As a teenager, the music I listened to influenced the literature I read independently. The Cure led me to Camus. The Police to Nabokov. U2 to Flannery O'Connor and Joyce (Bono living in a Martello watchtower on the Irish coast was enough to pique my interest). You get the idea. Morrissey's video for "Suedehead" showed him wandering around James Dean's high school in Fairmount, Indiana, where someone had scrawled on a wall "You can't go home again". In the days before the internet, it took some digging for me to connect it with Thomas Wolfe, although years later I found out he'd borrowed the phrase from friend Ella Winter (Godwin, 2011). "You can't go home again." It keeps sneaking up on me, especially now, during the time of COVID-19. In the most literal sense, I can't go home again. I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, and my side of the family still lives in Nueces County, consistently in the top 10 counties out of 254 in Texas of new COVID-19 cases per capita. My mom is in her late seventies. My niece has a newborn. Every one of my relatives' households has reasons to be highly cautious. No stopover on the way to a beach condo is worth it, so FaceTime and Zoom birthdays it is for a while. I'd never forgive myself for unknowingly transmitting COVID-19 to any of them, so I just eliminated the possibility. And just in case anyone didn't catch the implications of that, my going back to work in a school with children literally means that for the foreseeable future, I can't visit ANY of my family members, maybe until the end of the school year. Usually by late July, my back-to-school dreams have started. Sometimes, it's the first day of school, and I've accidentally slept in. Other times, I'm back in high school, and I've forgotten my drill team gauntlets before a football game. I make to do lists, split, and reorganize them. Even after twenty-two years of teaching, the beginning of the school year is not unlike the days leading up to a wedding, full of excitement and insomnia. This year, it's anxiety, caution, and insomnia. Classrooms are second homes for teachers, and the ways they look are just as varied as our homes in which we sleep. During the work week, we spend more waking hours in our classrooms with children we call "our kids", even though they're not legally ours. Sprucing up our classrooms makes us feel more at ease and happy to be there as we build relationships with our new school family for the year. . .although we all know they will forever be "our kids" in our hearts. Last year was my swansong as a regular, classroom teacher. I'd completed my Master's in Library Science the previous summer, and the last of a strange and winding path of timbering dominoes fell, three years in the making, ending with me accepting the librarian position at the neighborhood school I had spent the three previous years teaching third grade. When I packed up my classroom in the third month of the pandemic, I didn't yet know it would be the last regular classroom I'd ever have. (Lots of "threes" in that paragraph there. It IS a magic number, after all, and who doesn't need a little magic?) Even if I were going back to the classroom in the fall, it wouldn't look like this, with the flexible seating, beanbag and bucket chairs at the ready, curtains, and modular table arrangements. This fall, because of COVID-19, gone would be the high-fives, hugs, and handshakes. I wouldn't need my rocking chair and floor space for minilesson gathering and read alouds, because they wouldn't be allowed due to social distancing. I couldn't go home again, even if I wanted to. During my graduate studies, we were asked to design our dream library, which programming would we include, and how would we prepare our 21st century learners for an uncertain future. (After all, the year I was a third grader, the Internet was first assembled into a cohesive network!) How would I make my students feel welcome? In what ways would I build a collection that is not only a reflection of their lives, but a window to worlds unlike their own? In all my ponderings and plotting, I never envisioned plexiglass, quarantined books, and gloves. Being the new librarian, it saddens me that the kids will be disappointed when we get back. In their minds (who am I kidding? In my mind, too!), the library is browsing for books and huddling over their choices with a friend on the cushioned furniture. We explore coding apps on the iPads, try out research resources in pairs, gather in the Book Nook for read alouds, and make wish lists for the book fair twice a year. We have author visits and kids scope out the newly-checked in books, where most graphic novels get snatched off the book carts before they ever make it to the shelves. The new library home I had wished for won't quite be . . . not just yet. I don't think people realize that "going back to school" at the very beginning of the year only means being inside the school building; "school" as we know it has been put off indefinitely. There are so many things we will ALL have to wait for:
Wishing will not make the number of COVID-19 cases subside. Real work, personal discipline, science, and time will. I believe it will. I HAVE to. I WANT to go back. My children want to go back, but they don't want to go through what some of our extended relatives in other cities experienced in March/April with this virus. I don't know what to tell them, except that we want nothing more to protect them, that they are the most precious beings in the world to us. That means for as long as we can manage as a family, our children will be distance learning as my husband works from home, even if I have to return to campus. Our family decisions will be guided by local case numbers, not crossed fingers and hoping for the best. So as their father and I each sift through the remnants of our former work homes, his because his entire office building is being reconfigured for the new normal of more employees working from home, and mine because I no longer need most of the twenty-two years' worth of teacher stuff I've accumulated, our home has been transformed. Uprooted. Whatever. I imagine Marie Kondo nodding sweetly as we empty each box. We've eaten in the dining room multiple times each and every day, since the kitchen table was chosen as the easiest spot to set up online learning. My school mini-fridge suddenly became a necessity at home--we needed the extra space. My husband's desk upstairs is now his primary workstation, with several monitors and a headset. The day I rushed out to replace our modem/router and the evening when a transformer blew and cut our electricity for a few hours weren't just minor annoyances. There have been times when my husband and I have debated getting a larger house, but now this isn't just our first house we've ever owned, nor just the place where our babies first lived, or our Census 2010 and 2020 house. Our home is now The House Where We Lived during the Pandemic. So far, our household has been spared, and every day we pray that we won't get sick. Someday, hopefully sooner than later, we will be able to go home again, and not just our homes where we've been quarantined, either. Our work homes. School homes. Worship homes. Comfort zone homes. Hometowns. Ancestral homes. And one day all these homes will feel completely safe again. In the meantime, please don't assume I don't want to work, that distance learning is easier, or that anyone deserves a tax rebate while their kids learn from home. And lastly, don't be surprised if your child comes home from school that first week saying they want to stay home, because school just isn't the same. It WON'T be their same learning home for a while. Again, it will be up to real work, personal discipline, science, and time. References
Godwin, G. (2011). "Introduction". You Can't Go Home Again. Simon and Schuster. p. xii. Harvard Global Health Institute. (2020, July 22). Covid risk levels dashboard. Pandemics explained. https://globalepidemics.org/
5 Comments
Kathleen Mensing
7/24/2020 11:31:25 am
I enjoyed this blog very much. You share prose and passion, what a great combination!
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Dina Mensing
7/24/2020 02:12:14 pm
Thank you so much, Kathleen! That means so much to me.
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Anushka1
8/28/2020 11:34:30 am
Awwwww...
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Raghav Sharma
9/10/2020 10:51:31 am
Hello Mrs.Mensing,I enjoyed the blog and it was great!Thannk you!!!!!
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Raghav
9/10/2020 10:56:03 am
That is supposed to be 1 n.
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