The Twilight Zone

I'm going to be completely honest. The emails that rolled in all day yesterday freaked me out more than a bit. Groups to join. Content CLTs to schedule and "attend" weekly. Everybody sharing resources for online instruction. Expectations galore. I do realize we need to work for our keep, but for someone as technology-averse and people-preferring as myself this is going to be very challenging.

That said, I think our administrators are just trying to put the wheels in motion as best they can. Yesterday afternoon when I popped into the building for the last time, I found the entire admin team in the school library spread out among the the tables in what seemed to me to be the perfect compromise between social distance and face time. Seeing them together in that command center gave me strange comfort.

One AP walked me down to a colleague's room to retrieve some plants that weren't going to survive on their own, including newly seeded ones that her students had recently planted. I turned off the light table in the corner, grabbed the Lysol and the Purrell from the desk, as she'd instructed, and we headed back down the spine of the once-familiar building with two arm loads of salvaged greenery. We passed the head custodian in his face mask, but not one other living soul.

It was only as we approached the sunlit lobby that I realized how eerily dim the rest of the building had been, like a distant memory or a dream you're awakened from abruptly. Relieved to be back outside, I drove off wondering when we will all be together again and how we are going to navigate this twilight zone.