Reflections on the 2019-2021 School Year

 Sitting at their kitchen table today after our lovely department retirement breakfast, my mom asked me, "Do you think when you've reached the end of the year that you finally retire that you'll look back on this school year as the hardest one of your career?"  

And I really had to think about that for a bit. 

Because my gut instinct said "No," but I wasn't sure why.  

It has been a hard year.  A really hard year, though perhaps in some ways maybe not quite as hard for me as for others at least in terms of the technological learning curve. And I clearly thrive in isolation for the most part. The aspects that others struggled with didn't get to me as much or as often. (It's also entirely possible that my personal life going to shit just four weeks into the school year made the school part seem less hard because it was all I had to think about...) 

I absolutely do not want this to be misconstrued by anyone thinking that I am speaking on behalf of teachers everywhere to somehow downplay the challenges of the last year.  They've been monumental, and for a lot of teachers, it's been the thing that propelled them out of the classroom. Redesigning all your curriculum for online learning was no small feat; not knowing your kids well enough to know how to help or motivate them when they're a little black screen was intensely frustrating; not always having the technological knowledge to pivot or adapt or problem solve when something goes sideways makes everything orders of magnitude harder.  All of this is true, and this year was spectacularly hard for so, so many reasons. (Then add the complexities of school districts making all kinds of weird and frustrating decisions, plus the grumpy parent community at odds with everyone else ... it's been *a lot*.) 

So I sat there reflecting on why my instinct was to say no. 

And I realized: I am much, much less tired this year than I was at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. 

The year that started with a student death days before school started.  The year we lost Veronica Aguirre in a car accident right before Winter Break. And the year Chelsea King disappeared on a run and was found days later, raped and murdered by a monster. 

We spent that entire school year swimming -- and eventually drowning -- in grief. It started in grief and ended in grief and the fact any of us accomplished anything that year is still an absolute testament to the resilience and persistence of both teenagers and teachers. 

There's no teacher preparation course called "Grief 101" or "Dealing With Campus Trauma." No one knows how to do this; we're not trained in grief counseling -- or any counseling, for that matter -- and when you have three consecutive traumas in a single ten month span, it's a grueling dance without any choreography. I can barely describe what it's like to have a room full of 16 and 17 year olds look at you with terrified, traumatized, grief-filled eyes and wanting -- needing -- you to say The Thing that's going to make it better. That's going to alleviate their fears that what happened to those students could happen to them; that's going to help them make sense of a senseless act of violence; that's going to explain the utterly unexplainable. It's absolutely, astoundingly, absurdly fucking awful. And yet teachers all over America, when these traumas happen, do it. We stand in front of our students, meeting their eyes with ours, and try our best to figure out what to say. Sometimes we say the right thing. Sometimes we say the wrong thing. We don't know. All I know is that my only answer is to tell the truth: "I don't know what to say or how to do this, so be patient with me, but I'm going to do my best to get us all through this." 

And that year, we all had to do that a lot. Too much. All the time. After Chelsea disappeared, we did it straight for weeks. Not days. Weeks. And it took every single atom in my body to keep doing it, to keep showing up for kids, to keep trying to keep myself together so that the kids could fall apart if they needed. We watched stupid movies and I trooped them out to the space in front of the Performing Arts Center just to sit together and process their grief and their fear. We packed the football stadium for her memorial, sobbed through Noah and the Whale and Owl City songs, and tried to love on our kids as much as we possibly could. And graduation was both an exciting and excruciating capstone to the whole year. 

Then I went home and laid on my couch in pajamas for two weeks. And I am not exaggerating for effect here. I wore pajama pants and a hand-me-down flannel shirt and every day moved from being horizontal in my bed to being horizontal on the couch, letting the sound of the television waft over me for two entire weeks before I started to feel even remotely human again. I finally had the time and the space to process my own grief, to try to refill my own cup that was so empty I could barely feed myself. It was exhaustion on a cellular level because of the emotional labor it required to help 150+ students every day keep on going, and to somehow keep learning, too. (Because if we've learned anything these most recent two school years, CollegeBoard stops for nothing...)

And here's the thing I realized as I was explaining this to my parents. At least with the pandemic, everyone in the United States -- hell, everyone in the world -- has experienced this in real time, all together. Sure, different places had different responses, and not everyone's experience has been exactly the same, but there's a commonality across the country that enables educators to nod to each other in solidarity and understand that we all understand. That we're all dealing with new technology and with a lack of connection to each other and our students and with the fear that comes along with a super scary virus that might kill someone's grandparent or parent or teacher or other loved one at any moment.  But we have all, in one way or another, experienced these hallmarks of the pandemic, so there's a common language and a common empathy around it. I hadn't realized until today how much that's actually helped. How much memes on Instagram and Teacher TikTok has made it feel less hard by making it feel more communal. 

