Tag: lockdown

The Uncanny

(note: I began this post in Panama nearly two years before re-discovering it and completing it in France)

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Have you ever experienced the uncanny? That sudden intense feeling of detachment and dread when an occurrence doesn’t quite fit our rational ideas of what counts as possible or real? During these moments, one is thrust back to early childhood, when the world was imbued with magic and each object and event was a profound and inexplicable mystery.

I’ve had this type of experience many times. Here is the most recent.

My wife and I live in Panama. Panama had a merciless lock-down when COVID started. For nearly 6 months we were stuck in our tiny apartment in a high-rise on the coast in Panama City. I was allowed outside only for an hour a week based on the last digit of my ID card. We could not walk in hallways or stairwells in our apartment building. The city was cordoned off and split into neighborhoods with checkpoints everywhere. If you did not have a salvaconducto saying you were headed to work in an essential capacity for the functioning of society, the police could arrest you and fines were up to $1000.

So, for 6 months we taught from and lived in our tiny place on the 54th floor above the sea. I spent hours on the balcony photographing random things because aside from reading and doing Tai Chi and fooling around and cooking, there was not much else to do.

Casco Viejo, the Amador Causeway, and the Canal from our 54th floor lockdown

When we finally escaped Panama City we did not have a salvaconducto. At the edge of Panama Province there was a police checkpoint where they were sending cars back into the City if the driver could not produce one. We lucked out because a pickup-truck with a bed full of workers pulled up at the other side along with a huge bus and the cops from our side of the checkpoint rushed over to the other side of the highway. I drove through without getting stopped.

Freedom! We drove 6 hours to Cambutal, which is super-remote and undedeveloped. It’s mostly farmland with a jungle down to the beach where a couple hotels and a few small housing developments and restaurants have sprung up. It’s on the Pacific side close to the border with Costa Rica. The beaches in Panama were all closed at the time because of COVID, but in Cambutal there are no police, so we could go to the beach and ride horses and go hiking with no problem.

We stayed in a small compound of cabins built by a young Dane over a couple years. I woke early in the morning one day, perhaps around 5:15, and decided to walk the 400 meters to the beach. My hope was to see sea turtles nesting, or perhaps even more luckily to witness a hatching. I’d seen several baby turtle trails in the sand the day before.

When I got to the beach there were no turtles. The sun was just emerging above the costal hills down to the left. The waves were a dark verdigris and pelicans were skimming the foamy crests looking for food. A young man–the local surf spotter–emerged from his wooden teepee on the beach and started texting the local surfing groups to let them know the conditions.

A few stray dogs I’d already befriended ran over and I played chase and fetch with them for a few minutes, then I decided to walk back to the cabin to see if the wife was awake.

As I walked along the road I felt a strong sensation of alert. My entire spine and in particular the back of my neck started tingling to the point almost of vibration. A mist had arisen from the trees and fields and was moving across the road. The birds which had been cacophonous moments before at dawn were suddenly silent.

Then, a regular and heavy clopping echoed along the road. At first I couldn’t place its origins, as the sound echoed from a hill to my left. Turning in the mist I looked behind me and the vapors parted. In the center of the road to my rear was a white horse, its head lowered menacingly, its eyes fixed intently on me. Its jaw was working as though at an invisible bit. It was one hundred or so meters away. When I turned to look it immediately picked up its pace.

I worked at a horse farm as a very young kid, aged 11 and 12. I know the behavior of horses, and feel fairly comfortable around them. This one wasn’t right. I am not one to panic around animals, even aggressive ones, but as soon as this mysterious apparition picked up its pace I bolted and ran full-tilt. The compound was just ahead and I figured I might have enough time to get inside and evade this creature which would be much faster than I.

I got through the gate at the compound as my pursuer reached me. Our cabin was immediately inside the entrance on the left, seated behind a tall hedge. I got to the hedge entry and behind it just as the horse reared and neighed. Its hooves crashed down through some yellow flowers bordering the hedge and not a meter behind me.

Then, winded, I watched through a gap in the hedge as the horse turned and returned to the road via the gate to continue on its way. Its muscular thighs trembled and shook and its mane was scraggly and covered in burrs as it swung its head around and grunted. I could hear its slow clopping long after it dissolved into the mist.

