Zoom Waiting Room

When my students come to me with questions, I answer them. This was not how I imagined this year to be. I have fancied myself to be a writer for a long time, but have not put my writing out in the world. I am shy, I think. Bashful to expose something of myself that feels somehow too personal, when all I want is to desperately be seen. It’s funny how we work sometimes, isn’t it? It feels as if I have stepped outside and a cold January wind immediately ripped my breath straight away from me leaving me gasping. I thought myself a writer, but never tried to become one. Here I sit now, in Brooklyn, teaching English to a robust group of fifth-graders. 

It is a privilege to teach my students. My students are kind and funny. They ask me how I am doing and they notice when my Zoom background changes as I travel back and forth from home in the valley and my apartment in Brooklyn. They care about who I am. They surprise me with their insight and their ability to identify powerful themes in their lives and in the texts that we read. Some struggle with remote learning. They find themselves to feel isolated and lost. They are unsure how they fit into their new school and among one another. Life is not how they imagined, either. I cannot blame the students who do not want to engage with me every day. Some days are hard. Some days feel like it is almost too much, too acutely painful to sit on Zoom for one more day, one more hour, trying to pretend like everything is okay in the outside world as numbers rise and the winter approaches. 

Despite our struggles, I like to think that they look forward to seeing me in the same way that I look forward to seeing them. They make me smile when moments before class began, I was drying my eyes in my kitchen with an unforgiving, unsympathetic paper towel. One student once asked me if I believed in God in the middle of class. I did not respond, but he did make me think. Do I believe in God? Do I believe in some higher power that shuttled me towards a year spent teaching small children how to become better readers and writers? How to become, in short, thoughtful adults who may truly create a positive change in our world.

I have not thought much about free-will. Some think we have it, others think that we don’t. What I do know, is that there are things that happen because we have been guided towards them. We make our own decisions, but there are some things that absolutely must happen for us to become the people who we were meant to be. Whether you have that experience now or later is no matter. You will have it nonetheless. And that is what teaching is to me. I believe that I was meant to be here with my group of 10-year-olds. In the fall of COVID, we are learning together. We are laughing together. We are sharing with one another how it feels to miss our friends and the family members who we have not seen in ages. We have formed a community across the abyss of the internet. Abyss no more, perhaps. Instead, it is something that has been filled with a lightness. A brightness. They ask me questions, and I answer them.