A Letter to My Students

Dear students,

I am proud of you. Over the past few weeks you have had to take on the weight of the world. You have lost so much you were looking forward to. You have lost your activities. You have lost your friends. You have lost your routine. You have lost a sense security. You have lost closure to your school year and, for seniors, to this entire chapter of your life. You have lost the ability to believe that the world as you knew it might always be the world. You have lost the right that usually accompanies youth - the right to take things for granted. You have lost in these last few months more than many of us have lost in our entire lives.

But you persist. You endure. You carry on. You survive.

Because I teach mainly concurrent enrollment courses, I have carried on teaching most of you, holding higher expectations than I have wanted to, grading the work as it comes in, holding you accountable in ways that felt far more important in early March. I have kept teaching, and through it all, somehow you have managed to keep learning.

I want you all to know how proud I am of you.

To those of you who have embraced this new, self-directed learning with enthusiasm  and are working hard on every assignment, I am proud of you. I am proud of your newfound confidence, of your optimism, of your desire to learn. I am proud of you for refusing to let our changing circumstances take control of your motivation. I am proud of your willingness to carry on with this semblance of life as usual. I am proud of you.

To those of you who have found yourselves suddenly working all day, every day to keep the grocery stores, the restaurants, the daycare centers, the nursing homes, and any number of essential services running smoothly, I am so proud of you. I am proud of you for coming home at night exhausted and doing your homework anyway. I am proud of you on the days when you just can't find time to do your homework. I am proud every time you manage to meet a deadline, and every time you email me to tell me why you can't. I am proud of you.

To those of you babysitting siblings, cousins, neighbors, and friends so essential workers can keep the world humming, I am so proud of you. I am proud of you when you attend a Zoom meeting with toddlers on your lap. I am proud of you when you didn't read the assignment but share with me the chalk drawing you did with your little brothers. I am proud of you when you find time in between meals and Pepe Pig and story time to research for your paper, or put together an annotated bibliography that seemed so much more important when I first assigned it. I am proud of you when the work gets done and I am proud of you when you email me to tell me why it isn't done...yet. I am proud of you.

To those of you who are stuck at home, missing everything you love but somehow manage to pull yourself out of bed in the morning, I am proud of you. I am proud of you as I see you sitting up in bed, wrapped in a comforter because you not only woke up, but sat up for our Zoom discussion. I am proud of you when the assignment comes in a week late, because I know motivation was nearly impossible to find, but you found it anyway. I am proud of you when you look at the world right now and wonder why anything I have assigned matters and send me an email to tell me you really are trying. I hear you. I understand. And I am proud of you.

To those of you who have fought through circumstances beyond your control to accomplish anything at all, I am proud of you. I am proud of you for driving to a parking lot for Internet. I am proud of you for finding a safe place to stay. I am proud of you doing your best when there is no para-educator sitting beside you. I am proud of you for putting on your headphones to drown out the ceaseless noise at home. I am proud of you for surviving the loss of everything that normally allows you to maintain your mental health. I am proud of you for focusing on schoolwork when you are worried all day about your nurse parent. I am proud of you for surviving today even if you did no school work at all. I am proud of you.

And to those of you who still haven't checked in, I am worried about you. I am more worried about you than you can even imagine. I'm not worried because I think the opportunity to write a peer reviewed research paper, participate in a scholarly discussion of Steinbeck, or read an essay on the Patriarchy is the greatest loss you will ever face. I think we all realize by now how insignificant those things truly are in the grand scheme of things. I am worried, because your absence means maybe you are not surviving. Maybe you are not enduring. Maybe you are not carrying on.

Dear students, you have been catapulted into adulthood in ways none of us saw coming. We - who have grown up in times of peace, in times of health, in times when tragedies were targeted and isolated to "other places" on the map and other people who were not us - we cannot understand what you are enduring. We can only love you, believe in you, and stand in awe of what we hope is your resilience and your strength - whether the strongest thing you do each day is stand in a grocery store for eight hours, worry about your mom at work for twelve hours, or pull yourself out of bed for a single hour.

I pray the day will soon come when you can return to your childhood, even if just for a little while.

