When a bomb goes off, many of the people in the immediate
vicinity of the explosion often get killed instantly or die from their injuries
shortly thereafter. Some people may get hit with shrapnel or falling debris and
suffer life-threatening injuries, even if they ultimately survive. Others may
suffer minor injuries that are not life-threatening. Still others manage to escape
the explosion completely unscathed. Even a lucky few benefit, in a way, from the
destructive event. For example, think of the construction firms and the workers
they hire to rebuild what the bomb destroyed as just one example of those who
find fortune in the aftermath of mayhem. Ultimately, these effects of the
explosion are all felt long after the initial blast.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been like a series of bombs detonating
all over the world at different times and in different degrees of intensity. Like
an explosion, a COVID-19 outbreak kills many people. And just like an explosion
may leave many victims with serious long-term injuries, COVID-19 has claimed
its share of “long haulers,” or people who still have symptoms months after
being ill. The comparison between bombs and the pandemic doesn’t end with how
people suffer, though, because just like bombs may directly or indirectly
benefit some, COVID-19 has also greatly rewarded businesses and individuals
uniquely positioned to take advantage of the situation. It’s a well-known fact
that companies like Amazon saw a massive increase in sales as people staying
home relied more on the delivery of products, leading Amazon founder and CEO
Jeff Bezos to see his already considerable wealth increase by tens of billions
of dollars, even while many millions lost their jobs through no fault of their
own. And just like how the repercussions of an explosion are felt long after
the dust settles and the smoke clears, we will very likely be living with the fallout
of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of public health and the economy, for
many years to come.
Due to the nature of how the COVID-19 virus spreads, the
basic guidelines for preventing infection include wearing masks, social
distancing, and frequent handwashing. Although plenty of people taking these
precautions have still gotten infected, many of the people consistently adhering
to these guidelines have managed to dodge the COVID-19 bullet, including me. Throughout
this pandemic, I have avoided crowds as much as possible, worn a mask almost
every time I’m out of my apartment, and washed my hands almost to the point of
obsession. Of course, these personal safety measures have gone a long way to
keep me safe. However, I cannot overlook the fact that a big reason I have
managed to steer clear of infection is because of what I do for a living. As a
teacher, I am blessed to have a career with a professional organization
aggressively advocating on my behalf at the national, state, and local level. Thanks
in part to the efforts of the United Teachers of Dade (UTD), our local teachers’
union, schools in my district closed completely in March 2020 and reopened only
after the union was able to secure significant safety concessions, including
offering parents the option to keep their children at home with online learning
and strict masking, sanitization, and social distancing protocols for in-person
learning, including broad guidelines for quarantining any students and staff who
are exposed to the virus. Together with these important safety measures, we
suffered no layoffs or interruption in pay. In fact, amid all the chaos surrounding
the pandemic and school closures, UTD negotiated pay raises for members of the
bargaining unit.
So, when determining how COVID-19 has impacted my profession,
it becomes clear that it’s also important to acknowledge how my profession has
impacted COVID-19. Because without our union pushing for school closures and
the implementation of strict public health and safety measures upon reopening,
it is very possible that the pandemic’s impact would have been far worse than
it already is, since the proximity that comes with in-person learning could
fuel what would essentially be thousands of daily super-spreader events
occurring simultaneously across the school district.
Nevertheless, COVID-19 is having a profound effect on my
career as a teacher. We had to rethink and reinvent instructional delivery on
the fly when schools closed last year. This school year, we’ve had to navigate
the challenges of teaching both in-person and online students while observing
COVID-19 protocols at the school site. And as we reach the end of the school
year, we begin looking out toward a hopeful but ultimately uncertain future as
we anticipate the return to full in-person learning this fall. That is where
we’re at right now: still recovering, and in some cases still suffering, from
the havoc wrought upon our lives by the pandemic, all while keeping an eye
toward a future where things may be a little better in certain instances, a
little worse in others, but definitely very different overall.
