On hiatus

Because for a few weeks I’ve been thinking about how I haven’t wanted to write lately, and a few days ago I gave myself permission not to write this week unless I wanted to, and then I spent Saturday morning cleaning floors and talking with my daughter and eating German pastries with Cane and taking a long walk in the sun and it felt really, really good to start my day that way, and I’d like to have more spring Saturdays like the one I just had.

Because getting to the end of the school year feels like rounding the last corner of a 440 (as it was called back in my track days), where you somehow have to sprint even though your legs have turned into hot plastic and it feels like you’re about to vomit your lungs.

Because I need a different kind of space and energy, for awhile, as we emerge from our pandemic lives and make our way not back to our pre-pandemic lives but forward into whatever our post-pandemic lives will be.

Because I have three consuming and life-changing projects beginning, and I need to make a lot of things happen in a short period of time.

Because writing, my whole life, has been marked by fallow periods that are just as important as the ones in which words bloom.

Because I can still connect with far-away folks through their blogs or through email or social media.*

Because too much heat and light will kill the seeds of whimsy before they sprout.

Because white space might be the most important element of design.

Because the days are getting longer but life is getting shorter.

Because sometimes even I need a break from my voice.

Because right now I want to listen more than talk.

Because a hiatus is a pause, not a stop.**

I hope you enjoy the spring, whenever and however it comes to you. Take care.

*I have a Twitter account, but I rarely use it. I’m on FB less and less. I’m liking Instagram and accept follow requests from those I don’t recognize unless: a) you’re a guy who likes to post pics of yourself with no shirt on and/or only pics of yourself; b) you’re following 300 gazillion (or so) but you have only 3 followers (like, literally only 3); c) you only have 3 posts; d) you somehow otherwise smell like a bot; e) any of a-d and your account is private, so I can’t investigate further to get a sense of you are.

**I am 99% sure I will resume writing here, and probably sooner than later. If you want to know when a new post goes up, please subscribe so you’ll get an email notification. There’s a place to do that at the top of the right column. I won’t spam your inbox or sell your address or do anything that’s otherwise nefarious or intrusive. Aside from the fact that I find such practices gross, to do those things I’d have to figure out again where in WordPress subscriber addresses are, and I’ve got way better things to do with my time.

Whiplash

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the day I went home from school and never came back. Late in the day on March 12, 2020 our governor announced that schools would be closing on March 13. Most schools in my district had no students on the 13th (staff development/grading), so our students’ desks and lockers were filled with books and papers and soon-to-be rotting lunches.

I began the morning of the 13th with a staff meeting that I later described as “horrific.” I remember shock, tears, and anger as teachers worked to process what was happening. I served our alternative school last year (in one of my half-time positions), and ours was the only building that had students that day. I watched the adults around me pull themselves together to create calm for our students. Those in alternative programs have generally been failed by a variety of systems, and our staff was dedicated to preventing further school-based trauma for them.

The initial outpouring of love and appreciation for teachers at the beginning of the pandemic was both gratifying and disconcerting. It’s always nice to feel seen, but seriously: Have none of y’all been paying any attention over the past few decades?

Our “spring break” ended with a state-level directive to switch our schools to an entirely on-line experience. (Except for lunches. We still needed to feed the kids.) We had two weeks to put that in place. We limp-sprinted to the end of the school year, throwing together packets and scrambling to learn new tech tools and worrying about our students and their families while grappling with our own shock, disbelief, fear, and grief about what the pandemic–and what it was revealing–was doing to all of us.

By the summer, as arguments about what school would be in the fall started, we were no longer heroes. (Not really any surprise there.) We tried to make plans for a constantly-shifting landscape. Some teachers worked the whole summer (unpaid) to ready themselves. Others did not (to ready themselves in a different way). My administrators spent most of the summer planning for hybrid instruction, only to learn in August that we would be fully in distance-learning mode.

Two weeks before school was to begin, our alternative high school staff was informed via group email that our school was being closed, disbanding our small, close community. Our students were sent back to the large high school that hadn’t worked for them or to a new online school that was being put together as the email was being written. A few staff were assigned to the new virtual school. Most were scattered around the district. One was first assigned to a 5th grade class, then, a week into the school year, moved to the online school to teach high school.

Our “not-open” schools were closed the second week of school because so many were displaced by raging wildfires and our air quality was so toxic our homes were unhealthy to breathe in.

I was still an instructional coach, but I didn’t get a new school assignment until mid-October. I didn’t want for work; I supported teachers I’d worked with before, and there were days of training for a whole, new, comprehensive coaching program being launched, pandemic or no. In some ways the lack of assignment was a bit of a blessing, as my other half-time job (being the librarian for all of our schools, K-12) could have kept several full-time people busy. Prior to the pandemic, we had no ebooks in our collections and our teachers had made little use of the digital resources we had. There was a heavy lift to get things up and running in a system that was reeling. Our library staff had their hours cut, and one position that went vacant wasn’t filled, causing us to reconfigure how we provide services.

By the holidays, as some schools in the country remained closed while others opened, we teachers who resisted re-opening were turning into villains. The others (especially the ones who got sick or died) were turning into martyrs. The teachers I know were exhausted. I was exhausted.

