Being the Bardolator that I am means that my preferences for Shakespeare's plays runs on a continuum more than a binary. I don't hate any of them, and while I do love some more than others (Richard II and Coriolanus come to mind once the masterpieces have leapt about the list), there are some that I like less well. Titus Andronicus is so bitter, so painful, so dark and depressing that I'm not a really a fan of it. Having seen Cymbeline a couple of weeks ago, I can also say that it was…fine. I'm okay with not experiencing it again for a long time. A Midsummer Night's Dream is also in that category of liking it less well than others, though that comes from exposure more than anything within the play itself. I've seen it performed I don't know how often and had it on my curriculum at least three times. Unlike Hamlet, which is a well deep enough for me to dip into it annually and still not sound it, A Midsummer Night's Dream does not have enough beyond light laughter to really draw me toward it. That isn't to say laughter can't be worthwhile in and of itself; The Comedy of Errors is even more sparse on the profundity and is still a lot of fun. In fact, I took my entire family, from my eight-year-old up to my teenager, to see the Utah Shakespeare Festival version of that play this summer, and I laughed all the way through. I enjoyed it for what it was, as that's all it's trying to be. Having just finished A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon, I find that I'm not much changed in my opinion about it. The fairy magic and Bottom will always be the best parts of this play; the problematic solution to the lovers' quarrel will always stick out to me. The premise, if you've forgotten, is that there are lovers: Hermia and Lysander, who want to get married. Unfortunately, Hermia's dad, Egeus, is a dirtbag who wants Hermia to marry Demetrius. Not only does Hermia not care for Demetrius, but the man has "made love" (1.1.107) to Helena, another young woman of Athens. (It's always important to remember that, despite how many sex jokes and innuendoes Shakespeare puts into his plays, this isn't one of them: To make love is to woo or court a person.) So Helena wants Demetrius who wants Hermia who wants Lysander. The antics of the play really take off when the four lovers head into the woods to escape Egeus' ultimatum that Hermia must marry his preference for her or face death. Because this is a fairytale, the woods are packed with fairies, including the irrepressible Robin Goodfellow (also known as Puck), King Oberon, and Titania. Oberon has his own subplot about laying claim to a changeling child that Titania has in her train of followers--a subplot that's resolved off-stage and related to us in a brief explanation in 4.1--but his main purpose is to get the squabbling lovers (remember, Demetrius wants Hermia) to stop fighting. To that end, he has Puck put a special love potion on the eyes of…the wrong guy. If one wanted to take a more cynical stance on this play, it's really about four horny people who are interested in having sex and which partner they get doesn't matter much. Yes, Hermia (and Helena, though she doesn't demonstrate it as Hermia does) is interested in consummating her relationship with Lysander, but only after getting married. Lysander is much more anxious for their relationship to become more physical, and that becomes parodic when the love juice accidentally lands on his eyes. He falls for Helena, spurns Hermia, and then ends up trying to woo Helena with a surprising level of gusto. Because Demetrius isn't interested in Helena, then changes his tune after he gets some of that Love Potion Number 9 in his face, Helena ends up with two men vying for her attention. Helena is furious at being made the butt of their jokes: Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? She rightly takes issue with becoming this focus of infatuation, then has to deal with the fury of her best friend, Hermia, who is now being abandoned by Lysander… Look, the interplay of the characters can be a little complicated. It's harder to read than some other plays by the Bard because of the close proximity of the girls' names (Helena and Hermia) and the interchangeability of the men (Lysander and Demetrius both lust after Helena). Many years ago, I had to come up with a mnemonic to help me keep the pairings straight, or else I become hopelessly lost: Both pairs are supposed to have an L and an M in their names. So Lysander and Hermia go together, while Demetrius and Helena are a couple. And that's part of the point, I think, of the play: When it comes to purely physical relationships, the partnering is one of proximity and convenience, not of compatibility. It's a rather cynical take on what it means to fall in love, surely. The play is filled with slapstick, hijinks, and verbal flourishes, but it's all to further this thesis that love is as mercurial as…well, a dream. But that isn't all. (When it's Shakespeare, there's always a bit more than just the surface story.) Yes, there's a big problem with the concept of consent: Egeus will only consent to having Demetrius marry his daughter, Hermia. More alarmingly, Helena--who seems to love Demetrius purely, though she's not too happy about him behaving so unaccountably strange during the second act--ends up with Demetrius by the end, the love potion removed from Lysander's eyes and leaving Demetrius still drugged. We're told in the final scene by Oberon (or perhaps it's simply a song sung--the First Folio doesn't give him these lines specifically) that "So shall all the couples three/Ever true