NEEDED: Teachers. Students. Parents. Administrators

Will You Tell Your Story?

The pandemic quarantine has given me a lot of time for journaling, blogging and returning to my retirement project of writing a book for new teachers.  It dawned on me, that what has been dubbed “our new norm” would change some of the content of that book. So I revamped my layout and am dedicating a special section to our Covid-19 experience in education.

As a semi-retired educator, I know OF the struggles but I am not IN the struggle. Listening to my teacher friends and family on Zoom, I realize that I am a better conduit, than informer for the real stories. 

I am a cheerleader for my student teachers, enthusiastically coordinating meaningful learning and teaching experiences for them as their student teaching placements were wiped out from under them by the virus.

But Teachers! …struggling to find a way to make learning happen, as they discover what every teacher already knows in her/his heart… that children’s wonder and laughter is what makes a classroom, and subsequently THAT’s how the learning happens. But that is gone. And they are in mourning…

And Administrators.  …being called to read the situation on a whole new level and then to ask an already over-extended group of professionals to do ‘one more thing,’ as living rooms become class rooms, but without the human spirit to hold them together.

(My) current work station with email always open and our student info system. Missing is (my) phone used for texting admin team…

Parents, …struggling to keep a schedule, ‘teach’ their children, handle the fragile emotional state that the virus brought over each household, AND maintain their own job, or spend endless hours applying for unemployment…

And our students, from preschoolers who think they cannot go to school because “their teacher is sick”… to high schoolers, whose social life-lines have been reduced to texting, Twitter, Snap Chat and other social media… which they’re finding is NOT ENOUGH. They NEED to be with each other.

These stories need to be told.

You can paint for me a picture as someone in the “educational trenches” of what a “day-in-the-life” looks like. There’s a gold mine of happenings; both the struggles and the victories are worth recording.

So I am putting it out there. I invite you, the ‘soldiers in the educational fields’ to share your stories. Tell me how education has been changed by the pandemic and subsequent quarantine in a way none of us ever imagined…. Tell it from the perspective of you, the teacher, the parent, the administrator, the student…

Maybe you need to tell your story as much as we need to hear it… again, the human spirit of connecting. We all know that the best way to build community is to come to better know each other; to walk in each other’s shoes.

My hope is that I can take your stories, and put them in the  book I’m writing. It’s a book every teacher will want to own, to pass on, to share…

For now, please consider. I will accept your story in any form. Text me, attach a document to the blog, call me…

I’ll listen to your story and put your words onto the page.  I just ask for the stories. They need to be told.