By Miriam Ryden
I remember the last day before school closed. It was March 13th and some of my students had already stopped attending earlier that week due to their parents’ fear of the virus. The end of the day was a surreal blur, saying goodbye to students, making sure we’d gathered all their things, having no idea when we’d see them again. Back then, I thought it would be a couple weeks, I thought we’d be returning to school after spring break and this would be in the rear view. But, as cases climbed and the news got worse, we settled into this new reality.
So here we are. Eight weeks into remote learning, distance learning, or whatever else you want to call it. I call it “Zoom world.” Before this I taught Junior Kindergarten, spending my days with kids - teaching, laughing, reading stories, running around, and getting the best hugs. Now I spend my days on Zoom with 5 year olds. Children who know about a “virus” and “Corona” but also don’t understand why we can’t be at school and why they can’t see their friends. The existential dread and confusion of a pandemic is enough to make me cry, and I'm an adult. My students have only been on this earth half a decade, so what they're internalizing is that much more confusing and disorienting.
I start my morning at 8am in a staff meeting with passionate yet exhausted educators. Sometimes there are announcements or updates (no one quite knows what the future holds, but we try to plan for next year anyway) or teachers share what has been working for them and their class. At 9am I have 1:1s; it’s like a solo hangout on zoom with a kid in my class. Parents sign their children up to hang out with us (me and my teaching assistant). It’s surreal having to schedule time to hang out when we used to spend the whole day together. 9:30am is the big whole class meet - ten to twelve 5 year olds all sign in at the same time as if we were starting our day together on the big gray rug in the classroom. We still begin with mindfulness, the calendar, and going over the schedule for the day, remnants from our lives together in person. Then there’s an activity, whether we’re practicing writing lower case letters (they’re a bit harder then uppercase and you learn them afterward), working on letter sounds (which helps with pre-reading skills) or reading a book that talks about our feelings (to make sure they know it’s okay that they don’t feel okay). Next is an hour of small groups, consecutive 15-minute meetings with 3-4 children at a time to work more closely on something. Sometimes it’s addition and subtraction, sometimes it’s working on nothing, we’ll just hang out and talk about dinosaurs or magic tricks or play rock paper scissors, one of the games we’ve found that translates on zoom. Inevitably, in the afternoon I have more meetings, with kids, with their parents, with my division. The day never really ends, because even when I stop working, I’m still thinking about these children. I’m worrying, I’m missing them, I’m thinking about what we’ll do next week, I’m inevitably glancing at their parent’s late night emails and practicing work-life balance (oh so important now more than ever) by not responding until daylight hours. I will admit this was always true, even before Corona, but life was a little easier then and I didn’t worry about their mental health quite as much.
I miss starting the day with countless hugs. I miss the excitement of a new school day. No two days are ever the same with children, even when your schedule remains the same. I know the kids miss this too because although they are still working on communicating feelings (especially sadness, fear and frustration), they do share that they miss what we had. What we all had. We used to have circle time in person, we would have lively discussions and no one had to mute or unmute themselves. We used to dance together, run around together and play hide and seek with the entire class when we had the yard to ourselves. I would scoop them up in my arms when they cried instead of comforting them through a screen. I miss playing with them, they miss playing together, we all miss playing together; play just happens to be the greatest teaching tool for this age group.
We’re trying to make the best of an awful situation. We still laugh out loud every day, there are still moments of joy and learning and ah-ha moments and all the reasons I became a teacher in the first place. I’m trying to establish consistency and normalcy for these children in a world that is anything but. But now… now it’s just different. Weird. Surreal. What happens next? My job involves giving my heart and soul to these children, and I do it willingly, but now my heart and soul aren’t the same. This job is a beautiful distraction from what’s really going on in the world but it’s also more draining than ever, and that really is saying something. I don’t know what to say anymore when they ask when we can be together again. They’re growing up and going on to Kindergarten, they won’t be with me anymore and school is not going to look like the school we knew, not for a while. In the meantime, we keep learning, we keep laughing, we keep Zooming. We’ve got a week left and I couldn’t have asked for better companions.
Miriam Ryden aka “Ms. Miriam” is a teacher in Los Angeles and has been working in early childhood education for 8 years. She likes traveling, trivia, television and alliteration. She’s obsessed with the New York Times crossword and currently quarantining with this blog’s namesake.
