Reflection

 

     Yesterday I closed the book on my thirtieth year of teaching, and, like every other year,  it is forcing me to reflect on what the previous ten months have meant and the effects they have had.  Most years, I fall into a melancholy, mostly thinking of the seniors that have graduated and I may very well never see again, and how I will miss the daily interactions with my students that simultaneously energize and exhaust me.  After the hybrid hot mess of 2020-2021 that we somehow duct taped into a leaky raft that barely got us to shore, we all had higher hopes for 2021-2022.  It turns out, despite a relative return to normal, this year brought its own challenges that may have been worse.

    Don’t get me wrong.  Back in person was a breath of air (I can’t say fresh air because we were still in masks), and having everyone’s partial faces all in the same room was wonderful.  And as the year went on, we seemed to get closer to the light at the end of the tunnel, even unmasking when we returned from February vacation (although by June, most of us had felt like we had been out of masks all year). Sports ran.  There was no sanitizing after every class.  Less distancing.  I was able to have face-to-face discussions and write on my white board without worrying about remote students on Zoom.  It should have been a celebration and a counting of our blessings.  But something was still off.

     As with any traumatic experience, there are different levels of coping.  There is the immediate shock and disbelief (when we first shut down), the ensuing anger as we realized how our near future was about to fall into a grim unknown (my April, 2020 trip to Florida to see my baby niece canceled) , a jump to action (do whatever we need to do to get through, without much analyzation), and then limited hope as we start to see progress (in person, vaccines, unmasking).  But, then comes the long, deep reflection as we relive and remember everything we went through individually and collectively, and from what I’m seeing, it has been more impactful than many want to admit, especially with our students.  

     There has been a great deal of talk about the social-emotional impacts on our kids, but the problem is they don’t necessarily manifest themselves in ways we would expect.  Teachers have always dealt with a level of apathy or anxiety, depending on the student.  I won’t speak for others, but I am seeing a strange mix of the two that is hard to explain.  Students have a hard time getting assignments in by a due date, and as a result the number of assignments adds up.  The reaction we used to see was some alarm at how low the current grade is, prompting them to either make up the work or kick start their efforts in future assignments.  Now, the reaction seems to be paralysis by a feeling of being overwhelmed by the list of tasks they have neglected.  As a teacher, it is difficult to know how to react, almost to the point where there is no clear action for us to take. 

      Much of this can probably be attributed to everyone’s rush to “return to normal.”  As Covid statistics became more favorable, and we peeled away layer after layer of protocols, many of us thought we were in the clear.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as the whole Covid “thing” hung around like a heavy fog that never fully let the joys of life return.  We saw many, many people get sick and test positive (including me, as I saw my second attempt to get to Florida go up in smoke two days before departure).  Our expectations of each other (students, parents, teachers, administrators) grew exponentially even though our abilities to meet these expectations had atrophied over the last year and a half.  “We’ve got this!”, lost its meaning, and became annoyingly toxic positivity.  Society was not really allowing itself to address the world of burden on each person’s shoulders, and, predictably, many lost the will to continue fighting.  When the goal is unattainable, people will eventually accept “failure.”

      To add to the professional issues, I have never in my life witnessed the amount of personal problems that I saw this year.  Between students, faculty, administrators, and others in my orbit, there was almost literally no one who wasn’t dealing with a profound personal problem.  Whether it was medical, marital, familial, emotional, mental, or whatever adjective you could think of, people were buried by the weight of their own issues.  Yet, they persevered. They came to school.  They interacted.  They worked together.  They argued.  And no one felt like they had succeeded despite their Herculean efforts to stay above water level.

        There are not enough doctors and nurses to care for the sick, and many are leaving the profession at the worst possible time.  There are not nearly enough therapists and residential placements for those in emergency need of it (and this includes an alarming increase at the elementary school level).  Add to this mix a tragic school shooting, a Congressional hearing over a potential coup, a war in Europe that has caused ripples around the world, an economic fall headed towards a recession, and massive effects of climate change.

 

        We need to cut each other some slack. More importantly, we need to cut ourselves some slack.  

     None of this is to say that we should stop trying.  We do need to model coping skills for the younger generations (because, believe me, they struggle with it).  But, we went into the 2020-21 school year with no expectations and high anxiety, and we struggled through it the best we could.  I still get a pit in my stomach thinking about that year.  We then made the mistake of overestimating what 2021-22 would look and feel like.  We all suffered due to our expectations overmatching what was really possible.

      My final thoughts are this.  I loved my classes this year.  I wish I was getting them back next year.  This year was an unequivocal success, despite our feelings of falling short.  My colleagues were superstars.  My students made each day worthy of teaching.  I’m going to recharge, establish some reasonable goals, and spend the next couple months mapping out how to achieve them.  

       Bring on 2022-23.