Choose Your Own Hellscape: 5 Hours in the Life of a 2021 Teacher
After an hour of tossing and turning, I reach through the dark for my phone. 4:03am. I sigh and roll over in bed, praying that the knot of anxiety in my stomach will subside enough for me to get another hour of sleep. I know it won’t. And so I face my first choice of the day:
Do I sacrifice rest to start making lesson plans, or do I sacrifice preparedness and lie in bed for another hour?
I choose to lie in bed, tossing and turning until my alarm goes off at 5:00am. While I wait for the coffee to brew, I open my laptop to start creating my lessons for the day. But before I can start working on the slides, I see that I have five emails from parents, all of which are angry, and most of which are angry that their child is failing my class due to refusing to complete any work all semester.
Do I create my slides so I’m ready to teach, or do I respond to the emails so these parents don’t start making angry phone calls to my classroom, making it impossible to teach?
I work on my slides, hoping the parents won’t escalate things if I wait to email them back during my planning period. I arrive to my classroom at 6:15am, half an hour before I’m required to be there. It’s the only time there’s not a line for the copy machine. The heat isn’t working (again), and my room is a chilly 49 degrees. The machine notifies me that I’ve already used my allotted amount of copies for the school year and won’t be able to print out an assignment for my students. It’s October. I get back to my classroom at 6:30 and have fifteen minutes to try to create an entirely new assignment that doesn’t require any printed materials. I post it to Canvas so students can access it from their iPads. At 6:45, I head outside for bus duty, which consists of standing outside in the dark while it’s raining and watching students get off the bus for 20 minutes. I return to my classroom, cold and wet, where I have students lined up outside the door frustrated that they have to wait for me. I teach the administrator-created Advisory lesson on our school dress code while students mostly ignore me and watch videos on their phones, regularly looking up to complain that they’re cold.
Do I demand that students put their phones away and listen to me, or do I let this slide and risk the possibility that they’ll never listen to me again?
I let it slide. Let’s be honest, the dress code is transparently racist and sexist. I’m not going to enforce it anyway. While I’m teaching, my classroom phone rings. I stop in the middle of teaching and run across the classroom to answer it. It’s the secretary. Due to our substitute shortage, she tells me, I’ll have to cover my colleague’s science class during my planning period. For the third day this week. Guess those parent emails will have to wait. When Advisory ends, I rush out of the classroom into the halls, reminding students to pull their masks up over their noses only to have them respond by swearing at me. I make it to the science classroom just as the bell rings to signal the end of the four minute passing period, and I realize how ridiculous it is that we mark students tardy if they don’t make it through the absolute nightmare of these hallways in four minutes. My colleague’s lesson plan is scrawled on a torn-off piece of notebook paper: 2.2. That’s all it says. I look at the students, “Okay, so today we’re doing. . . 2.2. Does anyone know what that means?” One student responds, “Yeah. It’s a lesson on our iPads. But we did it yesterday.” Several other students confirm that this lesson has already been completed.
Do I call the office desperately hoping someone can help me figure out the lesson plan, or do I give in to the students’ desire to have a free class period?
I give in, deciding that these students deserve a break. They’re happy for about two minutes, and then, chaos. First, they start throwing pencils at one another. Then, one student grabs his friend’s phone and takes off running around the room. His friend pursues him, knocking over several chairs. Other students pull out their phones and start recording. Some start shrieking. I ask them to sit down, and one girl says, “Who the f*** are you? We’re not listening to you.” And before I know it, four students are throwing punches at one another. I manage to break up the fight, separate them from one another, and call the office. They send an administrator down, who gives me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to document the incident. Normally I would do paperwork during my planning period, but. . . here we are. At least the heat works in this room. When the bell rings, I run back to my classroom to find my disgruntled students lined up outside. As students filter in, one of them tells me that someone wrote something offensive about her on the bathroom wall, and another tells me that he’s feeling a little sick, and he may have been exposed to Covid-19 on his bus. Four students tell me that, for one reason or another, they have none of the materials they need for class. Six students walk up to me and say, “What are we doing today?” I try to get all of them to sit down and read silently while I triage these issues. I see several students scrolling through social media on their phones instead of reading their books.
Do I make sure every student is reading their book, or do I focus on discretely contacting the office to ask what to do about the potential Covid case?
I decide to email someone in the main office about the Covid-19 concern, asking if they can verify whether this student may have been exposed on his bus. While I’m looking at my computer, two students start throwing pencils across the room. Another student starts loudly playing a video on her phone. I get an email response telling me that they’re sure the potentially ill student is fine and should be kept in my classroom. I start the lesson, but the WiFi suddenly cuts out. My projector screen goes fuzzy and blasts out a loud staticky sound. I can’t use my fancy Apple TV to project my slides, and students can’t access any of the work on their iPads. And of course, I’m out of copies for the year, so there’s no way to get a paper version.
Do I scramble to find a way to teach the day’s curriculum, or do I give up and let students lead us through group games for the rest of the class period?
I take a deep breath and ask if anyone knows a game we can play. Multiple students volunteer, and they work together to choose a game: Four Corners. We have fun tiptoeing silently from one corner of the room to the other, trying not to be heard by the student who is “It” and can get us out at any moment. In between rounds, I chat with some students about their latest crushes and their upcoming basketball games. I remember, briefly, why I became a teacher, why I find so much joy in spending my day with young people. And then the classroom phone rings. A parent wants to know why I haven’t responded to the email they sent last night. It rings again. The office just realized one of my students who is present was not supposed to be at school due to a recent Covid-19 diagnosis. While I’m on the phone, students have a disagreement about who should be “out” of the game of Four Corners, and two of them start hitting each other. One throws a highlighter across the room and hits another student in the eye. I look at the clock. It’s 9:03am.
Can I make it through this day? And then 150 more days like this?
I’m not sure.
