Always the fear, but never the reality

            Replaceable
            Ancillary
            Nonessential
            Irrelevant

But now,  this flipped upside down bizarro world

Everything is the same, and yet...

              empty
              vacant
              barren
              depleted

So unnatural, lacking

               community
               kinship
               intimacy

Untethered from one another, left without a counterbalance
I can see the invisibility surrounding us

It is, truly, a fight for survival...to see each other.  To be seen.

I can’t breathe.  It’s not the virus that is plaguing the globe, it’s the one that always lies dormant within me.  The one that is so much a part of me that I always know how to respond.  I know the right medicine and the approximate dosages depending on the severity of the inflammation. I know how to treat this affliction, but all of the remedies are just out of reach.

I am paralyzed by the paths that lie in front of me.  None of them seem to go far enough.  None of them go past my front door.

Computer? Too much information from one side and not enough connection on the other.  Where are my students? Where are my friends? Where is my family?

Movement? Rain is coming, followed by a threatening return to winter.  The house is too small for yoga and the treadmill’s location in the dark basement has the potential to add to my already dark cloud.

Books are scattered everywhere and each holds the promise to a new, unchartered world.  But I have to read differently.  I have to read just for me, not for my reluctant reader or my voracious reader…there is no one to share this world with when I come out on the other side.

Writing is all I have.  It is all I am, some days.  The words in my notebooks and, now, on the computer, are all I can hold on to right now.  And even those are elusive and temporary, lost in the waking house around me and the immediate needs of those I love requiring me to continue to breathe, despite it all.

My home is a bit of an anomaly these days.  As a public school teacher I, too, have found myself thrown into homeschooling, but, unlike most folks, my kids have always been homeschooled.  This is business as usual for them and I am the odd man out.  Our decision to homeschool our kids started when our eldest was just approaching school age.  We had lots of reasons, ranging from the state of our local public school to the newly implemented standardized testing that came out of Common Core to our own son’s unique learning style.  Fast forward 10 years and it has been a success.  My academically inclined husband (valedictorian in high school, historian through college and extensive post-graduate work) has led this charge and the results have consistently exceeded my expectations.  

Now I find myself trying to fit into their rhythm, which doesn’t match up with the structured compartmentalization of my years of traditional school conditioning, and it is a bit jarring.  Normally, our transitions to “mama’s home” during school breaks and especially summer vacation are simplified by the fact that I leave my school responsibilities behind and their rhythm changes to accomodate long days and late nights.  But this is not normal.  This is far from normal.

One place where our worlds came together was this morning, during “Books and Coffee” followed by “Sacred Writing Time”, with the first being a well-established routine for my husband and the kids, and the latter being my addition to our new reality, a practice that has for years grounded my 7th graders at the start of almost every ELA class.   This mash-up was even better than Billie Eilish meets The Beatles.

We are all adjusting, just like the rest of humanity, to new rhythms.  The music that is being created may not sound like anything that has come before, but if you listen close enough, you’ll hear the melodies that defined an earlier time.

Looking through a notebook, trying to find a glimpse of me, because right now I am feeling lost. out of focus and nebulous, somehow reflecting the insecurity that surrounds us all.  Deep among blank pages, there it was:  an incomplete poem without a title from a time I’d almost forgotten.  Almost.

This darkness has been descending for a long time

I can usually find a way to hide or insulate or even fight back with bursts of light ameliorating  the threat to completely erase me and everything i know

This darkness has been descending for a long time

Today i feel like spreading my arms wide welcome…

                                                                         you won’t find any closed doors this time

While I am far from the darkness, I am not foolish enough to believe that it is ever that far from me.

 

An envelope for every student.  A  packet from every teacher for each envelope.  Every teacher prepared two weeks of daily plans, along with supplemental materials.  Just under a thousand students.  Just under a thousand envelopes ready to be picked up or delivered.  A middle school transformed into a strange version of a factory.

 

A new world?  Hopefully not.  Just a brief glimpse into a world that I hope will never come to pass.  I write that as I sit here, wondering how to use the technology that most (but not all) of my students can access.  How to balance the worksheet hell that lies inside those envelopes?  The worksheets that are the outward manifestation of a pedagogy that I have successfully resisted.  Until now. Now the only consistent communication I have with my students is through the worksheets in those envelopes.

It is a thin, thin thread that connects us now.

At least two books in the possession of every student.  Check.

Writer’s notebooks going out with every student when they leave the classroom.  Check.

Lockers cleaned of food & wayward gym clothes. Check.

Plans & packet sent to copy center. Check.

Electronic platform ready to go if I have “go ahead” from district. Check.

Talked to kids.  Answered questions.  Reassured them.  Tried to give them some certainty in uncertain times.  Joked with them.  Sent them away.

Check.

 

 

 

I.  I stop and try to fully understand what was just said.  To be perfectly honest, I stop because I did understand it, I am just trying to decide how to react.  But before I can think about it too much, I am laughing with my whole body, unable to maintain even a small semblance of professionalism.  My eyes are wet, my stomach is aching and I can’t quite catch my breath.  The shared moment of ridiculousness has united us, we are beyond teacher & class…we are insiders, sharing the joke that can never be translated; we have found ourselves in our own “you had to be there” moment.

II.  I am unable to speak, because if I do, the ache that has swelled up in my throat will break and the tears that would flow out of me would overwhelm (and possibly terrify) not just the student sitting expectantly at my desk, but the other 20 students who are still quietly in their own writing spaces.  The words–the poetry–that is on the page has surpassed my expectations; we are moved beyond student & teacher…we are, simply, reader & writer.

