The beginning of a new school year is always a stressful time. Prep work, meeting new groups of students, and curricular changes always lead to some level of anxiety. This year, however, the anxiety I am feeling about returning to school is heightened for obvious reasons – in a little over a week I will be teaching biology to high school students, in person, in the middle of a pandemic.
The major source of my anxiety is not so much about getting sick, though I would be lying if I didn’t say that is a concern tucked somewhere deeper in my mind. I’m relatively young (45), reasonably fit and healthy with no known underlying conditions (one of my goals over the past several months has been to COVID-proof my body as much as possible by resuming regular running and starting cycling), and my wife and kids are fit and healthy as well. In other words, the odds are in our favor should the virus enter our house (though there is always worry based on stories about young, fit people getting sick…). My anxiety, rather, stems more from the unknown. I don’t know what to expect, I don’t know how to prepare, and I don’t know what would happen should I or one of my students get sick.
I work at a semi-private high school that functions as the public high school for several small towns in south-central New Hampshire. We’re a bit unique in that we are run by a board of directors rather than an elected school board, and therefore decisions about many aspects of our school are made independent of local school districts (though recognizing that we are linked directly to the local public elementary and middle schools that send their graduates to our high school). Currently, the plan at my school is to open in person a week from Friday with Freshmen only, and then all students return the following week in two alphabetically divided groups that meet on alternating days. The following week everyone will be back together.
To some, this plan might sound crazy, and if I were in Texas or Florida right now I would agree. But if there is a location where conditions relating to viral spread might allow a plan like this to work, we likely are one of them. The towns that send their kids to our school have consistently had fewer than 5 positive cases at a time throughout the summer. I live in Concord, the capital city of New Hampshire, and even here case counts remain quite low. It is for this reason that I am willing to cautiously move forward with in-person teaching, but also why the unknown scares me so much. Can we respond rapidly if case counts rise? How long will we wait? Will testing delays even allow us to catch cases quickly if a child with symptoms shows up at school? Who gets quarantined? For how long? If I have to quarantine, how does that affect my wife and kids (my wife works at a different high school in our area)?
Another reason I am willing to proceed with in-person teaching is that remote teaching is incredibly difficult, and because it would be even harder to do if I did not have a face-to-face relationship with my students before going remote (as I did last March when we shut down). I firmly believe that remote teaching can be done well, and I’m confident that I can provide as good an education as possible while remote. For example, my AP Biology kids did fantastic on the exam last Spring, even given that we were remote for three months and the exam format changed considerably from what we had been preparing for prior to closure. That being said, I teach college-prep, honors, and AP kids so they are mostly highly motivated and have a strong drive to do well (not to mention that almost all of them are destined for college, so grades are very important to them). If I can get several weeks of face-to-face time with my students before we switch to remote (and I’m viewing this more as a when than an if at this point), the remote learning experience will be much better for all of us.
Unlike some districts, I feel like my school administration is handling things as well as can be done given the situation. Just as teachers complain about administrators making decisions when they are not the ones in the classroom, it’s hard for me to question some of their decisions when I don’t fully understand the complexity of what the slightest change means to the functioning of our school and the families we serve (things as simple as how changing school hours can affect bus routes for example). Our administration has been willing to listen to concerns from teachers and has adapted the initial opening plan based on our feedback. There are things I still might have issues with, but some of these are things that would need greater governmental support from above to implement (e.g., greater job protections for teachers over 65 or with underlying conditions who are potentially risking their lives by returning to school). Though I have strong feelings about it, talking about the government response is not something I want to do right now. School is opening in a little over a week, and I have little choice but to do the best I can to keep my students healthy and safe, and to teach them as well as I can given the safety measures we plan to take (e.g., distancing, required masks, one-way hallways, outside teaching as available/possible, etc.).
I’ll finish by saying that I feel for teachers everywhere. I feel for staff, custodians, lunch room workers, bus drivers, subs, paraprofessionals. We are all walking into the unknown together, though depending on geographic location that unknown is likely much scarier for some than for others. It’s hard to not feel like we are being pushed off a cliff, that we are currently being used as pawns in a political game or for the sake of the economy. Some of us can and should resign, retire, or take a year off (if that is a financially viable option). But for those who have just returned, are about to return, or who will be returning next month, hang in there and stick together. Don’t try to be perfect, just be good enough. And most importantly, though it can sometimes be incredibly difficult for those of us in a largely selfless profession where we give our all to the care and teaching of others, take care of yourself.