teaching in a pandemic

 If you're new here: hi, I started teaching English this fall, despite not having a teaching degree, kinda making it up as I go along, but I have enough base knowledge to really fudge some things and now I'm here. 

So, pandemic. 

Let's get this one thing out of the way: I'm in North Dakota, which is like, one of the bad ones. One quick bing tells me we're number 2 in Worst States to Be In For COVID Right Now, second only to our neighbor to the south, so that's real fun. This is probably because good ole Doug didn't issue a mask mandate until like, last week, so all we could do to make the kids put on their masks was uh. 

Tell them. Which didn't always work, because we didn't have any real support. School board says we can't make them. School board says we can only request. Now we've got a mask mandate. Gotta wear it. 

So about half of the high school has moved to distance learning. This doesn't sound like it would be super bad, and in fact it's not, it's just... weird? Let's get this straight, this is a rural fuckin' school. There are like, less than 50 kids in the high school. Today, I counted and, with the non-VoTech English IV kids as my witnesses, "Huh. 23 in-school, 25 distance." My last class of the day, English II, went from thirteen to two. 

Two. 

So we're trying to all coordinate sending materials home and the language is more "when we go full distance" rather than "if we go full distance" because we've been distance twice already this year, just briefly, but we have been, and now one of the paras is out with symptoms and four more kids got quarantined and there are three eighth graders in the school and nobody really knows when anyone is coming back. One of my seniors, in a fit of frustration today said, "At this point we might as well just go distance!" 

And like, he's kind of right? It is so weird to have such calm, quiet classes. And don't get me wrong, classroom management has been a breeze with half the kids. But I kinda miss arguing with a kid for three hours a day. I miss having to say, "No, you do not have projectile privileges, finish your work." I miss the rousing class discussions the eighth graders used to have! They still have the main talker, that's true, but we're missing five of them! I've only been teaching for like, four months; I can't help but wonder how much it sucks for teachers who have been teaching for longer. 

It's a weird world out there. Least I haven't knowingly had COVID yet.