> Hasn't happened, and the numbers show that would be rare.
Okay, but it has happened to other people, and even if it is a rare occurrence, it can throw an entire school district off axis. That's been shown to be true even if it hasn't happened in your wife's particular school.
> Nope, didn't say that. Strawman.
What you said was "They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff". So now you're telling me now you are open to other possibilities. For instance the possibility that they don't have faculty/staff because sick people are being quarantined, or that many teachers are retiring and not being replaced?
> By allowing staff that's not actually sick to teach, therefore you're not loading extra burden on fewer teachers.
Okay, but what about in the cases where teachers are too sick to teach? Or when they have to take care of others who are sick?
> School isn't for teachers, it's for educating kids to be productive members of society. Any teacher worth their salt knows this.
School isn't for teachers, but you still need teachers to teach school. And if things aren't good for teachers, you're not going to be able to hire new ones. This is the very attitude that is causing so many to leave the field or avoid it entirely. Any teacher worth their salt also knows their worth, and they know when they're being exploited and disrespected.
> You're right, so they need to start acting like it
Well they have been acting like it for a very long time throughout this pandemic. Teachers have been teaching in person all year. They have actually died in service of their discipline and the nation due to this diseases despite the fact that you don't know any personally. They have done so at great cost to themselves financially, emotionally, and mentally while around them others, who are neither essential nor workers, have profited massively. What they are asking for now is to be supported and listened to, and not be called lazy, unpatriotic, un-American, traitors who deserve to be fired.
> The entire problem here is that you're basing your stance off of false assumptions.
I'm not basing my stance off of assumptions, I'm basing it off of experience. I am a teacher and what you say about students is just plain wrong. Maybe for small children it's true, but the kids I teach are teenagers and they spread covid just fine. The first week in class there was a massive outbreak as students mixed together after summer break -- over 250 cases were recorded. Some people got very sick. We went remote for a week, cases died down, and then we were back in the classroom. The rest of the semester went on uneventful.
This only worked because we had proper precautions. We had a vaccination mandate with 90% compliance. We had mandatory masks, mandatory and available testing, and mandatory quarantine. These are the kinds of measures that are nonstarters at public schools, but experience has shown they are needed to keep things open and running and teachers happy. Teachers were giving the requested tools, and they got the job done. In other cases teachers are being disrespected, minimized, even demonized, and in those cases teachers aren't getting the job done, because they can't.
Yes it's true that young children don't spread it according to the statistics. That's a relief! But I don't know how many times it needs to be said that children are not the only human beings in a school community, and the school is not a closed system. When community spread is as high as it is right now, it really doesn't matter how much children do or don't spread Covid!
> You know what the biggest burden my wife had was during all of this? Creating multiple lesson plans
Very true, I had that same problem! Based on my experience, I think there are approximately 0 teachers I know who would prefer teaching online to teaching in the classroom -- teaching to children in person is the entire joy of the profession. Without that, it's really not that rewarding of a job. But that's another issue of a lack of administrative support for teachers. Technology support staff could have been hired to help essential teaching workers through this time, but that never happened.