12 days in.
12 days of hybrid teaching and learning under my belt so far. I’m still trying to write every day to document this experience. The writing is cathartic, the writing is also a record. Due to school privacy issues, I cannot post pictures of my students, so I refrain also from posting pictures here that are obviously my school environment. I am a photographer and a documentarian. I want to show you. I think it is important for context and for the ‘the record’ as it were.
It is a beautiful foggy morning in the upper northwest section of Washington DC. The coolness and fog trigger sense memories of my won high school experience- the early before school athletics practices in particular. I want to run and sweat and play- I wish my body could do these things now as freely as I did them, but alas, adulthood has introduced all sorts of not so healthy coping mechanisms that come at a cost. Rich food, the cult of business, and the social hurdles of gender and identity as part of freedom of movement come at a cost.
Ahmaud Aubry was killed while out running, for exercise.
I wanted to be someone who paid attention to her carbon footprint, made decisions that were always in support of preservation, that chose clothing based on sustainability, ate healthily, and lived in harmony with the earth. Well, as a woman, who is also African-American, hair is a perennial issue. My hair is political whether I want it to be or not. Ride your bike, wear a helmet, sweat, what happens to your hair? What if I want to keep my hair long, not in braids or twists or locs? What if the external politicization of my hair affects my ability to get or keep a job? We are still in an age of humanity were en mass we as humans are unable to accept other humans as nature designed them- there are still communities where plastic surgery for adolescents to change the shape of their noses or their eyes is a gift from the family the message being- you are not ok, you are not beautiful the way you are and therefore we will help you change, so you fit it, so you will be included.
Inclusion= opportunity and safety, right?
Sometime in my own adolescence, my Mother began trying to teach me to cook. Outside of the easier everyday items like eggs, bacon, and pancakes, specifically, she tried to teach me to cook to help with Thanksgiving. I was great with the vegetables and the baking, it was the meat and meat parts that led me to choose to become a vegetarian. I can still remember the lesson about the turkey, how the additional parts of the turkey that had been removed in the packaging process where also re-bagged and inserted into the bird. How do you know that the internal parts are the actual same parts removed from this specific bird, I wondered. I understood that we, as African American people, had a proud legacy of taking the scraps from others to fashion a unique style of food for ourselves- we were survivors, and I understood that. I was proud of this, it made me feel special.
When my mother tried to teach me to cook Chitterlings- that was the end of the passing on of cultural foods for me. She opened the bag and within minutes I had stepped out of the kitchen door and vomited over the railing of the back stoop. My logical brain could not understand- we had to do this at one time, we now know that these things are not good for human people to eat regardless of their ethnicity and their history- so why are you teaching me to carry on a tradition that also leads to health conditions that are killing people- and people like us in particular? I still don’t understand. So, I became the object of much family teasing- a new tradition- for my non-conformity based on what I learned in school- the private schools that my parents paid for so I could have a ‘better’ opportunity in life. If they sent me to these schools to learn, and then I brought home what I learned and shared it with my family, and you told me that what I am getting, what I am learning will arm with knowledge and opportunity so that I can do ‘better’- why am I being teased for this? I’ve never, ever understood. Still don’t.
12 days into hybrid teaching and learning the structure of the day loosely resembles the 40+ years I’ve spent in school environments. The day to day experiences with my students- the human interaction part of education- releases dopamine and makes us feel good. It feels good to see people other than the people you live with, it feels good to have adult conversation face to face with the other adult humans I work with, the people on my team as it were. Humans are inherently social creatures as a species, so we humans feel good connecting with other humans, sure.
The good feelings don’t mean that COVID19 is gone. The good feelings don’t mitigate the danger of this virus that has killed over 250,000 Americans and 1 million Earth citizens. Yes, Earth citizens, other humans on our planet who may not share our ethnicity or national identities or religion or language.
The good feelings won’t protect me from the riskiness of interacting with 50+ students each week and by mathematical association their families and anyone they’ve been in contact with.
The good feelings don’t negate the mathematical reality of the probability that someone in our school community has COVID is asymptomatic and spreading it unknowingly.
The good feelings that we returned to in-person learning for X# of weeks- aren’t we an awesome institution- won’t give anyone’s family comfort if someone gets sick, or worse.
If I told you there was an active shooter on campus- there is someone who is randomly attacking people- and this person is invisible- would that change the conversation? This is like the childhood game of “murder” were one person is the murderer and you have to go around and either shake hands or make eye contact with people- winking at them or tickling their palm in a handshake to murder them. The rules of the game are that if you are murdered you have to count to 10 before you ‘die.’ Other in the game are supposed to try and detect the murdered based on their pattern of ‘kills.’
Pandemic= murdered. 14 day incubation time= counting to 10 before there is a consequence. How are we not seeing this? How is this an acceptable risk?
How is our human capacity to consider the well being of others so low, so corroded, how are we so selfish that we want others to engage in these unacceptable risks for our own comfort?
There are people who have organized protests because gyms, hair salons, and bars are inaccessible to them.W-T-F.
12 days in you know a little bit about what to expect, you know a little more about what to do, you know a little more about the energy it takes to do it even though none of the risks have changed. 12 days in you are responding to the dopamine and going in the direction of getting more positive hormones, more good feelings even if it is not logically what you should do to keep yourself and others safe because you are human and you are having a human response to stimuli.
What is the use of science if we are not going to use what we have learned to protect humans- even sometimes from themselves?
How long would we need to have stayed in Quarantine before it felt ‘normal’ to do so? 12 days into hybrid teaching and learning I’m fearful of the ‘normalization’ of this level of risk- as we know mathematically it means we are okay with sacrificing some of us for the benefit of others.
Is this what it means to be an American? The willing cannibalization of some-? How would you feel if we told you- statistically- that it were you? We are willing to sacrifice YOU, for the rest of us to go on.
You good?
Capitalism sucks.