Some of us spent the year teaching online, posting lessons, or in live video meetings. Some of us went traveling around the building on a cart, or transformed our music rooms and made individual music kits to keep social distancing. Some of us taught non-music subjects. Some of us left teaching altogether. Most of us did some combination of several of the above.
Hopefully there are things we learned from the process of reinventing our teaching practices that we can carry into the years to come. Hopefully we will appreciate those little things we used to take for granted a little bit more when we regain them. Hopefully we will not lose sight of the inequities that were made plain to so many more teachers, and we will continue to push for changes as a result.
I'm still processing. I'm sure we all are, and will be for years to come.
I look back at last summer- the panic I felt about reopening in a hybrid model, the time and energy that I poured into figuring out how to teach music to 6 year old's without singing, without instruments, sitting in desks in rows in the gym where the internet kept kicking me out of my own zooms- and it feels like so very long ago. I think about all the different modalities and schedules and teaching spaces I've been through in one school year and it makes my head spin. And we're not even done yet. Things will be better next school year, but we will not be rid of covid protocols completely.
It's going to take time to heal from the trauma, to process everything we've been through. Intellectually I know we will begin to heal, and we will forge new paths. But right now I'm tired. Emotionally, physically, mentally, psychologically, socially exhausted. And all I can say is no matter what our paths ended up looking like, we did it. We are so much stronger than we knew, and we did it. I'm proud of myself, I'm proud of us, I'm proud of my students, I'm proud of my family.
And now I'm going to take a nap.
No comments :
Post a Comment