Snapshots from the First Day of School

I begin my first day of fiftieth grade working at home, prepping tomorrow night’s seminar. New this year is historian Catherine J. Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness, which I have slipped into the syllabus sight unseen. When we talk about teaching, my graduate students will consider Denial’s suggestion that teaching begin with kindness, toward ourselves and our students.

When I am on campus, printing out the class list, news of the killings at Apalachee High School comes across my newsfeed. I gird myself, pray about the body count, turn my mind sideways, do the mental calisthenics I learned somewhere between Sandy Hook and Parkland. I carry my books and papers and welcome the undergraduates to class.

I begin with my values. I tell my students I know they are people first. They have complicated lives that will sometimes get in the way of their ability to do the work we are meant to do together. I value their physical and mental health. Last fall a student told me no professor had ever offered that message before. I tell them teaching is a sacred trust.

I assure the students that the deadlines are soft. We will have ungrading instead of rubrics and graded assessments. When they do the work in good faith, I will give them the same engaged feedback I give my colleagues. They will not lose points for lateness or misplaced apostrophes or less than fully-formed ideas. Learning to please their own standards outweighs the anxiety of trying to meet mine, still unknown to them. I also ask them for their grace. I am a caregiver for a relative in hospice. Soon I may need them to forgive my distraction and absence. I too am a person with a complicated life.

The class meeting is full of laughter, with more instantaneous connection, engagement, and pleasure than I have ever experienced on the first day of school. The students are genuinely enjoying themselves. They are also giddy with relief. They may have come to class knowing about the news from Georgia, done their own psychological gymnastics. They are mostly no older than Columbine. They have grown up in the shadow of school shootings and the heat of a warming planet. They have chosen higher education despite it all. My classroom will provide a little respite from the grief.

After dinner I deal with my high school senior’s back-to-school paperwork. I read and sign a syllabus. It is fierce and adversarial. It admonishes and threatens. It tells students they must do the reading, come to class fully prepared, not hide in the nurse’s office during a test, write an extra test if they miss the AP exam next spring. It looks like the kind of syllabus that many of us wrote before the pandemic. But at least my child came home today.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel defeated in this vocation. Educators feel ourselves so thoroughly devalued. Policies set us at odds with our students: following the curriculum is more important than learning, judging our students is more important than loving them. Our schools have been stripped of funding. We show up for the first day of school knowing that somewhere in the country, dozens of our colleagues and students will be murdered at work this year. Perhaps in ours. In school, the Second Amendment outweighs our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I no longer hope that we will renounce the madness of the guns. The worst has already happened, over and over again, and nothing has changed. Kindness is not the kind of structural transformation that can counteract the consequences of bullying, abuse, illness, and rage. It is a pedagogical strategy, or perhaps a tactic. It is not enough. But it is something that I can bring to my teaching, to how I work with students and how I set up my classes.

After I walk the dog in the dark, I have a free hour to write. I contemplate the metaphors of conflict built into my vocabulary: snapshots, gird, deadlines, defeated, strategy, tactic. I consider whether to free my language of their taint or to keep them, markers of how hard it is even to speak peacefully.

Earlier this week, another teacher reminded me that in the long run students will forget the content of my class, but they will remember how I made them feel. I am not so naïve as to think a million teachers infusing our courses with kindness will be enough to stop school shootings. But as I peer over the rim of my own despair, I wonder whether being kind might be enough to give pause to the shooter who walks through my hallway. He might point his gun downward as he passes our classroom door, away from my beloved, laughing students, full of the joy of learning.

The Lessons They Taught Me

The last weeks of 2020 have brought me two unexpected and grievous losses.

