Countdown

Okay.
You want the truth?
I am not having a good time here. Not because nobody else is having a bad time. Everybody else is having a bad time. That's kind of guaranteed with a pandemic.
But if someone had told me that school would be out after the second week in March, I would have imagined a mash-up that included equal parts Pleasure Island and my couch. All those books and movies that I have made excuses for years about not reading or watching, ignoring the opportunities to learn something new. At last, I can finally take this moment to sit down and listen to a podcast. Maybe a few podcasts. This is my chance.
Except that is not how I am wired. First of all, nobody said that school was called off, not completely. I am still duty and honor bound to teach. Not the way I used to. Not the get up at five forty-five and be at school at six thirty in time to prepare to open the gates for those first kids to spill onto the playground at seven forty. Not the moderate an ever-growing mass of kids until the bell rings at eight thirty to send them all into their classrooms. Then spend that first hour preparing for my first class, checking to see if there were any teachers or students straggling in for the purposes of coverage and herding. Monday and Tuesday it's computers. Wednesday through Friday it's PE, with a new class every fifty minutes. And then it's time to open the gates and let them all spill out into the afternoon, with the clock ticking down the moments until they return. Until we hit one hundred eighty days and then we lock the gates for a couple months to reset the system.
But now the system is all cattywampus. There is no rhythm to what goes on. I confess that I take a small comfort to having my life run by a series of bells ringing. Time to move on to the next thing. But there are no bells now. There is no clear line guiding me from one activity to the next. I am deprived of that oh-so-important ritual of the countdown to summer vacation. It's not here, but it is. We're still teaching. We're still meeting. Over Al Gore's Internet.
Now we're counting the days until things go back to normal.
Whatever that means.