Melanie Sirof is a teacher in the Bellmore-Merrick School District on Long Island innNew York.
“Let’s start rowing in the same direction”.
“Posting this now, before I walk into the first day of meetings that signal the start of school. I’m sure by three o’clock I will feel overwhelmed & frustrated, so I write this now, while I am still clear-eyed:
Know this, parents, we teachers are going to make the most of this lemon of a situation. We want your students to have a great year & not just “a great year, all things considered.” We are aware of our place in the story of your child’s life, understand that they only get one “senior English teacher” (or Math, or Chem, or Gov), one sixth grade experience. So we are going to do our best to live up to that mythology. We want your children to discover things about the world & themselves they had not known before our time together & our time starts now.
Can you help? Can you stop talking about what a disaster this is going to be? (Perhaps it will be, but let’s not lose the game before we get on the court.) Can you help your kids to respectfully reach out to us when they are struggling? Can you set them up for success with a mindset that says “yeah, this is the hand we were dealt, & look how everyone is doing the best they can with it.” Can you give them some agency in this, help them understand the buy-in? Can you stop calling out teachers you feel did your students wrong on social media? Give them the benefit of the doubt (a rough day, an honest but not malicious mistake) or the professional courtesy of handling the issue privately?
This will not be a lost year, it will not be a year of treading water, this will be a year in the story of your child’s life & you & I & they have the power to create some true greatness here. That is how we would like to be remembered when they come together in 10 and 20 years for reunions, when their own children (should they choose that path) start school & they are sitting around the dinner table swapping stories. We want your kid to say “Oh yeah, I remember my __th grade teacher…” & then start to tell funny stories about class or remember something they learned that year & never forgot, a new way to look at the world, a new part of themselves.
It’s a big ask, to want be remembered that way, maybe selfish and a bit self-aggrandizing to want to seize the opportunity given every teacher every September. But so many of us are in front of the classroom for exactly that reason, we had teachers we still talk about, people we met at 15 who continue to influence us at 45.
Let us do that -in person, or remotely, or some combination of both- we want the best for your children. Yes, we are all in the same boat, let’s start rowing in the same direction.”
Melanie Sirof
English Teacher
Mepham High School
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good morning Diane and everyone,
I cringe when I hear words like mindset and buy-in. With 2 days before the start of 4 jam packed conference days this week, my husband and I, both teachers, are not deluding ourselves about “true greatness” as mentioned by this author. We are fully aware of the chaos to come and are preparing as best we can. But we are also planning what we will do and not do to keep our sanity and our health. When “the district” gives you an impossible plan to carry out, what will your response be? Will you drive yourself into the ground and jeopardize your health and wellness? We won’t. We will create boundaries between our home and work life and try to stick to them as best we can. We will have to do things differently and we recognize that not everything will get finished. This is reality. That’s the bottom line. My dad, a psychiatrist and physician, used to say that your physical and mental health are the most important things. You need them to live a good life. If you lose them, you won’t be able to care for everyone else in your life and your community. I hope all teachers remember this as we go into this year.
I also found this story interesting:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/05/us/new-york-school-district-delays-online-classes/index.html
With all due respect, Ms. Sirof doesn’t work in a system that’s short over a hundred nurses days before opening. She hasn’t just been facing a strike, one of the most stressful things many of us have been through, even though it didn’t happen. Things are just a little different in NYC, and I’ve got an inbox full of letters to prove it. People write me not only from my school and I see a very different picture. I don’t cutely suggest people are whiners or ever suggest they stop talking about very real issues.
Further, I doubt Mepham High School requires thousands of teacher that do not actually exist to carry off the program. Ms. Sirof Isn’t facing the possibility of having to expect a sub with no experience, hired yesterday or not at all, to carry off a lesson plan. She doesn’t have to worry about whether her co-teacher is familiar with her subject. She hasn’t got to worry about being saddled with some educrat from Tweed who hasn’t taught in 30 years but knows everything regardless.
