Chris Voisard – Applied Creativity

Tag: teaching

Shelter In Place

Only a few days in, I knew the whole covid thing was a lie.

Not that there wasn’t a virus, I was one of the first people I knew who got it.

I’m not some grand prognosticator, it’s just when you grow up with lies, like in my case where they told me that my younger brother was my uncle, among other things, you get really good at sniffing out the Truth. Or at least that’s the case with me. Some call it hyper-vigilance.

My early tip off was three little words: Shelter in Place. If not for the fact that I’m an elementary school teacher in California, I might not have known exactly what that meant.

Friday the 13th in March of 2020, was the last day that I saw kids at school; playing in the playground, tumbling and touching, laughing with their heads back and mouths open wide, for a long, long, while. Spring break was only a week away, and spring fever was hitting hard. The kids didn’t feel like working, and neither did I. Ms. K, the principal, called us into special meeting that Thursday after school in the library. I was thinking, really? Can’t you just send out an email or something? An extra meeting was the last thing I wanted. On the other hand, it wasn’t too often a special meeting was called, so I was somewhat intrigued.

“The students are not coming to school next week,” she told the assembled, tired-looking teachers, scanning the room for reaction. “We are being told to close an extra week out of an abundance of caution, so that they can get a handle on this virus that is going around.”

At first I thought she meant because so many kids at our school had been sick. Lots of kids had been sniffing and coughing right in my face, and wiping ribbons of snot on the back of their sleeves. I had been working with kids one-on-one on a computer for English proficiency, and had to keep wiping down the screen and keyboard that was sprayed with sneeze spittle. But closing the school just because some kids were sick? That was unheard of. They don’t close school for anything, as much as I wished we could have a snow day or something once in a while, but no such luck in California.

The room full of teachers sat for a full minute of stunned silence trying to digest this news. Ms. K continued, “Governor Newsom has ordered all the schools closed in the seven Bay Area counties, due to the spread of the Corona virus.”

Oh, that? Sure, I had heard of this Corona virus in the background of my busy days, the guy who died in China, the three or however many cases they had detected in the US, mostly by people who travelled to China. I remember people being scared to go to the Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco that past February, but I thought that was ridiculous hype, and went anyway. I had heard that a State of Emergency had been declared, but I thought, yeah, yeah, that’s how they get money. None of the talk meant anything to me until I heard Ms. K say they were going to close the school. All the schools in the Bay Area. For a week!

My first guilty thought: we don’t have to teach next week! Yahooo! And then we still get another week off for spring break? Two whole weeks without the kids, an extra week off? I think I can speak for most teachers when I say that while I love teaching kids, the job is, let’s say, taxing. I adore kids, more than adults, but at that point in the year the extra break was welcome. I could feel this somewhat verboten thought ping-ponging around the worn-out, spring-fevered, teachers’ brains in the room. Though most sat stoically stone-faced, no one would admit the glee I think we all felt until I heard a teacher behind me whisper, “What, is this Christmas? I thought it was Easter!”

“You will all need to report to work next week,” Ms. K went on. “We will need you to help gather materials for the students to use during the extra week they will be at home. Although the kids will not be required to come to school, they will still be considered instructional days.”

Anybody who is a teacher knows that any kind of “work” that doesn’t involve trying to wrangle kids attention, inspire them to learn, keep them following the rules while fostering and independent spirit, making them laugh, consoling their injuries, and loving them at the same time is not work. Any kind of task on a computer screen, or talking on a phone, or doing something menial, does not compare with the spiritual and emotional effort required to turn a classroom of kids into a cohesive community. So, whatever we teachers were going to be required to do the next week felt like an unexpected vacation.

After we were dismissed, some of the teachers buzzed in corners, and a couple of teachers in the principal’s inner circle went up to talk to her in low voices. I thought I heard her say, “Yeah, I don’t think they’re coming back at all this year.” I thought I must have heard that wrong, and put the thought out of my head as being too impossible to fathom. Only later did that overheard remark come back to haunt me.

