Going Back to School As a Grieving Teacher

After a year of virtual classrooms, what have we learned?

This is Bell Ringers, a column by Erin Crosby-Eckstine about the state of contemporary education.

“Make lesson plans for two weeks. You probably won’t need them, but plan for it anyway.”

The principal flashes through haphazard slides about digital learning as we sit clustered around circular cafeteria tables, their surfaces sticky from the students’ afternoon milk cartons and Arizona Iced Teas.

“Since parent-teacher conferences are cancelled, you can use the evening to make your remote lesson plans. Stay in the building until at least five, as planned. Make time in your classes tomorrow to present them to the kids. Lastly, please hold your requests for more hand sanitizer and disinfectant; the school is out.”

I wiggle in my seat. The frost of New York’s 2020 winter has lifted early, revealing a sunny March that can wrap your bare shoulders in comfort, but inside, the air is heavy like bathwater, the breath of hundreds of teachers and staff heating and rising under the midcentury radiators. Should we even be sitting this close?

I run to the bus after six, staying late to make copies of a Joyce Carol Oates story for ninth-grade English. Remote or in person, it’ll be my fault if I don’t have a lesson ready to teach. The bus wobbles through Brooklyn to its terminus next to a grocery store, which I eye like a pool in a desert. The shops near me have already sold out of toilet paper and Lysol. My boyfriend could barely walk into the Target without colliding with dozens of frantic customers. I had already cut all my classroom Lysol wipes into fourths, then eighths, in the hopes of sanitizing the maximum number of desks between periods.

This store is no better. I twist through the throngs of people until I emerge, victorious, with one bottle of kitchen disinfectant. The bottle will come with me to school tomorrow; we’ll make do with soap at home.

The next day is Friday. Half the students are already gone, and the other half run through the halls, giggling and practicing TikTok dances, as though it is the day before summer vacation.

“Why haven’t we already closed?” they ask.

“The mayor is worried many students will starve without school lunches,” I reply.

“But people could die if we leave the schools open too.”

“Yeah, they could.”

I measure sprays of disinfectant for each desk after they go.

The administration announces the closure two hours before the end of the school day. Two weeks learning from home. I toss everything I can into a dusty green bin hidden underneath my desk: my classroom plants, the unit texts, my favorite grading pens. I lock the door to my bright-yellow classroom, not knowing I won’t step through that door again for a year and a half.

*

In the digital classroom, the students are all there at first. They join the Zoom calls and send chats, ask when we’ll go back to school, share the pets curled in their laps. But, as the sirens outside get louder, more of the boxes on my screen begin to go black as students turn their cameras off. Attendance in my classes dwindles. I hear rumors of students who’ve lost their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents. I send them messages that are never answered.

It takes me three months to buy a desk. Teaching high school was meant to be one of the only jobs where I’d never need one, as papers are best graded on the sofa. I tell people who ask that I can’t find a desk small enough to fit into my junior one-bedroom, but the truth is, getting a desk feels like giving up on my little yellow classroom. So instead, I spend three months redesigning the walls of my water-damaged apartment into a space that resembles the home teenagers might expect their English teacher to have, one filled with books (the truth) and free of empty wine bottles (the lie). My partner and I alternate between the used Karlstad sofa that makes our backs ache and the coffee-stained dining bench where I keep the papers I’d grabbed when I left. I spend the days teaching literary devices while sirens and protest chants echo in the background and the nights writing lesson plans for units I never intended to teach, feeling the time until my partner’s visa expires tick in my chest. When my partner leaves for London, Covid cases surge, and my back pain is bad enough to keep me from walking, I buy a desk.

It becomes clear to me that society does not see American teachers as people, but as the binary stereotypes of the “good” or “bad” teacher. Pop culture loves this dichotomy: Bad teachers are Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, drunk, foulmouthed, and unfeeling. Good teachers are Miss Honey from Matilda, effectively adopting their students and living solely for the job. Bad teachers are seen as underqualified and overpaid by public funds, turn on movies instead of lessons, and terrorize children in the name of education. Good teachers work day and night with smiles on their faces, through sickness or health. They create imaginative experiences funded out of their own pockets. They die for their jobs, whether at the hands of an infectious virus or a deadly weapon. Bad teachers are the reason why we can slash the education budgets; they don’t deserve the money anyway. Good teachers are also the reason why we can slash the education budgets; they don’t do it for the money, they do it for the kids.

I think of myself as a good teacher, so I do what I’m supposed to and teach six months at that desk in total isolation. I spend my winter waking up early for classes and working well into the nights. I counsel students through their assignments. I console them through the deaths in their families. Even as a self-proclaimed introvert, I feel my resolve crack from the solitude of talking to blank screens all day. I hide my tears from my students and colleagues and admonish myself for crying, telling myself I should be grateful to have a job in a time where many people are unemployed with no options.

By the new year, I don’t know how the world sees me anymore. Nor do I know how I see myself. I strive to find meaning in my work while also being able to eat. I’m willing to put in a few long nights or extra dollars each year to benefit my students’ learning, but I’m not willing to give up my basic mental and physical health. I would put my body on the line for any of my students, but I will also fight to avoid that situation at all costs.

