For a teacher, the end of the school year is like a breakup. I spend a year trying to show 80 17-year-olds that I care — and then I never see them again. The better I am at this, the harder I hurt in May and early June.
This past year, of course, was different. The injury was more jarring, the hurt longer-lasting. Usually I watch my high school seniors go through their era-capping rituals in person. This time, there was no prom. Instead of giving live speeches, students submitted videos for their senior year statements of self. They graduated in masks from the backs of pickup trucks.
I had to start over again in August, and I didn’t get the benefit of having half a year in person with my new seniors before being wrenched onto a video-conferencing platform. My students are bruised. Their school community unceremoniously evaporated last March. The day school closed — March 13 — one of their peers died from a gunshot in a car in front of the school. Two days before that, the year’s second threat of school violence meant third period had to squirm under desks for two hours. Then they endured six grueling months of a worldwide pandemic before returning to a Zoom classroom. Understandably, they are skeptical that anyone or anything might rouse curiosity or conviction.
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My job is to get them to challenge that skepticism. A good English class invites students into each others’ lives. Students learn about their classmates, even more poignant when they’re seniors and still strangers, which is actually common. They share their stories and opinions, conduct research, and explore literature that offers portals into real and imagined experiences. Students step into these works and invite the texts into their lives too. Discussions about identity, history, justice, freedom, and love are tough. They only happen when students trust their classroom community.
But how do you create a community when the building is locked? How do you bottle that trust and care and disperse the cocktail across the gaping divide? How can you imbue a grid of blinking rectangles with energy and humor when you yourself are caught up in despair, when you’re hung up on death, insomnia-stricken, struggling to be a less terrible parent on an hourly basis as your daughter weeps and screams red-faced after her Zoom kindergarten classes and constructs an elaborate play-world of imaginary siblings to pass the droning expanse of time?
Over the weeks, I learn that Zoom both alienates and imposes intimacy on us. To cope, students angle their cameras so that the bottom of the frame barely grazes the tops of their heads, and mostly captures shadows spilling across a ceiling. The point of turning on a camera feels diminished. I’m powerless to adjust the tilt of a lens, just as I cannot leap through a screen to keep a kid from watching porn or gaming. Students may be both isolated and seen, trapped in a rectangular Zoom cell. Acquiescing to the invasion of space while asserting passive-aggressive control feels like a natural teenage response. The consequence? Students present as fuzzy fragments of their whole selves.
Students often tune in from nests in half-made beds. They snack. Some sit at kitchen tables as family members do chores. A girl in workout clothes is in the middle of a forearm plank when she realizes her camera is on; she lunges to turn it off and classmates chortle. When students unmute their mics, off-camera squabbles or celebrations (it’s not easy to tell) sometimes reverberate like cans tumbling into a dumpster. Students with quiet, private workspaces are overwhelmingly white. Students who show up on the way to work or wrangling cherubic diapered cousins are not. For these reasons, I don’t feel comfortable requiring cameras to be on.
For years after college I’d wake up panicked from bad student dreams: I forgot to buy books for a class I never attended. Now I have nightmares about silent, sneering, invisible students. A grid of pure black. In these dreams, I talk to myself and look at myself and hear my garbled voice bounce back through some unmuted mystery kid’s computer.
Under such circumstances, what tools help forge the community that students (and teachers) need? Or, how do I keep my nightmares insubstantial?
I become mime-like. I do what I call the “pandemic wave,” a jazzy two-handed flap. I give dramatic thumbs-ups to celebrate participation and loom over the camera’s green light until my face warps like a ’90s music video. I whisper conspiratorially about conflict with my family members having meetings in other corners of the house. My five-year-old waves on her way to the bathroom, and students hear the toilet flush when she’s done.
I try holding class from the laundry room, the only room in our loft-style apartment with walls and no toilet.
“Welcome to the laundry room,” I say. A silverfish scuttles over my bare foot. I’m aware of the circuit breaker behind my head, the interrogation-harsh light bulb above me.
Weeks later, my family out for the day, I give class a virtual tour, carrying my laptop around the house.
“Here’s the kitchen,” I say. “Here are my guitars. Here is where my daughter sleeps. Here are my bookshelves. Here is my desk.”
Normally I’m not a sharer, but I want to defuse the anxiety most students feel about sharing their homes, which happens when cameras are on. Each student reveals a world that classmates normally imagine. Accustomed to controlling their own social media brands, Zoom makes them vulnerable to scrutiny they cannot see coming — sometimes ogling, even mockery. In minutes, a classmate can screenshot a Zoom meeting and post annotated images to Snapchat. Or make a snarky TikTok ranking faces or hair.
As I whisk students past a row of potted plants my spouse (inarguably) loves as much as me, they needle me in the chat.
Damn, Simmons is rich
West Egg over here
“West Oakland, actually,” I respond, laughing. I’m aware my loft appears luxurious to some and cramped to others. My school is socioeconomically diverse: Some kids have backyard pools and golf club memberships and others share small apartments with multiple generations. The point is not to show off my guitars, records, and books, but to offer students a frank window into the world I usually keep hidden: the refuge from what is usually the workplace. If I can turn my camera on the half-chomped remains of breakfast on the counter, maybe more students will show their faces.