in loving be" (5.2.37-38). The spell, it seems, will always be on Demetrius, shifting his consent from Hermia to Helena. When I think of it that way, I bristle. These meddling fairies have essentially forced Demetrius into a situation that he didn't choose, their manipulation pushing him into a relationship that he didn't want. But I think there's something more to it. There's magic in words--well-wrought words, I should say--and there are many things about which we change our minds. What is it, exactly, that convinces us to change course? There can be a lot of things, from political ideologies to religious dogma to personal experiences, all of which work on us to get us to move. An example that's a bit of a thing right now is how President Nelson, the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has asked that members of the Church get vaccinated and to mask up when social distancing isn't possible. It has caused a kerfuffle, to say the least, as there is a strong anti-mask sentiment among the rank-and-file of members (in my experience, I should say) and now those who felt that their God-given right to breathe contagions into the air is being challenged by the man they claim has a God-given privilege to guide the Church on Earth. What will convince someone to wear a mask during church meetings? Science hasn't done it for many of them; social pressures likewise seem irrelevant. Fearmongers, grifters, hucksters, and other bad actors have eroded the faith of some members in the reality of the global pandemic. Will they change their minds because President Nelson asks them to? Am I comparing, then, the leader of my church to a magical love potion? Well, to a certain extent, yes. The largest difference is that this masking example still hinges on the consent/choice of those who are struggling with changing their minds, while Demetrius has no say in what happens to him. He doesn't even know why he suddenly can't live without Helena. On the other hand, how did you first fall in love? Was that a conscious choice, one that you made out of a rational weighing of the merits of the object of your affection? Or was it something that just…happened, something that, as Mr. Darcy says of his path toward loving Mrs. Darcy, "I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun"? Perhaps there is little choice in falling in love, which is all that this play is concerned with. For us foolish mortals, however, the choice remains on whether or not we remain in love. So maybe the love potion is the mechanism by which Demetrius falls for Helena; let us pretend that, once that has faded, he chooses to remain with her. Of course, there's a lot more to this play than just the lovers, and the hands-down best would have to be Nick Bottom, a weaver of Athens. He is guileless, charming, foolish, brash, and enthusiastic. He's also incapable of keeping the right words in his mind (when he says "deflowered" instead of "devoured", it leads to really bad connotations about what the lion purportedly does to Thisby) or of remaining dissuaded of what he wants. And what he wants is to perform a farcical play for Theseus and Hippolyta on their wedding day (at night). It is his genuineness that pulls me toward him. He is foolish, yes, but he's authentically so. He bungles most everything, but it does tend to go well despite all of that. And there is--though Bottom certainly doesn't know it--a profundity to the speech he utters upon waking up in the forest, his memories of having the head of a donkey and being wooed by Titania (another victim of the love potion): I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom… (4.1.199-209) His attempt to recreate 1 Corinthians 2:9-10 is delightful, and it points to the simplicity of the man who is trying his best despite not having all his facts straight. It's a brilliant bit of characterization that is in line with everything else we see of Bottom throughout the play entire. It's also rather indicative of the dichotomies, paradoxes, and oxymorons that Shakespeare weaves throughout the play. Okay, so a bit of personal history here: I took one (and only one) Shakespeare class during my college days. Most of the term was spent in rehearsals where I and four other girls were tasked with doing an abridgment of 5.1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As I was the only guy, they (naturally) cast me as Thisby, the female lover who kills herself most tragically for love. So there are parts of this scene that live in my memory, even if I wouldn't be able to perfectly recite the words. This part of the play is absolutely my favorite, as it resides close to my heart. In this scene, Theseus says the line "That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow" (5.1.59), which has stuck with me because of its fundamental paradox. How can you have hot ice? But it isn't just there: We get lots of paradoxes and oxymorons in the speeches of the characters, which adds to the impossibility and dream-like quality of the play itself. In other words, through this constant paradoxical pressure that Shakespeare baked into the poetry, we get a strange sense of a world where impossible things can happen, where our typical boundaries of expectation and reality are bent, twisted, or lost entirely. "So musical a discord," says Hippolyta in 4.1.115, "such sweet thunder." These are not typical--discord does not make music and what thunder savors of sweetness?--and neither is this enchanted wood just outside of Athens. I think that's really cool. There are some other components to this play that I noticed, but I think this has probably gone on long enough. If you haven't watched a Shakespeare play in a long time (or ever), my over-familiarity with it leading me to like it less shouldn't dissuade you from making the choice to give it a try. If you don't like it, just take Robin's advice during the Epilogue: If we shadows have offended, The Sundays of 2020
