While I know that this is meant in jest, I can't help but feel the need to speak up about statements like this. Healthcare workers got vaccines, but no one joked "maybe I can be an attending physician while I do my normal job" or "maybe I'll go give sponge baths to bed-ridden people" other such jokes. Maybe saying "I can quit my current job to work with kids" wouldn't be as insulting or (hopefully unintentionally) minimizing the work that educators do.
Last spring our country got a peek into what it takes to work with kids on a daily basis and everyone sang the praises of educators. Social media posts saying that teachers needed raises were abundant last spring. Yet 12 months later, we're back to joking about how we could do so while still doing another job.
*steps down from soapbox*
Let the mask bickering resume...
This is more a coping mechanism for our "return to school" plan. We're still 100% remote here. I put it in quotes because it's not really a "return to school" plan. They're going to bring 50% of middle and high schoolers back, 25% week 1, 25% week 2 alternating. The off weeks they'll be remote, just like the 50% that are staying remote. Classes will be for the combined group in the building and remote. But, this is the kicker. They're not getting in room instruction. They're putting 15ish kids in a room with a monitor not a teacher and those kids will zoom to class just like they would from home. They stay in the one room all day without switching. They're not all even attending the same class and they have to use headphones to avoid disrupting each other. It's exactly like attending remotely, only worse because now they're in a room with kids in different classes instead of the home workspace.
My 6th grader has been ranting this is a disaster since it was announced. She's got a two Chromebook optimized setup at home and this is a huge step backwards. She wants to go back to school, even with the masks and distancing, and room air cleaners, and increased ventilation, and the messed up transportation, and complicated lunch. All the extra hassles are worth it to actually interact with other kids and have an in person teacher. But, this solution isn't any of those things. The point of doing all those things was so we could get that value add, and we're not getting any of it. Just checking a box that they're in the building.
Hence the joke about "being a room monitor". They're hiring a bunch of them, that's the actual job description. Not a joke that teachers are just babysitters, but an actual job description our system is hiring that's not a teacher but is a babysitter. Since the teachers can't actually teach from the front of a room where most of the kids aren't even in that class. They may try that in the High School, but that's even worse for both the teacher and the kids.
I should have said "school employee" not "teaching job", since it's all one priority group for vaccine. I couldn't actually be an educator, that's a different job and a hard one.
Massive envy of schools using mitigation to get kids back to real education.