Teaching in the time of COVID (with thanks to Gabriel García Márquez*)

Our school broke up for the August holiday on Friday. For a blogger, it follows ipso facto that this is the perfect time for some introspection on what the past four months have been like.

In a nutshell: It fundamentally changed me as an educator.

There are so many things to consider. In this article, I am only going to focus on one: the social and emotional impact it has had on our staff, students and parents.

Some context: I am the head of an independent school in the South of Johannesburg. Our fees are similar to those of some state schools ("ex model C") but much lower than the top, traditional independent schools.

After the first lock-down at the end of March, we, like many other schools across the world, focused on doing the one thing that the techno-sceptics have told us for the past decade was not possible: shifting learning and teaching online. And, like thousands of teachers across the world, our teachers delivered this brilliantly in almost no time. We used Google Classroom and that was pretty much it. Free whiteboard apps where we could find them. Zoom in very small chunks of time.

Our school, teachers and the majority of our students do not have the money to pay for lots of data. Most of the students and teachers only have access to mobile data in very limited amounts. (Having said that, we still had more access to data than the majority of rural South African students and teachers do.) But we got the job done. Teachers had to redesign curriculum and delivery on the fly. And they did. By working incredibly long hours and going the extra mile to support their students. But that is the topic of another article.

Then the reopening debate started.

And the amount of uninformed pontificating just exploded.

We are teachers. We know that kids should be in school. We prefer to teach them face-to-face because we know that relationships matter. We also know that, even though we managed to continue teaching, those students preparing for exit exams need more on-site support. We want them back in class as soon as possible. Most of us are also parents. And we know that having your children stuck at home is not good for them (or us!). 

Like all South African schools, we opened up and like most independent schools, we opened up for more Grades than initially allowed because we had the space and ability to do so. 

But please, be careful with your certainties around the reopening of schools if you have not spent a year in a classroom.

The prompt for this blog came from one of my heroes, Max du Preez. When I was a student, Max started Die Vrye Weekblad (now resurrected in digital format). They held up a blinding spotlight to the atrocities of the final years of the Apartheid government in South Africa. I respect Max's opinions greatly. But he posted this and I realised again that we all have our blind spots:

To me, this tweet shows how deeply disconnected even well-informed people are to the daily reality of standing in a classroom in South Africa (and most of the world). It goes without saying that any person who ventures outside of their house to go to work would be at greater risk of contracting the virus than they would if they stayed at home. 

But when it comes to measuring the risk and the impact on children and the community, we at least need to understand the kinds of interactions that we are talking about. Having been part of this debate from the inside, I can assure you that this one is fraught with complexity and anxiety from school leaders, school owners (in the case of independent schools), parents, teachers, and students. What is the appropriate cost/risk factor, if we want to use business-speak?

As is often the case, a full appreciation of context is critical. I am heading a school that is part of a group of schools. And even for our schools inside our group, we had to make allowances for differences in context.

Firstly, are we talking about pre-school, primary or secondary? Each one of these phases has different operational realities that need to be accounted for. For example, in a primary space, most subjects are taught to a class as a whole and, in the lower grades at least, one teacher will cover all subject areas with that class. In the secondary space, especially in senior grades, you have multiple subjects being taught to multiple classes at the same time. A very different logistical space to manage.

But, more importantly in our country, there is the socio-economic space. We are all acutely aware of the vast disparities in our society. We are still dealing with Thabo Mbeki's "Two Economies". 

When you consider the realities presented by this photograph on the left, are you assuming that all schools must open, regardless?

Image 2: Source: Business Insider

 

Are we to assume that children and teachers in this school on the right (Image 3) will be as safe from transmission as those working in a school serving the left of the Image 2?

 

   Image 3: Source: Mail & Guardian

 Image 4: Source:  

Even in this relatively well-resourced school above (Image 4), carefully observe the spacing. Remember that this teacher will be in this closed space with these children for at least six hours every day. Anybody who has spent a year in a classroom will tell you what happens during flu season in any school. 

Note the cartoon below (Image 5). While funny, any teacher will tell you that there is a lot of truth in this. (And also note that there are only six children depicted!)

                    Image 5

                                                           

All of which then leads to Scooby and team trying to find substitute teachers to look after those classes now without teachers. And, from personal experience, I can tell you that doing substitution when teachers are absent is an incredibly difficult and complex task to manage. The children will arrive, and if there is no one to manage them, they will fool around. They are children, after all, not passive little units of DNA waiting to be manipulated on a checkerboard when we can find the time.

Now, when the reopening of schools was announced, we were presented with volumes of documentation with advice and instructions on how this should be approached. None of which you will now find on the Department of Basic Education (DBE) website here. Although I do still have two PDF documents shared with us earlier: DBE1 and DBE2. In these documents you will notice requirements around social distancing and the need to be able to trace student movement and contacts that clearly did not have any relationship with the reality of the vast majority of schools in this country. Not even within the relatively privileged space that my school inhabits.

Let's return to Image 2 above. My wife teaches at a school that services only the ultra privileged, wealthy people represented by the left of that picture. My school serves a cross-section of students and parents from mostly the grey area in between those two worlds as well as some people from the edges of the two extremes.

When my wife's school reopened, they had almost 100% attendance across the board and that was sustained all through the term. When my school reopened, we started with around 60% attendance and, as the number of cases in Gauteng rose, that figure steadily dropped towards the end of the term.

Why?

Imagine you wake up in a comfortable house on the left of Image 2. It is only you and your own immediate family in the house, situated in a garden behind gates. When you drive your children to school it is to one of those depicted in the masthead of Nic Spaull's article here in the Daily Maverick with enough space and students sitting quietly in their desks. Nothing really to worry about.

But if you wake up in an RDP home or shack or overcrowded flat represented by the right of Image 2, things look very different. You are probably sharing that space with elderly relatives who are extremely vulnerable, you look out your window and you see a crowded street with little or no social distancing happening. Your kids must take public transport to get to school. You must take public transport to get to work. None of the COVID-regulations will be enforced. Some of the teachers at my school must take six taxis to get to and from work every day. Then spend their days as depicted above and return to their own families.

And even this is a simplification because I have had parents from both sides of the divide wanting their kids to stay at home (or come to school).

I spent many hours over the past months only dealing with the anxieties of parents and teachers trying to address their fear of what would happen to them and their families should they or their children be infected. Anxieties supported by the ever-changing picture of how the disease is spread to others by children. Anxieties of parents needing to weigh up academic progress vs safety.

But, in the South African context and Max's tweet and stated explicitly by Nic Spaull in his article, I believe that at the heart of the sometimes cynical view of teacher's concerns about returning to work lies not only a blind spot for what happens on a daily basis in schools, but also a level of anger and exasperation with our biggest Teachers' Union, SADTU. And this is perfectly understandable. SADTU has a terrible track record for supporting mediocrity in education and actively undermining any efforts to improve teaching. However, it is worth noting that almost all the teacher's unions support SADTU in their call for caution on school reopening because they know the dire state that most schools are in. Just because SADTU is usually wrong doesn't imply that they are always wrong.

My plea is for some level of real engagement with the people in schools every day when making your arguments for the blanket reopening of schools. Every point in Spaull's article has merit. But his cost/risk analysis suffers from a lack of context. What will the real cost of an acceleration of cases be should schools reopen under their current constraints with no real support in manpower in order to facilitate the level of control required to avoid the spread of the disease? Do we really understand the dynamics of schools in South Africa when we make pronouncements on how to interpret international research data on the spread of the disease in schools?

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Gabriel García Márquez*