There are so many things rattling around my head right now, few of them positive or happy. This is not unusual, as Sundays have historically tended to be the days that my depression is keenest. That being confessed, the past nine months have seen that historical trend skewed. It isn't much of a surprise to me to realize that the pressures of being in an extroverted (we prefer the term missionary-minded) church as an introvert were wearing me down. In Church BC, I would be fine in the first hour--Sacrament meeting, after all, requires very little in terms of personal interactions--then find solace in drawing notes about the Sunday School lesson. I sat next to my wife, whose presence calms my anxieties and explicates my eccentricities to others, so though Sunday School required more interaction, it was mediated by Gayle. Once the third hour showed up and I was off to the gender-segregated Elders' Quorum, thinks became even more uncomfortable. It's hard for me to really parse how I felt in many (by no means all) of the EQ lessons. I do know that part of what made me uncomfortable--and still does in other circumstances with other people--were the invisible lines of power that adults have to navigate. Some don't care about them, don't worry about them, or intuitively weave through them, but I'm not someone like that. In my classroom, there are very clear lines of autonomy, authority, and expectation. If something bothers me in my classroom, I can address it. In more grown-up situations like Church meetings and family gatherings, those clear lines efface. I don't know if it's appropriate to call out someone for a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, and when I do, I worry that I will have ruined a relationship or caused offense. (Example: I'm pretty quiet when my brothers-in-law gas about politics, but it was only when one of them declared the Second Amendment gave him the right to shoot someone on his property that I had to speak up. He retreated when I said that, but I know that it raised questions in his mind about what I think with regards to the Bill of Rights.) The stress of being in that kind of situation is really draining. It should come as no surprise that, when the Primary presidency stopped by the Elders' Quorum to find last-minute substitutes, I would almost always volunteer. I could be a warm body and quietly urge six-year-olds to sing along with Primary songs. Those are power dynamics I can understand. Church attendance--a major portion of a Mormon's Sunday--was one of the reasons that the first day of each week was one in which my depression was larger. Add to that the feelings of inadequacy that I gleaned (rightly or not) from my own lack of piety, faith, and commitment as opposed to what was on display at the local chapel, and you've a ripe recipe for feelings of self-loathing and -insufficiency. The gospel of Jesus Christ is very positive and affirming, very confident in the individual to become better, through the merits of Christ. The Church is very good at (purposefully or not) generating a type of pious competition. And while everyone's experience varies (and I should say that my current ward doesn't have this problem quite as much as previous places I've attended), what I've outlined here pretty well reflects how I feel about the end result of three hours of worship. In the past eighteen months or so--maybe longer? It's hard to tell with COVID fog in the mix--the Church shifted to a two hour schedule, with more focus on learning the gospel at home. I appreciated the change--for what should be obvious reason--though not all of the problems I had with Sundays disappeared. Once the pandemic struck and in-person worship cancelled, I felt significantly better about Sundays than I had in a long time. This doesn't strike me as some sort of cosmic indication about how I should treat Church services--if it's ever safe to worship in person again, I'll be attending once more--as it also tracks with the other areas of my life where additional stresses show up, and how those anxieties receded once the expectation of non-participation became the norm. In other words, not having to be around other people meant that I wasn't as stressed as I had been during the Before Times™. By worshipping at home exclusively, there have been some positive moments. My wife and I are in control of the situation and conversation, and my boys are (I hope) gaining a more intimate understanding of the doctrines we abide by. The down side to this, of course, is that trying to keep a seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old interested in the topic without it becoming too diluted for the older one or too complicated for the younger one has been a hit-and-miss proposition. