I didn’t write a close-out post. I feel like NYC public schools already closed back in March, back when I thought our country might have a chance to see kids again the last two weeks of June.

Everyone who’s read this blog for some time knows that hope is my passenger, realism my backseat driver. As Rebecca Solnit says:

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, a alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what is may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”

As I sat there on the Friday before we shut down, hope set in. Hope came in multiple forms. I hoped, between our governor and mayor’s petty jousts, they would both listen to educators’ concerns and parents’ necessities. I looked at the dwindling number of students per class, hoping they would find rest wherever they lived. Underneath that, I hoped that America would recognize how the personal is political, and all the ways we neglected thinking of our communities allowed for the eventual and exponential number of deaths.

In addition to people, this era would also kill ideas. Like the one where I’d spend the last day of the school year doing the same dance I’ve done for fourteen years prior.

But hope kept pushing me. I learned how to take pictures, edit film, and create engaging YouTube content. I advocated for our students, families, and communities on multiple venues, most of them virtual. I wrote and crafted, and kept myself busy until the single-digit hours of the night and awake again by the single-digit hours of the day. I saw my son lead his class’ morning session a few times and deconstruct institutional racism through June. I observed my wife seemingly grow limbs like an octopus as she ran an entire school while eating breakfast and tending to our son’s literacy work.

Oh, and I was thankful I learned data entry because what is Google Classroom but a set of data? What were students but a set of data anymore? What is a student but a rectangle with an avatar, an initial, a chosen representation when they refuse to show their faces? What was a conversation but a flip between more rectangles, illuminated with a neon outline when active? What was learning but a set of slightly delayed interactions between digits?

What was emergency distance learning but a delayed lie as fellow citizens across the globe fell to their untimely deaths?

By the time June 26th rolled around, I could stop saying to myself “If this is the only way I get to reach my students, then so be it.” I used my last session with students to just listen to them. As the music quietly played and the semi-inappropriate jokes whizzed by my screen, I remembered that they, too, had to wear masks through this. Even the usual introverts missed their friends and rituals dearly. Adults aren’t “special” in feeling as we do.

But that was three weeks ago. Stay-at-home orders distorted the meaning of time for all of us. I already miss the laughter, the voices, and the questions that emanated from the rectangles. My senses knew this isn’t what teaching felt like, but I’m glad that, when I did teaching right, children were on the other side of those rectangles, seeing the same things I did.

Photo by “enigma” by craigCloutier is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0