The school year has wrapped up for San Francisco Unified School District. I’m sure that for many in my communities, for other teachers and for many of my students, it was one of the worst years on record. We have all experienced the pandemic, closing all school sites, and 187 days of online/remote learning…so it’s honestly been pretty miserable.
But also…honestly, it’s been pretty wonderful as well and for me and my context anyway, I can’t say it was significantly worse than any other year of teaching prior because those years as well were horrific, traumatic, beautiful, kind, and important.
I wish I weren’t exaggerating, and it’s not my business to disclose all the details in a public forum all at once, but the reality is that some schools and communities experience death and trauma more than others and this held true for my school relative to other schools as it has every year. I was speaking to a dear friend who works at a different school site in San Francisco, and they were talking about how the community was shocked by the loss of the death of a student’s sibling. I felt deep empathy for that school and their experience, reminded of how profoundly my school and I were affected by the loss of a friend and classmate in high school.
But I also honestly spoke to the reality that death of former students, staff, and extended community members (siblings, parents, uncles and aunts, etc.) in my school context is so common I have learned to shake my head and feel a softer, more porous kind of grief.
In some ways it is ‘worse.’
In others, it simply is what it is.
I have to be honest and say my descent into this underworld (I say this semi-ironically in light of the fact that our school is located in non-pandemic conditions on the bottom floor underneath the richer, more affluent Ruth Asawa School of the Arts) has never been easy and it is always a challenge to my experiences and ways I have moved through the world. It’s comically cliche to have a bright-eyed college graduate from an elite university be blindsided upon her experiences at a ‘low-income/urban/insert euphemistic proxy here’ school.
But there were also things that have always felt honest and true, a place to work from. Like my relationship to students and my willingness to be wrong and start over. It’s from this place I’ve persisted and taught for five years at this school site. It’s from this place that I can look back and see what’s sustained me this year during crisis learning — which is simply the truth that I’ve always been learning and practicing how to teach and learn and love in crisis.
So here are the teaching practices I had already put in place that made pandemic teaching much more bearable and even enjoyable this year:
1. Slides, slides, slides. I made guiding slides on Google Slides every day for every class every year for in-person teaching. Sometimes they were bare bones, but they usually at least had a loose agenda, a mini-lesson or lecture with interactive or video components, and then instructions for the independent or group work to complete in the second half of class. I made these because they were useful for in-person learning, but it was also easier to keep a student on track if they were chronically absent or were suspended. I just sent them the slides, or students knew they could access Google Classroom to catch up. When we switched to online learning, I was able to curate lessons quickly from my backlog of four years of lesson plans and copy/pasted routine activities such as check-in questions, stop-and-jots, etc. These things still worked out well for students who had internet issues and couldn’t log onto Zoom regularly, or perhaps they were doing okay at first but their mental health or home situation was volatile, or a number of other reasons where accessing school on a regular basis was difficult.
2. Mindfulness. When I started teaching Health, I set aside ten minutes every day for ten minutes of meditation using the Daily Calm program on Calm, for which I received a lifetime subscription while they still did their Calm for Educators program. While some students initially found it boring, eventually almost all students appreciated the time to rest and have time set aside just for them and whatever their body and emotions needed. When online learning began, my US History juniors clamored for the return of mindfulness sessions which they had experienced in ninth grade. I was nervous at first because I had no idea if students were actually present on the other side of Zoom, but many reported gratitude for that space to meditate and breathe.
3. Rose-Bud-Thorn or socioemotional check-in questions. One of my favorite parts of teaching this year was checking in with students at the end of each week asking for their rose, bud, and thorn.
Rose: What was something good that happened this week?
Thorn: What was something not so good, that you could have lived without?
Bud: What is something you’re looking forward to?
I had used this question on occasion prior to the pandemic, but during the year of online learning, I found that it was a powerful community building tool. Students would share publicly in the chat or privately to me directly about their successes, their challenges, and their hopes. I found that it brought a lot of humanity and joy to the week, and gave me an opportunity to learn so much about students about what sustained them in these times. Students also displayed such kindness and support for each other, like offering their tens of thousands of Robux on the Roblox game to another student when she had said her thorn was needing more money for something she wanted in the game.
4. Gratitude, trusting students make the choice to be present. This year more than ever, I was able to expand my capacity for gratitude every time students showed up or turned in work. While I still often experienced frustration that it was clear students were logging onto Zoom and then just walking away, over time I realized that that was still a choice to be grateful rather than being resentful. Students would apologize for sleeping in and being late, or that their mom had called them away to vaccum, that they got distracted, or that they didn’t have capacity to do work because they had recently lost a loved one. I found that saying, “No problem, I’m just so happy you’re here now learning with us” yielded far greater ease for me and facilitated an easier transition into learning for the student. I felt truly grateful for every moment I shared with each and every student this year in a deeper way.
These things helped me sustain my practice as an educator, and I think they helped us all make it through a strange and sad year of online learning.
The school year ended and for all the fanfare about equity and caring about the whole child and their socioemotional wellness in a pandemic, I look back and see only adults breaking promises and pretending they never lied in the first place. It was painful every time a student asked for permission to go to the bathroom in their own home. It was painful when students bemoaned the stress and pain they felt because teachers were relentless in assigning work. It was painful when adults insisted that students needed to be on Zoom day after day, for 180 days. It was painful when it was clear that so many issues piled up because of miscommunication, and no one — adult and young person alike — had the capacity to make things different. The pandemic proved to me that I am grounded in the right place as a teacher and that my heart is still open to the voices of young people; but it also showed me that not nearly enough adults anywhere are as committed to unlearning things in order to properly hear the youth.
I am reluctant to say we are anywhere close to the end of the pandemic, but I also understand that some sense of ‘normality’ is returning to the United States. I feel like I am entering this new era believing more than ever in youth, but also jaded and faithless in the institution of school at all. I have at least one more year of classroom teaching in me, but I can’t say I really believe that the benefits of school outweigh its oppressive downsides. While being an effective and kind educator is literally invaluable, it’s also just too heartbreaking. I don’t like working alongside people who sincerely use words like equity or trauma-informed or even abolition but then turn around and exert mindsets that control, police, and shame young people if not outright punish. I cringe every time a young person believes that I’m a ‘good teacher’ just because I did the bare minimum of treating them like a human being, deserving of trust and care. It’s hard for me to hold those truths at the same time, to see death and life, punishment and freedom constantly in conversation when I work in schools.
But may we continue to move towards, as the Zapatistas say, “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.” A world in which many worlds fit.
