A few tough moments to start the semester

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: teaching is hard, and Covid teaching is harder. If you asked me to pick out the worst moment of my first day of teaching for the year, I'd have to narrow it down: 

• When the fifteenth student walked into a classroom that contained only fourteen seats so I had to roll the teacher's desk and chair over to the corner so the student could sit and then there was not a single place for me to sit down while my students did their first-day-of-class writing, and I had to worry what sort of pandemic protocols I was violating by allowing fifteen students in a room approved for only fourteen, but then I also had to wonder why the people in charge of assigning classrooms hadn't found one more appropriate for the size of the class.
• When the technology that worked fine when I tested it just last week refused to work properly so that the student joining my class from quarantine was unable to communicate with me or the rest of the class except via the chat function, which I couldn't see with my back to the screen and couldn't read when my attention was drawn to his comments because the print was too small for my decrepit eyes.
• When the technology that worked so well in a classroom I used all last semester refused to respond to my promptings so I had to dash down the hallway and fetch the administrative assistant charged with solving every problem in every single classroom in the whole stinking building, and I'm sure she's already getting tired of my face because I had to seek her assistance three different times before noon.

Those were difficult moments but not one of them was the worst. The worst moment occurred in my fourth class of the day, when I had finished going over the syllabus and my students were dutifully writing in response to a prompt and I was relaxing in the knowledge that all I had to do was sit there until they were done writing and I'd be done teaching for the day, but in the quiet of the classroom, something unexpected happened:

I had to cough.

And not just a little gentle throat-clearing snorf but a body-wracking cough that would shake me from toes to temple, the kind of cough that might attract concerned attention in the best of times but that could send people screaming for the exits during Covid-19.

Well what could I do? I felt the cough coming so I excused myself to the rest room across the hall, where I let it loose. I sincerely hope it was nothing worse than my usual reaction to returning to the classroom in a moldy building. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to be sick right now.

But that's just the bad news. The good news is my students all deserve gold stars for complying with mask and distancing protocols, and they wrote some really interesting stuff today, engaging with ideas in a way that fills me with hope. No one ever said teaching would be easy, but in this case I think it's worth doing anyway.