The B-side of my Covid Teaching Years

I, along with so many other teachers, found myself having to remake myself during the worldwide pandemic.  Teaching elementary age students art virtually was one of the most challenging assignments of my teaching career. My work life was turned upside down and I was expected to adjust, adapt and provide instruction in a way I never imagined. 

Why did I feel like I needed PTSD therapy at the end of school year 2020-21? Why was the life sucked out of me daily while teaching art to grade schoolers? Why did I feel utterly inadequate, inept and ineffectual after 22 years of teaching? Oh, maybe because, I taught on-line art classes to kids during the Pandemic.

Entering the teaching year 2020-21, which I have come to call, the Shit Show Cluster Fuck, SSCF 2020-21 for short, I realized I was going to have to up my tech game. The “specials teachers”-those of us who teach art, music, physical education, digital media (the title given to 21^st century librarians) discovered in mid-August 2020 that we would be teaching virtually on Google Classroom all year. Instead of groups of 20-25 students visiting our classrooms for 45 minutes at a time for hands-on creative experiences, our class sizes would rise to 40-50 students for 20 minutes twice a week for on-line lessons. Talk about a schedule change. I would have to wrap my head around teaching an art lesson in 20 minutes without any shared materials, using whatever kids had at home. I knew I had to get supplies to my kids, all 600 of them. I cajoled my principal and begged our PTA for extra funds. I knew my typical pre-Covid budget of $4 a school year per student would not go far. Luckily, both the principal and the PTA were willing to work with me. I was confident I could figure out the supply dilemma - however, I was not as confident in the delivery of instruction completely on-line.

After a particularly challenging morning at work, I was running out on my lunch hour to fetch dinner supplies, when a phrase lambasted me on my way to Dominick’s, our local grocery store.

“Dig deep, dig deep that’s what we have to do”

That phrase played on repeat until I reached the parking lot. No tune. Just the words, playing over and over in my head. As I turned the key to shut the car off, a melody hit me. I knew I had to start writing. Unfortunately, the only paper I had was the grocery list, so the chorus and first verse of “the song in my head” were added to the list.

Chorus

Dig deep, dig deep that’s what we have to do.

Life’s about the moment we have to seize it me and you.

We all have anvils hanging on our heart.

Open heart for others is a great place to start

 Verse

We like to live our lives, believin’ we’re in control.

Thinking day to day creates a status quo.

Our lives are not our own friend, best to jump and hold on tight.

The adventure’s always worth it if you can let go of the fight.

I lost myself in the creative process of getting those words out of my head and down on paper. I never made it into the grocery store and was almost late getting back to school for my afternoon of teaching. I didn’t get dinner supplies, but I captured the start of a song.

I will come clean, I can sing. I sang in choirs all through school. l was awarded the leads in my high school musicals. However, I am not proficient at reading music. I can do it, but I never actually learned any of my parts by plucking notes. I faked my way through reading music. I learned my musical parts by listening intently, imitating the musical or choral director, and eventually memorizing songs by ear. I faked it until I learned it.

Racing back to Benjamin Franklin Elementary to teach an afternoon of on-line Google Classroom ART to my students, I had half a song playing in my head. That was my teaching life in the SSCF school year of 2020-21.

Let me step back a bit and explain my antiquated tech solutions prior to the pandemic. The art and music rooms at Ben Franklin Elementary were designed as an addition in the 1980’s. The original building is a 1920’s red-brick, two-story colonial structure that has been added on to over the years. The Arts wing design is less than optimal. Students must walk through the Music room to get to the Art room. Whatever one teacher is presenting the other class is privy to. My Art students constantly sing along with the music class. On days when I walked into the Music room before school started and I spied the music teacher arranging the drums, I knew it was going to be an Ibuprofen kind of day.

The kid teaching next door grew up with technology. I avoided it. My pre-Covid tech solutions were solved by projecting my voice loudly, “Mr. Van Duzor, can you come here for a moment?” He quickly understood what that call meant. He kindly and graciously popped his head between the wall, “What can I do for you Mrs. Dallman?” My millennial cohort was able to solve whatever tech issue I had in two minutes, but all of that changed once we had to teach virtually. 

