#I've just been. staring at a single math problem all day and losing

[dodgebolts]

this is what the last year has been like a little bit

[blogpostatron3000]

one of the questions im perplexed as to how its incorrect, but at least the first i got wrong (the very first on the paper!) is something ive made the same mistake on OVER AND OVER and have learned NOTHING from, despite knowing VERY WELL about it and my tendency to do it. im just too great an imbecile to pattern recognize. i looked wholeheartedly at some fluorocarbon and thought to myself "it could never hydrogen bond with water". very humbling! while thinking properly of the definition of an h-bond, too! just stared at all those fluorines and comprehended nothing, like the stupidest of idiots.

this wouldnt have happened last semester. i used to be so smart. it used to be that i could do upwards of 60 math problems a day and not get a single one wrong, and now i stumble may way through four and barely land on my feet each time. ive become so unbelievably stupid. i get tired after only 3 hours of study. 80% on a fucking test - suicide would be more respectable. everyone is going to be so disappointed with me and my sunken prospects, and i dont know if im more afraid of losing the good opinion of my friends or of my professors.

i dont know how im going to make it through university like this. i wish i'd never caught covid. i should be able to think straight by now if i werent irreparably altered in some way. maybe its the caffeine. i feel like my brain is on fire all the time ever since i started getting very info coffee, but im afraid to lay off, because if i still make infantile mistakes on everything i attempt it means the fault lies with nobody but myself, forever, and that i'll never be capable of Anything as worthwhile as before Ever Again.

what happens to me if i have covid brain damage? i know i must have some, studies show everyone who catches covid has some degree of it, and i'm almost definitely stupider now than i would've been if i'd never been infected once. but i mean Very Bad, Cognitively Impairing brain damage. what if this is permanent? what if i can never do math as well as i did again? what if i've been robbed of understanding of everything i love? nothing even feels real. these past couple of weeks i've felt like i've been showing up to places i don't belong and sitting through lectures i can barely stand to pay attention to. i'm like a speck of dust floating through the room, floating into my car, floating home. doing nothing. barely cognizant that he's in university, or that there's any urgency to be less of a moron.

[coffeeteaitsallfine]

I've been chewing on that nyt article all day. I show up to work this morning for a 2 hour planning "PD" day and my coworkers are all talking about the same thing. We all see that students are in a crisis but we are powerless to do anything about it. Parents want their kids in person for school. We want them there too. I HATE teaching remotely. I know they need to socialize and it sucks all the joy out of an already draining, difficult job. I understand that little transmission happens compared to in the community (though i am a tad skeptical cause these kids rarely wear their masks correctly). BUT it is also unrealistic to treat it like a normal school year when so many students are quarantined or just staying home because they're burnt out.

We have no answers or solutions because it seems like a catch-22 in addition to all around pandemic awfulness. School officials, teachers, and parents are at an impasse. Schools have been shut down in Chicago over teachers refusing to work. Every teacher knows being in school is imperative to social and mental development, but (vaccinated!) teachers are getting sick and/or quarantined too. Almost the entire math dept at my school has been gone this week.

Also there is such a bad sub shortage: "Principals have been teaching and some classes simply have security guards watching over them. . .we don’t have enough people to cover classes, meaning we don’t have enough grownups in the building, so instruction isn’t happening. We are warehousing children in large spaces with warm bodies.” "The same is true for bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and other adults in school buildings — somebody has to do the work, or the school can’t function." (x) "All those recruited to help out when colleagues are in quarantine, meanwhile, lose time they might ordinarily spend grading or planning class for the next day."

I showed up to work Monday, with no copies done for the day, but did I get to do them on my prep period? Nope! My contract time is 7:15am. I walk into my office and a coworker asks me, five minutes before 1st hour starts: "did you check your email? you have to cover for someone" well, no time to make copies now! I had to ask another teacher for a favor.

And when a student is quarantined and they don't have a certain amount of discipline, they are not getting caught up because teachers do not have the time to support them! Parents don't seem to realize this in a lot of cases. We barely had time to do the minimum even pre-pandemic. If everything is online that makes it easier for those that are quarantined, but they stare at computer screens in every single class so they hate! every assignment! and YET students don't want to play games or talk they just want to get a worksheet and be done so they can sit on their phones.

which is another issue that is astronomically more difficult, but do teachers have the energy to deal with that? NO! we are too busy arguing with students over masks on top of instruction, safety concerns, do i have a lesson plan for tomorrow? do we have homeroom this week? did I ever get back to that student who messaged me? 10 students were absent the day of a quiz, did I remember to ask each one of them if/when they can make it up? who is failing? I'm 2 weeks behind on grades so I don't really know!

The only solution seems to be a shorter school day and/or being hybrid, but no one is even seriously considering it. We have to be fully in person or fully remote because we have to meet a state quota based on the minimum number of days and hours there are bodies in a school building or logged into an online class.

We are asked to consider their mental wellbeing but they won't talk to us and we're not trained therapists; we don't even know how to do that for ourselves.

"a lot of schools are responding to burnout by offering professional development sessions devoted to self-care, which don’t really fix the problem. 'They’re like, Hey, here’s how you can tend to your own emotional needs...And it’s like, No, I just need more time.'" (x)