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.