I’ve spoken with hundreds of students and dozens of teachers from many schools. So this is anecdotal based on interviews…
School district policies were reactionary in large part. Some schools were all paper based. Some were all digital. Some students didn’t have reliable internet. And it took months to get anything figured out, because in many situations the bosses had no idea what to do. However, schools with leadership who could take assertive steps to say “this is our path for the next six months” tended to be less stressful working environments.
Now, what about attendance. Again it depended on the district. Still does. Most schools classify infectious disease absences as uncounted absences, which don’t show up on the transcript. But what about edge cases? If a parent is worried about infection, then what? If a sibling has a fever but doesn’t get tested, then what? If a student is absent but only on quiz or test days, do you fail them for those quizzes and tests, even though the reason given would ordinarily let them retake the quiz or test, or not have it included in the grade? … And absence count might matter for university, or maybe not, but we didn’t know back then so we had to assume it did. And what if a student misses all the term tests? Can you give them a grade at all? … These questions could be answered by the department, school administration, or district. And yet at many places they were often left up to individual teachers. In any case, there is no clear notion of “fair” if you consider all the edge cases.
Overwork is even easier to see. Teachers had to get students to fill out health forms, and collect them, and maybe call parents who didn’t. Teachers were running thermal image cameras, and disinfecting things. In many districts, lessons were hybrid, and teachers were running all the tech for that. I could go on, but this should be enough to explain the general situation that thousands of teachers faced.
In other words, please talk to other teachers in other school districts in Japan. :-)