What kind of year has it been?

 The 2020-2021 school year ended this past week. It was a year filled with unknowns, emotions, frustration, and long stretches of Zoom induced boredom followed by moments of "why isn't it doing that?" (Like while attempting to get your fourth device to connect to the wifi so you can write with the magic stylus and it worked just a minute ago but now 23 high school sophomores are watching you struggle hard.) The highs were high, and the lows were low. It was very easy this year for students to avert my educatorial gaze by simply hitting "stop video", and yet I made some profound connections with students this year that I might not have if we didn't have a pandemic. There are several thoughts I have in regards to the past 10 months, and here are some of them. 

First, I can't help but face the fact that I'm underwhelmed. We got to the end of the year, this crazy year, and it sort of just ended. It left me thinking, "Is that all there is?" The last day was filled with two years worth of emotions and all of the rollercoaster turns jammed into one hour-long staff pot luck. It just seemed small. Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what else I would have done. I don't know what bigger thing I was seeking. I just felt the moment should have somehow been bigger. 

I will admit that my reaction there is likely a personal one, and I don't know how widely it is shared. I like moments. I savor them. I tend to place value in them, so it seems natural that I might feel this way. I had a similar feeling when I graduated college, but for different reasons. All that to say: the preceding paragraph aught to be taken with its prescribed dose of sodium chloride. 

While sitting at that the previously referenced pot-luck, a colleague asked me what I would tell the September 2020 version of myself if time travel existed. Or perhaps some chronologically transcendent letter box system like in The Lake House. The colleague was actually ambiguous on how the letter would get delivered so I'm filling in the gaps. Anyway, it's the content of the letter, I think, that was really the important part of the question. 

There are two things that I thought of. The first was to find the people that help keep me afloat and stick to them. I work with great people, without whom I would struggle way harder than I do. I can say with my whole heart that me making it to the end of the school year in one largish piece with a small debris cloud hanging around in the general vicinity of my head is the direct result of friends, colleagues, and my wife, who helped me stay floating. 

The second thing was: don't be afraid to make changes, even scary ones. The pandemic forced our hands in several ways, and anyone who didn't change struggled. As a catalyst for change, a global pandemic isn't great. But, we can't go back. We can't unlearn the lessons we learned this year. I changed some things about my teaching practice this year, partly due to necessity, partly because I wanted to. Most of those changes made my job more enjoyable for me, and more effective. 

Part of the underwhelming sensation I've been feeling for the past month or so is tied to this second point. At the beginning of the year, after last spring's fully remote world, I anticipated change on many fronts and on many levels. Literally, the year was going to be different because of the pandemic. It is different not seeing half of people's faces, and having people around you get sick, and all the other subtle and not so affects that ripple outwards just from those two changes. I had a sense at the beginning of the year that whatever happened, it would be quite unlike anything else I've experienced. 

I also thought there would be more change on a deeper level. I thought the system might change, just a little. I thought this event, the most traumatic thing to happen in my lifetime, would cause a "what are we doing" affect that might mean we evaluate why we do education the way that we do, why we live our lives the way that we do, and why we treat the planet and each other the way that we do. I'm afraid none of that really happened. Maybe on a small scale, but not in a big way. The system will return to it's previous trajectory, despite the efforts of the small few. For now. It was wishful thinking on my part, and I do understand that in these matters patience is necessary. I thought the general chaos of the past several months might act as a catalyst, but I think it was more like an outgoing tide. It could help a vessel begin a long voyage, but it will also come back in again as the earth-moon system rotates beneath it. So now we go back to our work, the small few, changing the course of that vessel, that monstrous behemoth, by pushing on its bow with swim floaties. 

The unsung heroes of this school year were, without doubt, the kids. They were asked (told) to do things completely differently, sometimes on a weekly basis, all while wearing masks and dealing with Zoom, and they did. They were often way more adaptable than some of my colleagues. At the beginning of the school year all the "adults" I know were absolutely freaking out about the school year, and anticipated the students would be doing the same. Do you know what? They weren't. They just showed up and wore their masks and did what they were told to do. (Did that mean I never had to remind them? No. But generally, the kids were great.) Teachers undoubtedly had to deal with a lot this year, but do you know what? We've been recognized for it. In the conversations with strangers, in the appreciation from administration, and the thank you notes from parents and students, we've been recognized. I work with amazing people and they made me feel valued. If we had to do this year again, with the people I work with it could be done. (I wouldn't be excited or anything, but it could be done.) The students this year were the only ones in the building with less power than the teachers, and by and large they handled it with grace and resilience. I'm not sure if they ever got properly thanked for that. So, thank you kids. 

There were some realities of the school year that should be addressed.

