the letter I'm not sending to my ninth-grade students.
You guys. I have been thinking about you almost every day, because I feel bad.
I want to apologize for having lied to you, except that, as I keep reminding my highly emotional seven-year-old, “lied” means that there was an intent to deceive. I told you things that probably weren’t true, but in my defense, I thought I was telling you the truth. I just didn’t understand.
You remember in class how you kept asking questions about the coronavirus pandemic, and I kept saying, you know, it’s serious but we’re going to be okay? In my defense, I did tell you that I wasn’t speaking from a place of expertise, just as a person who had been reading the news a lot. “I’m not a public health expert,” I said every day. “If a public health expert says something different, believe them and not me.” (One week in to this horrible routine, I said “I’m not a public health expert” and one of you interrupted— “Oh, you’re not? I thought you were.” And we all laughed.)
So here’s the thing. I didn’t understand. Three weeks ago—really? Yeah, okay, three weeks ago. I checked the calendar, it’s a little over two weeks since I last saw you all. So three weeks ago, when I said things like, look, eighty to eighty-five percent of people who get this are basically fine… I mean, I thought that “basically fine” meant “basically no symptoms” and the rest of the people would range from “noticeably sick” to “really bad.” I didn’t understand that people who feel so sick they can’t get out of bed, people who say their bodies feel like they were hit by trucks, people who cough up blood, those people are all in that eighty-to-eighty-five-percent group. That the fifteen to twenty percent, “really sick” doesn’t mean “you notice you’re sick” it means “you need those increasingly scarce ICU beds.”
I have been asking myself, a lot, why I didn’t understand. Here’s what I have: maybe understanding was too hard. Maybe this is too scary, and maybe I didn’t want you to be scared.
I also wanted to be teaching you while I still had you in the room—it was increasingly clear we were going to be closing school, and I really wanted to just be your teacher while I had you in the room. Part of being a teacher is creating a space that’s normal. Kids come to school every day with god-knows-what in the background of their lives, and in my classroom, we center ourselves and we focus and on a good day we learn some history.
So I didn’t want to be scared, and I didn’t want you to be scared, and honestly I just didn’t understand what we were facing. I mean, I didn’t want you to be stupid, either—I told you to wash your hands, I told you to stay home if you’re sick, I told you to be careful. But I also told you it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t going to be that bad, we’re all going to be fine.
We’re not going to be fine. I know that now. Individually, I would guess that most of you are going to be fine. But our community is not going to be un-touched by this disease. Statistically speaking, most of us are going to lose someone, or have someone we love be forever changed. And these weeks of isolation are going to have an impact on all of us.
Next week we start “online school” and I’m not sure how that’s going to go. I have lesson plans—readings you’ll do about imperialism, a paper you’ll write. We’ll do quick video-chat checkins and I’ll be fully aware that you’ll all be making fun of my terrible hair or my fat chins on screen. We’ll get through this, more or less. And I’m sorry.