Require COVID vaccines for high school students. I want to keep teaching in real life.

It’s great to be back teaching in person, even half-suffocating behind a mask. The students seem happy to be in a room with one another and with a live teacher. They seem to accustomed to wearing their masks, resigned to the regulation, respectful of the danger in the air. 

Some of my colleagues and I used to wonder, jokingly, whether we would miss the mute button that for the past year-and-a-half enabled us, with a single mouse click, to silence a disruptive student (though most of the disruptions were actually parents and siblings yelling in the background). We wondered whether students would mind having to ask to go to the rest room, or whether they would have any attention span left.

As it turns out, I don’t miss the mute button at all and I am hesitant to silence students, even when I need to tell them something. Online teaching has made me despise silence in my classes and, at least for now, I welcome chatter. Students don’t mind asking permission to leave the room, and their attention spans might actually have improved. Perhaps they have grown a little sick of electronic communication. I hardly see them trying to look down at their phones during class. I think we have all gained a better appreciation for human interaction. 

Close contact and then quarantine

Hopefully, we will be able to stay in-person for the rest of the school year and beyond. Everyone seems to be preparing themselves, mentally and otherwise, for a sudden change in course. But in the meantime, we read things, talk about them and write about them. They really seem, to me, less distracted.

One student looks up from a story we are reading and asks what a “balmy evening” is. 

And I do what teachers do – answer with my own question: “What is a balm?” 

No one is sure, so I ask, “What’s lip balm for?” 

Someone says it’s to grease up your lips. Someone else asks whether balmy means greasy. Then someone figures it out and I’m so excited. And that’s when the classroom phone rings and it’s the office telling me one of my students is going home. A minute later, another student. Four in all during one class, nine altogether. 

Before the school day is over, my inbox fills with emails from them. They don't want to fall behind while they are quarantined. 

I want to know why, if I was in contact with these students, I have not been informed directly about the exposure. I am told that there was one student with a positive COVID-19 test and that those being quarantined all sat in proximity without masks during lunch. 

So I’m back to defining terms. While I was helping students figure out what a "balmy evening" is, other people were deciding the definition of "close contact."

I guess a school district has to draw the line somewhere, logical or not. Otherwise, one positive test might as well close the whole school, and that’s the last thing any of us want. But I do want to know why we aren’t drawing the line at "Are the students vaccinated?" 

Vaccine mandates are not oppression  

This is a high school. Our youngest students are 13 going on 14. They are all eligible for a shot that would make us safer, but we have no idea how many of them have gotten it. 

One nearby school district has mandated the vaccine for all students eligible to receive it. Culver City, which I traverse every day on my way to work, rarely distinguishes itself much from Los Angeles, which surrounds it. So I am little surprised that it is the trailblazer on this. 

Actually, I’m surprised and not a little disappointed that every school district doesn't require the vaccine for everyone who sets foot on our campuses and is old enough to get one. 

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I support this even if it wouldn't allow us to unmask. At least it would lessen the possibility of any of us getting sick, or of an outbreak severe enough to close the building again and bring back the insufficiencies of online-only learning. 

I have heard the arguments against vaccine mandates. We all have. They aren’t worth repeating. They are not based on science or logic – other than the science of emotional manipulation and the logic of politics. 

I will say this much. There are grotesque violations of human freedom in our country but they have nothing to do with vaccines or masks. If we want to oppose oppression, start with civil asset forfeiture, stop and frisk, or the cash bail system. Throw in government and corporate surveillance. 

What could be more oppressive than needing a ventilator to breathe?   

Call me selfish, but I want to remain teaching in my classroom. I want to see students in person every day. I want to hear their collective laughter and be able to gauge their level of interest – or boredom – by looking at them. 

Perhaps having nearly a dozen students required to quarantine after just one day of school will inspire those unvaccinated to get poked. Perhaps. 

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But since when have we elevated human judgment above science? 

I guess it’s nothing new. From Galileo to Einstein, scientists and their revelations have aroused the wrath of the ignorant and incited persecution and protest. In 2011, Philip Contos participated in an annual motorcycle ride to protest the New York state helmet mandate. The bare-headed biker crashed and died of head injuries. I find no satisfaction in the irony that is this poor man’s legacy, but I will say that at least his bad judgment didn’t lead to the closing of a school, or the failing of a hospital, or the suffocation deaths of 100 strangers. 

Larry Strauss (@LarryStrauss) is a high school English teacher and retired basketball coach in South Los Angeles. A member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors, he is the author of more than a dozen books, most recently "Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher" and, on audio, "Now's the Time" (narrated by Kim Fields).