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The Pandemic Made Me Lose Sight of the Person I Want to Be
A year ago, I thought we would only be out of school for two weeks
I received an announcement last year, on this exact Friday, that school would be out for two weeks due to the coronavirus. I heard about the coronavirus on the news, but it seemed so distant for about two months. It was something that happened in China, in Italy. That week, however, felt ominous. We just had our first COVID case in Maryland a week before. My students shared memes and jokes about the coronavirus, one of a person sneezing at a bus stop and everyone else moving away, with one person spraying Lysol.
When I got the announcement we would be out of school for two weeks, I was honestly relieved. I was rounding out the last three months of my first year teaching, and I was just exhausted. Never had I felt so little control, so incompetent, as after November, my classroom quickly turned into a dumpster fire once my kids sized me up and realized I was too nice and would let them get away with too much.
I couldn’t manage my middle school self-contained classroom. Every day, I didn’t want to go into work. Every day, I tried to do better, only to fail more. I was a terrible teacher. I was tired of being called names, tired of feeling absolutely helpless, begging for June to come as…
