covid 19
first year
reflection
time off
COVID Quarantine — Week 1
March 22nd, 2020
No. I will not apologize for not writing. I created in other ways, like collaging and editing a vlog together.
With all this time on my hands, I've been reading a lot of poetry. Two Saturdays ago, I went to downtown GR on a whim to register to vote. It was too late for me to register online, and the free bussing and sunshine lured me right out of my house. After registering and voting, I made my way to the main branch of the library and skimmed across the poetry shelves, looking for covers I recognized from Goodreads or names I knew from Twitter. I picked up 3 books, Natasha Trethewey, Ada Limon, and Danez Smith, and have been reading them alongside my usual fare of YA books.
Trethewey wrote a lot about grief, and two of her earlier poems really got me. "Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky" paints a picture of Trethewey's parents and ends with her mother lying "down among clover / and sweet grass, right here, right now— / dead center of her life." It knocked the wind out of me, and then I thought, "I could write a poem like that. Calculate the center of Mom's life."
Whenever I connect on a personal level to a poem, my first thought is to mimic it. But I'm trying something different today (because writing poetry is dang hard): I'm going to muse about a poem that struck me—"Killing Methods" by Ada Limón.
The poem felt disjointed to me the first time I read it; perhaps it did to you as well. Limón pivots from a metaphor about stories to grief to people outside of grief to her killing a truth. As someone whose profession is to propel people to love stories, this poem is making me question how we do that. Limón seems to argue that we draw stories from our own lives and wrestle them into an agreeable form. We take the wildness and stab it out of our stories, only leaving the beauty. But I'm not sure that is everything. At the end of the poem, the speaker is killing out of desperation, out of a plea to be believed and understood. Writing and storytelling and the narratives we tell ourselves about it can seem so calculating, but in reality writers write to understand themselves and understand the world around them.
During this moment, I've been avoiding writing, despite Penny Kittle and Kelley Gallagher whispering in my ear, "Write every day. Write every day." I feel the pressure to pluck the perfect story, to arrange its limbs clearly, and to script the genus clearly under it. I want to make sense of this historical time and to document, to show what it's like to be living through this. But I'm not sure "how to hold this truth," so I've been letting them fly away. But when I'm back to regular teaching, when the children are driving me up the wall, or when I'm in year 2 of remote teaching, I will want to be reminded of how these days slipped through my hands, at how I couldn't touch anyone, how I finally understood the pain of dry skin and of the world being out to get you at any moment, and how keenly I felt the absence of things like my church community, a regular structure, and a general assumption of safety. These stories seem boring and over-abundant, but perhaps I'm just afraid of what their confinement on a page will show about me.
In other news, the entirety of Ada Limón's The Carrying is as thought-provoking and beautiful as this poem. Find some way to read it, please. Here are a few of my favorites that have found some homes online:
* * *
March 18th, 2020
5 Acts of Tenderness: (inspired by this prompt from Twitter)
* * *
March 17th, 2020
I made a daily schedule for myself to keep myself accountable during the craziness of the world. It’s a little lenient, as in a lot of free time where I get to read and watch movies and whatever, but one section of it is “Academic work.” Two hours in the morning that I commit to working—planning lessons, updating my resume, deciding if I want to teach at River City again next year.
Yesterday, I went into school because I had to rearrange my classroom for cleaning. I also wanted to connect with my coworkers and get some work done. I hunkered down in my transformed room (desks piled to the left, chairs in rows like I was about to put on a show on the whiteboard) and worked for hours on my lesson plans. As I left at 2:30pm with lessons printed and in my mailbox, I thought “Awesome, I don’t have to do any work tomorrow.”
This morning, I planned on watching the Metropolitan Opera’s video of Carman, streaming for free until 3/17 at 3:30pm. I hunkered down, grabbed some popcorn, and watched the first five minutes before I googled “Carman summary.” Then, as you do, I hopped from summary to Facebook to Twitter, where the first thing I saw was Penny Kittle.
Penny Kittle is my teaching hero. I adore the work she does. So when I clicked on the video of Kelly Gallagher and her talking about teaching and learning and saw that it was 31 minutes long, I thought, “I trust Kittle. I guess this’ll be my academic work for today.”
