A Hug

How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?

I haven’t had a lot of time today to respond to this prompt until now. I don’t want to break my streak of daily posting, but I also don’t want to pass up this topic. I’m going to deviate a bit from what this is asking. After all, I don’t see many changes anymore that were brought on by the pandemic. Much of what changed has disappeared. Everything is open again, fewer people are social distancing and/or wearing face masks, and really, except for a new annual vaccine being available, there isn’t much change that I have seen still existing. Perhaps it’s because it’s all part of the norm now. Certainly things have changed permanently, such as having the option to hold meetings and events virtually now. Or at least more often than they were held in that format prior to Covid.

The changes that existed at the start of the pandemic, however, are at the forefront of my mind. And the simple reason for that is because of someone who came by my office yesterday at work. My office is a tiny little hole-in-the-wall space that was initially temporary while our “real” offices were being renovated. I really don’t like my office, which rumor has it, is now permanent. It opens directly onto the hallway and sits between two classrooms. Remember, I work at a community college. There are classrooms all up and down the hallways of the building I’m in. The ones on my floor are for the adult classes. Upstairs, many of the classrooms are for the high school students. The high school is not an early college, but it’s a school of choice that has the label “polytechnic”. It’s a good college prep type school.

Yesterday, with about 15 minutes left in the day, my supervisor was standing in the doorway of my office and we were just chatting. There was a young man that walked past my door and then back the other direction. He appeared to be lost. It happens frequently in my building. It’s a busy hallway and often people aren’t sure where to go to find a particular room. My supervisor turned and asked the young man if she could help him find something. He said no and something else. Then, he spotted me sitting at my desk. As my supervisor described it today, his jaw hit the floor, and his eyes got so wide! He pointed at me and very excitedly proclaimed, “That’s my middle school teacher!” I didn’t immediately recognize him. I had taught middle school (6th through 8th grades) for about six years before becoming a principal. A lot of students have come through my classroom. When I asked him who he was and he told me, my mouth and eyes matched his. I did remember him. I hopped up and went out to greet him. He hugged me with the strongest, most excited hug. Before we parted ways, he hugged me twice more.

I asked him how long it had been and he said about 5-6 years. That meant he was about to finish high school, the one upstairs to be exact. I spoke to him for a good 10 minutes and learned that he’s applying to schools in New York City and is particularly interested in going to Columbia. As his former English teacher I gave him my card and told him I would be happy to review his entrance essay if he wanted. He had expressed concern about it.

What connects this encounter with him to the pandemic is that this young man was in the 6th grade during the 2019-2020 school year…the year that saw the kids at home doing school virtually for the last two and a half months of the school year. And come to think of it, his family didn’t return the next year. He went to a different middle school as I recall. But I do remember that year with him in my class. I remember always helping him with essays that I had assigned. He asked for help as much as he could because it was obvious he was trying hard and wanted to do well. It was difficult to help him and the other students in that same manner when we were all at home. When the pandemic started, us teachers were just beginning to learn Google Classroom. Classes were not conducted live. It was us posting assignments, the kids doing them, turning them in, and us providing written feedback through email or messages on the virtual platform. Near the end of that school year I had gotten the idea to record videos of lessons and posting them on my private YouTube channel for the kids to watch. To say it was a challenge is an understatement. It was an incredible amount of work to prepare all of that and evaluate the students and help them through the assignments. We hadn’t yet established expectations and norms for this type of learning environment. It was doing whatever we could to get through until the end of the year. Seeing that former student yesterday and hearing about his grand ambitions to get into an Ivy League school warmed my heart. I was only one teacher that he had one year for one subject. But that partial Covid year didn’t hurt his learning like it did for so many students in the public schools who had an entire school year of learning like that after that first shutdown. Our school opened back up in the fall. Which brings me to the next thing that I remember about the pandemic.

This student yesterday hugged me with an affectionate fierceness. That couldn’t have happened in the pandemic years. When my school reopened after summer break, social distancing was a huge factor in our ability to reopen. We had protocols in place for the students wearing a mask, for interactions with each other, and generally anything that involved them sharing a space. Students couldn’t so much as touch the same school supplies, like scissors, that other students had touched. Forget about touching the students themselves. This was particularly difficult for one young lady, who even as a middle school student, used to greet me with a great big bear hug every morning. The year we reopened, when she could no longer hug me, I overheard her at lunch one day. She was telling her friends that when this is all over, she was going to give all of her teachers the biggest hug ever. I never got another hug from her because her family moved away before the restrictions were lifted and she could hug us again.

I’m so glad that social distancing is not a change that became permanent. Of course, it’s still a good practice, especially during flu season or if you’re sick yourself and don’t want to infect other people. The human element is what was so difficult to be without during the pandemic. The isolation from others, even when in the same room as them, was tough. I couldn’t kneel down next to a student’s desk to give them that personal attention when they had a question or needed help with something. I had to help them from 6 feet away. Or 6 miles. Some students participated in class from home and were present on their computers while others were in the actual classroom. That was an even larger challenge.

I’m glad that now we are back to a time when I can express my excitement over seeing a former student with a hug. I can engage in a catch-up conversation without having to put a large gap between us. Introvert though I am sometimes, I still need to interact with other people in a manner that allows for true connection. It’s an important part of what makes us human. May there never be another global pandemic that keeps us as apart as we were back then.