Chris Voisard – Applied Creativity

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  • Post Covid teaching: Part I Foreshadow

    How do you teach with a mask on?

    I didn’t get it. Projecting your voice, articulating clearly, making exaggerated facial expressions is all part of teaching. Just as important, is watching the kids’ faces, to see if they’re tuned in, checking their expressions for understanding. I have trouble enough deciphering what some kids are saying without them muffling themselves with a mask. Teaching is dialogue.

    There was no way. I would have to do something else.

    That was my mindset during that summer of ’21, when it was announced that California schools would finally fully re-open after two school years being ruined by lockdowns, shutdowns, and Zoom, but all students and teachers would have to wear a mask and try to stay 6 feet apart. I personally had lucked out during those two ruined school years, the first year painting a mural at a school, and the second year running a ‘pandemic pod’ of 14 kids at a pony ranch. Now it seemed my luck had run out.

    Then this teaching job appeared, I t seemed almost by Providence. I wasn’t looking really, I just told my plight to some former colleagues when we got together for lunch at Harry’s Hofbrau, where we had gathered in late summer to tell the tales of our war-time teaching during the pandemic. Little did I know that one of my old work buddies had recommended me to her principal, I’ll call her Ms. A, who was moving to a new middle school, and was hiring. My friend had told Ms. A that I was good at art. The next day Ms. A called and offered me a full-time job teaching art at a salary higher than I’d ever had in my teaching career thus far.

    Maybe my Lucky Pandemic streak had not ended! An art job! Even though I snuck art into every subject I taught, and a few times was the art specialist for elementary schools, teaching art full time was a job I had coveted since I had begun teaching, but I didn’t quite have my art credential yet. I needed one more pedagogy class to get my single-subject, but Ms. A was willing to hire me for the art position since school was about to start in a few weeks, and they were short of teachers. The district paid very well. Outside of the mask thing, it sounded like my dream job. How could I say no?

    I justified breaking the mask rule to myself by thinking that teaching art didn’t require as much direct instruction as teaching English, my usual gig, so maybe I could tolerate wearing the mask until they lifted the mandate. They would lift the mandate eventually, wouldn’t they? I imagined a hands-on classroom, children creating, in their own worlds, where oral communication might not be as important, art was the universal language! I justified further that there would be no test scores at the end of the year, grading would be simplified.

    I accepted the job.

    The first day of our two-week orientation, I was sitting in the sunny district office around the table with other new-hires, and we were each given a folded card to make a name plate, just as I often assign kids to do on the first day of school before I have learned their names. I often try to make even this lesson somewhat creative, teaching the kids bubble letters, or telling them to draw a symbol on their card that would help me remember them. They always treat us teachers like kids in these meetings, I thought to myself, when we were told to write our name on the card in large letters, and in the four corners write our favorite color, the city we live in, an adjective to describe ourselves, and our preferred pronouns.

    I did as I was told, filling in my city of Half Moon Bay, ‘orange’ as I always do for my favorite color, and creative for my adjective, the one I always use since it works when they require the adjective to start with the same sound as your name, so I was on autopilot, but when I got to “preferred pronouns” I didn’t know what they were talking about. Do people have favorite pronouns? Like the royal ‘we’? Or maybe ‘mine’ if they are particularly possessive? Maybe ‘everyone’ if they liked to be inclusive? I seriously did not get it. I looked around the table to see what everyone else was putting down, and I noticed most of the other teachers putting she/her/hers on their cards, except a guy who put he/him/his so I did the same as the other gals, but I was mystified. That’s how isolated I had been in my Pony Pandemic Pod with no access or time for the internet.

    The Asian woman who was in charge of the orientation, was wearing a mask as we all were, but what made it even more difficult to understand her was the fact that half of her face appeared to be paralyzed. Her one eye and the brow above it drooped down, and was slightly closed. When she pulled down her mask to take a sip of water, one side of her mouth turned down and didn’t move. She apologized and explained she had Guillain Barre syndrome, another thing I had never heard of, and reassured us that her condition wasn’t permanent, and bravely carried on lecturing to us for two weeks about the school district, that had a very thorough hiring process. I stared at her face daily during our orientation, finding her condition very strange. It was much later that I found out that this condition was one of the vaccine injuries often reported.

    Finally, I was brought to the school itself, a very large, modern concrete-penitentiary type of place with iron gates in front, to meet Ms. A. who was sitting in her windowless office eating out of a Tupperware bowl. When she saw me at her door, she carefully put on a mask, and then, to my somewhat amusement, a second mask over that. I inwardly rolled my eyes, wondering if this was for show.

