Light a Candle in the Window

By Adrin Fisher

Let me be honest: I’m getting a little tired of living through history. Pandemic teaching. Insurrection. Racism. COVID variants. A magical quick-change school map. The supreme elevation of opinion over truth. Fear and violence and doubling down on hate. 2021 is shaping up to be a lot.

To add insult to injury, just as back in the before-time, there are the losses that come with living on this circling planet. Just before Christmas, my high school art teacher, Russ Neptune, passed away. Mr. Neptune taught for close to forty years in a huge room with fifteen-foot windows, radiators on the brick walls, and big zinc sinks stained with years of paint splatter. My favorite memory of his class is how he would build an incredible hodgepodge structure out of found objects: old bicycles, rocking chairs, chandeliers, terra cotta pots and bricks, American flags and antique mirrors. He put it up on tables in the middle of the room, and we would sit all around it, scouting out sections for our still-life projects—line drawing, colored pencils, water colors.

But that’s not all we did. He taught us things I’d never heard of, like batik, linoleum printing, and etching zinc plates with acid. I paid tribute to artist Andrew Wyeth. I water-colored the doors of our local mansion, built by a coal baron when the Titanic was new. I mashed up my parents’ 1960s album covers. I drew my Converse sneakers. I took Mr. Neptune’s class for three years, and many years later, when I returned home, I became his colleague.

When he passed in the plague time, his family asked that former students post pictures of their artwork with the tag #UncleRuss. It took me almost fifteen minutes to find my work. Fifteen minutes to locate a garbage bag full of art I made almost 30 years ago—after four moves across two states. Fifteen minutes.

Why have I carried my bag of art all these years? It’s because, like any great teacher, Mr. Neptune taught his art students more than techniques or terms. He taught us to trust our eye, to think outside the box, to experiment. He gave us freedom and autonomy and a chance at self-expression.

He made me feel like an ARTIST.

In past times, people would put a candle in their windows. Maybe it was a sign of good news. Maybe it was a beacon to a family member journeying home. Maybe it was a sign of a friendly welcome for a traveler. In all cases, it was a sign of hope. It reminds me of a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival (from one of my parents’ old albums): “But I won’t, won’t / Be losing my way, no, no / Long as I can see the light.”

So, teacher-friend, here is my New Year’s offering to you. I’ve got no lists of self-care ideas or teacher resolutions or easy technology tricks. I just have one thing.

It’s a candle for your window. Make it your goal to make your students feel like a—

Well, whatever it is you’re teaching this year.

I want my students to feel like WRITERS.

I want them to feel like READERS.

Maybe you want your students to feel like ATHELETES or MATHLETES or LINGUISTS or SINGERS.

I want them to feel welcomed and competent and confident. I want to point the direction and then set them free. I want them to find their voices and their motivation. I want to remind them to hope.

This is a hard time for an educator. It’s tough for students and parents, too.

Basically, it’s a challenging time to be a human.

But, in the words of Mikey in the 1985 film The Goonies, “This is our time.”

So, instead of giving up or hunkering down or shutting off, I challenge you to light the candles in your windows. Cultivate the good and open your heart to hope. Remember that your passion and your effort (especially in the plague year) are not lost. Remember that some day, even if it’s thirty years down the road, some former student will remember you fondly—for how you made them feel—for what you taught them they could be.

Take it seriously, because it’s a serious charge.

As my parting gift this month, I invite you to share in the hope offered by British indie-rocker Frank Turner in “The Next Storm.”

“So open the shutters, raise up the mast.
Rejoice, rebuild, the storm has passed!
Cast off the crutches, cut off the cast,
Rejoice, rebuild, the storm has passed,
Rejoice, rebuild, the storm has passed…

“I’m gonna step out, and face the next storm.”

Now, go light some candles in your windows. Courage, dear-heart!

Adrin Fisher is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. She wishes you light and hope on your journey. She’s a National Board Certified Teacher, an Arch Coal Teacher Achievement Award Winner, and a finalist for WV State Teacher of the Year. She teaches College English, AP Lit & Comp, and English 12 at Fairmont Senior High School. You can follow her on Twitter @fisheradrin

The Epic Nevertheless, Starring You

by Adrin Fisher

Epics are my thing lately. Maybe it’s because I picked up a beautiful new paperback of The Odyssey translated by Fagles. Maybe it’s because my family has been loving Disney’s show The Mandalorian, the one with “Baby Yoda.” Maybe it’s because in many unexpected ways, fiction has become fact in 2020.

