Today was the first day I’ve spent working in my classroom since halfway through the week before distance learning began. If we go as far back as the last day I’d spent in there with my students, it’s been approximately as long as a summer break. Today was one of the designated days for us to take care of some year-end wrap-up jobs, like cleaning, removing things from the walls, and taking care of some inventory. It was odd being back.
My fob still worked, so that was something. I walked in the building at about 8:30, and it felt like I was the only person there. The whole place smelled of humidity and floor wax, just like it does every year when we start back in August, after it’s been empty for so long and cleaned so thoroughly. After a few minutes I heard a child’s voice from far down the hallway, probably one of the first responders kids being taken care of during the day. The first person I saw was one of my team members. Even though I’d been on a video chat with her for nearly three hours the day before, it was a little jarring to see her for the first time after so long in real life.
The bells in our school are still scheduled to ring at the same times, whether students are in the schools or not. (Right now I just wondered if they still go off all through the summer.) Bells ringing in an empty building, with not even the voices of my colleagues talking in the halls feels like something out of a Walking Dead TV show or a Fallout video game. All of the student chairs are stacked and pushed to one corner of the room, with the desks grouped anonymously, much like I had left them. The math calendar we updated each day stands paused at March 12, the last day my class and I were all there together, seventy-six days ago, which is almost exactly the length of a typical summer break. The calendar triggers a thought. I look around the room and notice more detail, seeing that everything there is dated in the past, as if time had stopped at the onset of a calamity. Which isn’t far from the truth.
I made mental notes throughout the day about which personal items I’m touching that I’ll be bringing home, and which ones will need to be disinfected upon my return. Stopping every half hour to wash my hands eventually starts to irritate my hands. I feel certain they’ll be scaled and peeling and bleeding tonight. Hypothetically my classroom should be one of the safest places in the entire county, since the only people who have been in it during the past two months have been the ones coming in to clean and disinfect it. All the same, I remain cautious, perhaps too cautious, but unapologetically so. We keep hearing how the virus is primarily transmitted from person to person, with different theories about how long it could survive on different surfaces. I don’t want to be the person who leads to the discovery that the coronavirus is able to exist for thirteen weeks on whatever kind of metal pencil sharpeners are made of, so I’m trying hard not to take any chances.
Luckily I don’t have much work to do. Because of the humidity, the blue painter’s tape I used to mount the posters to the wall surrenders its hold almost willingly. When I pull down a list of vocabulary words meant to prepare the kids for state testing, it gives me pause. With everything up in the air about how school will start in August and September, I realize I haven’t thought much about October, November, December, and so on. State testing was bagged almost as soon as distance learning began this year. I wonder how altered from the norm the next school year would have to be for that call to be made again. I smile a tiny bit, trying to imagine how panicked all the educational data jockeys of the world would be if that were to happen.
I’m seeing constant traces of things that don’t just remind me of the people in my class, but of who they were as a class and all the things I really miss about them. I randomly think of one kid who had a day back in the winter when he wore five pairs of pants and nine shirts all layered, just to get a little extra attention. He would not enjoy the humidity filling the room that day, but that particular self-appointed class clown he would still dress that way, and pretend it didn’t bother him.
I finish everything I need to in just a few hours. That’s still less than what I normally would want to do. That’s a little difficult to reconcile, but, not knowing what the fall is going to look like, there doesn’t seem to be much point to doing everything I normally would. The idea of being able to begin a school year with a clean slate might elude me for a few years.
There’s really no emotion involved in picking up the things I decided to bring home and walking out to the parking lot. I can only hope there will be more closure to this weird and stupid year when the staff comes back in the final days to wrap it all up, and I get quick glimpses of my students when they drop off their books and computers, and I get one last chance to spend distanced time with my friends before we all retreat to our own versions of self-protection for the summer. There definitely won’t be any goodbye hugs being exchanged this year, which is too bad. Because I wouldn’t mind a few.
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