After 27 months as a pandemic-era high school teacher, and 27 months COVID-free, I finally tested positive for the virus on the weekend before finals and two weeks before our final yearbook deadline.
I’d done most things right over the last two years. Learned to teach remotely from home, then in an empty classroom, then to half of my students at home and half of them in front of me at the same time, then back to a full classroom community with a vaccination rate that got stuck somewhere around 70 percent when the online dashboard came to a halt.
Got the vaccine and boosters as soon as it was possible. Wore the recommended masks, shifting as the recommendations changed from cloth—journalism- and photography-themed ones that my mother lovingly stitched—to KN-95s that worried friends dropped off at my home.
Only in the last couple of months had I started to breathe mostly-unfiltered classroom air again. Still, I wearily switched my donated HEPA filter on each day before I lit the string lights and the lamps.
Most teachers use the word “tired” in the first sentence of collegial conversation these days, but it wasn’t until the virus hit that I admitted to myself how tired I really was.
The administration allowed me to waive the “final” for my photography and video classes. Of course, we had no pencil-and-paper final exams. I’d been planning to evaluate my students on how well they could manipulate manual camera settings to capture the splashing of water balloons. This was not something I could ask a sub to handle. (I’m not sure there were many subs left, as the groups of students in the auditorium for each block of the day seemed larger as the days ticked closer to the end of the school year.)
So, once granted a reprieve from finals, I sent emails to students and parents, posted the cancellation to our LMS, and kept my email open to answer questions— all as my fever climbed and my vertigo grew. I drank hot tea to quell both the symptoms and my anxiety about how I was going to get the yearbook done by our deadline while feeling this awful.
And then, all that was left—all that could possibly be left—was to set my away message, burrow under my weighted blanket, and disappear from the world for a few days.
I’m sure it was my symptoms that made me so tired. I ran a 102+ fever for a couple of days, and my throat felt like it was on fire.
I’m also sure that it was more than my symptoms.
By the end of this school year, there was nothing left in my cup. Nothing left to pour out in support of others, nothing left of the enthusiasm-mask that is part of my daily wardrobe, just… nothing. There had been too many pivots, too many careless gestures, too many impossible situations, and to describe all of this would take more energy than I have in mid-July. It has all already been written, anyhow, by news outlets and by other teachers in long edu-content posts and Twitter threads (and some edu-content based on Twitter threads). If it hasn’t been written, it’s been said in hushed voices in hallways or louder voices at union meetings.
The words of others have been enough to keep me silent on this blog for almost two years.
But I still had to keep refilling that cup from a faucet of nothing, because that is what teaching demands. You always have to be ready to support others, even when you’re propping yourself upright with caffeine, ibuprofen, and necessity.
We tried working together on Zoom. The students were earnest and worried. They signed out the studio cameras, finished coverage of the school year, and kept their say-do ratios high as I asked them to chase down the leftover copy and captions. But after more than a year of Zoom classes, the platform left all of us feeling tired and distracted. We would need a real in-person team to get the job done.
So, one week after my positive test, still feeling exhausted and congested, I was back in my classroom to coach our yearbook editors through deadline.
I did not feel fully recovered—still don’t, even though it’s now midsummer. Yet, according to our COVID guidelines, I was allowed to be back after five days of isolation. Maybe even expected to be back, as my fever was gone and I was nearly out of sick days. I made sure I was stocked up on KN-95s and cough drops, and resolved to do all my coaching from as much distance as I could.
The school year had effectively ended—all that was left was a day for make-up finals, and a few days required for teachers. So when the students bounced into my classroom in their bright-yellow yearbook t-shirts, it was miraculous to see this energy. “You’re back!” they exclaimed. “What’s first?”
There were no grades to earn—never were, our book is a club program for now. I didn’t have the time, health, or personal budget to transform the deadline crunch into the sort of celebrations that I see other yearbook advisers share on social media. The students knew that I had just barely recovered enough to show up.
And yet, they arrived—eager, curious, a little nervous about our capacity to finish, and ready to work.
And they stayed—for a total of 23 hours over three days of their summer.
At one point, an editor decided that a copy submission just wasn’t good enough—so she juggled three recent graduates on the phone at once for some better interviews.
At another point, an editor reconsidered the photography on a page—so he went back to edit another few albums of photos.
While they had been hesitant to design pages from scratch before, now they were flying through the process of adding photos, copy, and captions to the unfinished pages.
One student’s family donated pizzas. Another showed up with huge bags of candy. Another brought fruit and leftover baked goods from her graduation party.
“What do you think of this?” “How do I do this?” “Can you take a look at this?” The questions were almost in percussive rhythm as we worked—directed to each other more often than to their ailing coach. They were probably just trying to shield me. But setting the conditions for them to coach and cheer on each other had been the goal all year long.
“That page SLAYS,” shouted one editor as she fist-bumped another student.
When my last classes walked out of my classroom this year, I felt exhausted from COVID and burned out from teaching. By the time the student editors clicked ‘submit’ on page 240 of our brave little club yearbook, the lingering symptoms of COVID left me ready to sleep for a few days—but my energy for teaching was back.
I’ve felt this energy around student journalism before. But I don’t think that I’ve spent enough time examining why it feels so different from the side of teaching that left me feeling so empty at the end of this school year. These comparisons are swirling in my brain this summer as it emerges from virus-fog. I have some ideas that are all over the map, and some provocations that might transfer the energy to my day-to-day.
These ideas are how I’m going to form some words again. Buckle up.