Epics are long, narrative poems that tell the story of a courageous, larger-than-life hero. The action takes us on a journey, the villains often have supernatural power, and the hero triumphs (mostly). There’s also a lot of talking involved.

My teacher-friends and I have talked and talked. Since the beginning of the pandemic, our emotions have been like cheap plastic kites jerked about in gale-force winds: disbelief, anger, sadness, cautious optimism, fear, exhaustion, hope, grief. Lots of us have settled somewhere in the area of resignation, our little kite selves bent and busted, but still fluttering. We’re not thinking of ourselves as particularly heroic.

In some ways, to a person born and bred in Appalachia, this feeling of resignation is home. When I introduce Beowulf to my seniors, I talk about the Anglo-Saxon worldview. Fatalism, I say. This conglomeration of conquering tribes believed that Fate ruled all. This, I say, is familiar. You know this. You’ve heard people say, “It is what it is.” You know the phrase, “What will be will be.”

Then we go to the epic. We hear Beowulf himself say, “Fate will unwind as it must,” and we remember the Fates fighting over their eyeball in that old Disney movie, Hercules. We remember reading Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books. This we know.

We could talk about why fatalism is a cornerstone of the Appalachian ethos. We could point to it as a reason why education is not of primary value in many of our families. We could think about the vices our students start experiencing in middle school—the drinking, the vaping, the smoking. We could think about generational poverty and cycles of abuse and drugs and promiscuity and injustice and broken promises. We could mention it all. We could rake ourselves over the coals.

But we don’t. Others do that for us.

Instead, we talk about Abraham Lincoln, a fatalist through and through. We talk about underdogs. We talk about justice and paybacks. We talk about the strength it takes to live under the weight of fate.

We ask, why should we bother?

We ask, what drove Beowulf? That one’s easy: he wanted to be remembered for his actions. Beowulf voyaged across the sea. He fought a demon, weaponless. He swam to the bottom of a bottomless hot spring and killed a Water-Witch. He trekked to the mountains and slew a dragon.

We talk about strength, courage, generosity, right motives. We talk about resilience. Hope.

We, teacher-friend, are teaching through a pandemic. We are making history. It’s not pretty, but nevertheless, it’s pretty epic.

We’re navigating a patchwork of rules and regulations with unclear requirements and expectations about devices, broadband, virtual meetings, and student involvement. We’re choosing the essential. We’re protecting our people. We’re extinguishing fires. We’re dismembering demons and slaying dragons every day.

So, today, I’m asking you to fan that little flame of fatalism that may yet burn in your Appalachian heart-of-hearts. Use it as a reminder of your own strength, teacher-friend. Let’s accept the hand that’s been dealt. But let’s reframe our journey.

Let’s fight.

We’re not just fighting for ourselves. We’re fighting for our communities, our students—whether they know it or not—and we’re fighting for their futures. We’re fighting for our profession, our families, our colleagues, our work-life balance, and our sanity. We here in Appalachia have been fighting for a long, long time.

We have all lost in the past nine months, to be sure, but we are not losing. And neither are the kids. There will be pieces to pick up. There will be wounds that need healed. There will be grace given.

But—as we’ve learned from epics—heroes are never perfect, but they are always moving.  

You are the epic hero in your own story. Courage, dear heart.

Poem Credit: “Ulysses”

Adrin Fisher is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. She wishes you courage. She’s a National Board Certified Teacher, an Arch Coal Teacher Achievement Award Winner, and a finalist for WV State Teacher of the Year. She teaches College English, AP Lit & Comp, and English 12 at Fairmont Senior High School. You can follow her on Twitter @fisheradrin

Eyes on the Prize: Growing Student Writers

By Adrin Fisher

Last spring, deep in the futile throes of correcting essays I had collected on March 13 (the day that must not be named), I promised myself that this year would be THE year: the time when I finally figure out a way to do this essay grading thing better. 2020 has been a lot. 2020 is being a lot.

However, in the interest of keeping promises to myself (despite the deep temptation to keep doing the things I can control in the same way I’ve done them for years), I am forging ahead.

Please forgive my naval-gazing. COVID has caused a convulsion in the school system—and for someone with twenty-three years in the classroom, a spouse in his twelfth year as a reading specialist, and two teenagers in school, a convulsion in the school system affects every aspect of life. So I will start by centering my beliefs about myself as a teacher:

• A growth mindset is my greatest weapon.
• Proactivity within my circle of influence is my work.
• What I focus on grows.
• My profession was and remains my choice.