*

By March, I teach my English classes from my grandmother’s desk. It is a heavy dark wood with golden handles, the same one she has had for as long as I can remember. The surface is scattered with her notes; scribbled to-dos and phone numbers in a shaky but unmistakable refined cursive. I run my fingers over her words, wondering if they are still fresh enough that the ink will stain my fingertips. I turn on my Zoom and share my slides as the digital bells ring to alert me that the students are joining. I swallow and close my eyes.

You can’t be this version of you here. You can’t show this side of you now.

The students notice right away that the background is different; they don’t recognize the beige walls or the closet behind me bursting with files. I smile and tell them the truth, that my grandmother passed away that weekend and I am in Alabama to help with her funeral arrangements. I don’t tell them the whole truth: that I hadn’t seen my grandmother, my role model, since the Thanksgiving before the pandemic, that I’d flown down to Alabama as soon as I got the call that she was ill, that she’d died while I was on my way from the airport. That I am surrounded by scraps of her that I can’t assemble into the real thing. Somehow, a few of the students still see it all. They message me how sorry they are, how they want me to take care of myself first, how they know my grandmother is in heaven looking down on me with pride. I swallow my tears with a smile and send them to their breakout rooms, where they’ll work on their short stories while I draft my grandmother’s obituary.

Late at night, after the family arguments wind down, the lesson plans are finalized, and the six-hour time difference ends my FaceTime calls with my partner, I lay in bed awake, reading the news I missed during the day. Each article has the same refrain, expressing the joy that would come with reopening and the disgust with those in our society who hold us back. I know that in the eyes of these politicians, writers, and leaders, I am part of the latter category. I am not teaching in the school building, even though I’m vaccinated. I don’t believe it’s safe to attend again until the students also have the chance to be vaccinated. As my weeks in Alabama wear on and vaccination rates increase, the refrain gets louder. District leaders tell us that Covid is not a real threat anymore, that us teachers are taking a paid holiday working from home. Parents begin to accuse teachers of being lazy or uncaring. Mayoral candidates take aim at teacher’s unions as the reason why the city’s reopening is so sluggish.

After several years in the profession, I am used to being scapegoated, but hearing this after each day spent teaching at my dead grandmother’s desk begins to chip away at my armor. I go back to New York right after the funeral in anticipation of in-person teaching, not knowing if my medical accommodations will be honored much longer. Shortly after I return, my grandfather dies suddenly.

The cycle begins again. I plaster on a smile. I get blue hair in the hopes it will distract from my puffy, tear-soaked face. I try to salvage the grades of my failing students who’ve disappeared from my class. I tell students why my lung disease keeps me from working in the school building like some of the other teachers. I plan a week’s worth of lessons and take the last of my seven days off to attend my grandfather’s funeral. I drown in a grief I’ll never surface from.

My grandmother was a teacher too. She met students hours before classes to tend the class sourdough starter, took teenagers on overnight trips to New York City to study fashion, and even broke up a knife fight in the hallway. I became a teacher because, even as an adult, I always wanted to be just like her. I love my job immensely; I can’t imagine myself doing anything that makes me as happy as talking about stories with my students. But I, like many teachers, am entering this school year tentatively, still healing from the grief and betrayal of a year that made me feel disregarded and disrespected in my work.

*

While politicians and other leaders will never say out loud that they feel that my career—one that I’ve devoted years of work and education to—is nothing but glorified babysitting while adults stimulate the economy, that belief is implied through their actions. When divided down to an hourly wage, my position in New York City, a municipality with some of the highest teacher salaries in the country, pays about twenty dollars per hour (which, incidentally, was my babysitting rate as a college student). Most teachers in the United States spend over $700 of their own money each year on supplies due to lack of funding in schools. Buildings in urban areas are notoriously dilapidated, an issue that produces safety concerns for both staff and students. In essence, public school teaching does not make a direct financial contribution to the free market economy, but instead is a long-term investment we as citizens make in the future of our nation. The opinion of those in charge is often clear: If the teaching isn’t about money, why bother paying them well? If the schools are filled with children our white supremacist society does not value, why ensure they have a safe and healthy place to learn? If the kids and teachers in schools aren’t making us more money right now, why bother treating them with respect?

This fall, students and I will be back in the school building for the first time in nearly eighteen months. I imagine in many ways the first day of school will be like those I’ve taught before; I’ll guide nervous new high schoolers through their class schedules, I’ll gasp at the growth spurts of my former students, I’ll write lesson plans, throw them out, and rewrite them again. But this will be the first year where I don’t recognize many of the faces of students I was teaching only a few months ago, who hid behind black Zoom screens. It’s the first where I won’t be able to hug students I haven’t seen in nearly two years. It’s the first where I might be more nervous than my ninth graders. It’s the first I walk into in mourning, not just for my grandparents, but for my trust in a profession I was silly enough to believe loved me back.

Even through my grief, I know that little will change about the career I’ve devoted my life to. Every year, I give all I have of myself, whether the classroom is my little yellow one or my Zoom screen. I get the annual privilege of meeting one hundred new people and teaching them the power of language to transform their worlds. Nothing will ever approach the swell in my heart when a student falls in love with a story, grasps a new literary concept, or writes something beautiful and expressive. But, this year, there may simply be fewer pieces of me to give.