The last time I shared about how the coronavirus has been affecting life here in my Vermont town, it was March of 2020, when COVID-19 had only just started to up-end the world as we all knew it. Since then, there’s been a lot of challenges and a lot of changes, though many changes are pointing in a positive direction. This is what’s been going on over the past year or so of the pandemic, from my experience here in the Green Mountain State.

Professional Life

My professional life as an educator has definitely been the aspect of my life that has been most dramatically altered by the pandemic, and it has been altered and re-altered multiple times throughout, as guidelines have changed and cases have popped up in school.

For the end of the 19-20 school year, from March to June, I, along with countless other teachers across the country and the world, was tasked with learning to teach remotely in an unthinkably short amount of time, especially considering I’ve never done anything close to this as a teacher of early elementary grades. I did my best, though, and came out at the end of the year knowing Google Classroom and Zoom fairly well after working out how they worked best with young students over the final few months of school. Of course, having everything remote had its disadvantages, including the fact that there were several kids in my class who simply didn’t participate, whether due to not having enough support at home with parents as essential workers or just not being developmentally ready to learn in this very different manner. There were benefits, too, though, including a chance for the kids to learn all of this new technology along with me (it definitely helped prepare them for the next wild ride of a school year) as well as really basic but amazing privileges like being able to use the bathroom whenever I needed it (such a rare luxury in the teaching profession).

That was certainly an experience, but approaching its end, I can confidently 20-21 school year has required more adaptation on the parts of educators, students, and parents than any I’ve witnessed as a teacher or even during my own years as a student. It would take several posts to fully detail all of the changes that took place, but in a nutshell, in my district/school, we started with remote learning (this now involved me learning a whole other digital learning platform, as Google Classroom was not the one chosen for the younger grades), shifted to a model where most kids were remote with a few exceptions, went to an A/B hybrid model, and finally ended up on a 4 day in-person/1 day remote model with some kids doing the full remote option. While all of that was going on, we’d also have full remote weeks here and there after vacation weeks like December break, as well as at least one due to positive cases. My brain has been admittedly overloaded with all of this, especially having to plan in-person and remote activities for the majority of the year. Helping kids learn to manage all of the virus-related expectations, such as wearing masks correctly and social distancing, has been another new aspect to the job. Despite the challenges, I have been extremely impressed by how understanding and flexible the parents of the kids in my class have been, and the by the level of resiliency shown by the kids themselves. That being said, I am very much hoping that next school year will be more consistent and less taxing for students and staff alike.

Personal Life

This is a bit related to my professional life, as I was able to get it slightly earlier (though not as early as I wanted!) as an educator, but a big thing that happened for me (and hopefully many of you) recently is that I received my covid vaccine toward the end of March 2021. I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, along with many others at a vaccine clinic specifically for educators.

Though it was very uplifting to see so many school staff members out and I don’t regret getting it, I did have fairly severe side effects that resulted in several doctor’s visits and missing an entire week of work.

Vaccine aside, things in my personal life have not been too eventful at all. I started getting more comfortable with things outside of the home in the summer of 2020, enjoying some outdoor dining and getting a haircut for the first time post-pandemic. When in-person school started, I was more cautious in my personal life out of concern for my students and their families. However, after the vaccine I am feeling a lot more open to different experiences; my husband and I have gone back to the occasional outdoor dining and I’ve even been back to the dentist by now! Of course, the pandemic has done nothing to stop me from spending a lot of time in the great outdoors running, hiking, and, naturally, walking my sweet dog. Fiddle has not been bothered one bit by pandemic life over the past year or so.

It has been a long time since my husband and I have seen our friends and family in-person, especially considering we live far away from them in any case (Zoom has been helpful with this!). We have several potential visits planned and/or in planning stages for this summer, though, which will involve seeing many people we haven’t seen in a year or longer. This is very exciting!

State and Neighborhood Life

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been keeping up with the Vermont Dashboard on a daily basis, and the experience has been incredibly informative and occasionally anxiety-producing. However, it’s been great to look at over the past few weeks and see numbers of new cases as low as 10 and 11, after months and months of new case numbers in the hundreds (this might seem minimal but keep in mind that Vermont is the second-last-populated state in the U.S.).

Things seem to be going well in town, too. Though my husband will forever lament the loss of our nearby Burger King, lots of local businesses have either continued to thrive throughout the pandemic or are coming back up as things loosen up. There are even places that have opened during these wild times, such as Farm Road Brewing right in the downtown area, a place I’m certainly interested in checking out in the future.

This past year has been an intense time, but my hope is that it’s helped many of us grow stronger, as individuals and as communities. Here’s hoping that things will only improve more from here.