Pandemic Narrative Part 16: The Beginning of the End

I started writing these narratives back on March 14th, intending to give myself a way to trace how the pandemic changed the world around us throughout its duration. I wrote up a list of ten thoughts on that first post. It seems appropriate on this one, the last post of the year, that I should do the same.

1. Since I’ve included statistics in each pandemic narrative, I feel I should keep that going. Worldwide: 81.5 million cases; 1.78 million deaths. America: 19.4 million cases; 347,000 deaths. This means approximately one out of every one thousand Americans has died from this. If that count been the result of a war, I’m pretty sure that both politically and socially we would be much more united around the idea of working against it than we currently are. However, I’m now able to add a new statistic to the tally: So far, there have been 2.1 million vaccines given. A start.

2. I don’t like this about myself, but I’ll own it: I rarely start a new year with optimism. I think it’s fair to attribute this to losing my sister: When the new year rolls around I always carry at least a small suspicion that there’s going to be a day when I’ll be expecting everything to be normal, and life will put up a serve that resets it in a darker light, and everything will be about trying to survive and process the experiences that follow. Vaccine production aside, there’s still a pandemic going on, and there are still reasons for all of us to begin 2021 with active caution. On the plus side though, at least the most incompetent, self-centered, ignorant, and corrupt president in all of American history, whose foolishness is largely responsible for the predicament we’re in, will be out of office in a few weeks.

3. I honestly feel like I’m one of the few people left on Earth who still bothers to live with any precautions. Cars pass my house all day long like they always have. On the rare days I go to Target for a curbside pickup, all of the parking lots are full. I have filled my car's gas tank twice since March. Granted, I have no metric for what the outside world is like, other than the way the selfish, headstrong few will broadly paint social media with proclamations of their bold stands against anything they’ve been asked to do in the name of public health. Feeling like I’m one of the 0.0004% of the population still striving to adhere to anything but the bare minimum of staying safe is disheartening. It only compounds the isolation. Even if it’s mostly imagined, it feels just as real when you don’t have any evidence in front of you to prove it’s wrong.

4. What will it be like when the world begins to once again take the shape of something recognized as normal, whenever that might happen? How long until the world is safe again? How difficult will that transition be, to rejoin the world? Being an introvert has helped tremendously as far as the isolation goes, but introverts are not, by nature, antisocial. I don’t mind wearing masks, but my God, I can think of maybe five times in the past nine months I’ve even touched another person. 

5. There’s no way this isn’t taking a mental toll on me beyond what I immediately recognize. Many people who’ve known me have heard me say how I feel like I drop off the face of the Earth for someone else unless I’m directly in their line of sight. That’s never been more real now, feeling tucked away like stored human surplus that society has found a way to manage without.

6. I also feel a sense of wasted time, which is probably a reflexive response since I’m always so ready to be self-critical. I haven’t baked any bread or learned any new languages online. I haven’t read a fraction of the books I could have, or caught up on classic movies or developed a yoga routine or painted any rooms or learned the ukulele. But then I remember the time I put into revising a new book, and how difficult that was, and I’m quite proud of the accomplishment. I feel this one could be my best shot at publication, at least as far as middle grade goes. I still think it’s a weird story, but it’s thought-provoking, it’s original, it’s fairly well-written (if I’m allowed to think that about my own story), and I’m anxious for more people in the world to know about it, even if in the immediate that only amounts to a handful.

7. If I were to go back to school and earn another degree, just to pursue an interest, I think I’d study sociology. Because of that, I’ve often wondered exactly what the tipping point was for America, when we went from agreeing to shelter in place and behave in ways meant to preserve the greater good, then shifted over to so much more of a “Well, I’m not sick/This is a free country, don’t take away my rights” ethos. The idea of “we’re all in this together” that was so prevalent back in the spring has worn away to nothing but a faded platitude. I fear that perspective, as well as the reactions to it, will make it much harder for our society to recover and reunite. I’m afraid things will continue to get worse before we see any significant social healing.

8. How much longer is this going to go on? The vaccine is here. When will I be able to get it? When will the rest of my family be eligible? Which one will it be? What will be the circumstances of its availability? Everything about this is still new; there’s no way to see past the next turn in the road when no one has ever traveled the road before. 

9. Do I really want life to go back to what it was before once the world comes back together? Honestly, not in every way. I’m not sure if this is a reaction to the beginning of a new year, but I feel like the pandemic is still going to be around long enough to use this as a transformational time. How could I take steps, even tentative ones, that would develop over time to replace the things in my life I’m dissatisfied about? How much of that thinking is my own motivation, or coming from subtle pressures of what society has to say about what I should be, or what other people in my life expect of me? God knows how many years I have left. Ten? Twenty? Twenty-five? Six? There’s no telling. What do I want that time to be like? What would make it the best, the happiest, version of a life I could build around myself? Has there ever been a more appropriate time for that kind of self-examination? I keep falling back to the idea of where my priorities should be, and why (or if) the things I've held as important are necessarily things that should even be considered priorities. 

10. Like I said, I rarely start the year with optimism. However, there’s always that flicker of hope that refuses to die. We all have dreams and aspirations. We all have anxieties we’d like to banish from our lives. Could 2021 be the year when things drift to the positive, and things will go our way? Will we be gifted with small pieces of individual balance to reward us for what we’ve endured? 

I suppose we’ll start to discover that in a few more days. 

Pandemic Narrative Part 15/Big Block of Cheese Day

If you don’t know the Big Block of Cheese Day reference, then you haven’t watched enough episodes of “The West Wing.” Quick description: There are some posts here on the blog when I have different things on my mind at once, so instead of deciding on one as a topic, I put together some shorter posts inside one longer one. I’m also tagging this as part of the overall pandemic narrative as well, since each topic is somehow related to Covid-19 and its aftermath. Because what isn’t these days?

THE ACTUAL PANDEMIC NARRATIVE PART

There are more than 9 million Covid-19 cases in the United States. By the time you read this, there will probably be 230,000 deaths. Our President is a liar, and anyone who believes him when he says we’re turning the corner and the military will be able to delivery 70 bajillion doses of the vaccine in time for Thanksgiving leftovers is too naive for words.

Since the last time I updated the narrative, Covid caught up with my family and knocked back one of my blood relatives pretty damned hard. He’s doing a lot better now, thank God, and hopefully will be done with all of it much sooner than later. It was maddening when he was in the thick of struggling with it, and all my family could do was wait and see what happened. The last I heard was he was hoping to return to work in a couple days. Fingers crossed he does, and that’s the end of it for him.

Minnesota is on fire. We’re currently experiencing thousands of new cases daily, which of course means more hospital beds are occupied, and tragically more people are dying. None of this seems to have any impact on the people who have succumbed to their Pandemic Fatigue or their Covid Anger, or the cultists who still feel this is a hoax and “refuse to live in fear.” Anyone out there walking around feeling emboldened by the armor of their ignorance who wants to blather on about how Covid is a hoax? Acting with caution and living in fear are very different. I hope things aren’t going to catch up with you and show you how seriously you should have taken this. Sadly, I think that will inevitably be the case with some. I just hope getting to watch your kid take a few hikes during his senior year of high school football will have been worth it.

SHIFTING LEARNING MODELS DURING THE PANDEMIC AGE

The state and the school districts have said since back in the summer that it was likely the learning models being implemented would change throughout the school year, depending on the spread or containment of the virus. Four weeks ago, our district was considering returning the hybrid students to a full-time model. Two weeks ago, they saw that couldn’t happen. Two weeks after that, or now, they’re arranging for the secondary students to begin a full distance learning model while the elementary students remain in a hybrid. Elementary could potentially change to distance learning as well, provided the Covid data being monitored locally ever necessitates such a change. 

