When the Tide Goes Out

On the eve of our school's shutdown, I heard a quotation attributed to Warren Buffet regarding economic collapses. Apparently he said that when the tide goes out we learn who is not wearing a swimsuit. It made me chuckle. I know he was trying to share an observation on economic life. It's easy to apply that truism to politics, though, and it certainly looks more obvious than ever that our president is an emperor with no clothes.

A First Reaction to Teaching from Home

I've been teaching for 22 years. Sherry and I are now sharing the home as an office space. We've been married 20 years and we have lived at this home for 17 years. Had this pandemic hit more 17 years ago when we were first here, it would have been impossible for either of us to work from home. The technology and mindset of that era would not have permitted it.

My first week of teaching remotely is finished. I hope to get to do so next week, which is to say that I hope to resume teaching Monday even though it's certain I won't be in my classroom Monday. There are some legal technicalities that might put us in limbo as the new work week dawns. More on those technicalities (which get to the heart of some political and philosophical non-technicalities) in another post.

The work of teaching remotely isn't too challenging form me. Economics lends itself well to that kind of instruction. The nature of my students, also, is quite conducive to learning electronically. And I had been dabbling with some ways to blend technology into my instruction for the past five years. So I felt ready to roll, ready to do more than I was allowed to do this week.

And the interaction I had with students this week was actually quite satisfying. I used a Microsoft application to conduct "office hours," video conferences my students could join. Those video conferences featured some fascinating questions about the nature of our emergency at the beginning of the week, and became good forums to address more technical elements of what we had just been learning before the shut down. There were a lot of good email exchanges, too.

The greatest sadness over teaching from home, though, was the lack of interaction with my peers. I've sometimes bemoaned how at a high school featuring a schedule like mine doesn't allow me ample time with colleagues. Yet the schedule we do have allows me to see my neighboring teacher four, five, or even six times a day. It allows me to see my friend who teaches economics about three or four times a day (my classroom is on his line of approach to the bathroom). Even if I'm very busy I get to talk briefly with about twenty other adults on a school day.

This sudden interruption of brief but regular and meaningful time with my friends at work is the most miserable part of this remote teaching. It's a humbling reminder of how our jobs are really about more than work.

What Will I Remember?

My normal routine has now been interrupted for a week. Last Thursday was the last day I was teaching at my school. Since then, I've been teaching from home. All the activities that constituted our fairly packed family schedule (music, dance, church) were cancelled as of last Thursday. I'm finding myself at the end of the eeriest week of my life, more eerie than that first week after the 9/11 attacks. More eerie than the first week after I lost a loved one.

So when I sharing stories in the future about this confrontation with the Coronavirus, what will I remember most?

I'll remember the feeling I got when the dam broke. It was Wednesday, March 11. I saw a notification on my phone that the NBA had suspended the rest of the season. I don't even care about professional basketball that much. The idea of a whole league, hundreds of players, millions of fans, billions of dollars, suspending the totality of their activities was the thunderclap that made me realize we had suddenly lurched into a strange new land.

I'll also remember that next day of school, a day that had an ethereal sense to it. There was a great challenge keeping the kids focused at that day as everyone wondered what would be cancelled next. Teachers struggled with being focused that day, too.

And I'll remember a small shopping trip I did late Saturday morning, driving around retail locations that were quiet in a way typical of a sleepy Tuesday morning, not a Saturday.

There was another shopping trip in which there were no frozen vegetables to be found at Giant, nor any whole chickens at Costco. It's when I started to realize that the stores still open had most things, they just didn't have everything.

I'll remember seeing yellow caution tape surrounding closed children's playgrounds. 

But I'll probably most remember that sound when the dam burst, when a sports league I didn't really care about simply shut it all down. And knowing then that the world was about to change dramatically.