This Is Not An Anti-Teacher Gotcha Moment

 So I posted this on Twitter, and drew the response pictured here

Usuals: "Here you go--hospital-grade safety measures!"
Teachers: "But we need to get the vaccine."
Usuals: "Here's your vaccine."
Teachers: "BTW the kids need the vaccine too."
Usuals: "There is no vaccine for kids."
Teachers: "LOL, suckers."

— LiberalAgainstLockdowns (@LLockdowns) February 9, 2021

There's a special group of folks among those who hate teacher unions and the teachers who belong to them. You'll remember these folks from back in the days when we were going to use test-based teacher ratings to fire our way to greatness. Their story of the US public education system is something like this--

The whole system is a sham, a massive con perpetrated by the teachers union, in which they get a whole bunch of people who don't want to teach, don't even want to work, but just want to sit lazily in a comfy sinecure for which privilege they pay a kickback to the union, which is only interested in public education as its big fat fund raiser.

You won't find these people writing in any mainstream outlets, but you sure can meet them on Twitter. And as the battle over re-opening school buildings heats up, they are pointing their fingers with great fervor, because they are sure this is a gotcha moment. "Look!" they want to holler. "See? I told you! Teachers do not actually want to work. This (probably fake) pandemic gave them an excuse to sit at home and get paid for doing nothing, and they don't want it to end! I told you and told you--they're a bunch of lazy slobs attached to the public taxpayer teat. This proves it!!" And like my friend above, they believe that teachers think the taxpayers are suckers for letting them do it.

Thing is, I know lots of teachers, and I can report that since last March, I have not heard a single one say, "Man, I just hope this goes on forever." Not one, and not anything remotely like that. If I've heard anything outside of the mainstream versions of the sides of this debate, it has been teachers who say, quietly, "Even if it's not safe yet, I'm okay going back because it would be such a relief to be done with this distance/hybrid stuff."

Teachers became teachers because they want to teach. Teachers are also varied human beings, many with families and children and health concerns and even business/employment concerns and all the same issues that all the other various human beings are dealing with.  

This time, this pandemic, is an absolutely wrong time for folks to indulge in the tendency to demonize the other side. Everyone is facing a range of options that all suck, and everybody is worried about whichever suckness is currently staring them in the face and why should anybody actually have to explain this? Now would really be a good time to work hard at humaning. There are no gotchas to be got.