In mid-December, I learned that my high school Latin teacher died. I hadn’t seen James Bigger since my freshman year, but his imprint was indelible. A big man with capillaries tracing down his nose, a dapper dresser who wore three-piece suits to teach in a suburban public high school, Mr. Bigger dominated the classroom. He addressed us all formally and led us unrelentingly through the first-year Latin curriculum. I loved his class, which set the intellectual foundation for the next seven years of my life, carrying me from northern Virginia to Princeton, where I majored in classics. The way he unpacked the structure of the Latin language taught me more about my native language than twelve years of instruction in English did and made studying German and even ancient Greek a breeze. Brilliant teaching wasn’t enough to turn his three sections of Latin into a full-time job, however, so Mr. Bigger left us for greener pastures at the end of the year. Eventually he settled down into long-term employment at McLean High School in Fairfax County, a position he retired from a few years ago.

Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi could not have been more physically different from Mr. Bigger. A slight and unassuming man with an irrepressible mop of black hair, Ashkan was killed last week along with 11 companions, mountain climbing in Iran. Ashkan was one of the best doctoral students I ever worked with. He took two graduate seminars with me before inviting me to sit on his dissertation committee. It was a pleasure to read the work of this luminous young man, whose study of public space in his home city of Tehran fearlessly took on the intellectual giants of social science. Before graduating, he left Milwaukee to live with his adored wife, who was pursuing her own advanced studies in Denver. When the American Historical Association met there in 2017, the two of them graciously welcomed me and a classmate into their home, serving a feast that he had spent all day preparing. Although I knew that Ashkan was a mountain climber and accomplished harmonica player, the stunning landscapes on their walls introduced me to his eye for photography. Soon after, they returned to Iran to care for their aging parents and raise their baby. Ashkan landed a position at the University of Tehran and settled down for what we all assumed would be a lengthy tenure teaching and researching urban design.

While we might resign ourselves to the prospect that our beloved teachers may die before us, we are never ready to lose our students. I feel Mr. Bigger’s and Ashkan’s deaths as body blows, but our student-teacher relationships had long since transcended physical space. I never spoke to Mr. Bigger after he left my high school, but in 2010 I tracked him down for a long-overdue thank you message for his influence on my life. Although an ocean and a continent and failures of international diplomacy separated us, I never believed I had seen Ashkan for the last time. I sometimes daydreamed of visiting his growing family in Tehran, and I was delighted when just a few weeks ago he asked me for letters of reference for postdoctoral work in the US. In the shock of knowing that both are now forever beyond my reach, cut off from attending their memorial services, unable to find obituaries, I mourn by revisiting the lessons they taught me.

Once in Mr. Bigger’s Latin class, he stood right next to me and pushed his pointer finger down hard on my desk. “Never second guess yourself in language, Miss Seligman!,” he admonished in his typically florid tones. Patrolling the class, he had spotted eraser marks on my test paper, where I had replaced a correct answer with a wrong one. Did I end up getting that answer right? Thirty-seven years later, I have no idea. But with decades of teaching experience under my belt, I can see what he was doing pedagogically—building my confidence. He had taken my measure as a person and intuited that much more than language instruction, what I needed was to trust my first instincts. Learning a “dead” language suited me because I could deliberate over my answers, but for a “live” language—or to teach, or to parent—I would need to be able to think and speak on my feet. In the decades since then, I’ve often reminded myself, “Never second guess yourself in language, Amanda.” Eventually that confidence has seeped out beyond language—a little more slowly, perhaps, but I am still a work in progress.

In much less dramatic fashion, Ashkan also taught me. Since I was the professor and he was the student, it was ostensibly my job to do the teaching. But the best students also teach their teachers—about the stuff they are learning, and also about how to be in the world. In early 2013, I forwarded Ashkan an announcement about a public event relevant to his research. Born into an earlier generation, I would have been the kind of busybody who was forever mailing clippings to friends and family.  Not wanting to overwhelm Ashkan’s in-box, I cautioned him, “Tell me when these get annoying.” In gentlest fashion, he thanked me for the information and told me, “Acts of kindness never get annoying.” Although this might seem obvious to you, Askhan’s note pulled me up short—such a profound insight, delivered so straightforwardly. In retrospect, I can see that his message arrived the beginning of a journey to transform my teaching, learning how to make relationship and kindness the foundation of my pedagogy. In the moment, though, Ashkan’s words revealed the essential characteristic of a much younger person who already knew how to preach the gospel of kindness, even to his professors.

