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The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

ISSN: 2472-7318

I Am Not OkaY

Mary Lourdes Silva


Keywords: parent death, sibling death, grief, dance

 

Categories: As If the Pandemic Wasn’t Enough: Tales of Loss and Grief; Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work; Arting/Crafting/Making in a Crisis

 

Content warning: parent death, sibling death, grief

 


“I’m sorry. Can you say that again?” I asked for the third time. I leaned my ear into his cotton-covered face. In the first ten minutes of class, I knew this academic year was going to suck.

***

I started teaching exclusively on Zoom like most college professors nationwide in March of 2020. The Great Pivot was jostling. Who wanted to give up their spring break to crash course on free webinars about digital learning and accessibility? I picked up a few new tricks along the way, like how to listen to training videos on double time, how to invite students to turn on their cameras when it mattered the most, and how to coordinate teaching time with kitchen time. “Students, go ahead and turn off your cameras for privacy, take out some old-fashioned paper (steal it from your parents), and freewrite for the next 10 minutes about ________”, and in those 10 minutes, I could reheat my Panera Bread tomato cream soup and grilled cheese sandwich. The reports are not an exaggeration. In a review of 25 empirical studies, researchers Wang et al. found that teaching online increases instructor time investment. In addition to developing course content, communicating with students individually, and grading student work, I had to trial-and-error my way through buggy course management systems and a suite of technological resources that made empty promises about reducing time on task. By the time I had enough technology and curriculum to meet my learning goals, a new and improved software update promised even “better” outcomes, or the new technological normal wasn’t accessible enough, which required a redesign of my curriculum, more crash course webinars, and more trial and error.

During the first few months of the pandemic, I maintained a labor log, clocking in 8 to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. After 18 months, I dropped my numbers to 8 to 12 hours ONLY 6 days a week. The pandemic is not entirely to blame. In the last year, our college underwent major structural changes, downsizing the student population from 6700 to 5000; laying off 116 full-time equivalent faculty (10 from my department) and staff; increasing course capacity; freezing retirement contributions for a year; delaying sabbaticals; and eliminating course release for service. In other words, we now work more for less.

Weeks before the fall semester started, news spread about our college president stepping down to accept another position. Once again, another interim administrator to fill a vacant role. All down the drum line, we’ve had senior leadership, faculty, staff, and students leaving. The news was depressing, to say the least. Faculty morale was already low, and the bar came down another notch. After 18 months away from campus, I stayed clear of my ground zero until hours before my first class. In those early hours, the solitude was palpable. Colleagues whisked by from the copier room to their office to steal a brief moment to breathe without masks. Sightings of hallway chatter were rare. When it was my turn to encounter one, the conversation had the right amount of banality.

Not everyone in the hallway knows my older disabled sister died in 2020, a devastating casualty of the pandemic, as well as my father, who died days before the first American tested positive for COVID, which means most don’t know I’m still grieving. I don’t talk about it because we are all grieving. Someone knows someone who lost someone. During the first draft of this essay, 637, 356 Americans have left behind mourning fathers, mothers, grandparents, sisters, brothers, and friends. By the time this essay is published, we can anticipate more loss amongst the unvaccinated, the immunocompromised, and the unlucky.

We are not okay. This new normal is not okay. On July 29th, 2021 Inside Higher Education dedicated an article to college faculty living with long-term grief and psychological stress due to the pandemic. Authors Simula and Willink (2021) explain that faculty are dealing with compassion fatigue, particularly women and faculty of color, who worked overtime to support students with mental health challenges and limited access to technology. The authors efficiently identified the problem and transitioned to a list of recommendations for administrators to help us remedy our grief and fatigue. I should be comforted that I am not alone, that someone wants to pay close attention, that not only students matter.

I dealt with my grief online by participating in virtual tango classes with my profe Virginia Pandolfi in Buenos Aires. Right before the pandemic, I completed my one-year sabbatical in Buenos Aires studying the culture and history of Argentine tango, an improvised couples dance. When I returned to New York, barely two months later, the world shut down, and so did my ability to embrace strangers. Argentine tango is danced weekly worldwide in every major city. The kinesthetic discourse is a universal language shared by lovers, friends, family, and strangers. When a tanda begins, a set of 3-4 tango songs, it takes about 1-2 songs to learn the dialect of your new partner, and a lifetime to appreciate the beauty and sensations of that one embrace. Learning to dance a kinesthetic discourse online is not exactly tango; however, it was a chance to refine our technique and musical training. Week after week, I looked forward to my online tango family, the same 8-10 women from 3-4 different continents. At one point, we had Hollywood actor Bill Murray attending class. He didn’t last too long. His movie On the Rocks had him touring in 2020, which made it difficult for him to stick to the strict tango schedule. Tango is not for the faint-hearted. Its sirens entice every new dancer, seducing them to study more, dance more to experience once again the euphoria of the perfect embrace to the perfect song in the perfect place. But tango also promises loss and despair. Author Nina George (2015) writes, “Tango is a truth drug.” It exposes without restraint or reason your vulnerabilities and desires. “People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango,” George writes. When we find a tango connection, we hear everything.