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don't. The yearning here is hard to define: I don't really want to go back to the weekly slog of feeling inadequate and acting as though I'm excited to be at church. Yet I know that it's important to create friendships and connections with my neighbors (I know hardly anyone in the neighborhood), something that has been neglected throughout 2020. Maybe this upcoming year will see some sort of breakthrough in my own spiritual journey. Maybe. The Cancer of 2020 This week marks another surgery for Gayle. She needs to get her chemotherapy port "installed", which will require another out-patient surgery, another dose of general anesthesia, another afternoon in a waiting room where I watch the sunlight slide across the carpet to an early sunset. I'm yearning here for a quick recovery and that the process not take as long as last time. I'm sure it won't. The fact that we're at this particular part in our journey against Gayle's breast cancer is hard for me to come to grips with. There are so many things that have made me despise this year, but Gayle's cancer is by far the largest. We've done a fair job of using the holidays as distractions, keeping the need to focus on our annual celebrations as excuse to avoid thinking about the necessary steps. We did that with Thanksgiving; we did it again with Christmas. Once the holidays were over, however, reality came knocking like a debt collector on our door and now we have no choice but to face what's in front of us. Here's what is currently most on my mind about the cancer issue: Like so many people, I've been holding on to the hope the arrival of the vaccine would provide. The light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel is glimmering and could even possibly be sunlight. The conclusion of this pandemic's nightmare feels tantalizingly close. Real life and normality are returning…but not for us. After going through this hellacious year with the entire world suffering with us (to an extent) gave, if nothing else, a sense of solidarity and mutually shared and -endured hardships. But not for us. The hardest trial we have to face right now is stretching before us all the way into the early days of summer. I won't be able to attend my school's graduation without knowing that there's another chemo appointment either just passed or on the horizon. I'm looking down the barrel of another half year of difficulty and stress. It's possible that many people's goodwill toward us was heightened by the pandemic (and I'm grateful for that; the amount of help that people have extended to our family will always be a highlight of a dark year), when we were all having a hard time. But when the vaccine has finally added up to pulling the numbers down, we will still be in survival mode. We will still be taking each day as its own challenge, focused on trying to accomplish the most we can with what we have. We will remain in the crucible while so many others will be able to move into the next stage of rebuilding. It's hard to not feel a bit of acrimony over that. And while I acknowledge the great blessing and privilege I have that this is our grand trial (rather than, say, the manifold miseries that this world could otherwise offer), that doesn't diminish the fact that this is one of the hardest things I will ever have to do…and I'm not even the one who is going through with it. Up until 2020, the worst year of my life was 2007--my oldest's two emergency heart surgeries were some of the hardest things I've ever been through--and this year is the year that keeps on giving. I yearn for this nightmare to be over, to leave us alone, to move on…I yearn to move on myself, but the tendrils of 2020 are perfidious and plentiful, stretching into the future to corrupt us in ways both visible (the divisions of the country will not be miraculously healed because of a change in political parties) and invisible. I'm done with the problems of 2020; the problems, however, aren't done with me. The Sacrifice of 2020 Though it may seem contradictory to what I was saying in the Cancer of 2020, there has been something that has weighing on me for the past five-or-so months. I write this hesitantly, knowing that some who read this may feel called out and/or attacked by what I have to say. I'm speaking in broad terms and generalities, for the most part, though there are no broad terms that don't encompass some individuals. There isn't a way to sugar coat my feelings here, which are raw and angry. If you're not interested in seeing that, feel free to skip ahead to the next topic. Or stop reading, I guess, that's okay, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, back when we were unsure about what to do and what, exactly, would be required of us, there was a sense of communal response, mutual responsibility, and joint reaction to the immense trial in front of us. We were throwing down tracks as the train barreled behind us, responding to contradictory impulses as best we could. Education, economy, and governmental authority all started straining in ways that we didn't know how to handle. School was dismissed and moved online, with poor results happening for the majority of students. Business had to close down for a bit, and when they reopened, lukewarm support from states forced other businesses to stand up for public health, leading to the sorts of viral videos of entitled white folks screaming at Costco employees because of the business' requirement for a mask to enter the premises. The governor's vacillation and unclear explanations about what public health needs were added to the confusion. This is a story we all know. As the summer waned and the pending school year loomed, it became clear to me that the people of my state were never actually interested in the lives of others. The way we drive in Utah is, apparently, the way we view the world: Incidental to us and there for our exclusive use. We, and only we, matter. Everyone else can, well, die a preventable death. The data are pretty clear: Every time there was a call for the community to sacrifice for the betterment of the entire