Reflections on the Past Five Years
(from Harvard Class of 2007 Class Report entry)
From the chaos, I choose gratitude. I feel grateful for the ways this pandemic has affirmed the love and connections we humans share and build. Social isolation has given my husband and I so many opportunities to take joy in one another. I feel so fortunate that we have only grown deeper in love and closer in our companionship as we adventure in this wide world. The joy, humor, and trust of my students gives me so much hope for how life finds a way.
When they said "it gets better", they never explained that we were the ones who were supposed to make it "better". Three more things I learned, mostly about myself, though I claim no expertise:
Teaching has been healing work for me. It feels incredibly fulfilling to share in the "aha!" moments and witness the fruits of constantly challenging students towards their greatest potential. My students' curiosity, forgiveness, and love have sustained me throughout this pandemic and made both distance teaching and masked physical classroom teaching easier to bear and full of wonder. Being in the classroom gets me a front-row seat to the questions and concerns of the next generation. How marvelous it is to be taken along with them into the future!
Exercising healthy boundaries has been my key to maintaining a sustainable commitment to teaching and education. Some stubborn instinct drives me towards service, so I've been honing ways to work smarter as an educator. When the pandemic began, I was on a semester break to work on GenderInclusiveBiology.com. Much of the world was learning coping strategies and self-acceptance that I'd picked up from years of therapy after a chaotic upbringing. When I read about isolated students needing engagement in a scary pandemic I'd already taught in Physiology, I decided to return to high school teaching.
Teaching has also helped me love myself more as a positive element in the universe. To my surprise, distance teaching revealed to me strengths I didn't know I had. Teachers across the US and in homes that used the curriculum I shared wrote back encouragingly. Sharing what I was doing in my own distance learning classroom also helped me feel less alone. Knowing that the students showed up every day to connect with me and each other encouraged me in the most difficult times when mortality and anxiety felt fever pitch. Even if my self-confidence flags, the call to service keeps me going.