Letter to teachers and administrators:
I know you are all very busy, and everyone is just trying to make it through these last weeks. I know this email is long. Some of you will recognize shortcomings mentioned below, and I hope you’ll keep reading knowing this is written with kindness and respect and there is a caring and heartfelt request here. I’m not only asking on behalf of my own kids. This is bigger than that. I wish I’d sent it weeks ago, but here it is. I hope you’ll read this with an open mind and consider it thoughtfully.
I’ll start with a reminder of something we are all highly aware of in our own lives. Teaching, learning and parenting are all infinitely more challenging during a pandemic, and we’re not done yet. We are all doing the best we can. None of us is succeeding at every part of this. For example, some teachers are successfully sending detailed weekly launch emails to students and parents. Others have sent those emails 50% of the time, only to parents, or in some cases haven’t sent those emails at all. The same teachers have done other things well and/or fallen short in other ways. Students and parents are surviving similarly. We are doing some things well, and falling short of what’s needed or expected in many ways as well.
I start by asking that people avoid holding students to higher standards than teachers and parents can consistently meet for ourselves. Harsh late penalties, inflexible grading policies and expecting students to be the only ones responsible for reaching out when they are struggling is inappropriate to the times we’re living through. Ultimately it creates grades that represent organization and coping during a pandemic more than knowledge gained, and GPAs are rendered meaningless as far as representing actual knowledge or learning. But these GPAs also remain impactful in students’ lives. Grading policies such as these serve primarily to perpetuate social privilege in “normal” times, but even more so during a pandemic.
But broadly, and perhaps much more importantly, many of us find ourselves needing to cope with more during a pandemic than we’ve ever had to process before. We learn that people we know and care about are severely depressed and possibly hurting themselves. We have lost loved ones. We have felt isolated.
For our kids this has been especially trying and difficult to process. The kids are discouraged, tired and even many of those who aren’t seriously depressed are somewhat depressed. The kids at home feel quite invisible a lot of the time. They are having trouble seeing this year through to the end right now. I know teachers are also! But please reach out to students when something seems amiss, especially in these last couple of weeks. It really cannot be just the students’ responsibility to always be the proactive ones asking for help!! As teachers you have the available information to notice if a student might be struggling. The claim that you can’t know if a student needs help unless they ask is actually false. In fact, teachers can often be the first to notice when a kid is having a hard time because you have information that is different from what parents have. It’s not all on you either!! But when a kid isn’t acting like themselves, or misses a major assignment without communicating with you about it, or starts turning in a bunch of late work, that’s often when they are the least capable of advocating for themselves because they are struggling or discouraged. Please notice and reach out with an expression of care and flexibility to the student and the parents. The kids need you to help them see this year through to the end.
We all need to be more flexible and tolerant of each other’s shortcomings this year, next year and even retroactively, including but not limited to missing launch emails, poor communication, late work and everything else.
Hang in there. Know that we appreciate all that you are doing so very well. And I ask, even plead with you, to approach these last weeks of this crazy year with compassion and flexibility for students and a lot of proactive communication. We’re almost there, but it would be nice to get to the finish line feeling like the records, including grades, represent success and learning, not feeling defeated, but rather feeling like we can walk into that last day of school with heads held high knowing that we all held each other close and were proactive about supporting each other to be successful to the very end.
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