Hurt upon hurt upon hurt…
This past week was painful all across the US as we bore witness to shocking acts of racism that tore open wounds that were nowhere close to healed.
During a pandemic.
We had already planned to devote this newsletter to ways we can teach while also caring for our traumatized students by interviewing Dr. Lyndsey Moran from the Boston Children Study Center.*
We had planned this because we are seeing collective exhaustion in our schools.
Dr. Moran pointed out to us that when you are living in a drawn-out crisis like this one, it is a normal human response to push the stressors to your periphery. They’re STILL THERE, draining our internal “batteries,” but we fix our gaze on what’s in front of us. So we can move forward. So we’re not focused on the stressors at all times.
But this past week really made that impossible. The “slow burn” of those batteries accelerated. The stressors piled up and could not be ignored.
And they shouldn’t be. We need to pause and look at some very painful facts head on:
- COVID-19 has disproportionately killed people of color.
- George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for eight minutes--in the daytime--in front of a crowd.
- Floyd’s murder came quickly on the heels of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery’s murders--more names added to a grim list that reminds us that Black Lives are at risk every single day in this country.
- The president incited violence as an appropriate response to protesters.
- AND...we are still living through a pandemic.
We wanted to take this week’s newsletter to acknowledge the hurt upon hurt upon hurt we are feeling. Two particular articles shine light on this pain:
We decided--with Dr. Moran’s wisdom ringing in our ears--that it was necessary to pause and
focus on TEACHER SELF-CARE in this issue
. We work in a human service. We have to acknowledge our own humanity and needs before we can be there for our students.
This week we want to focus on YOU, teachers. We want to acknowledge the pain that has built up over the last few months--and the added hurts of the past week. Next week’s newsletter we’ll share what we learned from Dr. Moran about teaching our students through a trauma-informed lens.