Gaining Perspective

Shortly before break, I was deep in preparations for the state individual speech contest. I was also auditioning students for a spring play and preparing for the most epic Roaring Twenties prom of all time. It is typical for me to spend 12-16 hours a day at school during the spring semester, when all my extracurriculars converge, and one season bleeds right into the next. While it is happening, I convince myself I love it. I convince myself I thrive under pressure and that I am not nearly as busy as people think. What a thrill to know my classroom has a revolving door creative students enter to thrive! What an amazing opportunity to get to be a part of so many incredible projects and watch so many incredible kids grow in their talents, their leadership skills, their confidence, and their sense of self! There is some vanity there too - I like smugly to brag that I balance numerous activities at once.





But something happened right before spring break that stopped me in my tracks and left me to reconsider my hectic schedule. It was the week before the state speech contest that never happened when a student posed a question that has returned to my mind again and again over these past few weeks at home. As she finished up her practice, my last practice of the night, I packed up my bag to head to my Wednesday night church youth group. “Mrs. Vernon,” she said, “You are the busiest person I know and you never seem to let it get to you but what are you trying to avoid by staying so busy all the time?” I laughed it off and assured her I wasn’t trying to avoid anything - I just love what I do.





Two days later, we learned our speech contest was cancelled, and, as we began what was supposed to be spring break, it became increasingly clear that the end of that break was a moving target. It was not long before my mind returned to that young performer’s question, “...what are you trying to avoid by staying so busy all the time?” Well, I thought, I guess we are about to find out. I am not going to lie - I was worried about what answer I might uncover, but, rather than uncover what I had been trying to avoid, I discovered what I had been missing. What follows is a list of things I have rediscovered under self-imposed quarantine with my husband and three of my kids:





Taking walks - I never have time to take walks during the spring semester, unless they are walks from my classroom to the stage. It feels great to exercise daily.


The sun - Apparently the sun shines during those hours I am in my classroom or on the stage and I have been missing it, entirely.


My husband - Turns out, this guy I usually only have time for in June and July is actually pretty fun to be around.


My college freshman daughter - She is not happy to be online learning fashion design from home, but I am incredibly grateful to have this extra time with her in the years before she fully springs forth on her own adventure.


My high schooler son - This kid is the busiest person I know (busier than me). He loves people, he loves performing, he loves being active. This whole thing is incredibly difficult for him but, for once, I get to see his face and listen to his voice telling me something other than “see you later.”


My middle schooler - No kid in my family is more neglected than this one. She never complains about the hours I spend with other people’s teenagers, but I am starting to get the feeling that she was missing time with her mom.


Creativity - Ok, I had lots of this at school too, but I have been amazed at the displays of creativity I have seen from everyone all over the world. From online concerts to online Broadway musicals the famously creative are responding to a need for art, but here at home people are growing wildly creative as well. My kids take dance class and piano lessons online now. I am writing an elaborate mystery play for my girl scouts to perform from their own homes and solve in movie form. My teacher colleagues have found fun and engaging ways to keep kids thinking and learning in different ways than the traditional classroom allows. A friend of mine who teaches in another district arranged a play reading activity for a small group of local teens who are friends with her niece. Listening to my son read The Importance of Being Earnest with her from his bedroom is one of my favorite confinement moments to date. Even the small town library in my school district has found incredibly creative ways to keep people connected and reading.


Connection - I have had time to call my mom every day. I have connected with my adult daughters every day. I have texted back and forth with my best friend every day. You might take these things for granted, but I do not have time to do these things every day during the spring semester. Ever. In addition, I have watched my kids connect differently. My son’s friends have dropped off baked goods in our mailbox and he has dropped off novels in their mailboxes. My kids are sharing quarantine stories with their friends in Spain, Japan, and Puerto Rico. In some ways, connections are strengthening during what so many thought would be a lonely time of isolation.


Decent meals - From January to June my family is lucky to have a home cooked meal together twice a week, and even then the meal is usually something thrown together quickly by an exhausted teacher mom who grumbles through the whole process. This spring, my family is eating together every night and the food is fresh, delicious, and made without my exhausted, resentful rage.


Reading - There was a time when I believed being an English teacher would allow me to read a lot. Turns out, it allows me to read a lot of essays (which I do love), and the same novels year after year as I try to keep up with the same reading schedules I assign my students. In week one of confinement I finished The Goldfinch just because I wanted to. In week two I am reading a mystery novel, JUST FOR FUN.


The joy of teaching - Five of my seven classes each day are concurrent enrollment classes. That means I am still teaching online for several hours a day right now so kids can earn their college credit. During this time at home, I have been able to think hard about what is most important in their learning and, with little else to distract me, I have been able to provide engaging lessons and immediate personal feedback to every child. Of course, I would rather teach in my classroom and see their faces every day, but this experience has forced me to to focus on what matters most, and I think my students will learn better because of it.