state, it was ignored. Mask mandates in schools were a hot button issue for a while, if you recall, because some people viewed the possibility of a teacher getting sick because of COVID-19 exposure a price they were willing to pay. The speed with which teachers went from being praised during the spring and derided (and, let's be brutally honest here, threatened with death) during the fall truly was breathtaking. We teachers were asked to put it all on the line while every Chad and Karen out there got to lather up their indignation at the idea of wearing a mask to the store. And skipping a holiday? Upset traditions? Oh, well, that was not a sacrifice they were willing to make. This hits me very deeply. I got sick with COVID-19, brought it home, infected three other members of my family, and could have been responsible for the death of my oldest son, because Utah was willing to do piss-all to get the virus under control. Utah has been doing horribly with the COVID response, with cases constantly escalating, ICU beds beyond safe occupancy, and an ever-increasing death count that--considering the sparsity of our population--is mind-numbing. Utah failed me entirely. I was told that if I did the right things--washed hands, cleaned down surfaces, kept my distance, wore a mask--I would be "safe" at my school. I wasn't. I was lied to. Like many (I don't even know if I can say most), I sacrificed a huge amount this summer. Every time I stepped out of my house, I knew I was putting myself and my family at risk. So I minimized those. We skipped every family gathering--from my sister's wedding to my nephew's baptism to each birthday and holiday. Oh, sure, we visited in the backyard with masks on from a safe distance on Mother's Day, but we didn't have a Mother's Day dinner together. We didn't go when I could see my siblings or my kids their cousins. We went, just us, for a quick visit in the backyard. And every time I did something like that, I felt guilty for not being more careful, for not taking "one for the team" and letting go of what I wanted so that the state could be healthy again. But it was a waste. I contracted COVID from a student--one who had been sick the week before but his parents wanted him at school so that they could go to work--and it very nearly led to a coffin and a tombstone. For over three hundred thousand Americans, it actually did lead to the cemetery. Yet the sacrifices of the rest of our country is too much? Those deaths are a price they have to pay in order to disrupt others' lives the least amount possible? Each time I see a video of people being together, or hear about other people's kids going off to play with their friends, I'm reminded that my children have not been in their friends' houses since March. More than an entire year of my kids' childhoods has been stolen from them by this virus. At the outset, I thought that we were "all in this together!" but it's clear by the roving bands of maskless teenagers that I see slouching through the neighborhood, the "sovereign nation" types strutting about the stores without keeping their distance while their mask is below their chins, the lies of parents who Tylenol their kid before sending them off to school with symptoms, and a litany of other stark examples that we are not in this together. We are in this alone. One thing my self-sacrifice taught me quite clearly: It doesn't matter what I do if others don't sacrifice with me. If it were a simple matter of the Dowdle family taking the rules of the pandemic seriously, we wouldn't have COVID in the state. But I have to rely on everyone else to do something for (and I know this is shocking and monstrous to dare dream) someone else. That, it has been made quite transparent to me, is asking too much of the community I live in. My responsibility for keeping my family safe was one that I took very seriously. I'm not saying that I was perfect at the lockdown. I'm human, too, and there were times I caved. Yet each infraction of the rules--we visited Sanpete county during the summer because there were very few cases there, despite knowing that traveling was a risk--made me feel guilty. Nevertheless, I do the most I can as often as I can to try to help put an end to this pandemic. So when I see videos on social media of family gatherings for the holidays, where mixed families have come together to do their annual traditions, with all the fixings, trimmings, and habits unchanged, it hurts me. When I see news clips of college-aged kids going to parties, dancing and singing without masks or social distancing, it hurts me. When I catch a glimpse of a selfie taken during 2020 with two friends who "haven't seen each other in ages!" smiling with their heads close together, it hurts me. Time and again I look out to see the solidarity of action. Instead I see the indifference to human suffering that has made America the world leader in both COVID cases and deaths. We have more than doubled the number of dead that World War I claimed, and it seems as though we're well on our way to have more dead to COVID than we lost in fighting on two fronts during World War II. As other countries demonstrated, it didn't have to be this way. We were told how we could save lives; we just felt that our lives were more important. And you know what hurts the most? Being a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that, in part, I am supposed to "mourn with those who mourn". Yet so often it's members of the Church that I see who are doing the very things that are causing others to mourn. (The kid who brought COVID to my class? You guessed it: His