It’s the last week of classes at Penn State, and then students take exams and professors frantically grade papers. It’s been a different teaching life with masks and COVID testing and vaccine mandates and updates about community transmission. But we did it! Our class survived another semester.
I’ve never seen their faces. Can you imagine? Unless a student talked to me outside where we could remove our masks, I still don’t know what my students really look like. I look forward to the day when I teach without a mask, but I just read Penn State will require classroom masks for the spring semester. I’m keeping a positive attitude!
One day, we’ll look back on this moment in history and wonder what it was like to live through a pandemic. Well, here’s my contribution to the archive: I taught every day in a mask; they learned every day in a mask. Another semester went by, and we adjusted to a COVID world.