Teaching During the Apocalypse

Everything is hard. Nothing works as it should. Textbooks are due.

In lieu of a spring break, this semester our university has declared two “instructional break” days, one a Tuesday in March, the other a Wednesday in April. We are not to have class, hold meetings, or do work on those days. Some thoughts:

1. On the Tuesday in March, I got a flood of administrative emails, mostly about committee business and all the things we all need to do.

2. I absolutely understand that the one who sent all those emails was probably drowning and grateful for the chance to catch up on this “off” day, and also, when you have to come into the office on your day off just to keep yourself afloat, something is very wrong.

3. It’s not really an off day if you have to send emails.

4. Everyone is trying their best.

5. We went to this policy to discourage our students from traveling and thus spreading the plague. Many of my students traveled anyway, logging into the virtual classroom from hither and yon.

6. Everything is hard. Everything is painful. Nothing works like it should.

7. I love my job. I believe that I am good at it.

8. I am alive. I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.

9. I don’t know.

10. People who work outside of academia may look enviously at the academic calendar — there are no spring breaks for ditch diggers. They are right! Ditch digging is harder!

11. Those within the walls of academia know all too well the sheer tonnage of hyper-concentrated work within a given semester, and also understand that teaching is but one part of the academic’s responsibilities, and therefore understand on a bone-deep level that “spring break” time is actually “try to breathe” time so we all don’t spin out and lose our minds, trying to do the impossible.

12. Try to breathe. Try to do the impossible.

13. No one likes complainers.

14. Sometimes I think about the future, the fall (textbook orders are due, syllabi are due), about how we’ll all be in person then, and if my children will be vaccinated (no), and how there are currently 600 students quarantined in the Iowa City school district because our governor demanded the return to in-person school, and I wonder how we’re going to make it, but I wonder it in a kind of abstract, “I wonder if there’s water on Mars” way, a way that acknowledges I have zero control about any of it and anyway I’m too busy with the present to borrow trouble from August.

15. Maybe it will be fine.

16. What I really need to do is steel myself for our end-of-semester festival, which this year we should rename Theatre of Zoom Cruelty because it’s going to be zoom after zoom after zoom after zoom after zoom and there’s nothing for it, nothing, it’s the iceberg and we’re the Titanic, we are all trapped by forces larger than ourselves, we beat on, we beat on, we beat on, please god save us (no), more, harder, more, again.

17. Textbooks are due.

18. I can’t help but feel all this would be easier if I could just talk to people, just look my students in the eye, their real eyes, not these pixelated simulations, if we could be humans together. They are drowning. They are furious, and they are drowning. Sometimes they are furious with me: why can’t I be better? Why can’t I fix the thing? I don’t know why. Some of my other students are disappearing like chalk drawings in a thunderstorm. Where are they? If I could just see them, talk to them, hold onto them, tug their arm, say “this way” but really, what way? I only know together is better than apart. But it’s not to be.

19. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m failing them.

20. Will I ever write again? Is this it? Does this count?

21. I love my job. I believe that I am good at it. This is my rosary.

22. I’m so tired. There might be something going on with me, something under the hood. But who can tell? Who can parse out pandemic stress from Something Is Wrong? I can’t sleep, and I’m so tired.

23. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. Nothing is good and everything is fine and I love my children and my spouse and my dog and my life and we’re making it, I swear, we’re making it. Things are already better.

24. I will get through this semester. I don’t know at what price.

25. Nobody likes a complainer, Megan. Other people have it harder.

26. All art is a radical act of hope, even the depressing stuff. It’s an act of survival: I am here. I did this. This is my truth. And I offer it so that you will see me, and know me, and through me know my truth which is your truth, perhaps, and then you will feel seen and known, even through we are strangers, and so it’s a miracle, how we connect with each other across impossible distances, across time, across space, across fury and pain.

27. We are together in this moment.

28. Let it be enough.

29. Send in your textbook orders. The future is here.