Predictably, there are many people and families who agree with more careful learning models, as well as many who feel the amount of implemented caution is too extreme. Somehow (45) this has been bastardized into being a political issue. This is leading to a lot of raging comment threads on social media, many of which assign teachers as the most identifiable face of the school system and freely bash away at them (us) as if they’re (we’re) the ones making these decisions, instead of the elected officials and district administrators following the science. It’s really unfortunate that our community is struggling so much to come together at a time like this to and support each other through the unprecedented challenges we’re all experiencing. I would like to suggest to anyone who may someday invent a time machine that your best move would be to travel back to Harvard around the turn of the century, and convince Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend not to dump him. Then maybe social media will never have a pathway of coming into being, and everyone in the world will be happier and get along better for it. 

NANOWRIMO 2020, OR RAGING AGAINST THE EMPTY

I’m just going to say it: I’m coming off a bad week. Why was it bad? I wish I knew. There was no starting point when things went from their standard neutral to bad, but it sure happened. There wasn’t a lot of smiling or laughing going on, at least outside of the time I was with my students. Sleep was more of an interruption in the darkness than an escape, when it even came. Emotions ebb and flow, however. Yesterday was net positive, and today feels nice and normal. Bad days come, sometimes stretches of them, but they also balance out. Plus there are things people can do to fight back the negative. Those things are probably different for each of us, and I feel like I have a basic understanding of what a few of my things are. One of them is definitely reading a good book. Here’s the one I picked: 

It took one book for Justin Cronin to become one of my favorite authors. I met him at a book signing in 2012 for his novel THE TWELVE, which is the second novel in the trilogy that started with THE PASSAGE, a horror novel that, coincidentally, began as a story about a pandemic that started with a bat and decimated the population. As he signed my book, I mentioned I was a teacher hoping to be an author someday. He said he’d started out the same way, which of course I already knew.

Four years later when CITY OF MIRRORS came out, I was back for another book signing, but this time with a different story to share. Instead of buying my copy of the book at the signing, I brought my own, which my agent had given me as a birthday present a few weeks earlier after she somehow managed to score a copy of it before it had even been released. You might think that shouldn’t be any great trick for someone in the publishing industry, but for a high profile book like this was at the time, it was no small feat. I was absolutely blown away. When it was my turn in the book signing line, I told Cronin how things had changed for me since his last signing. He shook my hand, congratulated me, and asked what I was working on. Then he wrote this with his signature.

I know that reading a good book does something to my brain, like flipping a switch that primes it to narrate. I recently decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year, so it seemed like a good opportunity to start reading a good long book and tap into that priming action. I picked CITY OF MIRRORS because he’s a really good writer, I’ve only read it one time, it contains a section that I would argue is one of the best love stories ever committed to paper, and above all it’s a horror story, which is what I’m going to be trying to write next month. I’m putting aside the middle grade work for a shot at adult fiction, and specifically horror. I’ve been looking for a good horror story to tell for a while now. When I started writing for real in college I wrote horror almost exclusively, but I still haven’t done it as a full-length novel, at least in adult fiction. I’ve had a number of conversations with my agent over the past year about taking on a project like this, and decided I had to go forward with it after she gave the concept her blessing.

I can’t say I’m really excited about it, though. I’m very excited about the story, but not so much diving into another round of writing a whole damn book in a month. First of all, it won’t be a whole book: Nanowrimo only requires 50,000 words in 30 days, and my draft should be aiming for something closer to 80,000-90,000 before editing, which would be really taxing to do in 30 days. I still win if I hit the 50k mark, and I will win at this because I won’t allow myself not to, but I’m okay with finishing the rest of the story in December.

See, I realized earlier this month that I feel better when I’m creating something. I finished revising a middle grade novel a few weeks ago, and noticed that the darkest part of October started soon after I was done with that, and continued to get more pronounced the longer I sat on the sidelines. Writing lesson plans helped, believe it or not, because there’s a certain amount of creativity that goes into that. Everyone has their own ways of proactively fighting whatever depression or anxiety they might be experiencing during these crazy pandemic days. I think my fight has to do with reading and writing, between keeping my head occupied, filling me with whatever collection of hormones are dumped into my system when the reading ignites that narrative response, and the feeling that follows the achievement that comes from writing something that brings me a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing that I seem to need that so much, but it’s probably good that I recognize it. 

Okay. That’s enough for now. Since I can’t start working on the new book until tomorrow, I’m going to go do some reading instead.

If She Were Here

Last year when I wrote my annual memorial post to mark the date we lost my sister Erin — 16 years ago now — I listed things about everyday life for all of us that she had never been alive to know about. It put a cold perspective on how long we’ve been without her now. Here in 20-frickin’-20, everything comes back to all the forms of disaster that have manifested during this calendar year. There are more than 7 million cases of Covid-19 around the world, and more than 200,000 deaths (and counting) in America alone. As of the past few days, one of those millions of cases even includes our esteemed president and several of his best administration pals. I’ll refrain from going beyond that other than to say the problem has been with us for a long time and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. It got me thinking: What would it have been like if Erin had still been around to get through this with the rest of us?

She would have been the one driving out to deliver things to her friends and family confined to home to keep them safe. She liked knowing she was able to help people. She enjoyed being relied on. She once held up a shuttle bus at the state fair parking lot from leaving so she could help an older woman with a walker get on the bus. 

She would have taken mitigation very seriously since she worked with seniors, and wouldn’t have wanted to be unavailable to them.

She wouldn’t have been following the politics of the election too deeply, but she would have known enough about what was going on to hate the president as much as she had hated any other bully she’d ever encountered, and she would have been taken over by the personality combination of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The cousins in our family who live locally and have small children would have had her coming over occasionally, probably bringing some simple new toys to leave behind, and playing with them in some socially distant way she had thought up on her own. The kids would just see this as a fun new game, and would probably refer to it as something like “The Erin game.”

She’d be unhappy about the Vikings and their 1-3 record, and would have opinions about Kirk Cousins. 

She’d visit Jenny and me on occasion, but primarily to spend time with our dogs. 

When our family would have some kind of event coming up like a birthday or holiday, she would figure out where and when we were going to celebrate and then give each of us our directions, and possibly tell us which of our masks were expected to wear.

She’d be on Facebook because so many of our cousins are, and her timeline would be dominated by memes. Half of them would be critical of the job the president has done (and likely based around jokes related to poop or farts) while the other half would be inspirational sayings and poems with calming nature backgrounds.

When she would come to my house (to see Freddie), she would occasionally bring me some kind of gift she had noticed in a previous visit that I needed. This would be indicative of both her wanting to show kindness to people, but also a way to keep the fires of sibling rivalry burning brightly, something like “The last time I was here I noticed that all of you kitchen towels are completely worn out and suck, so I got you some new ones.” This would be her way of showing she was aware of me and my surroundings, but also her way of sticking it to me to highlight how incapable I would be of having nice towels without her help. Like I said, sibling rivalry. 

The thing about reimagining what the present would be like with her as a part of it was something I didn’t even realize until I was nearly done thinking my way through it: Every moment of my picturing her with us now saw her as she had been before she was sick. I didn’t see the Erin with the incessant cough or the crippling fatigue or the heavy knowledge of her fate. I saw the person she’d been at her peak, healthy and strong, living the life in front of her and struggling to figure out what was going to come next, like so many of us do each day. 

It was good to have some time with that version of her again. 

Pandemic Narrative Part 14: Back to School, Kind Of

First, the numbers. Cases in the United States: 5.97 million. That’s a number greater than the population of thirty different states. Deaths: Just over 183,000. In Minnesota, that’s more than the population of any city other than Minneapolis or St. Paul.

School for the staff in our district begins tomorrow. The meetings and training sessions will be held virtually this year, with an extra week of planning and organizing built into the calendar. Students will be welcomed back after that one-week delay, with hybrid learning in the elementary schools and distance learning for secondary, with the intention that the secondary schools will transition to a hybrid model two weeks later. However, any families who were hesitant about sending their children back were given the option to have them continue with distance learning, at least for the first trimester. Enough people chose this at our school that one teacher from each grade has been designated a distance learning teacher.

These teachers will still collaborate with both their grade level teammates and each other, and most of them will be working in the building with the rest of the staff. Most, but not all. One was granted an accommodation by the school district because they’re carrying around Covid-19 underlying health conditions, so working in a public building puts them at a greater risk. That walking risk factor? That would be me. 

