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.

Can Learning be "Virtual?"

Over the past few weeks I've been doing a lot of consulting work with several schools who are preparing for the fall semester. I've been doing some professional development for teachers, and helping school leaders think through some pedagogical and technological decision-making as they develop multiple options for what the fall might look like for their schools.

It's interesting to see what has been common experiences for many teachers in different parts of the U.S., and what is unique to particular places as well. Overall, I could summarize the online teaching experiences of teachers with whom I have interacted as challenging, exhausting, and not entirely pleasant. (And that might be putting it all very nicely, honestly!) Many educators have found the distance teaching adventure of Spring 2020 to be demanding, to say the least!

But one comment I heard from a teacher in one of these meetings really grabbed my attention. In fact, I paused to scribble it down right when this individual said it:

Moving and Change

We moved to a new home last week. It was an adventure, and still is, I guess, since all our stuff is in the new house but we are still figuring out where it is, and where it should be. When one of the kids unloads the dishwasher, it takes three times longer than it used to, because for almost every item they have to bring it to Mom with a, "And where does this go?" And it's not just the kids, it's me too: "Honey, have you seen the box with extension cords in it?" and "Where did we put the blender now? I thought it was in this cupboard..."

New house: Brick! Walking distance from campus! 

Moving means recalibrating. We get to find new "normal" places for our stuff. We get to figure out traffic patterns for how we function together in this space. We get to (try to) figure out which switches control which lights. We get to settle in to new routines.