Love,
Your honored and humbled teacher

Just a Minor Meltdown

Don't read this blog for a pick me up. Or do, because it might make you realize you are holding it together better than I am. Just a little disclaimer before you get started: I love my job. I love my school district. I love my family. I feel lucky that I GET to teach online.  I am grateful.

I am also officially exhausted. I thought this time away from school would be sad, but easier. I imagined all the things I might suddenly have time to do. I planned to learn Spanish, to read a dozen books for fun, to be super present for my kids. I wanted to be at school but, I thought, as long as I am home I will make the most of it. My spring semesters are always crazy busy and this might be just what the doctor ordered (ok, it is exactly what a doctor ordered but I am speaking metaphorically).
For the first couple of weeks that is exactly what happened. I was getting lots of exercise. I was enthusiastic about trying out new recipes. My college freshman daughter, dealing with her own pandemic grief, smiled broadly one day and announced, "Quarantine mom is even better than summer mom," as she tasted a piece of freshly baked pie.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. OH MY GOSH! I do not remember the last time I was this tired. Teaching my concurrent enrollment classes online takes a lot of my time - and I mean A LOT. The feedback on assignments has to come fast because kids who are working without a teacher nearby depend on written feedback to be able to move on to the next step. Fast feedback is hard. Turns out it wasn't just taking me a long time because I was so busy before; it just actually takes a long time. How did I EVER get this done while teaching face to face all day?

Zoom meetings are hard - well the Zoom meetings with kids aren't, but the Zoom PLCs and the Zoom staff check-ins, and the Zoom everything else are actually harder somehow. Everyone is well intentioned, but most teachers seem a little out of practice in their small talk skills and their collaboration skills. Most teachers seem to be struggling a little to be sociable with kids and cats climbing onto their laps. I resort to mocking comments about the beards the men are all growing, hoping it distracts their attention from my own gray roots and forest-like unibrow. Sorry, but that stuff is hard.

And then this week, we unfurled our plans for optional learning opportunities for our students. They should be high quality, meaningful, prepare kids, meet standards, hit essential learning targets, give kids what they need for the right now, and for the future. They should also be non-threatening, loaded with opportunities to extend grace, respectful of the reality that not every child has equal opportunities, that some high school kids ARE the essential workers everyone is praising and some are caring for children so others can be the essential workers everyone is praising.  Oh, and the learning opportunities should be so engaging kids will choose to do them - even though they are optional - even though they are not graded - even though they will receive credit for the class anyway. Ok, no problem. I actually believe in all those things. I believe this is important. I will do it. AND I will collaborate with my whole team and an assortment of teaching partners as I do it. From home. While monitoring five sections of concurrent enrollment learning. NO PROBLEM!

If I am being honest, I will say I love challenges. Creating that learning was an exciting challenge. Providing feedback to kids that is so strong they can move on without me standing next to them cheering them on, is an exciting challenge. But holy smokes, this whole thing is full of challenges. It's like we kept all the less fun parts of the job (meetings, grading, written feedback) and lost all the best parts of the job - seeing our kids face to face, listening to them laugh, seeing the spark in their eyes when they uncover an amazing idea, coaching them, directing them, looking forward to exciting school events with them. We lost all the things that give us energy and kept all the things that sap it from us.

Add to that the reality that I now perform an endless number of mom duties during my workday, and  it is a recipe for exhaustion.

Here is the deal: I get it. I am sitting in a place of tremendous privilege. I can work from home and get paid. My husband and I are not worried about our jobs and we are not worried about our kids. We are isolating well so we are not even that worried about our health. Others are out there doing things that are genuinely exhausting, and I am grateful to every essential worker out there. Others are isolating in circumstances that are not as safe and comfortable as my home, and my heart goes out to them. But the novelty of this is wearing off. I am tired. I am worn down. I am sad. Having to cook yet another meal while here at work makes me want to set my own kitchen on fire, but I do not have time to set my kitchen on fire because I have six students who can't remember their college library logins, my husband needs help finding the V-8, and I have a lengthy worksheet to complete because I am on evaluation cycle and we are doing that meeting via Zoom this week.

