Teaching in Lockdown

It was weird. Going from seeing faces every day to seeing a screen with a bunch of black squares… sometimes a couple kiddos would show me they were there before turning off the camera, but usually it felt like I was talking to air.

I tried all the platforms. Streaming on YouTube (thank heavens for an old channel I had built when YouTube had just started, and the help of incredible IT people guiding me), Instagram posts, meets on Zoom and Google, group chats…

They were all weird. It didn't feel like it was real, except in the background my own kiddos were jumping through tech hoops on different devices and I was trying to run their tech and teach and work.

But the coffee was warm and I even got to make myself a hot lunch.

And, eventually we all came back and it was like a blip in time that we all were just forced into learning how to communicate in a very different way, and we learned how quickly we could create whole new ways to learn and model expertise, and we learned just how even in the midst of the world shutting down, the way in which we continue to connect with the most incredible humans (our students, their families, and our peers) might shift, but that connection WOULD never and COULD never be erased. The classroom would always be somewhere, and teachers were always going to find a way to make it work.

We could be locked in and stuck at home or alone in a classroom, but there was always a window open to greet one another, even if it was a different sort of 'window.'