Preparing for Red: Teaching in a Pandemic

We had a teacher workshop day on Friday.

I remember when workshop days used to start with leggings at 7:55 am, sometimes dark sunglasses and a side eye to whoever the lucky presenter was. Workshop days in 2020 look totally different. Mostly it’s just you driving your car into some kind of parking lot and someone has spray painted “prepare for red” in your parking space. No amount of Cardi B can change the spray paint. No one hands out muffins because of the gluten and also the dairy allergies and then the Covid sprinkles don’t help. So you don’t get the muffins people, you can’t handle the muffins! Then you check your email and it says daily agenda: red preparation. Pretty soon even the take out menu’s say that. It’s a real downer.

What does prepare for red mean to you?

To me it is quite startling. Red makes me think of March. The dark hour. The Tiger King , toilet paper counting, everybody cutting their own hair segment. It makes me want to ration my time and wine and sanity for the red. For the time of the red. But the problem is that we are in yellow and I have always lived my life in yellow anyways, because that is the land of proceed with caution. I really like the yellow camp. After all, the yellow camp, let’s me see my students a few times a week and although some of us forgot how to water color paint, or count by tens, or blow our nose, yellow is an okay zone to be in. Yellow is the safe place. Nobody hits a kid with yellow rain boots on. Facts are facts.

But the truth is, the Rona is coming. It’s closing in.

Schools all around us, I’m hearing of a case here or a case there. It makes me want to raise my own chickens, or have an outdoor shower that spits out lysol. Even little old me, your blog artist, experienced Covid symptoms prior to school starting. You might argue that it was allergies or a cold or my body rejecting itself, but six days before school began, I came down with a sore throat. I took my buns to urgent care and waited in all my sweaty glory for a fully hazmatted nurse to examine me. I felt very dejected when she came in with all that gear, like I was one of the others, one of the ill-fated chosen ones. She assured me I didn’t have it, but then upon seeing my swollen glands she couldn’t guarantee it and would it behoove us for me to get tested? Just to be safe.

We counted down the ten seconds together, that lovely nurse and I and I felt that Q tip rattle my brain tissue and then it was over and she sent me on my way.

Once home, I googled all my symptoms for the 50th time because I have a medical degree and know more than the rest of world. Surely my symptoms, coupled with my anxiety, and right to google would mean that I could fight this virus single handedly. As two days turned into three and I still couldn’t get my results, I began to bang on the door of the CDC (don’t they know Dr. Shah and I are second cousins ), but alas it took four freakin days to get my negative result and even after I heard it , I had to write it down on a napkin, with red lipstick. Negative. Free to walk around masked and in public. Gulp, sigh, swallow. Another week down.

The truth is we could all be little walking carriers, transporters of the germy germs.

I am just a teacher, in a pandemic, attempting to keep her classroom, co-workers, and family safe. It’s an all consuming job, but I’m trying my best. The truth is, I don’t really know what red will look like. Not exactly. I do know I’d rather stay in the yellow cautionary zone, but in the event that we do go to red, I think I have prepared my students the best I can. I have given them three pieces of advice that even adults can use.

If the chrome book is making you cry, close the screen, walk away and come back when your energy is better.

When the mask goes up, the manners don’t have to go down.

Eating good food and getting lot’s of sleep is medicine too.

I will admit, I am a little worried about the technology, about being enough for my kiddos and their parents, about taking care of them the way they deserve. I’m also worried about spiraling some the way I did before. That’s okay to say right? I think it’s mental health week, and this is a safe place. Situational depression is a real and legit deal that happened to me last spring and is happening to teachers across the country right now. People who work in professions where they take care of others, need to really take care of themselves too and that includes when they slip into red. If I work with you, or if I don’t. I am never too busy to hear your heavy. Please don’t go at it alone. You can never fully prepare for red, not entirely and if you do, then you aren’t truly existing in yellow and being present for the people who need you. So if this long blog post does nothing else, I want you to know that you don’t have to know entirely what red will look like, because the rest of us don’t either and we forgot our 3D glasses to boot.