But when it's just your campus -- and this is also what I imagine it's like for teachers who have worked at schools with similar nationally newsworthy events on their campuses -- it's isolating as hell, and isolating in a way that's not the same as having to stay home. No one can really ever know what it's like until it happens, and though of course other teachers offer support and sympathy, it doesn't really help. It's nice, but it doesn't undo the damage done, and it doesn't make it any less challenging to walk into the classroom the day after a devastating tragedy has happened to just your campus community. Life goes on around you, in your grocery store, or in your gym, or in Starbucks, where people are happy and laughing and enjoying themselves and a tidal wave of grief and loneliness will wash over you to the point where you want to scream, "Will you all stop being happy? Don't you understand the the world is a terrible place where terrible things happen but I can't let anyone know that's bothering me because I have to stay strong?! Just stop smiling, for the love of god!" At least that's how it felt for me. I'd have to constantly remind myself "They don't know" when I'd be out running an errand or something and it felt like people were being too happy in my immediate vicinity. It sounds silly, I know, but grief is just really, really weird, and it pops up in unexpected ways, at unexpected times, and suddenly you're the person crying in the cereal aisle because someone around you made it clear they have no idea what you're going through. And why would they? (And when do we ever know what strangers are going through?) 

While this year has been grueling in its own way, and I'm really glad that it's finally (almost) over (... teacher check out day on a Monday? ::shakes fist towards the sky::), here at the end, I'm just ready to go back to loving my computer for the video games it allows me to play and to not think about grading for awhile. To sleep without waking up to an alarm at 5:00 am. To read a book or six. To leave the house and get some sunshine. I'm an almost-normal amount of end-of-the-year tired; there's just some extra bonus tired that comes with how weird and unnatural pandemic teaching has been.  

But when I truly sit and reflect on this year, I think I already maybe had the hardest year of my career, and it maybe wasn't this one. 

Impatiently Patient

 Impatience.

That's what it is. 

Impatience. 

That's the sense, the feeling, that crept into my brain tonight after I finally fed myself dinner at 9:00 pm and tried to quiet the mind that was becoming increasingly unquiet as the night stretched towards bedtime. 

There are so many things to be impatient about right now. 

Firstly, there's the Incredibly Obvious Thing: the pandemic. I'm impatient for normalcy, as so, so many of us are, though normalcy as we picture it is still potentially a long, long way off, and it's hard to confront that each day this situation marches forward.  

I'm lucky in the sense that I have a disposition well-suited for quiet and solitude, but I'm also sensitive and empathetic to the struggles of those around me, and they accumulate on my psyche as someone who generally looks for solutions and wants to rush to help. But I know these solutions aren't solutions. Not really. They're only polite suggestions that we all know are meaningless, and do nothing to actually fix the problem. And the real problem of the pandemic is so staggeringly immense in magnitude that it exhausts and enrages me. 

But secondly, there are the less obvious but no less trivial things that make me impatient. 

To be honest, I'm impatient for my life to start over, and not just in the sense of the After Times of Covid. 

I'm impatient as I hope for things I probably have no right and no cause to hope for, impatient for answers to questions I'm too afraid to ask. I think about Prufrock in this moment, and I think of one of the lines that has always resonated so deeply with me, but particularly right now, about his fear of forcing the moment to its crisis. And in short, as Prufrock says, I am afraid. Afraid that in taking a leap, a risk, I find out it's for nothing; find rejection instead. And so, again like Prufrock, I am paralyzed into indecision and introspection. 

Lately, I retreat into the comforts of the secret favorite entertainment that brings me both joy and shame (but shame only in the sense that I truly enjoy some absolute garbage that people would a thousand percent judge me for listening to on repeat several times a day). But I do because, well, I'm alone. A lot. Days and days at a time, I am the only warm three-dimensional human in my orbit, and so I listen to, or watch, the embarrassing things because they provide a genuinely nostalgic sense of happiness. When things were simpler, and when daydreaming didn't seem quite as pathetic. I listen to early 90s slow dance songs and feel that same ache of longing that has characterized so much of my life of not-quite-requited love. I reread snippets of books I've loved for decades because they are familiar and their endings predictable. I watch the movies we favored as teenagers because they were sappy and lovesick, and wonder as I did when I was 15 whether any of that kind of love is real or possible.  

And then of course, I find myself thinking in the dark after a day spent alone, "Maybe?" And then I vaguely imagine scenarios I have no reason to imagine. Stupid, pathetic, love-starved scenarios that, again, I perhaps have no real reason to hope for; surprises and grand gestures and off-the-feet sweeping has never and may never exist in my world, and I've spent the last five months sitting with that, trying to be okay with that. Yet these scenarios, however fleetingly they last on my almost-always-otherwise-occupied brain, buoy a sense of optimism that feels ... real? Somehow improbably real, real in the sense that maybe I'm wrong, or at the very least maybe I am allowed to hope for what I hope for. 

That new possibilities exist and I just have to be... 

patient. 

We're back to patience, a virtue wearing thin on me in the solitude of a Saturday night. Oddly, I spent the vast majority of my day today plugged into the hustle and chatter of a 12 hour Zoom call and yet after a day spent (virtually) surrounded by people, I feel a keen sense of loneliness tonight, a loneliness that crept in only after I stepped away from my computer and my office and fed myself and took a deep breath and looked around my living room. 

And that's when the sense of impatience overwhelmed me, but realizing that I could point to the feeling and name it felt good; it felt powerful to accurately label the disquiet I feel tonight. 

So perhaps you, too, dear Reader, have been wrestling with an unnameable, abstract emotion, not as strong as fear or anger, but not as uplifting as hope or happiness. I don't feel mad, or sad, but in this moment, I also don't feel happy or optimistic. 

Tonight, it's simply impatience.