Next, I will review my teaching-of-writing process. It goes something like this: think of an interesting essay assignment. I usually create my own because I naively believe it discourages cheating. I talk about how to pre-write and organize. I model. We write in class and I do “walking conferences.” Then we peer edit. Then I collect the final copies with all the work attached.  

And then I mark the essays. This takes time. The stack is thick. I procrastinate a bit first, because I know it will take me hours and hours. In fact, my usual rate is 20 minutes per essay. Multiply that out over 110 students, give or take. 

No wonder I hesitate.  

Two or three weeks later, I return essays. Next comes the possibility of bonus points for revising. To get a good revision grade, students have to address my comments and then make changes. Not hard, really. I give points based on the changes—did they develop? did they fix all the awkwardness?  

But, of course, 90% of my students don’t revise.  

Which means that the 20 minutes I spent pointing out issues in logic or grammar, correcting sentence structure, and asking pointed questions are wasted—waste multiplied by 90%.

Disheartening. 

And in a plague year, nearly enough to push me under.

I have specific ideas about myself as a teacher. I confess that the truths I listed above have not been always the truths of my teacher-self.  But now, this year, maybe I can change.  

Maybe I can take back my weekends (once this hybrid-distance double teaching job with no extra remuneration situation I’m in finally ends). Maybe I can adjust my thought patterns to accept that I am not the sole arbiter of teaching writing. Maybe I am not exclusively responsible for the students’ success. 

So, here are some strategies I’ve collected:

Intentional Marking:  Grade only for one thing. Pick something to correct: introduction, thesis, transitional phrases, organization, etc. Force your pink pen to only touch those things. Only.

Code It:  A few years ago, a younger teacher told me about a system of marking that involves coding rather than correcting. The student (and you) has the key to see what the errors are. This reminds me that one of my high school teachers put a checkmark at the end of a line but didn’t reveal the mistake.

Bank Comments: Create a comment bank for your online assignments. This is a feature in Google Classroom that lets you save comments and then choose the appropriate one from your own list. Likewise, you can use a Google add-on called Keep—it’s a post-it note tab—to hold comments you keep using. You can copy and paste from your notes

Whole Class Feedback: After reading (but not marking) essays, create a list of the big issues and write the class a “letter” that shows common mistakes and fixes, and then encourages students to dive into their own writing.

Just Don’t Grade It: Let students practice, and let yourself cheer them on. This approach is beloved by teachers such as Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle, and Sarah Zerwin.

These strategies are fine and good, and maybe one or more of them will work for you. I still have a problem, though. It’s my weird obligation, a dire sense of “I’m not doing my job unless I…”

Fortunately, in my diligent search, I have come across something I think I can do. At the start of school, I joined a Facebook group: Teaching Teachers How to Teach Writing created by Kristian Kuhn. Despite my desire to sit on the couch and worry that evening, I joined a live PD session given by a Minnesota teacher named Mara J. Corey. (The hour-long session is still available in the archive of the group.) In the session, she explained how her goal is to make students do the heavy lifting of writing.

 

Instead of commenting on each paper (because, let’s be real, similar issues come up over and over again in a set of essays), she provides “Big Picture” pre-teaching. Corey anticipates the problem areas and addresses them during the writing period. For example, she might attack passive verbs or weak sentence construction. Or perhaps she’ll review the ICE heuristic (Introduce, Cite, Explain) for building in text evidence.  

Then—and here’s the really new-to-me-thing—she provides students with a Growth Focus. Either she or the student will choose ONE thing to work on, which is graded on a separate rubric. For Corey, this addresses the 90% wasted time issue by demanding that students improve: It’s not good enough to write an essay that scores 4s across the board; you must ALSO demonstrate that you’re getting better. In fact, she makes the Growth Focus rubric worth 50% of the total score. It’s a simple rubric, A through D, based on how the student sought instruction and applied it.

D Not Proficient	C Approaching Proficiency	B Proficiency with Help	A Independent Proficiency
No improvement in the growth focus area  Not yet proficient in the growth focus area	Improvement in the growth focus area Not yet proficient in the growth focus area	Improvement in the growth focus area Proficient in the growth focus area with one-on-one teacher help (relearning)	Improvement in the growth focus area on my own   Mastery in the growth focus area on my own

Corey’s Growth Focus Rubric

I’m anticipating your question: If you have to now track each kid’s Growth Focus over time, and coach the students along the way with mini-lessons, small group sessions, or online materials until they master one GF and choose another, how is this going to save time?

