| On Tuesday, The Atlantic ran a piece written by a New York intensive care nurse calling on teachers to return to the classroom in the fall. She grounded the argument in her own experience, noting that she could have taken leave as Covid-19 ripped through city hospitals and health care workers drew up their wills but ultimately told herself, "No, I can't just chump out!" The teachers threatening safety strikes to keep schools closed until the virus is better contained needed that same perspective, she wrote. “Schools are essential to the functioning of our society, and that makes teachers essential workers. They should rise to the occasion even if it makes them nervous, just like health-care workers have.”
Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, taking a more laconic approach to the same idea, described the piece as, “A nurse tells teachers: Do your jobs.” In Goldberg’s framing, “the job” is to show up to a classroom. And for the intensive care nurse, “the job” involves self-sacrifice in the face of a failed state response and a staggering number of students already home in quarantine.
But for Annie Tan, a public school teacher in the city who supports the safety strikes and sick-outs, the job right now is to protect her students, her community, and herself from a pandemic that is still killing people every single day. She works in a windowless classroom, she told Jen this week, and her principal isn’t confident that the school can secure an HVAC filter in time for the new semester. She has been told she will have to teach her class in the library alongside another class that also can’t use their classroom for safety reasons. “How is that a good idea for students or for teachers?” she asked.
The danger of the virus isn’t an abstraction for Tan. In her small class alone, her students and paraprofessional colleagues have so far lost 14 people to Covid-19. “I don’t want that happening again,” she said, “and I know that my students are still dealing with that grief.”
So she’s fighting alongside other teachers to make sure schools stay closed until it’s safe and that students have what they need until then. That’s the job, and I’m grateful she’s doing it.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor | 