Up In The Air

The rhythms of this summer have been replaced by the herky-jerky jangling of a new school year beginning. None of this seems familiar. It doesn't feel like the weird rush that accompanied the closing of school and the attendant discovery of distance learning. In many ways, that was survival, and each day that we got through without a dozen questions or complaints felt like a victory. One of our teachers described it as trying to fly a plane that was still being built.
As a result, not a lot of soaring took place last spring. We celebrated completion. We made a fuss over kids showing up. Now, as we creep toward opening for what will be our fourth month of teleducation, we hope to be able to step up our game. A bit. The metaphorical plane has been in the metaphorical hanger for a couple months, so we ought to have a little better sense about how to keep it from crashing back to earth.
I remember the first time I came to the school for those days leading up to Day One. I was a fresh-faced recruit with an intern credential, ready for whatever this teaching gig had to offer. We took a bus to a conference center: an off-site meeting. It was there I got to know my colleagues and began to piece out what everyone was going to do once we started letting children in. Over the course of my career, this bus trip has been a simple meeting in the library, or a trip to Marin where we stayed in a hotel for a couple nights as we repeated that same exercise. Coming together as a staff, old faces mixed with new, changes in curriculum, stories of summers well spent and some not so much. Inevitably, one or two kids would come sniffing around in hopes of getting an early peek at the class lists.
Not  this year. We are doing all of that same work from a distance of six feet or more. I really have no idea when I will see all my fellow teachers in the same room again. Instead, we group text or Zoom, always with an eye toward the day when we might sit around and enjoy one another's company. Not now. There's too much to do, too many choices and connections to make and they all have to be done from the relative safety of our living rooms, offices, or kitchens. Wherever the wi-fi is best.
Except for things like handing out Chromebooks, or helping parents get registered. That's where I put on my mask and wander into the fray, wishing that there was an easier way, repeating myself often to be understood through my face covering. We all know that we are doing everything we can to be safe, with the possible exception of waiting until there was no more coronavirus.
But that's not going to happen. It's time to get this show on the road, plane in the air, with or without wings.