Maybe this is a surprise to you. It has been to a lot of people so far. If that’s the case, it’s  probably because I decided it isn’t your concern and I’ve chosen not to share it with you. Don’t take it personally, since that describes most people. We all have aspects of our lives we choose to keep to ourselves, and since this is one for me, I’d rather we all just accept it as a truth and move forward without making an issue of it. In other words, mind your business, and have a nice day. 

So why bring it up in the first place, you might be wondering? It would be pretty impossible to write this post without giving you at least that much context. So, context established — let’s move on.

I stopped at school this past Friday, for an hour or so, just to pick up whatever personal or curricular items I would need before my classroom is turned into a day care center for the next x number of weeks or months. There had already been at least one email sent out from our principal by then that would make it clear to anyone paying attention I won’t be roaming the hallways for this year, or at least for some of it. It was good to see some of my grade level team and a few other friends and colleagues in the short time I was there, because I know the separation from all of them will absolutely be the hardest thing about teaching remotely for me. 

Don’t get me wrong: I know how lucky I am to have gotten this accommodation. With the number of morons in the general public either ignoring, disregarding, or not taking mitigation guidelines as seriously as they should, it seems likely that eventually some student or staff member is going to let a little Covid nugget piggyback into the school. Not ideal, but we’re talking about a virus that spreads aggressively, which means that old brick schoolhouse that’s welcomed me back for the past twenty-eight school years is not the place for me to be right now.

So, where does that leave me? As far as the job goes, eh, it’s not really a big deal for my part. I’ve done distance learning before. I’m not getting the whole thing dropped on me out of nowhere like the big ugly surprise it was in March. I had a trimester to find out what works and what doesn’t. I’ve learned a lot about the tech. Not everything will go right, but most of it will. The families I’ll be working with chose that model, which makes me hopeful they’re at least on board with the idea. There will be things about it that are difficult, but there are going to be difficult things about the hybrid model I won’t be doing, so it should mostly be a wash in the end.

I’m not expecting the job to be too much of a problem. In fact, I’m actually looking forward to taking on some of the challenges. So I’m ready for the job. I’m anxious to teach again, even like this. I’m more worried about all the other things. 

I won’t see my team. Online? Sure. Group messaging? Constant. But will I be there to laugh at the knock-off Pringles? The Asimov quiz at lunch? The hallway decompression after another day in the psychedelic monkey house? No. But they will. And they’ll have each other. And they will build bonds based around the shared experiences unique to this school year that I will only ever know about as second hand, at best. 

I won’t see my friends. I don't suspect I’ll be missing out on many happy hours or game nights or team building events on the weekends, but: Our staff shifted hard last year. There were seismic changes in the district with new schools opening, and a lot of my long-time friends left, as a whole bunch of strangers came in to take their places. In many ways, I started last year feeling barely tethered to what my school had always been to me. As time went on, I slowly got to know a lot of these brand-new people, and developed stronger relationships with some of the others I’d work with for years but had never known well. This kind of relationship building happens gradually, collecting the momentary experiences that occur and letting them grow. Sometimes relationships organically occur, and sometimes you have to decide to put in the work needed to foster them. This year there are going to be more brand new people walking our halls. Most of them I haven’t even met. They’ll be nothing to me but names on a Google Meet tile, and I won’t be much more to them than a ghost or a rumor. They’ll build relationships with my friends and colleagues, and I could be a year behind everyone else by the time I get my chance to know them half as well.

I’ll still have my role in the greater purpose, but I won’t have anyone to share it with in the crucial moments. Everyone in a school knows which kids are the challenges in which homerooms and which grades. We all have our people we can safely vent to when it’s necessary. We have the running jokes that keep us sane. Being a part of a school staff is very much a “We’re all in this together” feel, in a way people who haven’t experienced it themselves could not appreciate. This year, I suspect that feeling is going to be even stronger and more connecting for the people there. And then there will be me, the virtual one, the afterthought, the asterisk. We’re all in this together, and, ooh, that’s right. Someone needs to remember to tell him, too.

I selfishly hope distance learning does start for everyone, which is counterintuitive since the only thing that would make that happen would be an even wider and more aggressive spread of the virus through the community. But if things do get bad, I want my friends and colleagues and my students and their families off the front lines. I want to know they’re all safe, and I want to know that when I rejoin the world, someday, it will still be somewhat familiar.

It’s daunting to consider how it’s inevitable the world is going to move on, and that the school, and the school community I return to, is going to be very different than the one I’m sidestepping away from so I can stay alive. It’s also daunting to think about how the experience at my end of it will change me as well. 

There’s nothing any of us can do but survive and wait to see what’s next.

How to Fix School For 2020-21 and at Least the Next One Hundred Years

For the past several weeks, finding the best way to operate schools during a pandemic has been at the forefront of a national discussion. Most people agree that it’s a nearly impossible problem to solve, which actually puts it on top of a pile of several other nearly impossible to solve problems education has been facing for generations. That’s okay though, because these problems are only nearly impossible to solve, and not literally impossible. I know this because I thought about them for a little bit this morning, and I think I’ve got everything figured out.

Now, full disclosure: These hypotheticals would cost a LOT of money. There’s no way around that. But didn’t the government just issue stimulus checks like they were Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons this past spring? I’d argue that with the size of our national economy, there’s money available to allocate if education is made a big enough priority (or, in other words, if it finally became the priority it already should be). 

So, let’s start with the easy part: How do we get through the 2020-21 school year? 

*Accept that 2020-21 is the Covid-19 Year and will be forever marked with an asterisk because of that, which — let’s face it — is already going to happen anyway. We’re in a pandemic. Don’t let the gravity of what that means diminish just because you’ve heard the word so many times in the past six months. There is no true sense of when this will end, or how much worse it will get before it gets any better. It’s a health crisis at a global level. We have to deal with it. So far, our country has come up with some spectacular ways of failing at that.

*Start the school year on October 1st. Go 10 weeks instead of 12 for each trimester this year, to allow for a built-in quarantine stretch between academic terms. Abbreviate the curriculum and eliminate the time used for baseline-establishing standardized testing. Use that extra month up front to give the active teachers time to plan out what needs to happen to make the rest of the year successful. I’m not saying the curricular specialists or the administrators wouldn’t have anything to add, but leaving thousands of teachers out of the planning loop is a waste of talent and creative energy and passion. Give us a rough outline to follow. Give us guiding standards. Then let us start doing the things we do better than anyone else ever could.

*Distance learning for everyone, period. The whole year. Let’s not worry about the time and energy that would need to go into trying to arrange a completely safe hybrid or full return. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than a whole bunch of funerals no one could physically attend. Plus it would take away all the stress related to wondering how each separate district is going to try accommodating their communities every time the Covid data changes a tenth of a percent. Remember — this is the year that’s getting the asterisk anyway. The school buildings could remain open to provide food service for families in need of assistance, and opportunities for students to meet in individual and mitigated settings with social workers, psychologists, speech pathologists, tutors, and whatever other professionals provide necessary services. But traditional classroom teaching? Nope. Just be sure you keep those devices charged. 

*Socialization worries? Overlooking the fact that socialization will be nothing at all like what people advocating for a hybrid model are hoping for, the districts can organize properly mitigated activities, perhaps weekly, for student and/or family participation depending on the course of the virus through their communities. Parents who are concerned about their kids seeing their friends can decide whether or not they’ll allow them to attend. Transportation would be provided to make sure everyone can get there. 

Okay, there we go — 2020-21, settled. Boom, we’re done. Nothing to it. Let’s move on, because we still have some work to do here. Now, when it comes to solving all the other problems school has:

*All teachers working with students through distance learning this year will be doing so with the maximum student-teacher ratio allowed for that grade level. This will allow hundreds of teachers to step away from their direct teaching responsibilities for the year, and instead begin working on reinventing the education model. They’ll be tasked with developing ways an equitable education can be delivered to each student. Covid-19 isn’t our only problem, folks. Systematic racism. Culturally imbedded sexism and gender biases. Fundamental disadvantages associated with poverty or language differences. The constant pursuit of eliminating the achievement gap. Varying opportunities available not just when comparing different school districts, but sometimes between schools in the same district. Schools have become the hubs of their communities, because they represent cross-sectioned samplings of the problems all of our communities face. Every person in education tries really hard to do the best they can, but too often getting through the school day is like swimming uphill. There must be things we could do better.

