Teaching in 2020

I want to make some kind of 20/20 vision joke as I start this post, but nothing is coming to me. I am a little overwhelmed with how this school year has started.

It's year 23 for me as a teacher, and year 9 for me at Dordt. I still love this work immensely. I still am learning all the time about how to do this work. I still am my own worst critic too--in my heart of hearts, I know that I'm fulfilling my calling in what I'm doing here, and yet, I see all my errors and missteps and agonize about these.

This feels like a confessional, so I'll keep going in that vein: I think that this has been the most ambivalent beginning of a school year for me in my years of teaching to date. Don't hear this wrong: I am THRILLED to be here, and ELATED to have students on campus again! That part has been so, so wonderful. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting up with my new students, and reconnecting with students I've taught before. I don't have any brand new courses this year, so it's a year of revising, and refining, and a little re-imagining. And it's all off to a great start, honestly.

But...

On the other hand, teaching in the Age of COVID-19 is perhaps the most demanding thing I've done since those first years of bumbling through, when I learned something new about this arcane craft every day. Teaching in a mask or face shield ain't all it's cracked up to be. Teaching in two modes simultaneously (with some students in our face-to-face classroom and some joining in via Zoom) has an incredible cognitive demand. I am so grateful that I was scheduled to teach two of my courses online this term, because I have those ones more-or-less dialed in at this point, which frees up some more of my cognitive energy to focus on reinventing how I will connect with my students in my "face-to-face" courses. (Which are now hybrid format.)

It's not that I feel like a first year teacher again...but it is definitely a feeling of "unsettled" that I don't think I've felt since that first year.

And so I am calling this an "ambivalent beginning." The elation of being able to meet up with students again that I usually feel at the beginning of every school year is being tempered by anxiety about the unknowns and the ongoing extra work of retooling my teaching on the fly. And teaching with a mask and/or face shield, or hiding behind plexiglass at the podium? This is really cramping my style!

All of that said, I'm reflecting on the lesson I taught on day one of Introduction to Education, a lesson I revised a bit from the way I've taught it in the past to accommodate having students Zooming in, and teaching with my PPE in place. But the heart of the lesson was unchanged. Lesson 1 in Intro to Ed is this: "You Teach Who You Are."

Begging the question...who am I as a teacher? 

Does the mask, and face shield, and Zoom-split cognition, and weirdness of having students sitting six feet apart in our classroom define who I am as a teacher?

Not in the least.

This is a season of struggle for me, one that I hope to not repeat anytime soon. But I'm tapping into my creativity, my resilience, my flexibility, my empathy, my professionalism, my resourcefulness, my passion--all those dispositions that I hope to be fostering in my students--and I'm going to serve my students to the best of my ability, with all the care, and compassion, and responsiveness I can muster.