I never want to be a closed door

Teaching challenges every assumption I make about teenagers. Every single year.

I still make them. I don't mean to, but I do. These days, with a bit of age and experience, I can usually remind myself to extend grace to these kids, but there are moments. 

I've been reminded so many times this month that this isn't school like normal. I can't expect what I normally expect because I can't support kids like I know how to do. Sometimes kids access my class from their phones in a parking lot. Sometimes they drive to a friend's house in a different town to borrow their laptop so they can log in. Sometimes they're caring for younger siblings or neighbors' kids, and their houses are chaotic and they literally have people climbing on them while they're trying to annotate a passage from a novel (two of my students allowed me to see that this week when they turned on their cameras, bless them). 

But all the same, I'm human, and dammit, I want them to do well. I mean, I also a little bit want them all to fall deeply in love with what I'm teaching because I love it so! much! And I hate not being able to communicate that to a room. Sometimes teaching is performance. It's hard to be my best teacher self when I'm mostly staring at my own face reflected on a screen. I get tired of looking at my own face. I can't blame kids for keeping their cameras off.

Still, I am working hard, and sometimes I let frustration get the better of me. Why hasn't that child even dropped a comment into the chat box? Why haven't they signed up for an incredibly non-threatening five-minute time slot to chat with their friendly and frankly sort of desperate English teacher, just so she can hear their voice? Especially when she begs, insisting again and again it won't be scary?

So it's easy to assume, this close to the end of the quarter, that a student is lazy, or doesn't care, or isn't cut out for my class. Especially if I don't know them. The only face I have is the face on last year's student ID badge, the face that shows up in my online gradebook. If I've done everything I'm supposed to -- I've contacted home, I've e-mailed, I've texted, I've sent private messages in the chat during class -- what else can I reasonably be expected to do?

Then this tiny message appeared in the chat, right as class ended: Miss, can I stay after?

I almost missed it. I had to pee. I wanted my five-minute break. Students from my next class had started to pop into the waiting room.

I waited, staring at the name, the same white letters stark against a black square. Would this be like the other times, when this student just didn't log off at the end of class? When, after long, silent minutes I assumed he'd ghosted my class, logged on and left, taken a nap?

"Miss?"

"Hi! Yes! I'm here!" 

I laugh at this a bit, hours later. Of course I was there, trying to calm my face, ecstatic at hearing a tentative voice through that black screen, trying not to scare him away. It reminds me a bit of taming feral kittens on the farm. Sometimes I was successful. Not always.

"Um. I'm sorry I haven't ever talked to you before."

My heart broke in that moment. It just broke. But I kept smiling.

"It's okay! I'm glad you're here. How can I help you?"

"I don't know if this is okay to ask, because one of my teachers told me it's too late to do a bunch of stuff. So I don't know. If it's -- I mean, it's okay, but my situation -- it's been hard, so I haven't been able to -- but some things are better now, so I'm trying to catch up enough to hopefully pass your class?"

"I'm so glad you're here, and it's not too late for anything."

"Can you help me?"

And my heart quietly broke again. 

Please never let me forget how much courage that question takes.

In a non-pandemic year, I'll be honest: sometimes it is too late to reasonably do All The Things, or even Enough Things, at this late hour. But when there is no reasonable way for me to support these kids in my actual presence, where I can carve out a routine and semblance of normalcy for awhile (as much as they fight me there sometimes, too), then I will hold the door open as long as someone wants to walk through it. Or as long as I can see someone hovering nearby even thinking about it.

I sent him a list. Do these three things first. Let me make sure you understand this, and then we can tackle this next chunk.

I waited an hour before I sent him a message, hoping against all hope that he would reply when he has never replied to me before.

Did you get it? Let me know!

Ninety minutes passed, but the reply came.

I got it. Thank you. I'm here.

What matters most

Trump is a loathsome monster of a human being, but he is still a human being, and I don't want COVID to kill him.

Some of my friends have some outspoken Trumpers on their friends lists, and those I haven't blocked I sometimes watch with real curiosity. Some claim they're unfriending reams of folks, apparently, for rejoicing over Trump's diagnosis and wishing his dead and this is what's wrong with the hateful left.

None of my more conservative friends are posting this, thank goodness (or if they are, they're filtering me out of it, which I appreciate. Please keep doing that if it applies to you). I also call BS on the ones who are. It's not that I don't believe these posts exist somewhere; I just don't believe the folks who are all, "Time for some FRIENDS LIST CLEANUP because I don't need that kind of hate in my life!" First of all, I could show you just as many random internet posts "rejoicing" at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg if I spent three seconds hunting for them, and second of all, four days ago your leader attempted to bully his opponent over his dead son, mocked his last living son, refused to denounce white supremacy and told the Proud Boys to stand by, and then he exposed how many people to this virus while he went on to attend events after knowing he'd been exposed (and likely after he tested positive)? The virus he called the "China Plague" on Tuesday night? Tell me more about loving people and being a good human. I'll wait.

For the record, I haven't seen a single person on my own friends list who has "celebrated" Trump's diagnosis. Not one.

It doesn't mean we're wringing our hands, though. It doesn't mean we're wearing our "Oh no, I'm shocked!" faces.

