I just heard that I will be starting the school year teaching remotely. The Archdiocese put out a statement today after the governor announced guidelines for the start of the school year yesterday. Upon reading the news, my body literally flooded with relief. I hadn't realized how much anxiety I was living with, both in the not knowing and in the possibility of having to navigate teaching in a physically distanced, PPE'd classroom. But as I read the announcement, I felt tension ease in my jaw, neck, shoulders, stomach. Perhaps I will be able to sleep without melatonin tonight.
Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to get back in front of a classroom full of students, dancing, jumping, standing on table tops, and doing what I love to do. I see and feel all the ways remote learning falls short of what I have been doing in classrooms for the past 20 years. But over the past month I couldn't stop thinking about all the ways in person learning was going to fall short this fall. Thinking about maintaining/policing six feet of distance, mask wearing, no sharing... and all of the CDC guidelines for re-opening was going round and round my head - always landing on the same thought: All the reasons that make in-person learning superior to remote learning are off the table until the pandemic ends. Add the risk that is inherent in bringing students and school employees together, and I was having a hard time getting excited about the start of the school year.
For a someone who knew from the first day of kindergarten that one day I would be a teacher, that was a huge problem. Every time I thought about setting up my new classroom or welcoming students on the first day, I literally pushed the thought away.
But with today's announcement, I can hunker down and begin planning for real. For really real. I can focus my attention on the online platforms I will be using, and dig into the resources that have been provided by my new team and the online conference I attended this summer. I can have conversations with my partner teacher about how to establish community and build relationships remotely. I can set up my home office thoughtfully (not quickly, like I did in the spring). I can stop watching the evening news with the lens of what might happen to my school, my classroom, myself when school opens.
I had a stranger on the Internet ask me what I need to see before I feel safe returning to the classroom. I can't answer that comprehensively, but my knee jerk response was that I'd like to live without a mask wearing mandate when in public before heading back to work. I doubt schools will actually wait that long to re-open, but a girl can dream.
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