I went back to teaching in person this week.
The starts at 6:30 am with coffee and confusion as I get my two year old son ready for daycare.
I pulled into the student parking lot at 7:30 am, a time I would have been shockingly proud of last year, but this year many other teachers are there too, unpacking their children from minivans and carefully placing masks on their faces. I walk the length of the school's campus to get to our building--each grade group has a different entrance now and a section of the building they're confined to, so the teachers' lot is now for Pre-K parents only for a socially distanced drop-off.
The breezy, summer morning air cools the anxiety raising in my face, and the metal stairs up to the high school entrance vibrate strange music from my quick steps up.
When I get to my classroom, I turn on the air cleaner and put the air conditioner in my window at full blast. I have been told that your body regulates your heat mostly through your mouth, which is why I keep getting sweaty and dizzy during the day. Both machines scream awake, and I sanitize the desks (even though I did it before I left yesterday) and make my way to the faculty meeting, pausing in the halls to sanitize my hands. Muffled hellos emit from masks beneath concerned eyebrows as our administrator reminds us of CDC guidelines and policy changes.
Our meeting ends at 8:00 am and we leave to our battle stations for the staggered arrival of students from their designated door. We're a small school--my high school class sizes range from 4-9 students. Last year I had eight preps for eight tiny classes, but this year I have only six for slightly larger classes, as COVID has bizarrely garnered us a larger student body. I don't know what my new students' faces look like, trying to guess at what they might look like from the shape of their forehead and eyes.
Most things about teaching in COVID are harder. Hearing and speaking are arduous. Trying to teach Spanish 1 in a mask is quite challenging: trying to demonstrate how to do an alveolar tap was confounding. And it's so difficult to read a class. Are they connecting with the material? Are they understanding? Are they zoning out? I can't tell: all I see are eyebrows.
There are some silly advantages to all the extra spacing, masks, and hygiene. I don't have to smell particularly odiferous individuals. When someone says something bonkers my instant expression of disgust is veiled. My unfiltered responses finally have a triple-layered cloth interceptor, so I do get a second chance to think about if that particular witticism is actually something I should be saying. When I want social distance from someone, I am free to social distance in the name of public health.
There are some really good things about being back. The learning environment, though muffled, is back. I explained to my ninth grade English class what tenor and vehicle are in a metaphor, and only about half of the class was getting it. I had them work in (socially distanced) pairs and make up their own metaphor, identifying the tenor and vehicle, and five minutes later the whole class understood. This social learning can be laboriously created online, but the effortlessness and ease of in-person is so satisfying.
The most startling advantage to me of teaching in-person in masks happened when I was teaching American Literature. I changed the order of the works we read, and we started with Fahrenheit 451 instead of ending with it. Dystopian literature seemed very salient to our cultural milieu.
We read in class the first fourteen pages, pausing to discuss different aspects of the story. On page 10, Montag waxes poetical, thinking about Clarisse. He thinks how her face is like "the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour snd the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new Sun."
This is the first time we see Montag have any original thought in this novel, not merely giving the automated responses he's been conditioned to. As soon as this passes through his head he responds with:"'What?' asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience."
I posed to the class the question, "Have you ever experienced this? The person society is crafting you to be and a secret self both at war inside you?"
One student, one who I have known for five years and has never been candid with me, said that this is true for him. He said he pretends to be happy and makes jokes so that people laugh and don't see how sad and lonely he is inside. He explained this contradiction within himself with a sharp, painful accuracy. His classmates' eyebrows raised and their eyes widened, but most of their response were masked.
I was touched by his raw honesty, and while many students have been vulnerable in class discussions, I would have never expected this from him. It was as though the warmth of human connection and the safety of an emotional distance behind a mask gave him the voice to articulate this secret self.
As our wills, habits, and consciousnesses crumble in this pandemic, maybe the secret self will find her voice in the reconstruction of our worlds.
I finish the day, misting everything in sanitizer and Lysol, and walk next to the babbling creek and pack myself into my car. I go to pick up my son from daycare. He hugs me fiercely, saying "Mommy, you tame back. I missed you." His little face looks earnestly up into mine.
I look at his nose, a little runny, and wonder if he got COVID or if he just has a cold from being out of our house for the first time in six months.
His hazel eyes are bright and I hold him tightly, as much for his comfort as for mine (I also have been locked in my house for six months).