Year 11 – Week 30: To The End Of The School Year

What am I going to do for the rest of the school year? 

Usually, I come back from Spring break with preparing for my 5th graders' performance and the middle school band concert. 3rd grade is usually deep into their recorder unit and moving along at a good pace.  

There is no live performance. My 5th graders cannot sing and play recorder as part of the COVID-19 mitigation practices, and we can't bring parents into our school for a performance anyways, so that is done. The middle school band concert is canceled for the same reason. We haven't had band or choir all year. This year I'm not teaching 3rd grade for the first time in almost a dozen years because of scheduling issues, so I'm with 4th grade, and I'm not sure what we are doing in that class when we get back from break.  

I'm unsure.  

Like every stage of this school year, there are new challenges and changes. My 4th and 5th grader classes were split up into six pods/grade of 9-10 students, and they will now be combined into three pods (classes)/grade. The CDC recommends that social distances in schools can be changed from 6 feet to 3 feet means that we can combine these students into the class sizes that we have done in previous years.  

This will be a significant change. Having twice as many students in a classroom will feel different. Having only 9-10 students spaced out in a room felt pretty good. It felt right for students to have so much space around them, so this will feel crowded. I'm probably going to feel a bit uneasy being in those classrooms with so many students. That is something I am going to have to process.  

The classroom community will need work. It takes a while for a group of students to feel out the social and power dynamics in a class. It will be interesting trying to balance out the time needed for this classroom community to realign and reorganize with curricular goals. I'm not sure how to play it yet. Part of me just wants to get to curricular work and establish norms as we work, but part of me thinks clear reminders and discussions may be necessary.  

I'm excited.

My 8th graders have been in their larger sections about 18 students this whole year but have not been able to be in classrooms because of the 6-foot social distancing recommendations. Now that we are down 3 feet, they can finally be in classrooms. I've been teaching them in hallways, in part of the library, an art classroom, which worked pretty well, so it's going to be nice to teach them in a classroom. Teaching them in two rows spaced out down a hallway is not fun. I'm not going to miss that.  

And I'm worried.

Will we more exposures at my school, which will lead to more quarantines? Now that I'm vaccinated, I'm not concerned about my health that much, and with the layers of mitigations my school has put into place, we have not had students get COVID-19 from being exposed to COIVD-19 from other students in classrooms.  

The first time I was exposed to a COVID-19 positive student was one of the most challenging days of my teaching career. That was before I was vaccinated, and it was very stressful. Since then, I've been exposed two other times after being vaccinated, and it's still hard to process. I don't have to quarantine since I am vaccinated, but the students do, and it's unsettling.  

I don't want the year to end with more of this, but that may be something I need to accept. I don't know if I should mentally prepare for more quarantines or hope to make it to the end without these situations coming up. The fact that we have not had spread from our classrooms means that our mitigation practices are working. That is a good thing, but the fact that we even have to deal with this feels still so wrong after all this time.  

What will the end of the school year feel like? Will it feel like a moment of great accomplishment in the worst of times, or will it be filled with regret? What will the parents say, what will the teachers say, and what will our students say about all we did this year to make in-person school work? 

We will find out, and until then, like everything about my job in the past year, we have to take it one task at a time, one day at a time. Accept uncertainty, be flexible, and stay focused on what is best for the students.