As a teacher,  I don’t want your cape, I just want your respect | Opinion

Teachers, in a matter of months, went from superheroes to villains. Social-media posts once flooded with thank-you statements, praise and revelatory comments from parents and community members regarding the amount of work and the many hats teachers wear swiftly shifted to accusations of laziness and clenched-fist memes shouting, “GET BACK TO WORK.”

In tandem, the school system made the decision to return to in-person education with little regard for the impact this decision would have on the professionals who share these spaces with students.

I made a conscientious choice to choose me and literally put my mask on first. Pre-pandemic, choosing myself may have felt selfish, but this pandemic, and all that it revealed, made it the only choice. Honestly, I have never been more afraid to go to work than I was during this pandemic. It felt like every doorknob, every student who wore his or her mask incorrectly — or who coughed or sneezed — was a threat to my safety.

Teaching does not offer a great deal of opportunity to build a professional community, because we spend most of our day within our classrooms, and the pandemic amplified that chasm. This year was filled with isolated lunches in my car that felt safer than my classroom. There were awkward waves from masked co-workers, greeting each other with friendly, yet cautious eyes and perfunctory chit-chat. We remained in motion, not stopping to truly engage with each other.

It was difficult to build a work community when the pandemic required isolation.

In the midst of my internal angst and the pandemic swirling around us, students in the classroom and at home needed to be educated. This year I, along with teachers around the world, reinvented the meaning of quality instruction. Overnight, we became experts in multiple technological platforms, learning as we went, improving methods of checking in on students’ well-being by unconventional means.

Often on Zoom, black squares with students’ names on the screen replaced their actual images. To respect their personal space, I became accustomed to communicating with those black squares. I became more attuned to stress in their voices, their messages in the chat and their “reactions” — Thumbs up? Thumbs down? A smiley face?

It was exhausting trying to engage students who were showing up to class inconsistently, or not showing up at all. Often, I would call and get a non-working number or speak to a parent who is using the student as a temporary guardian for their siblings. There were students whose internet bandwidth didn’t meet the demand or those in the building but physically tapped out.

Such obstacles to students’ success, unfortunately, are par for the course during these unprecedented times. We as professionals are understanding of the diverse needs of the students and the hindrances to their education, but we are too often met with the absence of equitable treatment.

Teachers, by way of emergency order, have been told they will be evaluated based on the performance of students who may or may not see the importance of taking standardized tests during a pandemic. Rating teachers on professional performance during a pandemic seems ludicrous and another slap in the face of teachers who have been keeping it together in their classrooms for their students, parents and their own families.

The pandemic has further proven to me that teachers are one of the most innovative, resilient and hardworking groups of professionals with whom I have ever shared space. At the same time, the pandemic has magnified how undervalued we are and the necessity of returning the cape.

Alexandria Martin teaches English at Miami Carol City Senior High. She is the designated building steward, co-chair of the Standards for Educational Evaluations Committee and vice president of high schools for United Teachers of Dade.

This story was originally published June 8, 2021 at 6:16 PM.