Friday afternoon I got my classroom ready for fully onsite learning come Monday.

Before I shut the classroom door for the weekend, I looked back at the tables filled with chairs and felt a wave of anger growing in me.

Anger, you ask? At whom?
Not at my students.

I'm angry at how I am supposed to accept this as the "new normal", as if somehow test positivity rates in my county (currently just under 7%, but recently as high as 15%) and new case numbers nearly 30/100,000 (and long-term growing) are just risks we have to endure.

I'm angry at narratives that pit the health of educators against the well-being of children, as if educators like me, who have spent the best parts of our lives caring for children and supporting their growth don't care about them after all!

These narratives make my 'selfishness' or my "personal worry" the problem, while they erase the decisions my "leaders" made and didn't make that could have meant we entered the school year with low and declining numbers, rather than increasing infection numbers. It was possible.

I'm angry at the way my leaders have covered up the nature and extent of the problem and protected the powerful. The way they returned to legislative session long enough to pass a law exempting businesses from COVID-related lawsuits but

didn't require accurate reporting from and oversight of the Department of Public Health and answers from the Governor, or adequate testing and contact tracing, or a law that might have allowed communities to

create mask mandates and school districts to follow their own plans based on what will keep their communities safe.

So I looked at those tables filled with chairs and I know how invisible all of this is to the general public. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom knows that

when you bring 25-28 (or more!) kids into a classroom physical distancing is no longer possible. Sanitizing desks and adequate handwashing, either.

Luckily, I teach in a district that requires face coverings. But there are plenty of people in the community who don't "believe" in

the virus, too. And that division is because of a "leadership" failure, too.

Those masks are our only defense right now for self and community. We may get lucky and dodge a bullet. But that's not a strategy, that's a hope.

And I am tired.

Teaching under these circumstances is draining. It's hard to live with callousness and disregard while you give it your all each day. Callousness and disregard for me and my colleagues for sure, but also for the packing plant workers down the road

who felt the brunt of the disease early on, for the nursing home residents, and prison inmates who rely on us to take care of them. For the multi-generational families, the grandparents and parents and aunties and uncles.

The way the disease, whose effects are felt so much more by people of color, exacerbates the callousness in an already racist country that is expressing its racism loudly and clearly. I'm tired of how the disease

can make the suffering of some never even register in the hearts of others.

I know I'm not the only one who sees this callousness, this lack of leadership.

And I know what I'm doing about the lack of leadership; I'm voting and trying to get out the vote.

About my profession and my place in it? I'm still pondering. Daily. Weekly. I know others are, too.

So, FWIW, these are one teacher's thoughts as he closed the classroom door on a hard and joyful week of work and readied himself to do it all again on Monday.