Pandemic School: Year 3

Though it seems insane to write it down, this the third year I will teach school while a pandemic rages on.  The first year, 2019-2020, began as a typical school year and then shifted homeward in the last third of the year, while we all tried to flatten the curve (remember that?).     

The close of that year was filled with volumes of uncertainty about what was to come for the following year. , so much so that it seems to me that uncertainty was the theme of the 2020-2021 school year.  I joked often that it was year that featured a lot of planning of things that we would subsequently cancel.  There is a painful truth to that.  As the school year unfolded,  I taught most of it in a hybrid model, punctuated at times by being fully remote and then a close to the year that brought most of our students on campus in the month of May.  That last month felt as close to normal as anything has been since March of 2020, albeit a normal with everyone in  masks and a few students still fully remote.     

We plan for 2021-2022 to be a year of students fully on campus.  When planning for September began in earnest in in late March 2021, vaccines were briskly rolling out and every teacher and most children over 12 of my acquaintance were eager to get one, that seemed like a reasonable assumption.  Now, with the start of classes just a few days away, and the Delta variant in full command in the U.S., I worry that our plans are overly optimistic.  Even with more than 80% of those over age 12 and nearly 100% of the faculty and staff vaccinated, I’d feel better with a school-wide vaccine mandate to go with our mask mandate.  Instead, I’ll have confidence in our community, a confidence that is rooted in knowledge of the community as much as it is hope.    

I no longer believe in anything like “normal."  In fact, I think a large measure of our national divide is driven by a set of people who believed in a “normal” that privileged them at the cost of others.  I have come to see normal as a problem.  I think we need to be realistic about how we live our lives in this challenge.  But lives can be lived and we must do so.  Here's to the hope that always attends the start of a school year.  Here's also to the values of a school community that looks after one another.  In these two things I hope we find the strength to make our way forward.

Snow Day Grievances

With a Winter storm featuring 24 hours of snow on the horizon, last night my school made the call for a snow day today.  I was not mad about that because I love myself a leisurely morning and with classes cancelled I can freely indulge in such luxury.  The rest of the day will be given over to catching up with work —— new lessons for the 8th grade, comments home about quizzes and such, a calendar for the post Spring Break months, planning for a (fingers-crossed) in-person but socially distant closing ceremony for the 8th grade.  In short, there is plenty to keep me busy today.

Around 8:30 am I opened up my side of our school digital platform to find no less than 8 messages from students.  Several wanted to know if school was cancelled….all acknowledged that they had received the school message which read “…Thursday, Feb. 18 will be a snow day for all students.  All instruction and campus activities are cancelled.”  

Yikes.

A few more students sought to find out if the digital open note quiz, assigned three weeks ago and slated to close tonight at 8 pm, would have an extension because there was no class today.  

Ahem, hard NO.

A few more offered explanations for why they had submitted incomplete quizzes and were now sending additional answers to the quiz questions.   Would I please give them full credit?

I cannot even.  

At this juncture, I took a pause from school work and stuck my nose into a Miss Read book.  Her February in Fair Acre features early daffodils and the smell of Spring.  That’s a balm to my tired soul and spirit.  When I return to the business of quiz grading and such, it will be with a patient heart.  Pandemic school is hard for us all.  Winter makes it harder.  We are all worried and afraid.  But kindness is free and I will find some hope; I always do.

The quiet fall of snow is lovely.  We have heat, running water, and electricity in my corner of the nation.  Winter can’t last forever and March is on the horizon.  Sassafras Spring will surely arrive even sooner.  We can do hard things.  And we will.

The Light of a New Year

As twilight settled on the evening of the 31st, I lit two luminaries to light the path for the new year.  They burned brightly through the night as T, JT, and I played card games, listened to a playlist of music curated by the boy, and laughed together.

The laughter was especially nice.  

As T and I prepared to climb the stairs and tuck into bed, JT told us that if someone had told him at the start of the year that 2020’s last day would be spend in our company instead of with his friends, he would not have embraced that news.  Then he told us that the evening felt good and right; that’s he’d had a good time with is and wouldn’t have spent it any other way.

In a 2020 that brought fear and uncertainty, that found the three of us being cooped up for months and occasionally feeling a little too close with one another, my son was on the mark in that observation.  In this year of so much loss, I will be forever glad of the extra time to watch him grow up far more than just one year signifies.  The last night of 2020 was a good one for counting my blessings as we looked to the light.