What Fleeing a Wildfire Taught Me About Teaching Through COVID-19
By Amber Foster, Ph.D. – August 22, 2020
It was Wednesday of the first week of classes, and things were going well. Despite the dire prognostications I’d heard about student engagement online, my first few Zoom sessions were full of students eager and willing to participate.
I was five minutes into my last class of the day when police officers came knocking at our door. “Mandatory evacuation,” they announced. My family’s Northern California home—my refuge during COVID-19—is in a subdivision surrounded by rolling brown hills, the kind that make perfect tinder. The fire had been started by lightning, after summer storm clouds clashed with a triple-digit heat wave.
After apologizing to my class and notifying them of the last-minute cancellation, I did the usual things you’re supposed to do if a raging wildfire is at your doorstep. I packed only the essentials: my laptop, my cat, a few clothes and toiletries, a mask, and a bottle of hand sanitizer.
Police officers in neon vests lined the roads, directing traffic. Nearly every exit from town had become a parking lot. People were getting out of their cars and walking around to stretch their legs. Re-entry into evacuated neighborhoods was blocked by police cruisers parked in the middle of the road. The officers waved us on, as if saying, you can’t go home, but you can’t stay here.
My first thought was to find temporary lodgings—something with a/c and Internet. I tried two local motels outside of the evacuation zone. Both full. I went to my brother’s house to use the Internet and try to find a pet-friendly hotel. His place wasn’t an option: he has an aggressive dog and two cats, not to mention two kids and no spare rooms. I managed to book the only pet-friendly room available for 20 miles, only to have them call me to cancel five minutes later. “We’re overbooked,” they lamented.
I found another hotel farther afield, only to be turned away in the lobby because their “pet-friendly” policy did not, in fact, include cats. The hotel had been mobbed with people escaping the fires—most wearing masks, most standing six feet apart, and everyone with the flat glazes and slumped shoulders of people having a Very Bad Day. Back in my car, I indulged in a moment of self-pity—head on the steering wheel, cat meowing plaintively from her carrier in the back seat—then shook myself out of it and picked up my phone.
I wound up driving another hour and a half to a town just outside San José, where another member of my extended family lives. I was able to stay the night in a spare bedroom, after five hours on the road.
At 12:30 a.m., the evacuation order was lifted. No houses burned down in our area, although it’d been a close call. I was one of the lucky ones: I had a car and a full tank of gas, relatives nearby, and friends who would have welcomed me (and my cat) into their homes, in spite of the risk of contagion.
When I was back online again, I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of concern from friends and colleagues. I even had emails from the students in my cancelled class, asking if I was okay. They’d all done the hastily-prepared asynchronous assignment I’d posted in lieu of class, without complaint.
Before the semester began, I was afraid of what this crisis was doing to us—making us socially “distant,” making our teaching “remote.” I grieved the loss of daily connections I’d once taken for granted—shaking a colleague’s hand, or sitting next to one of my students as we discussed their work.
Instead, however, I’ve been feeling an unexpected closeness with my students this semester, the kind of bond that emerges out of conditions of adversity. My freshmen have no doubt been experiencing disruptions of their own, as their first forays into adulthood and independence have been curtailed by the virus. They are no doubt grieving their first-year college experience—the late-night study sessions, the camaraderie of dorm life, the social gatherings, the forays to the USC Village for smoothies or snacks. Many know someone who has become sick with the virus; a few know someone who has died because of it. Most are worried about whether remote learning will impact their academic success, about whether they will be able to make friends, about whether their professors will see them as more than a tiny face in a tiny box on a screen. To alleviate their concerns, I’m doing what I can to create an online community within each class; as the saying goes, only time will tell.
My colleagues in the Writing Program have helped me more than I could have anticipated. Last year, I might have only shared a polite greeting with some of them as we passed each other in the hall. Now, we are interacting with each other every day via social media and text. We share materials and ideas for online teaching, and we vent about—and try to solve—the technological problems we encounter. We check in. Where I used to turn off my phone for large portions of my day, I now find it reassuring to see the scrolling text on my phone’s screen, the words expressing a shared uncertainty about what the future holds for all of us. During the evacuation, colleagues messaged me, telling me to stop worrying about missing class, or about whether or not I’d have Internet for my office hours the next day. “Your students will forgive you. It will be fine,” they assured me.
They were right, of course. I made it back home 24 hours after I’d left. Nothing had changed, except the blackened hills and lingering smell of smoke in the air. I would be able to carry on with my semester, comforted by the knowledge that I was doing the best I could, and that I wasn’t alone.