A Teacher’s Guide to Inauguration in 36 Easy Steps

or, Reflections from the Evening of January 19, 2021: How to Manage to Stay Afloat for the Next Eighteen Hours and Hold up the Walls of the World While it Watches, Waits, Breathless

1. Pull yourself away from noise.
2. Pet your dog.
3. If you don’t have a dog, pretend to have a dog.
4. Drink something warm.
5. Listen, just for a moment, to tomorrow’s poet, Amanda Gorman.
6. No. I mean really. Go listen. It’ll take you two minutes.
7. Pass the tissues.
8. Get a good bedtime.
9. Wake up. Look at yourself in the mirror.
10. Don’t just find the visage in the glass. Find the PERSON behind it.
11. Don’t tell yourself “You’ve got this.” You’re tired of hearing that.
12. Don’t tell yourself to breathe. You’re tired of hearing that, too.
13. Tell yourself that you will get through today.
14. Just like you do every day.
15. Even the most difficult ones.
16. Because that’s what we do.
17. Get yourself to school, or to your Zoom, on time.
18. Or not. Folks aren’t taking tardies today.
19. Remember that our children are the reason we get up each day.
20. Put your suffocating dread in its own breakout room.
21. Tell your students you have faith in them.
22. Tell your students you have faith in this world.
23. Tell them again. Most of them won’t believe you the first time.
24. Tell them they are part of history, that future children will hold their lives between the pages of a textbook.
25. You will get through the day.
26. Just like you do every day.
27. Even the most difficult ones.
28. Because that’s what we do.
29. Close your computer and walk away.
30. Do what you need to do to unclinch your white-knuckled grasp from your fear and anxiety.
31. Because tomorrow your children will be waiting for you.
32. They will need to hear, again, of your faith in the world.
33. They will need to hear, again, of your faith in them.
34. And again.
35. And again.
36. And again.