family that sent him to school sick is LDS.) Yeah. That's the one that really hurts. COVID isn't going away. The coronavirus is potent, potentially mutating, and more of a threat now than it has been before. The vaccine still has question marks about whether or not inoculated people are still capable of transmitting the disease, to say nothing about its safety for non-adult people. My son wants the vaccine, but we don't know when we'll be able to say it's safe for half-hearted folks. The anti-vax and anti-mask movements have much more potency than logic would dictate is possible, and the fact is, we need more people to become vaccinated than have indicated that they would. The need for other people to sacrifice for each other is just as high as ever. But when has that ever meant people will do the right thing? So I yearn for my sacrifices to not feel invalidated by the selfishness of others. I yearn for some sort of solidarity and recognition of the crises we're facing. I yearn for a stopping of the hurt. The End of 2020 The year closes in four days (at the time of this writing). I have written about 480,000 words thus far. I had the chance to teach a Harry Potter class that was magical, generating worthwhile memories for the students involved. I have taught in all sorts of new ways that I had never anticipated, including livestreaming a lesson from my car while stuck in line for my COVID test. I have been rocked by personal tragedies, familial struggles, and societal unrest. I have been reprimanded for speaking up for Black lives and saying that they matter. I have missed more days of work than I have cumulatively missed throughout my entire career. Almost all of my goals ended as failures or were forgotten outright. There is precious little that I will cherish or treasure from this year. While there were moments of gasped-in air, the majority of this year I spent drowning. I yearn for this year to end. Today I see the last day of summer 2020. It is also the last time that I will wake up without having to go into a classroom filled with students since our school dismissed on 13 March 2020. It was like there was a fire in the far corner of our cafeteria when we evacuated. Now, most of the building is in flames and we've been equipped with a spritzer bottle to combat the inferno as we're called to return to our classrooms.
I am not happy about the returning school year, though I think such a bald statement misses what's happening here. I'm not happy because my children aren't getting the annual tradition of back to school shopping, the thrill of new backpacks and lunchboxes, the excitement of seeing their friends, the challenge of a new grade. I'm not happy because instead, my children will be stuck at their grandma's house, wearing masks and tooling around on Chromebooks for the majority of the day. I'm not happy because the hollow words of praise from society about what teachers were able to do in the spring quickly collapsed into criticisms for failures, many of which were far beyond a teacher's power to control. I'm not happy that there are people who are planning on using their children as a political statement and thereby endangering other people's lives when they send their kids to school without the mandated masks. I am not happy because I will not be a teacher this year. Oh, I still have a job. I'm still in the classroom. I'm still covering the same moments in history, the same literature of the time. I'm still doing a job, yes, but I'm not a teacher. For me, a teacher is someone who inspires, instructs, and involves students in the process of learning. It's someone who seeks out ways of connecting--emotionally and intellectually--to the students and curricula. It's a person who wishes to use the content to create better people. I'm none of that this year. In order to do that, there are a handful of things that I've come to expect, almost all of which are givens during normal times. I would expect to have a full classroom, a (sometimes beyond) critical mass of minds that come together daily to discuss the great things that I have in store. Instead, I'm getting half a class every other day. This is an excellent accommodation, given the circumstances, and I'm glad that there's at least that much attempt at allowing for social distancing. I would expect students to chat, have fun with friends, and share their thoughts in class-wide discussions as well as smaller groups and individual conversations. Instead, I have them physically separated (about four feet between desks on either side, but they're in rows front to back with only a few inches between seat and desk), will have to listen to their muffled voices, not see them smile (or frown), and keep them in the same spot throughout the year. I am glad that I have as much space as I do, since not everyone can get their classes down to a maximum of 14 kids (which is twice as many as the room would fit if following the guidelines fully). I would expect to see former students passing me in the hallway, eager to share a fun experience that happened to them over the summer, or maybe recollect an inside joke from our time together. Instead, I plan on arriving before the bell to rotate rings and keeping myself isolated in my classroom as much as I possibly can. I'm grateful that my admin allows for this sort of thing, as I know that other teachers aren't so lucky. Normally, I look forward to the recharge that comes during lunchtime, when I can sit and chat with other adults and build up those communal bonds that strengthen the school's spirit. Instead, I have a microwave in my classroom