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.