The next day, on that Friday the 13th there was a palpable grief floating through the kids’ collective psyche, while we teachers were temporarily psyched up. They had definitely gotten the memo about the extra week off, but I was surprised to see kids crying here and there, some clustered in small groups, their arms around each other, heads down. Kids came up to randomly hug me. It felt like a funeral. Actually, it was, but I didn’t know it yet. The kids seemed to intuit what was happening though. “Aw, come on, it’s only a week,” I said to whatever kid was acting overly dramatic, as kids tend to act.

Monday morning, we teachers all reported to an eerily empty school void of kid-noise and energy. The bells rang anyway, signaling nothing. We were told to go through the desks in all the classrooms, and start making packets of work that the parents would later pick up. I set to work in various rooms, putting crayons in baggies, and making stacks of work and books, and packing and marking them in paper bags. About half way through the day on Tuesday, I heard Ms. K make an announcement on the loudspeaker. “Everyone is to go home. Now. Please just drop what you are doing. The governor has announced a Shelter in Place.”

I was like, what? Shelter in Place?

I knew what that term meant, as most teachers do, because ‘Shelter in Place’ was one of the many emergency drills we practiced with the kids every year. Fire drill, evacuate the building, earthquake drill, get under the desk, unfortunately in later years, ‘active shooter’ or lockdown drill, close the curtains, lock and block the door, and keep quiet. Shelter in Place meant do not evacuate, immediately seek shelter in the nearest building or room, and if possible seal the windows and doors and turn off any air conditioning because of immediate danger outside. The danger could be some hazardous chemical material in the air, or else severe weather. Shelter in Place is a command that is only meant to last for a few hours.

This is where the governor made a big credibility mistake with me, very early in the game, and I never believed another word he, or any other person in the government or public health said on the matter. Immediately my hyper-vigilant brain started rapid-fire spitting out questions as it tends to do, often to people’s annoyance. Like the evil covid germs were just floating around outside in the air? Invisible spiky red balls had permeated the atmosphere? Were we supposed to hold our breath on the way out to our car? Was everybody sheltering in place? And for how long? If there was imminent danger, why weren’t we sheltering there at school? And why only the Bay Area?

I went to talk to Ms. K, being mindful to only ask a fraction of my zillion questions.

I remember asking her if the gas stations were open because I didn’t have enough to get home. She told me they were, and right then I thought, if we have to Shelter in Place why didn’t they? Were they risking their lives? I left the school in a daze. Not scared, just dazed and confused. I tend to get slow and calm in emergencies. Driving home I looked around outside, observing, and thought that everything looked remarkably normal. I didn’t see people dropping dead in the streets like they showed in those fake Chinese YouTube videos. I saw cars driving, some people walking around, kids playing. I stopped and got gas; the workers seemed non-plussed.

That’s when I knew they were trying to scare us. That’s when I knew it was all hype. Everything after that day of the ‘Shelter in Place’ announcement only confirmed my suspicions. That the government would outrageously lie to the people, did not surprise me. I grew up not trusting the government since I was a little girl with my semi-hippie parents, who sent me to school with a black arm band to protest the Vietnam war, and pointed out the flag-covered coffins of drafted teenagers coming back from Vietnam on our little black and white TV. ‘Question Authority’ was a prominent bumper sticker back then, and all the rock n roll heroes confirmed that you should never “trust the man” or the guys in suits. ‘Fuck the establishment’ is what I learned early on.

The teachers were instructed to make one word signs, and take a selfie holding the sign. When the pictures were grouped together, it read “We miss you! We will see you soon.” I held the ‘soon’ sign. But we never saw the kids again that year, or the next. In fact, I never saw that group of kids at that school again.

March 20, 2026
Learning Loss Part 2

After spending that dreamy school year in the outdoor barn surrounded by ponies and chickens and mostly maskless children playing in the hay, I could not imagine going back into The System, or whatever was left of it after most of the kids had not been in school for a year and a half. I’d heard stories from the outside. I’d seen pictures, like masked kindergarteners walking in lines with their arms straight in front of them to maintain the proper distance, or sitting outside in circles drawn on the asphalt to eat their lunches alone in silence. I wanted no part in that.

