So, You want Life to be Normal Again

Dear Parents:

Are you longing to return to work?

For your life to return to normal again?

I want one parent to tell me to my face that I’m “lazy.

Please tell how I didn’t do anything as a teacher during virtual learning in the spring.

This has been the experience of some teachers looking out for their health in the county where I work and live. This has been the response of a few parents online and to teachers’ faces outside of district board meetings.

Please tell me I did not care and did not do my job.

Because, as I wrote on Facebook in a recent post, I often sacrificed my daughter’s, Corrie, preschool E-learning to teach English I, regular English and Social Studies, and to work with my son.

Corrie, just like Hayes, knew how deeply I loved my students. I had one write to me earlier in the school year that I was the first teacher she felt had ever cared for her.

I used to wait for a parent to tell me that I don’t understand what it’s like to have a child with special needs. I never responded rudely. I believe you can respond sternly while using your manners. It is a misunderstanding that you can be walked all over if you have manners.

When it came to the 2019-2020 school year, I felt I had the best parents ever. I had so many supportive parents. When it came to my darkest hour, some parents drove their children all the way to my daughter’s visitation in June or sent flowers.

I wish every teacher and every parent had this beautiful respect all of the time.

I want you to tell me “you’re lazy” one time during this COVID-19 crisis and its effect on schools.

While my daughter lay dying with what I thought was a stomach bug just before her doctor’s appointment, I gave feedback on five students’ work when I wasn’t going to work at all that day due to my daughter’s illness.

I did that virtually for my students.

Yes, it pains me that people still degrade teachers to the point of not trusting our professional judgement when many of us go back summer after summer for classes or professional development.

This is the first summer I have not touched professional development because I am having a hard enough time with the fact I will have to walk back into my classroom soon with the memory I was there one day before my daughter died. I took down the Lego house my daughter had built when she was at the school with me in March while I made plans, so the Legos could be ready for my new students in the fall.

I took apart the last thing my daughter built in my own classroom.

Corrie was so proud of the fact I was a teacher. She often drew on my white board. She would either pretend to tell a story, or teach a lesson. A lot of the time, she worked to perfect the e in her name. She felt that she never wrote her e good enough.

Corrie thought teachers were the best people in the world, and some of the people who loved her most.

She respected her teachers at every school. Corrie thought preschool and Kindergarten teachers were some of the most important people in the world.

I am a parent, and I had to make tough decisions, too. I fully believe preschool education is just as important as when children begin Kindergarten. It gives them the foundation.

Corrie had it all. She was writing and reading. She had the skillset, and I knew she’d be fine for Kindergarten.

Corrie didn’t always like it that I had to put her brother first under some circumstances.

So are you a parent who thinks teachers are lazy if they’re not ready to return or sacrifice their health?

Please share with me.

Are you a parent who wants things to return to normal?

Please tell me.

My daughter was susceptible to COVID-19 because of her history in every year of her life of facing pneumonia and bronchitis, with the exception of this year. We followed all guidelines in the spring.

I wanted things to return to normal, for my son to return to school because I constantly felt like I was not doing a good enough job with him, and for my daughter to survive the COVID-19 pandemic without any problems.

So teachers are nameless people at whom you feel you can state frustrations and tell them how they’re not doing a good enough job?

Please tell me. Feel free to share your words of wisdom of what you believe.

I pumped my daughter’s chest three hours after giving feedback to five students. My daughter went into cardiac arrest on the side of a highway on a state line with rain pouring down. Two more ambulances arrived on scene. I asked a paramedic if she was still alive, and he responded, “We’re going to do everything we can.”

At that point it time, there was exactly one week of school left.

Do you think I had a choice in life going back to normal?

I watched my daughter die. Yes, I tried to save her life, but it was not enough.

Parents, there are so many teachers I work with across my state and in my county. They have more years of experience than me. I believe they are better teachers than me currently, and I have so much to learn from them.

Parents, they are tired.

Not tired as in they’re going to fold their cards.

They’re tired of being so openly disrespected when they have the teacher version of qualifications equal to doctors and lawyers.

My son’s teachers are heroes. My daughter’s teachers are heroes. My students’ other teachers are heroes. We do not have the right to speak to teachers the way some of us have.

Look me in the eye. Please tell me I’m “lazy.” Please tell me I’m not worth the tax dollars. Tell me how you want things to return to normal.

I’ll tell you how I will have to walk back into a classroom and teach again with a broken heart every single day.

My life will never be as it was.

Although I may cry as I approach my classroom, there is the spirit of a little girl saying, “Teach again. Other kids will need you.”

There is a five-year-old spirit telling me that teachers are amazing for having to endure everything during COVID-19.

Corrie believed in me, and said, “You are a good teacher, Mommy.”

I think Corrie would respond to you if you said “My child learned nothing during virtual learning” with:

“Did you see how my Mommy and I taught students to create masks for their play?”

Please tell me how you want life to be normal again.

Rebecca T. Dickinson