I have never not had a summer. I’m a teacher, and teachers look forward to the two months between school years to refresh and energize themselves for the next year. While many of us still work second jobs (I worked camps for 15 summers before I had my children, and now I operate my part-time photography business year-round), it’s still a couple of months doing something different, not having to make 14,000 educational decisions a day, and having time to think through some of the changes we want to make for the next school year. But this summer has been different. While I have been at home since March, there has been nothing refreshing or energizing about our current situation. E-Learning completely turned our school and home life upside down, and when it ended in June, things didn’t change much. Preparing for the upcoming school year in the midst of a global pandemic has created a tremendous amount of anxiety for every teacher, parent, administrator, and school leader that I know for our entire summer. And now that we know the date(s) we are expected to return, teachers are scrambling to ready their physical classrooms, virtual classrooms, and lesson plans to take on this new challenge.

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