So what would a complete reinvention for something like this involve? As it happens, I have a few starting points in mind. 

*Keep classes capped at a maximum of twenty students. 

*Each grade level or department in each school should have its own administrative assistant, as well as its own paraprofessional to support instruction. (To be fair, I'm stealing this idea from a friend of mine who has advocated for it for at least a decade.)

*The number of social workers staffed at any building should increase by at least five times, because that many are needed. Really. They are. Additionally, Character Education, or whatever it would be called, would be raised to the level of any other academic discipline. Too many members of our society clearly have things to learn about getting along with other people.

*Speaking of curriculum, it would be reimagined from the ground up. The days of trying to accommodate specific numbers of minutes spent on each subject daily while using prepackaged curriculum plans as gospel truth would be over. Curriculum packages would be starting points. One of the biggest jobs those teacher Think Tanks during the Covid year would be reimagining curriculum in ways that would (a) address state standards and (b) efficiently integrate different disciplines into the same learning opportunities.

*All specialists would have adequate space and materials to work with. Media centers would be updated with current fiction and non-fiction titles each academic term.

*Get rid of the agrarian calendar. Instead of giving students a summer break (because it’s not really like a lot of them need to spend their summer helping to work the family farm anymore), give them four three-week breaks between academic periods spread out during the year. This will go far in eliminating the dreaded “summer slide” and the reteaching time needed at the start each new year to make up for it. I know, I'm not crazy about giving up summer breaks either, but we're doing bold thinking here.

*Extend the school day by an hour (and increase staff pay accordingly). Use that extra hour to give the students more time to eat their meals, more time to read, and more time to meet with the psychologists, social workers, and health professionals they need to see. And on the subject of health professionals, each school health office should be staffed full-time by one doctor, one nurse, one dentist, one psychologist, and at least one paraprofessional.

*Each school should be staffed by a minimum number of licensed substitute teachers, ready to step in and take over a classroom when the emergencies happen, because they do. Exactly how many people would be staffed in these positions would depend on the size of the building. If these teachers are not needed as substitutes, they would be available for classroom support or tutoring during their work hours.

*Finally: No more Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for snacks. Those are just wrong.

Okay, so — I think we all know this list barely scratches the surface about what could be done differently to make schools more effective. But I don’t really know if the original premise is that far out of line: This school year isn’t going to be any kind of normal. No solution will be great. We’re all just imperfect human beings moving into this great unknown, hoping we’ll be able to do our best with the unprecedented situation we find ourselves facing. But if there ever was a time to re-evaluate the way we do things, why not take advantage of a time when we kind of have to do that already anyway? It doesn’t hurt to dream. Procedures begin as plans, and plans start as ideas. Without an idea, there's no first step.

Pandemic Narrative Part 13: Stability Threats and Opening Schools

I had my first education course in my junior year — Intro to Elementary Education, predictably enough. Starting it was a big transition, signaling that I had dispensed of all my generals and was finally starting to work on my major. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about the class, but I do remember one point our professor made early on — the generalization that a lot of people went into education because they wanted a life of security. 

His point, essentially: “Your jobs will be more secure than most, because society will always need schools. You’ll have unions to protect you. You likely won’t be rich beyond your wildest dreams, but you probably won’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, either. Your work schedules will closely align with the schedules your children will have. All of these things will provide you with a fairly reliable sense of security that will enhance your quality of life.” At first it seemed like he might have been taking a shot at us for following a safe and easy route with the directions we were choosing for our young lives, but it was really more of a read on what he assumed we valued, and even a compliment for picking a career that could likely provide us with the kind of life we hoped to have. (Of course at twenty years old, we still had no idea how infrequently “easy” was ever going to figure into our professional responsibilities.)

Our education system is an absolute bedrock of social order. The amount of time, thought, capital, energy, and emotion invested into just its peripheries says a great deal about our collective priorities. Football games played on autumn Friday nights are such dominant community events that the results merit coverage on more than one local television station. Video cameras seem to spontaneously generate whenever a few dozen second graders climb up on risers in a gymnasium to sing about the United States while playing rudimentary percussion instruments. Which high school people attended sometimes becomes so ingrained with their identity that they’ll wear it as a badge of honor throughout adulthood. Several aspects of our economy are arranged around, if not defined by, the school schedule. How many families organize their lives by the school year instead of the calendar year?

We crave stability. We want to know our vehicles will get us where we want to go, and get us back home afterward. We want to know our loved ones are alive and healthy and happy and safe. We want to trust our paychecks will show up in time for us to pay our bills. We want to be able to rely on knowing Fridays are something to look forward to while Mondays are test of endurance. When fundamental stability is threatened or diminished, people have a hard time accepting it. 

So what happens when a previously unknown and potentially lethal virus becomes a variable in the equation? Where does it leave us when the stability we’ve come to appreciate and base our lives around is torn to shreds? Which of our priorities are revealed to be more luxury than necessity?

Well, the virus is here, so things are going to be different now. Being able to rely on the stability schools have provided throughout our lives is, in the best case scenario, temporarily on hold. Institutions we once felt we could rely on when situations became dire might end up losing some of our trust. Sometimes that’s fair, sometimes it’s scapegoating. Sometimes the truth will be on a spectrum somewhere between those two points. 

Speaking of truth, there aren’t many truths greater than the facts, so here’s what we’re looking at as far as our worldwide pandemic goes. As of the day I’m writing this: 

*More than 18.6 million people worldwide have been infected by Covid-19. The United States has 4.9 million, or more than one fourth, of those cases. 

*Over 702,000 people have died from the virus. The United States has seen 160,420 of those deaths. That number was closer to a still horrifying 36,000 less than four months ago.

*The state where I live has seen 1,670 deaths. Of those, 938 of them have occurred in the two counties where the schools of the district in which I teach call home.

*The most recent testing positivity rate in my state is 5.1%. Anything higher than 5% is an “indicator of concern.” That rate has been trending upward in recent weeks. 

This is what our world is now. 

The school district where I teach recently announced they’ve decided to open the year in a hybrid model, meaning the kids will be learning at school for part of the week, and at home for the rest. I can’t be much more specific than that, because there’s still a lot about what this model will look like that we, the staff, don’t know yet. If this hybrid plan actually comes to fruition, a degree of risk for students, staff, and families undoubtably comes with it. I’m personally hoping that while our district leadership engages in this thankless and nearly impossible decision-making process, they still might change their minds and give distance learning a hard second look.

This pandemic has made me acutely aware of the privilege I carry. My life is far from perfect, but compared to so many others I have to admit how unbelievably fortunate I am. I have that secure job I was able to pursue in college, and it’s given me a nice and stable life I try not to take for granted.

Acknowledging that, as I think about exactly what it will look like when the new school year begins, I can’t say I’m feeling particularly secure. I’ve said this before, and it’s still true so I’m going to say it again: I have already figuratively given my life to education. I’d prefer not do it literally as well.

The Challenges of Opening Schools

One of my biggest gripes about teaching has always been how so much of the general public thinks they understand what goes into it: “Well hey, I went to school! I did the worksheets and used the flash cards and watched the filmstrips! I saw what those teachers did all day!” And so on. I think this past spring brought an awakening to a lot of people when they took on distance learning for their children, and perhaps speculated what it would be like to do that with twenty-nine other kids at the same time.

But now it’s summer. It seems much of that perspective, and the grateful sentiment that came with it, has evaporated. The stir-crazy feelings of sheltering at home became too much for some. States began opening with the virus still in circulation. People were irresponsibly encouraged to go back out and act like things were normal. Some decided the risk was worth taking, just so they could “feel like it’s summer.” Ignoring social distancing guidelines and refusing to wear masks became a divisive political issue. Anyone with a passing awareness of how COVID-19 has been progressing knows these decisions have only made both the spread of the virus and the negativity of the social climate even worse.

