In PreCalc every year we do a scavenger hunt with encoded matrices. I told my team we had to do it this year. I feel like we’ve taken so much of the fun stuff out this year for safety reasons and for equality reasons with kids home sick or quarantined. (When I sit back and think about all that teachers have had to adjust for this year and all we’ve carried, it makes me want to sob. We are so close, sisters and brothers.)
Usually we do said scavenger hunt on the third floor, but I didn’t want to ask my science colleagues to give up even more instructional time this year so I remade the clues and we hunted in the library, thanks to the librarian’s kindness.
I asked my kids if they’d ever been geocaching before. “Make sure you don’t let the muggles in on any of the hiding places! Be sneaky. And also be quiet since we’re in a library.”
It was fun. Like all things this year, it wasn’t as good as it usually is up on the third floor. But it was good for my soul to get a glimpse of what teaching used to be. And to be given hope that we’re getting back there soon.
I long for the day when we can do roller coaster projects and switch groups without worrying about sending yet another seating chart to the main office for quarantine purposes. I long for the day when I can see my kids’ entire faces and they can see mine. I long for the day when I have every kid in class. I long for the day when my kids don’t look like they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
I hate when people say, “I wish we could go back to the good old days.” I usually give some snarky remark like—“What good old days? The days when we offered children as sacrifices? Or the days when Black kids couldn’t drink from the same water fountain as white kids? Or perhaps you mean going back to the days when I couldn’t go to college or couldn’t study what I love or couldn’t vote because of my gender? Or maybe the days when my parents couldn’t marry because their skin colors didn’t ‘match’?”
Most days I believe the “good old days” is an absolute hoax (and also conflicts with my view of God being a God who isn’t stagnant but moves towards us and hence moves us forward).
However…
Today…
Today, I want the good old days.
Today I’m faced—for the thousandth time—that while I do believe we’re moving forward, the pace can be so infinitesimally slow sometimes that we just can’t see it unless we zoom out. Local linearity is what we call it in calculus. Up close, we might not be able to see all that’s going on. Everything looks linear and boring:
But when we zoom out, there’s often a beautiful picture all around us:
Today I choose to zoom out. I choose to be thankful for a scavenger hunt that still wasn’t as good as it usually is, but sparked joy nonetheless. I choose to see that our quarantines are way, way, way down. I choose to focus on my AP kids who are determined to crush their AP Exam despite all the inconsistencies of learning this year. I choose hope.
I choose to zoom out and remember the big picture.
one good thing 