Prior to pandemic teaching, my job was very physical. I rarely sat down. I ran on a loop preparing the art room for 600 kids a week, organizing supplies, teaching classes and running from table to table helping young artists create, then cleaning it all up. In 2020-21, I taught to a computer screen with one-quarter inch boxes staring back at me. Some of those squares held attentive children, some squares were black with a name in a corner, occasionally there was a square on my computer with a child jumping on their bed or playing with their pets while I tried to impart some art wisdom. 

Not only did we teachers have to learn new technology to be able to deliver instruction, but we also had to learn to practice patience and calm when the tech platforms did not work. The first couple of months, if the technology didn’t work or there were glitches which seemed to occur daily if not hourly some days, I panicked. Heart pounding, sweat beading on my forehead, eyes popping until I could figure out how to fix the problem.

In November of 2020, I made a conscious decision not to add any new technology to my teaching regime. I had mastered presenting lessons through video and live demonstrations, and I was able to trouble shoot on my own- without panic or hysteria. Students were engaged and I was receiving positive feedback from parents that their kids were enjoying art that year.

After figuring out the technology, I had to plan how and what supplies to get my students. Back in August 2020, I found cheap sketch books for every student. I slapped a blank white 6x9 inch sticker on the front of each sketchbook and organized pick-up arrangements for each class either by parents or delivered by our social worker. The first art lesson was a self-portrait which kids drew and colored on the front of their sketchbooks. I asked them to draw themselves as an Art Superhero because that is what we were that year.

The percolating half song was hanging out in the back of my head while I was packaging individual art supplies, planning out the next week’s lessons and researching the next artist we would study. When I needed a break and needed to recharge, I pulled out my notebook of half-baked songs and tried to move each story forward. In spite of the fact, I didn’t know how to denote the tune I was trying to create. Lucky for me I worked closely with someone who did.

During lunch, I played the voice recordings of my songs to my music teacher buddy, and he transposed what I created into musical chords. He listened to the parts of the melody I had recorded on my phone and wrote out the notes I had sung. This allowed me the luxury of the structure I needed to be able to finish the songs. We collaborated on editing the lyrics and refining the music to create a finished song. We have both said that creating our songs was a highlight and a saving grace to the SSCF 2020-21. Music saved my ass that year.

Looking back on the year and the stress in our workplace, my time for the creative process happened during my breaks by singing and working on song writing. In a non-pandemic art teaching year, I had hands-on experiences everyday with kids and their art. We created together and then shared the work we had created; visually, tactilely, emotionally, and verbally. For the last 5 -10 minutes of pre-covid art classes, my students and I would come together and talk about the process, emotions and visual aspects of what they created. During our year on-line, my art class students would hold up their artwork so that we could see each piece on our computers. For that school year, I never actually held a student’s piece of art.   

By April 2021, our students were back in the classroom fulltime, albeit with masks hiding their young faces and desks placed in 1950’s-esq rows , six feet apart. With social distancing needs, both the art and music rooms became part of the lunchroom and break rooms for staff. We moved to art and music on a cart. Instead of students coming to the art and music rooms for classes, we went into classrooms to deliver instruction. We had no place to go between 11 and 2 (song lyrics are lurking everywhere.) It is disconcerting to not have a place to go to between classes. We ended up in the hallway outside of our room, and then we got creative and found a new place to practice our music: the boiler-room, housed in the grimy basement of our school.

 Amidst the mismatched, discarded often broken furniture, the rattle of the washer and dryer, the odor of bleached rags waiting to be washed and the ever-present hum of the HVAC system, the ARTs dept. – the name for our singing duo – was created. We practiced our original songs in the 100-year-old basement of Ben Franklin Elementary. It became the joke amongst staff that we would be “caught singing.” We found out that teachers would congregate in one of the bathrooms which was directly over the boiler room to listen to us. Singing with my friend was the highlight of my day. I got lost in trying to figure out harmonies for our new songs. Thirty minutes of singing over our lunch hour carried me through the rest of my workday.

