What Just Happened? A Short Post about a Long Year
What the hell just happened?
School has been out for five days now, and I have yet to fully process and integrate the last nine months. This daunting task feels like straining to yank an elephant backwards through a keyhole.
Under even ideal circumstances, teaching and learning are incredibly complex interactions incorporating the interplay of multiple shifting variables. This last year was anything but ideal. Off the top of my head: school shootings, racial violence, classrooms and schools shutting down from Covid, students assaulting teachers, students assaulting each other, and social media trends encouraging kids to wreck school bathrooms. The waves of state legislation barring teachers from discussing topics such as racism, and transphobia. The creation of “tip lines” to report teachers who did teach about these issues. Deficit narratives of learning loss ringing from every corner of the public sphere. More tests. More trauma. More demands. More of everything (except funding).
During the last week of school, when an altercation at a 7–11 put neighboring schools into lockdown, an armed family member showed up at my school and tried to kick in the front doors to presumably ‘rescue’ their child. Just another day ending in Y.
As Lisa Delpit said, we are teaching in a time when the world is truly on fire.
Normally, I like to focus my posts on small moments of classroom life. Because the classroom is a nexus of power relations, even a single interaction with a student can yield interesting insight. But when I look back on this year, I don’t know where to start.
Do I write about barely keeping myself together every time one of my 2nd period students would bash himself against the door, screaming his lungs out about killing himself?
What about the parents on social media actively wishing for a school shooting so they could blame teachers and my district’s school board for removing SROs this year?
Perhaps a post about the Instagram accounts some kids at my school created to post pictures of their teachers and make disrespectful comments about their appearance?
Or I could explore the physical toll of teaching during the pandemic. Lips rubbed raw from hundreds of hours of rubbing against a mask. Lungs straining to gobble down the oxygen required to speak loudly through two layers of plastic polymer N-95s. The pounds added from eating my stress for the last three years.
Maybe I could write about how it feels to be expected to form a meaningful relationship with each student, heal their trauma, increase their test scores, prepare them for a job, push them to become global citizens, develop their empathy and compassion, and help them navigate the intense pressures and scrutiny of social media, all while teaching them how to be better readers, writers, and thinkers.
This year wasn’t all negative, of course. I had a ton of wins. The girl who wrote me a letter about how the class transformed her from a non-reader into a kid who inhales chapter books. Being able to use my extensive experience with ADHD to help a family finally understand their son’s diagnosis. The satisfaction of watching students joyfully engage in a new unit I spent tens of hours of outside labor creating from scratch. The kid who turned an amazing drawing of my face into a sticker.
I don’t know if there was more success or more failure. When I look back on this year, what sticks out most is the struggle of just showing up every day as my best self.
This was harder to do than it was last year, something I didn’t think could be possible. 2020–2021 was grueling, to be sure, but it felt more manageable. This might have to do with the ecology of virtual teaching. Teaching through a screen shrunk my aperture. So while I could sense the conflagrations burning around me, I couldn’t really see them. My students that year rarely used their mics and never turned their cameras on. I was left in the literal and figurative dark with regards to their struggles. Like, if a student never turns on their camera or mic, do they exist?
This year was a brutal re-introduction to the corporeal nature of teaching. For the first time in seventeen months, I stood in a room packed to the gills with flesh and blood students. I saw their meltdowns. I witnessed their chronic absenteeism. I felt their desperate desire to establish meaningful connections with their peers and teachers. And to be honest, I experienced these same things myself. Everyone seemed to be hurting.
I’m left wondering how I made it through, and how I will keep going next year and the year after that.
I don’t know what else to say about last year other than it’s over.
We survived.