A bit more than a week later, my wife and I went on a horseback excursion to visit some old petroglyphs carved into ancient rocks. When our horses arrived I saw the one I was to use and thought: “oh, no!”

But it was a lovely day.

returning from our petroglyph excursion along the beach in Cambutal

Year 15

I’ve begun year 15 as a middle school teacher. I spent eleven years teaching in Baltimore City Public Schools, and made the switch to an international school in Latin America four years ago.

Year 13 we started to discuss “Um, what if COVID comes here?” in February. We had a meeting about using Canvas to teach remotely and how that might work. The next week we had a meeting about using Google Classroom and Meets instead. Because my team was asked to pilot GC and learn how it worked starting in January, we got to help explain it a bit.

The next week we were closed by the government mid-schoolday, because the entire country was going into lockdown. I remember thinking “We’ll possibly be out a month or so”–and I grabbed a few items I’d gathered with that possibility in mind. The next day I was teaching online.

The rest of that year I taught from our apartment, while my wife taught her Pre-K and Kindergarten art classes in the next room.

My middle schoolers would be doing a Socratic Seminar and they’d hear my wife singing about the continents and oceans in the background.

Year 14 started with remote teaching, which lasted all the way to March. At that point the government granted our school permission to return to campus with strict biosecurity protocols: half the students present, half at home on alternating days, and only for half the day–afternoon classes would be completely remote. Lots of hand sanitizer, very strict mask and distancing enforcement, etc.

This was basically remote learning with some students in the classroom logged in while most were at home logged in.

Year 15 started with hybrid learning.

So, half the kids on one day, half the next, but for full days. We were required to teach both groups equitably, but the kids in class could not be on devices for a least half the class.

Impossible! But teachers routinely do the impossible.

It’s been so strange returning to managing a classroom instead of a Google Meet. I’ve forgotten much about how that works. The enormous amount of innovation and adjustment the past year and a half required make me feel like I can’t remember how do what I used to do. It’s quite a surreal feeling to sit in a classroom as a fifteen year veteran and to be at a loss how to start the school year. But education is so challenging and difficult as a matter of routine that it’s not unusual to feel like I’m lost or unsure.

The above photos are of a discussion protocol I used to use regularly. In the protocol, students move to different partners and share their responses to prompts. Some students were online so I made my laptop a partner and then kids in class could include kids at home. I was sitting at my desk trying to plan lessons and I remembered this protocol all of a sudden. I had used Back 2 Back/Front 2 Front routinely before, and had completely forgotten it. Classroom teaching techniques will come back to me.

The government has suddenly given permission for ALL students to be present on campus ALL day for the first time in a year and a half. We still have strict biosecurity measures, but distancing has been eased. Masks are required. We also do contact tracing and regularly already this year entire teams of staff and entire student cohorts have been sent home and taught remotely. 85% of our faculty and staff are vaccinated, and 80% of our students who can be vaccinated have been.

I should point out that Delta has only just arrived here. I have a sinking feeling that we will be on full remote learning again at some point, looking at the situations in several other countries. And I also know that though students will be required to attend campus in order to receive instruction, that when there are confirmed cases on campus entire cohorts and groups of teachers will be working from home while others are present at school.

The hybrid is exhausting, and the hybrid will continue. But if we go on lockdown again, remote teaching is much easier than hybrid!

I’ve done many different jobs over my lifetime, from demanding physical labor on farms and construction crews, to customer service in retail and food service environments, to management positions in HR, Inventory, Operations, Merchandising, to managing an entire multi-floor operation with nearly a hundred salaried and hourly employees, to being an adjunct professor and then to being a librarian, and thence to middle school in the trenches of Baltimore City and then to teaching students of the 1% at an elite international private school.

I know first hand that teaching is the most difficult work I’ve ever done. By far. All of the other jobs I’ve ever done–many of which were highly demanding and taxing–pale in comparison. And teaching during COVID has proven again how adaptable, indefatigable, resilient, and innovative teachers are.

But I think I’m done after this year. I was burned out five years ago, but hung in there and decided to get a change of scene. But the burn out has returned. I think I’m done.