Once the lockdown ended, we received an email from our union president who commented how well - “too well” - our students handled the scary situation. Students have become far more adaptable, flexible and resilient than I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of teaching. To say that students haven’t learned much over the last three years, as many have argued, is an insult to what they have been through. “It’s like throwing a wet blanket over the entire classroom,” a colleague said to me, frustrated about how tiresome it is for students and teachers to be in a mask. We’ve taken bets on how long it will last before we need a new one. We have had discussions about the literature we’re reading in masks, played games in masks, held one-on-one conferences in masks, cried in masks, joked in our masks that the table in my classroom that used to hold food on Fridays is now the permanent home for the industrial-size jug of hand sanitizer. We have been wearing masks in school all day, every day, since we returned last April. Immediately, we moved to remote learning. Students, teachers, staff and administrators have shown relentless strength. I realize now that day marked the culmination of how much teaching has changed, how much more on guard and worried we are every day we enter our schools while trying to move our students through our curricula and be there for them in so many ways. School shootings were on the rise then, yet that already feels like a long time ago.
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