I never imagined that the year would end like this. On Monday, April 20th, the governor announced that in-person classes would not resume this school year. When they first announced the then temporary closure, I knew it would last longer than the initial 10 days with a niggling suspicion that school would not resume. By the time the original end date came and went, I knew we would not return. We just had to wait a couple weeks for the governor to get his ducks in a row before he announced.
Even though I had long resigned myself to finishing out this crazy year through virtual teaching sessions, seeing my students occasionally on a weekly flipgrid assignment, I started to tear up a little at the thought of not seeing my students again. Even though as a seventh grade teacher I will see them again next year, I will not see them again as my students in the same unique mix. On top of that, at the moment I wrote this post I happened to be interacting with one of my students who will not return next year. Her family had moved mid year so for eighth grade she will attend her zoned school.
I thought about the moment I last set foot in my classroom. Before I left that last teacher work day, I stood at the door and contemplated the surreal fact that a historic event in progress had reached out and touched my life. I thought about the fact that I had just put all my books in cabinets, out of the way for the deep clean to come. I thought about the projects in progress my students made that I had stashed in the book room to protect them and of the amazing artifacts they had created like a burned book or a recreation of Dietrich Bonhoffer’s study. (This project was a joint ELA and Social Studies task on the WWII.)
This feeling set in hard core when I returned to the school the last week of April as part of my school leadership internship work. I sat in the hallway by the cafeteria while the occasional parent or student came by to drop off library books or paper packets. While I waited I worked on my computer. Each time I entered my classroom to grab my computer I paused but then rushed out quickly. I could not stand in that classroom long without getting crazy emotional.
None of us wanted this. Despite the fact that we knew the best thing to do, the right thing to do would be close the schools (you cannot properly social distance in a classroom holding 24-28 people much less on a school bus holding twice as many), we did not want to end our school year that way. We did not want to have our last time seeing the kids end ignominiously since we supposedly would come back to school two weeks later. Those of us that had an inkling of what would come could not say goodby since our officials had yet to acknowledge the severity of the crisis we faced.
Going forward, we have a few more weeks of online learning. Our focus has shifted to interacting with the kids, grace over grades. Admin will focus on the procedures for families to drop off materials and how to close up the school for the summer. Even though we will not start that process until after Memorial Day, the social distancing protocol has not relaxed. (Some of the teachers started clearing out their room yesterday.) It could still change, obviously, in this time of unprecedented uncertainty. The only thing we know for sure is the fact that things will look quite different when we finally return.