Keep Humaning
Building Connection with Virtual Post It Notes
I closed my laptop and sat on the table in my empty room. Through tear-filled eyes, I looked at the bright post it notes on my classroom wall: pizza, Fluffy from Harry Potter, So I don’t have to walk in the elements, more pizza. I smiled at these handwritten relics of students’ presence in my classroom; they had been here and left a visible, brightly colored mark.
But the students weren’t here now, and I was struggling on this first day — like many teachers — with wondering how we can connect as humans from afar this school year.
I know how to connect in my classroom. Each year I spend the first two weeks finding commonalities, reading postures and smiles or frowns, gauging enthusiastic participation or nervous reluctance, noticing what is carried materially or psychologically, showing them that they are a human first and then a student, showing them that being human in our classroom means being real and being comfortable in our own skin.
But in those brief ten minute classes that first day, I felt removed from my humans, my normal strategies insufficient in a new setting, the Zoom silence a void concealing enthusiasm and apathy alike, leaving me staring at a wall of pink and blue and yellow post it notes feeling like I let my students down.
And then, I remembered a student of mine from a few years ago who both struggled and flourished in my gradeless classroom, who upon leaving wrote me a letter where she gave me a mission I’ll never forget: Keep humaning, Doucette.
Keep humaning. I smiled, remembering her words. But it feels like I don’t know how. I could almost see her smile and shaking her head at me — Maybe not yet, she would say, but you will. Keep humaning.
And has there ever been a more important time to keep the human at the center? The world feels tired and angry and overwhelmed, and we need to heed each other’s humanity, to connect and find commonalities, to honor differences, to brighten each other’s lives with metaphorical post it notes of joy and hope, to become relics in each other’s stories.
The world weighs heavy, and seems to collectively yearn for a past that isn’t returning. I hear that in the voices of my colleagues and parents when I ask them how school is going for them and their students. The response doesn’t vary much: “It’s fine, but it’s not the same.” I get it. We are built for consistency in a world of constant change.
That feeling of “not the same” dwells in our students, too. They hear their voices echo in an empty room. They miss their classmates and their backpacks and passing periods where they can stop in with their friends to chat with a favorite teacher. They are frustrated with mute buttons and bad internet and tired eyes from screen time, they are grieving the loss of Homecomings and athletic events and their favorite activities. They miss humaning — with their friends, with their teachers — all of us in the same space.
But nothing’s the same right now, is it? Going to the grocery store isn’t the same, going to a restaurant half full isn’t the same, saying a long midwestern goodbye without a hug isn’t the same. So why are we expecting school to be the same? And even more, why do we want it to be?
We need to not aim for same. For our students, we need to strive for better, to be better, to do better. And I knew that as I sat on my table staring at my post it note wall, that I owed it to the students to be a better I had yet to discover.
Now two weeks into the semester, I see hope in connections building gradually. One day I took extra minutes from my very short class period to wish a student a happy birthday and listen to his birthday plans. I met with students in individual conferences and I listened to them talk about their days, their rooms, their lives. I took time to notice words, responses, visibility and invisibility. And I collected relics this week: ramen noodles as birthday dinner, a dog-eared copy of The Alchemist, and a Lord Huron concert poster. I can almost see their writing on bright post it notes in front of me: blue, pink, and yellow, scribbles in the corner, tossed on top of each other on a blank wall, building connections and possibility. Humaning together.