For years I’ve been telling my children that true love makes you a better person; if you are in a relationship with someone and your behavior becomes worse instead of better, if you feel yourself decaying instead of elevating, something is out of sync. You might love that person, but it’s not true love, not fully reciprocal, not one that you should commit your life to. Pedagogy is like that too. Minimal teaching fills a student with knowledge. Good teaching recognizes how relationship informs learning, motivates a student to dig deeper, creates aha! moments, earns hugs and tears at graduation. But great teaching transmutes you, you the teacher and you the learner. Great teaching—like great learning—builds you both into better people than you were when the classroom door opened. If you have passed through a crucible of great teaching, its lessons will spin out in unexpected moments, in forms tied to the original moment by a slender but unmistakable silver thread.

As 2020 draws to its awful close, Jim Bigger and Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi no longer walk the planet. But they are not absent from my life. For the remainder of my days, I will carry the lessons they taught me, mix them up in my being, and reweave them in new forms, for my future students, my future teachers.

Thinking about St. Anne at Christmas

 

December 24, 2020

From my childhood until I was married at 30, my Christmases had three noteworthy aspects: gathering with my mother’s family, the celebration centered on bringing a pine tree into the house and decorating it with ornaments above and presents below, and the story of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem—at least as it was filtered through my decidedly non-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches. Santa wasn’t really part of my direct experience; we rarely if ever had Christmas stockings, and no one except popular culture tried to fill my head with stories about a jolly old man with a white beard. To young Amanda, opening our gifts on Christmas Day was surely the heart of the experience. There were SO MANY presents that my aunt always called it “Pig’s Christmas.” My grandmother, perhaps making up for family money and status lost with the picture cord factory in the Great Depression, made sure there was always a multitude of gifts to unwrap. A family rule was that everyone had to watch everyone open every single present—no presents could be opened when it was time to tend the feast in the kitchen—so the whole thing took hours. The present-opening ritual was always capped off by a visit from the Table Fairy, an idiosyncratic guest who left inexpensive practical presents such as office pens or a fresh box of paperclips on everyone’s dinner plate. The Table Fairy ensured that as the presents under the tree dwindled, no one would selfishly lose interest in the process of watching the unwrapping because everyone could look forward to have one more gift just before dinner, to be opened simultaneously.

If you had asked me as a teenager, I probably could have told you about Mary and Joseph, as could most American children who grow up in a superficially secular society that nonetheless shapes itself around the rhythms of the Christian holiday cycle. The UU churches I attended as a child taught me to love Christmas carols and to know the basic outlines of the story of Jesus’s birth. One year my brother had a part in the Christmas pageant, playing Joseph. He had a line reassuring the ass who carried Mary to
Bethlehem: “There, there, Small One.” We spent so much time finding the right tone for this line that it became a family byword for years afterwards. But the recitation of the classic Christmas story, which I encountered on Christmas Eve, really functioned as a prelude to the main event of unwrapping a seemingly endless supply of presents. No one did the work to connect the dots between Christmas presents and the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the kings brought for baby Jesus.

My primarily secular understanding of Christmas changed when I married a Roman Catholic husband. Neither of us was going to convert for our marriage—he is too dyed in the wool of theism to understand Unitarian Universalism as a religion at all, much less one he would practice; and becoming a Christian would require me to believe multiple things that I find impossible. But we respect the importance of each other’s faiths and from time to time attend worship at each other’s churches. Until we had actual children, I assumed that the challenges of raising an interfaith family would be central to our marriage. But our distinct theologies lead us to the same fundamental values, and our children’s major challenges have little to do with our religious orientations. The interfaith quality of our family is peaceful and enriching rather than a source of conflict.

