By Aimée N. Lanteigne
SABATTUS — With few exceptions, 2020 thus far has been a year most folks would prefer to forget, or maybe at least fast forward through. There has been precious little to celebrate lately with the worldwide lockdowns, job losses, illness, and unrest around the nation.
Brides had to cancel their dream weddings, babies were born without proud grandparents in attendance, old folks were completely cut off from their loved ones, waitresses were laid off, and seniors left school one Friday afternoon never knowing it would be the last day of their in-house high school or college careers. Despite the innumerable blessings in my life, I have fallen victim to depression and anxiety in the midst of the world’s angst.
You see, for the last 12 weeks, I haven’t laid eyes on a single one of my students at Oak Hill Middle School. One day in March, we were having a 200th birthday party in our classroom to celebrate Maine’s bicentennial with cupcakes, whoopie pies, cookies, you name it. We set up a green screen in our room and each of us chose a beautiful Maine-themed scenery background and then filmed ourselves saying what we loved most about our state. It was a wonderful day, a bonding experience and a little piece of history, but we didn’t know just how historic it actually was. When the dismissal announcement sent kids to the buses, we walked them out, pushed the chairs in, and headed home for a well-deserved weekend, never imagining we would not return on Monday.
My balloon of hope deflated a little more as each deadline to return to school slipped by with yet another extension of the shelter-in-place order. Teaching remotely, while better than nothing, simply cannot replace face-to-face, in-person education. The social, mental and emotional connections made at school between teachers and students — and peer to peer — cannot be mimicked virtually, despite our greatest efforts. Technology can be a wonderful thing, but it can never replace human connection.
I spent 12 long weeks teaching from my couch or my kitchen counter or my dining room table.Twelve long weeks of staring at a gallery of 20 little black screens, each with a name, but no face and no voice. Most students turned off their cameras and their microphones, so I really only got to converse with a handful of kids willing to show their faces or speak up. I missed them all so much, and told them so each and every class.
What I wouldn’t give, I told them, to be back at school with a zillion paper airplanes aimed for my head and all those adolescent goofballs chasing each other around the tables at top speed using their very best outside voices! I meant it, too. As the academic calendar year drew to a close, attendance in each class ebbed. I knew I was losing them to the weather, to isolation, and to sheer frustration with the situation that just never seemed to improve.
On June 4, our last day of classes, I announced a few special awards in each of my seventh-grade classes, then had kids complete an end-of-the-year survey. When I said goodbye to my last student in period 5, I closed the lid of my laptop and sobbed like a baby. Twenty-five years of teaching had come to an end just like that. No hugs, no cards, no adult beverages with colleagues after closing up our rooms for the summer. It was one of the emptiest moments I have ever felt as a teacher.
Thankfully, that sadness wouldn’t last long. The very next day, a ray of hope finally broke through the clouds. Oak Hill Middle School had planned a reverse parade to celebrate the end of the school year. When I asked my students how many of them planned to attend, I mostly heard crickets; nevertheless, I looked forward to the simple act of driving to school, to seeing my co-workers (albeit outside the building maintaining six feet distance) and to celebrating the end of one of the toughest years of our professional and personal lives together, or at least as “together” as we could be. Teachers greeted each other excitedly, happy to be together again, but finding it so strange not to be able to hug one another.
We decorated our vehicles, put up our posters, blew up our balloons, put on our Hawaiian leis and readied our noisemakers. At precisely 6 p.m., school resource officer John Dalbec, released the line of cars that had been waiting at the foot of the school entrance. From the bus circle, where all the teachers were positioned, we couldn’t see what was approaching.
Easily a hundred vehicles came streaming up the road toward the school. Kids were hanging out the car windows, standing up through the sun roofs, riding in their parents’ truck beds. Many held signs thanking the teachers, wishing us a great summer, and proclaiming our unity together as a school.
A fire truck came through, blaring its siren and sporting a “Thank You, Teachers!” poster. Wow. That’s when it hit me. We weren’t on the front lines of this pandemic. We didn’t have to mask up day after day and put ourselves in harm’s way like nurses and paramedics, not seeing our families for weeks. We aren’t heroes, but in the midst of that parade, I realized something. To those kids and to their moms and dads, we ARE heroes. Not giving up on them, calling them, emailing them, checking in on them, telling them we missed them, we loved them, and continuing to try to teach and get them to produce work was more appreciated than we knew, not only by their parents but also by the kids themselves.
As the cars rolled along, many stopped to thank us or tell us goodbye. We shouted out well wishes for the summer, best of luck for the kids moving on to high school, and stretched out our arms in virtual hugs. It was a beautiful, warm, blue-sky evening, and for the first time in a long, long, time, I felt hope.
Who knows how much longer this will go on — the pandemic, the school closures, the shutdowns, the uncertainty? It is my fervent prayer that we will emerge from this tumult soon, and that the world will be a better place for having struggled through it and figured it out together.
Since 1978, I have looked forward to a new school year every September. Whether as a student or as a teacher, I have not known a fall without school since I was four years old, and I don’t want to start anytime soon. I want my students back. They give my life purpose and meaning, a reason to get up each day, knowing that I am passing on what I know to the next generation so that a little piece of me somehow goes on.
As the hour-long parade petered out, Office John Dalbec rolled through to signify the end of the evening. We packed up our lawn chairs, took down our balloons, put our coolers away, and headed home, one by one. We don’t know when we will “see” each other again, or our kids, or our school, but the overwhelming outpouring of support and thanks shown to us by our RSU 4 parents and students at the parade gave us a renewed sense of hope.
These kids are young. They will persevere. They will survive. They will shape the future to make it better than today.
I am still young. I will persevere. I will survive, and I will help give them the tools they need to make tomorrow better than today.