Things sort of settled down–in terms of actual teaching and working–after break. Folks got a chance to catch their breath over the winter break, the first real time off many had taken since the previous one. Teachers were cresting the summit of the steep learning curve they’d climbed. They were figuring out how to do things well. We were calm enough to begin noticing benefits from distance learning and thinking about how they might be kept when we return to in-person instruction. My district publicly stated their commitment to providing quality instruction through distance learning, taking into account the needs of our disproportionately-impacted-by-Covid community, and I felt myself exhale just a bit. It was a relief to know what I could expect, and it allowed me to focus my work in a way I hadn’t been able to do since the previous March. I felt a commitment to distance learning that I hadn’t previously, as it’s hard to pour yourself into something new that could go away with little warning.

Then some districts in our state began pushing for in-person teaching, even though our Covid numbers were the worst they’d ever been and nothing had been done to mitigate problems with poor ventilation and air circulation in our aging and long-neglected buildings. Our governor changed metric requirements, prioritized educators over seniors for receiving the vaccine, and set Feb. 15 as the date she wanted schools to return to in-person instruction (but still left decisions about changing instructional models to districts).

If we were villains before winter break, I don’t know what we were by mid-February, when schools weren’t immediately resuming in-person instruction. According to some on many a school district Facebook page, we were lazy, selfish, uncaring, and getting paid to do nothing.

In the midst of the vaccine rollout, an ice storm took out power for hundreds of thousands, and our schools closed again. Some were outraged. “How hard is it for teachers to roll out of bed and stroll over to their computer?” I saw one person ask in response to a district announcement about closure. I worked for 4 of the 8 days I was displaced from my home, but I couldn’t fully work because my school-issued computer has a broken microphone that prevents me from using Zoom on it. (I’ve been using my personal desktop computer since we stopped working in our buildings last spring.)

I sat in a meeting last week where plans for LIPI (limited in-person instruction) were being talked about. We have been working to start LIPI, which would provide in-person instruction for our most vulnerable students, by the end of March. As I listened to the various components that had to be sorted–bus schedules, cohort and other mitigation requirements, teaching team configurations, union negotiations, staffing decisions, food services, communication with families–I understood in a new way the Rubik’s cube nature of solving the complicated problem of returning students to buildings. “I wish the public could know and understand how many moving parts there are to running a school in a pandemic,” I said to a colleague. “I wish people could understand that changing course is like turning a very large ship.”

Last Friday, I worked in our high school’s library. The library manager (the only person who works in the library, and who also manages all textbooks, and whose hours were cut this year) and I were sorting through all the books from the closed alternative school’s library and determining what to do with each of them. (Incorporate into the high school collection, send to the middle school, offer to teachers for classroom collections, discard.) Every single table in the library was covered with either stacks of books to process or packets of instructional materials for students to use in distance learning.

As we were ending our work for the day, the principal came in. In the course of our conversation she shared that the governor had just issued a new order requiring schools to open to in-person instruction by March 29 for K-5 and April 19 for 6-12. That’s two working weeks for our elementary schools to figure out how to pivot to something we’ve never done before while continuing the work we’re already doing, which is still very much in-progress.

In pre-pandemic times, we often shook our heads over being expected to fly the plane while we were building it. What’s going to happen now is more like flying the plane while we’re building it and simultaneously building a whole other plane that we will be transferring passengers to in mid-air, using punch-drunk pilots who’ve exceeded regulations on how many back-to-back shifts in a row they can work.

The point of this post is not to make or engage in arguments about distance learning vs. hybrid learning. The point is also not to defend educators or engender sympathy for us; sympathy does not help and so often is used to turn those we are sacrificing (health care workers, our military, low-paid essential workers, etc.) into heroes or saints or martyrs so that we can justify the things we do to them and ask them to do. I am not writing to invite debate or discussion about the relative merits of different options. There are no good ones, given the things we are unwilling and/or unable to do, and I cannot stomach any more discourse that repeats the talking points of disingenuous and self-serving leaders, or that assumes that how we are living is “just how it is,” or that contains “what about” arguments. I’m just done with all of that. I’m too tired and I have too much to do to spend any energy on debates that will change nothing and do nothing but make everyone involved in them angry.

A year ago, I wrote these words:

As I’m watching the world around me shift to accommodate the shape of something we’ve never experienced here, there is something that feels almost holy in this moment. I have been thinking for a long time that it would probably take some kind of disaster to turn us around on the path we’ve been hurtling down. That is the opportunity inherent in this unfolding disaster that will touch all of us in some way, if it hasn’t already.

My deep, fervent hope today is that this will propel us to remember how inter-connected we all are, to reach out to each other rather than erect walls between us, to uphold ideas and ideals that have always been the best part of us, and to act more from love than from fear.

I want to reach back in time and pat myself on the head and murmur, “Bless your heart.”

While a pandemic will, of course, always create hardship and change and pain, ours hasn’t had to play out the way that it has–and I just want us to, for once, be honest about that and about why that is. I want us to be honest about all the ways in which our schools were broken and not serving kids before the pandemic. I want us to be honest about what we are going to get–and not–from the choices we are making.

If this post has any real point, it is only this: To shine a light. To share experience. To mark a significant anniversary. To tell a truth. To be seen.

PS: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/health/virus-oregon-variant.html