"It's a Beautiful Life"- Genevieve Galvan Frenes

Greetings everyone…

It has only taken me SIX months to get back to you after a daunting encounter with teaching distance learning from home to hybrid learning in the classroom to in-class hybrid learning with multiple cohorts. This probably doesn’t make sense to most people unless you’re a teacher coming out of a pandemic which nearly blew our minds (and sanity) at times.

The word that comes to mind is “survival.” Survival was key to everyone this year–from superintendents, to administrators, to teachers, and most of all, students. From the constantly changing mandates given from the state to the districts, we all found ourselves reeling from the next change that was set in place just to get back to some sort of normalcy. There was nothing “normal” about this year except that we had to somehow get through it despite all of the changes coming month after month. We also found ourselves in the midst of a virus that was invisible yet very deadly.

Most of us kept our hearts in the right place as we tried to understand situations beyond our control. But to say this year was just “hard” is an understatement. Truly, I can’t find a better way to express it, other than “we survived.”

At the end of the school year, I had my students write letters to me. I asked them to express what they learned from this year. Most of them spoke about missing their friends, the activities, or the environment of a full class day with everyone present at school. Many of them regretted their use of time and now were anxious to regain their credits with the hope of graduating this upcoming year. They expressed their loss of school as something taken for granted…something that used to be, but didn’t exist anymore. And in my letter to them, I challenged them to write about this time during the pandemic.

I challenged them to write about their experience since they were now (in the process, of course) of being survivors of a pandemic. What did that mean? I explained that to be a survivor meant you overcame an obstacle, endured some kind of ordeal which others had not, and because of this ordeal, it somehow made you resilient, more determined, and more conscious of the world around you. I asked them to write this letter or note at some point after school ended and to hold onto it in a special place. I told them to never forget this time in their life and to look forward to a new school year headed toward what we once remembered as normal.

I wanted them to understand that although the pandemic was a horrific experience for all of us, it was not going to break us. Something good is on the horizon for us.

And as I finished my 24th year of teaching, I thought it was ironic that I was instantly drawn to my first year of teaching in the same district. I remembered being 23 years old. I was young and felt uncertain of what I was doing in my classroom. Inexperience was a common theme in that year, but I did learn what worked and didn’t work very quickly with students who were just a few years younger than myself.

Now in 2021, even with all of the experience which came along the years, I was still uncertain. Even with my experience in technology, I still found myself in a new realm of screens, unfamiliar voices, tech problems, and much more. Daily student issues and hundreds of emails met me at the beginning of each day, but somehow the year passed and I survived. Although my experience as a veteran teacher did help, nothing could prepare me for teaching in this year of the pandemic.

And so to all of my fellow teachers, I say, “I’m glad you made it through. I’m proud of you and I know you made a difference.”

I’m certain our students think we made a difference.

Stay blessed everyone...