While I was lolling at Lazy H Ranch, reading Roald Dahl to my pod of kindergarten through fifth graders with a backdrop of golden hills dotted with horses, the rest of the school-world was tangled in a fierce debate of bureaucracy and fear, wrapped in the colored ribbons of the Tier System, purple being bad, very bad, then red, orange, and yellow. There was no green tier, no, no one was ever completely safe from the covid boogeyman, unlike George Bush’s Terror Tiers, where at least there was blue and green; maybe you had a slight chance of letting down your guard and not worrying about being attacked by ISIS. Red was the highest tier in Bush’s system, but California’s covid tiers had purple. I wondered why at the time, was it like a face being so angry it turns from red to purple? I didn’t know, and still don’t. A district had to stay in an orange or yellow tier for 14 days to even consider opening. At first, I checked daily with our tier status, but after a while, gave up, knowing it was as much of a sham as Bush’s Terror Tiers, based on nothing. Sometimes our county would turn red for a few days, or a week, only to revert back to purple which meant we had to start all over again.

I screamed my protests into the abyss at first, writing profanity laced emails to Governor Newsom or our public health director, Scott Morrow, pointing out how little sense this all made, how the goal posts kept moving, how bad it was for kids, and how arbitrary it all was. That’s when I still thought that they might actually care about the kids welfare. Or ours for that matter.

But in September of ’21 Newsom finally said the kids could all be back in school! This was after months of the teacher’s union still fighting the reopening, arguing at first, that it would be impossible to keep the kids 6 feet apart with the size of the classes and classrooms, so those in power quickly recalculated to say, ok, only four feet apart would work, or just “do your best.” There were further demands that had to be met. Teachers would be first in line to get the vaccines. Masking, testing, ventilation systems, extra cleaning. The teachers union got everything they wanted, to the tune of millions of dollars.

There was a big distinction between the unions and the teachers wants. My daughter Reyna went on TV to be interviewed as to how she was a teacher, and didn’t agree with the unions, and no union representative had ever contacted her to ask her opinion as to whether she felt ‘safe’ enough to go back to school. Teachers were split. While many felt like Reyna and me, that “remote learning” was mostly fiction, and morally wrong, many teachers I talked to loved it, or pretended to hate it but secretly love it, like a teacher who told me she cried every day, but went to live with her daughter and grandbaby for the school year, and had the students watch movies she recorded for science lessons. Teachers told me of going on hikes every afternoon, or having a beer or two while teaching. There was no accountability, no low grades were allowed, and no discipline problems to deal with. Sure, a few teachers insisted that the kids get out of bed and sit up during class, but mostly the kids were allowed to keep their camera off on Zoom calls, because of “equity”. Some students might have been embarrassed to show their living conditions the unions argued.

I walked into my daughter Reyna’s house during the lockdown and she was in the middle of teaching her Home Arts (used to be Home Ec) class a cooking lesson in her kitchen. She was teaching her heart out, talking animatedly into her laptop, bringing it over so that the camera showed her taking the cookies out of her oven. “How are your cookies looking? Show me some of them!” she said into the computer. I walked around and looked at her Zoom screen, and only saw about five faces, the rest of the boxes that represented her class were black. “Where is everyone?” I whispered to her out of screenshot. She explained to me how they weren’t required to turn their cameras on. “I don’t think they’re even there,” I said. She nodded her head in agreement. She went on trying her hardest anyway. It made me sad.

So, like I said, I wanted no part of the public-school craziness. Some of the parents tried to keep the Ranch School open another year, but it was not to be. After a couple of false-hopeful jobs with my old district and my old principal, I half-heartedly looked around for a job that could be palatable in the teaching realm, but had just about given up, and resigned myself to collecting unemployment for the first half of the school year. But then I had lunch with some colleagues from the middle school I worked at for many years, I told some of them my plight. Within a couple of days, I got a call from the principal of that middle school, telling me she was moving to the Belmont school district, and would like to hire me at Ralston Middle School. “What subject would I teach?” I asked, thinking I did not want the job. “Art,” she said. She had been tipped off by my old friends that art was my thing. “And a couple of periods of study skills.”

