I have started and deleted this post at least 3 times. Each time I started the words just never came out right and never worked. This week marked my 6th week hybrid teaching and it also just happened to be the first week the general education teachers in my building started hybrid teaching.
This morning as I drove to work conversations we have had during my team and conversations I have overheard recently started to nudge at me…” You should share with your friends and teachers in your building how you felt when you started last month. Someone might need to hear your experience.”
Today after my teaching day was done I wrote this email and hit send.
Hi all-
I have had a few conversations and overheard a few conversations lately and it made me feel like it was time for me to share something. Six weeks ago we (my special education team) started teaching students in a hybrid model. Some of our students would be in-person for 1/2 the day while some students would also be remote and at certain times all of our students would all be remote. My first week teaching in this model was the hardest and most challenging week of my 22 years of teaching. I would drive to school and suddenly start to cry. I would leave school to drive home and cry some more. At home with my family, I felt this overwhelming sadness that wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t until later in the week when a friend asked me about my week and I decided I was finally going to be honest about how I was feeling that things started to change. I told them I was sad, sadder than I had ever been in my life and the only way I could describe it was that it felt like my best friend (being a teacher) had died and I was mourning its loss.
The days went on and the more honest I was with my friends, the better I felt. I also started notice other things that helped (and I am not a huge…oh boy! yeah! its self-care… kind of person). I noticed that adding things to my day that bring me comfort made a difference. Like, having my travel mug of homemade Chi Tea, that my friend taught me to make, every morning. I noticed that giving myself grace by taking things off my plate started to help too. If I didn’t have the energy to make dinner I stopped and got dinner (sometimes even more than once in a week). I made sure I got out and walked. Even if it wasn’t the more rigorous workout I would usually want to do, I was moving and it made me happy. Finally, I started to really focus on the reason I loved teaching, my connections with my students. No matter how hard my day was, every smile (under our masks), every laugh together or each new thing I got to know about my students made my day better and it made me happier.
So know that this does get better. The hard and different will get easier….and no matter what we all have each other and none of us are in this alone!
Carrie
Whether you are deep into hybrid teaching or just getting started, none of this is easy, none of this is something any of us would have ever expected to be doing in our teaching career. Most of all, caring for ourselves, being there for each other and consistently building our relationships with our students will fill us up and get us through this.
There are things, ideas, tools, technology in education that are made to specifically do [insert description]. I am reflecting on the power of mismatch thinking. The power of thinking differently about what things are created to do. Changing our thinking, retraining our thinking to think about what they can do for us and our student’s learning. What if we stopped thinking what technology and tools say they can do and started using what they can do to enhance student learning and improve teaching.