Attending Catholic services even once in a while did transform my experience of the major Christian holidays. I was so surprised when I realized that there were Trinitarian versions of the familiar Christmas hymns, which even in UU form are already much more theistic than I am entirely comfortable with. I couldn’t belt out lyrics about “the offspring of the Virgin’s womb” with the same kind of gusto I sang about fields and flocks or the silent night. But over decades of marriage, my appreciation for Christmas has only increased, while I have backed off of Easter altogether. I began to understand Easter as the spiritual centerpiece of Christianity. It was not, apparently, a holiday about rabbits and jellybeans and finally the blessed return of springtime, as my various UU churches took care to emphasize for our members who are come-outers, so wounded by the churches that rejected their sexuality and feminism and generally questioning spirits that the traditional, resurrection-oriented Easter triggers their deepest hurts instead of offering them the promise of salvation. So I decided to let my husband shape Easter for our family, providing a festive ham-oriented meal on his request each year, but leaving the candy buying and church-going priorities to him (though I did continue to supervise egg-dyeing and hunting until the teenagers took over that one for themselves). Most years now I don’t even try to get the children to a UU Easter service as well as the essential Catholic mass. But Christmas—perhaps because it is a holiday with a baby at the core—has taken on many new valences to me over the years.

Christmas first began to grow new meaning for me when our first child was a toddler. We hadn’t tried to travel for her first Christmas, when she was five months old. That year, perhaps in a misguided effort to recreate my childhood Pig’s Christmases, we spent three days trying to keep her attention by opening all of her presents between nursing and a precious few naps. But we discovered it didn’t really feel like Christmas when it was just the three of us, so in following years we packed ourselves up and traveled 800 miles east to my family or 2,000 miles west to his. It turns out that there is nothing like traveling with a baby at Christmas to help parents feel both empathy with and sympathy for Joseph, and especially Mary, great with child, riding Small One in search of a hospitable inn. Sure, travel with fractious children and many bags and teeming, keyed up crowds in 21^st century America is hellish; but at least we knew that at the end of the ride our families would meet us at the airport and whisk us home for homemade spaghetti sauce and a futon made up with many warm blankets. Mary did not complain the way I did; but she was filled with the same love for her infant that I had.

My sense of connection to Christmas shifted again as my children grew old enough to participate in the pageant at my UU church, always held on the Sunday before Christmas (not Christmas Eve, which was reserved for a short homily; caroling culminating in the whole church singing Silent Night in a darkened sanctuary, the light from a single candle slowly spreading around the encircling congregation, one person at a time; and, of course, frosted cookies). The church I attend now, in the Universalist Midwest, tends not to use the opportunity of the Christmas pageant to relate the birth of Jesus. Our hard-working Director of Religious Education develops a new script every year, with evergreen woodlands, or elves, or once even a screaming latke at the center. I don’t much look forward to attending the pageant, which always feels like amateur acting rather than worship to me; but I definitely see the value of the children learning to take on these varied roles and the older members appreciating their efforts. My older child, inhabited by a level of stage lust I’d never previously witnessed in person, will take on any role asked of her, and is a very reliable narrator because she is naturally LOUD, even if she has to learn to slow down. My younger child, full of stage fright, will always try to participate but can’t always bring herself in front of all the loving eyes of the congregation. For her, the breakthrough year was the time she could manipulate a shadow puppet behind a screen.

Where is Christianity and the connection to Christmas in that reflection about non-nativity pageants, you ask? Well, it’s admittedly a bit more tenuous. Traveling with older children was easier than with infants, but we started staying home on Christmas to allow them to be in the pageant; and being home also makes it easier to go to both a UU service and a Catholic mass (a feat, by the way, that makes it very hard to feed a family on Christmas Eve; no time to cook, and the only restaurant open in Wisconsin is McDonald’s). But around the time of the pageant years, the UU Religious Educator Sophia Lyon Fahs’s words often got repeated at Christmas Eve services and on Facebook memes, words that make the birth of Jesus once again a universalizing experience: “Each night a child is born is a holy night.” My children might not have been sent to save the world, but their lives are sacred; I can treasure them; and I can try to raise them to bless the world despite our imperfections and brokenness.

