Opinion: On the first day of school, the teacher cried
Tracy woke up early on Monday, August 3, the first day of school at Sequoyah High in Cherokee County. But she never left the house. Instead she drank her coffee alone and worried about the other teachers. And she cried.
“We all just want to do our jobs,” she told me on the phone later that week. “We want to be alive to do them.”
Americans living apart and together in the age of pandemic
Tracy is 53, with a minor heart ailment and a more serious lung condition. Her father smoked in the home when she was a child, leaving her vulnerable to respiratory viruses. In 2014, a bad case of the flu became pneumonia and put her in the hospital. Now her in-laws live with her. Both are in their 70s. Her mother-in-law has diabetes and high blood pressure; her father-in-law has Parkinson’s Disease and takes immunosuppressive drugs for his rheumatoid arthritis. All that to say why Tracy could not afford to bring home the coronavirus.
For Tracy, the risk was too great. She resigned and applied for early retirement. On the Friday before school started, she went to her empty classroom and prepared it for the teacher who would take her place. She hooked up the printer, arranged the tables and chairs, and said good-bye to Fred the skeleton.
Then she went home to worry and wait. She considered herself lucky. Although she would take a financial penalty for early retirement, she could stay home. Other teachers decided they could not. Some were single mothers. She couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Viral loads, lines of defense, molecular warfare. Her work felt more relevant than ever, and she was not there to do it. She imagined the children in what used to be her classroom. About 30 of them, two at each table, pressed in close for 55 minutes. Young hearts and lungs. The air circulating.
Other schools would remain open. People would do what they wanted. These choices would have consequences, for themselves and for others, and some of those consequences would be shattering and irreversible. At Sequoyah, the children dispersed. It was just another afternoon outside another high school in a nation grappling with the meaning of freedom. A girl drove off in a Jeep Liberty. The players got ready for football practice.
