Amidst a world that is still battling coronavirus, Dave Grohl has penned an op-ed in defense of teachers who await for schools to reopen.

Throughout lockdown, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has been doing a bit of writing on the side, telling stories from his career in rock, as well as penning opinionated editorials for The Atlantic.

His most recent editorial stems from a debate sparking in the United States: is it a good idea to open schools in August amidst a pandemic that is ever-growing, with tens of thousands of new cases added each day?

Grohl starts his editorial by mentioning he was a “terrible student,” who always “waited for the final bell to ring so that I could be released from the confines of my stuffy, windowless classroom and run home to my guitar.”

Noting that he’s a high-school dropout, he queries “you would imagine that the current debate surrounding the reopening of schools wouldn’t register so much as a blip on my rock-and-roll radar, right? Wrong.”

Apparently, Grohl’s mother was a public-school teacher, and between juggling being a single mother of two, taking care of the home, and being a school teacher, she had to “supplement her meager $35,000 annual salary” by working at Bloomingdale’s, Servpro, and as a soccer coach, as well as a prep teacher for SAT and GED.

Dave Grohl and his mother
Dave Grohl and his mother – Andreas Neumann/Supplied

“She helped generations of children learn how to learn, and, like most other teachers, exhibited a selfless concern for others. Though I was never her student, she will forever be my favorite teacher.”

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Dave Grohl writes that one thing he noticed from his mother being a public-school teacher is that “it takes a certain kind of person to devote their life to this difficult and often-thankless job.”

With the U.S. mass amounts of coronavirus cases, many citizens are wondering what school will look like come August (when the school year begins for U.S. students), and how some politicians are disregarding children’s well-being.

“Teachers are also confronted with a whole new set of dilemmas that most people would not consider. ‘There’s so much more to be addressed than just opening the doors and sending them back home,’ my mother tells me over the phone.”

Based on his mother’s 35 years of experience in the school system, Dave Grohl notes that one of her concerns stems from knowing that “most schools already struggle from a lack of resources” and queries how school systems “could they possibly afford the mountain of safety measures that will need to be in place.”

When weighing out what his mother would do amongst the pandemic, he imagined “if my mother were now forced to return to a stuffy, windowless classroom. What would we learn from that lesson? When I ask what she would do, my mother replies, ‘Remote learning for the time being.'”

With remote learning taking on throughout the world, Grohl admits that it “comes with more than a few of its own complications, especially for working-class and single parents who are dealing with the logistical problem of balancing jobs with children at home.

“Uneven availability of teaching materials and online access, technical snafus, and a lack of socialization all make for a less-than-ideal learning experience. But most important, remote setups overseen by caretakers, with a teacher on the other end doing their best to educate distracted kids who prefer screens used for games, not math, make it perfectly clear that not everyone with a laptop and a dry-erase board is cut out to be a teacher.

“Remote learning is an inconvenient and hopefully temporary solution. But as much as Donald Trump’s conductor-less orchestra would love to see the country prematurely open schools in the name of rosy optics (ask a science teacher what they think about White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s comment that “science should not stand in the way”), it would be foolish to do so at the expense of our children, teachers, and schools.”

So, how would we handle things instead? Grohl continues, stating that “every teacher has a ‘plan’,” because “that’s what teachers do: They provide you with the necessary tools to survive.”

“America’s teachers are caught in a trap, set by indecisive and conflicting sectors of failed leadership that have never been in their position and can’t possibly relate to the unique challenges they face,” he writes.

“I wouldn’t trust the U.S. secretary of percussion to tell me how to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if they had never sat behind a drum set, so why should any teacher trust Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to tell them how to teach, without her ever having sat at the head of a class?

“Until you have spent countless days in a classroom devoting your time and energy to becoming that lifelong mentor to generations of otherwise disengaged students, you must listen to those who have. Teachers want to teach, not die, and we should support and protect them like the national treasures that they are. For without them, where would we be?

“May we show these tireless altruists a little altruism in return. I would for my favorite teacher. Wouldn’t you?”

Check out Dave Grohl in Foo Fighters:

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