Well, the answer, I think, is in the comments. She gears ALL feedback to the Growth Focus. She relies on her essay rubric to take care of the general feedback, without additional comment, so everything she notes or writes on the student paper is only and ever about the Growth Focus. Sounds sensible, right?

So, today, in the autumn of a plague year, I have decided to adopt Corey’s strategy. To that end, I have created tables listing each student along with a GF they’ve chosen and that GF grade.  

Now, have I really cut my correcting time?

No. I’m still figuring out how to be all things to all learners—some on paper, some in Google Docs, some on Kami with my weird little plug-in tablet and stylus. I’m still so tempted to type comments. I think it maybe is taking longer than ever, but I’m afraid to time myself. So, no, not yet.  

But, there is hope. I think this is something I can get behind. I think I can wean myself off marking each RO and asking for clarification each time. I think I can focus on one thing, one individualized thing. I think I can let myself slide into something that’s just as personal, yet less demanding on my time…once it’s set up. I think so. It’s worth a shot.

Eyes on the prize, teacher-friend. The prize is student growth WHILE you live your life. Let’s have our cake and eat it too.

Go forth, be well, and take courage, dear heart.

 Adrin Fisher is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. She wishes you light. She’s a National Board Certified Teacher, an Arch Coal Teacher Achievement Award Winner, and a finalist for WV State Teacher of the Year. She teaches College English, AP Lit & Comp, and English 12 at Fairmont Senior High School. You can follow her on Twitter @fisheradrin

An Open Letter to the Beleaguered

by Adrin Fisher

Dear Teacher-Friend,

I’ve been thinking a lot about my situation, teaching high school English in a plague year. I’ve polished up a little sentence to describe it.

My boss made a promise that I can’t keep.

I’m fond of that sentence. It feels to me like a short, pithy Sherman Alexie sentence in the story I read to my College English classes last week. Zinger, I called it. A gut punch, I said. A sentence that perfectly encapsulates a situation.

Teachers have been told to get on with it. Assess students—both blended and distance learners simultaneously—meet them in the gap, and then work your miracle-worker magic.

But, that’s not what we had planned for. Or, more accurately, that’s not what was planned for us. The promised technology has not yet arrived. Our provided training was “a lick and a promise”—the lick part being the shock of being exposed to a dozen new programs in nine hours in September. Broadband is spotty and rain interrupts satellite internet and kids are sharing devices, so also send home packets and books. And also benchmark…and also do this test training…and also create videos…and also receive meaningful contact…and also join these Teams meetings…and also…

Before you internalize the chorus of armchair experts singing, “Teachers always rise to the challenge!” and “Mr. Rogers taught virtually!” let me pause to address those claims. As anyone with any longevity in a field that chews up and spits out 50% of new teachers within the first five years can tell you: what we’re being asked to do now? It’s not the same.

Magical thinking only works magic in the realm of thought.

Mr. Rogers didn’t assess anyone, didn’t teach more than one thirty-minute lesson per day, didn’t manage IEPs or 504s, didn’t field parent calls, didn’t connect with more than one hundred separate personalities with one hundred separate (sometimes fluid) identities, backstories, and sets of conflicts, issues, and emotions. And that’s what teachers do in a regular school year. Mr. Rogers didn’t have to spend precious lunch minutes to discern whether the person really has never grasped the concept of “downloading” or whether the student (and/or parent/grandparent) considers distance learning in the fall of 2020 a Get-Out-of-School-Free card. Mr. Rogers didn’t have to teach himself a learning management platform in public or thoughtfully respond to electronic messages on four different platforms. Hourly.

Mr. Rogers was a saint, to be sure.

But try to explain to me that this has all been done before? Tell me that if I can’t do it, it’s a personal failing? Spare me.

To stop myself—and possibly you—from spiraling into the recitation of woes—none of which we caused and none of which we can eliminate—I will share with you my second sentence, my second zinger.

This could be the year that school swallows me up.

I know that doesn’t sound particularly cheerful. But stay with me.

