A Teacher’s View
The troublemakers have gone quiet. Zeke’s paper airplanes are grounded. Dara’s audience dispersed. For the first time without complaint, Kamil writes an entire paragraph, as if in penance for the possibility that his wish has been granted: no more school.
The fifth graders keep their torsos inside the square frames of the video call. They do not slouch or whisper, stand or object. The autonomy they were discovering is no longer as satisfying in isolation. Gideon changes his name display to read “gideon is the best ☻” Evan changes his: “n0 eVaN i$!!!” They change their names back when I ask, but I’m actually disappointed. I scan the grid, looking for a smirk, hoping for an outburst, praying for a challenge.
Five weeks ago, when we were together in the classroom, we spent most of the day pretending I could mute us with a bell, a lecture, or a glare. Our deepest fear and greatest solace came from knowing it wasn’t true: I can’t keep you quiet. Now the buttons on my screen mock the myth that once sustained us. Amanda starts speaking out of turn. She is muted.
From my living room, I enter an unprecedented classroom. They’re in my home and I’m in theirs. Brooke logs on for class in her pajama bottoms, rolling over in her bed to see her teacher and her classmates. From the same couch on which I’ve begun and ended love affairs, I suggest revision strategies. It’s not Mateo who answers my question, but his mom, who is lying on the floor so as not to appear on screen. They drag limp pets to the keyboard, shoving paws towards the camera. Older siblings appear behind their shoulders, mocking raised hands. They spoon cereal into their mouths, milk dribbling down their chins. As the sun shifts outside my window it catches the zit on my chin; I find a more flattering angle before the next 25 minute session, preparing to transmit my voice directly into their ears. I am too far. Too close.
In slow Sharpie, I write each student’s name on paper torn from the back of a notebook I found in my bedroom. Tomorrow morning I will hold the small squares up to my computer one at a time, giving us the order of a game we like to play. By the time I reach the J’s, I am crying. I tear another page and try again: Jackie, Jamal, Josie. The tears return. I am the closest I have been to them in five weeks. I add a painstaking curl to each lowercase vowel, and by the end of the alphabet I cannot bear how earnest and how futile I am.
I am allowed to take a weekly walk with Ethan, who lives in my neighborhood. He cannot discern and maintain six feet, so his ramblings are interrupted by a gentle reminder from his mom, who supervises. “Stay back,” she says, as we circle blocks and he circles topics. Unfounded predictions about the NFL, reports regarding indiscernible pets, what he hears his sister say on the phone. I smile, nod, and step away. For the first time today, I have no digital reference of my face during a conversation. Unable to see my eyes, I worry they betray my ambivalence. I used to spend eight hours a day immersed in the looping rhetoric of childhood. That has shrunk to 90 minutes, and so has my tolerance. Conversations are now detourless. I speak primarily by drafted emails delivered en masse with parents blind copied. When it is time for lunch, I am relieved to eat without interruption, and I think I’ve lost my touch. If there’s a walk next week, Ethan will notice.
Early last November, I set an alarm for 7:03 AM and took a six-minute nap in my car before entering the school’s double-doors. I was exhausted, not so much by teaching but by my resentment of it. In the rearview mirror I saw the teacher I never wanted to be, and so I closed my eyes. I soothed myself to sleep with the fantasy that a different title, school, or degree would allow me to be the teacher I really am. Up against what administrators like, what parents pay for, what colleagues expect, and what ten-year-olds need, I told myself all it would take is starting over somewhere new to rediscover that teacher.
Five weeks ago we sealed the school building, and along with it my excuses. Those double-doors shut on books mid-chapter, on plants already wilting, and on the fallacy that there is a gap between the teacher I want to be and the teacher I am. The students are remote, but there is nothing distant about this learning as the barrier between how I have, want, and try to teach dissolves. What’s left is the self-view in the top right corner of my computer screen. I am facing — uninterrupted — my own attempts to be the teacher I always said I would be if just given the chance.
The kids log off, leaving me alone in the classroom. I stare at the screen and lock eyes with the teacher.
Julia Juster lives in Cambridge, MA. She teaches middle school English, and is a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was born in Cleveland, OH.