Those who follow this blog or know me in any way know that I am in favor of reflection. I'm a big believer in John Dewey's statement, "We don't learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience." He said this in a time before experiences came at you as quickly as they do now, so taking intentional time to think about what you have learned from an experience and put it in perspective is not only wise, but critical. Your brain simply needs the time to process it all. That's why this blog exists. You are along for the ride while I engage in reflection.
If there's anything that has been moving fast and needs reflection, it is the pandemic. It has come at us in the form of a pretty terrible trilogy - the spring and summer lockdowns of 2020, the hybrid year, and the one that was supposed to be better. Each of them had its own challenges and lessons, so I wanted to spend some time thinking about them, hopefully in hindsight.
Spring and Summer 2020 - The first person who suggested lockdown to me was a student. While our administration had a lot of foresight and had begun discussing the what-ifs, I had not yet heard about it. When this student said, "Do you think they'll close schools?" my response was, "Schools don't close." Well, little did I know that school buildings would, in fact, close and remain closed for quite some time. We got the email on Saturday, March 14, and had two days of planning on the 16th and 17th. I then proceeded to teach every class I had from March 18 through the end of May in a virtual environment from my house. I wrote extensively about this back then, so if you care about the details, you can go back in the archives and read about that. What I want to reflect on here is the big lesson of that time.
It's this. We can do things we didn't imagine. When I began my career, if you had told me that 22 years later, I would teach students who were at their house from my house, I would have suggested you get some professional help. If you had told me that on March 1, 2020, I would have done the same. We learned so much so quickly. We made mistakes, but we adapted. I learned that, while many say that grades don't motivate students, not having grades certainly de-motivated them. I learned that non-verbal communication is even more important than I realized, especially from students to teachers. I learned that the neurotransmitters we get from physical contact are important to a healthy brain. I learned that my administrators are the best people to be led by in a crisis (actually, I was reminded of that because I already knew it). I am grateful that we had the ability to keep school going, but I hope we never have to do it again.
I included the summer here because it wasn't really summer. We spent most of it reckoning with the aftermath of George Floyd's death and preparing for the return to school. It is hard to separate it from the spring because we were still mostly in lockdown.
Hybrid Year - "So, how was it?" It seems like a casual question. The answer is anything but casual. It's too much to talk about with someone who didn't do it. The answer I finally came up with was, "It's the hardest thing I've ever done for that long." That answer is honest, but it doesn't require me to go into detail about how difficult it was to attempt to teach students in my classroom and online simultaneously, to know kids stayed home to cheat on tests and be able to do little about it, to spend weekends recreating everything I had used for two decades of teaching in digital form, to know that no one was getting my best and that working harder (even if that were possible) wouldn't solve that because split focus is inherently not a good model. Don't get me wrong. It was the right thing to do. We had students who needed to stay home because they were immunocompromised or because they lived with an elderly family member or because they had been exposed and were required to quarantine. For all the focus people have put on masks, that what actually the least difficult part of the 2020-2021 school year.
It's harder to find what I learned from that year because my brain wants to block so much of it out. I'll start with this. The kids were incredibly kind and patient with teachers who were figuring out how to deal with technology in another new way (it was different than the lockdown because you had to also show it to the kids in the room with you). They helped out when the internet suddenly went down or I got feedback from having too many microphones on at once or when I forgot to take the iPad outside for a demonstration. I may always feel more connected to the kids I had that year because we did it together. I also learned (again, was reminded of what I already knew) how amazing my co-workers are. People stepped in to cover duties when someone had to leave early even though we all had more duties than ever. If they figured out a better way to do something, they shared it with others. They sent encouraging messages. They held virtual meetings with students and their parents since parents couldn't come in. My hope is that any student we had that year knows that they are valued and loved by their teachers because it was the only reason we would have put ourselves through that experience.
By the way, the pandemic wasn't the only difficulty of that year. How do you help kids process a contested election, role models who scream at others, and an insurrection at the Capitol (while we were virtual for the week)? The pandemic was not the only hard part of the year.
The Year That Should Have Been Easier - After the vaccine rollout in the spring, we were living well in the summer. We went places again. We were mostly unmasked. We got some actual rest. We thought we would return to a pretty normal school year. Then, the Delta variant happened. We rightly returned masked, but while the year before it had been a non-issue, it was now a daily battle. If a word cloud were to be made of my speaking for the first three quarters of the year, the biggest words by far would be "Mask Up." Students have experienced social-emotional developmental effects, and that was a lot to deal with because I know how to teach the grades I have experience with, which wasn't how they were presenting. When the Omiron wave happened, it was like being back in hybrid. Thankfully, it was pretty short, but it was crazy. We also had grief to deal with because so many of us knew someone who died or struggled greatly with Covid. People have changed their worldview, and they have become more dramatic and less tolerant of anyone whose view is even a little different from theirs. (Again, the pandemic isn't the only thing to deal with. The Russian aggression in Ukraine and mass shootings are difficult to navigate with students as well.) In early February, someone said that the past two months had been the most difficult of the entire pandemic, and I think they were right. We had as much to deal with but with less fuel in the tank.
I want a name for what teachers are experiencing. I don't think it is PTSD. For one thing, it is a response to chronic stress, but also, it isn't the same as what police officers and military veterans experience. Last year was hard, but I didn't see someone die. So, I don't think it is PTSD, but it ain't nothing. It is definitely something. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to put a name on it.
It may be too early for me to know what I've learned from this year. Perhaps, it was that, with intentional effort, students can progress faster than we think. I didn't want to send my 8th graders up to 9th grade as far behind as they were when I got them (socially - academically, they seemed okay), so I and my fellow 8th-grade teachers did a lot more behavior training and character discussions and mediating arguments than we have ever done in other years. While they didn't end up where I hoped, they made remarkable progress. I'll have to mull a bit longer through the summer on what else this year that should have been better taught me.
Here's hoping for something resembling normal for next year.
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