III.  I turn around from my search for the perfect mentor text, ready to quiet the buzz that is disrupting the typical silence of our workshop, but I am stopped cold.  The buzz is coming from intense peer to peer conferencing.  They are engaged in actual feedback, papers between them, discussing context and word choice and other Big Ideas.  They are going so far beyond what I prompted them with my “guide sheets” and conference question suggestions…they are, beautifully, writers, conferring with one another.

IV.  They are texting.  I know they are.  They are texting instead of listening to me read and I know it and they know it and I am furious.  So I yell.  Loudly.  And it gets their attention.  I use my big teacher voice and cash in my authority chips.  They slide their devices back to their hiding spots, look sheepishly at me, knowingly at one another, and pretend to be interested in the text.  We are in our roles, me in the front, them in their seats.

V.  I am here and they are wherever they go when we’re not in school.  I have spent days trying to figure out how to do this.  How to be all of this with space between us.  I have thought about materials to give, words to write, books to hand out and I have accepted that I won’t have any of the interaction that makes us who we are.  We will all be spinning around in our own universes, operating at our own speeds…there is no way to maintain community in a time of isolation.  They are there & I am here.

 

It is no surprise to those who know me that I am a creature of habit.  And that is an understatement.  I like predictable.  I like control.  I like knowing what is coming next, knowing how to prepare or what to avoid.  Perhaps it is a part of my insecurity.  Perhaps it is leftover from a childhood that never felt fully grounded.  Perhaps it is just the way the stars were aligned when I entered this world.

I don’t know how to do this.  I doubt that any of us do.  I feel like I just figured out how to teach my students in person, through conferences and strong eye contact and listening and giving space and providing materials and and and…

I just figured out how to do this in person, how do I do it in absentia?

I spend a lot of time finding the Just Right way to do all of it.  All of it.  And it’s never Just Right, but it’s usually pretty damn close.  And when it’s off, I can typically figure out why it’s off and fix it.  And it’s never a lesson or a unit.  I teach writing and the writing process, so by this point in the year, they are finally independently writing.  And moving through the process in their own way.  I am just providing them with the guard rails so they stay on the road.

It is now when they are beginning to blossom.  This is the sweet spot.  The turning point, when the itty bitty little 6th graders who entered in September are beginning to show glimpses of their future 8th grade selves.  This is what I treasure and this is what, in September, I forget will ultimately come and in June, I have undoubtedly forgotten that I treasured it so completely.  But this is it.  Right now.

And I am going to miss it.  Or lose it.  Or what?  I don’t know because I have never been here.  None of us have.  And so I am unsettled and feeling off kilter and out of whack.  I want so desperately to have another day to prepare them, but I don’t know what that should look like.  I want to tell them…something.  I want to give them…something.  And I have no idea what that should be or what that could be or how to do it effectively.

I have spent all day trying to find my footing amidst all of this, but I am…we are…standing on shifting sand.  I don’t think I will fall completely, but it is hard to walk right now.

It was a day.

Professional development.  Training for our upcoming computer based state testing that probably won’t happen.  Planning for project based learning and cross curricular planning that probably won’t happen.  Discussions around vertical alignment that didn’t happen because they were interrupted by the governor’s address.

Ratification of our proposed contract.  Questions asked by people who never attended informational meetings.  Questions that felt like complaints.  Questions that created defensiveness and divisiveness.  Silence that sat uncomfortably in the midst of it all.

Information.  Texts. Emails. News reports. Press conferences. Charts. Numbers. Statistics. Projections.

People.  My people.  Out in the world.  My healthy people and my not-so-fully-healthy people.  Out in the world.  Touching doorknobs.  Pushing full grocery carts.  Pumping gas. Breathing air. Breathing air.

It was a day.

“There will likely be times in your life when your soul evolves more quickly than your circumstances.”  –Madisyn Taylor

Maybe that’s what has been happening.  My soul is evolving. It doesn’t really hurt, not like the growing pains I remember from my childhood that seemed to only be fixed by my father’s deep tissue massage as I sat, crying, with my legs aching.  You can’t see it like I see my own children evolving from baby to toddler to child to teenager, leaving behind a wake of outgrown clothes and outgrown phases.  No one else seems to notice, just as no one really notices weight loss at first, there’s just a sense that something looks different (new haircut? new glasses? new shirt?).

It is hard to identify when you are in the thick of it, because evolution isn’t announced with trumpeters and fanfare…it crawls out of the muck and finds its land legs, gradually becoming less amphibious and more reptilian, protective scales and all.

But my soul is evolving.  I don’t feel it when it’s on the upward swing, but rather I notice it when old habits come and wrap themselves around me like a worn sweater.  I feel the absence of the evolution.  I look in the mirror and see all the flaws.  I speak out and hear all the misspoken words and watch the faces around me not understanding what I am trying to say.  I swirl in my own miscommunication.  I move from one space to another and wonder how to shrink my presence so that I am almost invisible.  And after each of these moments, I am struck by the contrast between who I am and this person that I have always been.

I want to shake off the sweater, but this time I don’t want to just toss it in the back of the closet.  I want to be brave enough to pack it up and Marie Kondo that thing out of my existence.  And yet, I know, that even though I no longer have gills, there are aspects of my past self that are integral to sustaining my future me.  All of it is connected and dependent and part of the larger whole of who I will ultimately become.  My soul is evolving…it always has been, I just didn’t really notice.