This gave me pause. Teaching art had been my dream job. Although I incorporated art into all my teaching jobs, I had never taught it officially. I had finished all the requirements for the art credential, passing the required art CSET (California subject exam for teachers) except for one pesky pedagogy class that they stopped offering at SF State during covid. I explained all of this to the woman on the phone, Sabrina Adler was her name. She seemed unfazed. She spoke in a nasally, almost robotic voice, void of any emotion. I asked if I could get back to her, and she said yes, but she needed to know by that afternoon. Wow, they really wanted me. This was a switch from usually having to beg for jobs. I hung up the phone, and paced around the house, thinking. I didn’t want to teach in a mask, and so far, had not taken the vaccine. But an art job? And a couple of periods of study skills, whatever that was, it sounded easy. How bad could it be? They wouldn’t be on a computer. Then looked up the salary schedule for Belmont, and I was stunned to see that they hired at a high experience step, and that I would be making more money than I had ever made for a school year by a long shot. It seemed like a Sign. Art and money. I paced and fretted a little more, and then called Sabrina back and accepted the job.

Little did I know what I was letting myself in for. Little did I know how much things had changed during covid. The teaching had changed, the kids had changed, the teachers had changed, the culture had changed, the expectations had changed, the attitudes had changed. Everything had changed in only a year and a half. That’s all it took. A year and a half of everyone staring at the internet and getting brainwashed, not by the classes they were supposed to be taking, but by the TikToks they had going up in the corner.

I only had one little clue of what had happened during my year of oblivion at the pony farm. A friend of the family of the farm, wanted their daughter to work with me as an aid. She had been a freshman in college at a University in Florida, but had dropped out, due to covid pressures, she couldn’t handle it. So, she was hired at the ranch. She was constantly looking at her phone, instead of paying attention to the kids, and when she wasn’t, I’d see her nodding off in class, her head jerking back, and her eyes looked funny. Finally, I asked her if she was on drugs, and she told me yes, she was on four different psychiatric drugs, none of which I had ever heard of. “Does your mother know this?” I demanded of her. She said yes, and the reason she was tired is that she often stayed up all night. This girl also told me that she that her generation was different, because they didn’t all go by the strict rules of being boys or girls. The girl would have the kids go on their computers during recess when I forbade it, thinking they had enough computer time during their Zoom calls, but going behind my back. I finally called her out on it. She said, “Why should I have to work as hard as you? You get paid way more money than me.” I was shocked by her attitude, and explained that I had been teaching for decades, and that the first few years of student teaching I had to work for free. She said that was my fault.

I thought this girl was a one-off, a bad hire, a bad seed. Little did I know that all the kids were watching the same TikToks, all the kids had been indoctrinated, all the kids had changed, just like the adults had changed.

June 19, 2025
Learning Loss Part 1

Learning Loss:

No one ever imagined that we would still be locked down in September.

September means back to school. New backpacks and shoes for the kids, and we teachers sigh to say good bye to the summer, but there are fresh bulletin boards and ‘Welcome’ signs, new rosters, and classrooms that had the floors polished in the summer. September meant new beginnings, new kids, a renewed sense of purpose after resting all summer.

Not that year. The schools had been shuttered since the March before when they told us all to go home. ‘I thought it was Easter, not Christmas, I heard a teacher whisper when the principal told us our spring break would be extended another week, to two weeks, to you know, ‘flatten the curve’. We all know the story now, yadda yadda, the kids of California never went back to the classroom that year. Nor the next.

I spent the last half of the 2020 school year sitting on the school yard asphalt by myself, surrounded with buckets of paint. Most teachers had to start Zooming, but since I taught ESL that year, they told me I could just go home and collect my paycheck. The thought of getting free money for doing nothing was unfathomable to me (but I guess a lot of stuff that happened that year was) but also immoral, so I asked the principal what else I could do to help. She gave me the perfect job of painting a giant map of the United States on the playground.

I sat, day after day, month after month alone, painting each individual state in a color palette of my choosing, my headphones on my head tuned in to Adam Carolla, the comedian I had listened to in the morning for years. He was a voice of sanity to me, my friend.