 And I am not going to learn Spanish during quarantine.

Teaching - Love in the Time of Corona

Over the past month, education has changed dramatically as teachers have been asked to move instruction online and students have been asked to learn online. By now, most teachers have read the various "we didn't sign up for this" articles and most parents have shared the memes about "homeschool," with a few laughs about principals drinking on the job and maybe the occasional nod to the difficult job educators face each day.  Iowa has been a little slow to the party. Either out of an abundance of eternal Midwestern optimism (we do boast the largest contingent of Cubs fans outside of Illinois) or foolhardy Midwestern stubbornness, we held on to the misguided belief that everything would be fine by April 13 and kids could acceptably miss a month of school.

All that changed on Thursday. The governor extended our absence from school until the end of April (still holding out hope, I guess) and the DE rolled out a list of options for schools to begin delivering instruction to students. Suddenly those laptops and tablets the vast majority of schools in Iowa have provided students in the interest of enrichment and equity, will become the primary vehicle of instruction for students throughout the state. Suddenly teachers who build their instruction on platforms of engagement, connection, and interaction, have to learn how to teach from behind their computer screens.

Because the majority of the high school classes I teach are concurrent enrollment courses, I have a head start. Those courses for which students are receiving college credit moved online three weeks ago. That head start has provided me a little time to reflect and a little insight I think is worth sharing.

The first week of teaching online, I cried every day. Every single day, I would sit with my Macbook in my lap and before finger hit key, I would cry - for everything my students were missing, for the conversations that would never be the same online, for the stress I knew they were under, for how much I missed their bright faces, for how inadequate I felt for this job, and for how fortunate I felt to get to teach them at all.  It didn't take me long to realize this could not go on for the remainder of our confinement and I had to find a way to pull myself out of the hole of loss I had managed to dig. Then in a brief moment of clarity it dawned on me -  it's all about perspective. I can choose to look at this as an impossible task, given the seemingly insurmountable hurdles involved with teaching students in the midst of a global crisis or I can choose to look at this as an opportunity to reinvent myself as a teacher and discover how good I can truly be.  Thus began a Thoreau-like purge of my curriculum, beliefs, and even my teacher identity, during which I cast out all but what is truly essential. 

That was hard, the stripping away of layers, the sacrifice of lessons that in a normal year I would deem critical, the realization that what I do right now simply cannot look the same as what I did last year. That is the number one piece of advice I would like to give educators who are at this very moment considering how to move their instruction online:

Do not be tempted to take everything you normally do and put it online. The world is not normal for our children right now. Nothing about any of this is normal, and pretending normalcy will not fool or heal our children. Besides, this is not the time for your Clark Kent glasses; this is a time for your superman cape. So put it on and start asking yourself some hard questions:

What are your students going through right now? I know some of my students are suddenly working 40 hours a week in grocery stores. Those seniors who just earned their CNA certifications are doing their best to keep the elderly protected in nursing homes. Some of my students are babysitting so healthcare professionals can keep doing their jobs and some are living with friends because their parents are healthcare workers. My high school kids have lost the certainty of the things they love - their sports, their theatre productions, maybe even prom and graduation. My seniors aren't even sure when their freshman year of college will begin. Right now, those are the kids I must teach. Those are the kids I must convince literature is important, the quality of the sources for their research paper matters, APA style is critical to future success. Do you think they believe me?

What do your students REALLY need?This question is a trigger for a lot of us. We have been asked this by well-intentioned district administrators for years and we have "packed," "unpacked," and "bundled" our standards, putting them in spreadsheets and curriculum planning resources where they will live until we do it all again. But that isn't really what I am asking. I am not asking which standards are your "rocks." I am asking what your kids need RIGHT NOW, when they are scared, or overworked, or depressed, or stressed, or lonely. I am also asking what skills your kids really MUST practice to be ready for their next step. While an elementary teacher might want to make sure her students do not lose prior learning and growth in this time away from traditional school, someone who teaches seniors might very worried about the two or three skills that have not been taught but college freshmen will certainly be expected to know. Figure out what those "can't move forward without them" skills are, and be honest with yourself. Yes, it's all important, but what is ESSENTIAL? Ask yourself that and then ask yourself "why" again and again until you boil it down to what matters most. To borrow a phrase from Thoreau (and Robin Williams), suck out the marrow.