My list could go on, but you get the idea - I wasn’t avoiding anything, but apparently I have been missing a great deal. Don’t misunderstand - I will be excited to get back to my students. I hope we can have a spring play. I hope this Roaring Twenties prom is only made more epic for our isolated spring. I won’t pretend I will suddenly change my entire life because of what I have learned during quarantine. I won’t magically become someone who manages a perfect work-home balance. Frankly the life of a high school teacher doesn’t lend itself to that easily. Maybe, though, I will approach my time both at school and at home with a little greater appreciation. Until then I will take a breath, look for the silver linings, and maybe shoot my student a message to let her know I have an answer to her question - finally.

Remembering What Matters: Education in the Age of Pandemic

I am a teacher. It isn't just my job; it is who I am. I have watched other teachers post their musings on our current reality readily and often, but I have resisted, not wanting to put down on paper anything I worried might make things real, might make things raw, might make things hurt more than I want to bear. See, I know that I have only two settings: calm and total collapse and I worried in writing down my feelings I would resort to total collapse. I can't do that because, though I am a teacher, I am a mom even more and I have three teenagers at home who need calm. Besides, there are others who have it so much worse than me that I can't even entertain the thought of feeling too sorry for myself - not when there are nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers literally risking their lives, not when there are grocery store employees working long hours and subjecting themselves to so many germs, not when there are truckers, sanitation workers, and mail carriers still showing up to work every day, not when there are people worrying how they will feed their families because they cannot work, not when there are people dying.  I am sitting home. I am healthy. I am teaching from behind a computer screen. I don't get to cry. Anyway, I am not a crier.  I don't cry. I don't cry...except I do. At least today I did.

Today I watched from my front yard as the elementary school teachers from my neighborhood paraded through the streets in their cars while children stood on the corners screaming and laughing and holding up signs professing their love for the teachers they missed. They screamed for them as if they were celebrities and the teachers honked their horns and waved wildly out of car windows. That was my moment. That was the moment the wall collapsed and I was left to realize the magnitude of this job, the magnitude of this loss, and the depth of my sorrow. I ran upstairs, locked myself in my room and just cried while my husband comforted me.

I cried because it was beautiful, but also because the love in the air was so thick you could almost touch it and it reminded me why I love this job so much that I claim it as a part of my identity. So much has gotten lost over the years in a push to hold schools accountable for every child's success. So much has been introduced to quantify and standardize what we do, to slap a "one size fits all" sticker on education and legislate, mandate, and collaborate our way "to the top" (whatever that means). Frankly all of that has burdened and exhausted me in recent years and I had begun to worry that "education" had moved on from teachers like me, who lead with our hearts and know what kids have learned just "because we know." I worried that my unwillingness to sacrifice my idealism at the altar of data made me an irrelevant vestige from another time "before we knew better," and that my insistence that building human beings was more important than building skills was something that would not allow me to long survive.

But I think what this epidemic has taught us about education is everything I knew all along. Your child will still be ok if he doesn't grow a year in reading comprehension. Your child will be ok if he doesn't practice math for 30 minutes a night. Your child will be ok if his research paper has three sources instead of ten because he is writing it in the middle of a global pandemic. But your children do need school. They need it for the reasons those little children on the street corner screaming with glee were celebrating. They need it for what it teaches them about community, about connection, about trying hard and thinking deeply, about creativity, about laughing with friends, about loving and being loved. What school gives them is a sense of purpose, a sense of place, and sense of their own value.

Don't misunderstand. I want kids to learn, to grow, and to meet and exceed the standards the government has set for them, but that isn't my primary purpose for teaching. My primary purpose for teaching is the speech kids who enthusiastically performed at a make-shift state contest when their scheduled contest was cancelled before we were really social distancing,  the young women who begged me for book recommendations on day four of social distancing, the young man who emailed me an idea for his research paper with great excitement on day five of social distancing, the teams of teachers who poured their hearts into building creative lists of optional learning opportunities for kids, the seven adult men who called me from their individual man caves this week because they were so bored in isolation they longed to speak to their classmates from twenty years ago and invite their old teachers to join. My purpose for teaching is human beings.

This pandemic has forced us to peek behind the curtain of our schools and realize the elements of daily education we truly value. Turns out it was the very things this seasoned teacher thought mattered most all along. And so I watched the teachers waving wildly and the children jumping for joy at the sight of them and I cried like a baby, because I remembered how much I love the teenagers I teach, how much I depend on their smiles, their ideas, their "good mornings" to get me through my days and most of all, how very much I miss them.