School officially ended that June along with my temporary job. Painting the map of the states had inspired me to drive across this country of ours. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening everywhere else. I was prepared to drive alone, anything to get away from the irrational craziness I saw when I wasn’t in the refuge of my asphalt canvas. I couldn’t bear to continue to witness the lines of masked people bracing themselves against the wind to get into the grocery stores, or physically fighting over toilet paper once they got in. I had to get the hell out of Dodge. The fact that the unelected health officer, Scott Marrow, told us to stay within five miles of our homes made the trip even more enticing. It couldn’t be like this everywhere. My friend Merry ended up going with me. ‘What if we die?’ she asked me before we left. After all, we were going into the eye of the storm, the scary states that didn’t lock down, where covid floated in the air like a thick invisible blanket, they told us, where faces were obscenely seen because of the lack of masks. “Then we die,” I said.

We didn’t die, and I was right. The rest of the country wasn’t like us. They all went back to school in September, rightly seeing the insanity of keeping kids at home staring into a computer. Not California. The 2020-2021 school year was upon us, and Newsom told us the schools were not opening, we had to continue to stay home to save lives. Remote learning they called it. It was a joke.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but like the school year before, providence handed me the perfect job during that second Pandemic Lockdown School Year. A one-room school house out in the country, as though my classroom was a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Charlotte’s Web, in a rough-hewn wooden barn.

One wall had a white board where I kept track of the fourteen kids complicated Zoom schedules, another wall had horseshoes nailed into it in such a way that the students could hang up their backpacks and coats, another wall I covered with the kids artwork, and the fourth wall was non-existent. Like, there wasn’t one, the barn had three walls. That meant that I had an unobstructed, open-air view of the rolling hills, dotted with horses separated by white ranch style fences, and the smell of fresh hay and manure wafted around my classroom. The en plein air classroom was a draw for some of the parents of the students that ended up being in my ‘learning pod’ one of the pandemic concepts already fading from our collective memory, where it was said that a random number of kids, say a dozen or so, could be together and it was ‘safe’ especially if air was circulating, and boy did the air circulate there! Most pods had to buy HVAC systems, but ours was natural. As beautiful as a semi-outdoor classroom was, it also meant that many mornings were freezing cold, and getting the propane going on the one heater we had wasn’t always easy. Also, since we were on a dirt road, clouds of dust would float in and settle on everything whenever a car or horse went by.

I’d gaze out at the hills and horses and tell the kids that ranged from kindergarteners through fourth grade, that they were the luckiest students in the whole state. ‘Whoever gets their math done can go on the hayride!’ was my daily refrain meaning that some lucky kids got to ride around the ranch in the quad with Breen, my stepson, and owner of the Lazy H Ranch, and throw flakes of alfalfa in the feeding troughs.

One corner of the barn had eggs in an incubator at the beginning of the year, and as the months went by, we watched the chicks hatch and eventually turn into four rust-colored teenage hens. The chickens were like our kids that we had raised. They wandered freely around the classroom clucking softly, and some of the kids liked to hold one of them in their lap grounding them to reality while they watched their teachers trying to explain math on their laptops. The two barn dogs guarded us, but one always was licking his chops around the chickens, and the kids would scream at him to get away, until one day the dog came in the barn and I literally saw feathers come out of his mouth, like a cartoon. We didn’t tell the kids for days that he ate one of the hens, and I privately cried.

After ‘school’, we’d all go up to the hay loft and watch movies on a TV, and some of the kids would jump out the opening holding a rope, and land in the pile of soft hay below. Two giant tire swings hung in the trees further up the hill, a thrilling ride where up to four kids could comfortably sit and spin dizzily around holding on to the thick chains. The kids all got riding lessons on ponies in the coral for their afterschool program.

I was in an idyllic world, far from the ugliness of the lockdowns and people’s reaction to them. No television blaring propaganda, no radio to tell us to be scared. All it took was a mile or two to get out of town and completely change my reality into that of country living in the old days.