1) Zoom classes did not really work. They could have, and I believe if education were entirely remote, we could optimize for it, and perhaps create a more engaging product, but the way it was half cobbled together this year did not work well. I'm sure someone learned something on ony of my zoom classes this year, I'm just not sure it had anything to do with what I was intending to teach. This made it a general challenge to get through curriculum, because half of the kids were physically present for half of the material, and not really present for anything else. (If you're a student reading this and you disagree, message me.) 

2) A caveat to the above item: The students for whom Zoom worked, it worked well. A small percentage of the overall student population flourished as all-virtual students. They figured out how to make Zoom work for them, and got their work done. I see a space for a small alternative remote high school program here. It could be designed for remote learning, and optimized for that space. It could leave the box (literally and metaphorically) of a traditional high school experience, and make use of virtual and augmented reality, and other technology to create a more engaging experience. The chance of this actually happening is I fear small, because so many people in positions of power in education are relieved to go back to a normal that didn't really work well for those students who would and did benefit greatly from the ability to learn remotely this year. 

3) We - teachers - need to up our game. The fact that we don't face, because it's hard, is that the reason our students didn't engage on Zoom is because we didn't find a way to make Zoom engaging enough. That level of work might not have been physically possible. It may have broken some of us. I'm not sure. This truth does not change regardless. My students did not engage because I didn't do enough or any of the things that would engage them. This is not for lack of effort on my part. My heart and soul and some of my body it feels like got left out on the field this year. From what I can tell, I managed as well as the people around me. Teaching is difficult under normal circumstances. It changed a lot this year, and I will be the first to admit that we could have adapted better. The end of the world is no excuse for poor professional performance. 

4) This one is a little more specific: Motor breaks work for high school aged kids. They might spend less time in the classroom, but that time becomes more focused and more productive, and they do actually get more work done. 10 minutes of walking and talking and moving around is a price worth paying for that in an 80 minute block. Especially when the kids have to sit in those torturous desks. i will do mask breaks rebranded for a more optimistic time as brain breaks or somesuch thing for as long as I teach, because they just work. What's more, I don't need a psychologist to explain why. There's an explanation, and one that might be interesting to know. But you don't need to know it to see that within 90 seconds of getting the kids outside, they're a completely different group. You don't need to be an engineer to know how to fly a plane. 

The truth is, I'm afraid I'm going to miss the pandemic. The sickness and death, no, not that. But as we look ahead to a "normal" fall, I look back on the memories of the past year with a hint of bittersweet. People were nicer to each-other. people asked you how you were doing and they meant it. Not like before, when it was mostly just to be polite. This pandemic killed some of us, and the rest of us became a little nicer people. It shouldn't take teach to do this, but it almost always does. 

In the depths of the fall, the uncertainty and chaos that existed (it still exists, it's just not as obvious now), the not being quite sure what the week after next would bring, I couldn't escape a thought that everything in my life before that moment had prepared me to be exactly where I was doing exactly what I was doing. Some of this, I'm sure, is post hoc rationalization. But I look backwards and forwards and right where I am and I realize that I enjoyed doing what I did for the past year. 

Many people have said anecdotally that we endured this year and will hopefully never have to do so again, for a long, long time. These people haven't been paying attention. There will likely be another pandemic during our lifetime. This one isn't really even over. The next one might be way more deadly. If there isn't another pandemic in our lives, it will be because they were prematurely ended by the changing climate. 

I don't think this is going to be our last school year that gets blown out of the water by our collective world. During the first week that we were all sent home in last spring, I talked to someone whose opinion I value, and they said about the situation: "Whatever happens, it's going to be fascinating." It's been one of the most accurate things I've heard anyone say about the past 15 months. Now, as we take a reprieve for a couple months, looking forward to a system that is far from the one we left in March 2020, those words will continue to be accurate. For all this year has been, we're not out of the woods, not by a long shot. We're not even out of this pandemic, although some may seem to think that we are. I'm wary that what we're experiencing may simply be the eye of the storm. We've made it this far, but the eye-wall coming our way contains a maelstrom beyond our imagination. 

There's a movie called The Truman Show, where the main character discovers that he is living in a false reality, where his "life" is recorded and broadcast to millions of tv viewers for entertainment. He learns of this, then thinks of and carries out an escape from that reality so he can go live his own life. (Or become a homeless person, similar to what would happen if you set a foraging pet loose in the wild. They don't know how to do anything because you've been feeding them their whole life. But that's not important.) After this, the show is over. There isn't anything else to broadcast, so it just ends. We - the meta-viewers - then view the viewers and their reactions. What do they do? They just change the channel. This year has been revelation similar in scope to Truman's. Everything about our world has been turned upside down. It wasn't a fluke. It will likely happen again. So what do we do? Just change the channel? Or maybe we'll get up off the couch and face the reality around us.