Which brings us up to now, when planning for a return to school in the coming weeks has emerged as the newest national argument. Now, I wouldn't claim to be an expert on education, but I know a few things about it. I’m about to begin my 29th year in the elementary classroom. I’ve earned a masters degree and an additional sixty credits beyond that. I’ve taught in four different grades, I’ve held building leadership positions, I’ve worked under more extra service agreements than I would want to take the time to tally. I’ve tutored students at home when they were too sick or injured to attend school. I’ve written curriculum. I’ve delivered professional development, more than once. Heck, I’ve even won an award. Because of all this, I think it’s fair to say I know as much as anyone about what would need to be considered for schools to open safely during these times. I’m not claiming to present any solutions here, but only sharing my insights with some of the issues I’ve been thinking about.

Full disclosure: I absolutely believe schools should return to distance learning this fall. I’m hoping to live long enough to see at least another Thanksgiving, and another birthday, and not have to worry about who will take care of my dog if I die. I’ve already given my life to education, metaphorically. I’d rather not do it literally as well.

So, breaking the issues into categories, here are some of things that would need to be considered:

School Atmosphere:

As a teacher, my top priority has always been that each student feels safe when they’re in my classroom. Coming back to a school with social distancing mandates where everyone is wearing masks and everything about the familiar routine of the school day has been reimagined will not make them feel safe, even if that’s the intent. It’s going to feel at least slightly dystopian. Even if they have enough time to get used to their new school normal before the first round of distance learning inevitably begins, they’ll never be completely at ease, which will make it harder to learn. They won’t have the chance to be themselves. Plus, since I’m calling this category “atmosphere,” let’s also briefly acknowledge how the current air circulation systems in even the newest school buildings likely aren’t engineered to prevent the spread of a virus we didn’t even know existed a year ago.

Long Term Goals and Standards:

One common refrain these days is how we don’t want the kids to fall behind. My question: Fall behind what? What’s more important here? To preserve the social order of the agrarian calendar education has traditionally followed for over a century, or to keep people alive? 

Grade level standards don’t even align between all of the states. Content isn’t delivered with the same fidelity between districts, or even buildings, or classrooms. All teachers try, but we have different approaches, different strengths, and different weaknesses. Here’s a thought experiment for you: What would happen if all three school options — full open, hybrid open, or distance learning — were all set aside because the pandemic raged undeniably out of control, and every citizen of the United States was completely on board with closing schools for an entire academic year? Would anyone technically be behind anyone else, or would they all still be at the same level as others their age? Would kids learn less if they ultimately graduated at nineteen instead of eighteen for a generation? Wouldn’t such an event be a perfect chance for schools to look at alternative schedules, and even working through the summer as several locations around the country already are? Maybe once we were safely to the other side, all kids would take a placement test to determine which grade they should be in as things start back up. What really could be a better reason to enact such a drastic step then a lethal virus spreading through the population? I’m not advocating this plan, but just pointing out there is no hard deadline on when learning ends, or any one educational model that has to be followed.

Student Behavior:

I work in elementary, but this is true for all K-12 students: They’re kids, and they will not always do what’s expected of them. It’s their nature. They are still learning about the world. They are never as well-behaved as the kids you might see in a back-to-school commercial, trying to get parents to buy new shoes and backpacks with choreographed dances and singing Kidz Bop knock-offs of old Whitesnake songs. How many kindergarteners would wear masks all day long without playing with them, or trading with their friends, or getting frustrated enough to throw them away? How many fifth graders will find creative things to do with their masks to get a laugh? Which students will refuse to wear their mask as a willful act of defiance? I mean, come on. You’ve probably seen some of the videos circulating online of the tantrums adults are throwing if a cashier politely asks them to mask up. Swearing, throwing things, intentionally spitting and coughing on people? Again, these are ADULTS. Now think about the seven-year-old who has yet to learn self-control, or the twelve-year-old carrying so much emotional trauma they don’t have the skills to process how they feel. How will they react when they reach breaking points?

Supporting Student Needs: 

People tend to think of school as primarily what happens in the classroom. We have speech students. We have English Language Learners. We have students receiving reading and math support. We have social workers, psychologists, and clinical therapists. How will all of that be managed? Most, if not all, schools will have students dealing with homelessness, or poverty, or enduring more kinds of abuse and neglect than you care to imagine. There have been several years when I’ve seen kids spending their first day of summer vacation riding their bikes in the school parking lot, because it lets them be near the place they feel safest. I’d argue these are the kids who need to be in school more than anyone else. Right now, a lot of these service providers are lucky to have a semi-private table to use, which they use several times each day, and will have to repeatedly disinfect. How will social distancing work with that?

Socializing: 

One of the most common reasons people say they want kids back in a normal school environment is so they can be with other kids. Yes, this is a powerful reason. The most common thing I heard on video chats with my students in the spring was how they were bored and wanted to see their friends. However, keep in mind: In this vaguely dystopian hybrid education model, even socializing is going to look different. How many kids would be allowed to sit at a cafeteria table? They’d likely all sit on one side, if they went to the cafeteria at all. How many would have “bathroom emergencies” to squeeze in a few minutes of chatting with friends from other classes? (And yeah, of course they’ve learned to coordinate these times.) Soccer, football, tag at recess? I honestly don’t know what recess would even look like. Everyone standing in a marked-off square, six feet on a side? This would be like walking past the windows of the bakery: They could see the donuts through the glass, but wouldn’t even get to smell them. They won’t get to work in small groups or play games with partners, unless they do it online.

Shared Materials:

Textbooks. Paper. Clay. Notebooks. Sticky notes. Meter sticks. Omnifix cubes. Markers. Library books. Gymnastics mats. Crayons. Glue. Lunch trays. Tape. Science trays. Jump ropes. Paint and paint brushes. Calculators. Maps. Chromebooks. Drinking fountains. Hockey sticks. Tissue boxes. Silverware. Notecards. Chairs. Basketballs. Game cards. Puzzles. Bowling pins. Pencil sharpeners. Game pieces. Plastic bins. Terrariums. Containers full of condiment packages. Scissors. Paper towel dispensers. Highlighters. Pencils, for crying out loud. This is a partial list of the things students share daily. You might be thinking, “But what about that list of supplies families buy at the beginning of the year?” 1) Not every family buys everything. 2) Supplies run out, more quickly for some kids than others. 3) Things break and get lost.

A lot of kids learn best and are most engaged when they work with their hands. If there are not necessary materials in the classroom to work with, someone will miss out on a chance to do their best learning, and might feel a little ostracized every time they need to get out their calculator and they’re one of the few who does not have one. There are already a boatload of issues that come with trying to manage common materials without being vigilant about keeping them disinfected. Those issues will inevitably compound each other.

Transportation:

A typical bus holds about seventy kids, if they sit three to a seat. Most bus routes won’t fill a bus to capacity, but will still be over half full. Social distancing? Impossible. For that we’re talking one kid to a seat, with each seat separated by an empty one, in a best case scenario. How many more bus routes will this require? How much longer will some of these bus rides be? How many more buses will be needed, not to mention the drivers needed? And how much fuel? Transportation costs will be five times higher. How could these changes affect the length of the school day? How many times daily will the buses need to be disinfected? Take everything that would make this more difficult, and double it. At least.

Health Services:

I’ve heard some of the more ignorant officials in the federal government say it wouldn’t be such an undertaking to take the temperature of each student as they arrive. Are you kidding me? How many thermometers will be needed to get that done with expediency? Will temperatures be taken more than once a day? Will we need extra nurses or paras fully PPE’d up to float around the building for temperature checks, who would then escort sick kids to the health office so they don’t cough on the several dozen lockers and classroom doors and drinking fountains they’ll pass on the way there? What happens if we find ourselves in the beginning of a spike? The health office in my school has two cots. We can’t always rely on parents being able to pick up their children right away. Also, let’s not forget about all the other normal reasons the health office stays so consistently busy each school day to start with. What happens to the ones with strep throat? Lice? Pink eye?