The Zoom teaching made me sad though. The Chromebook laptops were the worst part. I remember the sight of one kindergarten girl named Steele diligently doing jumping jacks solo out in the courtyard behind the barn for ‘P.E.’ while staring at the computer. A long-awaited annual fourth grade field trip to the Sanchez Adobe was watched by the kids on the computer while they pretended that they were making the mud bricks they usually got to make with their hands. Breen’s son, Chinny, in his senior year, wandered in and out of the barn. He usually stayed in bed until noon, watching his high school classes on his phone in bed. He missed most of his long-awaited football season, his prom, and his graduation, although the moms tried the best they could to make facsimiles, it wasn’t of course the same, the sadness was obvious in his eyes.

I was privy to see how more than a dozen teachers interpreted ‘teaching’ during the lockdown. I saw some teachers showing up over the Zoom every day, well, actually only four days a week, because they called Wednesdays ‘asynchronous learning’ a euphemism in the New Speak that meant ‘you’re on your own kid, and yahoo, the teachers get a day off’. Other teachers just directed their kids to watch videos, and sent home thick packets of busy work. I heard one kindergarten teacher tell the kids to go outside and observe nature for their science lesson.

That school year went by like I was in a dream. At the beginning, in September, we survived the ‘black day’ when the smoke from the fires was so thick the sun never came out, by hiking up to the ridge with flashlights, and watched the traffic below, the headlights barely visible. We made applesauce and carved pumpkins, and Santa and the Grinch made surprise appearances at Christmas. In the spring we planted flowers in decorated pots for Mother’s Day, and at the end we held a formal graduation, complete with graduation caps that the kids made themselves.

The horror of what the lockdowns did to most the kids didn’t hit me until the following school year.

March 23, 2025
Hallways

Hello.

How the hell did I end up here?

I’m writing my first blog with my laptop propped up on my knees, since I’m crouched down in a dim, narrow, metaphorical hallway, my back leaning against one of the many locked doors that are in here. I am currently residing smack in the middle of an overused cliché, ‘when one door closes, another opens’.

I’ve been in this dark corridor for six months now, ever since one big door slammed in my face after I was unceremoniously pushed through it. Yup, that’s right, fired for the first time since I was 21 when they let me go from my waitress job at a faux-fancy restaurant near the airport, because I didn’t empty the ashtrays fast enough. After being a tireless, creative classroom teacher for 25 years, I was inexplicably let go without reason from a private school I job held for three years. While I was still in shock, I thought I’d just go back to my old job in the public school system, but when I tried that door, it was shockingly …locked.

Since then, I’ve spent all my time knocking on all kinds of doors in this hallway, doors big and small, weird and familiar. Lots of doors. So far, no one has answered my sometimes insistent rapping, and my knuckles are getting sore. I have a lot of keys on the chain that God gave me, but so far, none of them fit in the locks. I stand in front of all kinds of unlikely doors, (even a coffee shop!) inwardly incanting Open Sesame!, like Ali Baba, and hoping the magic entrance will spring open and I will walk out of this dark hallway and like Dorothy, be standing in Technicolor Oz, munchkins singing all around me.

I know there must be A Reason for my current predicament. Perhaps my soul was yearning for something else, but if that was the case I wish my soul would speak up now and tell me what the hell it wants me to do. I’ve been paying close attention to my dreams, writing them down every morning, searching for clues. My faith waivers, huge roiling tsunami type ebbs and flows of doubt and elation. When the tide is low, I imagine I am In Control, and delude myself into thinking that I need to hurry this process along, and if I don’t, doors in front me will remain forever closed,

When I was in one of these moods recently, I went to Home Depot and bought two doors, one sliding glass, the other double French, to the tune of a grand slapped on my credit card. Many would (and did) say that this was not the best use of my money when I was on Unemployment with no future means of support. But the metaphor was that important to me. I needed to see new physical doors in front of me. Doors that I could open. One of the doors is still in the factory wrapping in my garage, but the other one has been installed on a former blank wall. I open this new door frequently, just to assure myself I still know how.

And so I remain in this strange hallway, looking for a little beam of light. When I was on Alcatraz recently to see the Ai Wei Wei exhibit, I stood in the pitch black isolation cell and listened to the ghost prisoner’s voice on my audio tour describe how he would concentrate in the dark until he saw a point of light, and then he would focus on that pinpoint of light until a world opened up for him, “like watching TV,” he said. I’ll try and report any images I see on my own personal TV in my head, here.

.

December 13, 2014