I attended Mepham High School, and when I was there the school was clean every day. Even now I doubt they fail to replace custodial staff when they retire, If I were there now, I’d have more faith that the custodians would be able to handle the additional task of sanitizing the building. As it is, our custodians are a skeleton staff in the most overcrowded school in New York City.
As for mental health, I’m not at all sure that putting on rose-colored glasses and seeing this as the best of all possible worlds is going to achieve it long term. If that works for you, great, But I see a lot of tough times ahead and while I’m prepared to confront them, I’m not going to put on a smiley face and pretend otherwise.
The in-person, Covid classrooms in NYC will become pressure cooker environments, exacerbated in schools where general student cooperation and compliance have been issues. Enforcing Covid Safety rules will amp up the stress level beyond the imaginable and will make a normally exhausting job unbearable. Good luck to all UFT teachers!
Thank you. I agree. Right now some schools are concurrently excessing and hiring, which is nuts. The hanging threat of 9,000 layoff isn’t helping much either.
No more blood in your stone. My Dad taught for 34 years in District 5 during the Al Shanker years (1950 – 1984). I feel your pain. Hang in and one day at a time.
I’m not a teacher. I’m a parent. You see this post at a totally different angle, but I think it’s directed to parents. She just wants parents to acknowledge that teachers can and will do everything they can under the rotten Covid circumstances to educate the children in their “classrooms” (virtual or in person). She wants parents to know that teaching will be kind, meaningful and relevant. She just wants the teacher bashing from the parents to end. Just my opinion.
Lisa
You inspired me to start a blog intended to help science students with a wide range of topics. It just went online a few days ago. If your son needs some help with physics give it a try. Use the contact page and I can send some hopefully helpful info.
Just Google: The Un-Retired Science Teacher or
sciencehelpforsciencestudents.org
Good luck
Hello LisaM,
Yes, I agree. As difficult and frustrating as it will all be (and it will be for students in school and online), kids and parents can also take responsibility for themselves and not rely only on institutional education. That’s one box. The other box is finding out about their own interests and pursuing those. That’s just as much a part of a “real” education. You can’t count on schools to help you with that. Parents have to encourage that in students and students have to follow their own interests. If the two “boxes” can merge, great! More often they don’t. So, get what you can from your institutional education but grow your own garden! 🙂
@Rage…thank you! I will look at the site. AP Physics is going to be tough this year. Wondering if he just should have taken regular Physics instead? His Chemistry teacher recommended him because he thought he could handle the work…but that was before lockdown when everything went online.
As a freshman I assume he will be taking AP Physics 1.
That’s introductory physics, no prior experience needed.
He should be ok. My first bit of advice is to focus more on the concepts and the math will be easier. Unit labels are a bugger for most physics kids even if they’re good at crunching numbers. Here’s my email: sciencehelpforsciencestudents@gmail.com
Kudos for optimism. However most reality based stakeholders, especially high schools students, just aren’t buying it: school minus all the good stuff. Teachers will be at huge disadvantage compared to last March when they had over six months to establish relationships with students. Teaching students you never met in person will be like teaching in the dark. Nothing can change the simple fact that remote instruction is disliked by the vast majority of students for all the right reasons. It’ not real school and they know it! The loss of respect will be impossible to overcome.
That’s the point, I think. Teachers will be doing the best they can in a very bad situation, and teacher bashing/scapegoating is not going to improve the situation. The loss of respect may be understandable but it really is a way of letting everybody but teachers off the hook.
school minus all the good stuff: might as well stay home?
Kids are back in the classrooms or online. It’s so wonderful to hear from an educator who is clearly dedicated to making this a positive (even if it’s different and even if they’re worried, anxious, or angry) experience for our kids! We’re all scared. All facing incredible challenges. But if we remember that kids will be impacted by our thoughts and words, we can make this new experience great….. together. It’s also a great reminder for parents and teachers to remember what we worked hard to establish through the opt out movement – that our goals are the same – to help children. We’re in this together!