Dipping A Toe into the Water
I am sitting here writing this at 7:50 in the morning on a day in March, as the world is still sleeping, freshly draped in quarantine. What a strange time to be alive and have kids and try to teach kids. I have been wanting, NEEDING to do a blog for years now, but I have had every excuse in the book not too. I don’t have time, my kids have too many activities, I’m trying to earn my masters.
Well I have decided, the excuses are up, the time is now. I am going to spend this time writing, instead of just watching that tiger show on Netflix and giving the side eye to the pile of laundry. One of my biggest roadblocks in starting any kind of writing publicly (besides facebook of course) is that instead of becoming a healthy and positive outlet for me, I will incessantly check if anyone is reading it, if my words are valued or respected or extremely detested.
The truth is I love all things writing and this could be a very positive outlet for me or it might not. But hey , I could spend my time doing worse things, like buying different couches online that won’t fit into my very small house or selling hand sanitizer on amazon and then getting ridiculed for the fool that I am.
No, I have decided that this is my journey. This is my first pinky toe dip in the ocean, this is my first try on of spandex before a spin class, this is my first nervous read aloud to a room full of uninterested fifth grade learners. This is me, ready or not, I hope you like it, or are amused by it, or can find some morsel of entertainment value in it.
I want to open my writing debut by lamenting about these last few weeks and what a train wreck they have been. My husband would tell you that I am a dramatic person, not in a look at me sort of way, but in a communication, sharing of feelings 101 sort of way. I tell him and I will tell you that I am in fact not dramatic, I just feel things more than other people and this is absolutely the truth. What is the term for people who feel things so intensely that they feel the burden of that weight all day long and question whether they did or said the right things, thirty or forty times to themselves in the shower? Am I plagued by empathy, anxiety? Am I the Giver in teacher’s clothing? It’s hard to tell, but you will see through this post and any other future posts, that I am a definite “feeler”. I am in tune with how anyone is vibing in the room and often assume their emotional residue. This can be a gift and it can be a curse. Read on to find out which day is which.
What a Week it Has Been
Anyhow these last three weeks.. what a ride it is has been. It all began with a birthday for my now 11-year-old and ended with isolation for the entire planet. Just a few short weeks ago, with what now feels like a ride on It’s a Small World , at Disney World (Oh, how I miss you Disney, we will come back to one another), it was just another day in the neighborhood in teaching second grade. Yes we were amping up the hand washing, yes we were paying attention the news (I’m not very good at this), but then what felt like a big massive hit on Red Rover Red Rover. The kind of hit you take when Johnny comes running at you full tilt across the field and you are tying your shoe and look up to check out Nick Waterbury and really just take that spear and land on your ass the way karma intended. It really just felt like a good smacking, what I would imagine it would feel like if Tom Hanks exclaimed YOU SUCK or if the car wash stopped working mid car wash and you stepped out to see what the problem was and suddenly you are being hit with jets of blue and purple Smurf foam. It was a hard smack.
To make my guilt ridden heart really dive into the ice cream, I said goodbye to my students the way I normally do on every Friday. I gave side hugs, I shoved their half zipped backpacks full of soggy mittens they had forgotten. I admonished a few on not shoving others in the line, I didn’t make GOOD eye contact people, I didn’t squeeze like a hug should be with all the feels. You know what I mean by feels too. I watched those big yellow buses take off and I thought my goodness onto the weekend, Taryn, you have worked so hard and now put your feet up.
And Then. It happened. The phone calls, the texts , the massive email chains and group texts back and forth. Is this really happening? Are we really calling off school this week? Maybe not just this week? Now it’s next week too? Then all of a sudden I am sitting in my classroom , looking up other people’s nostrils, on other people’s unmakeup’d faces on google meeting and wondering how did we get here?
In the next few hours, my two amazing co-workers and let me just say, I don’t know if they will ever read this blog, I hope they will, but I don’t know for sure. They stepped the f up. I mean stepped up in this situation. People always like to share that quote of Mr. Rogers imploring people to look for the helpers. Well, I work with a couple of helpers, that is for dang suuuuuure. WE WERE not organized for this kind of a situation. We stared at each other for a few minutes because other grade levels seemed to know exactly what to do. They had crayons. They had notebooks. They had had beautiful laid out piles, complete with personalized notes for each cherub and we had an empty table with dried glue stick smear on it.
But I will say, when I felt immobilized by fear, when I felt like what in Gods Green Earth is even happening. My co-worker Tracey she just started moving. She was grabbing the A-Z books, she was gathering spelling graphic organizers. My other co-worker Kris began dumping out her prized binder clips and sending practice pages through the copier, like it was the first edition of the first newspaper ever written.
I can honestly say in those next few hours, I have never experienced carpal tunnel quite like I had in stuffing those folders. We stuffed and we double checked and we added sharpened pencils and cute bunny erasers, then more teachers came in and we stuffed those items too. And you know how it felt, purposeful and excruciating at the same time. It felt purposeful because we were given very little notice to complete a task that children would need to use for the next two weeks, with their families who may not have a background in education or feel comfortable with teaching their children at all. We were god damn rockstars, assembling a job while the job was actually happening, supporting each other from six feet while crumbling into the ground at six feet simultaneously.
BUT in the midst, it felt wrong, it still does. I don’t think worksheets are what make the magic happen in a classroom. I think they can be a tool, I think they can be a vehicle for Cinderella’s pumpkin, but they are not the end, all be all. They are not even the magic wand. So it broke my heart to think, I
A. Hadn’t said goodbye properly to my students.
B. Didn’t have a a lot of time to plan for them.
C. Knew this wasn’t the same as what they would do on the daily.
I have since come to terms what what happened in a “it is what it is” sort of way, but it still gut punches me every now and then. I have been endlessly researching, planning, searching , zooming for all the right tools to send them on the next round of “REMOTE LEARNING” which sounds so cold and clinical when you say it out loud.
I don’t know if other teachers feel similar, I don’t know if I should let go and let God, so to speak. I am proud of what we accomplished, are accomplishing, but I am still feeling the inadequacy of doing my job from afar, when I have reached so much self worth from seeing the magic happen up close.
Thank you for sticking with me through this long and winding post. I’m sorry that my brain takes so many u-turns while I’m writing. Make sure to comment below your thoughts and or feelings from whatever vantage point you are on. I would love to hear them.