Gallagher and Kittle talked about books and writing, but they began by acknowledging that teachers need a community during this time. They had both just shared some lesson plans for online learning for their classroom, and Kittle was surprised at teachers not just saying, “Thanks for your thinking” but also “Thanks for reaching out.” So they decided to talk for a bit each day about their pedagogical thinking and how it intersects with the coronavirus pandemic today. If you know Kittle and Gallagher’s work, it was very on-brand: talking about their own writing and reading and how to get students passionate about their own work.
At the end of the video, Gallagher closes with “Thank you all for hanging with us today. We look forward to building a community of thinking and a community that’s going to help us through these troubling times.”
And me, the washed-up English teacher who has been teaching art, who is so excited to not be teaching for 3 or more weeks? I started to cry.
I’m worried about my students, yes. I’m worried that they won’t be able to learn like they were at school. But I’m also concerned that these students aren’t getting the kind of English education that Gallagher and Kittle are providing. When they talk about students writing in notebooks and student choice, and then I turn around to hear my coworkers discussing testing our students for the skills they know and creating lessons around that, I want to scream. I wish I could convince my school system that these short stories focused on skill-building isn’t the way to teach students to take in information and love reading. I wish I had the courage to walk into that English classroom and put the focus back on language rather than testing.
But perhaps these kinds of videos and this kind of community will start that courage. Right now, it’s making me want to write and document. So here I am, welcoming you into my space. Make yourself at home.
No. I will not apologize for not writing. I created in other ways, like collaging and editing a vlog together.
With all this time on my hands, I've been reading a lot of poetry. Two Saturdays ago, I went to downtown GR on a whim to register to vote. It was too late for me to register online, and the free bussing and sunshine lured me right out of my house. After registering and voting, I made my way to the main branch of the library and skimmed across the poetry shelves, looking for covers I recognized from Goodreads or names I knew from Twitter. I picked up 3 books, Natasha Trethewey, Ada Limon, and Danez Smith, and have been reading them alongside my usual fare of YA books.
Trethewey wrote a lot about grief, and two of her earlier poems really got me. "Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky" paints a picture of Trethewey's parents and ends with her mother lying "down among clover / and sweet grass, right here, right now— / dead center of her life." It knocked the wind out of me, and then I thought, "I could write a poem like that. Calculate the center of Mom's life."
Whenever I connect on a personal level to a poem, my first thought is to mimic it. But I'm trying something different today (because writing poetry is dang hard): I'm going to muse about a poem that struck me—"Killing Methods" by Ada Limón.
The poem felt disjointed to me the first time I read it; perhaps it did to you as well. Limón pivots from a metaphor about stories to grief to people outside of grief to her killing a truth. As someone whose profession is to propel people to love stories, this poem is making me question how we do that. Limón seems to argue that we draw stories from our own lives and wrestle them into an agreeable form. We take the wildness and stab it out of our stories, only leaving the beauty. But I'm not sure that is everything. At the end of the poem, the speaker is killing out of desperation, out of a plea to be believed and understood. Writing and storytelling and the narratives we tell ourselves about it can seem so calculating, but in reality writers write to understand themselves and understand the world around them.
During this moment, I've been avoiding writing, despite Penny Kittle and Kelley Gallagher whispering in my ear, "Write every day. Write every day." I feel the pressure to pluck the perfect story, to arrange its limbs clearly, and to script the genus clearly under it. I want to make sense of this historical time and to document, to show what it's like to be living through this. But I'm not sure "how to hold this truth," so I've been letting them fly away. But when I'm back to regular teaching, when the children are driving me up the wall, or when I'm in year 2 of remote teaching, I will want to be reminded of how these days slipped through my hands, at how I couldn't touch anyone, how I finally understood the pain of dry skin and of the world being out to get you at any moment, and how keenly I felt the absence of things like my church community, a regular structure, and a general assumption of safety. These stories seem boring and over-abundant, but perhaps I'm just afraid of what their confinement on a page will show about me.