And now this year. 2020. The year of the pandemic. This year my older child is 16, the same age Mary was when the state sent her off to Bethlehem, nine months pregnant, to be counted with her husband’s family (this version of a census never made sense to me, and still doesn’t; what kind of government counts people where they come from instead of where they actually are? One that doesn’t care about efficiency but does care about controlling people, I suppose). We aren’t staying home this pandemic year because the state insists we do; in fact, in Wisconsin the state’s power to order us home has been severely attenuated. But we are staying home voluntarily because we treasure other people’s children and the elders that they love and depend on. In the absence of church services, what does the Christmas story have to teach us this year?

My 16 year old hopes that she won’t be at home next Christmas; she has applied to spend it with a host family in another country. If she is away, I will miss her terribly. My thoughts turn to Mary’s mother, St. Anne, who is of course never pictured at the nativity in the manger, where Joseph was Mary’s only human companion. What was that first Christmas like for Anne? I wondered how she felt about sending her own pregnant child off with a much older man, even one to whom she was betrothed. Giving birth leads as easily to death as to new life. How much anguish did Anne experience, worried about how her beloved child would manage in childbirth, especially without her mother’s comfort to carry her through?

I do a little superficial research about St. Anne (and ask friends more knowledgeable about church history for a boost). I am shocked to learn that their mother-daughter story is one that is about familial separation well before the first Christmas. Anne and her husband Joachim do not appear in the Christian Bible. Instead, their story is related in the Gospel of James, which the Bible’s compilers decided to exclude from the canon.[1] Anne and Joachim are wealthy, and pious, but refused from certain desirable statuses because they are childless. Anne miraculously conceives—the Immaculate Conception—and gives birth to Mary. Anne cossets her child Mary throughout her infancy, but delivers her to the temple to be raised by priests when Mary turns three, as a way of offering thanks for the gift of her life. Did Anne ever see Mary after that? Was the first Christmas only one of many in which mother and daughter were apart? The tradition seems murky. For a while, teenage Mary, alarmed by a pregnancy she cannot hide or explain to the satisfaction of the priests, takes refuge with her cousin Elizabeth. Was Mary still connected with her family but fearful of the prospect of her mother’s wrath at the pregnancy? Depictions of Mary and Anne in the medieval period show mother teaching daughter to read, suggesting that then, at least, the church accepted the idea that they had an ongoing relationship, even if they were not together when Mary birthed Jesus.[2]

But 2020’s Christmas lesson is a poignant one for me. For 2000 years, Christians have celebrated the mother and son, Mary’s bond with Joseph solidified by the birth of the precious baby Jesus. But what of the mother Anne and daughter Mary, separated at the time of travail, by an unholy conspiracy of state and social dictates? Were they not also a family? Christmas is a time of family celebration but also of family put asunder.

Photo by my mother, Kerry Mueller, the artist.

---

[1] Why is the Gospel of James excluded, you ask? Read it for yourself here or here. It’s shockingly different from the more familiar gospels, and not only because a midwife attends Mary’s labor in a cave instead of a manger.

[2] Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta 32 1) (1993): 69-80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/767018

Pandemic Learning

Let’s talk about the suffering of American schoolchildren, shall we?

Until the 20^th century, children were entitled to a rudimentary education of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Most families could not spare their children’s labor—bodily labor on the farm, wage labor in the factory—so basic literacy was the maximum they got.

During the Great Depression, Americans started implementing universal high school education. Not because they really believed in the benefits of a superior education, but as a way of keeping youth off the job market. If they were in school, they would stop competing with grown men for family-supporting wages.

But that’s all taken care of right? That’s history.

Consider also these conditions that continue into the present.

Local municipalities and states denied African Americans the resources to run adequate schools. Buildings were ramshackle, teachers taught 100 children in a classroom. After the Brown I and II decisions, black children had better access to schools that had been built for white children. But African Americans and other families of color often have to make a trade-off: send children to schools built around white children so they can learn in well-resourced conditions, or keep them in a culturally-supportive, close-to-home environment where they are not subject to racist hazing and daily micro-aggressions.

Children with disabilities received either no education or entirely segregated education until the Americans with Disabilities Act meant they were entitled to education in the least restrictive environment. Even now, however, because schools cannot be bothered to implement Universal Design and the states have not quadrupled educational funding, they continue to learn on the margins of an educational system built for neurotypical students.