I don't wish him ill. But Trump has access to the best care in the world, and my concern still lies with the folks who have fallen ill and don't have access to those resources and state-of-the-art care, who have lost their lives, who have battled with long-lasting effects of this disease. Who fell victim to his negligence and his lies and his utterly disgusting lack of empathy. Some of these folks are my students and their families. 

I wish the president could feel the effects of this virus enough to empathize with the folks who've suffered far more than he likely will, but I simply don't believe that's possible. He mocked Biden for wearing a mask; four days later he's making a video about "fighting for" all the millions of people who have been infected. I couldn't finish watching after that. Trump has only ever been about one person on this planet.

(Edited to add: See also the bizarre joyride he took today, forcing folks to share a hermetically sealed Covidmobile in what looks like a Weekend at Bernie's moment.)

I don't want him dead. I want him out of the White House.

***

And now for something completely different.

It's October, and we're nearly halfway through our first quarter. I spent nearly the entirety of the last two weekends and all of my weeknights until bedtime planning and uploading and planning and uploading every moment I wasn't actively teaching. This week I felt something shift; it is possible to breathe. Literally breathe.

Every day after school, the kids and I go outside. Often I convince Isaac to head over to the school playground, where he rides his bike and I jog around the track for awhile. Sometimes Suzannah joins us. Often Matt takes a quick work break to walk over as well. Sometimes the kids play basketball or ride the scooter around our house and I walk several miles alone through our neighborhood streets, because I appreciate the burn in my legs and love the sweeping views of Puget Sound. The afternoons have been sunny and warm. The leaves are turning gold against a brilliant sky. Every single day I go outside, just to notice it. To see everything I can, to breathe it in. This, I believe, is what living fully means. It's not about whether or not I can do whatever I want. It's about staying fully present in the moment I'm in.

***

I can complain all day long about how I miss teaching in my classroom. Well, I can teach in my classroom, but I can't be with kids in my classroom. That's unlikely to change any time soon, and as much as I want to be back I also understand that in a Pandemic, what we want is less important than lives, and that is actually what is at stake here. So I choose this instead: to become a better teacher. Even now, especially now.

Remote learning isn't "best" for most of us, but it is what we have, and it is necessary. And it doesn't mean that we give up and grow complacent, because our purpose isn't tied to a place; it is all about the folks we serve, in any context. It is critically important to be intentional in what I teach, and how. It is critically important to think about what matters.

Connecting with kids matters the most, full stop. In a remote setting, this takes intention and work but it is is not impossible.

Helping kids connect their learning with the bigger picture -- the "why" -- matters too. This is why I'm grateful to teach in an IB school, because this is the heart of good IB teaching (well, really good teaching anywhere, period; IB didn't invent that, but the IB mission statement acknowledges that our work is to create a better world, not just to get into a better college, and it's made my teaching more intentional in that way). Concepts over content. Inquiry. Curiosity. Empathy. This week one of my students sent me an e-mail in which she explained that she was worried her responses to an assignment weren't as concise or as clear as she'd hoped, but that she felt incredibly passionate about the topics we've been studying and discussing and she hoped that would come through in her writing.

Yes, I need to teach them how to write well. But first -- first -- I need to tap into their passion, if I can. I need to consider what they care about beyond the walls of our "classroom." I tell them I didn't become an English teacher because my passion is perfect thesis statements or grading essays. I'm an English teacher for the same reason I'm a writer and a reader: to connect. To feel that incredibly solidarity of "Me, too." To share a human experience with someone whose context is different from my own. To feel something enough to act on it. And to share, simply, what I love. This is the essence of what I do, and why.

And doing this over a screen is significantly harder for me. I don't really know how to work a faceless audience, when I'm mostly looking at my own face staring back at me. At least that's how I feel in my low moments, when I'm exhausted and overwhelmed. But I can't drop anchor at exhausted and overwhelmed, because the needs of my kids don't change based on my daily mood or energy level. So I try to remember this: I have an opportunity to try to be better, and I'd best take it. So what I care about this quarter isn't so much whether my students can practice enough for an IB assessment they don't even understand yet; what I care about is making connections with them and guiding their thinking, so they can make their own connections between what we read and the world in which they live. If they can do that now, the rest will follow. And it means they send me these little notes attached to their assignments. Sorry if this isn't clear, I just really get worked up and I'm trying to express that in sentences that make sense.

And that resonates with this teacher. 

***

During the winter of 2019, I met with my friend and colleague Shonda at Starbucks. We were armed with colored index cards and sharpies, the new IB subject guide, and plenty of energy. We decided to keep The Handmaid's Tale because we love that novel (and we had our picture taken with Margaret Atwood herself back in 2013 when she appeared at Seattle Town Hall after the publication of Maddaddam, and you are jealous). We also decided to add James Baldwin. We've gone back and forth over other others to include in other parts of the course, but Baldwin was at the top of the list, and we never considered cutting him. And so when I was faced with the daunting task of choosing what mattered most in a two-year curriculum I love deeply, it was a difficult choice--but then again, not so much. I taught The Handmaid's Tale in the fall of 2016, and it couldn't have been more relevant In the fall of 2020, it feels even essential. I'm teaching a quarter of Revolution and Resistance: James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood. There's no way I'm teaching it well enough, but I'm teaching it with everything I have, all the same. And maybe, maybe, the fact that I can't afford to be careless--I don't have a single moment to spare, really--means I can see this as an opportunity to do better and be better, in any year.