The lion has roared; who will not fear?
The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?
—Amos 3:8
Should a man reach eighty, he has had eighty Septembers.
It does not seem like many, said that way.
It seems as if there are so few
each one should have been better used.
—Travis McGee
I have always appreciated that Judaism celebrates its new year in the fall. As a teacher, autumn has been my new beginning for over 32 years now, and it is always with a smile of remembrance that I look up each morning on my pre-dawn run and see my old friend, Orion, in the southern sky. I always know that when that particular constellation is visible, it is the time for my “deep gladness” to go to work.
I have also always appreciated that the Jewish New Year is at the time of harvest and that at the very heart of the Ten Days of Awe lies Yom Kippur, a day set deliberately aside for taking stock of oneself. It is an opportunity for a type of self-accounting for who one has chosen to be the previous year and who one will choose to be in the year to come, and again, as a teacher, the start of the school year is my time for thinking about lessons learned from the previous year, about how I will adjust my teaching and what new ideas I will try, and about how things this year will be different. Hence, the notion of a time for deliberate self-reflection to recall that I, too, like my students, remain a work-in-progress appeals to me.
And part of that self-reflection this fall has me simply musing about life in year two of the pandemic. Things are certainly different in school this fall. In-person classes have brought some much-needed joy and energy back to teaching and learning, and the difference between my zoom zombies last year and my eager, puppy-like 9th graders this year is so stark that at the end of just our first class together I had to fight back tears of happiness. The flip side, of course, is that the return to the pace of a normal school day has challenged teachers and students alike as we have struggled to rebuild those atrophied mental (and sometimes literal) muscles, and the necessity for masks, social distancing, and now weekly COVID testing are still no less psychically wearing as perpetual reminders of what we don’t yet have back from the “before times.” But all-in-all, at little over a month in, I don’t know any of us in schools who aren’t celebrating the difference between last year and this one.
Or I should more accurately say “at least any of us in schools here in Maryland,” where wearing masks in Pre-K thru 12 schools is mandatory and every college and university is requiring proof of vaccination to attend in-person classes. If I am a student or teacher in Florida or Texas, I have a governor who could legitimately be charged with manslaughter for school policies that have already cost youth who are ineligible for the vaccine their lives. If I am a student or teacher in Idaho, I am at risk of dying if I contract COVID at school from an unmasked peer because there may not be hospital space for me due to the need to ration medical care. And if I am a student or teacher along the Gulf coast, I may not even be in school yet because two climate-change related hurricanes in little over a week have so flooded and wrecked the power-grid in my town that there is no place for me to attend.
However, regardless of where a student or teacher lives in this country, they at least all have access to some manner of education, regardless of how benign or contentious that access is. If I am a female student or teacher in Afghanistan right now, that is no longer the case, and I am most decidedly not celebrating the difference between last school year and this one. It took the Taliban mere days to reverse 20 years of progress, and I must confess that as someone who dedicated 23 years of my career to the education of teenage girls (and would be still if not for changes in administration), this one hits close to home. In fact, I almost do not have words for my despair, knowing that all the data shows that the status of women in a society determine the fate of that society. The more respect, education, and legal status women have in a society, the more that society’s economy thrives, the healthier its population is, and the more stable, uncorrupt, and democratic its government. It is that simple, and it is why I dedicated so many years to empowering young women in the STEM fields where they have historically been under-represented.
It is also why I look at what the Taliban are doing overtly (and what so many societies do covertly) and shake my head in bewilderment. Men denying women rights is simply shooting oneself in the foot because in such societies, the men are worse off there as well! From a strictly self-centered pragmatic standpoint, you would think the patriarchies of the world would get a clue and start promoting the status of women because then their own collective wealth, well-being, and power would be better off and more stable if they did so. Their behavior and choices are utterly irrational.
I know. We are not a rational species, and if I ever needed a reminder of that, it came in our first week of school when an e-mail was sent out that the boy’s bathroom outside the 9th grade commons space was now closed due to vandalism. Since that went counter to my experience so far of this 9th grade, I was a little puzzled until enlightenment came in the form of an NPR story. Apparently, the latest trend in social media is to perform a “devious lick” (the latest adolescent slang for “steal”), taking a structure out of a public bathroom and posting this “triumph” on a TikTok video—with the larger the structure, the greater the social cache. Schools across the country have apparently been having to close and repair bathrooms as soap dispensers, mirrors, sinks, and even entire urinals and toilets have been ripped from their mounts to earn “hits” and “likes” on TikTok.
My own school is no less immune than any other to the undeveloped pre-frontal cortices of adolescent boys and the role of social media in their lives; hence, the e-mail earlier this month. What’s more, if I needed further proof than such collective idiocy that technology and social media will be our downfall, learning recently that there are Facebook pages that contribute to the recruitment for human trafficking, that there are internal documents showing that Facebook’s management knows this, and that Facebook refuses to block or take down these pages because doing so would hurt their revenue stream….well, at least the recent Senate hearings about the negative impact of Instagram on teenage mental health has forced Facebook to delay development of its new Instagram for Kids app for children under the age of regular Instagram’s use agreement.
Granted, that’s a miniscule victory in a world where a recent study on young people’s anxiety over government inaction on climate change revealed that over half of the 10,000 sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds interviewed across 10 countries think humanity is doomed and 40% expressed reluctance to have children themselves due to their fears about their future. But it is a victory, and I am not sure how many of those we have left.
Which brings me to my final musing, a subject that I have been wrestling with deeply this school year as we remain grasped in the pandemic’s talons: when do we acknowledge the certainty of an injury and its inevitable loss? I keep thinking of the analogy of terminal cancer patients and the point in the battle where many make their peace, stop their treatments, and prepare for hospice. They know the certainty of the outcome of the disease, and they own—even sometimes embrace—the reality of hat truth. Similarly, with my students, I want them developing their agency for change, but I also don’t want them wasting that agency tilting at windmills. When, I keep asking myself, do I teach them how they can affect positive change, and when do I teach them about the necessity to perform triage? How do I help my share of those interviewed 10,000 understand that while the irreparable damage they fear is certain and the kind of future they were taught to envision is no longer viable, that that does not mean they will have no future at all?
Moreover, how do I help them develop the tools to construct their futures in ways that enable them to work around the massive damage they inherit to construct meaningful and fulfilling lives? I do not have answers to these questions, but I know finding them is going to be critical for those of us in the classroom because otherwise, it could prove very challenging to keep hoping. And my regular readers know that I am all about hoping!
That’s it for now, then. Such are the musings rummaging around in my head as the school year gets off to a new start—thoughts from my educational frontline to yours. For everyone out there in the classroom, stay safe and stay well!
References
Morning Edition (Sept. 17, 2021) NPR. https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/2021/09/17/1038169044/morning-edition-for-september-17-2021.
Weekend Edition (Sept. 19, 2021) NPR. https://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-sunday/2021/09/19/1038681715/weekend-edition-sunday-for-september-19-2021.
Light a Candle 