I am so full, being back in the room with live students again—building upon the energy of conversations, refining ideas in the back-and-forth of group dialogues, humming with the frenetic goof and teenage verve that had, for the last year and a half, been flattened and muted on isolated black Zoom cells. I know none of us is as safe as we’d been when spread out across the city; I know some struggle to mask their beaks and noses seem suddenly indecent; and I know that no students in my crowded room have the short yard of distance the CDC hopes they’ll keep for safety. But for the first time in a while, there is a buzz of teenage nervousness and joy.
I’ve loved that. And yet, my
colleagues and I are exhausted. It’s hard to quantify all that’s involved in
this, because some things are small, like trying to hear and be heard and
understood through a mask and over the drone of our filtered fans and street
noises of open windows, straining to communicate emotion, excitement, and
interest when faces are hidden: we must work harder to amplify our sound, our clarity,
our energy, and fall hard at the end of the end of it.
Some things are not small at all:
Student trauma and isolation over
the quarantine reverberate back now in anxiety, tremendous sensitivity in
feeling, difficulty sustaining attention, and most of all, a huge hunger for
connection, so when a teacher is on, with our own strained emotionality and sense
of precarious safety, that’s a lot to absorb, feed, or fend off.
Students’ acute outrage and
demand for equity and justice, and the language and routines that reflect them,
guided by a year and a half of all discourse mediated through Tik Tok and
Instagram, I embrace gently through careful discussions about how we hold
discussions. It’s meaningful, tender work, and in student sincerity and hunger,
I give my own vulnerability and heart.
That’s not nothing. But the day
is long.
