I didn’t write yesterday and maybe that is why I was so tired last night- no outlet so I carried the frustrations with me and it wore me out. Maybe.
On Monday after I attended the Zoom meeting at school I decided to leave campus and go on with my day. Frustrated with having to come to campus on a national holiday, a pain point that reinforces the ‘in it but not of it’ positionality of my school community, we were expected to stay on campus until noon to ‘do our own work’ and/or meet with the IT staff (1 person offering to help 60+ faculty members in a 30-minute window) and/or have department time. WHY??? With everything that we are managing as people, as humans, after a huge lift and adjustment to shift to hybrid learning and being hyper-vigilant all week about sanitation to avoid transmission of COVID19 what we all really needed was a BREAK. That would have been useful and respectful and earned some trust from us faculty but that is not what happened.
So I left. I went to the grocery store and then home and I logged in for the remaining sessions of the online conference I was attending. The next day when I checked my work email there was a note from the Head of School apologizing for missing the mark in the planning of the PD day. There was an apology that said ‘I didn’t think this through’ followed by ‘I wasn’t paying attention to you or considering this from your perspective’ that concludes with an admission that she has not been in our classrooms so doesn’t fully understand our challenges wrapped up in toxic positivity. The next official communication I read from the school, published on the same day, was an email to parents talking about how wonderful it is to see everyone working so hard in their classrooms- giving the impression that she had indeed seen what was going on in the classrooms. So, which is it? How do I trust given the disparity? I’m sure I don’t have all the information here to fully understand the situation. What I do have, and the way what I do have plays out does not engender trust nor respect. This is the atmosphere that has been created.
Yesterday was day one all over again with the second cohort of students. My anxiety was off the rails watching students not observe physical distancing. Risk is high. I’m still not convinced that the risks being undertaken by faculty are translating into actual gains for our students.
We are still in the middle of a pandemic and the president of this country is hosting rallies that are being compared to Jonestown- people not wearing masks, people crowded together. For people who understand math and science watching these things is a literal horror movie. Do you see what I see?
I waited until yesterday to finish my ADA request for accommodations paperwork. I waited because even though I had calculated based on my abilities that the situation being proposed would not work for me I am a team player and I wanted to try. I don’t want to be ‘accommodated’ I want the situation proposed to be equitable and meet everyone’s needs. But that is not what has happened here. So for a week, I tried to hear across a 6-foot divide with masks. In a one-on-one situation, this works. In a classroom with other noises, it does not. I found myself bridging the divide too many times- this is a health risk for me and the students. This means I cannot model the appropriate safe behavior. This means I cannot do my job in these conditions because my body does not function the same as everyone else. I filled out the paperwork and hit send.
I texted with my retired father (who is also hard of hearing) about my feelings. I reached out to my therapist (who I have not seen in almost a year because I had “graduated”) for some additional support. I’m reasoning with myself constantly that I am not stupid or deficient because I cannot do my job as exceptionally as I have in the past due to these new working conditions. This is uncomfortable, this heightened vigilance and anxiety is not sustainable. If I don’t make some changes this may drastically affect my health- how do I know? Because it has happened before. I’m still scared every day and it does not feel supportive to work in an environment that doesn’t understand this nor take this into account. Writing about it has been helpful. Writing about it is an outlet and a record of how it is going from my perspective at the moment.
In the car on the way to work I try not to listen to news. I listen to the satellite radio that I subscribe to- which was a great investment when we were spending a lot of time in the car, maybe not so much now.
So as I’ve been writing all of this today I’ve got Billy Joel’s Downeaster Alexa as my earworm. Tone.