All week, I have been seeing and posting "on this day, two years ago" memories. Considering it was the biggest transition in any of our lifetimes, it seems appropriate to use my blog to reflect on the past two years. I'm not going in with any particular point in mind, so this will likely be long and rambling and will likely not reach a conclusion. I'm just pondering.
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"What's the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic?" was the first Covid related question I got from a student. Over the next several weeks, I got a lot more questions, most of which I had no answer for. When one of them asked if I thought schools would be closed, I laughed out loud. "Schools don't close," I said. "They're schools." A few days later, I was sitting in a meeting in which our principal said that we were going to start making plans in case school needed to move into a virtual environment. We made plans that we couldn't believe would be needed, but Italy was being absolutely ravaged by Covid19, and no one wanted to be caught off guard.
On Saturday, March 13, the email went out from our head of school. We were going virtual. We had two teacher workdays for planning because not one of us had ever taught a virtual lesson. Our IT department worked round the clock to create events for each and every class with lists of students in Google Hangout because they wanted everyone to just click on the calendar time without the worry of being in the wrong class. Teachers collaborated on ideas and spent our last time together, much of it crying.
One of the things I remember was how we observed each other's coping mechanisms. Planners made list after list. Feelers checked on each other. One of our teachers sent a million memes. We were all exerting whatever control we felt we could because the situation was completely outside of our control. While we were focused on school, other closings began happening as well. Governors were closing bars and restaurants (and eventually nearly everything); politicians on the other side of those governors publically criticized those decisions. For them, there were two sides, safety or the economy, but we know it is much more complicated than that.
On March 18 and 19, I taught my first virtual lessons. I did it from my classroom because they allowed us to do that for the first few days in case we needed help with tech issues. That's not why I did it, though. I did it because I live alone, and I wanted to keep seeing people for as long as I could. I know enough about the brain to know that four weeks (which was the plan at the time) of being completely isolated isn't good for my brain. Even when I did start teaching from home, I made my bed, continued dressing as if I were at school, and kept a pretty tight schedule. If I hadn't done those things, I'm not sure where my brain would be today. I am still recovering from the effects of oxytocin deprivation even with those things, so I can't imagine where I would be if I hadn't done those brain-healthy activities.
Those first few days went quite well) so much so that short-sighted people decided this should be the future of teaching as though it represented normal virtual classes). The parents at GRACE were incredibly supportive. I got emails and notes on a near-daily basis from them, telling them how much they loved us and were praying for us. Culturally, teachers were being worshipped at almost the same level as nurses. Social media was filled with love for educators from parents who were trying to help their kids with remote schooling. That lasted about a month before the inevitable whiplash of parents going online to criticize everything their child's teacher did (I am NOT talking about GRACE parents, who continued to be as supportive as they had ever been and still are). As Easter approached, it became clear that this was going to last longer than we anticipated, and we planned for the month after spring break. I just kept hoping to have May with my students, not for the academics, but for the closure.
That was not to be, however. When it was finally announced that school buildings would remain closed for the rest of the spring, I went for an hour-long walk and cried. I asked my students to make sure at least some of them had their cameras on because I couldn't bear the rest of the year teaching avatars instead of students. Every school in America made plans for graduation. Some were on Zoom, some drive-through diploma pick-ups, and some found it too complicated to do anything. At GRACE, we held 57 individual graduations. It was the most beautiful experience that I hope never to have again, and I believe our students felt valued and loved.
The summer of 2020 should have been a time to recover from what we had just experienced, but just as it was starting, Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and there was an innate need to respond, whether through attending a protest or making donations to racial justice organizations or just simple internal examination of our own hearts. It was good and necessary to do these things, but it meant that summer was anything but a time of mental rest.
In August of 2020, many schools remained virtual, but I returned to teach in my school building. It was overwhelming finding out how much we would have to do to make this work. The masks and distancing of plexiglass-divided desks were the most obvious and talked about, but they are such a small part of the changes that happened. Distancing affected EVERY practice a school has from arrival to exit. We had walk-through temperature scanners, but the kids who got dropped off early had to come in through a different door and were manually scanned. They had to go directly to their classrooms because our prior practice of keeping them in the cafeteria until 15 minutes before school started wasn't appropriate for distancing. Lunch was socially distanced, which meant twice as many people had to be on duty to cover all of the areas we were putting them in. We were operating on a hybrid model, so the first thing I did each day was to log into an iPad as well as my laptop and make sure the correct combinations of muting and microphones were operating. I attended virtual faculty and prayer meetings as I had been doing from home in the spring. Yearbook planning was done in pencil because, at that time, we didn't know if there would be athletics, and many of the events we have always covered were not to be. We couldn't have chapel in any normal way because there wasn't room to distance them. If I took my students into the lab or outside for a demonstration, I had to make a plan for the at-home students. Even having a conference with a parent meant a virtual meeting (or one in which we sat outside to talk in person). Every minute of the day required 100% of my brain to make decisions in which I had no experience from which to draw wisdom, and it is impossible to explain to anyone who didn't do it. The best I can do is ask you to imagine what it would be like to do your job twice simultaneously, and it's not possible to imagine that, so it doesn't work.
Again, we got a lot of support from our administration and parents, but a model of split-focus is never going to be the best way to educate kids, and it was emotionally difficult to know that we couldn't make it better by working harder. When we held a socially distanced, masked, but in-person graduation, we felt so good about what we had done, and the parents applauded us on the way out the door.
We were living the high life in the summer. As a vaccinated person, I could ditch the mask in most places. I read a lot to try to recover my brain. I made a lot of videos to aid my teaching this year. We came back to a school without plexiglass and thought this year would be easy compared to last year. And then, Delta happened. I began the first day of the school year grieving the loss of a former student but shoving that grief down in order to get through the day. (You can't introduce yourself to your new students as a weepy person.) While we weren't distancing like we had been last year, we were still masked. Unlike last year, though, when the students wore them well and without much objection, this year, masking became a constant battle. During the Omicron wave, it felt very much like last year as we had so many quarantining that we were basically back in hybrid. There are ways in which this winter was harder than last year.
The only good part of how transmissive Omicron was was that the wave passed quickly. As numbers fell rapidly, we became mask optional. That has helped us feel more normal. I checked the numbers one day last week, and it is encouraging. It does feel a bit like we are on the other side of this thing. I know there will be ups and downs and new variants, but I don't live with the thought that we could shut down tomorrow anymore like I did a few times in the last two years. This isn't over for educators. We will spend a number of years dealing with the effects of kids being at home during their social development and re-establishing what benchmarks should be expected at each grade level. All of that will be hard, but none of it will be as hard as the last two years have been.
Well, I told you I would not likely land at a conclusion, and I haven't. I'm not sure there is one to draw. Maybe, someday, when I am looking back on this as history, I'll be able to do that.
