In the past two years, I’ve figured out how to be an educator during a pandemic. I’m flexible. I’m used to things changing without much warning, feeling unprepared, and teaching with the perpetual stress of anxiety of the COVID-19 virus. Getting exposed to the virus by a student, which had happened about a dozen times since September is a very different situation than when I was exposed in the fall of 2020. The likelihood of me getting COVID-19 from a student is low, and the chances that it will land me in the hospital if I do since I have had three shots is very low. However, there is still a simmering level of anxiety every time I get an email that tells me that I taught a student who tested positive COVID-10.
Uncertainty has become a norm for me. Making plans for performances that can be canceled with short notice has become a norm. Dealing with everyday crises in a school on top of the ongoing crisis that is this pandemic is my norm.
In the past couple of months, it has been clear there will be no victory moment. There will be no grand announcement, celebration, or parade to mark the end of the pandemic. Instead, COVID-19 is going to morph into an endemic. Even the lifting of mandates like masking, which many of us teachers imagined would be some wonderful moment in Illinois, is a transition fraught with lack of clarity, anxiety, and uncertainty. COVID-19 crept into our lives and was then hit with a sudden and violent blow when the schools shut down in the spring of 2020. And COVID-19 is not leaving us in the clear away as it came. Instead, it will become a less central concern in our lives. I’ll do the same thing as a teacher. I’m not going to put away my masks and put my “How to Teach During A Pandemic”- guide in a drawer and go back to being a pre-pandemic teacher. Instead, I will have to shift my concerns and priorities, which will take some doing.
To be clear, there is no “How to Teach During A Pandemic”- guide. That was a joke. If such a guide existed, schools in America would look very different for the past two years.
In a way, being a teacher during a pandemic has prepared me for teaching after this pandemic has passed. The pandemic forced me to better balance my home and work life, which will continue to happen. My ability to handle pandemic-level crises will help me handle the other crises of school more calmly and with more perspective. Most importantly, this pandemic has helped me better understand my role as a teacher with more perspective.
I am worried because I don’t know what this experience of being a teacher during this pandemic will do to me in the long term. Like people raised during the depression who carry on necessary depression-era habits long decades later, I wonder what I will carry with me as a teacher. I am worried that there will be things that I used to do that I know are good and right but will be a struggle to do. And I am worried how the challenges and traumas from the past two years will revisit me in the classroom, as many of them sit with me unprocessed.
One of the saddest things about this pandemic is that it has gone on so long that it feels normal. Even good changes feel scary because they disrupt what feels normal and predictable. We may be getting to the point that we can be done with this pandemic, but I feel like it will be a while before this pandemic is done with me.
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