On Monday of this week, I stepped into a classroom of 22 for the first time since March 2020—almost eighteen months ago. After half a semester of fully on-line, and then a full school year of hybrid teaching at half capacity, we are back in the classroom, completely and totally.
Initially we were supposed to be mask free, but a couple weeks ago, the spiking case numbers here in Florida—blamed on that insidious delta variant—caused a reversal. So I am still wearing a mask in the classroom. It is amazing how much I forgot the extent to which I hated it in just three months of summer. If things die down, they will reverse that. One wonders if things ever will die down, especially here in Florida, where our governor—busy running for president—recently enacted a law saying that asking for proof of a COVID vaccine is a $5,000 fine.
I wanted to believe things were getting better when the vaccine came along. It is nuts to me, absolutely nuts, that in a state that currently has three times the national death rate, we are stopping people from putting in place measures that could reduce deaths.
I went to a wedding two weeks ago, back in Ohio, with Son One. We scheduled this back in July, when it seemed like things were getting normal again. By the time I went, I was second-guessing myself on the wisdom of it all as I sat at the wedding reception. I got tested once we got home, though, and I was fine.
Even having half of my students in class at a time last year wasn't like real teaching. They weren't supposed to get closer than six feet to each other, so there was no group work, and frequently several were quarantined or otherwise absent, so you could have just four or five students. I had group work in all my classes, and there was something really reassuring about that babble of 22 people all talking at once. I haven't heard it in a long, long time! Real teaching is back. (Our administration often lacks backbone, I feel, but I am grateful for our Dean, who at every college meeting admonishes us, "Don't teach on Zoom! Even if you're sick! That's not why we're here.")
I am not one of those people who gets anxious about COVID exposure, I don't look at a crowd of people and shudder. (I don't trumpet this as a point of personal pride; it's just not how my personality is built. My anxieties are different!) But looking out at 22 people crammed into my tiny UT classrooms, I would feel so much better—for me and them—if I knew they were all vaccinated. I know that doesn't stop delta completely, but it brings things down to a level where I feel reasonable. But who knows what percentage of my students is vaccinated?
But then, cynically, I wonder if it all paid off. Here in Florida, we had much less strict, and much shorter lockdowns and mask mandates than other states, and here at UT, we have much less strict COVID protocols than other universities. Plenty of people criticized both. But, do you know what? We had a record high freshman class this year. Way more students took admission than predicted, causing some problems. Is it because these students thought they could go to a school where they would have a "normal" college experience? Were my governor and my provost "right"? It does give me some short-term job security at a time when many universities faced an enrollment crash.
I actually am not exposed to much anti-vaccine stuff. I have a pretty strong filter bubble at this point in my life; my facebook circle is mostly either academics or Star Trek fandom people. My family leans conservative, but (by and large, as far as I know) are not the type to buy into this bullshit. So it's not something I have much personal experience with. There's a family friend, though, who does; I haven't talked to her about it directly, just heard about it from my parents. She's a smart woman, college educated, clever and thoughtful. I just don't get how someone could end up like this, and it makes me doubt, well, everything. What's the point of college, of education, of media, of science, of religion, if this is where we end up as a society? If we have people so divorced from reality—and of course they think we are the ones divorced from reality.
And anyone could be one of them. My students, certainly. My childrens' daycare teachers. My wife's co-workers. Hayley and I are reasonably safe by virtue of being in our thirties and vaccinated, and the kids are reasonably safe by virtue of being younger, but none of those things are absolute. Nothing is, of course, but a little bit more relative safety wouldn't go amiss.
For a while it seemed like we were getting out of this. It's dumb, but two days ago I was listening a Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! from a couple weeks ago (I am behind), their first in-person live show since last year. And I actually got a bit emotional hearing a real audience roar and cheer for them for the first time in so long. This is how things were meant to be, and they are coming back. But sometimes it feels like "normal," not even a new normal, will never get here.
Last May, I posted to facebook a quote from Bob Garfield, late of On the Media, about the timelessness of the pandemic:
Not knowing what the passage of time will yield has left me unmoored, spinning in space as if my inner gyroscope were on the fritz. We all know about sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. But there is that often unmentioned sixth sense, proprioception, the unconscious awareness of our body position and movement. Could there be, I wonder, a seventh sense? A proprioception of time? If so, it's gone missing. Not just that I can't fathom what the world will be like in a year or a month. It's that in losing a sense of future, I've also all but lost the present. Ambitions, duties, desires, even the sense beyond hunger and fatigue of life itself. I cannot be alone in this because time isn't just a metric, it's a gravity that keeps us tethered to the world. By anticipating future seconds and minutes and days, we're able to fee; traction and trajectory. But without those hidden comforts of time comes this vertigo, this loss of chronological bearings.
He was talking about the perils of lockdown, how staying in your home all day removed your sense of time. I thought we were getting out of this—and what a miracle that was—but it just keeps going on. It's a different kind of timelessness, I think. It's like Narnia's eternal winter: always winter and never Christmas. The long winter of COVID is here, and even though the snow might be melting, it seems to me that we're being a bit rash in putting away the shovels when half the country is opposed to using rock salt.
(That was not a great metaphor.)
I will take my normalcies where I can get them, and I know the risks will never be zero, but I would be quite delighted to stop having to do risk calculations all the time—and I would be even happier to know that there aren't masses of people out there dying for an absolutely preventable reason.