How can you make it something they want to do? Motivation and uncertainty are not friends. Kids who don't feel they can count on the future, are less likely to jump into assignments designed to prepare them for it. Now is not the time to be the teacher who insists "life is not fun," and "we are not in the business of edutainment." If you want to motivate a kid (especially a teenager) in crisis, you better step up to the edutainment plate or at least the relevancy plate. This is especially true if your school has chosen the "voluntary" model for learning in your school. Ask yourself what will be so relevant and engaging that even a student who is not earning a grade will want to do it. Try tapping into the realities of their worlds a little more. Can you involve them in projects that get them to create solutions for some of the problems the world is now facing? Can you adapt your curriculum to get them to reflect on their own mental health right now? Can you create activities that will allow them to improve something in their own homes? Can you create an activity that encourages them to go deeper than they normally could into a topic or project that inspires them? Can you develop activities that provide them with an opportunity to have what they crave most - connection? Can you tap into something you know they already love or are doing - Netflix, music, social media, Youtube, work, going out in the backyard for fresh air - without sounding like the dorky parent who doesn't get it? Could they share learning in a new way? Can you ask your students for ideas? This is a time for us to deeply reflect on what we know about our students and how we engage them. See that as an opportunity to pull yourself out of a rut and sprinkle a little glitter on your curriculum.

How can you create something that meets the needs of everyone? This is the greatest challenge of all. So far, I have had it easy. My five DMACC classes do not include any students with identified special needs (of course all students have unique needs), so my only hurdles have been helping a few at-risk students check in and finding work arounds for a student without computer access. As I add my two non-concurrent enrollment courses to my load, I will need to ask different questions. I will focus first on what skills students already have and need to practice. Rather than immediately introducing new learning, I will tap into the skills already learned and ask students to practice and deepen those skills and apply them to new situations. We spend a lot of time casting the learning net wide, but I am going to look at this time as a chance to instead, dig deep.  I know what skills each student has and I will look for ways to make those skills stronger and to have them use those already learned skills in new ways. 

I know this doesn't answer the equity question fully and I will have to explore every tool available to me to meet the IEP requirements of my students and to ensure economic status is not a barrier to learning, but that is also an opportunity. Sometimes I ride too tightly on the tails of my special education co-teachers. Sometimes I rely on the equity of the public school classroom, to do the work that is my work to do. I can't be complacent right now, and I can't be lazy. I must reflect deeply on what my students need and can do. I must consider each and every one of them as an individual who needs something individualized from me, even as I attempt to create online learning for ALL.

Lessons to Be Learned

I know none of this is easy. I know that it will not be perfect. I know there are kids who will be missed by my instruction. Some kids have help at home and some do not. Some kids are busier than they have ever been and some are bored. Some kids are up and eager and some are too depressed to get out of bed. Some kids need their paraeducators to help them focus and some will manage somehow to get by without them. Some kids hate every minute of being out of school and some find online learning on their own schedule to be a dream come true.  Realistically, I will not meet all of their needs. But I am not a realist. I am a teacher and that makes me an idealist. I will embrace this new challenge and use it as a gift - an invitation to become more individually focused, more engaging, and more acutely aware of what matters most in my courses. It has already made me think about equity more deeply than I have ever considered it. It has already made me think about the value of engagement, relevancy, and connection. I don't want to walk this path. I want to be in a classroom with 150 amazing teenagers this week. I want to listen  to their discussions, hear their stories, direct their play, dance with them at prom. I want all of those things, but in the absence of the bone, I will find the marrow. I will boil what I do down to what is most essential and I will do what teachers always do. I will give absolutely everything I have to give,  go to bed knowing it was not enough, and get up to try again tomorrow. That is teaching and teaching, my friends, is love in one of its purest forms. Love in the time of Corona (shout out to Marquez!).