Sanitation:

First, let’s frame this topic by highlighting how an elementary school is the kind of place where, while infrequent, it’s not completely out of the ordinary for someone to sneak off to the bathroom and take a crap on the floor just because. I’ve seen random pants left in the hallway. I’ve had students leave small plastic containers of ranch dressing in their desks for so long that they grew into something unrecognizable. I’ve had students cough into my mouth at such close range I could taste it. I’ve seen a boy walk past a bank of twenty lockers in an empty hallway, plant his tongue firmly on the first, and lick each one in succession. Schools are big-time disease vectors already. 

Each night my classroom is swept, the wastebasket (which is usually spilling over by the end of the day) is emptied, and the recycling bin is dumped out if it’s more than half full. If I have an extra mess to deal with, I email the building supervisor and tell the night custodian, then cross my fingers he’ll have enough time that night along with everything else he has to do for it to be addressed. Will the plan be to disinfect every surface in the building that could have been touched by someone that day? Will that job become yet another expectation for the teachers? A lot of teachers probably will do extra cleaning on their own out of self-preservation — I know I would. What else would teachers be asked to do to keep their rooms clean, and how much longer will it keep them in the hot zone of their classroom? Or how many extra cleaning staff will need to be hired just for the daily disinfecting alone?

Nutrition:

There are kids who will not have the chance to eat healthy meals if they don’t get them at school. At our school we serve breakfast, we allow for snack time in the schedule, and we serve lunch. Our social worker will provide snacks for students who are unable to bring them from home themselves, and he goes through a LOT. I know our school district has a program in place to make grab and go meals available throughout the summer. Yes, this is a big reason to get the kids back to school, but there’s a reason why so many restaurants are at 25% seating capacity, or closed from indoor dining completely. If we get kids back in the building, how is lunch going to work? In the classroom? Shorter shifts than the already have? A menu with less variety? Something will have to change. 

Drills: 

Each school is required to run a certain number of fire drills / severe weather drills / active shooter lockdown drills during an academic year. How will these work? Everything done normally will take longer. How will that happen with distancing? If the call was made to say it just isn’t practical to run the drills, then why are we doing them in the first place? How do I get my whole class into the safest corner of the room during a lockdown when they have to be spaced? How do we get everyone out of the school as fast as possible when they can’t be near each other?

Lockers: 

They are all right next to each other. In some schools, they’re literally on top of each other. If we opened and managed to stay open into the winter because things were improving so much regarding the pandemic (AH HA HAA AHA), our students are expected to have jackets, snow pants, boots, hats, and gloves to go outside. Lockers are not six feet apart. Where do they keep this stuff? How much learning time is lost at the beginning and the end of the day, not to mention before and after recess, when they have to take turns putting stuff on over three different shifts on the hallway to make sure they’re distant enough from each other?

Substitutes: 

As ambitious as I was during the year I worked as a substitute teacher back in the Jurassic period, even I wouldn’t have taken a day job in a building where there could be a virus that might kill me. A need for subs doesn’t end with teachers, though. Don’t forget the paraprofessionals, cafeteria staff, custodians…the number of people needed to make the system work goes on and on. 

With that being my list, you might have noticed: I didn’t even touch the challenges that would come with the actual teaching and learning in any of these scenarios. It’s easy to break down the available opening options into three general categories, and calling something a hybrid model could literally mean one hundred different things. From my point of view, if all options end up being equally flawed, why not go with the choice that will keep the most people alive?

I’ve bought a school yearbook every year I’ve taught. Occasionally I’ll dig them out and look them over. Most memories are good. Not all, but most. I would never want to see a yearbook for the 20-21 school year including a memorial page that lists the names of the staff and students taken by COVID-19 because we went back too soon or unprepared. I’m afraid that scenario is far too possible. 

Pandemic Narrative, part 12: For Crying Out Loud

Do you remember how it started? 

The first news reports, most of them fairly measured, about a new virus emerging on the other sides of the world, moving higher up in priority as the days and weeks of the new year passed on? Casually witnessing from what seemed a safe distance as country after country was added to the roster of the ones affected, the number of cases growing at alarmingly geometric rates in so many different locations, the confirmed deaths growing from sad to tragic to terrifying? 

How did you feel when the NHL and the NBA suspended their seasons? When theaters closed and concerts were cancelled? When it was declared too risky to be in an enclosed space with more than 250 other people, and soon after that number dropped to 10? The jokes about toilet paper and hand sanitizer becoming the currency of the apocalypse? Trying to a package of Lysol wipes or their generic equivalents of any size, something reliably stocked in any retail store from Speedway to Target, then accepting what seemed impossible when the companies that produced them ran out. How quickly did you shift your mindset into rationing however many you still had on hand? 

Did you have a happy Easter this year, while much of the nation was on some version of quarantine? No, it never really was an actual quarantine; it just became convenient to call it that instead of by any of the names different states were using: Sheltering in Place, Safe at Home orders, and so on. We reading social media posts about all the banana bread and sourdough people were trying to make, and saw the Instagram pictures displaying their results. The invention and implementation of societal distance learning came into being, soon followed by memes and videos of how frustrated people were becoming as they struggled to manage their own staying-at-home lives with helping their children learn. Community events became online features — concerts, happy hours, birthdays, proms, graduation ceremonies. All were well-intended but were never substitutes for the real things, the idea of normal from which we felt we were being deprived. That was okay though. We were all in this together.

Everything had happened so quickly and there was still so little we knew about the virus. The safest thing was to keep our heads down and our doors locked. Doctors and nurses and really anyone in the medical profession, particularly the ones working in hospitals where patients were being treated for the virus were held to the same standard of heroism as soldiers putting their lives in jeopardy to protect each other and defend the ideas of our nation. State governments kept us informed about how bad things were, how much worse they were expected to get and by what speculated dates, and what we each needed to do to “flatten the curve.” 

Of course it didn’t last. When you put an ignorant and immeasurably selfish jackass in a position to influence the opinions of far too many people who are more than willing to be influenced, the Kumbaya of it all falls apart with very little prompting. Armed protests at state governments, many of which were at least encouraged by the previously-mentioned ignorant jackass, began demanding a return to normalcy. I understood the frustration at the root of these demonstrations, since so many people have had their economic livelihoods decimated throughout all of this, and desperately needed to return to work. After all, some reasoned, the part of the population most affected was the senior citizens, who were already more at risk due to health-related problems. Other people, convinced by the belief in their own invulnerability, had reached their breaking point. 

A few weeks after that chaos seemed to return to a controlled boil, the country really did get turned upside down. Suddenly we were looking at the probability of our society going through systemic changes that had nothing to do with the virus. 

Here in my state, things are continuing the gradual process of reopening. The current data I’m looking at lists 33,227 cases, with 1,416 deaths. We were in bad shape for a few weeks there, but things have calmed enough for politicians to decide it’s relatively safe to start slipping back into the habits of the old normal, as long as people continue to observe social distancing and wear masks while in public. Which, to no surprise, many people who are either too ignorant or obstinate or believe themselves to be making a political stand by their actions simply don’t. It’s becoming more common for viral videos to show adults throwing honest-to-God R-rated tantrums if employees asks them to wear a mask as they shop.

If we dare to go beyond the borders of my state, things are much worse. The United States has passed the two and a half million benchmark for COVID-19 cases, with, depending on the source, approximately 125,000 deaths. Not only has the virus migrated to states that managed to escape widespread infection in the spring, but its staging comebacks in some that are now having second thoughts about the rate of their openings, and its all happening at rates that put us, as a nation, in the middle of the most aggressive spreading we’ve seen yet. Last night I heard on the news that even here in my state, there’s a been a shift in the affected population: Now the greatest number of new cases is coming from people in their 20s, with clusters of virus spread originating in bars. I guess that invulnerability didn’t work out. 

As a teacher, my life is filled with three-word directions: Sharpen your pencil. Write your name. Tie your shoes. Wipe your nose. Wash your hands. Lower your voice. All because kids don’t always know to do the right thing on their own. 

Here’s one more for those that haven’t figured it out on their own yet: 

WEAR A MASK.