so that I don't have to go to the faculty room where maskless friends will be eating their lunches. I will sit behind my plexiglass partitioned desk and pretend that I'm not imprisoned by an invisible enemy. I'm glad, at least, that I have that small space in which to try to feel safe. A teacher should be a coach as well, and I am always excited to coach three drama students in Shakespearean monologues for our fall competition. Instead, I have to figure out how to walk someone through the intricacies of the Bard via online meetings and remote conversations. I recognize that many events are completely canceled, so even though the competition is just a video submission this year, we're lucky to even have that. I would have expected that our society would take seriously a clear and present threat to our children and their families, that safety would be paramount. But then I remember Sandy Hook and I realized that money will always be more important than human life, and there's no positive spin I can put on this. In a country where our solution to gun violence and global warning--one an immediate threat and one a larger, more abstract one--is to ignore or deny the problem, can I really be surprised that we exhausted ourselves with conspiracies and half-measures? To say that I feel abandoned and betrayed is to put it so mildly that it may as well not be said. Safety aside (as if that should be a thing), I have to keep reminding myself that these thefts of experience are only temporary, that there will come a time when I can return to the classroom with excitement and enthusiasm, that our competitions and assemblies may return, that the futures we hope to build for the students aren't mired by viral uncertainty and political errors. This reminder, however, always spins around when I push away from what I am losing and to what they will miss. I'm not so egotistical as to think that a student who doesn't attend my class will be permanently hamstrung in their future and that they missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from me. However, it isn't just my class that they're missing out on. It's the entirety of a learning experience that is being lost. I think of my own kids, and how my now-second grader struggled with school at first, but soon learned to really love his class and his school. His enthusiasm keeps twisting about, transforming from excitement into sadness that he can't return to where he wishes to be. Is there ever a year where it's "just fine" that they miss out on everything that year has planned? My now-fifth grader will not get to go on the exciting overnight campout that his grade always gets a chance to attend…I haven't reminded him about that, because why add to his sadness? My now-eighth grader was just starting to get the hang of the middle school experience when we dismissed; now he won't have middle school at all. He will be all online, learning via computer, and missing out on the interactions and friendships that he so desperately needs. As I roll over these realities in my mind, I get more and more frustrated. I don't blame the schools for wanting to be open--I want us to be open. Instead, I keep thinking about all of the missteps, the frittered away months where things could have gone differently but didn't, the energy wasted on pointless arguments and denials that have led to personal tragedies and a nation-wide catastrophe. I try not to look at other countries that sacrificed as needed to get their COVID response under control, mostly because it makes me feel jealous. That could've been us, but you playin'… In all honesty, I'm not surprised that we are in this situation. We are committed to the course we're on, apparently, and though there were offramps galore on this road we've taken, I don't see a lot of people in positions of power moving toward rectifying the situation as it stands. Is it possible to have prevented all of the deaths in the United States? No. Of course not. A novel viral outbreak is going to claim victims. Did we need to lose over 160,000--and be on track to lose maybe as many as 300,000 before year's end?--to say nothing of the untold and unknowable costs of COVID-related infections further down the line? No. Not even remotely. The frustration of people and the desire to seek out the normal we've lost is understandable. I recognize why parents want their kids to go to school--after all, many parents had the option to sign up for online-only schooling; most did not choose it--because of the many different realities that parents have gone through in their own individual journeys. For them, they don't see the risk as greater than the consequence; they likely also never saw their child embraced by cables and wires because that was the kind of hug that would keep them alive. I have. It's not worth saying goodbye to a loved one via Skype so that the soccer team can have a game. So while I understand where parents are coming from, in the end I have to say that what's being asked of me is not "my job"; it's asking for me to risk my life--or worse, my children's lives. I see no beauty in that cause, no desire to flout what's real in favor of hoping for something better. A new school year is supposed to be an opportunity to recommit toward personal growth and learning, to one's own education. All I can see is the potential for a grave, a breach in the ground where what I love has gone. That's not much of a vision for a new school year. And yet that is all I can see. |
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July 2022
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