My wife is a high school math teacher and I am writing this without her knowledge because I know how much she cares about the job of educating and how much she loves math and sharing it with students.

She wakes up at 5:30am to go on a walk, clear her head, and get ready for the day. By 7am she is on her computer making sure everything is ready for the day technology wise. She teaches for 1.25-1.5 hours at a time, takes a 10 minute break and repeats that 2-3x depending on the day. Then she has "office" hours for 2-3 hours where she answers questions from students. She has to be available during that time, even if no one shows up. If there is no one asking questions she grades assignments, plans for the next few units, and does administrative type tasks. Then she typically has a few district or school meetings and by then it is 5pm and I can tell she is physically tired.

During class maybe 2 or 3 students have their cameras on and if she's lucky one of them is using their mic. This means she is teaching a lesson and trying to read comments at the same time. She can't compel the students to turn their camera or mic on so that's just the way it is.

She usually spends a chunk of class helping with technical issues because students are using different technology, some are on phones making matters even more complicated. She's her own IT support.

We usually eat dinner and she's back to prepping lessons. All of her material that she uses during a normal year is a mix of analog and digital, she has to collate all of that into a digital copy now and make sure she can get the math to work correctly in the different tools that the district is mandating.

The technology that the district gave teachers (and students) is not great and we ended up buying my wife an iPad and Apple Pencil so that she could give live notes in the teaching sessions. She works from her personal laptop because the Chromebook she was issued can't handle some of the more complex math equations and stream her face and notes at the same time.

By the end of the evening she is usually finishing up grading assignments and then manually putting them into the gradebook because PPS did not spring for the integration between the assessment software and the digital gradebook. There's 2 hours gone in an evening just moving data...

I can tell she is frustrated. Maybe this post is more for me as I am frustrated for her. My job has always been remote and while I haven't been given the best technology the understanding is that if there is something I need (including just time) I will get it so that I can do my job better. She's tired. I'm tired. And the way things are going now, I can't see her sticking with it into the next semester.

And I don't want to discount what parents and students are going through right now. They've been tossed into this expecting to know the technology and expect there to be content presented. What they don't know is that the district has done very little to prepare or equip teachers and even less to equip students.