She is back in the classroom: First Lady Jill Biden has been teaching English at college again this week. In doing so, it also plays an important role model role for the Biden government.
After a year of distance learning, US First Lady Jill Biden returned to the classroom on Tuesday. According to the Washington Post, she will be teaching essay writing classes two days a week at Northern Virginia Community College near Washington. She had already worked there when her husband Joe Biden was Vice President under Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017.
Jill Biden is the first first lady to pursue a career of her own in addition to her public duties. With her return to college, she is also reaffirming her husband’s promise to bring American students back into the classroom safely – even if the Delta variant is currently on the rise in the USA.
“An inspiration for women everywhere”
Since moving into the White House, Jill Biden has used her role as first lady to campaign for schools to reopen. She particularly emphasized the work of those school districts that remained open during the pandemic and teach the children with a hybrid model. The Northern Virginia Community College also uses this model, according to which at least half of the semester must be classroom-based. In addition, all students are required to wear masks and keep their distance from one another.
Jill Biden herself tends to keep a low profile about her professional life. There was also no comment from the White House on her first day back in college. “I can attest that Jill teaches and I think it can be an inspiration to women everywhere, and a message that they can have their own careers no matter what their spouse does,” wrote Jimmie McClellan, dean of the Humanities and Biden’s supervisor at Northern Virginia Community College in response to a request from the New York Times. “Each spotlight should illuminate what it is doing off campus,” he wrote. “Here she should have her rest.”
“Must come together to keep our schools open”
It is not the first time that the first lady has played an important role model role. When the second wave of corona struck the United States in the spring, she traveled across the country for her husband’s government to convince citizens to wear masks and get vaccinated. Biden warned against politicizing the pandemic, especially in conservative US states such as Tennessee, Mississippi, Michigan and Alabama. “When we return to our classrooms this fall, we must all come together to keep our schools safe and open,” she wrote in one last week. “We have to remember that our enemy is the virus, not the other.”
But the timing for the planned school openings of the Biden government could hardly be worse. The delta variant, which is spreading massively, overshadows the relaxed summer mood with 140,000 new infections every day and hospitals that have long been working at the limit again. At the same time, the vaccination campaign is making very slow progress, despite many incentives. So far, only 53.4 percent of the population have been fully vaccinated. In addition, children under the age of 12 cannot yet receive the vaccination.
US President Joe Biden has promised to send the children back to school in the fall – and many have already returned to the classrooms. The question is how long this will last.
Sources: “”, “”, with AFP
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