Probably the area in which the COVID-19 pandemic had its
greatest impact on my career is in terms of self-care. Sure, self-care often
pertains to out-of-the-worksite activities, such as exercising and getting a
good night’s sleep. And there was certainly no shortage of ways in which my
increased self-care manifested in areas that had little or nothing to do with
work. With many restaurants closed or offering limited service, I naturally
gravitated toward cooking healthier food and eating at home rather than
ordering delivery. As a result, my cooking skills improved considerably. On top
of that, I also started doing things like baking my own bread and starting a
small fruit, vegetable, and herb garden in my apartment balcony. Being cooped up
all day long cooking and watering my plants, though, was not an option if I was
to take self-care seriously. So, I made sure to include lots of bike riding as
an opportunity to get much-needed exercise and fresh air.
Perhaps most importantly when it comes to self-care, the
COVID-19 pandemic taught me to appreciate every moment, because life is fragile
and way too short. This idea stretches beyond my personal life into my approach
to teaching and how COVID-19 has impacted my career. Now I find that, while I
still have the same high expectations I’ve always had with my students, I also
emphasize empathy. This is crucial because, to return to the earlier COVID-19 bomb
analogy, we don’t know which of our students or their close family members have
been caught at or near the proverbial ground zero. Also, while I learned early
on in my teaching career not to take things personally, the COVID-19 pandemic
has given that idea a booster shot. These are all parts of a holistic approach
to self-care. Because while eating healthy and exercising offer self-care for
the body, gratitude, empathy, and grace are self-care for the mind and spirit.
The idea of self-care created a solid foundation over which I
could build a whole new approach to teaching. And while we may be looking to a
return to normal soon, some of these new teaching practices I’ve adopted during
the pandemic are likely to become a permanent part of my teaching repertoire.
The first of these is the use of digital resources. I was not a stranger to
having students turn in work digitally before the pandemic. I have used tools
like Edmodo for years, and my students would see an online quiz from time to
time in my class long before COVID-19 was around. But school closures and fully
online learning forced us to forego physical resources almost entirely. Gone
completely, albeit temporarily, were printed packets and reading passages.
However, even as we prepare for full in-person learning next school year, I
intend to keep using many of the digital resources I came to rely on during the
pandemic. Not only is it easier to compile and analyze student data when they
turn in an assignment online, using digital resources also literally saves
trees, since we end up using a lot less paper. Assigning things online also
facilitates both remediation and enrichment, so I can better help the students
who are struggling and more effectively challenge those who are advanced.
One clear way that COVID-19 has impacted my career is by
amplifying the limitations that are a natural part of teaching. Dealing with
insufficiently motivated students is one of the constants of the teaching
profession. Often, these students lack parental support, but realistically it
can be a myriad of factors that contribute to a student struggling with school.
As teachers, we are always grappling with engaging unmotivated students,
challenging advanced students, and helping students who may not necessarily
have a motivation problem but could be struggling with any number of issues or
situations that require an individualized approach to help them reach their
full academic potential. This is all par for the course in the challenges a
teacher faces from one school year to the next. But COVID-19 has thrown a
veritable monkey wrench into this already challenging aspect of our profession.
Because on top of the obstacles we normally face throughout the day-to-day tasks
of our job, COVID-19 has forced us to reinvent what we do as we attempt to
teach diverse learners via Zoom while they are at home, often with all kinds of
distractions and sometimes even unhealthy home environments. Of course, there
is also the digital divide that exists in some communities, where the students
who often need the most help have unreliable Internet service or devices that
don’t work properly, if they have a device at all. There are many students who
have simply stopped attending Zoom class sessions altogether.
That doesn’t mean the teaching challenges augmented by the
COVID-19 pandemic are limited to online learning. In-person learning has also
changed. Because there are many students learning from home, and due to minimum
social distance requirements district-wide, classrooms are usually not as full
as they were pre-pandemic. And the students who are there are wearing masks
while they all sit facing the same direction. Cooperative groups where students
can collaborate closely together are not practical for safety reasons during
the pandemic. Activities where the students can take turns writing on the
whiteboard, while not prohibited outright, are virtually impossible since it’s
not safe for students to be sharing materials like whiteboard markers. A
vocabulary game I used to do that the students thoroughly enjoyed has been
indefinitely suspended due to the pandemic because it required students to take
turns at the smartboard and would thereby expose them to touching the same
surface.