May 31: Pandemic Summer

I’ve started past summers by covering my refrigerator door in a colorful array of sticky notes, creating a massive list of goals, hobbies, and adventures meant to fill my summer break with experiences and accomplishments. This summer I’m leaving it blank. 

This coming Friday would be Track and Field Day at my school. In a lot of ways, that day is the emotional starting point for the end of the school year. However, because of the coronavirus and distance learning, our Track and Field Day is virtual this year. No sweaty day out in the sun. No kids dumping out their water bottles on each other. No Tug of War, or Fifth Grade All-Stars competition, or dunk tank, or subsequent happy hour which I probably would have gone to this year.

The beginning of summer break is a wonderful time, the launch pad of so much possibility, and so many things to do. Go see a movie in the middle of the afternoon, if you want. Meet up with a few friends for lunch somewhere you usually wouldn’t go and catch up. Enjoy the open time without any immediate responsibility, or at least less of it.

This year though, I don’t know how much it will even feel like a break, at least for me. I haven’t seen my students in nearly three months, and I won’t see them as a group ever again. I’m sure it will feel like summer, with the pounding afternoon sun and the humid air and the occasional storm rolling through. So summer, sure. But a break from what? My work day for the third trimester has meant sitting in front of my computer screen each day, which is what a good chunk of each day will be like as I work (and yeah, it really is WORK) to write one new manuscript and revise another. That was always going to happen. Anything I would have had on the Sticky Note To Do List would have been distractions around it.

But this year, what’s going to happen in the outside world? For the second time in 2020, the world has gone through remarkable change for the worst almost overnight just this past week. George Floyd was killed not even a week ago, and not for the first time we’re finding so much of our lives affected by the actions of one violent ex-cop. Tragically there’s no way everything that followed that won’t lead to a second wave of COVID-19 by July, and my guess is that by then one community demanding justice and another wanting to go up North every weekend won’t eagerly welcome another shelter-in-place order.

So in my little world, there are a lot of things that either I really can’t, or shouldn’t, do, as well as things that would be pointless. There won’t be the traditional countdown to the first day back to school in the fall, because there’s really no telling what the fall will look like. There won’t be any boiling afternoons spent in a dark movie theater to retreat from the excessive heat and the storm watches, because even if the theaters were open there aren’t exactly any movies out for them to show. There won’t be afternoons or evenings, or sometimes even mornings, wandering the aisles of Cub or Target for an hour, only to arrive at the check-out with a cartful of things I don't really need. Live music is pretty much dead at the moment, so the one concert I was excited about attending has been postponed for at least a year, to say nothing of how there wasn’t even a Summer Concert Series at the MN Zoo amphitheater announced. I didn’t even bother trying to pick an Official Driving With the Windows Rolled Down Album of the Summer, both because friggin’ 2020 doesn’t deserve one and because the last time I filled my gas tank was mid-March and it isn’t even half empty yet.

On top of all this — no State Fair. Maybe at least on the Fourth of July I can try to watch the fireworks from that show near my house …maybe they’ll allow that with social distancing…at least on the fourth I can watch the Hot Dog eating con…nope, that’s getting shut down for sure.

I don’t know. I mean, I fully expect the Second Wave to hit like a tsunami, but maybe before it does I’m being too cautious. A lot of people are getting sick, but a lot aren’t. NO, that’s the kind of magical thinking that ends up with people in the ICU. I’m not taking any risks I don’t have to, and if that means more time in the designated pick up spots in the Target parking lot instead of in the store, so be it. I’m walking around with an underlying condition or two here. I’m not taking any risks I absolutely don’t have to. 

Besides, there are still a lot of things I can do. There are dozens of books to read in my house, along with the two of my own I’ll be working on. In fact, I’m halfway through the new Stephen King right now and have an older John Sandford mystery I still haven’t read on deck. I’ve got miles and miles of summer dog walks ahead of me, along with sunny afternoons we’ll spend in our chairs on the patio. There are all of those shows on Netflix people talk about, and I’ll probably take the final technology dive into Disney+ at some point, to anesthetize myself with Marvel movies. I’m also taking on the summer project of catching up on classic movies I’ve never seen; I think “From Here to Eternity” is actually recording as I sit here and write this. I have a well-worn copy of Fallout: New Vegas at the ready for any night I can’t fall asleep, now that I don’t have to worry so much about waking up to “go to work” anymore. And as far as shopping? I can get pretty much whatever I need delivered to my house. To paraphrase one of my students from an assignment they wrote about living through a pandemic, there’s a difference between the things you want and the things you need.

Whatever happens, the summer of 2020 promises to be both quiet (personally) and dramatic (publicly). Let’s just hope there’s still a world left out there when it’s time to start school again in the fall. 

May 30: Reflections on Distance Learning

The distance learning experiment began two months ago today. Teachers, students, and parents all had to learn how to make it work along the way. Some things worked, some didn’t. The district staff who slapped the original plan together all in a matter of weeks may be all intelligent and experienced, but they are only people and are subject to the same limitations as the rest of us. 

After two months of teaching from my home office, I feel I’ve got some of the distance learning process figured out. Here are a few things I’ll be keeping in mind for if/when we eventually fall back into the same routine at some point in the coming school year.

*Be flexible with your time. Office hours mean there are times you’re expected to be available, but not every child or every family will be able to align with that schedule. 

*Stay in touch with the families. Some families will roll with it all fairly well. Some will be anxious and confused. Some will not be very involved at all. 

*Make your directions abundantly clear. Sooner or later, you’re going to explain the directions to an assignment in a way that aren’t as straightforward as you intended or believed them to be. In a classroom, you can monitor and adjust. You can’t online. There likely will be times when the best thing to do will be to accept it didn’t work and move on. Video or audio instructions are very helpful. Some kids still won’t watch them and will do everything wrong.

*Understand that sometimes things will not go the way you want and there won’t be much you can do about it. It’s hard to find a balance between the rigor of assignments being too easy and too difficult. Sometimes you’ll thread that needle, sometimes you won’t.

*Some kids who are used to trash talking through their gaming and texting online will think that kind of discourse will carry over into their school work. If they aren’t going to show simple respect online, you probably have the capability to limit their interaction in the digital classroom setting. Use it. I did, once. I had to put up with a temper tantrum in an email later, but it worked. 

*If there’s a kid in your class who never shows their work, never hands things in, complains constantly about what they need to do (and there is at least one kid like that in your class), you’re going to have to monitor their participation very closely. If you have ways to stay in contact with them, use those to remind them about what they need to do. If they aren’t getting their jobs done, let the families know. With some families, that works brilliantly and you’ll see immediate results. With others, you’ll at least some improvement, either overall or in spurts. With a very small number of exceptions, it won’t make any difference at all. 

*Realize when you have video chats that sometimes the kids are only there because they want to see their classmates, and they couldn’t care less about what you’re trying to teach them. 

*Your email inbox is going to get ridiculous. Whatever tools you have, keep the important messages tagged because they’ll disappear in the crowd five minutes after you first see them. 

*Be flexible in your expectations because you don’t know what anyone is going through, but hold them accountable for what they’re expected to do. The day is going to come when they need that skill for real. 

May 29: 5 Good Things

The world isn't a great place right now. Minneapolis is in turmoil, the global population is being dominated by a virus, and 45 just keeps coming up with new ways to embarrass and distress the country he’s supposed to represent. Usually when I make a list of good things, I either do it to highlight how many good things there are in life at that specific time. When I’ve done it before, I would include ten good things. Today, I feel lucky I was able to come up with five. 

1. My students are aware of what’s happening in the Cities. There was a fair amount of discussion about the riots on our Google Classroom this morning as several people took turns expressing how they felt about it. Most of them were scared. I don’t like the idea that they have to accept that things like this are a part of the world they live in, but I’m happy they’re aware of it. I believe this will help them to be more involved citizens as they grow up.

2. My school has a very diverse population. While there are unavoidable hints and moments when racism comes out in the open and has to be dealt with, most of the kids acknowledge each other as individuals first instead of members of any pre-defined group. I believe attending school in such an environment will help them learn tolerance. 

