The masked humans stare back at me at the start of each class. I smile at them through my mask, and I hope they are smiling too, but you never know. I do know that more desks are empty today than yesterday, and those empty chairs stare at me too as I try to pretend that everything is normal. The elephant in the room keeps growing bigger day-by-day as my attendance becomes more sporadic.
The emails come flowing in: “I’m sick and waiting on test results.” “I’m quarantined and won’t be at school for a week.” “Can you send me work?” “I tested positive Miss P; let me know what I can do to not fall behind.” My prep comes, and I sit down to churn out responses to stressed students. The rest of my prep is spent digitizing whatever we did that day for those kids who are well enough to get work done. This is mostly futile because only a handful of students come back with anything completed. Can anyone really blame them?
All of this is done under my wide-open window, hoping that the freezing cold air is enough to keep me too from getting sick. Because my colleagues are sick, quarantined at home and trying desperately to keep their families from catching what they brought back from school. They are prepping lessons that they don’t get to teach and assessments they grade alone in their guest rooms. Still, we pretend that things are normal.
The emails keep flowing: “We need subs for the following teachers today…” The little prep time we have gets chipped away to make sure students are supervised. It is a balancing act keeping schools running. For every class you cover, you expose yourself to another group of students, more germs, more chances of getting sick, more anxiety. The emails never stop though and tomorrow brings more missing teachers.
Then there are the reminders; a daily barrage of communication starts at 3:15. Sometimes I haven’t even left the building when the text, phone call, and email all come through at the same time reminding me that I was definitely exposed to COVID today. Last semester, they closed the buildings for deep cleaning after we had an outbreak of a few students with COVID. Last week, our numbers were in the 100s at my school. This is not normal, and yet we carry on like it’s supposed to be.
The reality of the past three weeks has left me in tears some days, but mostly just numb. The conversations with colleagues center not around if we’ll get COVID, but when; it’s a future everyone is coming to accept and it is exhausting. It’s a train barreling toward you while you are tied to the tracks. There are no solutions, there is no escape, and no one is coming to save you.
I wish I had a happier ending for this blog today, but I don’t, so I’ll end with hope. I hope I have fewer empty seats on Monday. I hope I have more smiling, masked faces. I hope I stay healthy this week. I hope things start to get better, for all of us.
Photo by Paula Schmidt from Pexels
Rachel Perugini
I am originally from Pennsylvania where I earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Shippensburg University. In 2012, I moved to Arizona to teach on the Navajo Reservation; I liked the state so much I decided to stay. I taught language arts, reading, and journalism for three years at Many Farms High School. During that time, I earned a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction for Reading. In 2015, I moved to Flagstaff where I currently teach 10th and 11th grade English. I have been an avid reader all my life, so I love that my job gives me that chance to read amazing books with my students all day long.
Comments 4
In my school the worst seems to be over. In the first 10 days or so we had a lot of absences – but never more than a third of a class. And we’re suffering too much for subs. On Friday, I had a couple of classes with full attendance.
That said, some classes that had not absences at the beginning now have more, and we are getting more requests to cover classes.
It took all of January, but our numbers have dropped (finally). We still have the highest numbers in our district, and it still hurts when you’ve got kids out for 2 weeks at a time…but I think I’m finally seeing the light at the end of this particular tunnel.
I don’t think that the public truly understands what is happening in schools right now. Reading your blog post makes me so sad because it shows that all schools are in the same boat right now, and that boat is going through an insane 2-year storm with no end in sight. Covid made the rounds at my school again recently, and there was a week when 10 teachers were out each day. Oh, and no subs, too. I hope things begin looking up soon.
I can relate to how you are feeling. I think so many teachers right now are feeling those same things. I have 24 kids in my class and today I had 10 absent. Some days I wonder if I should bother teaching new content when a majority of my class is absent. They are all returning on different days and it is getting more difficult to remember who missed what content. I know that so many people want to return to normal, but it seems that this may be the new normal, as sad as that may be. Education will never be the same. It will take years for us to recover from this pandemic.