In order to teach the whole student you have to be whole first. What the last three years did do was give us enough fodder to sift through to find our spots. To locate our positionality. To uncover exactly where we fit within our roles of serving a child, a school community, an education system. The lucky ones found comfort zones within those live Google meets and zoom classrooms. I resented it almost every morning. Ironically, the time unattached to the physical location of the school building, for me, equated to solid personal growth. I became a way better cook. I read more than I ever did in my life. I took up meditation and finally started taking my insides more seriously. 

But if I’m being honest, it was a debacle professionally. I often looted my own integrity for the sake of self preservation. I pillaged my curiosity and leadership and devotion to the craft. Over the last three years, it was more of a relief than an accomplishment at the end of every June. Questions about all of my career choices and character arose out of my subconsciousness for the first time ever. I’m not content with anything I did school wise. Only thankful I survived. 

To say that I did a disservice would be too harsh. At the end of the day, those children got taught. They learned from their bedrooms and kitchens and auntie’s basements and grandma’s balconies while I explained and provided examples from my couch. I burnt plastic bowls on my kitchen stove trying to explain the particle theory and bought white boards that I’ll never use again in order to show certain ideas in geometry and geography. I never want to revisit those times. 

In fact, I am waiting for a new school year to begin. I feel removed from the irregularity that those three years brought. I want the opportunity to redeem myself. To build with humans in a way that could never be duplicated over a computer screen. The little things are what I look forward to the most. That nervousness and angst that you only get when you don’t know what the morning will look like but you at least know you’ll get to look at other people and they’ll get to look at you. In that middle part, the conduit between teaching and learning, is where I gather my joy in this calling. 

Maybe teaching during the pandemic didn’t make me a better teacher in the moment. But maybe it has the potential to make us better educators tomorrow.  

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I drank all the different types of herbal teas I had in my little cupboard and did my Googles on preventative measures to fight Covid (because that’s how my mind works) hoping that the dreaded fear that everyone has had in the back of their heads since late 2019 wouldn’t hit me any harder. Thankfully it didn’t. But I still needed to let my school know that I had to quarantine and wouldn’t be back with the rest of my colleagues when school finally reopened. My return date was set for the Friday of that first day back and I had a plan: I would tell my students the reason why I was missing. Authenticity through demonstrating vulnerability, right? 

My classroom was a straight up mess. Not a good start. The supply teacher had to definitely be one of those ones who came to school with a sudoku puzzle book and a newspaper. As students slowly filtered in, it hit me that I hadn’t really taught taught in over a month. 

“Good morning, 7B.” I said after the morning announcements finished. A handful of students answered me. I waited before saying anything more. The picture I had painted in my head was already off. “Good morning, 7B.” A few more students responded the second time. The questions that I predicted weren’t coming out. “So…ahem, yeah so, I was away for a few days. The reason why I was away…” I hesitated and looked around. “I haven’t been here because…”

“How come so many people are away today?” I pivoted, asked and without waiting for a response, followed up by asking, “So, how has the first few days back been? Has it been weird? What’s it like being back in person instead of in front of the computer screen?” We talked for less than five minutes and then decided on a due date for the writing project we had been working on during virtual school. I walked back to my desk and started organizing things that were already organized. Monday, I said to myself. Monday I’d tell them.

“So, listen.” I started Monday morning. “The reason why I missed a few days last week is because I tested positive for Covid.” I adjusted the mask on my face. “I actually had it when we were online.” 

I expected my revelation to take up half of the first period. It took up less than four minutes. “Yeah, I had it over winter break” one student responded. Others chimed in: “My aunty had it and had to stay in our basement for a week”… “They said on the news that we had sixteen thousand cases the other day”… Towards the end of those few short minutes one student said, “Mr. Morris, can I ask you a question?” I thought this would be the breakthrough that I had envisioned. The moment where some words would spark some conversation that led to deep relationship building and all that good stuff. “Mr. Morris, can we have an extra gym period today since our supply teacher last week didn’t take us to the gym? Please.”

A year ago Covid was such a taboo topic that it had families soaking their groceries in the kitchen sink and schools sending home entire cohorts after one positive case. We’re past that now. Covid is still as real and as scary and as dangerous and as consuming as it first was. I thought that by getting Covid and then discussing my experience would be something that my students would gravitate towards. They didn’t. I do not think that that means we are out of the woods with this. But I think it demonstrates how the individual mind––especially the youthful one––navigates the world, their community, the information they receive, and the obscure phenomena that become part of our evolving lexicon. This understanding moves way beyond Covid. How we react to the stimuli around us shows just how powerful collective culture has always been and will always be.