When I lead them to the newly paved outdoor patio, a quiet sanctum where cacti and arching rosebushes share a few hours of sun a day with gas meters, one student unmutes his mic:
“Time for a carne asada, Simmons.”
I interpret a yearning to rekindle a social tradition. He is superimposing a fixture of his world, one faded in quarantine, on the space he sees.
“Yes,” I say. “You’re all invited.”
Which, of course, they’re not. Not in real life.
When I move my monitor and school laptop into an unused upstairs bedroom at my mom’s new place in Oakland (to teach, not live, thank goodness), I introduce the class to my extended family. I’m honest with them: the cacophony of the wall-less loft was overwhelming. No one was getting enough work done; we were at one another’s throats.
My mom and stepdad hit Home Depot every day for a week, and host fellow retirees for wine and snacks in the semi-heated garage most nights. Theoretically they’re social distancing, but I confess to my students that they’re driving me crazy with worry about Covid exposure. Although I’m concerned about a deadly respiratory virus, not curfews or car access, I suppose I’m showing my class I’m not so different from them, rolling my eyes about generous and caring parents whom I depend on.
“I’m lucky,” I insist after joking about moving back in with my folks at age 40. “I’m thankful I have somewhere to work.”
Home lives are complicated. I’m sharing more than I’d like, being more vulnerable in a calculated effort to bridge a wider gap, but also because I don’t have the heart or bandwidth to temper honesty.
“In the long run one gets used to anything,” Meursault notes in The Stranger, but I’m not worried students will get too comfortable with this bizarro school, where their teacher wanders off-camera to marvel at a raven perched outside the bedroom window or allows a chat debate about favorite holiday foods to consume 15 minutes of class.
Green beans are gas, no cap
fattest cap
Mashed potatoes
Cappers, bruh
Pupusas
thats every day
Cue the laugh track, but I have faith that this will cause a chain reaction. That moving the guardrails of propriety boosts trust, that the kids may relax and feel more at home (at home). That they then may commit to academic and personal growth. That their writing and reading may improve. The overwhelmingly personal and creative assignments that spring from the texts we study offer chances to express this trust, to see it confirmed in the warm reception they may receive. History-inspired ghost stories in which students speak, if they choose, through the voices of ancestors. Open letters to future students about lessons learned during “the pandemic year.”
To add urgency, I publish their work in digital magazines with student-designed covers, sharing links, promising they’ll serve as time capsules for a collective experience long after the district closes student Google accounts, that the class will endure beyond the second tasseled caps fly skyward.
I accept that I will never know students as I’d like. I’ve identified the “black rectangles,” kids who never turn their cameras on. I would not recognize them if we brushed arms in a hallway. The black rectangles aren’t black holes though; they usually return messages. It’s always the same: siblings causing chaos, repairs on the house, illness, an uncle who won’t stop watching TV. It’s okay with me, I write back. It’s always okay with me. I’m Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye.
Fittingly, the most affirming moments are silent. A few students emoji-raise hands and chime in, but the class energy still crackles (albeit differently) when 20 names in various shades flit over a Google Doc table.
We read “Ask Me If I Care” from A Visit From the Goon Squad, and we’re talking about Lou, the music producer who preys on girls to shore up his sad fantasy of eternal youth, when the chat diverges from the text.
Men are disgusting
For real
KAM
KAM — what’s that? I ask. This is my section with 19 girls and just two boys, both named Jorge.
“Kill all men!” the writer shouts, and we have a good laugh, even one of the Jorges.
Weeks later, I stream Hamlet over Zoom and the class quickly pegs the title character as a jerk of high school proportions.
Wait what? he didn’t write those letters?
No, he did, but he’s upset and taking it out on Ophelia, I say in the chat.
WHAT
?
so dramatic for what 😪
he is being a dick
He is
Manipulative 😒✋🏽
Fake
gaslighting
F boy
Oh no…
Tea
#FreeOphelia
There is a strange new “4x4” schedule for remote school: not an ambitious In-N-Out order, but a split year in which teachers try to pack a course’s worth of learning into a single semester, and students switch to new courses for the spring.
When January arrives and our class comes to a close, I don’t know how successful I’ve been. I don’t regret the studied looseness of classes. I’m reasonably happy with the writing that students produced. I don’t trust the exit polls: Even protected by anonymity, students usually tell me what I want to hear. Education experts popular on Twitter say that it’s okay to not be your best self during a pandemic. Even as they announce dizzying schedule changes and the county’s disinterest in vaccinating staff, school administrators preach self-care. But caring for myself as a teacher means creating a community. Even in the ephemeral classroom without walls or desks.
Reading student work always helps me understand them better, but now it’s maybe the only way to meet the screaming imperative. I read closely because I’ll never know the black rectangles if I don’t, and this will be it, the deeper loss of what could have been, not just what was. Normally I’m sad because the thing we built collapses. Now I’m sad because, for all the chat chuckles and work preserved in digital amber they may or may not revisit, I don’t know if it was ever completed.
“Goodbyes are so hard,” sniffs a student on the last day of class.
But we hardly said hello, I think. I don’t put that in the chat. As rectangles disappear, I do the pandemic wave and click a red button to end things for everyone and watch the window swirl away before I go outside and get in my car.
In a week, I’ll try again.