time. I’ve seen staff and students work together to keep school cultures alive online through video channels and podcasts and online spaces purely for having fun and connecting personally, learning the technology along the way.

And we made the transition in a matter of days.

To suggest we’re not doing enough for our kids or that we are “child minding” erases the phenomenal work our school communities, teachers, support staff, students and parents, have done to keep our kids learning while also trying to keep our communities safe.

And that’s the thing here. Do you really think we want to be teaching from home? Trying to work even more than we usually do (I don’t know what’s beyond “above and beyond” but that’s what we’re doing right now) while also juggling toddlers and teens and primary schoolers and pre-schoolers now that we are keeping our own kids home?

We love being in the classroom. We long to be in our classrooms with our kids learning and laughing and feeling the pure joy of seeing a kid “get it” for the first time, of seeing them grow as people and have their own ideas, of having them teach us things too.

We would be back in a heartbeat if it was deemed safe.

The last of the seven principles you announced yesterday, that we follow the health advice provided by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, is the crux of the issue. As one school principal put it to me: “The national health guidelines in principle seven are completely unachievable, therefore schools will not be safe. An impossible request.”

Another colleague put it this way: “Asking teachers to provide work remotely for those at home, while also teaching face-to-face and then also cleaning every surface of the classroom that has been touched by someone (probably using products they purchased themselves) is going too far.”

You can tell us that “this virus behaves very differently with children than it does with adults and for children, the health advice has been very clear, that schools are a safe place for students to be”, but I’ll believe schools are safe when the government deems them safe through their actions, not just their words.

When kids can return to swimming lessons and organised sport. When they can have play dates and visit their families. When they can go to the library or on a bushwalk in a national park. When they can sit on a park bench and read a book. When they can loiter annoyingly at shopping centres and when they can sit for hours at a café with their friends after ordering one milkshake between them. Because if they can’t do all those things because the risk of socialising and surface touching is too high, then the risk must also be too high in a classroom.

As Summer Howarth, founder of The Eventful Learning Co., said, your comments have made “a generation of educators feels worthless and undermined, while giving the public a lesson in gaslighting”.

“We are hurt," another teacher told me. "It is a hurt that stems from not being trusted, and it is a hurt that will cause long term harm to our profession."

Blaming teachers for students not being physically at schools is damaging and it is dangerous. At first, we felt like sacrificial lambs in this crisis, but now many of us are seeing that we may well, in fact, become scapegoats.

Sincerely,

A teacher

Featured Image: Getty