What We Do

A week ago, I was poking around in the archives of this blog, located just to the right if you ever feel the need to do the same, and I came across something I wrote fifteen years ago about the first day of school. At that time, I was pleased and happy with myself for being a veteran of some nine years. It was old hat for me, this searching class lists for names and finding familiar faces among the crowd. Parents making sure that we had connected and their babies would be safe in our hands, and once everyone had trooped inside the building and made our ways to the room we would share for one hundred eighty days it had begun.
"It" being a new school year.
At that time, I was somewhat incredulous with the notion that I still got nervous even after all those years. In a few weeks, I will begin my twenty-fourth year teaching, and I will be nervous again. This one might make a little more sense because we are about to embark on a brand new vision of how school could work. This summer has seen a resurgence of COVID-19 across the country, and the neighborhood where I teach is no exception. After months of surveys, studies and questionnaires, the Oakland Unified School District felt that it would be in the best interest of all involved to begin the 2020-21 academic calendar in distance learning mode. Students would, over a period of weeks as conditions became more clear and safe, be allowed to come back in phases.
My first concern was for kindergartners. Welcome to your new life in elementary school, and we hope you can form a lasting relationship with your teacher and the other children whom exist much in the same way for you that SpongeBob Squarepants does: on a screen. The same worry extends to students who are new to our school, no matter what the grade and specifically those who are second language learners. To be sure, we have grown as educators when it comes to delivering content online. The learning curve for teachers was nearly vertical, but most of us scaled that slope and after a three month crash course, we were able to make sense of the tools we had been given.
But we have never begun a year in isolation. Teachers, for the most part, will be introducing themselves to children who are strangers to them. Connecting to them in meaningful ways in order to keep them coming back to class Zoom meetings and assessing their skills and abilities remotely will be a strange and curious challenge. This introduction will also include parents, who will not have the chance to stand in the back of the classroom that first day to dry tears or hold hands.
We have a month to prepare, and the good news is that most of us have been working straight through since we said our distance goodbye back in May to make August work. It is, as my principal and I agreed, what we do. We learn. We teach. Usually in that order. And then we repeat as much as we can until we learn something new.
It is what we do.