In March of 2020, I said, “See you on Monday” to my students on what I believed to be an ordinary Friday, albeit a Friday the 13th. That would be the last day I would see them for months. There was a period of uncertainty as everyone grappled with our new reality. The unadulterated meaning of pandemic, hit fast and hard.
After weeks of educational triage, sending emails and hoping that students would tune into our online classrooms, the 2019-2020 school year ended with only a brief respite before the next school year began. March to May was rough, but how could we learn from what didn’t work during “quarantine teaching?” How do we uphold educational integrity while still acknowledging that we are in the midst of a global pandemic and a fragile time socially and politically? The weeks separating school years were filled with questions like these. So many things left unanswered as the world we lived in was in flux.
Educators had to come up with answers and solutions.