In May 2021 at the end of SSCF 2020-21 the Art and Music departments were told that we would continue on-the-cart teaching in school year 2021-22. I kept hoping all summer of 2021 that Covid would become manageable, and the Arts would get their rooms back. Alas it was not to be. Music and art are still on a cart for which I had to psyche myself to teach from daily. As one first grader aptly questioned me as I was rolling my cart by his class,

“Do you have to carry all your stuff with you?” “Sure do,” was my reply. “That must be really tiring!” the little six-year-old exclaimed. Out of the mouths of babes. 

School year 2021-22 started with a glimmer of hope. At the end of July before we returned to our classrooms, teachers were told they did not need to wear masks if they were fully vaccinated. That decision was rescinded when the Delta Variant started to surge.  Fall of 2021 found us all back in school, teaching in masks to kids in masks which I tried not to be bitter about. My hearing and cognitive comprehension seemed to have diminished greatly during mask wearing teaching. I constantly asked kids to repeat themselves, 

“What was that, honey?” “Can you repeat that one more time, my friend?” 

I am blamed this ineptitude on the masks. Which may or may not be reasonable. At the time I was 57 years young. Making me one of the “old teachers” at my workplace. I feel like you never really see old age coming. It suddenly just appears and you aren’t quite sure how you got there.

Another surprise of mask teaching was the 10 am bad breath smell which seemed to linger in my mask all day, regardless of the mints I sucked or the mask breaks I took. I know these are small annoyances which arise from very first-world problems. I told myself over and over, 

“This is just another Zen practice opportunity.” 

Time and time again I found myself failing at Monkdom.

 I have continued writing songs. The ideas are not flying at me at such a prolific rate, but a few are passing my way. I keep bugging Billy V., telling him that we must make an album of our songs.

“You have the talent. I have the money. We can easily record our songs and get them out in the world.” 

Not that I have any idea of how to do that. Then again, before pandemic teaching, I had no idea how to teach solely from a computer. So why can’t I figure out how to be a music producer?

I really cannot explain how or why I started writing original songs. Was it due to the great stress of having to do my job in a completely different way so that my subconscious knew I needed a new miraculous coping mechanism? Would I have been blessed with this songwriting adventure if Covid hadn’t wreaked havoc on my work life? I do know that I am ever so grateful for my work colleague and friend. In times of stress throughout my life, I have been blessed with supportive friends. That was certainly the case with my teaching partner in the year of “The Vid.” He could have easily chosen to tell the Crazy Bat next door, 

“Figure all this out yourself. I have enough to do. I don’t need to carry you.” 

But he didn’t. He chose to be kind, generous and patient. I like to think he was rewarded with a lyricist who will help showcase his amazing music skills. But that may just be my delusional bravado speaking.

Teaching during the pandemic I experienced amazing joy amidst the chaos. If you would have told me I would be creating songs prior to 2020, I would have laughed heartily for an exceptionally long time. I would have told you, 

“Impossible. I have a shallow and cursory understanding of the structure and composition of songs- how could I possibly write one?” 

I sing in the shower. I sing along with familiar tunes. I have even created a parody or two. But an actual song; lyrics, a melody, telling a story in verse- nah, that isn’t a part of my creative repertoire. I am a visual artist. I work with my hands using paint, paper and fibers. I use my voice to instruct - not to create.  

When the miraculous musical muses decided to show up in my life, I guess I was open to accepting their graces. For me, most artistic endeavors start with a small something that bugs me, poking me to explore a bit, an idea to chase. I can either choose to follow the thread of an idea or ignore it. In 2020 these sparks fired continuously. 

My crazy naivete believed that the ARTs dept. had stories to tell through songs sung that needed to be released into the world. Our unforeseen creative collaboration was born out of a Pandemic. Songs from our hearts were birthed under duress. Did I create so much all at once, out of no-where because “sickness, death and the unknown” were looming? History may be able to answer those questions. Future generations may be able to look back and analyze and answer these questions. For me, I am ever so grateful that the music goddesses sent me inspiration, and that I had the gumption to follow the sparks. Most importantly, I am thankful that my friendship with my work colleague grew into a magical musical collaboration.