Distance learning doesn’t have to mean everything is on a screen. My number one goal in designing the learning experiences for my students this fall: Get them off screens as much as possible. If they watch an instructional video from me or participate in a Zoom, and then spend the rest of their “learning time” in front of a Google Doc or the internet, I’ll feel like I’ve failed. I teach HS English, so my default back in the spring was to get kids digital access to texts and resources. There are some great resources out there, of course, but the real challenge for me in planning is to think about what I can get kids to do that is unplugged and away from screens. This is by far the hardest part even if it seems like a no-brainer… What do literature and literacy look like when the power goes out and the battery is red? Ink and paper, of course, and though we’re hearing the calls to “prepare kids for the world of their future, not our past,” a future squinting at pixels is far from what I want for my kids. In particular for students who are self-described “non-readers,” how can I make literature and literacy experiential and away from the electronic interfaces we’ve come to rely so heavily upon? I’m working on that.

Before I initiate lessons about protests, racism, and oppression, I need to take ten steps back. Like many other educators, I worry that teachers who capitalized on the opportunity to do some self-work learning about antiracism and systemic oppression will dump all this learning onto kids without first building students’ personal skills and assessing students’ personal readiness for these topics. I need to make sure I get to know my students and build a strong classroom community before I immerse my kids in learning conversations about race and oppression. These conversations need to happen, and there are definitely wrong ways to do it. Reading Not Light But Fire by Matthew R. Kay was useful for my thinking about this. In addition, I need to remember: My personal journey as a cishet white man understanding race, privilege and oppression has taken years, while women, LGBTQ+ folks, Black Americans, indigenous people and people of color have been living what I have the privilege to “consider academically” from a distance. I have a responsibility to approach this aspect of teaching mindfully.

I need to remember and abide by the clichéd exchange: What do you teach? “I teach students.” Of course my standards and content are important. But I have kids who will be “Zooming in” on their school-supplied Chromebook while parked next to Starbucks where they can get free wi-fi in the car in which their whole family lives. No, not every teenager has an iPhone. No, not every teenager can just close the door to their room to have a quiet space to read and learn. These barriers existed before, but when a student could come to my physical classroom, there was at least some guarantee of space, resources, time, and an expectation of physical safety. I cannot make their non-school learning environment perfect and safe, but I sure can plan with it in mind and not be a jerk about deadlines, nit-picky assignments, camera-on-eye-contact, or requiring every stupid little box to be checked on some arbitrary checklist I create so that their compliance can somehow qualify as evidence of their learning or my teaching. Nope. It’s not about me. I am going to teach students: who they are, where they are, and when they can.

But, boundaries will be key to my survival. It took me way too long in my career to draw the line about work becoming life. The fact that I had a commute between work and home helped, but it required conscious effort to avoid devoting every waking minute to work…because in teaching, there is always more you can do if you let yourself. Last spring, the boundaries completely dissolved. My commute was to the garage and my make-shift “classroom on camera.” Asynchronicity and my worries about students meant replying to emails and Remind texts and Google Classroom messages at all hours. Other than scheduled synchronous sessions, I had no structure, no division between “Mr. Gardner” and “Dad” or even just “Mark.” Though we don’t typically accept this kind of statement from a teacher, I have to remember: Teaching is my job, not my life, and it is not all there is to me. And I should not be expected to be only my job. But it is up to me to draw those lines.

Would these all be important for in-person instruction? Of course. (Would I rather be planning for in-person instruction? Abso-cussword-lutely.) I will screw things up. I will do my best. I will worry about my students. I will continue to learn.