What of gifted/asynchronous learners? The schools have no obligation to meet their educational needs. The states have chosen to build schools around the learning needs of children of normal intelligence who meet a suspect set of developmental norms. They cannot have access to academic content appropriate to their intellectual gifts until their behavior meets the age-related criteria specified by developmental psychologists. Some gifted/asynchronous learners suffer their entire educational careers in schools that are built to prepare children for work and careers rather than for curiosity, wonder, and learning.

Some children are natural nightowls. Leave them alone and they will do their best and most creative work between about 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. But can they have a school experience that encourages them to learn? No, because school has to start at 7 a.m. so that student athletes are not denied the opportunity to practice and compete in the afterschool hours.

So, forgive me if I am not entirely sympathetic to the complaints of parents whose children would learn better in the school building than through temporary virtual learning. Your children are operating in a context that has simply not prioritized education for all students. Here in Wisconsin, the state and the public have decided that keeping tavern owners in business and going on with church services and weddings are all more important than keeping children in school buildings. They have taken this decision even though the entire planet is dealing with an emergency like World War II that requires everyone to sacrifice in order to keep our health care system functioning.

If you want an educational system that spares your child the indignity of learning from the comfort of home instead of with the direct supervision of teachers, then you have to work to build a system that prioritizes the education of all children. Because we haven’t had that yet in America. Maybe it’s time.

A letter to school board and administrative staff

Dear [school board and top administrators]:

Like you (I am sure), I have been giving a lot of thought to school reopening in the fall; I am literally losing sleep (hence the time stamp on this email). Thank you for surveying the staff and families about options. I suspect you have come to the conclusion that there are no good choices, only less bad ones. I personally have volunteered to teach my classes at [my university] face-to-face; but in light of the increasing prevalence of COVID in [our state], I am less and less sure that is a good idea, even for my classes that are smaller and less socially complex than classrooms full of children. I am particularly concerned about the [middle] school building, with few windows that would allow immediate fresh air to ventilate classrooms.

The more I think about it, the more I have circled back to the following principles that I would like to see govern the return to school in the fall:

• No staff member or students should be required to be in a school building unless they volunteer to be present
• Students with special educational needs and whose families cannot manage with them continuing to be at home should have top priority for being supervised at school.
• Regular in-building instruction should resume only when COVID is not still actively circulating in our community, according to public health authorities, and even then we probably need social distancing measures to begin.

These principles to me imply that the district should adopt a flipped-classroom model. Here's what I would suggest:

• All formal instruction takes place online, with Chromebooks issued to students and financial support for internet access for families who cannot afford it on their own. As occurred in spring, minimize the requirement to attend sychronous sessions (but make them available), to prevent bandwidth conflicts within households.
• The school buildings are opened up with staff and other supervising adults (volunteers?) who are willing to be physically present. The combination of the number of voluntarily-present adults plus social distancing factors should determine how many children can be present at the school together. The in-person adults can then a) supervise the work of students who need direction to get going and stay on task; b) provide additional tutoring and instruction to meet the needs of the particular students they have with them.
• Priority for access to the in-person building time should be explicitly allocated to families with the greatest needs (I don't have a system for determining priorities, but I assume school administrators including guidance counselors will have a good sense of this). The district should explicitly encourage families who can manage with their children at home and whose students will suffer the least from continued lockdown not to opt for the in-person option. Note that access to the physical school could rotate, or people could sign up on a drop-in model so that even mostly locked-down students could have some opportunity to connect with peers in person.
• Everyone in the building needs to wear a mask.
• Return to in-school instruction should not begin until the public health gating criteria indicate that it is safe to do so. I personally consult the [state recovery] plan every day; although [our state] was briefly at 5 out of 6 green lights, we are currently back down to 2 out of 6 gating criteria met. Even then, students and staff will need to practice social distancing until COVID is not actively circulating in the US or most of us are vaccinated.

