"It Feels Like There's No Winning": One Teacher on the Struggles of This School Year

Christopher Pinto is a high school math teacher at the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District outside of Houston. His school only decided to take on a hybrid model--both online and classroom education--less than a week before the fall semester started, even though it had gone fully remote in the spring. Thus, families got to choose between in-person learning and virtual, but teachers were expected to show up unless they had health issues. Pinto is immunocompromised--he has Type 1 diabetes--and applied to get a medical waiver so he could teach remotely, but he was denied. He still had some hope that the school's hybrid approach would suit him better, since remote learning was so isolating, but it's not normal at all.