What I remember about March 2020
The light coming into my classroom windows is bright. We haven’t yet left winter behind though. The old radiators are still hissing away and making the classroom feel almost subtropical.
Other than the radiators, my classroom is completely silent. Which is a disquieting soundscape for a classroom. I’m standing in the corner of our classroom library. The books are organized in plastic bins by genre or level of difficulty. Or they were in September. At this point in the year you’ll find plenty of mystery books haphazardly stuffed into bins for superhero books or biographies.
I’m looking around my classroom as if I'll find an answer to the question, "What the hell am I supposed to be doing?" I survey the snake plant and philodendrons in boring beige plastic pots I bought from Amazon sitting on the windowsills, the stacks of photocopied worksheets and the-constantly-growing-yet-to-be-graded piles of student work, and 21 desks arranged in four groups of four, five, five, and seven. Each desk has a pile with a Chromebook, a composition notebook, lined paper, three pencils, a ruler, and a variety of colored snap cubes that students use for math. I’m standing still, and feeling very lost. I have no idea what comes next.
Outside the classroom door the hallways are empty and quiet too. The silence is a sort of negative space that frames the missing sound of echoing footsteps, laughter, shouting, “Stop talking, so we can get down to lunch,” crying…
My stomach feels as empty and heavy as the hallway’s silence, and my chest is tight. I inhale deeply and sigh, realizing I’ve been partly holding my breath. I really don’t know what comes next and that is my least favorite feeling.
It’s been a week since students entered our school building. This afternoon we will meet them downstairs and give each family their stack of the materials slipped into a large zip-lock bag.
When the families start to arrive, the first student I see is one of my “troublemakers”. He is a smart kid who commands attention. He has a tight fade, dark skin, and a mischievous smile that makes my heart almost explode when I see it. It’s only been a week since I saw him last, but what a week it’s been.
We left school on Friday the 13th under a cloud of uncertainty. The NBA had shut down. Schools in Maryland, Ohio, and other states and school districts had shut down. But Mayor DeBlasio refused to make a similar announcement. Finally, Sunday night the Governor overrode him, and New York City schools closed too. It was a weird feeling. I was so relieved and grateful on the one had. But at the same time, I was so scared and worried.
The weeks that followed were some of the hardest weeks of my personal and professional life. The hardest part, the part that still makes a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, was the way we lost contact with so many students.
About a quarter of our students were living in homeless shelters when schools closed. Most of the other kids also lived in situations of extreme economic insecurity. During “normal” times some of our students missed 10, 20, even 40 days of school a year. When COVID came, it hit our community like a tsunami. I don’t just mean the virus, although it did take a great many lives in Central Harlem. But, I mean the way it completely upended the lives of so many families who were already struggling.
Some of my students did not have access to internet until weeks later. I had students who moved in with family members, because they needed internet or adult supervision. Over the course of the next few months we struggled to adjust to our strange new reality. Out of my 30-something third graders, I saw a little more than half of them consistently. There were about seven or eight students that I saw only once or twice the rest of the year. I knew that they were physically safe through our community’s word-of-mouth network. Nonetheless it was upsetting to lose touch with so many students so abruptly.
Why am I retelling all of this? Because it’s been two years since it happened, and sometimes it feels like we’ve already forgotten. In some ways we’re still very much in the midst of it. But in others it feels like we’re in a rush to move on without ever taking a moment to process what we went through.
Each person’s ability or interest to move on without processing is partly influenced by their personal experience of the pandemic. While I saw my students’ lives totally disrupted, my own life was pretty stable. I worked from home, avoided getting sick, and remained sheltered and employed. For people experiencing long covid, or the grief of losing a loved one, it is much more challenging to move on.
I wanted to share a small part of my memory of what happened two years ago, by way of asking you to pause and to remember your own experience. I know it might be hard to think back to that time. It is for me. But I worry about what will happen if we don’t.
The United States’ cultural approach toward trauma and mental health is generally one of denial. Many of us are eager to turn the page on this terrible chapter in our history. Our elected officials seem especially anxious to “return to normal.” I have some strong criticisms of this attitude that I’ll save for another post. But, if we’re closing the worst chapter of the pandemic in the United States, I’d like us to at least acknowledge what we’ve been through. We owe it to ourselves and each other on a personal level. It’s also necessary politically. I am ready to heal from the pain and grief I experienced. I don’t want to forget what I went through, and what we went through together. Because so much suffering that happened was avoidable. Remembering is a small way to promise to ourselves and each other that we won’t let it happen again.
Other recent writing:
[The Educator’s Room] Teaching Was Never Sustainable
[History Daily] Cassius Clay Becomes Heavyweight Champion of the World
[Is Our Children Learning?'] What do police do?
Other recommendations for listening/reading/watching:
“If Black Women Were Free”: An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective