Teacher, you're a badass.
It started as a simple search through my son’s Google Classroom. I wanted to find an assignment he had done a year ago, one I vaguely remembered from our early pandemic days. Those days were such a blur that it was hard to recall just where that assignment might be, so I brushed off our old login and took a walk down memory lane. To my surprise, memory lane was neatly ordered by title and date- a fete of organization and clarity I had been too stressed to appreciate at the time.
The early days of pandemic shutdown were not pretty in my household. Despite my determination that we would make the best of things, and my confidence that I was well-suited to facilitate my children’s learning, our ratio of tears to laughter was flipped in an ugly way.
There was more to navigate than what I understood at the time. My children were abruptly separated from the friends with whom they had begun to build their identities; the routines that helped them feel prepared to grapple with the world were stopped cold. My son’s interactions with his teacher- an important adult in his life who he trusted and wanted to please- was forced into hiatus, and then flattened onto a TV screen.
As much as I felt that I could structure routines in a way that would encourage school-at-home, my son’s teacher offered him something I will never be able to replace: she was a revered adult who was not his parent.
Outside of our home, he derived a sense of fairness, patience, and the trust that learning was worthwhile, from the teacher who modeled those truths to him five days a week.
It is clearer now, a year after the abrupt change in all our lives, what an important figure my child’s teacher was to him. More than the head-learning of academic rigor or number sense, teachers make a deep imprint in our children’s heart-learning. My husband and I take it seriously that, as parents, we are the ones to show our children how to be in the world. But the fact is, young children spend a lot of time with their teacher. (Or they did, and they will- schools are bound to open up.) Children can’t not pick up on what they see being modeled by the humans who keep their worlds clipping along in a predictable way, Monday through Friday. I now see what a human impact my son’s teacher made on him in his first few months of first grade.
I also see what a heightened state of stress we were all in last March. No one knew how long this would last. No one had a rulebook to follow. Many of us didn’t know if our income would dry up. And many of us were weighing these uncertainties while keeping children occupied, while working, without ever leaving the house and just trying to maintain enough toilet paper to keep all those behinds tidy.
We all arrived at the world of pandemic shutdown as human as we have ever been. Some of us had a network of family support, some were alone. Some of us had stable minds, others didn’t. Some of us started Day 1 already burdened with depression, anxiety or previous loss. I dare say a few were even excited by the change. Here is what I want to broadcast to the world: teachers were no exception.
All the unknown, the angst, and the gauntlet of trying to manage our children and our jobs and our homes- all the different textures of our own mental health- was just as true for teachers as it was for the rest of the world. Which is why, when I happened into my son’s archived Google Classroom, I let all the best curse words fly. There is no other word that gets to the heart of what I felt; my kid’s teacher was a badass.
When I scrolled through my son’s digital classroom last spring, I did so because I was mining for his daily assignments. My tunnel-vision focused on parsing out which work we needed to make up, how long it would take, and how many times I might need to pause to let my son roll around in the fetal position (no joke) so we could get the darn thing done. My own reserves were too shallow to consider what leaps and pirouettes of timing, self-discipline, and technology his teacher was undergoing daily. But with a fuller heart and calmer mind, I see it now.
My son’s teacher, whose Waldorf training had prepared her to teach with beeswax crayons and felted wool, brought her songs, artwork, and wellspring of enthusiasm to a crisply organized Google Classroom- something she learned how to use seemingly overnight. She filmed lessons and attached pictures, and even provided enrichment activities, all organized succinctly by date and topic. We all became very familiar with the refrigerator in her garage, because it doubled as an easel for her lessons- all of which, of course, relied heavily on large blank pages and a roll of thick crayons.
When my son’s teacher was finally allowed to use her empty classroom, her joy in using the chalkboard again was palpable. As she became more comfortable teaching to a cell phone camera, her performances evolved too. By May, she began lessons by calling on her students by name. “Yes, Eleanor, that’s right! We are in the land of numbers! Now who can tell me what Millicent Minus had to say to Darwin Divide yesterday? Owen? Excellent!” My son’s delight the day she used his name during her pre-recorded video was one of the sweetest moments of remote school. He was so thrilled that this teacher, who he adored, had used his name during her soliloquy that he shot his hand into the air and asked, “Wait, Mom, can she hear me?”
The answer to my son’s question is the reason I reel with gratitude at the hard work of his teacher. No, she couldn’t hear him. She didn’t see his face light up or his chest swell with confidence.
But in the midst of her world shifting under her feet, my son’s teacher did everything as if she were standing less than six feet away from the child who idolized her. She taught as if she’d get to see the payoffs of her efforts immediately, when in fact the messy, half-done lesson books parents turned in arrived weeks after she’d moved on from the lesson. The little signs teachers get from their students, to show they’re doing a good job, are removed when two-way interaction is reduced. And yet, she sang, drew, skipped, and taught like a badass every day.
As a high school teacher, I can attest that teaching in a remote and hybrid environment for over a year can chisel away at the resolve in the best of us. When we re-design every lesson we’ve ever taught, to make it work over a computer- and then receive minimal feedback from our students, it’s hard. I don’t know if my remote students are laughing at my jokes, having a bad day, or quietly hoping we’ll get a chance to talk privately. My disparate moments of victory- of seeing a student achieve something they couldn’t do before- have mostly happened with the handful in-person students who attend my class. There aren’t many of them. The word inadequate comes to mind when I think of many of my lessons.
However, when I visit other teachers’ classrooms, I tear up at the abundant creativity and effort my colleagues are putting forth. They are trying to make their students feel heard, even when they don’t speak. They are telling jokes to an empty screen. They are doing their own leaps and pirouettes through content that isn’t meant to be taught via keyboard, and they are doing it with gusto anyway.
Teachers have worked so hard this year. It’s no wonder so many of us are exhausted. It’s also no wonder so many of us have convinced ourselves that our work has fizzled into mediocrity. Sometimes it helps to see our messy situation by peeking into our own kid’s classrooms, or the classroom next door. Teachers are so busy trying that they don’t realize that they, like my son’s teacher, are doing a badass job.
I look at what it means to be a teacher this year and I think of Goethe’s quote: “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” It has been a whole year of upturned teaching, and teachers’ lives are just as impacted as the communities around them. Yet teachers are throwing everything they’ve got at a computer. Because they know that what is behind that computer, less than six feet away, is a human who may not be able to give anything in return right now. But at our best moments, we know that we are teaching to the heart as well as to the head. That’s a badass move, teachers.