***

I am not okay. Teaching in poorly ventilated classrooms, trying to connect with students wearing fibrous layers of Covid-blocking cotton. In one instance, I caught a student politely moving her head to the side, pulling down her mask to cough into her hand. The next day, another student pulled down his mask to sneeze. When the class critiqued his mask etiquette, he was shocked and disgusted that anyone would actually sneeze in their own mask. By Day 3, I was reminding students to cover all orifices that expel oxygen, the third one already covered. They laughed. The post-pandemic smile is now a pair of crow-feet wrinkles around our eyes along the outer trim of our masks.

I know I’m supposed to hate Zoom, because last year’s students hated Zoom, but I miss their Zoom smiles, faces amplified on my 25-inch monitor. I miss never forgetting their names, printed clearly below their faces or in their black Zoom boxes. I miss discreetly turning up the volume when someone suffering from chronic shyness or social anxiety could not project their voice willingly. I miss the sideways conversations in the chat. I miss breakout rooms and spending more time with struggling students who appreciated the extra attention without peers watching over their shoulders. Zoom offered an intimate private space for students struggling with personal insecurities, social anxiety, and depression to curate their identity, time, and attention during class time. I wanted to give my students permission to embrace the chaos of the moment, whether it came from within or outside—a judgment-free zone to think and act in rough draft. But honestly, I miss most what we can never have back—running into a student (maskless) in the hallway and being greeted with a warm hug and a pre-pandemic smile.

***

In 13 days is the anniversary of my sister Philomena’s final breath. I lay my right hand on her milky skin above the drum of her heart. In this moment, I learn that the heart races frantically like a cornered mouse trying to find the exit. I repeat, “I love you,” praying she can hear me. She was born severely mentally and physically disabled, so for the past week on a ventilator, she couldn’t communicate her thoughts and feelings to us, even if she wanted to. And prior, due to COVID restrictions at the nursing home, for 6 months, we couldn’t visit her. At this point, touch and sound was the only way to communicate.

In Argentine tango, touch is the primary sensory system used to communicate with your dance partner. Through touch, leaders and followers can identify the center of gravity of their partner, which foot they’re standing on, whether they should go left or right, whether the other feels anxiety or stress, and so on. It’s our motherboard into the dance, music, and body. Through touch, we hear ourselves reverberate in our partner. Without touch, we are lost in silence.

***

After an 18-month quarantine from tango events, our sweaty chests in the summer humidity connect like two palms in a prayer. I listen to his heart through my chest. “Do you hear that?” I whisper into his ears, both baffled and comforted. Philomena’s heart runs further and further away from my hand. The monitor next to her bed is already silenced to spare us the pain of that dreadful neverending note. Her lips cool gray with a tinge of blue. My hand is silenced. The tango is not quite over. He smiles at my question. The music ends. We peel apart. The prayer ends. I thank him for the dance, place my hand on my chest, on her chest, one last time to embrace the silence.

***

In the hallway, a colleague briefly pauses his busy schedule to ask me, “How are you doing?”

 

References

George, N. (2015). The little Paris bookshop: A novel. Crown.

Simula, B. L., & Willink, K. (2021, July 29). Navigating the continuing psychological pandemic. Inside Higher Education. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/07/29/how-academic-leaders-can-help-support-faculty-through-pandemics-next-phase-opinion

Van de Vord, R., and Pogue, K. (2012). Teaching time investment: Does online really take more time than face-to-face? International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning13(3), 132-146. 

 


Bio

Mary Lourdes Silva is Associate Professor of Writing and Director of First-Year Writing at Ithaca College. She received a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Composition Studies from UC, Santa Barbara, as well as her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Fresno State. Her past and current research examines the citation practices of first-year college writing students; pedagogical use of multimodal and multimedia technologies and practices; implementation of institutional ePortfolio assessment; gender/race bias in education; and movement-touch literacy as a modality to teach reflective thinking in first-year writing. She is also a community organizer and teacher in the upstate New York Argentine tango community.