Every year of my career I have sacrificed many, many hours outside my contract. I work hard. I feel weird saying that out loud, but it’s true. I correct essays, design lessons, prepare, make photocopies, read, write recommendations—I do all things we all do. In fact, I’ll do it again this weekend. Sometimes I feel really guilty, choosing between time with my family and time with my job. Sometimes I wonder what ELSE I am if my life is consumed by my job.

But now, I pour my energy into this monumental task: to be all things to all students in both 84 minutes per week and no minutes per week, on three different schedules and with precious little time or training. I’ve taught myself to be proficient in a program I’d only heard of before July. I’m planning and creating content on Sunday afternoon for Monday morning. I haven’t found time to grade much yet—even though a stack of essays and summer work and paragraphs and mission statements are traveling back and forth to school with me every day while their brothers and cousins quietly wait in virtual classrooms.

However, guilt and misery make no kind of life.

Therefore, I am choosing to adjust my expectations for myself. I’m deciding what I own and what I don’t.

So, because I can’t offer you time or money, teacher-friend, I offer you seven imperatives.

Be intentional.  

In these fluid times with these unrealistic demands, the only way forward is with intention.  When my sons were younger and stopped by the dining room table to tell me about a Pokémon evolution or a YouTube video while my pink pen hovered over an essay, I had to train myself to listen. I clasped my hands and looked into their eyes and forced myself to stop. I still do it, actually. That’s my model. I will intentionally not get swallowed up. I choose to stop, fold my hands, and listen.

Stop comparing.  

Even though we try to educate our students about how fake social media is, sometimes it’s hard for us to remember: not everything praiseworthy is Pinterest-worthy. Value function over form.

Less is good. 

Let’s move toward sustainability. This is not a normal year, not for curriculum, not for the SATs, not for special education referrals, not for anyone or anything. You are not a continuous miner or a perpetual motion machine. Choose the essential. Save the rest.

Be organized.  

Although I am not yet to the point where I can anticipate unit time-tables or plan for more than the following week, I have made it a priority to plan those five days. On Monday (or Thursday, depending on the cohort), I release the plans in the form of a slide, which I project at the beginning of each class, every day. I set it up as Day 1, Day 2, rather than Monday, Tuesday, so that I can use one slide for all schedules. I learned from a social media page how to “publish to the web” which allows me to make changes on the original and have those changes pushed out to all locations. I allow myself to correct typos, clarify, or add resources, but NOT to add assignments after that initial rollout—I realized last Monday afternoon that I’d forgotten to leave time to talk about a story I’d assigned in AP Lit last Day 3. That discussion will still be valid next week.

• 

  My Week 4 Slide for English 12

• 

  The icons help us track work

In a webinar in July, I learned a visual trick to help students organize. I have a different emoji for each topic (my utilitarian topics are Week 1, Week 2, etc.) and each assignment or resource for that week has the matching emoji. Students thank me for these two tricks.

Practice empathy. 

Students are stressed. They’re oddly quiet underneath their masks, but their eyes reveal a constant low-grade panic. Good students who’ve succeeded in past years are being tested—because as it turns out, they’ve relied on memory instead of a planner. But now? That won’t work. They’ve mostly never had to manage their unsupervised time at home. They must choose to close Tik-Tok and pick up school. We have to have lines, late points, rules, assignments—of course, teacher-friend.  But we should also have empathy.

Take refuge. 

Take refuge in nature. It’s beautiful out there.

Take refuge from social media. News flash: the “us” against “them” fighting is going to continue, whether you observe it or not.

Take refuge in texts. Billy Collins, one of my favorites, has done a Poetry Broadcast every weekday night since April. Maybe you have sacred texts. Maybe you will carry around a poem in your pocket through these long days (here’s what I’m asking my AP kids to do next week). Maybe you have an old standby, some delightful novel or biography that you loved once. Pull it out again.

• 

• 

Finally, remember who you are.

You are a teacher. But that’s not all. You win, not this school year. Don’t let yourself be swallowed up. Courage, dear heart.

Sincerely,

A Multi-Faceted Person Doing Her Best to Teach Through a Pandemic

WVCTE wants you to contribute to the conversation. What imperative would you add to the list? Leave us a question or comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook.

