As it turns out, it was not, in fact, a lack of time that has prevented me from blogging. Because for the last 75 days, I’ve had nothing but time, and I still haven’t written much.
75 days. It’s been 75 days since I last taught a live, in-person class. It was an unusual day, for reasons completely unrelated to the coronavirus. I had a meeting during first hour, returning just in time to teach the rest of my day. We’d had a performance the previous night, which meant the chairs were still in their auditorium-style setup. Since there was to be a second performance that night, I opted to leave the chairs alone and just make it work. COVID-19 was starting to be a topic of conversation, and the idea of “flattening the curve” was starting to enter our vocabulary. I took a few minutes in each class to explain what it meant and why it was important. At some point that day, I learned that our evening performance would be cancelled due to coronavirus concerns, so I had one of my afternoon classes return the room to its normal setup.
How we were to know that this was the last day we’d see our students?
During my planning hour, I received a mass email from church informing us that Sunday’s service would be online-only. My colleagues and I figured that a school closing was a high probability, but we had no idea that our planning-hour conversation would be the last time we were together in the same physical space for… well… 75 days and counting.
sistering along 