Monday, September 27, 2021

Back to full classes, full schedules

                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.


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