What I mean when I say I am a teacher grieving the remainder of this school year
When my child was born, my big brother leaned over the bassinet in the NICU and said, “It’s so wild, Urs. I mean, genetically, they’re 50 percent Joel and 50 percent you, but already — already! — they’re 100 percent Augie B.”
A class, too, is both unmistakably constitutive of its members and an entirely new being, with an identity all its own.
5th period is not interchangeable with 7th period nor 8th period, even though they’re all juniors and all taking the same U.S. history course.
5th period puts up a front of being a rule-following, obedient group of “good kids.” And they are such good kids—big hearted, outraged by injustice, curious about what they haven’t been taught and why. Still, they’re a bit uncertain about me, suspicious of my generosity and good will — what’s my angle, they wonder? They were the last class to start helping themselves to the snacks in the snack closet, as if my free food might come with a catch. I was eager to watch this group steal a bit more freedom in the weeks to come. I could see some faint signs of rebellion on the horizon.
7th period is a stained glass window. Each table group is its own brightly colored pane of glass, complimenting or clashing with the others, held together by a common frame and masterful soldering to bridge precarious gaps. The solderers? M______, C_______, Z_______, S________, C________ and me. We’ve got some tricksters, gamblers, and hucksters in this class. We’ve also got some griots, prophets, and savants. We’ve got court jesters, armed guards, and scholars. We laugh a lot. But I worried about whether our soldered seams would hold. I was hoping to find a new model of connection.
8th period is my shame and failure. There is no discernable, unified “we” yet; there is an “us” and “them.” The “them” are a group of children with whom I have not hit my stride, who rightly want to read the fine print and learn more about possible side effects before ingesting what I have to offer. They take refuge in each other’s acts of resistance and have honed their strategies to get my hackles up. The “us” group scorns the “them” group and sometimes worries I am indulging “them” at the cost of “us.” They may be right. This class was the first to discover the snack closet; most days, they cleaned me out. In the weeks before the shut down, I was standing on the deck of our class ship, looking toward the horizon, sensing our direction had shifted slightly — just a degree or two—toward generosity, forgiveness, and second or third chances. But I could be wrong. It could’ve just been a windy day.
While class identities are always distinct, they are not fixed. Who we were in August is not who we become in March nor who we are in June. And that is among the most heartbreaking things for me about this school shutdown. COVID 19 has abruptly written the final chapters of our classroom autobiography; we did not get a chance to write our own story’s end.
The last two months of class are often the most unpredictable, joyful, and profound. Even classes that have been excruciatingly hard at earlier points in the year somehow, miraculously, come together into something tender and beautiful. By now, we know each other. By now, we’ve learned together and learned how to learn together. We have a common history. We start to smile more easily. We speak more familiarly. We joke and gibe and when we overstep, we apologize with sincerity and without fanfare. We forgive each other and often ourselves. We ask big questions of each other and of those not in the room. We take risks. We tell the truth, to the best of our ability. And in those last weeks of school, when we’re feeling brave and giddy with sunshine, we admit, “I actually really liked this class,” or “I don’t like history, but this class was alright,” or “I hated this class at the beginning of the year because I didn’t have any friends in here, but it ended up being pretty okay.”
But this year, none of that will happen. 5th period will not discover its rebellious side and make me laugh to myself, “Man, these kids used to be so easy.” 7th period will not transform from a fragmented stained glass window to a collectively painted public mural. 8th period will not find its way to the otherside of its awful habit of othering.
We do not get to become.
We’ve been relegated to the past, frozen in time, our final form unrealized.
Yes, I continue to teach, albeit in a form that feels very little like teaching. I continue to communicate in meaningful ways with my students. And yes, they’re still becoming. They’re not frozen in time.
But these truths do not make the other losses a lie.