 Adrin Fisher is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. She wishes you light. She’s a National Board Certified Teacher, an Arch Coal Teacher Achievement Award Winner, and a finalist for WV State Teacher of the Year. She is currently teaching College English, AP Lit & Comp, and English 12. You can follow her on Twitter @fisheradrin

An Elegy for a School Year in Three Parts

Adrin Fisher

I. Lament

“Don’t know what you got till it’s gone

Don’t know what it is I did so wrong

Now I know what I got

It’s just this song

And it ain’t easy to get back

Takes so long…”

These lyrics from Cinderella’s 1988 power ballad are on repeat in the tape deck of my mind.  They ring true on so many levels. 

In emails from students and parents:

Maddie: “Mrs. Fisher, I never thought I’d say this, but I miss school.”

Isaac: “When are we going back to school? All this online stuff is stressful and confusing and it’s so much better at school.”

Garrett’s mom: “We just now got a computer up and running as of April 5. I see he has a lot to catch up on.”

In sadness:

I asked my twelve-year-old son to sort some school papers for recycling or the memory book. He said, “I want to throw it all away because it reminds me of school.  I never want to remember this year.” His English assignment is to create a time capsule of COVID-19; he works on it against his will.

In broken promises: 

Spring sports, prom, Senior Picnic, graduation, deadlines, expectations.

In hard feelings balanced with grace:

Fact:  Only 6% of my seniors returned work last week.

Fact: 58% of my honors kids watched my most recent YouTube tutorial.

Conclusion: I have been spitting into the wind, but that’s ok too.

Getting back, as Cinderella lamented, takes so long.  And apparently it involves hard feelings, suspicious glances, blasts of judgment, and fear.

II. In Praise of the Idealized Dead

It speaks volumes, our grief.

We hope to return to imperfect schools—the thermostats unpredictable, the hot water in the staffroom not quite hot—in order to work with imperfect people—who sometimes choose to “reply all” instead of “reply” and sometimes leave the copier jammed—and to fill our classrooms with smaller (or at least younger) imperfect humans who love their phones unconditionally and sass back and sometimes want to sleep in class.

Those 2019-2020 days were the good times:

Not because every lesson was great or every discussion was exciting;

Not because there was never any pushback or argument;

Not because every administrative decision was lauded;

Not because every student was engaged;

Not because we met every need or always maintained the productive struggle;

But because we were there. 

Together. 

We were doing our best, teacher friends. 

We were doing all the things humans do in community: laughing, working, trying, failing, getting frustrated, learning, and teaching. 

We saw the bigger picture every day.  Back then, we knew that school is more than subjects and letter grades.  We knew that school is about teaching younger humans to be better humans, and in the process, becoming better humans ourselves.

This is hard, this loss. Those are my kids, warts and all. I am their teacher, no matter what. And I want to be back with them.  I am doing all the work and having none of the fun. No one is laughing at my jokes, even though I am pretty darn funny. Also, back then, I told more jokes.  

And as time passes, as it is wont to do, the edges will soften and we will look back—maybe not fondly, but more judiciously—and the camaraderie and the work to come will taste sweeter.

So here’s to the 2019-2020 school year, improved with a backward glance.

Salut!

III. Solace

I am experiencing a turning back, a turning forward, a change in energy. Maybe you are too, teacher-friend.

The email messages are decreasing in proportion to the increasing length of daylight. 

There is a little burrow of baby bunnies in my backyard. I wrote a little story for a micro-fiction contest. I tried my hand at macaroons and made jelly out of violets. The rain will be good for my garden. The peonies will bloom soon. I’m still plugging away at the complete works of Shakespeare.

I plan to inventory my classroom library. I plan to do some professional reading, some non-professional reading, and some writing. I plan to lay out a new prep for the new school year, and figure out how not to spend so much time grading writing. I plan to get fresh air and exercise every day. I plan to hang out with my children, while I have them here with me. I plan to hug my parents. I plan to work toward goals in a focused way, but still be open to change.

We will go back into our classrooms again, one day, and we will continue to do the important and meaningful work of valuing all of our students, face-to-face and behind the screens.

May you pause to create a list of hopes and plans, a mixture of work and life, that will lead you forward.

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

W.H.Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

Courage, dear heart.

WVCTE wants you to contribute to the conversation. Leave us a question or comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook.

Adrin Fisher is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. She wishes you light and courage. She’s a National Board Certified Teacher in the middle of a global crisis and doing her best with seniors in co-teaches and dual-credit classes, and honors-level sophomores. When she’s not planning her next career as a YouTuber, you can find her calling “Hello!” to strangers, tree bathing in the woods with her kids, or writing in drips and drabs. You can follow her on Twitter @fisheradrin