Today I swung by my classroom to pick up some equipment I need for this school year: a Geometry textbook, my clipboards, extra pencils, the Christmas chocolates I never brought home. It was eerie; we’d left, of course, not knowing how long we’d be gone but hoping to return before the end of the school year, and then we were encouraged to not return, and not to linger if we did. So my room was very much as I left it. There were graded papers to return to students, scratch paper with a to-do list partially crossed off, a stack of photocopied worksheets, the lumps of modeling clay we used in our last activity in Calculus. My classroom was stuck in time, the end of the school day on March 13, 2020.
During the spring shutdown, I had a pair of students show up for scheduled Zoom time in PE, though it wasn’t required. We would sit and talk for an hour or however long it was, about life and the times and whatever was consuming our hours. One of them had picked up oil painting; the other, guitar. We talked a lot about how we were responding emotionally to the shutdown, especially as May approached, and then June, and we knew we were nearing the end of the year. One of these students was planning to apply for an early college program, and the other was moving to Atlanta, so we were not likely to see each other in person again. We were sad about this, to the extent we were capable of feeling sad. But it was hard to feel much of anything when so little felt like reality.
Back when I used to play tabletop Dungeons and Dragons, one would often face the question of what to do when a player was unable to make it to a session. Sometimes, especially if it was more than one player, you just canceled the session. Sometimes you made an excuse for that character to leave the party for a period of time. Sometimes you’d tap someone else to play the character, but that felt weird. Sometimes you placed the character in what we called “suspended animation”, where everyone just sort of ignored the fact that they weren’t there, and then next session they were there again, hey there buddy, welcome back oh wait you were here all along weren’t you? Or were you?
Throughout the shutdown I felt, often, like that player who couldn’t make it. It didn’t occur to me until I was talking with my students and we all realized that we were feeling similar disconnects to reality, and the analogy became plain. Sometimes we felt like we’d canceled the session: that when the shelter-in-place ended we would just pick up back in March again where we’d left off. Sometimes we felt like we were in suspended animation, with the rest of the world traveling along without us, and eventually we’d all return and have to figure out what happened while we were gone.
I’ve mostly gotten over these feelings, so returning to my classroom was disconcerting. Normally at the start of the school year, you scramble to reassemble your classroom, after having put everything away for summer cleaning. But this year, everything was already in place, ready to go for March 16, which came and went and at the same time never happened. It was like walking through a home abandoned quickly, or maybe Pompeii minus the corpses. A pause in time that somehow became lasting, grew cobwebs, gathered dust, and kept on waiting, for a day in a different reality, a day that would never come.
I didn’t touch much of anything, except my clipboard and the textbook and the chocolates. I left it otherwise as I found it. It was like walking through history, like if I crept through it and slipped away unnoticed, maybe March 16 would come after all, and I could resume where I left off, in that other reality that still exists in my classroom.
But there are cobwebs now. The place is more a mausoleum than a museum. Either way, I was glad to leave.
