Have We Found Hector, Yet? A Love Letter To Educators In The Midst Of Crisis
This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our guest today is Michelle Fine, a Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Other posts in the series are compiled here.
Each evening we ask Caleb the same question; as the numbers of 6th and 7th graders responding to his online “office hours” increase by the day, we ask “Have you found Hector yet?”
I am quarantined in Montclair, New Jersey, six adults and an infant; a home of heterogeneous teachers and activists. We are healthy and fortunate. We spend our days in Google Meets with 6th graders, community college students, working-class 4-year and doctoral students, most with deep roots in the working-class/immigrant/public housing community, and the news gets more and more grim. Each evening around the dinner table, the stories grow more painful; more students-grandparents-parents-loved ones-siblings are ill-dead-unemployed-hungry-worried about a grandmother in Ecuador or in a nursing home or in the next room in the Bronx. We don’t eat until we have each spoken “one good thing that happened today.” It’s harder now. In the month of March we saw people dying; in the month of April we witness institutions and the precious fibers of democracy – like public schools and universities and voting – placed on life support in budget slashing season.
And they still won’t release people from prison or detention centers.