After 9 months, hope is on the horizon

I am a teacher at a Connecticut university, and as did most of my colleagues, I spent a recent evening getting next semester’s classes ready online. We use a computer system known as Canvas (it’s called an LMS and if you don’t know what an LMS is, good for you because it’s academic jargon, so who cares). I was sitting in front of a twinkling Christmas tree lit so bright I hope it can be viewed from space.

Laboriously, I was moving course content — assignments, readings, and the like — from Blackboard, our old LMS (whatevs). Starting with the first week, I dropped the assignments that fizzled, and added new approaches with the hope that this semester will at least be better than the last. The fall semester was brutal.

With a mountain of uncertainty surrounding what the pandemic would bring, instructors were asked to prepare each class as if it might be offered online, in person, or a combination of the two.

And then we went to the workshop out back and made unicorns. Mine walks with a limp. Sometimes, it felt like the entire semester did.

Preparing for a new semester is pretty standard fare, except last spring was anything but standard. We were introduced to yet another new normal, which makes me think most normals are new. We just don’t label them as such. As I worked week by week, I arrived at the moment last March, when the bottom dropped out of everything and we were all sent home to hunker down and conduct classes online. The pandemic had come roaring into Connecticut, and the best way to flatten the curve, a phrase we began to throw around like fetid petals, was to stay away from each other as much as possible.

It all seemed so drastic — not unnecessary, I don’t argue with scientists, but drastic. How could something you can’t even see be so deadly?

As of that week, my learning modules take on an entirely different tone. My jokes are softer. I explain more. I’m more encouraging. Most of my messages follow a theme: This is going to be hard, and I’m here if you need me. Without getting sappy ( I hope), I let the students know that things were going to be OK, though things might be awful for a while, but then — no, really — things were going to be OK. We’d get through this together.

Those lessons contain some of my finest writing, and it’s like looking at a scrapbook I forgot I made. And here, class, is where everything changed, and we changed with it — and here, and here, and — yet again! — here.

The writing is even more remarkable because in the frenzied few days when I rewrote the entirety of last spring’s classes, I was making things up. Would things be OK? I didn’t actually know they would, though I very much wanted that to be case. I only knew that we were sad and scared, and that teachers teach, no matter what. Drive a truck through the white board, we write on the walls. Flood the class, we stand on a chair. We keep the light burning even if we have to set fire to our own hair to do so.

This past semester, the fall, we went back on campus while the debate was raging whether that was a smart thing to do. While rewriting rubrics and teaching our lessons, we stayed in touch with students who were quarantined, sick, or just lonely and in need of cheering up. We held it together — sometimes with gum and wire — but we held it together and with any luck, we taught the students something.

To the countless lastminute requests to be granted dispensation for a semester spent not doing the assigned work, we are tempted to take a page from an academic who suggested online that students who want to bring a grade up at this late date engage the professor in hand-to-hand combat, maybe with swords. Winner takes all. This, of course, would not be allowed but it’s fun to think about.

Outside, a storm is throwing ice hard against the house as we head toward the longest night of the year. We are told things are going to get bad, maybe worse than they have been, but there’s a vaccine that gives us hope.

And then I found a box of lights I forgot I had, and even though I made a mess of things, I strung all of them onto the already- bright tree.

The longest night of the year is followed by a night that’s slightly shorter, and then another that’s even shorter than that. I barely know what tone to take as I write my classes. I only know I don’t feel triumphant, or that things are OK just yet. Instead, we are poised on the edge of... something. It feels too early for “The light’s just over there. Let’s walk to it.” But soon, I think. Soon. We zip into our gear and trudge through the storm to look at the holiday lights on my town’s green. Soon, I think. Soon.