    I sat down and she started going over some logistics emphasizing the masks and distancing procedures. “It is only required that the students wear the masks indoors, but we’re going to require that they wear them at all times when on campus, even during PE and music.” I’m thinking, ‘oh kaay’, and also ‘oh nooo’. She went on to talk to me about my application, ignoring completely my impressive resume and years of experience.

    “I see you have decided not to disclose your vaccination status,” she muffled to me, her eyes narrowing over the double-mask that I could see was somewhat digging into her face. “You are not required to disclose this, but if you do not, you will be required to take a covid PCR test in the mobile van that will be visiting our school once a week, who will share the results with you and the administration. The policy at this school is if you test positive for covid, even if you do not have symptoms, you must stay home for ten working days if you are not vaccinated.”

    I’m thinking, ok, whatever, I’ll go take the dumb test every week. I heard that they didn’t stick the probe all the way up into your brain like they were doing at first, god knows why. What I wasn’t going to tell them was my ‘vaccine status’ since I hadn’t taken the vaccine. Yet. I hadn’t entirely written off the idea; I was taking a more ‘wait and see’ approach. The more I waited, the more I could see I didn’t want to, unless I was forced to.

    Note the foreshadowing: pronouns, masks, vaccines. I thought a high-paying art position was my dream job. I pinched myself when I thought my teaching luck had continued during what I could see was a systematic dismantling of the California education standards during those lockdown years.

    It was a dream I suppose; I mean nightmares are dreams, right?

  • Learning Loss Part 2

    ABC30 Fresno

    After spending that dreamy school year in the outdoor barn surrounded by ponies and chickens and mostly maskless children playing in the hay, I could not imagine going back into The System, or whatever was left of it after most of the kids had not been in school for a year and a half.  I’d heard stories from the outside. I’d seen pictures, like masked kindergarteners walking in lines with their arms straight in front of them to maintain the proper distance, or sitting outside in circles drawn on the asphalt to eat their lunches alone in silence.  I wanted no part in that.

    While I was lolling at Lazy H Ranch, reading Roald Dahl to my pod of kindergarten through fifth graders with a backdrop of golden hills dotted with horses, the rest of the school-world was tangled in a fierce debate of bureaucracy and fear, wrapped in the colored ribbons of the Tier System, purple being bad, very bad, then red, orange, and yellow.  There was no green tier, no, no one was ever completely safe from the covid boogeyman, unlike George Bush’s Terror Tiers, where at least there was blue and green; maybe you had a slight chance of letting down your guard and not worrying about being attacked by ISIS. Red was the highest tier in Bush’s system, but California’s covid tiers had purple.  I wondered why at the time, was it like a face being so angry it turns from red to purple?  I didn’t know, and still don’t. A district had to stay in an orange or yellow tier for 14 days to even consider opening.  At first, I checked daily with our tier status, but after a while, gave up, knowing it was as much of a sham as Bush’s Terror Tiers, based on nothing.  Sometimes our county would turn red for a few days, or a week, only to revert back to purple which meant we had to start all over again.

    California's Colored COVID Tier System ...

    I screamed my protests into the abyss at first, writing profanity laced emails to Governor Newsom or our public health director, Scott Morrow, pointing out how little sense this all made, how the goal posts kept moving, how bad it was for kids, and how arbitrary it all was.  That’s when I still thought that they might actually care about the kids welfare. Or ours for that matter.

    But in September of ’21 Newsom finally said the kids could all be back in school!  This was after months of the teacher’s union still fighting the reopening, arguing at first, that it would be impossible to keep the kids 6 feet apart with the size of the classes and classrooms, so those in power quickly recalculated to say, ok, only four feet apart would work, or just “do your best.” There were further demands that had to be met.  Teachers would be first in line to get the vaccines.  Masking, testing, ventilation systems, extra cleaning.  The teachers union got everything they wanted, to the tune of millions of dollars.

    safety barriers in classrooms

    There was a big distinction between the unions and the teachers wants.  My daughter Reyna went on TV to be interviewed as to how she was a teacher, and didn’t agree with the unions, and no union representative had ever contacted her to ask her opinion as to whether she felt ‘safe’ enough to go back to school.  Teachers were split.  While many felt like Reyna and me, that “remote learning” was mostly fiction, and morally wrong, many teachers I talked to loved it, or pretended to hate it but secretly love it, like a teacher who told me she cried every day, but went to live with her daughter and grandbaby for the school year, and had the students watch movies she recorded for science lessons. Teachers told me of going on hikes every afternoon, or having a beer or two while teaching.  There was no accountability, no low grades were allowed, and no discipline problems to deal with.  Sure, a few teachers insisted that the kids get out of bed and sit up during class, but mostly the kids were allowed to keep their camera off on Zoom calls, because of “equity”.  Some students might have been embarrassed to show their living conditions the unions argued.