I know that this will not be an easy decision to make. I am an educator myself and have placed a central value on education in my life. But I do not want our students and staff to face death or life-long health effects for the sake of keeping up with standards of achievement that were imposed in more normal times. We continue in a state of emergency, and our choices about how to proceed should reflect that state of emergency--the situation is substantially worse now in [our state] than it was four months ago when the schools (rightly) shut down. Humans have a long adolescence. For those who survive this pandemic, there will be plenty of time to make up for "lost" learning. Let's maximize the numbers of our children and staff who have that opportunity.

Sincerely

Amanda

An Open Letter to Wisconsin Republican Legislators

Dear Legislators

I am writing to appeal to you to get the Republican leadership in Wisconsin to cooperate with Governor Evers on finding a way to end COVID-19—even if that means ordering Wisconsin residents to wear masks in all public settings and temporarily shutting down businesses, churches, and other organizations again.

It is clear from the public health data that Wisconsin is on the cusp of tipping over into an outbreak of COVID that resembles the situations in Florida, Arizona, and Texas, which have become dire in the past week. Cases of COVID are steadily increasing, and they have been since Wisconsin reopened after the state supreme court decision setting aside the governor’s Safer at Home order. If this continues unchecked, we will soon arrive at the point where our hospitals are overwhelmed and cannot provide adequate treatment either to COVID patients or to people with other health emergencies.

My family and I have spent the past four months locked down at home, going out only for food and medicine, public service, and a tiny bit of outdoor recreation. We wear masks everywhere, even walking around our low-density neighborhood. Although my gym has reopened, I have not gone back to it. We are trying to model responsible behavior for our children as well as to protect our neighbors in case we are infected unawares. Even though the Safer at Home order was no longer in effect, it was evident that the key to beating the virus is to drastically reduce the number of potential transmissions.

But my family simply cannot do this alone. My children want to go back to school in the fall. They will not be able to do so unless the pandemic is under control. It was the right decision for schools to shut down in March with only a few cases circulating in Wisconsin, and it would be the height of recklessness to reopen them in September if the caseload is still growing—teachers and students will die and suffer lifelong effects of illness if schools are reopened too early. It is clear from worldwide evidence that the only situation that will allow safe reopening of schools is the virus is no longer in wide circulation in our communities. The only way to get that result six weeks from now is to get Wisconsin residents to stay home now and wear masks when they go out. And given the state of politics in Wisconsin, only the Republican leadership can make these things happen.

Please do the right thing for the people of Wisconsin, step up to promote sensible and mandatory public health measures, and turn the spread of COVID around.

Sincerely

Amanda Seligman

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Stores

Two days before we were told by our medical professionals to quarantine for 14 days and that we should go to the drive-through site for COVID tests, my husband and I separately went to the same store, him to pick out and pay for a household appliance and me to collect it. The people in that store were not social distancing and were not masked. I had to handle the door to open it. The whole time I was there, I was regretting the entire transaction. For a couple days afterwards I regretted the transaction and worried what it might do to us. I was angry with my husband for going there in the first place and not turning around and walking out when he saw it wasn't safe. And when we turned up sick, I felt like we should never patronize that business again.

Are we sure that those interactions made us sick? No, of course we don't know for sure. But what I learned from this episode (again) is to listen to my gut. We were lucky to end up with colds and not COVID, and most of the cost we paid was in our anxiety in the week between the purchase and when the negative test results came in. I don't want to live again with the worry about what will happen to my children if my husband and I are hospitalized, with the possibility of infecting the people I love, with fear of the short-term and unknown long-term ravages of COVID on my body. Other than food, there is nothing I need so badly that I should put us at risk.

So, I drew up this list of rules for a personal gut check before entering a store or other public place:

1. Have your staff wear masks properly
2. Limit the number of people inside
3. Let me open the door without touching a handle
4. Invite all visitors to wear masks
5. Post your policy at the entrance and on the web

If the store doesn't meet these criteria, I'm not going in. If I'm in the store and I realize it's not safe, I'll leave without the stuff I came for. Wisconsin reopened prematurely. I am not.