Last week, I was standing in the hall at the high school, Thursday Exhausted, the type of tired teachers understand, feeling like a failure.
It had been a ledger day–everything felt tallied. I’d had some successes with virtual classes–Google Meet, evidently aware that worldwide morale was slipping, had released new backgrounds. Our Chromebook screens were joyous rainbows: one student was in a bed of roses; another surrounded by thundering horses; several were oceanside. It was a touch of absurdity, a smidgen of joy. A few students were eating candy–contactlessly delivered on a sanitized desk–and we all laughed, hard, when a football player turned red and started sweating because his atomic fireball was particularly atomic. It felt like a corner of normal.
But, always, during this pandemic, there is the reminder that nothing is normal–that normal is, for now, away, having moved into the future, the smoke of a promise and a hope.
It is not something we now hold.
Sometimes, I miss it so. I miss college-ruled paper and sloppy penmanship and even bubble-heart dotted letters written in pink neon pen. I miss stacks of alphabetized papers carefully clipped together by a student helper whose hand-washing habits were of no concern to me. I miss dividing my weekends by sets of papers graded: three before the football game, two after church.
