31 July 2020 — 0931 mdt

Self-deception perpetuates pandemics

Magical thinking: guest post by Mary Sheehy Moe

Mary Sheehy Moe is a retired schoolteacher, higher education administrator, and former legislator, writing from Great Falls.

I’m just going to blurt it right out: Call off on-campus schooling for the foreseeable future. There is no way, in the throes of a pandemic, you can protect the safety of all the people in the school environment and all the people they go home to on a daily basis AND retain the advantages of in-class instruction. Yes, remote learning is not the same. But neither is what we’re planning, and all these labor-intensive exercises charting out inane details cannot blot out the big picture we’ll do anything NOT to see: We are stuck in this time and space. There is no new normal. It is what it is: a pandemic.

I’ll keep this at the K-12 level although it applies to higher education as well. I’ve watched hopefully as school districts have devised their plans for ensuring that students interact only with the same students and then only at a safe distance and, if they choose, with a mask. Here is what I’ve concluded:

I do not believe for a minute that any large school district in Montana has the resources to put these plans into practice. Bubbles and pods sound great if you are living in a carefully sealed bubble or pod 24/7. None of the people in a school are. They all move into and out of multiple pods day in and day out. There is no testing available to ensure that one day’s safety extends into the next. New day, new roll of the dice.

I do not believe for a second that the best-laid plans of mice and men can keep a kid from being a kid – nor, frankly, that “it is in the best interests of the child” to try to lay such Orwellian plans. Going back to school with a pandemic spiking is NOT in the best interest of children. Nor is it in the best interest of their parents, in spite of the fact that they dread an autumn like last spring and need to get back to work and want to believe that the old normal can return simply by ferocity of wishing. Parents, I’m not judging you. I would be feeling exactly the same way if I had school-aged children and a career to worry about. We should be helping you and your children with resources for the new reality, not filling your heads with bubble-licious.

Finally, what kind of magical thinking does it take to believe that this experience, if enforced as it must be to be effective, will not traumatize a child? Imagine recess, for instance: Kids playing the game du jour with gloves on their hands and masks on their faces, the ball being washed after the accidents that will happen. Kids being shushed singing jump rope songs – “the droplets!” Kid standing in a socially distanced line waiting for the monkey bars to be cleaned between each child’s romp. Kids being monitored by a masked adult with an electronic whistle or perhaps a pool noodle to corral the errant children erupting in a game of tag into the tiresome, deadening, ever-present, socially distanced, droplet-free zone. My generation blamed decades of substance abuse on the trauma of hiding under our desks for 15 minutes waiting for the atom bomb to hit. This pales in comparison.

May I mention the teachers and staff – what we now call “essential workers,” which, loosely defined, means “people we pay squat and treat worse so that they can take care of our kids while we go off to be big shots and make a ton of money”? What kind of magical thinking does it take to believe that a workforce 33% of whom are over 50 years old and a goodly number of whom suffer from debilitating conditions, are going to be just fine in that petri dish of humanity we call a public school?

I‘ve been willing to wait for some new incarnation of Peter Pan to bring us to Always Always Land by the time schools open in the fall. But let’s face it: Magical thinking isn’t working very well in Montana. Between “the re-opening” and now, we went from the most COVID-less state in the Union to a state so high-risk the District of Columbia won’t let us in without quarantining. The District of Columbia holding its nose in the presence of a visitor from Big Sky Country! Sheesh.

But that wasn’t the slap in the face that pulled me out of magical thinking. For that, I needed the Montana High School Association Plan for Fall Activities. It’s magical thinking on mushrooms. There are intricate, specific rules for the team box, for the ball, for face masks and gloves, for time outs and intermissions and the period after scoring. There are rules for fans and suggestions for tickets and even rules for enforcing the rules. The rules for the coin toss are a marvel of forethought and every-base-covered detail.

But how to deal with the pervasive presence of contact in a contact sport? Only this: “Always maintain social distancing of 6 feet while on the field/court of play when possible.” Is that possible in a sport where the coach famously says to the player, “Stick with your man. Think of him as chewing gum. By the end of the game, I want you to know what flavor he is”?

Don’t get me wrong. I admire the MHSA. Clearly, they’ve spent a ton of time coming up with this document. But it’s all centered on one basic premise: The show must go on. Maybe someday it will. But right now? It. Just. Can’t.

Yes, talented athletes are going to lose the season they always dreamed ofYes, it’s going to be a lousy fall, with parents either waiting for school to open in November or tearing their hair out trying to get their kids to participate in Zoom classes and do their homework and cut them some slack. But it’s going to be a miserable time any which way. We can’t change that. We can only do two things: shorten the amount of time and make it less terrible. Both require being the adult in the room.

Anne Frank probably didn’t learn in quite the same way the 761 days she spent in hiding. But anyone who has read her diary cannot doubt that she learned … or that her forced isolation in turn forced a level of study and reflection deeper than what any kids experiences in any school.

Last Sunday “60 Minutes” featured a re-run of a program on children learning from “Sesame Street” in a refugee camp. You think we’ve got it bad? Those children have been in their little tent in that huge camp for years and years. The older ones still remember the lovely home they fled from in Syria. The younger ones have never known any home but this God-forsaken camp. But parents and children alike are learning lessons remotely that we all take for granted and learning lessons about living in close quarters we could all profit from. They are not sitting around dreaming up rules for a game that is not in the cards. They are playing the cards fate has dealt them – wisely and lovingly.

It’s time to face facts. We are in the middle of a pandemic. The way to beat it is well-established. Magical thinking will not get us there. Only self-discipline and sacrifice will. Not our strong suits, apparently … but we can learn.