So yeah, happy Black History Month, y’all.  

The post I Told My Students I Had Covid, Here’s What Happened Next appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

When I teach things I’d taught before masks and sanitizers were a thing and I can recognize students learning like how they used to learn, I feel grateful on my outsides. But on my insides, something is off. I like when I don’t have to bend or break my teaching even though I feel like I haven’t taught taught in two years. I like when I can recognize everything that is happening during morning group discussions, afternoon recess time, stretches of independent work sessions, and blocked-off, silent quiz periods. I like it because it looks and feels and walks and talks just like how school used to. I like it because it makes my job easier. I like it because––to be honest––lots of days I feel lazy.

And parts of that scare me. 

I also feel like students shouldn’t learn like how they used to learn. Thus, I shouldn’t be able to teach like how I used to teach. I almost feel worried that I am able to do what I’ve done and continue with doing those same things that I’ve done before the pandemic after the pandemic. Actually, it scares me. I don’t know if it’s them or if it’s me. Or if it’s us. 

Or what it is. Thinking about that part really scares me.

The post Back To Normal, Sort Of appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

Maybe it’s because I’m entitled. To be honest, summer break hasn’t felt like summer break since 2019. And when I went back to work in the fall of 2020 I was waiting for the day that they would announce the premature end of it. I knew we couldn’t sustain. And I thought that maybe I thought those things because I tried to do my best in the spring of 2019 with that emergency education that few called it and then again when the pandemic swung it’s fists through my classroom and we had to quarantine for two weeks that possibly things would just come to an end because someone who was sitting in government chairs talked to their child and their child relayed how horrible public education had become and because of that conversation that they had, they came to work with a refreshed and realistic understanding about the futility of trying to teach children without the skills of teaching children in a pandemic and that they would cease school for time to allow time and bodies to recalibrate and rethink how things may work if we might have to do this yet again. But, nope. I had to keep teaching. And do all of those other things that come along with it. 

I thank too much to go to sleep tonight, and it’s only Monday. I thank about these last two school years, and as much as I tried, I probably will never be able to recognize those children if I saw them out at a grocery store sometime over the next three years. I thanked about the beginning of the end of two school years ago: when one of my students started wearing a mask to school two weeks before I saw Rudy Gobert come down with the Rona two nights before I was planning to book my Spring vacation to Miami. I thanked about calling my boy, Jay, and telling him that, “this Corona shit is getting serious.” And then texted my boy, David, in Miami, “Imma fall back for a few weeks and see what this shit lookin’ like in the summertime.” Recently, I thanked about what I thought about two springs ago. I realized that I’m thankful. 

I’m ready for August but not ready for much beyond that. That makes me queasy. The more I try to decompress the more I tighten up. I’m not used to this. I’m used to thinking; about school, and plans, and predictions. But this shit right here is brand new to me. And I feel like the onus is on my, our, shoulders. To figure it out and settle things down. But I’m not built like that. Neither do I have the medical and rationale capacity to side step my job and try to work on figuring it out. So I guess I’ll just go back to work in September. It’s not exactly what I signed up for, but hopefully the queasiness I feel will at some point subside. Still thankful, though. 

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That’s how I feel about entering a school building with two hundred other people every day. The other day, a 47-year-old teacher who was in good health was intubated in a Toronto hospital that is a 25-minute drive from my home. I don’t want to be “intubated”. That sounds scary. I don’t want that to be me. Or anyone I know. It’s getting ridiculous.

I can feel my lung capacity worsen over the last year and change. It’s because my habits around exercise and activity and lifestyle have pivoted more times than my role as a teacher has in the last year. Wearing a mask from 8:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. probably doesn’t help. Surely doesn’t help. In fact, it’s getting ridiculous. 

 I used to watch the news, CP24, while I got ready for work in the morning. I’d carve out fifteen minutes to drink a tea, eat two boiled eggs or a bowl of oatmeal, check the weather, traffic and the latest stories that happened in the city. I can’t watch the news anymore. I’m tired of cases and outbreaks and shutdowns and grey zones and protocols and vaccines and variants. I’m tired of Dr. Bogoch’s updates about updates at 7:20 a.m. I gotta mask up and get to work and make sure I complete my screening and sanitize my hands and my desk and screen students and remind a few of them to keep their masks over their nose and squeeze in some lessons on math and English. It’s getting ridiculous. Really ridiculous. 

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