As if all these challenges weren’t enough, we’ve also had to
endure frequent disruptions caused by students, teachers, and staff having to
quarantine due to testing positive for the COVID-19 virus or being
significantly exposed to someone who is infected. I lost count of the times an
administrator got on the PA and called down entire classes worth of students to
be sent home. The friendly morning and afternoon greetings or the chats with
our colleagues between class periods in the hallway were muted as teachers were
also sent home. Some teachers I haven’t seen this school year at all, except on
camera in our Zoom faculty or UTD unit meetings, because they received ADA accommodations
to teach from home full-time. While I don’t criticize these measures that have
been implemented to keep us safe, there is no denying that school morale has
been negatively impacted.
Another one of the most direct ways COVID-19 has impacted my career
revolves around my daily routine. First and foremost, when I arrive at my
worksite, I wear masks. For a while, I was wearing two masks plus a face shield.
I’ve stopped wearing the face shield, but I still wear a double mask. Once I
get to the classroom, my disinfecting and ventilating ritual begins. With a
disinfecting wipe in my hand, I open all the windows. I place a small
oscillating fan on the windowsill behind my desk and plug in an air purifier at
a nearby outlet. I wipe down the phone, desk, keyboard, mouse, monitor buttons,
desk drawer handles, doorknobs, and whiteboard markers. Finally, I walk around
the entire class spraying disinfectant. Once I do all of this, I feel safe
enough to remove my masks while inside my classroom. I get to enjoy at least a
few minutes of unrestricted breathing before putting the masks back on when the
students arrive. But it’s not just my interaction with my environment that has
been impacted by COVID-19 because my interactions with students and colleagues
is also different, as alluded to before. Sometimes I don’t see certain colleagues
or students for several days because they are under quarantine. Or I may not
see any of them at all, at least not in person, when I’ve been placed under
quarantine myself. And when I do see them, of course we’re all wearing masks,
and we keep our distance. Any physical greeting at all is usually limited to
the now ubiquitous elbow bump. Some of the teachers that I would see only at
faculty meetings because they work in a different part of the campus, I have
not seen in person at all this school year because our faculty meetings are now
on Zoom.
Most of these changes and adjustments have been highly
disruptive. But one unexpected development related to the impact of COVID-19 on
my career involves my own sense of job security. My first year as a full-time
teacher was when the annual contract law went into effect. That made my first
few years teaching a harrowing experience full of uncertainty and insecurity.
While I have since settled into my current teaching assignment at my present
worksite, rapid advances in technology, especially in the educational field, have
often made me wonder if it’s only a matter of time before teachers themselves
are deemed “obsolete.” However, COVID-19 changed that. If nothing else, this
pandemic has made it clear that the teaching profession is not going anywhere,
as many families across the country confirmed how important the face-to-face
interaction students have with their teachers and peers is for not only the
academic progress, but also the healthy social and emotional development of children.
The COVID-19 pandemic made many people realize, some for the first time ever
incredibly enough, that there is no substitute for in-person learning under the
guidance of a highly qualified teacher. So, I now feel much more at ease in my
career, not just because I was one of the very blessed and lucky people who was
able to retain employment throughout the pandemic, but because I realize I’m
not about to lose my job to a computer. If nothing else, with all the people
pushing to reopen the economy and get everybody back to work, I realized how
important my job is, even if some misguided folks see teachers as not much more
than “just a glorified babysitter.”
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the entire world is
severe and ongoing. Millions have died, and many millions more have gotten
seriously ill. To bring back the earlier analogy about bombs, the COVID-19 explosions
are still happening, even if they are decreasing in frequency and intensity in
some parts thanks to aggressive vaccination efforts. With such a pervasively
destructive event that has made such a negative impact on so many lives, it can
be difficult to even acknowledge that anything positive can come of this.
However, very often the best way to move forward is to get through all the
hardships and pain that come with the adversity and uncertainty of loss. Only
then can we begin to find the glimmer of a better tomorrow sparkling in the
distant horizon. That’s how I see the impact COVID-19 has had on me, and
especially on my career. I’ve lost family members and endured personal
challenges. My job as a teacher has taken on a whole new dimension as we strive
to meet the challenge of teaching our students under circumstances that are far
from ideal. But through it all, I get to keep the things that have made me a
better teacher, and that’s how the adversity of this pandemic can be turned into
a victory for the leaders of tomorrow.