In other news, the entirety of Ada Limón's The Carrying is as thought-provoking and beautiful as this poem. Find some way to read it, please. Here are a few of my favorites that have found some homes online:
- Dead Stars (I'm obsessed with this poem; see collages below)
- Notes on the Below
- Ancestors
* * *
March 20th, 2020
March 20th, 2020
(inspired by Ada Limon's "Dead Stars")
* * *
March 19th, 2020
* * *
March 18th, 2020
5 Acts of Tenderness: (inspired by this prompt from Twitter)
- Today I sat down at the dining room table. A benefit of living with five other people in a house that used to be a duplex is that you can still avoid other people when you need to and find them when you need to connect. Linnea took one look at me and said, “How are you doing with Shira leaving and Annika flying out?” I paused and said, “Actually, not that great.” I verbally processed with her, leading me to realize that today was not going to be an average day of productivity.
- A student emailed me for a password the other day. Since I’m teaching an elective class for middle school and a specials class for elementary, there aren’t a lot of students clamoring for my attention (which makes me feel less-than, especially when all the educators I follow on Twitter are like “I miss my students so much! They keep sending me videos!”). But I replied, gave some best wishes, and she wrote back “Thank you Ms. Johnson and I hope you are doing well and staying safe. See you soon.”
- I’m being cautious because of the pandemic. On my way to pick Anni up to bring her to the airport so she can fly home, I briefly considered the idea of keeping the 6 feet between us since she’s been at Calvin and encountering different germs. But when she held open the door to her apartment, there was no way that I was not going to give her a hug.
- I’ve taken it upon myself to plan “fun-tivities” since I’m the only one in my house that is on semi-vacation due to the quarantine. For the first one, I decided to teach the adults in my house the origami I’ve been teaching middle schoolers. It went interestingly to say the least; however, they were very gracious with my “just fold it!” instructions and hand-waving on how perfect it is supposed to look.
- Linnea played Psalm 126 on the piano yesterday, and it reminded me of how beautiful worship music can be.
* * *
March 17th, 2020
I made a daily schedule for myself to keep myself accountable during the craziness of the world. It’s a little lenient, as in a lot of free time where I get to read and watch movies and whatever, but one section of it is “Academic work.” Two hours in the morning that I commit to working—planning lessons, updating my resume, deciding if I want to teach at River City again next year.
Yesterday, I went into school because I had to rearrange my classroom for cleaning. I also wanted to connect with my coworkers and get some work done. I hunkered down in my transformed room (desks piled to the left, chairs in rows like I was about to put on a show on the whiteboard) and worked for hours on my lesson plans. As I left at 2:30pm with lessons printed and in my mailbox, I thought “Awesome, I don’t have to do any work tomorrow.”
This morning, I planned on watching the Metropolitan Opera’s video of Carman, streaming for free until 3/17 at 3:30pm. I hunkered down, grabbed some popcorn, and watched the first five minutes before I googled “Carman summary.” Then, as you do, I hopped from summary to Facebook to Twitter, where the first thing I saw was Penny Kittle.
Penny Kittle is my teaching hero. I adore the work she does. So when I clicked on the video of Kelly Gallagher and her talking about teaching and learning and saw that it was 31 minutes long, I thought, “I trust Kittle. I guess this’ll be my academic work for today.”
Gallagher and Kittle talked about books and writing, but they began by acknowledging that teachers need a community during this time. They had both just shared some lesson plans for online learning for their classroom, and Kittle was surprised at teachers not just saying, “Thanks for your thinking” but also “Thanks for reaching out.” So they decided to talk for a bit each day about their pedagogical thinking and how it intersects with the coronavirus pandemic today. If you know Kittle and Gallagher’s work, it was very on-brand: talking about their own writing and reading and how to get students passionate about their own work.
At the end of the video, Gallagher closes with “Thank you all for hanging with us today. We look forward to building a community of thinking and a community that’s going to help us through these troubling times.”
And me, the washed-up English teacher who has been teaching art, who is so excited to not be teaching for 3 or more weeks? I started to cry.
I’m worried about my students, yes. I’m worried that they won’t be able to learn like they were at school. But I’m also concerned that these students aren’t getting the kind of English education that Gallagher and Kittle are providing. When they talk about students writing in notebooks and student choice, and then I turn around to hear my coworkers discussing testing our students for the skills they know and creating lessons around that, I want to scream. I wish I could convince my school system that these short stories focused on skill-building isn’t the way to teach students to take in information and love reading. I wish I had the courage to walk into that English classroom and put the focus back on language rather than testing.
But perhaps these kinds of videos and this kind of community will start that courage. Right now, it’s making me want to write and document. So here I am, welcoming you into my space. Make yourself at home.
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