—for all teachers, past, present, and future
I’m standing at the door of my classroom on the first day of school. My hand is on the door handle, and my school bag is slung over my shoulder when I realize that I’m scantily clothed. Actually, I’ve come to school wearing only my underwear (and they’re not even professional-looking underwear at that). This is but one of the many pre-school nightmares that ravaged my sleep for 40 years in the weeks before school started. I’d wake up sweat-drenched. My heart would race until I’d remember that I didn’t have to go to school that day, that I had two precious weeks to prepare until school started. And then the next night, the nightmares would begin again.
If I were to make a top-ten list of these nightmares, they’d include things like agreeing to teach a section of advanced music theory (I quit taking piano in 1967!) or trigonometry (I maxed out in geometry, 10th grade!); showing up to teach on the wrong day or in the wrong building/classroom (What? This isn’t Tuesday? This isn’t Room 159?); and wearing an awful pair of slippers I’d received as a gift and should’ve immediately donated to Goodwill (Shark slippers, Grandma? Really?)
Actually, I did once return from a break during a night class at the community college, inadvertently entered the classroom of a colleague, and began teaching a group of students who didn’t recognize me from Adam. And I did once teach an entire day with blue mimeograph ink streaked across the left side of my face. Not one student or colleague revealed this to me, and I had to discover this painful reality when I checked my rearview mirror to back out of the college parking lot at the end of the day. These experiences–and others–confirmed that my nightmares were real forces to be reckoned with and that they could (gasp!) come true.
Today’s teachers, however, may experience pre-school nightmares that I never once imagined. I could conjure up some attempts at humorous ones: sneezing violently onto your face shield and peering at your students through a smattering of your own snot; discovering that you have no fingerprints after weeks of using industrial-strength cleaning supplies to disinfect your classroom; struggling to make any real conversation unless it includes an in-depth discussion of social distancing. I could attempt to laugh at potential scenarios like this, but I won’t because these scenarios are more probable than possible. Sadly, face shields/masks, disinfectants, and social distancing guidelines will NOT be the stuff that foolish nightmares are made of; they will be the real stuff that makes up “ordinary” school life.
And so it goes without saying that the dread that ravages the nights and days of most teachers is legitimate dread. As if creating and delivering excellent, relevant lessons weren’t enough. As if developing and maintaining positive relationships weren’t enough. As if attending to the educational, social, emotional, and psychological needs of students weren’t enough. As if preparing a welcoming school environment (largely with your own funds) weren’t enough. As if mentoring new colleagues and collaborating with others weren’t enough. Now, add to this list a guarantee that you will protect your students from a virus that persists and shows no real signs of leaving.
In the past few months, I’ve listened to those who’ve argued passionately about the real need to reorganize law enforcement agencies, who’ve suggested that we might use other professionals to assist in addressing social, emotional, medical, and psychological issues. We often ask law enforcement officers to perform tasks and take responsbility for scenarios that most have never been trained to handle. So, too, our teachers. We ask them to be content, instructional, and assessment specialists. We ask them to be social workers and mental health experts. We ask them to be counselors, friends, custodians, leaders, team-players, fundraisers, make-doers, role models, mediators, and all-around upstanding citizens.
And now–the pièce de ré·sis·tance–they are essential workers on the pandemic front lines. The fact that most will assume this role with grace, conviction, and courage shouldn’t go unnoticed, but I fear that it will. Perhaps my greatest dread today is that this role will quietly and permanently join the burgeoning list of teacher responsibilities and that we won’t have a national conversation about what teachers should reasonably be responsible for and what they should not.
School will go on, as it must. Whether it’s in-person, five days a week, hybrid, or online, teachers will lead the charge. But I’d like all the teachers out there to know that there are those of us who understand that this season’s dread is real and that we can only reminisce about the good ol’ days when our worst nightmares were those of showing up to school in our skivvies.
