I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but at some point I transitioned from being a new teacher to an experienced teacher. Maybe it was when I passed the infamous 5 year mark and proved to myself that I was, indeed, cut out for this. Or maybe it was when I worked with my first student teacher and realized that I was good enough to be supporting the next generation of educators. Whenever it was, I feel confident in saying that I have never needed a winter break quite like I do at this moment. I am privileged to work for a district that recognized the dire situation that was COVID-19, closed quickly in April, and began the 2020-21 school year in a 100% virtual setting. It meant that hundreds of teachers did not have to choose between their life and their livelihood, their families and their students. I did not have to figure out how to do music without singing, without dancing, without sharing instruments. Of course, it meant that I would have to figure out how to teach students through a screen, a daunting task to be sure. Thankfully there were plenty of cheerleaders on social media posting uplifting, encouraging memes and statements, like this: Yes! the educators of Facebook collectively thought. We can do this! Whether we're online or in a classroom, a teacher's gonna do what a teacher's gonna do!
Until we realized that the teaching wasn't going to be the problem. If it were just about conveying information, it would have been fine. Were my profession simply about presenting content then yes, teaching virtually would be little more than a matter of training myself to look into the camera and make sure I have a decent microphone. But even Bob Ross or Mister Rogers would have struggled to do the job of today's elementary school teachers successfully considering the immense load we carry on our shoulders every day. In a normal year, my work in the classroom consists of:
You might have noticed that only two of the points addressed instruction; the rest are all the components that go into successful instruction and child development. And of course there are the various administrative duties that occur outside of teaching itself - report cards, meetings, extra jobs and tasks around the school, and the occasional parent phone call when something happens in my classroom that warrants a parent's involvement. Now that we're teaching all our classes online, I've added these to the list:
Ask just about any teacher right now, particularly those doing some form of online instruction, and they will tell you this is the hardest year any of us have ever endured. This is harder than my first year when my first class of the first day was a group of 30 four-year-olds who didn't speak English and missed their mommies. It's harder than the year I learned that not all principals respect their music teachers as experts in their field and that I had to take the word "no" out of my vocabulary even when my principal asked ridiculous things of me and the students. It's harder than the year I was injured by a student, which was also the year another student grabbed my ukulele out of my hands and threw it on the ground, and another student threw a binder at my head. In all those other years, the good moments far outweighed the challenges. The experiences of singing and dancing with children, watching them discover what it felt like to make really good music together, helping them explore the world around them, high-fiving them for their successes, supporting them through their failures - these made my job meaningful and worth it at every turn. Every one of those feel-good moment filled me up and insulated me from the more depleting experiences. Even on an exhausting, overwhelming, no-good-bad-awful day, I could rest assured that so long as I dove head first into my teaching the next day, I would be replenished. Oh, how I miss those days. Throughout the past four months I've felt empty more than full. Even the most successful classes with the highest student engagement and the best demonstrations of learning leave me wanting. Perhaps I never truly appreciated how much the students gave me in my classroom, or the way I depended on them to keep me going. I suppose I always assumed that being the teacher meant giving it everything I had, never realizing that my relationship with my students was far more symbiotic. Online, that relationship is dampened, distanced. Every interaction feels taxing and unnatural, a perpetual swim again the current without the luxury of ever going with the flow. Did Mr. Rogers create his sets by hand because the budget didn't allow for something made by anyone more qualified to make them? Did Steve Irwin spend hours trying to get in touch with parents about the students who risked getting a 0 on their report card because they never showed up or did any of their work? Did LeVar Burton write his own scripts and find his own books and fix his own microphone when it suddenly stopped working in the middle of a live show? Did Bob Ross wonder if the reasons his viewers' canvases were blank was because he simply wasn't a good enough teacher? And did any of them do seven programs a day, every day? There is no doubt that those four were great teachers (and LeVar Burton still is). I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not so bad either, but I cannot ignore the very real toll this year is having on me and all the students who give life to my teaching. I can only hope that when we return to the classroom, my joy in my profession will return as well.
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AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
September 2019
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