It is teacher appreciation week May 2020 and we are in the middle of a pandemic. As a teacher myself, I'm teaching from my kitchen table on Google Meets about four hours a day. Upside, I am at a school where I am able to connect with all my students at least three days a week. All except, ironically, the Chinese students who have now returned home and have a great deal of difficulty accessing American sites like our Google Suite or Quizlet.
 |
| Teaching in 2020 |
These are strange times indeed. Or as I told my students as we read Lord Of The Flies and encountered the word "vicissitudes", the daily vicissitudes of quarantine are mighty exhausting. I can go from a morning joy having a lovely 9:00 late start, no commute, I can do yoga, I can walk my dogs 3 miles, I can have a healthy homemade breakfast!! To the depths of melancholy, I wish I could move around and tap Myron on the shoulder because I know he needs a subtle "attention reminder". Or give a knowing eye to Ally when I see that she understands, but doesn't want to say anything. I miss walking into my department chair's classroom and getting a Peppermint Patty and hearing his calming voice say that we'll all get through this.
The compression of "all the emotions" came to such a head recently when one of my students was featured on our Student Council's weekly Quarantine Shows (which are SUPER highlights to our lives). She sang "Rise Up" and I broke down. It was the first time that I cried during this "Shelter-in-Place" and here is why: I haven't taught this student in two years. In fact, I probably won't teach her again because I only teach ninth and eleventh grade and she'll be a senior next year. I only taught her for one year, but I feel like I've known her for much longer. She is one of my regular "hallway kids". All teachers have those, and our school is relatively small, only about 300 in the Upper School, so we really do have a chance to get to know so many of them personally through their activities, sports, performances. I've known this student since she was nine years old! I put her mic on her at a summer theatre program I was running tech for my first year at this now-not-so-new school. I saw her perform in all her Middle School shows. And while she was not what one would call a stellar English scholar in my class. She always brought a great deal of energy to the classroom. It is this energy I am deprived of and that is what made me tear up, ok, I'll be honest, I ugly cried bawled when I watched her performance. Even those little hiccup kind of sobs came out of me. What hit me so much was the loss of the micro-teaching moments.
Sure, I have the technology to convey information. Sure, I have the means and wherewithal to come up with meaningful projects for the students in my classes. But having taught at a boarding school for eighteen years, and being a twelve-hours-in-the-building kind of teacher at my day school, what I do in the classroom is the smallest fraction of what I believe I do as a teacher. I chaperone dances, I help sell baked goods, I cheer at basketball games and give standing ovations at the musical. In quarantine, I'm confined to my classroom in such a stifling way. It's shrunk down to a 13" monitor. My students have to be 'invited' in, and there are no waves at the doorway, or smiles and fistbumps in the hallways. My students only see this rectangular version of my face, the same books in the background. No arms hardly, no legs. I cannot dance like a lunatic at prom with them, I cannot sit on the bleachers and chat with their parents at the baseball game. I miss all these micro-interactions. I miss my "hallway kids". I miss all my students.
I hope during this teacher appreciation week we can all appreciate that while teachers, of course, teach content in the classroom, we teach character all throughout the building. We teach with our hearts and our souls and there is not a monitor big enough or HD enough to capture that.
