UNINTENDED LESSONS
The trauma students are enduring is real, but we are only in the middle of the story. Our students are learning, and they will write the ending.
I have plans for my students. I believe my lessons can change their lives.
Every March I read Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone” with my ninth grade English students at Bellaire High School. The nonfiction book follows a team of scientists and soldiers who fight to contain an outbreak of an airborne strain of Ebola — a disease that, at one point, killed up to 90 percent of the people it infected.
Preston shares all the horrifying and bloody details of a virus that liquefies the very tissues of its host. And he makes the stakes clear. “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes,” he writes.
We read this gory book in a unit that pushes students to consider big, complicated ideas about how disease and politics intersect. We want them to consider what happens when humans face forces beyond their control and about how we tell stories to make sense of it all. It was book we picked thinking someday it might be relevant to the students’ lives.
I began to suspect that we might be making a real-world connection, and soon. The school closure hit around the time the Ebola outbreak reached its terrifying peak in our reading.
“If Spring Break turns out to
be a little longer because of this whole coronavirus situation, please go ahead and finish the book so that we can discuss it when we’re all back together in a couple of weeks,” I told my students, in an unintended lesson on the dramatic irony of hindsight.
One of many, many unintended lessons — not the first and not the last for these kids.
When it became clear that instruction for the next several weeks would happen virtually, I settled into teaching in pajamas with guest appearances from the cat and my baby. I framed the experience as an adventure.
But by the end of the month, the novelty wore off. Kindergartners may gleefully babble over one another via Zoom classes, but teenagers are a different story. I tried to cajole them into turning on the cameras on their laptops, but to no avail. I found myself staring at a screen full of avatar icons that my self-conscious students used to mask themselves.
If we had returned to school, we would have sussed out themes from the “Hot Zone.” “Let’s discuss how poverty compounds disease,” I would have said as we looked at the ways that access to health care, education and infrastructure played a role in the African outbreaks of Ebola. “But let’s not forget that disease doesn’t discriminate,” I would have continued as we considered the book’s argument that a respiratory strain of the disease could wreak havoc within the borders of our own country. “And if nothing else,” I’d tell my class, “I hope
that our study of disease has now convinced you not to dunk the restroom pass in the toilet.”
But we didn’t finish “The Hot Zone” this year, not how I intended. We were in the middle of the story when I knew that this year what my students needed was a break from that book. One student emailed me to share that her grandfather had passed away from COVID-19, and another confided that the constant stream of news about the current epidemic combined with the reading was making her anxiety spike. The real-word connections were all too real. I thought about everything else these students had faced, including gun violence, climate disasters and food insecurity.
So we moved on to our unit on Shakespeare.
As our semester of distancelearning slogged on, the boundary between school and summer became increasingly hazy. I think it’s possible that some of the students who stopped logging in to our virtual classes might imagine that the play ends with Romeo and Juliet riding off happily into the Tuscan countryside.
I am the kind of teacher who stresses out about the loss of 14 minutes from a surprise fire drill in second period. But as the weeks of social distancing turned into months, I tried to remind myself that in my 14 years in education, the most lasting learning has arisen from the occasion of the moment. Did students lose out by missing practice with participles or hearing my lecture on non-linear plot structure? I suppose so, but the lessons that really last belong to another category altogether.
Our students are learning, and they will continue to learn. It’s what their brains are wired to do at this stage of their development. The lessons might have changed, but so has the curriculum of the year 2020. They are learning that when you put on a mask before going into the grocery store, you are picking sides in a raging debate. Do you respect the authority of experts who have dedicated their lives to the study of science? Or are you taking your cues from those who say masks are an affront to liberty? They are learning that when you can’t have friends over to celebrate your 15th birthday, it is because you value those relationships and want the people closest to you to stay safe and healthy. And then having made that sacrifice, they know what it feels like to see posts of pool parties in flagrant defiance of social distancing orders.
They’ll learn that elections have consequences for our dayto-day lives. And I’ll bet that when they emerge on the other side of this, kids and teenagers will have a keen understanding of exponential functions. Everyone deserves a master’s degree in public health at this point. Some of my students deserve honorary doctorates for all they have gone through and all the unintended lessons they’ve gleaned from those experiences.
Because here’s the thing about the ending of “The Hot Zone” that I most wish my students and I could have discussed; humanity wins. I mean that in both of its possible senses — in the fight against Ebola, the world’s human population triumphed over a catastrophic virus, but also compassion and altruism and intellect are the tools that we used to defeat it.
What I wish I could tell all my students, their parents, and my fellow teachers is to look beyond the missed learning objectives.
Around Easter, I remembered how our classes had talked about the etymology of the word “quarantine” — it comes from the Italian
term quarantena, meaning “40 days,” a reference to the period of time a ship was required to wait after docking in Venice before passengers could disembark so as to stymie the spread of the plague. It occurred to me for the first time that a medieval quarantine was the same length of time as Lent, and surely that couldn’t be a coincidence. Our Italian predecessors must have intended an understanding that the sacrifice of one’s time was itself a form of communion.
And for me, one of those sacrifices would be my lost days with my students. Gov. Greg Abbott announced that school buildings would be closed for the remainder of the year. Teachers had a few hours to reenter the school and retrieve whatever we would need for the foreseeable future. My classroom felt like a museum to a different era: stacks of essays I had intended to grade, bright posters about club meetings that would never happen on the walls, and a forgotten lunchbox, with a month-old forgotten lunch, I realized, as I let it drop into the metal trashcan.
The trauma we are enduring is real, but we are in the middle of the story. I hope the ending will happen in August or October, or January, when I’ll get to meet my new students in person, along with their one classroom community item of Clorox wipes or tissues or hand sanitizer (because schools don’t have the budget to provide those items for classrooms). But how we get there is the lesson, and it’s one that we’re all going to teach.