Mercedes Schneider teaches English to high school students in Louisiana.
In this post, she describes her triumphs of recent months: one hurricane after another has swept across her state. COVID threatens. DeVos expresses her contempt for public schools and their teachers, like Mercedes.
Yet she feels triumphant!
Well, Betsy, my public school is a good school, and I am a good public school teacher.
In the last several weeks, seven new students have enrolled in my Eng IV classes. Six arrived from other schools. That would not happen in a private school. There is no obligation to enroll whoever shows up on the private school doorstep. But we enroll students as they arrive, and each one enters my classroom with a circumstance that I must figure out how to navigate so that the student can become part of my class as successfully and seamlessly as is possible.
It is quite a challenge, but we do not turn students away. We. Do. Not. Turn. Students. Away. That is profound, and the likes of Betsy DeVos, steeped in her ideological bias, completely misses it.
Then there are the numerous specialized situations in which students and their families find themselves, circumstances that necessitate individualized, often instantaneous and creative, solutions. Longterm illness and disease. Comprehension issues. Physical limitations. Psychological challenges. Homelife instabilities...
The bottom line: My students and I are moving forward, despite COVID, despite hurricanes, despite DeVos.
And that, my friends, is success.
Here’s a new site to track superspreader events in your area:
https://covid19settings.blogspot.com/p/about.html
Here is the link to Mercedes Schneider’s post on her “successes” against the odds.
Holy Craps!
Success against the dice
Without a roll of seven
Mercedes rolls them nice
And rolls them right to Heaven
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901663,00.html
So love reading Mercedes! Absolute right. (Again.)
Triumpant
In triumph over Trump
Mercedes is on top
The facts will always trump
The nonsense that’s nonstop
And not a hurricane
Or even a DeVos
Or even covid bane
Can triumph over those
Public schools serve all students at any time. As an ESL teacher in New York, I had newcomers arrive after Memorial Day. We welcomed them and did our best to serve them. As a matter of fact, many of my students arrived in the spring which is an inopportune time in the school calendar. The main reason so many students entered in the spring is that parents did not have enough money to buy a winter wardrobe for their child so he or she arrived in the spring. Public schools adapt to the needs of students unlike so many charters that refuse to backfill vacancies. They do what is convenient for them and their test scores, not the students.
FYI-Off topic, but relates to the Biden campaign. Security analysts have declared the Hunter Biden “scandal” as fake news, and this link explains how it was concocted. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-groundwork-hunter-biden-conspiracy-deluge-n1245387