To the Teachers

We have survived the last 2 years of pandemic teaching.  I know that this time has been tough, and this is not what we signed up for.  We were in-person teaching on a Friday and had to pivot to online teaching by Monday.  We had perfected our craft of in-person teaching.  Most of us (especially middle-aged teachers) had little to no experience with platforms like Zoom or Google Meet.  We had to take a crash course on video conferencing by watching YouTube tutorials to learn how to project our screens, create break-out rooms and set up waiting rooms.  We had never even heard this lingo before that March 13th, 2020 weekend.  We saw this COVID lockdown as a temporary pause from in-person learning.  We did not know that we would teach this way for 18 months.  Our school administrators did the best they could supporting us in navigating this remote space. However, how could they teach us how to do it if they had never done it before?  So, we were off on our own deserted islands teaching from home, not able to walk down the hall to lean on a colleague for guidance.  We then had the real challenge of connecting with students.  We are social beings.  Many of us went into this field because we love connecting with kids.  Here we were teaching to 28 black screens.  We were receiving little feedback from the students with their cameras off, and few students felt the comfort to talk in remote school.  But, as educators, we did it.  I am not sure how, but we did.  We taught ourselves online programs like Flipgrid so we could actually see their faces and hear their voices.  In those 18 months, we pivoted between in-person learning, remote learning, hybrid learning and then back to in-person learning.  The rules of our game changed in a split second with the governor instituting the Stay at Home Order.  The playbook we had used for designing lessons, assessing work, connecting with students, and accommodating students with IEPs no longer worked.  And, then, we had to adjust again and return back to in-person school for everyone.   We figured out how to "read" the room without seeing the facial expressions of our students.  We learned to limit our talking in order to take breathing breaks and to drink lots of water to avoid headaches from masking up all day.  We figured out how to do collaborative student work while following the social distancing guidelines.  Here we are in late February 2022, and we are asked to pivot once more. Some public schools, at least for the time being, are mask optional in Illinois.  We now need to think about how to make sure all students feel safe in the classroom, those masked and unmasked.  We need to be mindful of not allowing this highly politicized mask optional guideline to divide our class communities.  I have no doubt that we will successfully adapt once again.  Our professional worlds have been flipped upside down, and we are still standing.  We have done a "good enough" job navigating this new terrain.  Hats off to you my fellow educators!  I am proud to be in the trenches with you.

- Lel Gray Levin