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