DeEscalating In A Pandemic

“I find myself sitting outside de-escalating a lot this year. Big feelings are hard to manage! Things we do a lot of different things including: walking it out, sitting outside, taking deep breaths, and talking about our feelings. But sometimes it takes some planned ignoring to get there. Today that looked like taking a selfie, making this post and doing a mini workout circuit while my student got their feelings out. 😂”

-Life Skills w/Laverty Instagram post, 11/12/21

Something I do towards the end of the school year is look back at pictures, or posts I have made, and reflect on what the year looked like, vs what I thought it would be.  Anyone in education entered the 2021-22 school year expecting it to be better than the year before.  The bar was so low! How could it get any worse?  If you scroll back far enough, you’ll find posts I made WISHING that it could be “next year” already.  I craved a fresh start, and needed the summer reboot more than ever in my career.  

With only 34 days left in this school year I'm realizing what they say is true.  The grass really is greener on the other side.  Every year brings different hurdles, and different reasons to celebrate.  It has taken me eight years in education to realize while some things get easier, there is always going to be something thrown at you that you didn’t see coming. 

This school year,  each and every student on my caseload needed more support than they had prior to the pandemic.  I had a majority of these students during our last “normal school year”, and knew them well before the shutdown.  I was shocked to find that even my easiest of easiest students needed a lot more from me than they ever did before; even when we were fully virtual.

Coming back in person was like ripping the bandaid off a wound, before it had a chance to fully heal.   I have never struggled with managing a class of students more than I did this fall. They were defiant. They exuded teenage attitude, and they were overall apathetic about pretty much everything we did. Of everything I had expected from the 2021-22 school year, this was the last way I thought it would start.  Don’t even get me started on how it’s ending.

2020 was hard. So, so hard. But I think this last school year felt so much worse because we all had high expectations.  We were back in person, and ready to get back to the old ways, but we still had to deal with the fallout of the pandemic.  I didn’t really get to see my students' faces until mid March! This was not the school year to be set up for success.  But I will say, as a millennial classroom teacher, I grew the most as an educator this year.  Switching to virtual learning was relatively easy for me.  I used technology regularly in my class and my students were trained on google classroom and knew how to manage it. 

I thought classroom management, and navigating behaviors were strengths of mine before, but I learned so much about what kids need and how they need it this year.  The kids that showed up in my room the first day of school were not the same kids who left it in March of 2020, and I was not the same teacher either. We all carried baggage on our shoulders, and needed to learn how to navigate our new normal.  This often looked like hours spent sitting outside with different students as we focused on breathing, and talking things out.  We had to work on our mental health before we could work on academics. 

I walked miles with students out in the sun, wind and rain as we got the heck out of the classroom and took a mask break.  I spent hours and hours in the break room, talking to a student about how our behavior affects other people, and learning how to take deep breaths.

This year, my students got a few more video breaks  and had more dance parties than usual. Why?  Because we all needed it.  Realizing this was a bit of a tough pill to swallow at first.  Stopping the plan, and removing the escalated person from the situation is not easy when you have 75 other things to get done that class period.  Ultimately, I had to reassess the priorities.  Paperwork, meeting deadlines and expectations had to take a backseat to the emotional needs of my students, and even myself. 

I feel like this year laid the groundwork we needed to be able to hit the ground running next year. I’m hoping all educators take the end of their school year, and the first few days of summer having fun, letting go of expectations, and finding themselves.  May we all come back next year reset, recovered, and with renewed intentions.  

-Lav