Returning to Schools: Why Academic Regression Isn’t My Main Concern

I’ve been teaching High School for just shy of a decade. My classroom has been full of the typical, English class stuff: we discuss Beowulf and the tragic hero, analyze Shakespeare and declare Lady Macbeth to be the most well-written antagonist in history (alright, well, I do). We write reader’s responses and research papers and break down MLA format ad nauseam.

But those things, only take up 40 percent of my day.

What could possibly occupy the other 60 percent of my time, you’re wondering?

As a High School English Teacher?

Ask me the last time I had a prep in which I was able to actually do what preps were intended for. There is often a line waiting at my door when I walk into school, only on my second cup of coffee at 7:45. But, they’re not waiting to ask me for an extension on their paper, or for another letter of recommendation.

My classroom is weekly (if not daily depending on the time of year- thanks a lot Valentine’s Day) flooded with tears, tales of horror and woe, betrayal, stories of incriminating photos. A lot of talking with one’s hands, waving phones about and over each other. It looks like the floor on Wall Street. But only until you listen to what they’re actually saying. My students put Shakespeare to shame. It’s straight-up Orwellian in my wing. The drama, the intrigue, the neediness.

I’ve adjusted to the cycle of this, “invisible work” and pursue the following in order, like a surgeon searching for cancer; I’m working on a bell schedule, you know?

1. Identify and empathize with the problem

2. Assess whether or not the situation requires administrative and parental attention (the most difficult part)

3. Hand out tissues (hugs and other forms of physical contact are forbidden), pats on the hand, pep talks of how High School sucks for everyone and assurances that life does in fact, get better in college.

It never feels like enough, because it seldom ever is. Nothing hurts like the first time a heart is broken and watching them flounder to recover amidst issues of bullying, social media exploitation, and general unkindness is a painful harkening to my own High School experience; and that was before selfies were a thing. I went to school in the dial-up, comp-u-serve, and myspace age- otherwise known as the nineties. The technology may have been different, but the heightened emotions were the same.

I think that’s something that people who aren’t surrounded by teenagers all day have a difficult time remembering. Adolescents aren’t “angsty” or “angry”. They’re not “moody” or “dramatic”. All of those feelings of frustration, hurt, pain, confusion, despair, loneliness are real and true and for most of them, have never been contended with on this level before. We don’t hand a child a bike and expect them to know what to do with it. They must be taught, encouraged, instructed. When they fall (because they will) there will be a bit of blood, and a lot of apprehensions to try again. People tend to believe that it’s quite, “hands-off” when they walk through the door to 9th grade- nothing could be further from the truth. I walk through my own front door a little after 5 pm feeling as though I ran the NYC marathon in flip-flops and it’s not because I taught Oedipus for the 134,987 time.

It’s not their fault they’re exhausting. They don’t know what to do with their intense emotions. Their sadness. Their sense of overwhelming despair. They’re looking to us to teach them, support them, hold them up, remind them they have a safe space, a purpose, a team of people rooting for them. Let’s be clear in that they’ll never actually say that to your face. But, the proof is in the pudding. When I finally think I have time to get to that one last research paper waiting to be graded on my desk and there is a small, tentative knock on my door. Another story, another box of tissues, another hour is gone.

This is the work I have been doing for a decade. Under, “normal” circumstances. But things have been anything but normal, and they haven’t had our doors to darken with their tales of teenagedom for months. At school, there is a team of adults assessing, analyzing, planning and supporting their needs. But at home, it’s just been them, a screen, and if they’re lucky, a parent on another screen the next room over who will occasionally ask if said child has eaten or changed out of their pajamas. So, what will happen when and if we return in September? After they have been isolated, alone, scared, disengaged, and without the resources they have been used to? After they have experienced the loss of loved ones, freedoms, and been denied rights of passage? I can tell you that as much as the powers-that-be argue for the reopening of schools in order to prevent academic regression, I can almost guarantee that I won’t have enough time to usher out a greeting before opening my door to an onslaught of scared kids who simply need reassurance that something in their lives is back to, “normal”- even while their desks are 6 feet apart.

For the good of teachers everywhere, please add extra tissue boxes to the school list.