"How do we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" This plaintive question from Psalm 137 resonated when it showed up in the Episcopal Prayer Book's queue of Psalms last Saturday. I'd just completed my 40th first week of teaching middle school, a week unlike any of the others.
My song as a teacher has always been one I've believed in deeply: that writing is a process for discovering more about yourself, your world, and your beliefs, while reading enlarges your experience.
The foreign land is school during this pandemic. Classes meet half as often, twice as long. Half the kids attend on line a couple days, then on campus a couple days. The ones on campus lug their bookbags past untouched lockers through a quiet hall where always before there was jostling, locker-slamming, gossip, high-fiving and general hubbub. Students meet just four of their classes one day, four the next, all 85-minutes long. That former hub of social interaction, the restroom, is now limited to occupancy by two.
[PHOTO: My lovely dog Brandy often joins morning prayer. The routine has been a comfort during this odd time; now it's an inspiration, too.]
Re-re-re-scheduling the start of school to reflect Georgia's having America's highest per capita spread of the virus, our leadership team wisely gave the students a day off on Friday, giving teachers time to reflect. What did we get right? What do we need now? I was grateful for the time to reflect. By the end of Friday, I'd had a breakthrough.
As my friend Susan observed, "It's like solving a crossword puzzle." Yes! "Across" is pretty easy - the literature we mete out in 20-page reading assignments every two days; language arts to practice; time for applying techniques in writing.
But "down" has been keeping me up at night. How do you keep kids engaged 85 minutes, half of them socially distanced in cloth face coverings (CFCs or "masks"), half projected on the Active Board?
By 3:30 Friday, I'd found a sort of crossword format for planning, and things clicked into place. I can see what the students need to experience in order to grow as readers and writers. Thanks to our leadership team and our technical staff, I have several options for how to connect on-line learners with the face-to-face ones.
On Saturday morning, after weeks of anxiety and waking up at 2 or 3 AM, I felt OK. I turned again to the Book of Common Prayer for the morning routine of prescribed readings and prayers that have been a comfort in stressful times. Not on the list, Psalm 33 kept bubbling up.
Psalm 33 proclaims, "Sing to the Lord a new song." I literally did, noticing in the Hymnal chants for weekday morning prayer that, as a Sunday singer for 40 years, I'd never had occasion to sing. I was delighted to discover expressive plain chant for "The Venite" and "The Third Song of Isaiah." Sight-reading, I sang at the darkness on that Saturday "Arise, shine, for your light has come." Like a crossword puzzle, the music works across and down. Going "down" through verses long and short, the chant is flexible to allow for length and emphasis, verse by verse -- as my new system is flexible to bend with the needs of the class.
Thank God, I'm feeling better about the year ahead than I have done for months. A colleague said on the work day, "We're all first - year teachers again!" So true: as I did in the first couple years of teaching, I've rolled out of bed as early as 3 AM to prepare lessons for the day; I've crashed as early as 8:30 at day's end.
Coincidentally, the same morning, I broke through on an actual crossword puzzle with the theme "Global Menu," where MousSEATTLE intersected CaraMELROSE.
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