An Open Letter to COVID-19 From an Overly Honest Teacher
Dear COVID, I’m Angry.
I’m certainly not the only one, as I know you are the recipient of hate mail from the masses. Countless emails, texts, and Tweets, all espousing complete and utter disdain for you and all that you stand for.
As a teacher and school principal, you have completely changed the landscape of education as I know it. You have forced myself and my fellow teachers to do what we have challenged our students to strive against—working from a distance, from behind the filter of a screen. Communicating with one another outside of the physical space we find so essential to emotional, tactile, interconnected development.
You have robbed us of the chance to watch friendships bloom, witness moments of spontaneous kindness unfold, delight in the jokes, antics, and banter between ourselves and our students, each moment so essential to our craft. We teach our children that humans are not meant to live in isolation, but instead, to thrive in community with one another. COVID—you are really getting in the way of that.
Sure, you’ve challenged us to get creative—to roll up our sleeves and dig deep to find ways to keep our students engaged. We’ve had to rely on apps to collect assignments, YouTube videos to instruct students about Art projects, Zoom workouts to prevent them from developing habits of the sedentary. Sure, an iPad and a stylus can help a child form letters, and digitally, we can witness the results of that, but it’s not the same as us inhabiting the same classroom, the same air, the same shared elation when that letter formation evolves into the crafting of a sentence, a paragraph, an essay. Emailed certificates are standing in for the ceremonial celebration and validation that comes from a job well done, and virtual stickers and “thumbs up” on a conference call just don’t have the same oomph.
I speak for myself when I say—I wasn’t looking for another challenge, COVID. Working to shape the next generation into humans of kindness, compassion, empathy, and determination was a big enough challenge on its own.
But now, you’re asking me to do that from afar, all while trying to find ways to get my kids to show up to daily Zoom meetings, hoping that they are being honest and forthright when they tell me that, “Of course I am taking notes!” and “Yep! I am following along with the book we are reading together.” You and I both know, COVID, that you’ve lifted the veil of accountability that was and remains so essential in my classroom. I can only do so much from behind a screen in terms of making sure that the eyes I see glued to the camera as we are speaking are not really gazing just beyond to their cell phone while Instagram stories run continuously in the background and capture their attention far more than my Vocabulary lesson from a distance ever could.
I’m mad at you, COVID, because you have placed an incredible burden on my students’ parents.
The hardworking moms, dads, and guardians who now have multiple jobs to balance. While I have always relied upon teamwork with my families, now more than ever, we are calling upon them to step-in in our absence. To not only continue doing that which commands their attention from 9-5 each day, but now, to also play teacher, counselor, referee, coach, mentor, mediator, nurse, and playmate. You’ve robbed many of my parents and guardians of their incomes, their jobs ripped out from under them with no way to prepare. And, what you’ve stripped away in terms of professional fulfillment, you’ve instead replaced with the worry, and fear, and anguish, and heartache that comes with wondering how they are going to keep their families afloat until you go away.
Go away, COVID. Can’t you take a hint? You’re not welcome here, or anywhere, and it’s time for you to leave. Don’t worry, you will long be remembered, though you’ll likely find yourself mounted on the wall of infamy with the likes of those who came before you and sought to destroy the human spirit. The human connection. The collective human voice that bands together and rises out of the ashes of your failed attempt to destroy us.
So, COVID, I’m writing to tell you that we will not be deterred. Sure, it will remain difficult and unideal to educate from afar. It will not cease to break my heart each time I have to send an email to a student instead of chatting with them in the school hallway, or stare blankly at a virtual facade of them in lieu of their actual face on a conference call. It will continue to boil my blood at each opportunity lost, news of each family that struggles, each report of another who has succumbed to your wrath.
But, we will keep teaching. We will keep creating. We will keep striving to expand the hearts and minds of our students everywhere. We will keep going because, as teachers, that’s what we do. We don’t give up when it’s hard; we don’t throw in the towel when a hurdle is tossed in our lane.
We rise, we jump, we pivot, we persist, and we teach our students to persist, too. And, no amount of social distancing is ever going to change that.
Cold regards,
Meredith