3. Our state has a governor with a wealth of useful life experience that helps him when it comes time to make difficult decisions. He is also someone who doesn’t shy away from the responsibility that falls to him when the time comes for him to make those decisions. 

4. This isn’t getting anywhere near the media coverage as the destruction, but there are so many people in affected communities taking it upon themselves to begin cleaning up after the ones who raged and burned and leveled tragic amounts of the city. There are people in the world making the effort to begin the process of bringing things back. These people are just as important as the elected leaders, if not more important, when it will come to healing. 

All right. I’m going to stop there. Things are pretty bad, and despite what points of view I try to look at things from, today I think I’m lucky I was able to come up with four. Maybe that should lead me into a fifth one: 

5. Even if things are bad right now, and even if our culture and society are horribly and combatively splintered, there’s always hope that things might someday be better for everyone.

May 28: We're Not in This Together

Today was National Hamburger Day. I wish this was the kind of frivolous thing people could widely enjoy, but there’s just too much going on to push the world in the other direction right now. 

There were riots overnight in Minneapolis, triggered by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who’d had a police officer kneeling on his neck for so long he stopped breathing. In other head-shaking news, the president signed an executive order today, basically trying to weaponize a temper tantrum that started when a social media network dared to fact check his comments, after different media sources have documented thousands of lies he’s told during his administration. And on the subject of lying, it just came out that Republican state representatives in Pennsylvania didn’t tell their Democrat counterparts they had been exposed to COVID-19 because owning up to the spread didn’t fit their political agenda. 

Of course, each of these points I’ve raised are far more nuanced than how I’ve stated them, and I’m sure there would be people out there ready to argue against each point I’ve made, or perceived sides I’ve expressed on the issues. Fine. I concede I'm not the arbiter of all that is good and right and just. But what about scientists telling people to wear masks in public, and so many refusing to? What about people ignoring the guidelines meant to keep them and their loved ones alive during a pandemic? What about the institutional racism that too many in the country are willing to accept as just how things are? What about having a president who is more interested in being combative than trying to support and heal the country? 

I don’t care how many celebrities film public service announcements from their rec rooms telling the rest of us how "we’re all in this together." It does not seem to me that we are, or that we will be anytime soon.

May 27: Back to School

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.

May 26: Masks

I saw the headline tonight on one of the news shows I watched commenting on how wearing masks in the time of COVID-19 has become a political football. In other words, there are people out in the world deciding on their own, or perhaps guided into making their decisions based on the nonsensical pronouncements of a woefully unqualified leader, that wearing a mask in the effort to slow the spread of the virus and protect others in the population is an indication of your political beliefs. 

My sister is a doctor of pharmacy working in a rural hospital. My cousin is the VHA National Infectious Diseases Clinical Pharmacy Program Manager, a title so long I had to actually copy and paste it from one of the many websites featuring her credentials, just to be sure I got it right. There are, at minimum, four others in my family I can think of working in environments that could be putting them at physical risk while this is going on. 

When the pandemic began in earnest, my sister, who also likes to sew along with knowing more about medicine than most of us have ever known about anything, made a mask for me. Actually, she's probably made hundreds of them by now, but I think I probably got one from the first batch. I'm fully aware that the protection wearing a mask offers me is minimal at best. I'm also aware how my wearing a mask offers more protection to others from the virus I could potentially, and unknowingly, be carrying. I'm fine with that. Actually, I'd rather be able to walk around in an impenetrable bubble to be completely safe myself, but I'll take the minimal protection they offer. The way I see it, if my wearing a mask could, in any remotely possible way, keep any of the people in my family who are working to protect the rest of us from the virus a little more safe at their jobs, it's a small sacrifice to make. 

It's kind of hot. It's flannel, so it's a little scratchy. I'll wear it while I'm out walking the dog, which is nearly the only time I leave my yard and could encounter any other people. I'm usually the only person I see on our walks wearing a mask. I don't care. Luckily most of the people I briefly encounter are a good distance away already, and just say hello and go on their merry ways. Sometimes I'll get looks or second glances that seem paired with some silent judgement, but that's fine. Maybe they'll come around someday. Hopefully they won't be forced to by a second wave in weeks or months that proves so much worse than what we've seen so far. As long as I don't need to listen to any of the self-righteous diatribes they've crafted after all the one-sided media they've digested, or the passive-aggressive and condescending speeches they'd like to share in an effort to educate me on how misguided and paranoid I'm being, I figure, live and let live. 

Because whether they realize it or not (and I'd argue they often don't), live and let live is very much a cooperative endeavor right now. 

May 25: The Edited Memorial Day 500

The grandpa of classic rock radio in the Cities, KQRS, has a traditional countdown every Memorial Day of 500 songs. I don’t how they determine which songs are included or in what order they appear on the list; none of that really matters because more often than not they wind up with a list that, in classic rock terms, makes as much sense as drawing song titles out of a hat. I listened to quite a bit of it this year, though. It was fun to hear a lot of radio songs and get a little touch of the outside world instead of going through my own playlists again and again. Of course I didn’t listen to all 500 songs — I don’t know how anyone could. But luckily they posted their list online so I could examine everything wrong with it. 

For today’s post, I went through their list of 500 and chose 100 songs that I agreed should have been somewhere on that list. There were others I would have included, but these are the ones that, despite what discombobulated order they were in, merited a place. So here we go, if you’re curious: 100 songs that KQRS got right for their 2020 Memorial Day 500. I’m only including song titles on my list, because frankly, the song titles here should be enough for you to know what they are and who sang them. As always, in no particular order: 

*There’s Only One Way to Rock
*Born to Run
*Dust in the Wind
*Mother
*Talk Dirty to Me 
*Bad Reputation
*Stone in Love
*New Year’s Day
*Cult of Personality
*Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting
*Blue Collar Man
*Roll with the Changes
*Rooster
*I Don’t Care Anymore
*It’s A Long Way to the Top (if you Want to Rock and Roll)
*Feels Like the First Time
*Shadows of the Night
*For Those About to Rock
*Heat of the Moment
*My Sharona
*Dr. Feelgood
*Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’
*Crazy Little Thing Called Love
*Shot in the Dark
*(Oh) Pretty Woman
*In Your Eyes
*Rocket
*Young Lust
*Mysterious Ways
*Fat Bottomed Girls
*Closer to the Heart
*Flying High Again
*December
*Bringin’ on the Heartbreak
*Tiny Dancer
*Somebody to Love
*Basket Case
*Only the Good Die Young
*Learning to Fly
*The Stroke
*Don’t Come Around Here No More
*Dancing in the Dark
*Revolution
*Shine
*Night Moves
*November Rain
*Take it on the Run
*Cherry Pie
*Gimme All Your Lovin’
*Once Bitten, Twice Shy
*Maggie May
*Under Pressure
*I Hate Myself for Loving You
*No More Tears
* Surrender
*Rock of Ages
*Shoot to Thrill 
*Come Sail Away
*You Really Got Me
*Working for the Weekend
*Animal
*The Spirit of Radio
*Wanted Dead or Alive
*Faithfully
*Foreplay/Long Time
*She Talks to Angels
*Sister Christian
*Hold the Line
*I Remember you
*Home Sweet Home
*Why Can’t This Be Love
*You Might Think
*Paradise City
*Two Tickets to Paradise
*Nothing Else Matters
*Comfortably Numb
*Hysteria
*Keep on Lovin’ You
*Wish You Were Here
*The Boys of Summer
*Bohemian Rhapsody
*Renegade
*Separate Ways
*Kickstart My Heart
*The Immigrant Song
*Take Me Home Tonight
*Jack and Diane
*Back in Black
*Photograph
*Carry On Wayward Son
*Go Your Own Way
*More than a Feeling
*Livin’ on a Prayer
*Pour Some Sugar on Me
*Don’t Stop Believin’
*You Shook Me All Night Long
*We Will Rock You
*Sweet Emotion
*Tom Sawyer
*Enter Sandman

If you don’t agree, that’s okay. That’s the beauty of a countdown like this — so many of the songs will mean different things to different people. With that in mind, feel free to make your own list if you’re as pathetic as I am and willing to invest the kind of time it takes to do something like this.