Have you ever watched monkeys on Monkey Island at the zoo?  They chase each other.  They bump into each other.  Physical contact rules the day.

What you see on Monkey Island is what it is like watching a group of Kindergartners on a play structure or running around on a school playground.  There is enormous physical activity and sometimes there is little regard for personal space.  It is a joy to watch.  It is how young children learn about themselves and their friends.

We are in the middle of a pandemic.  Covid19 has changed the world.

When I hear politicians say that teachers should go back to school so that kids can learn in the classroom, I think of Monkey Island.  I wonder if those politicians have ever been the only adult in a room with a group of five and six-year-olds….and not just responsible for a few minutes, but all day long.

I think that when politicians are saying words like ‘reopen schools’ or  ‘teachers return to the classroom,’ they are thinking of school in an abstract sense, not how a teacher is going to manage to keep young children socially distanced from one another.

It is not just the teachers of very young children who are concerned about in-person teaching.  When schools closed, teachers stepped up to the plate and learned a whole new way to educate the children in their class.  Teachers throughout America rolled up their sleeves and spent enormous amounts of time mastering a new way of delivering curriculum to students.  They did it because there was a pandemic.  The nation was in crisis.  They believed in the warnings about the severity of the problem.  They trusted medicine, and they trusted science.  They knew that they needed to pitch in and contribute to solving the problem.

From the beginning, information about the pandemic moved around.  We learned new ways of thinking about medicine and science, while at the same time, known facts developed, and new data was studied and understood.  It has been a stressful time for everyone.

Teachers are skilled in cultivating resilience in their students.  They are skillful in developing it for themselves.  They know that resilience comes from personal agency, feeling heard, and having choices.

Reopening schools?  There is disagreement.  There have been lawsuits.  There have been threats to lockout teachers from their students.  Threats that teachers will lose their jobs if they do not comply.  Some have called it chaos.  Some have called it teacher entitlement.  Some have said that teacher unions are defensive and stubborn and are placing a premium on protecting members rather than returning to classroom teaching for the good of the students.

There are solutions.  None of them are free.  The technology exists to test every child and teacher in a school two times a week.  It is possible to improve the ventilation systems in schools so that there is an air purification capability in every room.

People talk about smaller groups.  It sounds great, but who are the additional teachers, and where is the space to teach?

Getting all schools back up and operational and looking like school looked in January 2020 is going to take enormous amounts of money and resources.  Everyone agrees that online learning is about the safety of people and the containment of the virus.

Is it possible to label teachers as essential workers and prioritize their vaccinations as soon as possible?  Could we accommodate every teacher with personal health concerns or health concerns in their immediate family?  It seems reasonable to set a threshold for returning to remote learning if Covid19 cases spike.

For once in this country, could we listen to teachers?  Do politicians even want to hear teachers’ voices?  Social change is happening on a daily basis.  Rather than politicians and union leaders getting into a big fight over school reopening, could they work together and come up with common-sense solutions?  Solutions where everyone is heard, not just the loudest and most powerful voice.

It is hard to hear the most powerful voice in the school reopening conversation if it is from someone who has never managed a classroom full of students.   Air filtration systems, social distancing, and masks are possible but don’t forget about those monkeys on Monkey Island.