This isn't my usual blogging day, but there are kids taking a Spanish exam in my classroom, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings to process. This may come out as verbal salad because everything is a jumble in my head.
A year ago today, I check out of school in a virtual meeting with my principal. We talked about how hard virtual learning had been but how good we felt about having been successful at it. We brainstormed a couple of the procedures we might implement this year (about 1% of what we actually did).
Summer wasn't really summer in the normal sense. With so much shut down, I couldn't really accomplish the goals I normally would. I usually read a lot, but I found virtual instruction had taken a toll on my eyes, and the lack of oxytocin my brain experienced from lack of physical touch had caused some cognitive slowness and shortened attention span. We had several virtual meetings related to the start of the school year and a few around responding to racial reconciliation in a Godly way.
On August 3, teachers returned to the school building. Every start of a new school year is exhausting, but this was, as you can imagine, very different. Instead of the entire staff meeting together, I spent several days seeing only my own department. Each department was on a Google call with the rest of the departments. We heard from our counselor, our nurse, and our IT team about Covid specific things in addition to all of the regular start of school stuff. We found out just how many duties were added to our regular slate. To space students properly, we had to double the number of teachers on lunch duty. Initially, we posted adults by the thermal scanners (a duty we were able to eliminate once it became a habit). We relearned some of the tools we had been using in virtual learning because it is different when you also need the kids in the room with you to see it. We brainstormed how to keep virtual students informed without overwhelming them. We glued hundreds of sheets of plexiglass down to tables and rearranged our classrooms six or seven times to maximize spacing without making it impossible for kids to see. We made orientation videos for parents because we couldn't have the normal meet and greet night. This was all in the week before the kids showed up on campus. I've spent the last few years learning a lot about the brain, and that week, I learned that cognitive load is real, but it was higher than I had previously thought because we absorbed more in that week than I sometimes have to absorb in a year.
During that week, I overheard a number of conversations about how long we might be able to stay in person. I heard some estimate that we would be back home in a couple of weeks and one person said to me, "You think we'll get at least a day with them, right?" Some thought we would have to toggle back and forth, doing two-week quarantines here and there. While I was more optimistic that the protocols would work if we just followed them, even I wouldn't have predicted that I would be sitting here on May 27th, having only had 8 class days fully virtual (which was planned to give people a chance to quarantine from Christmas traveling). If you don't count December, we had remarkably low numbers. While we have had to quarantine individuals, groups, or classes, the school was only forced into a fully virtual situation once. We had our midterm exams in a fully virtual setting.
For all the generational talk about entitlement and selfishness, what I have observed this year is kids who adapted well, mostly complied with regulations, cared about each other and their teachers. The adults who have complained most about teenage entitlement in the last few years were the ones stomping their feet about their rights. The ones who have called the generation after them snowflakes were the primary ones claiming a mask would kill them. Kids understood, for the most part, when I had to change something because the original plan wasn't working. When tech sometimes failed, they were the ones figuring out the workaround that would make things possible. I don't know how this year will shape this generation's future, but I do know they learned adaptability in a big way.
I'm not saying the kids did everything perfectly. About halfway through the year, some of them definitely started playing games, deciding they just wouldn't attend school on Tuesdays or they would stay home on test days or they would join a class from the car while they were driving to the beach. Second semester's chaos was definitely less manageable than first semester precisely because of their adaptability. This way of life had become normal for them, so they figured out how to work within it.
As hard as this year was, I really had great students that I could enjoy. I told them all this week that I couldn't imagine how much harder this year would have been if I had had classes full of trouble makers or mean kid cliques or those who just want to fight getting educated. Instead, I had kids who enjoyed learning or made it enjoyable for themselves and each other. I have class mascots, Gertrude the carrot and Gus the lemur, who are entirely student creations. I have videos of kids being silly while personifying chemical elements. I have laughed with them a lot and gotten notes of encouragement from them. Don't tell me you can't see people smile behind masks; the yearbook has photographic evidence to the contrary.
The yearbook was an interesting experience this year. Without Grandparents' Day, a Homecoming dance, Hoops for Hope, and other normal events, we had to come up with ideas for replacement pages. We had to focus on covering people, not events. While our goal is always to cover people, it has always been through events, so that was a shift. Chorus and band couldn't have concerts, so those photographs were out. Athletic seasons were delayed. Photo tagging is a challenge when people are wearing masks (and facial recognition software surely doesn't work well). I am thrilled with the results of this year's yearbook. I think it would be one of our best in a normal year, but it was an exhausting feat to get done.
As I say all of this, I am aware of how I blessed I was to be in the position I was in. I am in a school with great technology, supportive administration and parents, and the money to implement everything that needed to be implemented to return to school safely. I know that if I had been in a fully virtual situation for this school year, I might not have survived with my sanity (living alone during lockdown was no joke). I know there are teachers who had to deal with administrators who did not care how hard this was for them while mine were praying for me on a daily basis. I know my students won't be struggling with the amount of learning loss others have had to experience.
Here I sit on the day that felt like it would never come. I feel a decade older today than I did when I checked out a year ago. Perhaps, it is because, from an experience standpoint, my brain absorbed the equivalent of another nine years of information, events, conversations, and experiences than it would in a normal year. (I haven't even mentioned all of the non-school-related things that happened this year - like a contested election and invasion of the US Capitol). I hope that when things return to some level of normal, there might be nine extra years of wisdom as well, but it is going to take time this summer for my brain to mush all of this around and make meaning of it in order to turn it to wisdom.
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