"What do you do all day?"This question came from my mother on, oh, about March 19. She is always curious about my job, and the idea of me overseeing a school from my living room was especially intriguing to her.
"I don't know what I do all day, Mom. All I know is it's taking me 14 hours a day to do it."
She laughed and told me I'm probably handling it beautifully, which, of course, is part of her job. She has complete and unwavering faith in me. She's good at her job.
Like all my educator colleagues, remote teaching and learning struck us like a thunderbolt. At first, it seemed overwhelming but do-able. After a week or two, it was just hard, in the way juggling water balloons is hard—you never know when one of those suckers might bust open and blast you in the face. And as the weeks went on and on, it got less overwhelming, because we hit our stride and learned how to manage our classrooms while managing our households, but it wasn't joyful. We were moving information around, and we were grinning at one another from behind computer screens, but we weren't in the same room, so there wasn't chemistry or energy or the million ways humans communicate nonverbally.
I developed technology fatigue. I learned, as did so many of us, that we can't thrive inside ourselves with a computer screen as our only tool. For me, the emails started at dawn and poured in, relentlessly, until after dark. A colleague of mine told me he woke extra early one day and fiercely chipped his inbox down to twelve. Swagging like a superstar, he let himself break for a bagel and a shower. Back at his computer, not even sixty minutes later, his his inbox read 74 messages. More than an email a minute. Gawd.
And Google Meets. They were an acceptable substitute at first, but I grew to dread them. I did them, and I did them as well as I could, and I don't like admitting I hated them, buuuuuut... well, you know. I kinda did.Look at this:
Video calls are unsatisfying not just because of the lack of touch but because they require mutual active presence. Conversation is only a part of companionship. It's hard to just be when you're on a call, hard to see when you're constantly looking.
These words came from Lauren Collins in "Missed Calls," a heartbreaking piece in a recent New Yorker about her father dying, an ocean away, and her only way to connect with him in his last days was FaceTime. Her mother and brother held the phone up to her father's ear so she could talk to him, but she didn't know how to do this massive job of saying goodbye over the phone, and she didn't know if he even knew she was there. At his funeral, she dialed in to the cemetery, where only three people—her mother, brother, and undertaker—were there to see him buried.
Can you even? Jesus.
But remote learning created a hole. It's a hole we tried to fill with iPads and iPhones and iMacs and iBooks and idontevenknowwhatallelse, but it was still a hole.
Our governor recently announced school will start up in the fall. I know there is a lot to be worked out. Lord knows, the questions will burst forth, and they will be fast and they will be loud, and it will be a challenge to answer them, one by one, systematically and thoroughly. I'm up for the challenge, though... even if it takes 14 hours a day.
