In Person
The Perfection of Being There Imperfectly
I haven’t been inside a classroom since March 12, 2020, when I told my students and colleagues “See you in two weeks” and shut the door, wiping down the door handle behind me with a spray bottle of sanitizer and a paper towel. What followed, of course, was beyond our wildest imaginings.
Over a year over Zoom, and I’ve gotten accustomed to staring at my laptop screen at the grid of student faces (cameras on), or names and pronouns (cameras off), muted, or unmuted. I’d forgotten the heart-pumping breathlessness of climbing four flights of stairs, the flicking on of the switch and buzz-glare of the florescent overhead light, the placement of my water bottle and papers on the table, the genial din of conversation, the palpable energy.
Yesterday I went back to school.
Walking into the building, I showed Ed, the security guard, my ID, which features dark-haired autumn of 2019 me. I said something about my current gray and Ed took off his baseball cap. “And I got balder. Whatcha gonna do? Welcome back.” When I got to the classroom, I met two students I’ve been teaching all year but had yet to meet in person. They were taller than I thought they’d be. Three of my old students have undergone their own transformations over the past 15 months. Of course, I wanted to hug them, but of course, I couldn’t. Prior to class, I had been instructed not to bring cookies (the chairman of the writing department knows me well). The class was a hybrid, half in-person, half over Zoom. The school laptop no longer recognized my sign-in credentials, so a student lent me hers. I kept having to toggle between muting and unmuting the Zoom mic, since we were working with another writing class in another room. Of course I would screw this up more than a few times, so I was in a steady state of tech anxiety, but still, happiness leeched through.
As imperfect as yesterday as yesterday was (and trust me, it was imperfect, not being able to see the smiling half of my students’ masked faces, and having the side conversations pop up not in the room but over Google Chat) it was still pretty perfect, because it offered enough to remind me that once upon a pre-pandemic time, I loved this job. In person, we breathed so much life into the space and time frame we occupied together.
To be honest, I am an introvert who feigns extroversion, and I recharge during my alone time. I have had moments during quarantine when distance and solitude felt like an embarrassment of riches. But I am also 100% experiential, and seeing these kids I’d grown closer to despite the meh of Zoom reminded me that I love being there in the reaction in the moment, the reading of social cues, the forming of friendships between students, the inside jokes, the bearing witness to the lightning creative breakthrough moment. Yesterday’s glimpse may have been brief and flawed, but now I remember what keeps me in this gig: everything it once was, and everything it will be again.