The first time I heard the suggestion of closing school was from a senior in my video editing class. It was mid-February. "Miss Hawks, do you think they'll close schools because of this virus?" My response was remarkably short sighted - "No, we don't close schools. How would that even happen."
A few days later, in a faculty meeting, my head of school said, "On Wednesday, we are going to have a 'just in case' meeting. We need to figure out what we will do in the event that we have to switch to remote learning for a few weeks. So come to this meeting with thoughts about what you would need to take home and what the kids would need to have at home." Little did I know that the administration and the IT department had been talking about this for several days, deciding whether we would use Zoom or Google Meet and how to load everyone's class schedules in the calendar so all the student had to do was click on the link.
Two and a half weeks after that "just in case" meeting, I was in a "this is happening soon, but we don't know how soon" meeting. It turned out soon was the following day. Our very forward thinking administration filled with aggressive planners were shown to be wise indeed. March 13, 2020 is the day the world stopped. It was the day we got the email that we would be going into a virtual learning environment immediately. And, of course in the next few days, everything else started shutting down as well.
As massive life transitions go, I have to say this one went pretty smoothly - for us at GRACE. Because they had been thinking about it already, the IT department started loading in class schedules immediately. Teachers were allowed to come to the building for planning for two days and could do their virtual teaching from their classroom if they wished for the rest of that week. I opted for this because I wanted to be near the IT department if I ran into any issues and wasn't sure if the wifi I had at home was robust enough. After all, I hadn't chosen it with large amounts of streaming data in mind. More importantly, I knew it would be the last time I would see people for a month (it turned out to be much longer than that, but at the time, we had planned for a return after Easter break, four weeks later) because I live alone. I knew that was going to be hard for me, so I stayed at the school building for as long as they allowed.
So, we only lost two instructional days before teaching our first virtual classes on March 17, 2020. As four weeks became six and six became the remainder of the semester, we checked in with each other every day to make sure things were going as well as they could, for emotional connection, and for prayer with each other. Students were remarkably adaptable and helpful. Parents sent me notes and emails of support (some even invited me to their homes for dinner because their child was worried about my being alone - which kind of misunderstood the point of what we were doing but was still very kind).
Being a single person who lives alone during this time was rough. My parents came over once a week, which was likely a violation, but I would have been useless to everyone if I had lost my marbles from isolation. We didn't touch each other at all. They just came over on Sundays and had lunch. I had no physical touch from another human being for 10 weeks. I don't know all the complexities of oxytocin, but I do know that having none of it did some screwy things to my brain that took a couple of years to recover from. One evening, about 5 weeks in, I was watching TV and looked down at my hands to find that my right hand was patting my left hand. I don't know how long it had been happening or if it was even the first time I had done that, but my body knew it needed something it wasn't getting.
Like all schools, we our administration had to plan for end-of-year activities, like giving kids things from their lockers, collecting textbooks and athletic uniforms, and handing out yearbooks. Our graduation was perhaps the best in America. I wrote about it here if you would like to read about it.
The summer was hardly one of rest, although as teachers, we got more rest than our poor administrators because they had to do all of the planning for the return. We had multiple online meetings, not only about how to deal with spacing but also about racial reconciliation in the wake of George Floyd. We made plans for how to teach in a way that would be equitable for those who would choose to stay home and those in front of us. It was hard to know what the correct decisions were as there was no experience on which we could rely to show us the way. My most common sentence as we returned was, "We're going to try this. If it works, we'll keep doing it. If not, we'll try something else."
I can't write much about the hybrid year. I'm still a little too overwhelmed by how hard it was to properly convey it. It's kind of a "you had to be there to understand" situation. We were working at 100% of our capacity every single day, and then there were days that required more, so we were living in an energy deficit. I was so grateful to be back at school because I couldn't have handled any more alone time, but it was still exhausting to face spacing, cleaning, masks, temperature scanners, plexiglass, and uncertainty every single day in addition to the normal challenges of teaching middle and high school. (I haven't even mentioned that we had a contentious election and an attack on the Capitol during this time.) Thank God we had each other, supportive leadership, and cooperative kids and parents. I can't imagine what people were going through in places that didn't have all of that. One of the top five moments of my entire life was at the end of graduation that year when faculty and staff received a standing ovation from the parents of our kids as we walked into the aisle for the recessional. It took a moment to figure out what was happening, and then I felt all the feelings there are. It was amazing.
When we took a photo together at the end of the year in our "We Did It" t-shirts, we knew it wasn't really over, but we were proud to have gotten through the most difficult year of our careers and had hope for the recovery.
I divide Covid into three parts - the virtual spring, the horrible hybrid, and the year that was supposed to be better (but wasn't). When the hybrid year ended, most teachers and many students were vaccinated. We spent the summer living footloose and fancy free. Just as school was about to start back, the Delta wave hit, so we returned masked. We had too; the numbers were just too high for anything else, and thanks to Omicron, we remained masked until Presidents' Day weekend. We had some protocols around who could be virtual, so it wasn't as pervasive as the previous year, but there was still a lot of it. We were in hybrid-lite, but the kids were done with it. They had been super cooperative with them the first year; I would see parents yelling on the news about masks and say, "This is an adult problem. The kids are fine with it." That was true during the hybrid year, but if you made a word cloud of my 2021-2022 school year, the words, "Masks up" would have been the largest by a mile. Things were supposed to be "back to normal," but unlike the beginning, there was no hard date on the end.
Education has suffered in the world since the pandemic. Attendance rates are at an all time low, not just in the United States, but worldwide. Patience is low; demands are high. No one can agree on what to do about learning loss, or even if it exists. And, since we never properly grieved (because part of the country, including its leader, doesn't want to admit this was real), we have not mentally and emotionally recovered from the chronic stress.
I'd like to reflect on the lesson we learned and what we can take with us, but this post has gotten very long. So, let's call this summary part 1. Next week, I'll try to bring it all together with some good lessons.
No comments:
Post a Comment