    Lessons From the Disaster of Zoom Teaching

    I walked into my daughter Reyna’s house during the lockdown and she was in the middle of teaching her Home Arts (used to be Home Ec) class a cooking lesson in her kitchen.  She was teaching her heart out, talking animatedly into her laptop, bringing it over so that the camera showed her taking the cookies out of her oven. “How are your cookies looking?  Show me some of them!” she said into the computer. I walked around and looked at her Zoom screen, and only saw about five faces, the rest of the boxes that represented her class were black.  “Where is everyone?” I whispered to her out of screenshot. She explained to me how they weren’t required to turn their cameras on.  “I don’t think they’re even there,” I said.  She nodded her head in agreement.  She went on trying her hardest anyway.  It made me sad.

    So, like I said, I wanted no part of the public-school craziness.  Some of the parents tried to keep the Ranch School open another year, but it was not to be.  After a couple of false-hopeful jobs with my old district and my old principal, I half-heartedly looked around for a job that could be palatable in the teaching realm, but had just about given up, and resigned myself to collecting unemployment for the first half of the school year.  But then I had lunch with some colleagues from the middle school I worked at for many years, I told some of them my plight.  Within a couple of days, I got a call from the principal of that middle school, telling me she was moving to the Belmont school district, and would like to hire me at Ralston Middle School.  “What subject would I teach?” I asked, thinking I did not want the job. “Art,” she said.  She had been tipped off by my old friends that art was my thing. “And a couple of periods of study skills.”

    This gave me pause.  Teaching art had been my dream job. Although I incorporated art into all my teaching jobs, I had never taught it officially.  I had finished all the requirements for the art credential, passing the required art CSET (California subject exam for teachers) except for one pesky pedagogy class that they stopped offering at SF State during covid. I explained all of this to the woman on the phone, Sabrina Adler was her name. She seemed unfazed.  She spoke in a nasally, almost robotic voice, void of any emotion. I asked if I could get back to her, and she said yes, but she needed to know by that afternoon.  Wow, they really wanted me.  This was a switch from usually having to beg for jobs. I hung up the phone, and paced around the house, thinking.  I didn’t want to teach in a mask, and so far, had not taken the vaccine.  But an art job?  And a couple of periods of study skills, whatever that was, it sounded easy. How bad could it be?  They wouldn’t be on a computer. Then looked up the salary schedule for Belmont, and I was stunned to see that they hired at a high experience step, and that I would be making more money than I had ever made for a school year by a long shot.  It seemed like a Sign. Art and money. I paced and fretted a little more, and then called Sabrina back and accepted the job.

    Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.  Little did I know how much things had changed during covid. The teaching had changed, the kids had changed, the teachers had changed, the culture had changed, the expectations had changed, the attitudes had changed.  Everything had changed in only a year and a half.  That’s all it took. A year and a half of everyone staring at the internet and getting brainwashed, not by the classes they were supposed to be taking, but by the TikToks they had going up in the corner.

    I only had one little clue of what had happened during my year of oblivion at the pony farm.  A friend of the family of the farm, wanted their daughter to work with me as an aid.  She had been a freshman in college at a University in Florida, but had dropped out, due to covid pressures, she couldn’t handle it. So, she was hired at the ranch.  She was constantly looking at her phone, instead of paying attention to the kids, and when she wasn’t, I’d see her nodding off in class, her head jerking back, and her eyes looked funny.  Finally, I asked her if she was on drugs, and she told me yes, she was on four different psychiatric drugs, none of which I had ever heard of.  “Does your mother know this?” I demanded of her.  She said yes, and the reason she was tired is that she often stayed up all night.  This girl also told me that she that her generation was different, because they didn’t all go by the strict rules of being boys or girls.  The girl would have the kids go on their computers during recess when I forbade it, thinking they had enough computer time during their Zoom calls, but going behind my back.   I finally called her out on it.  She said, “Why should I have to work as hard as you?  You get paid way more money than me.”  I was shocked by her attitude, and explained that I had been teaching for decades, and that the first few years of student teaching I had to work for free.  She said that was my fault.

    I thought this girl was a one-off, a bad hire, a bad seed.  Little did I know that all the kids were watching the same TikToks, all the kids had been indoctrinated, all the kids had changed, just like the adults had changed.