Pray.
Even if you are a card-carrying atheist, materialist member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation or the character of Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. Pray.
Pray for our young people.
Pray because 11% of them have reported actively contemplating suicide in the past 30 days, and that number increases to 1 in 4 for adolescents and young adults.
Pray because I have seen the despondency in their eyes firsthand now, and I can tell you it is very real, very chilling, and very numbing. Watching the faces of my students through a Zoom screen these past two weeks, I can see the emotional and psychological damage this pandemic and our public mishandling of it has wrought on an entire generation, and while it is one thing to know and write about the harm on-line learning is doing from the intellectual solitude of my sabbatical this past spring and early summer, it is another thing entirely to witness it live as one of the co-participants.
Sitting alone in my classroom, I have experienced my students gamely trying to engage their synchronous lessons as I have gamely stumbled through the learning-curve of teaching through a screen—all of us working to act as if what we were studying could possibly have any real meaning in the face of the isolation and fear so many of us are experiencing. And I, at least, currently have the mental health luxury of separating my workspace from my home-space, able to teach from said empty classroom. I can only imagine how schooling from home simply blurs into a sense of always slightly “on,” always slightly “off.” Engagement and disengagement become one and the same, and the ennui sets in, an unwelcome daily guest.
Moreover, I have nearly 60 years of life-experience to draw upon for my resilience in the face of the uncertainty, whereas they are having to mine their souls for it at an age when normally you just collect bits and pieces of resilience off the surface. It has been one of the greatest challenges of my career to behave upbeat and optimistic before an array of electronic faces who look back with such gloom, and I keep thinking: what must it feel like to one their age to learn this week that the world of adults in this country would put a man in charge of it who deliberately misled its citizens about the serious danger of COVID-19? Where are they finding the inner resources to keep showing up each day? Again, I say pray for them.
Pray also for our teachers.
Pray because the vast majority love children deeply and they find themselves in a quandary they never anticipated. As one of my colleagues shared during a tumultuous faculty meeting about school re-opening, he had never thought of himself as a front-line, essential worker the way a doctor or RN is, and yet here he was, faced with the reality that both the well-being of his students and the future well-being of our society may require him to be such a employee—along with all the personal risk that that entails to his own life and the health and well-being of his family. NOT something, he very deliberatly pointed out, that he had signed up for when entering the teaching profession (though I suspect neither did most of those entering medical and nursing school—no one except trained epidemiologists and public health care professional anticipate a deadly pandemic).
It was hard to hear his words, though, because I can see both sides. On the one hand, the fear he and many like him were expressing was totally understandable as it is not only their own individual lives they might be putting at risk by being back in schools working with children; it would be the lives of those they love and live with as well. Even hybrid models increase human-to-human exposure and the chance of catching the virus and spreading it, and so to be in schools in any capacity is to risk taking it home with you. On the other hand, nearly 20 years ago, I made a very deliberate decision to effectively “marry” my career, and when I did so, it became my students who became my children. Hence, my own personal values about my chosen profession are such that we are very much front-line workers, and in the face of the pain and suffering I have now witnessed firsthand, I would quite willingly risk my life to ease it. For me, saving their future is more important than preserving my safety.
I do, though, share fully my fellow colleagues’ frustration about the indecision guiding so much educational policy right now. Our governor’s recent pubic temper tantrum about in-person learning after insisting all summer that schools improving their on-line learning systems is just one of the many examples of teachers receiving mixed-messaging. As someone who has spent the past month and a half working feverishly to learn how to design effective and engaging on-line lessons, I share the strong sentiment of most of us in education right now: let us get at least one system of teaching and learning stabilized and functioning—for the sake of the kids and our sanities!—before insisting that we rebuild the wheel for yet another time.
There was, however, the briefest of moments this past week as I exited one of my Zoom breakout rooms in one of my senior classes when I swear I overheard one of my students declare about the activity they were working on: “this is so fun!” So perhaps all is not lost, and again, I say: pray for our teachers.
Coda
Which leads me to a brief explanation for why I picked this post’s title. The idea of “the trenches” entered the lexicon the last time the world suffered a pandemic to rival this one because after four years of trench-warfare, WWI had forever altered our understanding of what it meant to engage in battle. To fight in the trenches was to endure some of the most challenging and horrific fighting and loss of life humanity has ever invented, and in the post-war years, those who had participated in it came to be known as the “lost generation” because of the psychic damage they had endured (a theme often represented in the fiction of the subtly dystopian novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Erich Maria Remarque). Today, we face the very real possibility of a similar “lost generation” as we endure—to paraphrase historian James McPherson—a lifetime of emotion in a matter of years.
Meaning one way or the other, those of us in the trenches—teachers and students alike—will be forever changed.
References
Kamenetz, A. (September 10, 2020) The Pandemic Has Researchers Worried About Teen Suicide. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911117577/the-pandemic-has-researchers-worried-about-teen-suicide.
McPherson, J. (1988) Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Ballantine Books.
Wood, P.; Opilo, E.; & Bowie, L. (August 27, 2020) Maryland Officials Say All Public School Systems Meet New Set of Benchmarks for Some In-person Instruction. https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-hogan-schools-20200827-onx4lqaa2bhizfhp5e3ejrbvaq-story.html.
Light a Candle 